My run-in with the New York Times

Coming back from the dark side, Andrew? If so, welcome back. We've missed you.

This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem. Salem is NOT America's roots jackass. Salem was ONE small community of self righteous people. Sort of like your community Andy. What it REALLY is Sully, is many people like yourself afterburning your ideology to communism's roots and when you arrive, blaming it on America because there's no way the likes of you and your ilk could possibly be wrong. But I don’t have a magazine to write for any more. And you'd really like that to be Orange Man Bad's fault and not your "younger" Marxist colleagues at the NYT. Darn the luck old chap.

I didn’t realize Sullivan was a Brit before reading this. Maybe he is related to the General John Sullivan of Washington’s Revolutionary War army.

The "Bell Curve" thing must be understood not ignored. The correlation between measured intelligence and incarceration is alarming. I for one believe that the measure is influenced by both innate brain function potential as well as how that potential has been exercised. The solutions to the problems we are fixated on today may have solutions but when the data is too inconvenient to face we will never find the solution. #3 Get's points for knowing of General Sullivan. Some of my people served under him. His reprisal expedition in 79 was a response to the slaughter on the frontier in 78 which took a severe toll on my family.

Andrew is the liberal who got mugged.

Not sure what the second half of the article has to do with the first, unless it’s to make sure we understand that Andrew is still really a progressive, at heart. Some interesting facts about Salem: The Salem Witch Trials were over a period of 18 months, and less than 25 people were burned or hanged as witches, one of which was a dog. It was stopped by the people of Salem themselves, when they felt the movement had gone too far. So, not a stellar example of an American community, at one single moment in history, but a shining example of how Americans can and do right the ship.I hope, if Andrew’s analogy is correct, we can right the ship...and soon.

Always liked Andrew, generally; though his pathological obsession with Sarah Palin some time back was quite odd.

This incident would be funny if it weren't so ridiculous. The Bell Curve was an accurate, appropriate and excellent study of the origins and nature of intelligence. Read that book and view videos of "teens" running out of trashed stores holding up a new pair of Nikes or carrying a big screen, smiling like they had just won the lottery. All they do is prove the validity of the book.

I used to read Sully regularly. Then he got nuts. I quit but unlike the wokesters, I didn't call for him to be censored and cancelled. It seems the old Sullivan I liked is back. Welcome back Andrew - we have missed you.

I read "Bell Curve" when it came out, and what struck me was that it argued (in the chapter on race) that American Blacks are so disadvantaged that environment swamps genetics in determining IQ. The authors clearly and explicitly said that their argument about inheritance did not apply to Blacks. At the time, I was amazed that every popular account of the book ignored what it actually said, and when I mentioned this to friends at the time, no one wanted to hear it. They wanted to hate the book, or were afraid to even entertain the idea that the book might not actually be heretical. It's still hard to get used to, but in matters of public opinion, facts just don't matter. Even when the facts can be established by just looking at what a few printed paragraphs in a book actually say. In this piece, Andrew Sullivan defends his record of having organized a discussion of "Bell Curve" by talking about how many "stinging critiques" were published alongside it, but he seems to forget that the book itself absolutely did not argue that genetics accounts for the lower mean IQ among Blacks.

I think Sullivan was being sarcastic or facetious, #2. Of course, Salem isn't our roots.

Mr. Sullivan earned a place in my "never waste your time on this idiot leftist" list, and I won't bother to go beyond the opening paragraph shown here.

My observation of prison populations is that it's composed of three groups of people: 1. People who are very intelligent. More so than the average person. They think intelligence makes them smart- smarter than anyone else. Yet, they are in prison. 2. People with low intelligence, who think they are smart. Yet they too are in prison. 3. A few average people who made bad decisions.

My comment is that I agree with Mr. Sullivan that it's not a good thing when the national media is on your street. I remember 2005, driving down the street to my house one evening about a month or so after Katrina, and coming upon a group of cars and media broadcast trucks., As I slowly drove past I saw a 'video shoot' set up on the slab of one of my neighbors houses, with a big (maybe 15-20 ft. high) pile of debris in the background. My house was one of two on my street that, although heavily damaged, survived the storm. We lost about 250 houses in my neighborhood. Let the media go elsewhere. Let my neighborhood stay nice and quiet and uneventful.