The misfits and weirdos roster

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

I guess we’ll have to start paying attention to this Andrew Sabisky fella.

Downing Street has refused to condemn controversial past remarks on pregnancies, eugenics and race reportedly made by a new adviser.

This appears to be why Dawkins was musing aloud about eugenics yesterday, with such stimulating results.

Labour said Andrew Sabisky should be sacked for suggesting black people had lower average IQs than white people and compulsory contraception could prevent “creating a permanent underclass”.

Compulsory contraception for…whom? The parents of the future permanent underclass? How would he know which those were, exactly? Cue Dawkins explaining that it would totally work and we shouldn’t confuse that fact with whether it’s a good idea or not.

Mr Sabisky, appointed after the PM’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings called for “misfits and weirdos” to apply for jobs in Downing Street, has been contacted by the BBC for comment.

Define “misfits and weirdos.” Be sure to include “according to whom?” and “in what context?”. Show your work. Cite your sources.

Comments

14 responses to “The misfits and weirdos roster”

  1. twiliter Avatar
    twiliter

    Is Sabisky into craniometry by any chance?

  2. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Making cheap (or free) contraception available by choice would probably do more to prevent a “permanent underclass”, especially if you gave women the right and the means to make their own decisions about child bearing. And if you quit constantly going on about women’s needs to reproduce and the need for more taxpayers to support a bloated system.

  3. Claire Avatar
    Claire

    @iknklast Your general point is true But in the UK, contraception (including abortion) is free. And access is reasonably straightforward, at least in urban areas (maybe not so much in rural but that’s not exclusive to reproductive health.

    But this Sabisky fellow seems nice. I bet he fits right in at Number 10.

    Re: Dawkins – yes it would have been nice for him to give that context. But even if he had, he was still wrong. Some people on Twitter have noted that artificial selection =/= eugenics and he’s conflating the two. Someone might need to explain that to him. Not that he would listen, he’s rather Trumpian in that regard.

  4. twiliter Avatar
    twiliter

    Good riddance, Mr. Racist.

    https://www.ft.com/content/3e0c31fc-5186-11ea-8841-482eed0038b1

  5. twiliter Avatar
    twiliter

    Drat, paywalled. Maybe this one.

    https://news.sky.com/story/number-10-adviser-andrew-sabisky-quits-after-controversial-comments-unearthed-11936738

  6. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    But in the UK, contraception (including abortion) is free.

    Yes, but the most important thing is whether in the notices publicizing these services they use the word “women”, as that would be transphobic.

  7. Claire Avatar
    Claire

    @YNNB Marie Stopes uses “women” and “girls”. The general NHS website uses the pronoun “you” because it addresses the reader directly. I’m pretty sure it did that even when I lived in the UK, because it talks about condoms and STI’s which are relevant to everyone who is sexually active.

  8. Claire Avatar
    Claire

    As a general follow-up comment to YNNB’s good point about language point because it comes up time and again and it really chaps my hide.

    I work in women’s health in low and middle income countries. That means I am interested in reducing maternal and infant mortality, reducing the risk of other pregnancy-related complications, including pre- and postnatal care, broadening access to contraception and abortion services, and disorders of the female reproductive system. I don’t have time for this TRA bullshit and neither does a pregnant woman in Ghana trying not to die from preeclampsia.

  9. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    I work in women’s health in low and middle income countries. That means I am interested in reducing maternal and infant mortality, reducing the risk of other pregnancy-related complications, including pre- and postnatal care, broadening access to contraception and abortion services, and disorders of the female reproductive system. I don’t have time for this TRA bullshit and neither does a pregnant woman in Ghana trying not to die from preeclampsia.

    So accuracy, clarity, and precision in language can actually save lives.

    Gosh. Who knew? /s

  10. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Claire, that’s true, and sometimes I do get a bit US-centric, where the idea of free contraception is perceived as sluts wanting honest, hard working men to pay them to have sex (with other men, not the honest, hard working men paying for it). But the other part of my comment is still the case in the UK, and everywhere – there is some expectations of society that women should have babies, and that they naturally must have babies to be happy and fulfilled. Babies are valued over women everywhere, and the messages women receive end up being decoded to: have babies if you really want to be women.

    If only the TRAs would take on that message and get rid of it…then they would be doing some good.

  11. Tim Harris Avatar
    Tim Harris

    According to today’s Guardian, Andrew Sabisky has resigned. One misfit & weirdo less, but I expect there are plenty more would be ones on Dom C’s little list.

  12. maddog1129 Avatar
    maddog1129

    I still find it unfathomable why, if this were the context, Dawkins would choose to say that particular thing about eugenics (i.e., it would work).

  13. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Exactly so.

  14. Lady Mondegreen Avatar
    Lady Mondegreen

    Re Dawkin’s tweet–

    The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

    Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

    Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

    As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

    But for Klein, the editor of Vox, the ritual was not strong enough. Murray’s ideas are reminiscent of a grim history, in which pseudoscientific ideas about a hierarchy of humans were used to justify slavery or Jim Crow laws. For Klein (a low-decoupler, in Nerst’s taxonomy), you can’t simply take an idea out of its context like that. The context comes with it.

    These two paradigms are very hard to square. Harris thought he was having a coolly rational debate in the philosophy-seminar style, so was baffled to find he was being accused of racism; Klein thought Harris was trying to sneak racist ideas in under an academic smokescreen, and couldn’t believe Harris claiming otherwise. Their models of the world were so different they just couldn’t understand each other. So obviously it descended into a massive online row with accusations of bad faith and racism.

    That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” = “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

    But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other.

    I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

    https://unherd.com/2020/02/eugenics-is-possible-is-not-the-same-as-eugenics-is-good/

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