Tuesday, January 03, 2006

January is anti-women's month at the NYTimes

Tom Tomorrow asked, not long ago - Stupid or lying and featured David Brooks.

But anybody who reads his crap knows the answer - David Brooks, unaffectionately known as "Bobo" in the liberal blogosphere, is stupid as dirt.

He treats us to his typical stupidity in today's NYTimes:

(Linda Hirshman's) third mistake is to not even grapple with the fact that men and women are wired differently. The Larry Summers flap produced an outpouring of work on the neurological differences between men and women. I'd especially recommend "The Inequality Taboo" by Charles Murray in Commentary and a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke in the online magazine Edge.


I LOVE the fact that Brooks links to the debate between Pinker and Spelke because Spelke DEMOLISHES Pinker, who maintains that males are wired for the abstract more than females. Does Brooks even READ what he cites???

And of course he has to cite Charles Murray, whose deeply flawed but highly publicized The Bell Curve was debunked by many, including Nicholas Lemann in Slate.

But how much influence does Brooks have on his clone John Tierney? Is it a coincidence that right after Brooks wrote his idiotic column, Tierney wrote one about how it's not good for a woman to earn too much money or no man will want her?

The only surprise in Tierney's article is that he didn't cite any evolutionary psychology to support his opinion. Perhaps he feels that the absolute truth of evolutionary psychology is so entrenched in our minds that nobody would even question whether "Male Pride and Female Prejudice" is a symptom of a culture that until very recently didn't allow women the chance to earn a decent wage. No, surely this is an eternal reality in the big empty mind of John Tierney - because that's how things were when he was growing up, you see, and he lacks the knowledge or imagination to understand the fluidity of social attitudes.

Sorry Tierney, you STILL have to come up with some evolutionary psychology flimflam to bolster your opinion.


Oops, I skimmed through Tierney's article too quickly. He DOES cite David Buss, a major evolutionary psychologist. But the evpsychs all got the same memo:

Helena Cronin's policy paper to the British government, reprinted as an editorial Pity the Poor Men way back in 2000 goes a step further than BoBo - she proposed that the British government take steps to ensure that women are not able to earn more money than men! Cronin cites David Buss's infamous 37-country study to back her case for enshrining the beliefs of evolutionary psychologists in the British bureaucracy.

Brooks was harping women's essential inferiority last January. Tierney hadn't been given his own op-ed at that point, but Nicholas Kristof took up the slack by claiming that feminists just didn't care about sex slavery, while Christian evangelicals did and got faux feminist and David Horowitz's pal Donna M. Hughes to agree with him on behalf of feminists.

Echidne, Amanda at Pandagon Tom Tomorrow and Atrios all have something to say about the Brooks article. It's a virtual BoboFest2006!