January 22, 2014

Bullying and Projection

The media mania to punish Grantland for one of its rare good articles because it was about not just a conman (which would be okay), but about a conman who wore a miniskirt (which is Not OK) is tied into the Anti-Bullying Movement of recent years. 

The logic is that, by definition, anyone who is "transgendered" was bullied on the school playground, and is therefore above criticism.

The bullying part is no doubt often true. 

For example, I knew somebody who is now a drag queen. I first met him when he was two years old. And he was the gayest two-year-old imaginable. As I heard him explain to some little girls with whom he was dressing up Barbie dolls, "I only play with girl toys. That's just the way I am."

I never heard about him being bullied at school, but it's hard to imagine he wasn't bullied by some moron.

On the other hand, reading about Dr. V., it's hard to not to notice that the promoter was a lifelong bully:
For all her wild stories, though, what Dr. V was most, Kinney [an investor out $60k] said, was a difficult person to deal with. “She would just explode. If you’re disagreeing with her while she had one of her headaches, you were in trouble.”

From an email from the promoter to the reporter:
“To whom this may concern,” it read. “I spoke with Caleb Hannan last Saturday his deportment is reminiscent to schoolyard bullies, his sole intention is to injure or bring harm to me … Because of a computer glitch, some documents that are germane only to me, were visible to web-viewers, government officials have now rectified this egregious condition … Caleb Hannan came into possession of documents that were clearly marked: MADE NON-PUBLIC (Restricted) … Exposing NON-PUBLIC Documents is a Crime, and prosecution of such are under the auspices of many State and Federal Laws, including Hate Crimes Legislation signed into Law by President Obama.”

Hannan notes:
Over the course of what was now eight months of reporting, Dr. V had accused me of being everything from a corporate spy to a liar and a fraud. She had also threatened me. One of the quotes I was able to type down during our last conversation was this: “You have no idea what I have done and what I can do.” It’s not all that menacing when transcribed, but her tone made it clear she believed she could harm me. 

This is not wholly idiosyncratic. For example, the article that more or less launched World War T was a lavishly sympathetic New York Times story about the injustice done to a former male truckdriver who is not being allowed to beat up women for pay in mixed martial arts bouts.

A certain fraction of the trans community seem to represent less "a woman's mind trapped in a man's body" than an exaggeratedly masculine mind (as economist Deirdre [nee Donald] McCloskey kind of sort of admits in this New Republic article "I Know What Chelsea Manning Is Going Through").

To my regret, I've had the experience of noting that a subsection of the male-to-female trans-identified can be atrocious bullies. I got dragged into a bout of bullying organized by McCloskey, computer scientist Lynn Conway, and a few other  trans academics because they were out to get Northwestern U. professor J. Michael Bailey, and I had written about him. (This is not to say that Bailey is wholly right, just that trying to have chilling effects on free speech is a worse solution than, as Justice Brandeis said, more speech.)

McCloskey and Conway set out to systematically demonize anybody who had ever said a good word about Bailey (and, boy, are they ever systematic -- Simon Baron-Cohen could have a field day with their output). Their work was picked up and spread by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has used its crusade against "hate groups" to become the most lucrative hate group in America. This might sound strange, but it really isn't: after all, McCloskey and Conway are much smarter than most SPLC staffers, and also much more masculine -- thus, the flavor of their witchburning fervor is notably different from that of the women and dweeby dudes out to get Larry Summers or James D. Watson. Meanwhile the SPLC leadership is cunning about sniffing out the coming wave of money-making opportunities.

Here's a good New York Times article summarizing the campaign to silence Bailey.

For some reason, McCloskey liked to denounce "the Steve Sailers, Stephen Pinkers, and Seth Roberts of the world," an unusual case of somebody spelling my name right and Pinker's name wrong. 

Here's an email exchange between McCloskey and Roberts (minus Roberts' last email) that McCloskey hosts on his website because he thinks it makes him look good. McCloskey starts out politely, but ... buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. (Roberts' version is on p. 117 here.) 

Obviously, McCloskey has a lot of issues.

You be the judge of who is trying to bully whom.

Freud's concept of "projection" explains much about the postmodern world.
    

More on Dr. V

To give you some more evidence of the New Conventional Wisdom that has rapidly congealed that privileges for the amorphous class of "the transgendered" is suddenly the Crucial Moral Issue of Our Time (a.k.a., World War T), here are some more articles denouncing Grantland for publishing freelancer Caleb Hannan's fine piece of investigative journalism: (with one admirable exception at the end):

From The Atlantic (can't some billionaire with a sense of history feel offended enough by the Gawkerization of this property founded in 1857 to buy it and lose money on it running something other than clickbait for liberal arts majors?):
Dr. V, Sports Journalism, and Why Sensitivity Matters 
What Grantland could have learned from a past decision at Vanity Fair before publishing its controversial story about Essay Anne Vanderbilt
... The second troubling aspect of “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” is that it survived the editorial layers of a major publication like Grantland, which ultimately bears responsibility for running the story. In a lengthy mea culpa published yesterday, Grantland editor-in-chief Bill Simmons took responsibility for publishing the story, relating how several members of his team failed to flag the troubling aspects of Hannan’s writing. (To its credit, Grantland yesterday also published a stinging criticism by Christina Kahrl, a transgender woman who writes about baseball for ESPN.) Grantland didn’t publish Hannan’s story because it wanted to run a sensationalistic piece, privacy and sensitivity be damned. It published the story because its editors didn’t realize that writing about the transgender community required special sensitivity—and didn’t bother to ask. 

From Poynter, the website of some sort of foundation devoted to journalism education:
Lessons learned from Grantland’s tragic story on Dr. V 
by Lauren Klinger and Kelly McBride 
Published Jan. 22, 2014 2:23 pm 
By editor-in-chief Bill Simmons’ own admission, ignorance was the biggest mistake Grantland made in reporting and publishing the story of Dr. V and her innovative golf putter. Ignorance about one of the most vulnerable minority groups — transgender people.

Jamie Kirchik, who was the last of Marty Peretz's Bright Young Men (a lineage that includes Andrew Sullivan and Al Gore), dissents from the conventional wisdom in the Daily Beast:
Pressuring Journalists Won’t Protect Transgender People 
When Grantland revealed the inventor of a golf putter to be a fraud, a mob attacked the site as bullying a transgendered woman to death. They demand a double standard that is the antithesis of equality for trans people.

Teen employment rates: minimum wage v. immigration

It’s instructive to compare the vast interest in the econosphere over the question of whether higher minimum wages raise teen unemployment versus the crickets-chirping lack of discussion over whether higher immigration raises teen unemployment ... even though the most plausible answer to both questions is likely "Yes."

January 21, 2014

Hard-hitting journalism at its finest

From the front page of NYTimes.com:
2 Friends Reach Across the Aisle on Immigration 
If there is a way to unlock the immigration stalemate in Washington, colleagues say that Esther Olavarria, a Democrat, and Rebecca Tallent, a Republican, might find it.

Is this a news article, or the blurb for a new Sweet Valley High novel for tweens?

The article isn't much different in tone:
The two women might at first seem more like political rivals than a reminder of the way things used to work in Washington. 
Esther Olavarria, a Democrat, left Cuba as a child, worked as Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s top immigration lawyer and now holds a post in the White House. Rebecca Tallent, a Republican, left suburban Arizona and became Senator John McCain’s chief of staff, briefly advised Sarah Palin in 2008 and is now a top policy aide to Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. 
But if there is any way to unlock the immigration stalemate in Washington, colleagues say these two might find it.

Has Carlos Slim gotten his money's worth out of the Times' immigration coverage, or what?
  

World War T breaks out on the putting green

Here's my new Taki's Magazine column on the current brouhaha condemning a fine piece of longform investigative reporting in Bill Simmons' Grantland by freelancer Caleb Hannan on a con artist who duped Dan Quayle and golf broadcaster Gary McCord. Hannan's crime: prioritizing "fact-finding" over the subject's Pokemon Power Points in the victimism sweepstakes. 

Read the whole thing there.

Thanks to my readers who called my attention to this bizarre confirmation of what I've been saying for awhile about what comes next after World War G.
  

Richard Sherman

Seattle Seahawks' cornerback Richard Sherman is getting a lot of attention for a postgame interview on Sunday that's more WWE than NFL.

I saw him play in high school in 2005. His team, Compton Dominguez, was so loaded with talent that they crushed my old high school, Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks, in the Southern California Division III finals without this future Super Bowl cornerback standing out in the game as a wide receiver (a position he played well for a couple of years at Stanford).

Compton's fast black backs just ran the ball over and over (19 times on the opening drive for a touchdown) behind an offensive line of giant Pacific Islanders, including a 319 pound tight end.

Compton Dominguez had gotten some major personal foul penalties in earlier playoff games, of the kind Sherman got at the end of the NFC championship game, but their conduct was exemplary in this one. Slum schools tend to blow up in high school playoffs, but Compton was very disciplined and didn't start celebrating after tackles until the last couple of minutes of the game.

Compton dominated so dominated on the ground, that NDHS only got one offensive play off in the first quarter, although it was a good one: Quarterback Garrett Green ran a draw 75 yards for a touchdown, pulling away from all four Compton defensive backs, including Sherman. Green was a remarkable athlete, a white guy faster than Richard Sherman, an excellent defensive back, and a quarterback with more or less a Division I passing arm, although not the NFL passing arm required by USC during those years at the top of the heap. So at USC Green just played quarterback on the practice squad, imitating the opponents' quarterback for the USC defense to tee off on, then went into the real estate business, which is a good business to go into if your years of service to the Trojans are appreciated by USC alums.
  

January 20, 2014

The Spirit of 2076

Vroom, vroom, vrooom! The NYT editorializes:
Pre-K on the Starting Blocks 
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD 
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambitious plan to provide preschool education to every 4-year-old brings high expectations.

As a way to Fight Inequality Now, universal pre-K sounds ... stately. The median age of the Forbes 400 is around 66, so if enrolling 4-year-olds in 2014 works as well as promised, it should really make a dent in about half of the Forbes 400 within 62 years, which is 2076.

I'll be attending my 100th high school reunion (yearbook theme: The Spirit of '76) via one of Robin Hanson's downloaded ems, so I have that to look forward to, which is nice.
     

"Oscar Gold"

From the comments:
We need to write a script for a movie where the Russians and Yankee WASPs join forces with Southern WASPs and plot to take over the world from the Maidstone Club. The diabolical plot is uncovered by a heroic transgendered migrant worker busing tables at the Knickerbocker Club to help pay tuition at Harvard Law School, pay to feed his four children, and cover the sex-change operation that will turn him into a single mom. Oscar gold, Steve! OSCAR GOLD! 
"Oscar Gold" would be the name of the movie since that will be the name of the migrant hero for obvious reasons. 
   

Slate: "A Gay Holocaust"

From Slate:
Note to Mary Matalin’s Gay Friends: She Won’t Hide You in a Gay Holocaust

By Nathaniel Frank

My Bubbie and Zada used to tell me my gentile friends wouldn’t hide me in another Holocaust. I like to think they were wrong (and that there won’t be another Holocaust). But that won’t stop me from invoking their wise spirit with a warning to conservative pundit Mary Matalin’s gay friends: She won’t hide you in a gay Holocaust. 
The famously crabby GOP strategist shrugged off a growing human-rights crisis in Russia on Sunday with a glib dismissal of even discussing the anti-gay policy and violence there, just as the upcoming Sochi Olympic Games have finally brought much-needed mainstream media coverage to the problem. “I’m so sick of sports and politics,” she complained in response to questions from George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s This Week. Her bottom line? “All of my gay friends think [Putin] looks so buff in his shirtless publicity photos.” Mustering the ghosts of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” she asked about Putin, “Why is he even talking about this?” even though the obvious answer was that Putin was talking about it because Stephanopoulos had, quite properly, asked him about it, and later asked her too. 
It was difficult to make out if Matalin was quoting someone else, but the intent of her comments was clear, and despicable: All this talk of gay suffering is boring, unimportant, and makes lots of us feel icky (the gay part, not the fact that they’re being persecuted), and the only response is not to clearly condemn it but to vomit out a gay stereotype such as the one about how gays only care about how men look shirtless—indeed, they can only see flesh and muscle even when a major country is unleashing a concerted campaign to vilify and dehumanize their people for political gain, giving the green light to mob violence. 
This sort of response illustrates precisely why the head-in-the-sand, “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach can be dangerous and even deadly. The developments in Russia that Matalin was laughing off were a string of provisions passed last year—and their violent consequences—that punishes promotion or even discussion of homosexuality in a broadly defined set of scenarios. No, what’s happening there is not the Holocaust.

You should probably mention that to Slate's headline writer ...
But many observers have noted the eerie influence of the Nazi playbook, including the singling out of an unpopular minority for dehumanizing treatment, a campaign of terror unleashed by punitive laws and tough talk, and an autocratic leader’s use of blatant scapegoating to consolidate power and distract voters from his failed policies. 

1914: World War I
2014: World War G

1914: The Great War
2014: The Gay War
  

Are big brains not for being smart, but for staying smart?

Another Edge essay on scientific ideas that should be retired:
Nicholas Humphrey 
Emeritus School Professor, The London School of Economics; Author, Soul Dust 
[Anti-] The Bigger An Animal's Brain, The Greater Its Intelligence 
The bigger an animal's brain, the greater its intelligence. You may think the connection is obvious. Just look at the evolutionary lineage of human beings: humans have bigger brains—and are cleverer—than chimpanzees, and chimpanzees have bigger brains—and are cleverer—than monkeys. Or, as an analogy, look at the history of computing machines in the 20th century. The bigger the machines, the greater their number-crunching powers. In the 1970's the new computer at my university department took up a whole room. 
From the phrenology of the 19th century, to the brain-scan sciences of the 21st, it has indeed been widely assumed that brain volume determines cognitive capacity. In particular, you'll find the idea repeated in every modern textbook that the brain size of different primate species is causally related to their social intelligence. I admit I'm partly responsible for this, having championed the idea back in the 1970's. Yet, for a good many years now, I've had a hunch that the idea is wrong. 
There are too many awkward facts that don't fit in. For a start, we know that modern humans can be born with only two thirds the normal volume of brain tissue, and show next to no cognitive deficit as adults.

"Next to no" <> "no"

The brain scan volume to IQ correlations found in recent years have been in the 0.3 to 0.4 range, which is approaching a "moderate" correlation for the social sciences. In other words, the glass is part-full as well as part-empty, but very few people know that. Far more assume Stephen Jay Gould had the last word on the subject.
We know that, during normal human brain development, the brain actually shrinks as cognitive performance improves (a notable example being changes in the "social brain" during adolescence, where the cortical grey matter decreases in volume by about 15% between age 10 and 20). And most surprising of all, we know that there are nonhuman animals, such as honey bees or parrots, that can emulate many feats of human intelligence with brains that are only a millionth (bee) or a thousandth (parrot) the size of a human's.  
The key, of course, is programming: What really matters to cognitive performance is not so much the brain's hardware as its onboard software. And smarter software certainly does not require a bigger hardware base (in fact, as the shrinkage of the cortex during adolescence shows, it may actually require a smaller—tidier—one).

But the history of computers suggests that while there are occasionally advances in software that allow the same work to be done by less powerful hardware, the more typical pattern is for software to elaborate over time so that the minimum processor size keeps going up: look at the "Requirements" small print on an old Word Perfect box, say, and marvel over the tiny amount of hardware capacity (as measured in transistors) once required to provide highly adequate word processing capability.

What has happened of course (Moore's Law) is that the number of transistors you can place on a square centimeter has doubled every year or two, but that seems to be somewhat different from what we see in the brains of animals.
It's true that programs to deliver superior performance may require a lot of designing, either by natural selection or learning. But the fact is that, once they've been invented, they will likely make less demands on hardware than the older versions. To take the special case of social intelligence, I'd say it's quite possible that the algorithm for solving "theory of mind" problems could be written on the back of a postcard and could be implemented on an iPhone. In which case, the widely touted suggestion that the human brain had to double in size for humans to be capable of "second-order mind-reading", makes little sense.

Okay, but our relatively large-brained primate relatives don't seem as well-programmed as honey bees to benefit from cooperation. I've spent maybe 20 hours in the Lincoln Park zoo Great Ape House, and the chimps struck me as jerks. So, considering our relatives, maybe primates have to cogitate their way to cooperating more than social insects have to?
Then why did the human brain double in size? Why is it much bigger than you might think it needs to be, to underpin our level of intelligence? There's no question that big brains are costly to build and maintain. So, if we are to retire the "obvious theory", what can we put in its place? The answer I'd suggest lies in the advantage of having a large amount of cognitive reserve. Big brains have spare capacity that can be called on if and when working-parts get damaged or wear out. From adulthood onwards humans—like other mammals—begin to lose a significant amount of brain tissue to accidents, haemorrhages and degeneration. But because humans can draw on this extra reserve, the loss doesn't have to show. This means humans can retain their mental powers into relative old age, long after their smaller brained ancestors would have become incapacitated. (And as a matter of fact the unfortunate individual born with an unusually small brain is much more likely to succumb to senile dementia in his forties).

Not wholly implausible. Has anybody studied it?
True, many of us die for other reasons with unused brain power to spare. But some of us live considerably longer than we might have done if our brains were half the size. So, what evolutionary advantage does longevity bring, even the post-reproductive longevity typical of humans? The answer surely is that humans can benefit—as no other species could do—from the presence of mentally-sound grandparents and great-grandparents, whose role in caretaking and teaching has been key to the success of human culture.

Or, say, that having a crafty old mother or grandmother to act as matchmaker and social arbiter increases your chance of marrying well? Some of the predicament of the five unmarried Bennett daughters in Pride and Prejudice is not only that their father hasn't provided them with dowries, but also that their mother isn't all that bright at manipulating the social whirl for them.

The basic brain size equals intelligence in old age theory seems quite testable. For example, Ian Deary continues to give IQ tests to Scots born in 1921 who were first given IQ tests in 1932. What are there hat sizes today? (Granted, hat sizes are pretty crude measures.)
    

Ian McEwan: Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater

I've been pointing out essays by the Edge consortium on the topic of "What Scientific Concept Should Be Retired?" that I have disagreements with, so here's one I like by the science-minded British novelist Ian McEwan, author of Atonement.
Ian McEwan 
Novelist; Author, Sweet Tooth; Solar; On Chesil Beach; Amsterdam 
[Questioning the Question:] Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! 
... A great and rich scientific tradition should hang onto everything it has. Truth is not the only measure. There are ways of being wrong that help others to be right. Some are wrong, but brilliantly so. Some are wrong but contribute to method. Some are wrong but help found a discipline.  
Aristotle ranged over the whole of human knowledge and was wrong about much. But his invention of zoology alone was priceless. Would you cast him aside? You never know when you might need an old idea. It could rise again one day to enhance a perspective the present cannot imagine. It would not be available to us if it were fully retired. Even Darwin in the early 20th century experienced some neglect, until the Modern Synthesis. [Darwin's] The Expression of Emotion [in Animals] took longer to be current. William James also languished, as did psychology, once consciousness as a subject was retired from it. Look at the revived fortunes of Thomas Bayes and Adam Smith (especially 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments') We may need to take another look at the long-maligned Descartes. Epigenetics might even restore the reputation of Lamarck. Freud may yet have something to tell us about the unconscious. 
 
In general, the big boys of the past were extremely smart. Their best ideas were often dreamed up to deal with current situations, which, after awhile, stopped being current. But, sometimes, situations continue to cycle until there is some relevance between what he was writing in response to and what we face.

For example, in the middle of the last decade, I was developing my theory of affordable family formation, which struck some observers as fairly novel. Yet, much of the basis for it turned out to have been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin in his 1754 essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, a short essay that I had only heard of mentioned derisively for its immigration restrictionism and for Franklin's clumsy attempt to define the object of his concern.

Franklin's goal was to obtain for his people a higher standard of living, defined as higher wages and lower prices, especially for land, via having more land per person.

Now Ben Franklin is not a forgotten figure in history. He's on the $100 bill, the most closely examined form of money in the world, since it's the most tempting target of counterfeiters.

Moreover, this essay played a key role in intellectual history, since it preceded much of what Malthus had to say by almost a half century (as Franklin's admirers forced Malthus to concede in his second edition), and Malthus inspired both Darwin and Wallace to separately conceive of the theory of natural selection. (Wallace famously came up with it during a malarial dream following an evening reading Malthus.)

Still, the import of Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind has largely been forgotten. In part, this is because Franklin himself lost interest in the subject in the subject of maintaining a larger amount of land per person through immigration restriction in 1756.

Why? Because obtaining more land per capita through war suddenly became feasible two years later. The advent of the French & Indian War in 1756 brought up the possibility of Franklin's people spreading into the middle of North America, and Franklin became obsessed with keeping the British government from botching this opportunity by trading back North American conquests to the French for sugar islands. Franklin argued in 1760 that whichever power settled the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Valley would dominate the world in the 20th Century.

Then, London's Proclamation of 1763 restricting colonists from settling west of the Appalachians started to incline the previously highly loyal Franklin on the road to the Revolutionary War and America obtaining vast lands by defeating the Indians and Mexicans. So, Franklin lost interest in arguing against Invite the World and started arguing for Invade the World (or at least the Western three-fourths of the temperate zone of North America).

Personally, here in 2014, I don't want more war. So, the peaceful, let's-mind-our-own-business Franklin of 1754 strikes me as more appealing and more intellectually relevant to America's current situation than the militarily aggressive Franklin of 1756 onward.

But then I'm some sort of weirdo extremist who is skeptical of the Invade-the-World / Invite-the-World conventional wisdom, so I would think that, wouldn't I?
 

The Flynn Effect of NFL Passing

Over the years, NFL football teams have gotten visibly better at passing the ball. This graph shows NFL passing stats from 1950 to 2013. For example, the percentage of forward passes completed (red line) has improved from under 50% in the early 1950s to a record-tying 61.3% in 2013.

Or compare touchdown passes to interceptions. The average number of touchdown passes per team per game (green line) hadn't changed all that much, until shooting up the last few years, tying the record of 1.6 in 2013. Most notably, the number of intercepts surrendered per team per game (purple line) has dropped from over 2 to about 1 in recent years. 

There are many reasons for this, such as changes in rules to preserve receivers and quarterbacks and improvements in game conditions (such as domed stadiums and better turf). It would appear, however, that NFL teams are just better at passing the ball than they used to be. Although defenses are evolving too, offenses make fewer unforced errors than they used to. Thus the big improvement in the touchdowns to interceptions ratio from the Broadway Joe Namath days when advanced offensive strategic thinking called for the QB to heave it deep and see what happens.

The legendary season Namath led the upstart New York Jets to the AFL's first Super Bowl win in January 1969, the future Hall of Famer averaged 16.8 yards per pass completion, compared to Peyton Manning's mere 12.2 yards per completion this season. But Namath only threw 15 touchdown passes compared to 17 interceptions (in 14 games) compared to Manning's 55 touchdowns to 10 interceptions (in 16 games) in 2013.

When you see "Flynn Effects" like that, it's interesting to try to determine whether the improvements come more from change in personnel or from change in how they perform. 

For example, Bill Simmons notes in his big book of basketball a 1950s NBA center, a white guy listed at 6'8" whose name slips my mind (Neil Johnston?). He was a major scorer using a side arm hook shot. Then Bill Russell, a black guy listed at 6'11" arrived in the league and tried really hard on defense. (The NBA has always had a professional wrestling side to it, so trying hard to win on defense was a novelty in the pro game.) Russell blocked so many of his sidearm shots that he was soon out of the league. 

In general, though, it's not that easy to find all that many clear examples in sports history of players' careers being shortened by the overall quality of competition in the league going up. One inflection point might be when Maury Wills stole 104 bases for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1962: that is said to have had a big impact on the careers of catchers in the National League: the good hit / no throw ones were gone pretty fast.

But you also get a lot of examples of star players who just keep racking up bigger numbers as the game evolves. Manning, for instance, is 37 and can't throw the ball very hard anymore. He has to throw many of his passes at an arc, which ought to give the defense more time to break them up. Since entering the NFL in the last century, he has heard quite a few other quarterbacks proclaimed The Future of Football.

But this season Manning set records for most yards passing and most touchdowns in one season, and threw for 400 yards on Sunday to go to the Super Bowl. 

It's curious.
  

January 19, 2014

Paul Krugman notices he's in the One Percent

Paul Krugman writes in "The Undeserving Rich:"
The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the “1 percent,” which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.

I've never quite understood the political appeal of defining the Class Enemy so broadly as to include over 3 million people. I would think that you'd want to define it much more narrowly: The 400, say, the number who could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom, which Forbes appropriated a third of a century ago.

Perhaps one problem is that if you start narrowing the number of Class Enemies down to the point where it gets personalized, then you run into the problem that lots of people like famous rich individuals. Billionaires can afford appealing public relations strategies.

But I'm probably overthinking this. I doubt if all that many people denouncing the One Percent have ever even calculated what is one percent of the the population of the country (what's that?). One Percent is just a numeric-looking shorthand for a Really Small Number.
   

The triumph of hope over experience: $17-$20 million for Obama's 3rd autobiography

David Remnick writes in The New Yorker:
When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) 

Which one do you think will have the even lower finished-to-purchased ratio?

Remnick's long article features extensive analyses from Obama about how, on the one hand, the President should never say anything interesting, but, on the other hand, interesting things are those the President should never say. The article can't have set literary agents on fire with anticipation.

One possibility is that, having never said anything interesting in decades in anticipation of becoming President, Obama has been saving up the huge number of brilliant insights and hilarious zingers he's dreamed up, and will unload them all in his $20 million book. An alternative is that he hasn't actually thought up anything all that interesting, and that's what the people who will pay for this book want more of.
   

Diversity Before Diversity: Oklahoma's 1907 senators

In Gore Vidal's historical novel Empire, President Theodore Roosevelt exclaims in 1907 about the new state of Oklahoma and its two new Democratic senators:
"They have also, in their infinite Western wisdom, sent us a blind boy for one senator, and an Indian -- an Indian! -- for another."

The blind senator, Thomas Gore, was Vidal's maternal grandfather (but only a distant relation of Al Gore). Senator Gore had gone blind in a couple of childhood accidents. 

My general impression is that the number of blind people is declining. When I was young, blind musicians were prominent (e.g., Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Jose Feliciano, and Ronnie Milsap were all famous around 1970), but that seems to be less true these days. The Lt. Governor of New York recently was blind, but he ran into trouble when he moved up to the top job after Gov. Spitzer's resignation. It's hard being blind. 

The other 1907 Oklahoma senator, Robert L. Owen, is identified on the Cherokee rolls as 1/16th Cherokee, although that might have been an exaggeration. 

Still, he appears to have inherited some good hair genes from his Indian ancestor. Wikipedia reports: "He was a tall man of erect bearing, who kept a full head of hair to the end of his life." He looked like the kind of slightly Indian guy whom 1930s Hollywood directors would have been happy to cast as an Indian chief.

He publicly identified as part-Cherokee and was thus employed in various Indian affairs for years in the late 19th century. From 1900 to 1906 he represented the Eastern Cherokee in their famous case over having their lands stolen from them by Andrew Jackson, winning almost $5 million in a 1906 Supreme Court decision.

As Thomas Babington Macaulay pointed out in regards to English attitudes toward Scottish Highlanders, fear and loathing rapidly changed to thinking Scots were glamorous once they were subdued and longer likely to go on the warpath. So, by early 20th Century, being a little bit Indian was cool.

This was very different from the attitudes toward blacks in the U.S. in 1907. Latins who were somewhat black like the Dumas novelists, father and son, were okay as long as there wasn't much talk about it (e.g., some partly black Cubans broke the major league baseball color line playing for the Washington Senators in the late 1930s and early 1940s long before Jackie Robinson, but almost nobody mentioned it, so it wasn't a Thing). A few politicians were a little bit black (various Southern legislatures drawing up Jim Crow laws in the late 19th Century avoided "one drop" definitions to not disqualify some of their members). But it wasn't to be talked about, while Senator Owen or Vice President Charles Curtis being partly Indian was celebrated.

The causal mechanism was the reverse of what we are supposed to believe now. We are always being told that white bigotry against blacks was driven by "hate," but 19th Century whites had hated Indians far more than they had hated blacks. Just about everybody who contact with Indians on the frontier hated them, with only a few exceptions (e.g., Sam Houston), while most whites who came into contact with black slaves liked them. Mark Twain is extremely representative: compare Jim in Huckleberry Finn to Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer.

Both senators were highly successful, Owen serving straight through from 1907 until 1925 (he co-sponsored the Glass-Owen act setting up the Federal Reserve system in 1913), while Gore was in and out of the Senate until 1937.
    

NYT: "Russians: Still the Go-To Bad Guys"

Movies these days tend to be extremely accurate visually about what the past looked like or would have looked like if people back then had more money and time to work on their looks (e.g., all the work put into, say, American Hustle to look like 1978-80).

But the kind of people who write about movies are generally pretty clueless about how people thought or behaved in the past. Cultural pundits today mostly absorb some generally acceptable lessons about the evil attitudes of the past and don't look for nuance.

Thus, from the New York Times:
Russians: Still the Go-To Bad Guys 
By STEVEN KURUTZ
THE movie “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” which opens in theaters this weekend, revolves around an American C.I.A. analyst first introduced in Tom Clancy’s 1984 novel “The Hunt for Red October.” The source material isn’t the only thing that’s a little creaky. Ryan’s destination is Moscow, his target a Russian businessman plotting to crash the American economy through a terrorist attack. 
In portraying the diabolical oligarch Viktor Cherevin, Kenneth Branagh delivers his lines in the thick, menacingly slow accent that defines Eastern European baddies on screen: “You think this is game, Jack?” 
Nearly 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell and marked the end of the Cold War, Hollywood’s go-to villains remain Russians.

That assumes that Russians were the movies' go-to villains during the Cold War, which was hardly true. An obvious example is the James Bond movies, in which the novels' original bad guys, the Soviet SMERSH agency, were replaced by the nonideological for-profit multinational SPECTRE.

In general, Cold War movie bad guys were far more often the CIA, the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the rich, and so forth and so on. (Among powerful American institutions, the Marine Corps and the FBI spent a lot of money and effort schmoozing Hollywood to keep from being portrayed badly.) Overall, the Soviets didn't figure much in American entertainment, and when they did, were usually seen as not the real problem.

The use of the Soviets as bad guys tended to be a 1980s idiosyncrasy of a handful of out-of-the-closet conservative action stars (e.g., Sylvester Stallone) or writer-directors (John Milius -- Red Dawn). Their anti-Communist movies were extremely controversial at the time since they were much more popular with the public than with the culturesphere.

In general, Hollywood saw the Nazis as having agency, while the Soviets did not. They were a mere unfortunate reaction to our own agency. That's not a wholly unreasonable interpretation of history, but you can see why it wasn't very stimulating for making movies, so there were few anti-Soviet movies.

Even then, it is difficult to recognize any sort of negative ethnic stereotyping of Russians of the type we see today. Throughout the Cold War, American culture producers tended to view Russians as a cultured people as seen in all the great Russian novels and plays of the pre-Communist era. Many of the Russians in the West during the Cold War were refugee aristocrats of impeccable manners: some became head waiters, others novelists (Nabokov). For example, Ensign Chekov on Star Trek was named to call to mind the great Russian playwright.

The current notion of Russians as flatheaded goons didn't exist in America before the Berlin Wall came down.

While Soviet government officials were seen as boring and badly dressed, Americans during the Cold War tended, if anything, to overrate Russian culture as more elegant than American culture. For example, the Bolshoi Ballet was hugely famous during the Cold War. Similarly, young Texan pianist Van Cliburn winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was gigantically famous at the time. Russian figure skaters and gymnasts were highly admired. Even the U.S. victory over the Soviet ice hockey team at the 1980 Olympics was seen as bumptious upstarts somehow knocking off a team that was far more elegant than the brutal North American style.

At the upper end of Hollywood prestige, note Dr. Zhivago, the second biggest grossing movie of the 1960s, which depicts Russians as soulful, literary, and romantic but sadly victimized by Stalin. The movie ends with a travelog of a giant new Soviet hydroelectric dam showing the bad times are over and progress is being made.

The current stereotype associating Russians with organized crime simply didn't exist during the Cold War.
The last few years alone have seen a sadistic ex-K.G.B. agent (“The Avengers”), crooked Russian officials (“A Good Day to Die Hard”), Russian hit men (“The Tourist”), a Russian spy (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), a Russian-American loan shark (“Limitless”) and so many Russian gangsters they have displaced Italians as film’s favored thugs (“Jack Reacher,” “Safe,” “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas,” among others). 
I suspect screenwriters and studio executives have deemed Russians to be politically safe villains. No advocacy group will protest.

E.g., Steven Spielberg thought Hindus were a safe set of villains in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 30 years ago, but quickly discovered that he'd better go back to Nazis.
No foreign distribution deal will be nixed. Russian moviegoers here and abroad are probably inured to seeing themselves portrayed as Boris Badenovs on screen.

Russia is second only to China as a growth market for Hollywood movies. The movie industry is very concerned about Chinese sensitivities, so it would be interesting to see why it doesn't seem concerned about Russian sensitivities.
Why make a TV show about modern-day surveillance and wiretapping when you can do a Red-scare period piece and offend or provoke no one?
Still, it doesn’t make for as powerful drama as it once did.

If you grew up during the Cold War, you viewed Russians with a potent mix of hatred and fear, and felt in your gut that a nuclear war between our countries could erupt any second, obliterating everybody and everything. That’s why movies like “The Day After” and “Threads” were so visceral.

No, these were basically movies about how Ronald Reagan was going to blow up the world. It's funny how the gigantic Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s is so forgotten that it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page.
I doubt today’s teenage moviegoers are walking around with the same mixed-up feelings about the Russians. Ivan Drago, the Soviet-bred fighting machine who battled Rocky Balboa in 1985, may have been absurd but he was a fall guy for his time. Has our pop culture not moved beyond “Rocky IV”?  

Once again, Stallone was notoriously out of step with the rest of Hollywood in the 1980s by making anti-Communist movies, from which he made lots and lots of money, much as Mel Gibson made lots of money off the Mexican-American market with The Passion of the Christ. And don't forget that Rocky IV still ends with Rocky Balboa negotiating world peace with the young new Soviet premiere.

Now, in defense of post-Berlin Wall Hollywood screenwriters, let me point out that they were faster at sniffing out that something funny was going on in Yeltsin's new free market democracy than was, say, Stanley Fischer.
 

NYT, 1986: Boyhood Effeminacy and Later Homosexuality

Here is a very interesting New York Times article from over 27 years ago on a classic long-term study. I'm not aware of this type of study ever being done again. 

The article is quite good on the complexities of nature and nurture, of glasses that are part full and part empty. The NYT science section remains quite strong (despite the complaints of psychometricians who ranked the overall institution far behind my blog in accuracy), but there are simply so many more minefields these days that it's hard to imagine reading a single article this dense with information and analysis without long stretches of moralizing filler. In other words, you can still learn a lot reading the NYT, but you now have to home in on the nuggets of intelligence deposited here and there amongst the rubble and dust.
BOYHOOD EFFEMINACY AND LATER HOMOSEXUALITY 
By JANE E. BRODY 
Published: December 16, 1986

MOST young boys who persistently act like girls grow up to be homosexuals or bisexuals, a 15-year study of ''sissy boys'' has shown. According to the findings, neither therapy designed to discourage the extremely feminine behavior nor ideal child rearing could guarantee that the boys would develop as heterosexuals, although parental discouragement of the boys' girlish behavior tended to result in a more heterosexual orientation. 
Three-fourths of 44 extremely feminine boys followed from early childhood to adolescence or young adulthood matured as homosexuals or bisexuals, as against only one bisexual among a comparison group of more typically masculine boys. 
In many cases parents either overtly or subtly encouraged the feminine behavior. But when parents actively discouraged it and took other steps to enhance a male self-concept, homosexual tendencies of the feminine boys were lessened, although not necessarily reversed. Neither did professional counseling divert a tendency toward homosexuality, although it resulted in more conventional masculine behavior and enhanced the boys' social and pyschological adjustment and comfort with being male. 
The study was conducted by Dr. Richard Green, a noted sex researcher who is professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of its Program in Psychiatry, Law and Human Sexuality. Details of the findings and implications are described in Dr. Green's new book, ''The 'Sissy Boy Syndrome' and the Development of Homosexuality,'' to be published in February by Yale University Press. 
Although the study examined extreme cases of boyhood effeminacy, Dr. Green believes the findings may have relevance to lesser degrees of feminine behavior in boys. Such boys, who may, for example, be athletically inept or prefer music to cars and trucks, often have difficulty making friends with other boys and identifying with typically male activities. Dr. Green suggested that to help the boys think of themselves as male, parents might assist them in finding boy friends who are similarly unaggressive and that the fathers might share in activities the boys enjoy, such as going to the zoo or a concert, rather than insist on taking the boys to athletic events. Counseling to guide such parents and enhance the child's masculine self-image may also be helpful, Dr. Green said. 
The study did not examine the development of homosexuality in boys whose childhoods are typically masculine. About one-third of homosexual men recall such masculine boyhoods. Nor does the study suggest that all boys with the sissy-boy syndrome are destined for homosexuality. Indeed, one-fourth of the extremely feminine boys followed to maturity developed as heterosexuals. 
According to Dr. Green and other experts familiar with his study, the findings indicate that some children may have an inborn ''receptivity'' to environmental factors that encourage a homosexual orientation. Whether such a predisposition is genetic or the result of prenatal factors, or both, is not known. Recent research in animals suggests that prenatal hormonal influences can interfere with programming the brain of the male fetus and result in the birth of males that act like females. 
The study supports a recent Kinsey Institute survey of 1,500 adults that singled out ''gender nonconformity'' in childhood as the most important predictor of homosexuality. Dr. Alan Bell of Indiana University, a director of the Kinsey study, said he was pleased and not surprised that the findings of Dr. Green's prospective study corresponded with the retrospective Kinsey data. 
''The pendulum is swinging back to biology,'' Dr. Bell remarked. ''Apparently there is a very important physiological component that plays a big role in determining one's sexual identity.'' 
As have other recent investigations, including the Kinsey study, the new research challenges long-held psychoanalytic beliefs that dominant, overprotecting mothers and ineffectual fathers are primary ''causes'' of a son's homosexuality. 
Rather, the study suggests that some boys are born with an indifference to rough-and-tumble play and other typical boyhood interests and that this indifference alienates and isolates them from their male peers and often from their fathers as well. Dr. Green believes that such boys may grow up ''starved'' for male affection, which prompts them to seek love from men in adolescence and adulthood. To Dr. Bell, however, a sense of difference and social distance from males during childhood is what leads to the romantic and erotic attraction to other males. 
Dr. Richard Isay, a New York psychoanalyst whose practice is largely homosexual men, said: ''I would agree with Dr. Green. I too see no support for the notion that binding mothers produce homosexual sons, nor do I see any consistent pattern for absent fathers that I don't also see among heterosexual men in analysis.'' Dr. Isay, who is affiliated with Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute and New York-Cornell Medical School, suggested that the common depiction among homosexual men of an absent, distant father is in fact a defense against an underlying erotic attachment to their fathers.

Ah, good old Freudians ...
Dr. Green, who is now studying the development of tomboy girls, said the issue for girls who act like boys is very different. ''There are far fewer sissy boys than tomboy girls, but many more homosexual and transsexual men than women,'' he said.

I believe Green's study of tomboys eventually came up with the common sense finding that not all that many tomboy girls grow up to be lesbians, but a lot of lesbians were tomboys as girls. The number of models, actresses, and other glamor girls who tell interviewers they were tomboys as adolescents is noticeably high. My guess would be that long legs correlate with success in modeling, and long legs correlate with delayed puberty because girls typically stop getting taller around puberty.
Asked to comment on Dr. Green's findings, Dr. Judd Marmor, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles, said that they ''are another indication there is a biological element involved in the genesis of homosexuality, at least for those homosexuals with effeminate qualities.'' 
He added: ''Some children really feel different from earliest childhood; they are born without the aggressive masculinity other boys have. This is not something created by an overprotective mother or an absent or ineffectual father.'' 
Although the study involved a relatively small number of boys, Dr. Marmor, who is a past president of the American Psychiatric Association and an authority on homosexuality, called the research ''most important'' in what it revealed about the development of sexual orientation. ''Society tends to treat male homosexuals as if they had a choice about their sexual orientation, when in fact they have no more choice about how they develop than heterosexuals do,'' he said. ' 
An innate sissiness is ''not the answer to all homosexuality,'' Dr. Marmor said, ''but it is a factor that plays a role in a substantial number of male homosexuals.'' He added that homosexuality could also develop from a seriously distorted family environment but that ''it is much harder to develop that way, without a biological predisposition.'' 
Boys who participated in Dr. Green's study were first examined in early childhood, when their parents became concerned about the boys' persistent feminine behaviors and dislike of activities boys usually like. Many of the boys also repeatedly said they wanted to be girls. At the outset, Dr. Green thought he was examining the origins of male transsexuals -boys who grow up thinking they are girls trapped in male bodies and who may later seek sex-change surgery. 
However, only one of the feminine boys became a transsexual. 
In an interview, Dr. Green pointed out that the boys he studied were notably different from other children. While many, if not most, young children - boys as well as girls - occasionally dress up in their mothers' clothes, put on makeup or jewelry, play with dolls or assume the role of the opposite sex in fantasy play, the boys in Dr. Green's study did so almost exclusively. They spurned typical boy games, rough-housing and sports and instead would play with Barbie dolls for hours, frequently don female clothing and nearly always assume a female role when playing house. Many followed their mothers around the house, mimicking the mothers' activities. 
The boys and their parents were interviewed every few years, and some were seen several times a year in therapeutic counseling aimed at intercepting the boys' feminine tendencies and encouraging more ''gender-appropriate'' activities. 
Although Dr. Green found no evidence that the parents ''created'' feminine boys (many, in fact, had other sons who were normally masculine), certain parental attitudes and actions were correlated with a stronger homosexual orientation. 
One of the earliest influences was the prenatal desire on the part of either parent, and the father in particular, that the child be a girl. After the boy was born, the parents often considered their son to be an especially beautiful infant. Even strangers who admired the baby tended to make comments like ''what a pretty little girl.'' 
One of the most important factors related to a more homosexual orientation in adolescence and adulthood was how parents responded to the boys when they dressed up as girls and pretended to be girls. Many of the parents, Dr. Green said, thought it was cute and directly or indirectly encouraged the cross-gender behavior. For example, photographs of the boys dressed as girls were found in many family albums of feminine boys but in none of the albums of the comparison group of masculine boys.
No relationship was found between later homosexuality and the amount of time a boy spent with his mother. In fact, many of the feminine boys spent less time with their mothers than did the masculine boys. Nor was there any link to a mother-dominated household. 
However, less time shared between father and young son was an important factor. In the first year of life, the fathers tended to spend somewhat less time with their effeminate sons than did the fathers of masculine boys. During the next four years, however, the differences increased. By the time the boys were 3 to 5 years old, fathers of feminine boys were spending significantly less time with their sons than were fathers of the masculine boys. 
This does not mean, however, that the father rejected the son and that this rejection turned the boy into a sissy. Rather, Dr. Green suggested that the boys' feminine behaviors and rejection of male activities contributed to the fathers' indifference. ''It's not just a question of how parents impinge on a child; the child also impinges on the parents,'' he explained. 
In an earlier developmental study of 50 effeminate boys seen at a children's psychiatric clinic in Greenwich, Conn., Dr. Bernard Zuger, a psychiatrist, reported that the boys' ''closeness to the mother and distance from the father spring from their own needs.'' He suggested that parents need not feel guilty if their effeminate sons turn out to be homosexual. 
Another factor that interfered with the father-son relationship in Dr. Green's study was that the feminine boys were likely to be sick more often and more seriously than the masculine boys.

That's pretty interesting. Having been a sickly child was a pretty common theme in 19th and early 20th Century culture: e.g., Teddy Roosevelt was famous for having overcome his childhood infirmities through force of will. Many writers and artists had been sickly lads.
In most cases, it was the boys' mothers who cared for them when they were ill, especially if a lot of time was spent in hospitals. This also encouraged a more protective parental attitude toward the feminine boy. 
The culture may also play a role, Dr. Green said, though its effects are harder to measure. ''If the culture were less condemning of cross-gender behavior, social stigmatization would be less and perhaps these boys could socialize more with other boys,'' he remarked. ''Certainly that is the case with tomboys, who are treated by society as normal girls.'' 
On the other hand, he cited studies in several different cultures by Dr. Frederick Whitam, sociologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who found that homosexuals in these cultures were more likely to remember cross-gender behavior in childhood than were heterosexuals. Dr. Marmor pointed out that in many cultures, including certain American Indian tribes, less aggressive boys are recognized by their elders and are given institutionalized roles, usually as a priest. 
Rather than attributing homosexuality to cultural, parental or genetic factors, Dr. Green sees an interaction of the three, as evidenced in particular by a pair of identical twins in his study. One boy was clearly feminine and the other twin typically masculine. The feminine boy was sick a lot and had little to do with his father, whereas the masculine twin had a more typical relationship with his father. As adults, both boys were bisexual, but the feminine twin was far more homosexual than his brother. 
''The twins are the metaphor for this study,'' Dr. Green said. ''They are similar but not the same. The degree to which they are not the same can be explained by the early feminine behavior of one, not by genetics.''
   

NYT: Science proves Americans are still sexist

Economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes in the New York Times:
This [Google search] methodology can also be used to study gender preference before birth. Every year, Americans make hundreds of thousands of searches asking how to conceive a child of a particular sex. In searches with the words “how to conceive,” Americans are slightly more likely to include the word “boy” than “girl.” Among the subset of Americans Googling for specific gender conception strategies, there is about a 10 percent preference for boys compared with girls. 
This boy preference is surprising for two reasons. First, the top websites returned for these queries are overwhelmingly geared toward women, suggesting that women are most often making gender conception searches. Yet in surveys, women express a slight preference for having girls, not boys; men say they prefer sons. Second, many Americans are willing to admit a gender preference to even out a family. About 5 percent more boys are born than girls in the United States, so evening out a family would more often require having a girl, not a boy. Are men searching for conception advice in large numbers? Are women searching on their husbands’ behalf? Or do some American women have a son preference that they are not comfortable admitting to surveys? 
Other countries exhibit very large preferences in favor of boys. In India, for each search asking how to conceive a girl, there are three-and-a-half asking how to conceive a boy. With such an overwhelming preference for boys, it is not surprising that there are millions fewer women in India than population scientists would predict. 
Clearly there is more to learn. 

Here's something more that wouldn't be hard to learn: just looking at this graph above, it's pretty obvious that the small male preference in Google searches in America for information about how to conceive a son is being driven by Asians in the United States, especially South Asians (the same is likely true of Canada). In contrast, Australia, Britain, and New Zealand have more searches for how to conceive girls.

For collateral evidence, just do a Google search on "sex-selective abortions."
Because this data make it easy to compare different countries over time, for example, we might examine whether these gender preferences change after a woman is elected to run a country.
 
Hillary 2016!

Last year, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tut-tutted at a white Republican Congressman for noticing. Milbank wrote:
Republican’s abortion bill risks alienating Asian Americans  
Republicans long ago lost African American voters. They are well on their way to losing Latinos. And if Trent Franks prevails, they may lose Asian Americans, too. 
The Arizona Republican’s latest antiabortion salvo to be taken up by the House had a benign name — the Prenatal Non­discrimination Act — and a premise with which just about everybody agrees: that a woman shouldn’t abort a fetus simply because she wants to have a boy rather than a girl.  
The problem with Franks’s proposal is that it’s not entirely clear there is a problem. Sex-selection abortion is a huge tragedy in parts of Asia, but to the extent it’s happening in this country, it’s mostly among Asian immigrants.   ...
In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Franks didn’t dispute that Asian Americans would be targeted. “The real target in the Asian community here is the Asian women who are being coerced into aborting little girls,” he told me, adding: “When the left doesn’t want to make abortion the issue, they say you’re being against minorities.”   
Franks is a principled and consistent opponent of abortion, but his strategy has raised eyebrows before because of its racial component.