Andrew Sullivan - "unintellectual hero" and poster child for race hate groups.I cannot think of any off hand. Maybe there are some.
In fact, almost all the times someone has come up with proofless "genetic theories" in that context, the net result has been ... well, I guess, killing thousand and millions - or even setting the stage for intolerance and hate - is what Andrew might call "having a cow", in his seriously twisted world of self-importance on the topic.
I watched a good part of the drooling Dr. Watson on the weekend. He's the opposite version of AS, maybe - the guy without political acumen of note who made some empty or bogus imputations for "politics", depending on how one reckons them, from genetic speculations. This is what AS pretends to do, "discovering" "explosive" stories from genetic science. But, the real story is ostensibly the politics he wants, not the science he pretends to follow, "the truth", as he styles it - the truth is that science doesn't know AND says so.
Moreover, AS appears to acknowledge the limits of the current science, but ignores them. Why? Is the expansiveness of his political aims more important than the limits of the empirical truth he acknowledges (sometimes)? Maybe. More likely he just wants to be at the center of a stirred up "controversy" ("story of the week", "knocked my socks off", look-at-edgy-me) that drives traffic to a website or something. How b-o-r-i-n-g.
I suspect that if AS ever had to defend his views in anything but the South Park way that he gets to do it on his blog, now, he might end up as obviously uncomfortable answering questions as did Dr. Watson, who complained to the host when the questioning got tough, "I thought we were going to have a nice conversation", or some such to the same effect.
Dr. Watson went on to intone in his retractions that he was "mortified". Problem is that you cannot take back slanders. That's why they are so strictly circumscribed.
As a side note, one might criticize someone, like me, who isn't afraid of suggesting genetic theories for homosexuality, although few suggest that such claims are proven (even when Richardson got taken to task for it). These arguments, well used, are a supplemental effort to combat intolerance, quite obviously. The genetics of race that Sullivan finds so compelling go directly in the opposite direction. Why someone would take empirical uncertainty in that direction is what we call 'mean spirited', among other things, not "conservative" or even "anti-liberal" and certainly not "truthful".
Pretend all you want that there is a realism there (please spare us calling it "core decency", though), but at most all one has defended in the current context is the right to act an asshole, to its own end (AND certainly fertile grounds for more dogmatic ends - to ignore and dismiss such possibilities is to ignore "reality", too, to embrace "sanctimony"). With that, the right to act an asshole, we find another insight into the "Conservative Soul", sometimes not even hidden between the lines.
