The comments here are revealing. As revealing as the test itself.

Let’s start with some misconceptions. Feminism means many things but I think at it’s core its about asserting that women are human too. Those who dismiss or disdain feminism, for whatever reason, have a problem with that simple idea. Compulsive masculinists are hobbled by a male-centered ideology that allows them to see men as both men and as persons who transcend gender. Those who assert that men are superior, or more in a more complex emission, more interesting, fascinating, or appealing are easy to spot and swat. Theirs is an easier prejudice to combat. It’s the deniers that are harder to flesh out. They’re the ones to claim there’s no problem, the problem is old but solved, the problem is inevitable and thus not solvable, nothing interesting to see here, “I don’t see gender, I see people,” nothing to be done. This is a sexism by default, a sexism wrought by ignorance plus thoughtlessness, and a sexism rooted in self-centered approach to reality. This is sexism that results from the attitude that if it doesn’t harm me, then it’s not harmful…to anyone. That’s an attitude and a kind of sexism that has the odor of privilege.

The Bechdel Test is another way of capturing a truth that others have expressed. Years ago Marlon Riggs made the same point regarding race in his acclaimed documentary, Ethnic Notions. It’s at the exclusion of any representations other than the stereotype. Think about Hattie McDaniel. Here’s a black woman who won an Oscar for her role in Gone with the Wind. And she got it for playing a maid in story that is sympathetic to the side of slaveowners.

A lot of the comments smell of that peculiar odor. Fine tuning it and setting a better context is a dodge. The Bechdel Test is a simple but clever way of capturing a truth about movies and sexism: women are invisible and marginalized in most contemporary representations of women. Claiming that there are movies out there that don’t fit is a dodge. It’s a matter of patterns. Claiming that don’t reflect reality is a dodge. Aspirations, fantasies, and nightmares and who has them are very much part of reality.

But hey, the Bechdel Test is an example of education at its finest – it’s interactive, hands-on, and can be done at home in your underwear. Everyone can try out their own coding scheme.

Some of the comments really underscore the tea bagger's m.o.

1) paranoia - efforts like myth busting American history is an attack on the U.S.

2) projection onto opponents the bad faith of one’s own group (history is about positive accomplishments, i.e. propaganda).

3) use of techniques to neutralize guilt and responsibility (the harm wasn’t too bad, they had it coming, others have done it too, it was done for higher purposes).

4) conflate historical actors, ideas, and events (liberals are progressives are fascists are socialists are atheists are communists are alien satanic shapeshifters).

5) myth busting is dismissed as no big deal, as if it were common knowledge – this generally occurs after spells of paranoia and projection fail.

5) clam that many, if not most, of the wrongs done in history, actually were the responsibility of liberals, progressives, and the left.

It's the last one that adds some sparkle to the idiocy.

It's not a far stretch to claim that many turn of the century social reformers accepted the tenets and maybe the goals of the eugenics movement. Progressives were also not above the prevailing natavistic antagonisms directed a immigrants. But it wasn't political ideology so much as an uncritical acceptance of the science of the day. Progressives could stand by and accept the Plessy decision because science could advance an argument of why segregation was appropriate. Similarly, anxieties about miscegenation and inferior races, the endorsement of sterilization for defective groups, and support for immigration reform, were firmly rooted in the racial science of the day, the taxonomical studies in anthropology and biology and the hereditarian theories of intelligence and behavior. But eugenics and its more macro-oriented rival, social Darwinism, became popular across the political spectrum because they were expressions of modern science. It’s inaccurate to conflate eugenics and progressivism. This isn’t dodging the moral irresponsibility of the left but identifying one the main institutional foundations for the so-called ‘sins’ of the early 20th century: “faith” in science and progress.

Nonetheless, there were many who didn’t need no stinking justification in science for their race hatred or class antagonisms. These were (right-leaning and left-leaning) populists who took their natavism and agrian faith as organizing cornerstones. This populism wasn’t restricted to the south or to Democrats. And it was more than populists (and Democrats). These were also an older middle class of merchants and craft skill who were being squeezed out by bourgeoning corporate business and a mass of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in mills and mines. These were also rock-ribbed Protestants who felt under assault from Catholic immigrant groups. They targeted their opposition to Jews, Catholics, labor agitators, European and Chinese immigrants and blacks, but also urban life, secular thought, and a cosmopolitan ethos.

Try as the Beck-Goldberg variations to impugn the integrity of social reformers like Margaret Sanger or Jane Addams, their claims betray an familiar kind of anti-intellectualism. Margaret Sanger was no eugenicist. Charles Davenport was no progressive. Jane Addams might pursue efforts to ‘Americanize’ immigrants. Madison Grant, not unlike the Pat Buchanans out there today, would just as easily wish to euthanize immigrants.

It wasn’t science or progressivism that culminated in the 1898 racist coup in Wilmington, NC. It wasn’t a liberal elite that led the mobs in 1921 Tulsa who expunged its black population in a mass frenzy of white violence. It wasn’t good government reformers that oversaw the race riots in Chicago in 1919. Those weren’t salt of the earth socialists or communists who celebrated the ritual of violence in Jim Crow lynching.

The problem with all of this is that the so-called ‘sins’ of the right were very much part of the ‘sins’ of the age as well as indicting a lot of what was regarded as mainstream American culture and heritage.

Columbus may have been an explorer (or hustler) but he was a hero to Americans and Italian-Americans. Columbus remains an official holiday.

White unions were a main avenue channeling white racism. White businesses, sadly, did little better, using blacks and immigrants to gain leverage over white workers. I think we need to remind ourselves of who was responsible for employment discrimination, housing discrimination, or school discrimination.

In the runup to the passage of social security, it was southern Democrats channeling a decidedly non-leftists sentiment, that compelled final passage to exclude from social security coverage farm workers and domestics. Both of those occupations were disproportionately held by blacks.

I mentioned that one way to set the context for debunking American historical myths, legends, or history is set the historical record alongside the values and ideals a culture holds up for itself. The U.S. can be held accountable for its racist past precisely because it became a society organized around egalitarian ideals. Nitwits like the anti-Che seem to think this excuses the mass killers of the world. Actually, it makes their crimes (not sins) worse.

Our anti-Che interlocutor suggest a better context: it’s how high we set the bar and how hard we work to achieve it. Alas, in that light, there are some real contradictions around America’s accomplishments. It’s debatable how hard we’ve worked.

Che is dead needs to learn a bit more history. Support for eugenics occurred across the ideological spectrum. But we should also remember that the eugenics movement rose alongside the worst moments of Jim Crow. At that time the Democratic Party was more that sympathetic to white supremacy but many Democrats, especially the dixiecrats from the south would be regarded as conservatives and champions of states rights and small government. And they didn't really need any science, psuedo or not, to indulge in the rituals of violence that became the spectacle of lynching.
I'm always puzzled by those who, in their saner moments, would celebrate truth over falsehood, evidence based history over myths that form the shared narrative of a people. And yet, when given access to historical accuracy, quickly dismiss it's significance and seek to neutralize its impact with claims that everyone does it, others have done worse, America ought not be picked on, and the reminder that America is about much much more. Of course, the worse charge is that those who do the exposing are un-American or worse still, are America's enemies. I notice that the author of today's expose has already assured us that she loves her country.
Any group of people will produce a legacy of conflict and contradiction and it's really irrelevant what else the groups does or is about. If history is, in part, about constructing an evidence-based record of happenings and events, then all of the corrections supplied in this neatorama posting are important and important for people to know.
But in another sense, there's an additional contribution to debunking myths and legends. If a group - say, the U.S. - also has a record of ideals and values, it's important that the country (and it's state) be held accountable to it's own standards. This is where a record of genocide, enslavement, oppression, or exploitation come to have an even greater significance. It's one thing to find a country at fault for the wrongs its done but it's another for those wrongs to violate that country's own high standards.

Normalizing Glen Reynolds is like mainstreaming Glenn Beck. The damage that they have done to the discourse in this country will take decades to undo. I don't do links to these people.

This research may well be illuminating but I sense that the independent variable is well defined. The 17th century European city was a different beast than 19th century London which is a far cry from a crowded Manhattan sidewalk. In fact, this research seems to be part of a long anti-urban tradition in social science. Downtown Manhattan or any downtown business district - with it's overbuilt environment that is entirely beyond human scale is a limiting case. And urban sociology pointed to the negative consequences of population size, density, and diversity nearly 80 years ago. But the modern world isn't a city sidewalk. It's a mixed environment. I wish we might move beyond this simplistic brain science.

Zakaria's brand of prognostication is interesting but it's also more than a little simplistic. Pointing to pockets of wealth elsewhere in the world doesn't tell us much. In fact, the world has moved on, but we don't know where and who with. Japan was thrown up as the next great power in the 1980s but it's been hobbled by stagnation and the growth of low-cost competitors in Asia. The Asian Tigers were the next big thing but 1997 indicated how delicate was their balance. China certainly looms large. And that's just it. China looms large but of what? It is an extremely poor country and whose legs are wobbly from forty years of Mao and ten years of this bizarre combo of satanic mills capitalism and strong state communism.

After two hundred years of hopeful ideology and wicked economic regimes it seems we're about to jettison the hope and settle for the wicked. It's despostism, a bribed middle class, and ever moving site of worker bees and a huge global surplus populations.

He, here's an idea for America. Don't allow banks to operate in states where they've bought the regulatory apparatus and then interest rates won't be an issue.

Nah, it's just so much more fun to blame the victim. Ya get a much more smug satisfying sense of superiority.

Reading this piece reminded me of how racial science used to operate. Scientists hid their bigotry behind the facade of objectivity and then cataloged, er, searched for meaningful differences between racial groups - brain size, muscular structure, nose length, penis length (well, Rushton stills does that one) all with the goal of explaining why _the_ black primitive wasn't as rich and powerful as the white civilized. These scientists knew that there had to be meaningful differences and that racial difference congealed into different types of humans. These efforts nicely fit with the prevailing stereotypes and justified, er, explained racial inequality. Like Miller and it's colleagues, these race scientists eagerly went off to find their proof that would crack the mystery of why blacks and other non-euroamericans were so darned inferior.

You know if there was some lingering biological whatever operating that was signaling the fertile fitness of particular woman wouldn't we then expect to find that human mating all along was organized around women stripping. All those tens of thousands of year of cultural organization is just so much hogwash concealing the true, hidden, unspeakable reality of the human sex drive.

We know it's true because we're doing science at the strip club.

Are white people the endpoint of human physical evolution? The graphic you've used is itself a piece of racist fantasy that reinforces Euro-types that they represent the preeminent expression of evolutionary fitness.

This is claptrap.

Concepts like temperment are inherently contested and have little explanatory value

The claims made in the BBC piece generalized so far beyond whatever data they've mustered that at best it's a excursion of psuedo-science. But I'd wager that it's better understood as another piece of white racism passing for ignorance.

These geneticists utilize a logic that's not dissimilar from creationists. The zeal with which these folks dismiss the role culture plays is mind bongling.

All makes sense to me when I remember this quote by Kieran Healy:

"Oh god. Ayn Rand. Fourteen year olds of the world unite! The car keys shall be yours by sheer force of will! Objectivism requires it!"