Andrew Sullivan points out Steve Sailer's column about how the liberals have suddenly embraced IQ as being meaningful, after denigrating it for years as a useless and racist social construct.

Why? Because now, thanks to the recent flawed Supreme Court decision, they can use it to get folks off death row.

But Andrew also uses the occasion to take a poke at Bill Clinton, which, for once, is not justified. Clinton, many may recall, took time off from campaigning in 1992 to make sure that he could preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector in Arkansas, no doubt to burnish his anti-crime credentials. Mr. Rector has been repeatedly characterized as "retarded," and thus even many of his erstwhile supporters were upset at Clinton's cynical use of this hapless creature for political gain.

But the reality is that he was not retarded. He was brain damaged, as a result of a self-administered lobotomy--he shot himself in the frontal lobe right after murdering his two victims.

To my mind, even if one believes that people of reduced intelligence shouldn't be executed, that should only apply if the intelligence was low prior to their crime (thus offering some mitigating circumstances). I see no reason, however, to show mercy to someone who happened to reduce their intelligence after the crime was committed.

Rand, Read Joanne Jacobs's post on this today. There could be some unintended consequences if the left embraces IQ tests.

So I finally read Sailer's column. Even the "experts" implicitly admit that the tests measure nothing more than what one has already learned, i.e., they are not a measure of "intelligence" but of "education".

Best line:
"One intelligence expert worried that we will end up executing only those killers 'too stupid to realize that they ought to flunk their IQ test.'"

They measure both. You can't do well on the test if you can't read, no matter how much innate intelligence you have, but you can be well educated (or at least spent a lot of time in an educational institution) and still do poorly, because a lot of the questions really do require logic, pattern recognition, etc.

Yeah, but those are learnable skills (at least perfectable) - I probably should have worded it better. I don't believe the tests measure "intelligence" per se, they measure what you have done with it - which is far more important in any case (give me an average joe with the right attitude over a lazy "genius" anyday).

Still, there are few things more enjoyable than watching people hang themselves on unintended consequences, which I suspect will happen with liberals accepting the tests..

The Left has a history of being inconsistent when it suits them. Embracing eeeeeeevil IQ tests to weaken the death penalty is well within their pattern.

Oh, please. Even Stephen Jay Gould, the right's traditional bogeyman on this issue, wrote that IQ tests were good tools when used for their originally intended purpose, which was to identify which kids needed extra educational help, rather than to identify which races were irremediably better than which other races. It isn't a fatal inconsistency to avoid acting like an ideological robot.

Matt, c'mon. The left has trashed IQ tests even when used to "identify which kids needed extra educational help" (and I note that was the first mention of race in any of this).

Actually, it is probably a big reason they trashed the tests, because certain groups tend not to score as well. But rather than try to improve the schools (which would raise the scores and improve lives) they scream "racism". The fascinating part is that the left seems to really believe that people are incapable of making their way without the help of paternalistic liberals.