This started out wonderful with respect to the points about the Congress of Vienna "reaslists" and those that understand the actual human condition with respect to global relations.
I found these comments to be especially powerful in explanation:
"No nation is a unified collective. Every nation is a collection of competing interests, and foreign policy is set by whichever of those interests has become dominant."
"Europeans, from the beginning, welcomed and even invited American power. I think that's because of ideological affinity. They knew that American power does not threaten their fundamental freedoms, whereas the rise of other great powers who don't share these liberal values would inherently threaten their liberal values."
"But Americans have their own psychological hang-ups about how they feel about the world. We are very reticent in general about taking any action that has not been sort of forced upon us by an external event. "
But then this...
"It just happened as a series of historical accidents. But it is a powerful force, nevertheless, as we've seen."
and this...
"I don't want Donald Trump to be president after 2024 because I think he will then dismantle American democracy. Because he doesn't have any belief in American democracy."
So we can discredit almost everything Mr. Kagan writes as being corrupted by his connection to the American political establishment war machine and the related psychosis we have diagnosed as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It is fascinating to me that the cohort of academics that make their living delivering word salads to the rest of us lack such self awareness or intellectual curiosity, and especially in Mr. Kagan's case were he writes: "You can’t understand what the outcome of a foreign policy debate is unless you understand how much of that foreign policy debate is actually rooted in domestic debate.", to try and understand why the British voters would elect BREXIT and the American voters Donald Trump... but instead just assign it to some historical accident that they, the ordained word salad ruling class, just failed to anticipate but now can recover from.
In the end, Mr. Kagan probably unconsciously confirms his very thesis by wrapping his own realist position of pursuing his own economic interests into his ideological arguments and identity. Clearly his social and economic hierarchy is well-served by demand for his deep thinking and ideas. Unfortunately he now finds himself on the outside of the growing populist movement to break up the corporatist cabal that he and the political establishment feeds from, so that we return to a time of American middle class prosperity... that is the primary reason that the US, and it was no accident, has been successful ridding the world of tyranny that would seek to topple all that is good.
"when you have the overwhelming majority of one political party, either actually believing or pretending to believe that the last election—about which there has been no question of its legitimacy—was, in fact, a fraud"
That turns out to be a lie. This issue has been extensively polled. No "overwhelming majority" claims that the last election was a fraud. This is a lot like "Russian collusion", something almost all liberals believe that is just not true.
(1) While there is no shortage of things to worry about concerning Donald Trump and the Republicans in the 2024 election, I think you both might be missing or dismissing one option that still seems to be viable. Kagan says that the Constitution doesn't have a remedy for a constitutional crisis that could arise because of state actions about counting votes (my own concern exactly), and Mounk says he's even more pessimistic than that.
But the Constitution does have a remedy, and that is the Supreme Court. While both political extremes have been doing their best to undermine the court's credibility, which does show signs of grim success in public polling, I continue to have a great deal of faith that the court would, in fact, use its authority to restore sanity -- and there would be enough Americans who would welcome that to counter some of the state rearguard actions against democracy.
I might be wrong, or there might be much more violent protests by the GOP in some of the most resistant states, but I have seen Chief Justice Roberts, in enough cases now, to think he truly is a very strong institutionalist (a point Sarah Isgur makes repeatedly), and would be able to construct a majority, and possibly a unanimous court, to make a persuasive case to the nation.
We often forget that the courts have to justify their actions in writing, something no politician has to do. And those justifications have to be persuasive, even if there are two credible sides in any case. In an actual constitutional crisis, I still have faith that the Supreme Court would have the primary role as the final arbiter and justifier of what could or would have gone wrong.
(2) (Well out of my portfolio, but something the Ukraine invasion keeps bringing back to me). Kagan's thoughts about international realism and spheres of influence and the dominance of US Power was so helpful to this complete novice in international relations. But the question that I can't escape is whether Russia is, in fact, an international military power. It is clearly a nuclear threat, but in a world where every great power has enormous disincentives to use that part of its arsenal, non-nuclear war continues to be the norm.
And on that front, Russia seems to be much weaker than I'd ever thought. What do China and India and others really think of Russia's non-nuclear military these days? Is there any military reason to fear Russia except for its nuclear weapons?
It is still possible Putin will actually use them, perhaps some smaller, suitcase-style device. That terrifies me.
But absent that, the real war that seems to be going on is the truly World War of economics. In that, Russia is also a weak sister, but this winter the battle will be joined in a greatly unified Europe. I wish them the best.
But as we so often do, people are fighting the last war, and this new kind of warfare is probably the kind China is keeping its eyes on. Again as a complete non-expert, I deeply hope we are also figuring out how warfare on this new battlefield will work. The international sanctions on Russia seem to be right, but energy supply is one of the economic weapons that plays into Russia's leverage in a way that troops don't seem to be.
“Most research had been done on psychometric testing which was also by far the most widely used in practical settings. Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests do correlate with one another and that the view that the general intelligence factor (g) is a statistical artifact is a minority one. IQ scores are fairly stable during development in the sense that while a child's reasoning ability increases, the child's relative ranking in comparison to that of other individuals of the same age is fairly stable during development.”
“The report stated that IQ scores measure important skills as they correlate fairly well (0.5) with grades. This implied that the explained variance (given certain linear assumptions) is 25%. "Wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. There may be styles of teaching and methods of instruction that will decrease or increase this correlation, but none that consistently eliminates it has yet been found."”
“IQ scores also correlated with school achievement tests designed to measure knowledge of the curriculum. Other personal characteristics affecting this may be persistence, interest in school, and willingness to study which may be influenced by the degree of encouragement for academic achievement a child receives and more general cultural factors. Test scores were the best single predictor of an individual's years of education. They were somewhat more important than social class as measured by occupation/education of parents.”
There is actually a funny Tweet about this (from S.A. Pinker)
“Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN'T apply to IQ: huge n's, replicable results. But people hate the message.”
Heritability of IQ
The following is from Wikipedia. Of course, the anti-science left denies that IQ even exists, much less that it might be heritable.
“Estimates of heritability take values ranging from 0 to 1; a heritability estimate of 1 indicates that all variation in the trait in question is genetic in origin and a heritability estimate of 0 indicates that none of the variation is genetic. The determination of many traits can be considered primarily genetic under similar environmental backgrounds. For example, a 2006 study found that adult height has a heritability estimated at 0.80 when looking only at the height variation within families where the environment should be very similar. Other traits have lower heritability estimates, which indicate a relatively larger environmental influence. For example, a twin study on the heritability of depression in men estimated it as 0.29, while it was 0.42 for women in the same study.”
The left denies that race has any biological basis. Reality does not agree. The fact that race can be determined from tiny DNA samples with great accuracy does not seem to have impacted leftist thinking in the slightest.
See “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies” (NCBI/PMC). Risch was able identify race with 99.86% accuracy. Not bad for something that doesn’t exist. Note that Risch did not look skin color genes at all. Quote
“We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population. Implications of this genetic structure for case-control association studies are discussed.”
Take a look at “The Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA Profiling”. A scientist by the name of Tony Frudakis was able to identify the race of a serial killer in a police investigation in Louisiana. The police in Louisiana were looking for a white male killer based on (mis)information received early in the case. They were wrong. Frudakis examined DNA samples collected in the investigation and told the police that the killer was probably 85% Black and 15% Native American. Based on this new information the police starting examining new suspects and found the actual killer (who matched Frudakis’s description rather well). Tony Frudakis found that race could be determined from genes with 100% accuracy. Not bad for something that doesn’t exist.
Take a look at “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race'” by David Reich in the NYT. If race didn’t exist it would not be trivial to identify race from genes. But it is. Quotes
“Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.”
The left has been overtly hysterical about GMOs for years. A common phrase of the left has been ‘frankenfoods’. The fact that GMO safety has been repeatedly demonstrated has not impacted the debate at all. There is a marked trans-Atlantic schism on this point. The American left has never taken up the GMO cause (with some exceptions). By contrast, the left in Europe has gone completely insane on this issue.
Global Warming
To AGW obsessives only US / European CO2 emissions contribute to global warming. The fact that China produces more CO2 than the US and Europe combined goes mostly unmentioned. Of course, the bigger issue is whether AGW is really a ‘crisis’ or not. So far the answer is clearly no.
This is something that can be empirically measured in several ways. First, is global life expectancy rising or falling. One possible consequence of AGW would be falling life expectancy. However, global life expectancy is strongly rising. Of course, other factors (healthcare, etc.) could be more than offsetting an underlying downward trend driven by AGW.
Global food prices provide a more sensitive measure of the impact (or lack thereof) of AGW. If AGW was changing the world materially, global food prices should respond with dramatic increases. In real life, global food prices have been falling for decades (with high volatility).
Hurricane activity (or lack thereof) provides another measure of the impact of AGW. The hurricane activity metric shows a gradual increase of time. For example, hurricane activity in the 1880s (a peak) exceeded hurricane activity around 2000 (also a peak).
It should be noted that real climate crises have occurred in the past. By some estimate the lake Toba eruption (roughly 70,000 years ago) killed almost all living humans. Much more recently the eruption of Krakatoa (maybe) devasted the Eastern Roman empire (AD 536). Later the eruption (possibly) of Mount Tarawera, New Zealand might have caused the European famines of 1315-1317. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused crops to fail globally in 1816.
Overall, I rate the Democrats as the anti-science party these says. A few notes.
Vaccines
For years a standard joke about anti-vacination sentiment was from Seth Mnookin “Last April, we examined the state of the anti-vaccination movement, and turned to science writer, Seth Mnookin, who wrote a book about the vaccine-autism controversy. We called him again this week and started by playing back part of a conversation we had with him last year. In it, he told about an epidemiologist who would track where the anti-vaccine trend tends to cluster.
SETH MNOOKIN: And he said, sure, we just take out a map and put a pushpin everywhere there's a Whole Foods and draw a circle around that area. He was speaking slightly in jest, but what he was referring to is the fact that you do see a number of well-educated, politically liberal people who self-identify as being environmentally conscious."
Evolution
Almost everyone (exceptions exist) on the liberal/left is in total denial about evolution. Any attempt to suggest that evolution is (was) a reality and might affect all species, including humans, gets an overtly hysterical response. Disagreeing about global warming triggers debates on the right. Suggesting that evolution might be real, produces outright repression (including violence) on the left. For a depressing case in point, take a look at the persecution of Larry Summers. His critics didn't trouble themselves to disagree with Summers (hard to do, given that the facts were in his favor). They sought (with great success) to suppress any discussion of the topics at hand.
The harsh reaction to Wade's book is just one example of how intolerant the left is to the idea of evolution, including human evolution. Pinker in "The Blank Slate" (and "The Language Instinct") had many other examples of left-wing attacks on the very idea of "human nature", much less the notion that it might be the product of evolution.
Sadly, it appears that some folks don't know, that the very same leftists who use "the evolution of (non-human) species" to bash religion, get very religious (and deeply) upset when anyone suggests that evolution didn't stop with the great apes.
The "show trial" of Larry Summers is just one case in point. Summers dared to suggest (based on irrelevant things called "facts") that human nature might actually exist. His subsequent recantations and apologies were right out of Stalin and Lysenko. Note that Summers did not assert that human nature was/is the product of evolution.
The severe reaction (on the left) to the Damore memo was just another datapoint in the left rejection of evolution / science. There are some pretty obvious evolutionary reasons why women would differ (a lot) from men in their preferences for people vs. things (Damore’s key point). Was anyone (one the left) influenced by the rather clear science on the subject? Not exactly.
"What people are really talking about, if they're honest, is consigning Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and who knows who else, to Chinese domination"
Absolutely wrong, moralizing nonsense. This is like saying, by not hiring a police officer to follow every last American around 24 hours a day, we're consigning people to get murdered.
This started out wonderful with respect to the points about the Congress of Vienna "reaslists" and those that understand the actual human condition with respect to global relations.
I found these comments to be especially powerful in explanation:
"No nation is a unified collective. Every nation is a collection of competing interests, and foreign policy is set by whichever of those interests has become dominant."
"Europeans, from the beginning, welcomed and even invited American power. I think that's because of ideological affinity. They knew that American power does not threaten their fundamental freedoms, whereas the rise of other great powers who don't share these liberal values would inherently threaten their liberal values."
"But Americans have their own psychological hang-ups about how they feel about the world. We are very reticent in general about taking any action that has not been sort of forced upon us by an external event. "
But then this...
"It just happened as a series of historical accidents. But it is a powerful force, nevertheless, as we've seen."
and this...
"I don't want Donald Trump to be president after 2024 because I think he will then dismantle American democracy. Because he doesn't have any belief in American democracy."
So we can discredit almost everything Mr. Kagan writes as being corrupted by his connection to the American political establishment war machine and the related psychosis we have diagnosed as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It is fascinating to me that the cohort of academics that make their living delivering word salads to the rest of us lack such self awareness or intellectual curiosity, and especially in Mr. Kagan's case were he writes: "You can’t understand what the outcome of a foreign policy debate is unless you understand how much of that foreign policy debate is actually rooted in domestic debate.", to try and understand why the British voters would elect BREXIT and the American voters Donald Trump... but instead just assign it to some historical accident that they, the ordained word salad ruling class, just failed to anticipate but now can recover from.
In the end, Mr. Kagan probably unconsciously confirms his very thesis by wrapping his own realist position of pursuing his own economic interests into his ideological arguments and identity. Clearly his social and economic hierarchy is well-served by demand for his deep thinking and ideas. Unfortunately he now finds himself on the outside of the growing populist movement to break up the corporatist cabal that he and the political establishment feeds from, so that we return to a time of American middle class prosperity... that is the primary reason that the US, and it was no accident, has been successful ridding the world of tyranny that would seek to topple all that is good.
"when you have the overwhelming majority of one political party, either actually believing or pretending to believe that the last election—about which there has been no question of its legitimacy—was, in fact, a fraud"
That turns out to be a lie. This issue has been extensively polled. No "overwhelming majority" claims that the last election was a fraud. This is a lot like "Russian collusion", something almost all liberals believe that is just not true.
Two thoughts:
(1) While there is no shortage of things to worry about concerning Donald Trump and the Republicans in the 2024 election, I think you both might be missing or dismissing one option that still seems to be viable. Kagan says that the Constitution doesn't have a remedy for a constitutional crisis that could arise because of state actions about counting votes (my own concern exactly), and Mounk says he's even more pessimistic than that.
But the Constitution does have a remedy, and that is the Supreme Court. While both political extremes have been doing their best to undermine the court's credibility, which does show signs of grim success in public polling, I continue to have a great deal of faith that the court would, in fact, use its authority to restore sanity -- and there would be enough Americans who would welcome that to counter some of the state rearguard actions against democracy.
I might be wrong, or there might be much more violent protests by the GOP in some of the most resistant states, but I have seen Chief Justice Roberts, in enough cases now, to think he truly is a very strong institutionalist (a point Sarah Isgur makes repeatedly), and would be able to construct a majority, and possibly a unanimous court, to make a persuasive case to the nation.
We often forget that the courts have to justify their actions in writing, something no politician has to do. And those justifications have to be persuasive, even if there are two credible sides in any case. In an actual constitutional crisis, I still have faith that the Supreme Court would have the primary role as the final arbiter and justifier of what could or would have gone wrong.
(2) (Well out of my portfolio, but something the Ukraine invasion keeps bringing back to me). Kagan's thoughts about international realism and spheres of influence and the dominance of US Power was so helpful to this complete novice in international relations. But the question that I can't escape is whether Russia is, in fact, an international military power. It is clearly a nuclear threat, but in a world where every great power has enormous disincentives to use that part of its arsenal, non-nuclear war continues to be the norm.
And on that front, Russia seems to be much weaker than I'd ever thought. What do China and India and others really think of Russia's non-nuclear military these days? Is there any military reason to fear Russia except for its nuclear weapons?
It is still possible Putin will actually use them, perhaps some smaller, suitcase-style device. That terrifies me.
But absent that, the real war that seems to be going on is the truly World War of economics. In that, Russia is also a weak sister, but this winter the battle will be joined in a greatly unified Europe. I wish them the best.
But as we so often do, people are fighting the last war, and this new kind of warfare is probably the kind China is keeping its eyes on. Again as a complete non-expert, I deeply hope we are also figuring out how warfare on this new battlefield will work. The international sanctions on Russia seem to be right, but energy supply is one of the economic weapons that plays into Russia's leverage in a way that troops don't seem to be.
Make it stop
Excellent discussion!!
Part 4
IQ
The following is from the APA via Wikipedia
“Most research had been done on psychometric testing which was also by far the most widely used in practical settings. Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests do correlate with one another and that the view that the general intelligence factor (g) is a statistical artifact is a minority one. IQ scores are fairly stable during development in the sense that while a child's reasoning ability increases, the child's relative ranking in comparison to that of other individuals of the same age is fairly stable during development.”
“The report stated that IQ scores measure important skills as they correlate fairly well (0.5) with grades. This implied that the explained variance (given certain linear assumptions) is 25%. "Wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. There may be styles of teaching and methods of instruction that will decrease or increase this correlation, but none that consistently eliminates it has yet been found."”
“IQ scores also correlated with school achievement tests designed to measure knowledge of the curriculum. Other personal characteristics affecting this may be persistence, interest in school, and willingness to study which may be influenced by the degree of encouragement for academic achievement a child receives and more general cultural factors. Test scores were the best single predictor of an individual's years of education. They were somewhat more important than social class as measured by occupation/education of parents.”
There is actually a funny Tweet about this (from S.A. Pinker)
“Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN'T apply to IQ: huge n's, replicable results. But people hate the message.”
Heritability of IQ
The following is from Wikipedia. Of course, the anti-science left denies that IQ even exists, much less that it might be heritable.
“Estimates of heritability take values ranging from 0 to 1; a heritability estimate of 1 indicates that all variation in the trait in question is genetic in origin and a heritability estimate of 0 indicates that none of the variation is genetic. The determination of many traits can be considered primarily genetic under similar environmental backgrounds. For example, a 2006 study found that adult height has a heritability estimated at 0.80 when looking only at the height variation within families where the environment should be very similar. Other traits have lower heritability estimates, which indicate a relatively larger environmental influence. For example, a twin study on the heritability of depression in men estimated it as 0.29, while it was 0.42 for women in the same study.”
Part 3
Race
The left denies that race has any biological basis. Reality does not agree. The fact that race can be determined from tiny DNA samples with great accuracy does not seem to have impacted leftist thinking in the slightest.
See “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies” (NCBI/PMC). Risch was able identify race with 99.86% accuracy. Not bad for something that doesn’t exist. Note that Risch did not look skin color genes at all. Quote
“We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population. Implications of this genetic structure for case-control association studies are discussed.”
Take a look at “The Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA Profiling”. A scientist by the name of Tony Frudakis was able to identify the race of a serial killer in a police investigation in Louisiana. The police in Louisiana were looking for a white male killer based on (mis)information received early in the case. They were wrong. Frudakis examined DNA samples collected in the investigation and told the police that the killer was probably 85% Black and 15% Native American. Based on this new information the police starting examining new suspects and found the actual killer (who matched Frudakis’s description rather well). Tony Frudakis found that race could be determined from genes with 100% accuracy. Not bad for something that doesn’t exist.
Take a look at “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race'” by David Reich in the NYT. If race didn’t exist it would not be trivial to identify race from genes. But it is. Quotes
“Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.”
Part 2
GMOs
The left has been overtly hysterical about GMOs for years. A common phrase of the left has been ‘frankenfoods’. The fact that GMO safety has been repeatedly demonstrated has not impacted the debate at all. There is a marked trans-Atlantic schism on this point. The American left has never taken up the GMO cause (with some exceptions). By contrast, the left in Europe has gone completely insane on this issue.
Global Warming
To AGW obsessives only US / European CO2 emissions contribute to global warming. The fact that China produces more CO2 than the US and Europe combined goes mostly unmentioned. Of course, the bigger issue is whether AGW is really a ‘crisis’ or not. So far the answer is clearly no.
This is something that can be empirically measured in several ways. First, is global life expectancy rising or falling. One possible consequence of AGW would be falling life expectancy. However, global life expectancy is strongly rising. Of course, other factors (healthcare, etc.) could be more than offsetting an underlying downward trend driven by AGW.
Global food prices provide a more sensitive measure of the impact (or lack thereof) of AGW. If AGW was changing the world materially, global food prices should respond with dramatic increases. In real life, global food prices have been falling for decades (with high volatility).
Hurricane activity (or lack thereof) provides another measure of the impact of AGW. The hurricane activity metric shows a gradual increase of time. For example, hurricane activity in the 1880s (a peak) exceeded hurricane activity around 2000 (also a peak).
It should be noted that real climate crises have occurred in the past. By some estimate the lake Toba eruption (roughly 70,000 years ago) killed almost all living humans. Much more recently the eruption of Krakatoa (maybe) devasted the Eastern Roman empire (AD 536). Later the eruption (possibly) of Mount Tarawera, New Zealand might have caused the European famines of 1315-1317. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused crops to fail globally in 1816.
Overall, I rate the Democrats as the anti-science party these says. A few notes.
Vaccines
For years a standard joke about anti-vacination sentiment was from Seth Mnookin “Last April, we examined the state of the anti-vaccination movement, and turned to science writer, Seth Mnookin, who wrote a book about the vaccine-autism controversy. We called him again this week and started by playing back part of a conversation we had with him last year. In it, he told about an epidemiologist who would track where the anti-vaccine trend tends to cluster.
SETH MNOOKIN: And he said, sure, we just take out a map and put a pushpin everywhere there's a Whole Foods and draw a circle around that area. He was speaking slightly in jest, but what he was referring to is the fact that you do see a number of well-educated, politically liberal people who self-identify as being environmentally conscious."
Evolution
Almost everyone (exceptions exist) on the liberal/left is in total denial about evolution. Any attempt to suggest that evolution is (was) a reality and might affect all species, including humans, gets an overtly hysterical response. Disagreeing about global warming triggers debates on the right. Suggesting that evolution might be real, produces outright repression (including violence) on the left. For a depressing case in point, take a look at the persecution of Larry Summers. His critics didn't trouble themselves to disagree with Summers (hard to do, given that the facts were in his favor). They sought (with great success) to suppress any discussion of the topics at hand.
The harsh reaction to Wade's book is just one example of how intolerant the left is to the idea of evolution, including human evolution. Pinker in "The Blank Slate" (and "The Language Instinct") had many other examples of left-wing attacks on the very idea of "human nature", much less the notion that it might be the product of evolution.
Sadly, it appears that some folks don't know, that the very same leftists who use "the evolution of (non-human) species" to bash religion, get very religious (and deeply) upset when anyone suggests that evolution didn't stop with the great apes.
The "show trial" of Larry Summers is just one case in point. Summers dared to suggest (based on irrelevant things called "facts") that human nature might actually exist. His subsequent recantations and apologies were right out of Stalin and Lysenko. Note that Summers did not assert that human nature was/is the product of evolution.
The severe reaction (on the left) to the Damore memo was just another datapoint in the left rejection of evolution / science. There are some pretty obvious evolutionary reasons why women would differ (a lot) from men in their preferences for people vs. things (Damore’s key point). Was anyone (one the left) influenced by the rather clear science on the subject? Not exactly.
"What people are really talking about, if they're honest, is consigning Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and who knows who else, to Chinese domination"
Absolutely wrong, moralizing nonsense. This is like saying, by not hiring a police officer to follow every last American around 24 hours a day, we're consigning people to get murdered.