I'm trying to read "Ezra Klein’s Intellectual Demagoguery" by Kyle Smith at The National Review, but I've run into an atrocious men-in-shorts/Star Trek smash up and my heart cries out I don't belong here.
And I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational.
But I've started this post, so let me soldier on. I've avoided the Sam Harris/Ezra Klein discord for quite a while, but something made me feel that I could catch up by reading Kyle Smith:
[Harris's] tone remains steady...Ugh... tone...
... but the words are uncharacteristically pointed. During the debate, as Klein keeps delivering lectures to Harris on the history of racist injustice and repeatedly accuses him of having a “blind spot,” you can hear Harris sighing. Does Harris — does any intelligent person — really need to be told that blacks have been victimized by racism? Of course they have been. It’s a different conversation from the one about what we do and don’t know about IQ scores.If Harris is as educated and sophisticated as all that, he shouldn't have been "disorient[ed]." He should have been prepared for Klein's utterly predictable attack. Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?
Harris, who has to his credit a philosophy degree from Stanford, a Ph.D. from UCLA in cognitive neuroscience, and several well-reviewed books, has described himself as on the left on virtually every issue. How disorienting it must have been to find himself reclassified as a neo-Mengele and besieged by the social-media mob because he spoke with ["Bell Curve" author Charles] Murray....
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162 comments:
Who and Who are we concerned about? Nobody talking with nobody is of interest, why?
Zero Tolerance. We saw that with the French Revolution, Communism, and now Neo-Marxist Anti-Western Identity Politics.
"Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the good people's articles of faith?"
It's called "Eat Me Last". But they seldom do. They're hungry.
Althouse: I'm trying to read "Ezra Klein’s Intellectual Demagoguery" by Kyle Smith at The National Review, but I've run into a men-in-shorts/Star Trek smash up and my heart cries out I don't belong here.
Does that make Althouse a creep... and a weirdo?
Neuroscience could do a lot of us a big favor by figuring out the leftist thought process.
If Harris is as educated and sophisticated as all that, he shouldn't have been "disorient[ed]." He should have been prepared for Klein's utterly predictable attack. Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?
Is the "Article of Faith" that the "Bell Curve" is wrong, that the genetics is wrong, that facts are wrong or that conclusions are wrong? Ir is it just something that people shouldn't talk about.
This deserves an honest answer.
Jordan Peterson approaches all this is a thoughtful way.
Khesanh 0802:
I hadn’t known of Harris until a favorite blog linked to his essay on violence, which I found quite interesting.
I’ve read some of his work and heard a few podcasts. I disagree with him on politics and God, and I think he loses his vaunted dispassionate analysis a bit when it comes to Trump. He seems arrogant and prickly.
But he usually makes me think, and these days I find it refreshing to find people on the left who actually stand up for someone’s right to disagree with them.
Vox is Shorts Central of dissimulation, in which received wisdom is carefully garnished with the best studies confirmation bias can find. It combines the earnest condescension of NPR without the first-hand reporting. It's generally unreadably dull.
The thing that surprises me most about this article is that Sam Harris had never formed his own opinion of The Bell Curve, but simply accepted the opinion of his peers. Fish discovers water.
I couldn't finish listening to the podcast. I will steel myself to finish it because it is probably the best illustration of what will tear the Democrats apart.
First was Ezra berating Harris for not spouting the usual platitudes on racism, slavery etc. Harris said that a black man he respected suggested it was condescending to do that all the time.
Harris made a serious mistake right then. He should have said that I prefer to listen to a black man rather than a pasty white social climber. But he didn't and Ezra got on his high horse about how terrible it was for Harris to step outside what He, Ezra Klein has decided to be the proper bounds of discourse.
It didn't sound like it was going to turn into a fistfight, which was the only way to deal with twerps like that, so I stopped listening.
Sam Harris is getting an education. Finally.
"Does that make Althouse a creep... and a weirdo?"
LOL. I thought that song when I wrote that line, but you can tell from my context that I was getting the sense that Kyle Smith was a creep, a weirdo.
a truly extreme position: that only the environment affects IQ scores.
This is the old "Blank Slate" argument again. Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" is the Bible of leftist thought on behavior.
The "New Soviet Man" was the end product of behaviorism.
Unfortunately, Steven Pinker has done a pretty good job of showing that a lot of behavior is genetic.
Charles Murray has got crosssways with the left by showing that there is a statistical distribution in many characteristics, including IQ.
The Affirmative Action zealots are proving it.
Klein has certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of his UCLA Ba.
I couldn't sleep one night so I read the entire email exchange between Harris and Klein.
Oy vey.
Harris: There's a genetic component to intelligence and it is not equally distributed among the races.
Klein: You're a racist!
Harris: No, I'm not! I'm just interpreting the data.
Klein: America is racist!
It's pretty painful. Harris wins by a nod, but he still hasn't been mugged by reality.
Both of these guys deserved multiple Wedgies in high school.
"Good People's Articles Of Faith" is such an obvious religious metaphor. It's too obvious to counter a scientific claim. The better approach would be to debunk the science.
Many progressives like to lecture ethnic whites about racism against blacks.
They are the ones who live in areas populated by wealthier whites and Asians.
Klein didn’t grow up on the North Side of St. Louis or the West Side of Chicago.
He’s just a whiny dweeb from a wealthy LA neighborhood.
He’s never known any black people. They are just Progressives’ pets
I meant to add Harris and Klein don’t know any black peoole.
White Progresives run with a very insular crowd.
"Harris said that a black man he respected suggested it was condescending to do that all the time." That would be Glenn Loury, when they did a podcast. Right at the beginning.
"Harris made a serious mistake right then. He should have said that I prefer to listen
to a black man rather than a pasty white social climber."
You're saying that Harris should have appealed to the powerful logical principle that only black people are allowed to have opinions about black people. As a rhetorical move, I suppose that might be effective, although a shameless ideological thug like Ezra Klein has probably got a canned response ready. But as a defense of rational thought and argument, that would be an act of unconditional surrender.
> This is the old "Blank Slate" argument again.
I toyed with that idea for a bit less than a year, then gave it up. I was 15 at the time. I've never read anything by Sam Harris, but I do recall reading about his explanation of religion back when his first book came out. I thought it conventional and uninteresting, basically, IIRC, that religion is ignorance. I think that misses the profound role the religious impulse has played in human life and civilization.
I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational.
Ha ha. Remind folks of anyone here who affects (but does not actually practice) such an attitude and demeanor?
Sam Harris v Ezra Klein... the Special Olympics of Podcasts.
"The thing that surprises me most about this article is that Sam Harris had never formed his own opinion of The Bell Curve, but simply accepted the opinion of his peers."
I wonder what the ratio of people who have opinions about The Bell Curve, vs. people who have actually read The Bell Curve, is. Or who could even (accurately) state what the book is about.
Jupiter:
This is where I disagree with Harris, and he got a lesson good and hard in this podcast. Ezra is all about power, he is all about imposing the narrative. The whole email back and forth was about Ezra defending his organized back alley mugging of Harris.
Harris thinks that rationality is possible with someone like Ezra. It isn't.
He should have approached it like an archetypical fight with a dragon. He didn't because he doesn't think those things have anything to do with his rational world view.
So you look for weak points. Ezra is all about a reflecting what everyone else who is on the up and up thinks. Which is also his weakness, and Harris missed a roundhouse opportunity right off the bat.
He didn't think it was a fist fight but a rational discussion between two smart people desiring an exchange of views. He was wrong.
I think that misses the profound role the religious impulse has played in human life and civilization.
Atheism is just another religion. Complete with heretics.
“the most controversial passages in the book [Bell Curve] struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science.”
That's why "They" hate it.
Sam Harris's self defense paper.
Michael K said...
Atheism is just another religion.
No it's not.
Gays say there's definitely a genetic component to their sexual orientation - and you're a homophobe, if you dispure this.
Liberals say there's definitely not a genetic component to intelligence - and you're a racist, if you dispute this.
That's how they roll.
Althouse wrote;
"And I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational."
Hmmmm. So, "racist" is something that one wants to be? Believing certain facts to be demonstrable is a choice? An evil choice, in fact. And then I suppose that being one of you GoodWhites is also a choice, right? Empirically testable facts play no role in this decision, it's just two little cartoons on either shoulder. A bad little demon saying "IQ is largely inherited", and a good little Angel saying "They'll eat you last!".
My daughter spent yesterday at a prestigious university's conference on innovation.
When an author took the stage to discuss what she found about innovation from her research, she was questioned from the crowd about the lack of racial diversity in the innovators she'd studied.
It was more important to ask the one question they'd been trained to ask than to engage in a discussion about creating innovation.
I'll bet they all had Masters Degrees.
Ha! The Most Easily Triggered Blogger snarks at calm and rational!
Harris has a lot of problems with the Left these days (google the left is irredeemable). But not enough for him to take the next step: It is morally justified for someone to be on the Right, in order to stop the Left.
But maybe he'll get there if he keeps being mugged by reality.
Now I miss K-Lo and her ban on Star Trek at NR.
Caldwell to Michael K:
"Atheism is just another religion."
No it's not.
It has some things in common. Like, religious groups and atheists both have a subset of members who get all touchy and butthurt when anybody disses their dogma.
Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?
There are no good people, only "correct" ideas at the time. Once the good people believed in a colorblind society. Today that idea will get you driven off the stage.
I've heard the names but am unfamiliar with the individual spat.
I'd say anybody who wishes blacks well would be asking what should be done to accommodate lower average black IQ gracefully so everybody winds up happy.
Not marking people by race at all would do it. There'd just be Americans with a wide spread in IQ, like always. We've always managed. Go on good character.
That's anti-Democrat though, policywise. A leftist geneticist could wind up there. Pro-black and anti-policy, along with the right wing.
Kevin: “trained to ask”. EXACTLY.
It's all performance art - professional wrestling for the edumacated. The only useful purpose they serve is the boost they give to the straw man industrial complex. I've seen these "intellectuals" utterly destroy battalions of straw men with dispatch and elan. As to actual original thinking or new ideas? Not so much.
Caldwell:
Richard Dawkins gave a talk a number of years ago in Montreal. It was broadcast on CBC radio, late evening show. I was driving somewhere, and listened.
What shocked me was how the whole thing was identical to a Baptist minister giving a speech. The cadence, the self righteous noises from the crowd, even the arguments. God was replaced with other words.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Dawkins of all people know what those sound like, and he was doing exactly the same thing.
Every religious person I know would respond word for word identically to what you said:
Anglican is just another religion like Catholicism.
No it's not.
Racist means two things, one of them a connotation that's grown into a second meaning.
1. The races differ on stuff.
2. Wishes blacks ill.
The modern doctrine is that they're the same.
The right's position is "1 and not 2."
Hence the insistence on "racist," so as not to make the distinction possible.
I like Sam Harris a lot of the time, but he has blind spots, as we all do. The problem with the extreme rational thinker types - and the movements they tend to espouse - is that life has been too consistently affirming of they way their brains function from their earliest years. School traditionally rewards a particular kind of intelligence and cognitive orderliness, and sharp minds that work this way encounter little resistance and regular reward through the education system and into adult life. As such they never come to understand the limits of logic, and how one can reason through something perfectly and as dispassionately as is possible in human pursuit, and still have missed almost every salient point because logic was the wrong tool in the first place. They don’t understand that there are whole bands of human perception that their brains simply can’t tune to, like a radio that reaches the limits of its dial.
I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational.
The Economist: Mr Obama, a professorial, hyper-rational sort...
Politico: But even when it’s not strategic, low-key and above-the-fray is how Obama rolls. He’s a measured, professorial, hyper-rational guy.
The Guardian: ...he remained cool, calm and hyper-rational to a fault....
The Atlantic: I’m not sure, based on my last conversation with Obama, that he fully understands the depth of the regime’s anti-Semitism, in part because the regime’s anti-Semitism is so absurdly offensive and illogical that the hyper-rational Obama might not believe that serious people actually think the way certain Iranians think.
The New York Times: Mr. Obama, who is celebrated for his coolness, his detachment and his hyper-rational outlook
The New Yorker: One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational.
Vox: Your old boss, President Obama, is a hyper-rational, hyper-logical individual.
Kevin: “trained to ask”. EXACTLY.
It brought up an interesting discussion with her, the idea that it's easy to live in the past where everything is defined and all facts are known, but not easy to live in the future where the questions, let alone the answers, have yet to be defined.
I have come to believe we are no longer educating people to define a real and better future, but have instead made them more comfortable living in the past, where they can smugly recite selected facts and figures in an attempt to rise above others living there too.
For example: "Does Harris — does any intelligent person — really need to be told that blacks have been victimized by racism? Of course they have been. It’s a different conversation from the one about what we do and don’t know about IQ scores."
Students today would rather compete on how woke they are, than build something new which may or may not succeed.
And it's much easier for our colleges and universities to fulfill that desire than to prepare people to do the work to move humanity forward.
Smith: "He’s in the business of intellectual demagoguery. He debases the tone of good-faith debate. He whips up crowds using smears. Then he denies he did any such thing."
This is, after all, a prog we are talking about. Let's count the progs who don't demagogue, debase, whip up, and deny.
And then they call themselves the party of science.
Minor kudos to Harris for standing up to the BS, though he does seem a tad naive. Medium kudos to Harris for calling BS on the maligning of Murray, though the fact that he had to, you know, read the book tells you something about the prog bubble.
As hardin implies, it is an open question whether the denial of differences in IQ distributions serves black interests. Coercive equalization through "diversity" brings about mismatches all over the place that don't make many people happy.
In its current form, progressivism demands dishonesty.
Michael K said...
Atheism is just another religion.
No it's not.
Well, I certainly can' argue with that reasoning. Powerful argument there.
This post made me glad I used the portal today.
"Atheism is just another religion." Well, I certainly can'[t] argue with that reasoning. Powerful argument there.
Yes indeed.
Derek Kite said...
Every religious person I know would respond word for word identically to what you said:
Superstitious people like to claim that not believing in their religion is a religion, but never seem to claim that their own disbelief in other religions - Aztec, Hindu, etc - is itself a religion.
GERVAIS: "Okay. But there are about 3,000 [gods and religions] to choose from… Basically, you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more."
"I like Sam Harris a lot of the time, but he has blind spots"
To which of Mr. Harris's blind spots are you referring?
Michael K
Atheism is not a religion because it lacks the character of a religion. Do you believe in Thor? You are a Thor-atheist. Are you part of a religion therefore?
That said many contemporary atheists are unlike the Thor-atheists. They are not merely unconcerned disbelievers as we Thor atheists are. They seem to organize, hold conferences, elevate saints, and obsess about their rejection of Christianity. They chant too:”scienssssssssss, sciensssssssss”. For these people there really is an element of being a religion. I sometimes call them the Randiites, both for the fun of the double i but because James Randi is their John The Baptist.
rhhardin said...
"I'd say anybody who wishes blacks well would be asking what should be done to accommodate lower average black IQ gracefully so everybody winds up happy."
Huh. Apparently the Left does not wish blacks well. Surely that can't be right.
rhhardin: Exactly. If you start with the assumption that everyone everywhere is the same and that given the exact same education, food and cultural experiences they would turn out exactly the same.
That justifies centralizing power over education, economic policy, law enforcement, everything in one place filled with the smartest people telling everyone else what to do.
The reason that centralizing of power eventually falls apart is the simple fact that people are not the same.
IQ of groups cannot be the basis for centralized control, because inevitably it will do harm. I think that the out of proportion reactions of leftists to certain ideas, guns, IQ and others are a reflection of their realization what they would do with them if they had the power.
The fact that IQ patterns roughly follow groups is an indictment of the whole idea of centralized control. Let people be. Don't try to 'fix' people. Simply lay down some broad principles like the bill of rights, vigorously enforce them against those who think they know better, and amazing things will occur.
@Paco Wové I outlined it in my full comment. He doesn’t understand the limits of logic when an issue requires a different or more complex perception. It ends up in situations like the Charles Murray thing, his fairly militant atheism, being tagged as an Islamophobe etc.
I wonder what the ratio of people who have opinions about The Bell Curve, vs. people who have actually read The Bell Curve, is. Or who could even (accurately) state what the book is about.
That's the actual point, though. The approved narrative meme is that only racists would read The Bell Curve in the first place (truth is not the measure - it's more why would you need to even know these things if you're not a racist?) so if you've actually read the book, you are by definition racist no matter what you say unless you agree with us that Murray is an agent of Satan and should be de-platformed. You also know the fact that the race question is a tiny slice of the book and its true conclusion has been immanentized by his most strident critics, who have self-selected and intermarried into the heights of government, academia, and the media. The children of these unions are the ones seeking safe spaces from reality on campus and "asking" their mentors "who fucking hired you?"
These hyper-intelligent thought leaders show you who is most correct by whom they fear and hate the most. Hence, the growth of the Intellectual Darkweb.
The problem, rh, is that it does not appear to be merely an issue of IQ. The Chinese have somewhat higher IQs than white people, but they seem to be able to "accomodate" whites fairly well. That might change if whites were to start robbing, raping and killing them in hugely disproportionate numbers, while destroying huge swathes of valuable real estate, and contributing flat jack nothing economically beyond an especially obnoxious form of "music" that glorifies all this wretched destruction.
The Left has settled on this issue precisely because it is utterly intractable. Nothing is going to fix it, and therefore it can be relied upon as a fixed beacon of their faith. You may either admit, as a GoodWhite, that it is all your fault, or you can be branded a racist. Althouse stands ready so to brand you. Her iron is hot.
Ref Greg Cochran and Razib Khan (and they get the back-channel pre-published heads-up) the whole genetic basis for intelligence is about to completely break open. That is, to be able to predict the observed intelligence of an individual based on his DNA, to a high degree of accuracy, and moreover to identify the roles specific genes play in specific traits of the brain that seem to affect intelligence.
And all this will most definitely have unequal distributions according to ancestry - i.e., race.
This is due to the massive increase in sample sizes. One study they cite uses 250,000 individuals. Upcoming ones are said to use samples in the millions.
RK cites Hill, Marioni et. al. in Molecular Psychiatry, Jan 2018 as an example of solid finding of loci and specific genes associated with intelligence-enhancing traits. This paper was submitted last July. Six-seven months is not an unusual publication lag apparently, and results are evident long before the papers are prepared, so publication may happen a year or more after any given "Eureka!" .
"[Harris] doesn’t understand the limits of logic when an issue requires a different or more complex perception."
Can you spell out what you mean with a specific example? For instance, what are "the limits of logic" when applied to "the Charles Murray thing"? How does "the Charles Murray thing" requires a different or more complex perception? What are those different, more complex perceptions, anyway?
Michael K said...
Atheism is just another religion.
No it's not.
Well, I certainly can' argue with that reasoning. Powerful argument there.
M: Oh look, this isn't an argument!
(pause)
O: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!
(pause)
M: It's just contradiction!
O: No it isn't!
M: It IS!
O: It is NOT!
M: You just contradicted me!
O: No I didn't!
M: You DID!
O: No no no!
M: You did just then!
O: Nonsense!
Derek Kite said...
"That justifies centralizing power over education, economic policy, law enforcement, everything in one place filled with the smartest people telling everyone else what to do."
You left out a critical point. If people are innately equal, then any difference of outcome can be attributed to the moral failings of those who are better off. This demonstrates that they aren't just lucky, they are evil, and they must be suppressed if we are ever to achieve the Just Society that all decent people desire. Kulaks! Racists! Homophobes! Islamophobes! Many are our crimes, and the irons are hot!
I'd like to defend Kyle Smith's imagery and use of words from Althouse's unfair attack. While the thought of Mr. Spock wearing cargo shorts is indeed troubling that is not what Kyle Smith is saying. By shorts, Smith is undoubtedly referring to Mr. Spock's underwear. Mr. Spock was known for his hygiene and sense of propriety. There's no reason to believe that he wouldn't wear underwear and no reason to believe that he would wear cargo shorts........Also there's no reason to believe that the Romuluns would not use a low frequency, oscillating radio wave capable of penetrating the Enterprise's deflector shields and igniting the underwear of their combat opponents. Mr. Spock's formidable intellect would have availed him little if his shorts were on fire. Fortunately, the series was cancelled before the Romulans could develop such a fiendish weapon.
Why Leftists get to be the judges of the rest of us, I don't know.
You'd think peeps would fight back against all the race-baiting, but obviously they love playing "I'm not a racist, but you are" game.
Dumb.
As for Sam Harris. He's a Jewish Atheist. Figure that one out.
The problem, rh, is that it does not appear to be merely an issue of IQ. The Chinese have somewhat higher IQs than white people, but they seem to be able to "accomodate" whites fairly well. That might change if whites were to start robbing, raping and killing them in hugely disproportionate numbers, while destroying huge swathes of valuable real estate, and contributing flat jack nothing economically beyond an especially obnoxious form of "music" that glorifies all this wretched destruction.
There's the goldilocks theory of asians, that whites have other qualities that produce the right kind of cooperation in society that asians lack. Also there are various asians, not all of them with a higher IQ than whites, so marking is difficult.
On blacks, the destruction is socialization, part of the violent, stupid and dangerous threat of force if they're not paid off strategy of the black leaders.
If you're black and want to get ahead, don't identify as black. Dress white, take up some other white markers as well, and you'll do fine. Shirts with collars.
Markers can work for you as well as against you.
"bizarre" is the wrong word. The right word is "despicable."
For those who call atheism a religion (which never seems to be a claim made by an atheist) I wonder how you would define religion and fit atheism into the definition?
I tend to think of religion as a belief in one or more deities who:
Are living now;
Know humans exist;
Care about what humans do or think;
Are, for practical purposes, omnipotent; and
Have some higher moral knowledge (not just a “might makes right “ position).
This would exclude atheists, but might also exclude Scientologist, Zen Bhuddists, and Confucians.
"Atheism is just another religion."
"No it's not."
Yes it is. It is a belief system about the Unknowable. Faith that there is a god. Faith there is not a god.
Zero difference. Both are faith based. Faith based beliefs are the very core of religion.
"And I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational."
History provides many examples to the contrary. It is astonishing, even, how objectively deranged evil can be as a path to power.
I would say that leftism has become a religion for many "progressives." Marxism can be seen as a perversion of Christianity. Capitalism represents the Fall, capitalists and conservatives are the Demons, and we can recreate paradise on earth once capitalism is eradicated and everyone is equal. Of course, you also have to get rid of all the heretics who stand in the way of paradise on earth. Theoretically, the State will then magically wither away and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat shall reign forever more. Today's Marxists (what Tom Wolfe calls "Rococo Marxists") find the proletariat - the white male ones, at least - rather distasteful and have substituted racial and sexual minorities and women as the Chosen who shall inherit the Kingdom.
It's a bit puzzling since the State never does seem to wither away, but that's only because it can't until all the devils, all the Enemies of the People, are killed and there are always enemies to be found. Nobody said it would be easy to achieve Heaven on Earth.
And, of course, there is no room for traditional religious belief. The State is a jealous god and shall have no gods before it.
Yes it is. It is a belief system about the Unknowable. Faith that there is a god. Faith there is not a god.
Zero difference. Both are faith based. Faith based beliefs are the very core of religion.
Yes. Better argument.
Agnostics, like me, are not certain about anything much.
"preternaturally composed"
Also how Jordan Peterson was described during his interview with Cathy Newman
Blogger exiledonmainstreet said...
I would say that leftism has become a religion for many "progressives." Marxism can be seen as a perversion of Christianity. Capitalism represents the Fall, capitalists and conservatives are the Demons, and we can recreate paradise on earth once capitalism is eradicated and everyone is equal. Of course, you also have to get rid of all the heretics who stand in the way of paradise on earth.
Much better argument and a pretty good analogy
If people believed that I was stupid, ignorant and with propensity towards violence, I might have a propensity towards violence against such people. This would, of course, confirm the suspicions of those who think I have a propensity towards violence.
Henry said...
"And I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational."
History provides many examples to the contrary. It is astonishing, even, how objectively deranged evil can be as a path to power.
4/22/18, 11:34 AM
Hitler's rants mesmerized the Germans. They would not have been moved had he stood there calmly explaining just how a tiny minority of people he considered subhuman also controlled the world. In fact, the ridiculousness of his notions about the Jews would have been apparent to the Germans, a highly educated nation. The Nazis did not take over Germany because they were composed and hyper-rational.
Kindness for animals (except rats) required the imprisonment of Jewish experimental scientists.
That was a sign that things were going wobbly, but it wasn't really clear until Kristalnacht.
Hitler's speeches seem to me mindless like Trump's - who likes that crap? - or about every other political rally type.
It's Trump's tweets that show strategic genius. Sand in the gears of evil.
[color] diversity denies individual dignity, include racism, sexism, etc. Another wicked solution normalized by the progressive and liberal sects of the Pro-Choice Church.
Affirmative Action should have been affirmative help, when it was called for, but instead progressed as affirmative discrimination by color, sex, etc.
"Also there are various asians, not all of them with a higher IQ than whites, so marking is difficult."
Why dance around the issue? East Asians have higher IQ's then whites on average. That's a fact. Further, there are over 1 billion Indians. Even if there IQ is lower on average, there are still a hell of a lot of super-smart Indians.
People seem to forget that Chinese civilization was equal or superior to European Civilization until about 1500, and it took Europe until 1700 to catch up with Chinese agriculture.
Read about the Black IQ - its scary. The lowest 25% are off the charts. If you don't want these people turning to crime and despair, they need well-paying jobs that don't require a college degree.
But Liberals want to import foreigners to compete with them and drive down their wages.
IQ by country, map
https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country
Liberals always think of themselves as the Good People and are always surprised when other Good People turn on them, pointing their fingers at them and letting out otherworldly noises (like some mix between the Red Guard and Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Snatch This
What Sam Harris does not get (or maybe he does now), is that for Liberals, the Party is everything. More than family, more than friends, more than nation, more than religion, and importantly, more than individual liberty. Collectivism is the lens through which the world is viewed, and the State is the answer to overseeing it. Who runs the State? Who makes the decisions for these collective groups? Why...the Good People, of course.
But Liberals want to import foreigners to compete with them and drive down their wages.
4/22/18, 11:55 AM
Which is why I want to scream at the TV when I see some well-paid black liberals like Van Jones or Juan Williams vociferously attacking Trump's ideas about immigration as racist. Do they really not see that open borders hurts poor blacks more than anybody? Or do they not care because if blacks fail to prosper, they can continue to make comfortable livings playing the race card?
I think I've answered my own question.
I just got back from church and the only miracle was the dogs failed to catch that beautiful collared lizard.
chickelit said...
Jordan Peterson approaches all this is a thoughtful way.
As do hundreds of other people.
FWIW, there's a youtube video of Harris and Peterson, two atheists (yes, Peterson is an atheist) discussing the importance - or not - of mystical symbology; 'twas a bit boring even though Peterson has made some ludicrous claims about the subject.
Harris is something of a charlatan, isn't he? He received both his BA and his PhD late in life. He hasn't does anything with either of them, he is not a scholar. He seemed to want the credentials more than the education. His PhD in neuroscience is basically background for his odd belief that science can produce morality. Not arbitrary morality, but real morality.
I've seen Harris discuss his views. They are mostly gibberish, as though he is attempting to manipulate his audience into believing him because he is mentioning reasoning, science, and morality frequently.
exiledonmainstreet said...
"I would say that leftism has become a religion for many "progressives."
Mencius Moldbug has written about this, with the idea that modern Progressivism is the direct -- indeed, often genetic -- descendant of new England Protestantism. They are still living off the fortunes amassed by their more industrious ancestors, and they are still tirelessly trampling out that same old vintage, although just Whose truth is marching on is not so clear nowadays.
This is one of the best threads in awhile.
They don’t understand that there are whole bands of human perception that their brains simply can’t tune to, like a radio that reaches the limits of its dial.
That post, by Snark, is a gem.
rocean:
Why dance around the issue? East Asians have higher IQ's then whites on average. That's a fact.
Yep. I'm a white dude fwiw. Years ago, media critic Howard Kurtz had a local (DC) radio show, and I called in one night to point this out when he was chatting about The Bell Curve, which had just come out.
I also think I said that it would be better if what Murray and Herrenstein were saying wasn't true. Imagine being a black kid having trouble in class, with a cloud hanging over you that says odds are you're less smart on average than the white kid sitting next to you. Now on that particular day with that particular black kid, he could be struggling because of 1. A bad day 2. A bad home 3. Doesn't like the subject 4. Dozens of other reasons that affect everyone. But then there's that IQ thing.
rhhardin:
Not marking people by race at all would do it. There'd just be Americans with a wide spread in IQ, like always. We've always managed. Go on good character.
The answer is something like that. But as rhhardin suggests, our society is nowhere near being able to think and act that way.
The problem with the lowest intelligence quartile is that there are few ways they can contribute in a modern economy. Much of what they could do in the past was communal agricultural labor, leaving the planning and supervision to those better suited for these functions in the ancient village. They were useful in making up numbers available for simple work, a more intelligent and versatile sort of cattle.
But in modern societies machines have reduced the need for this work, and this has been going on for a couple of centuries. And the machine-operation jobs that replaced the hand-labor require much more intelligence, even if the user interfaces of the machines are simplified.
This problem is one of the more important ones discussed in the "Bell Curve"
Is it possible that there is a genetic component of IQ that correlates with race? Would knowing the answer (unless it is no) help civilization? I don't know either answer but clearly the left has declared the inquiry out of bounds. Any one who discusses or researches the issue in any sort of objective sense (without the absolute conviction that answer to both Qs is no) must be branded a racist and absolutely eviscerated as a deterrent to others. Of course, this approach is working. But it is also fueling and strengthening the dark enlightenment.
The problem with the lowest intelligence quartile is that there are few ways they can contribute in a modern economy.
"Brave New World" had "epsilons" operating elevators, another example of Huxley's lack of imagination about the future. That is not an option.
If they were less violent, it might be easier to think of roles they could play. Of course, the left has convinced them that any difference in achievement is due to racism. Starbucks barristas could be one role if it was not already filled with Humanities graduates.
One approach to a technical solution for the problem would be to develop a genetic-engineering "patch" to remediate a deficient set of genes.
Unfortunately the problem is looking more and more complex, involving more and more genes, and messing with these will have complex effects on other things, such as health or probably personality. Nature evaluated what works and what doesn't, consequences and tradeoffs, through the test of survival over time, which is not a method available to genetic engineers.
This approach will require large-scale physical tests, most certainly running over decades in order to find all the glitches, and it will most certainly require accepting large numbers of failed experiments, casualties.
The violence is part of the left's strategy for getting payoffs, not an genetic thing. I mean it's easily socialized out if you want to do it.
When I took biology a couple of decades ago, the textbook said that IQ was about 50% environment, 25% inherited, 25% unknown. That's the average, every individual is different, and I suspect that the ratio (if true) is only good for the middle of the range.
@Lewis W,
Harris is something of a charlatan, isn't he? .... His PhD in neuroscience is basically background for his odd belief that science can produce morality. Not arbitrary morality, but real morality.
"Charlatan" may be a bit harsh, but I certainly don't think of his demeanor in public debate as "cerebral" or "rationally detached". He seems to get pretty steamed under the collar when challenged by folks who know how to do the challenging, & by that I mean folks a lot brighter than Ezra Klein. He is, however, a lot better of an interlocutor than Richard Dawkins, who goes frothing at the mouth when challenged at all.
I gotta say that Harris is too smart & connected a guy not to know that the discussion of racial disparities in IQ is a mine field for the modern left. I mean, c'mon! What's next? Him telling a female interviewer that women are naturally submissive & best suited to raising young'uns? Just what does Harris think this whole "PC" business he's been hearing about concerns? "Personal Computers"?
Yes of course there is a possibility of a genetic component of intelligence (whatever its complexity) that correlates with race. All sorts of other physical traits do. If intelligence is largely or even partially a matter of brain hardware, then its in the same boat as all other physical traits that obviously also correlate with race. There is nothing special about appearance or musculature or bones or disease resistance or propensity.
And I've got to say, if you wanted to be a racist — or any kind of evil devil in this world — the best approach would be to adopt a demeanor that is preternaturally composed and hyper-rational.i
Dear Professor Althouse, that is literally the best thing you have ever written.
Blogger William said...
“If people believed that I was stupid, ignorant and with propensity towards violence, I might have a propensity towards violence against such people. This would, of course, confirm the suspicions of those who think I have a propensity towards violence.”
Do blacks really have a propensity towards violence? Or is the problem that, in our society, thanks to historical oppression they have been the major victims of LBJ’s War on Poverty, which, in essence, subsidized fatherless child rearing? Since that time, the black illegitimacy rate has essentially tripled, from 1/4 to 3/4. And a large number of the boys raised without their fathers in the household are never adequately domesticated, and made into contributing members of society. Instead, many end up dead or in prison instead.
GERVAIS: "Okay. But there are about 3,000 [gods and religions] to choose from… Basically, you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more."
Wow, that was some intellectually devastating stuff right there. Knocked me right out of my faith.
Dude, you don't actually think Ricky Gervais originated that old chestnut do you? You don't have to credit it to him, he got it from somebody else, who got it from somebody else, who got it from somebody else, etc.
Quick rejoinder:
Not believing there is any god and not believing in any particular god are not equivalent. An atheist is someone who believes that there is no god. A theist is someone who believes there is a god. Saying you just believe in one less god is just hand waving. Either there is a god or there is not, which is a binary proposition. The number of gods and religions that people may believe in is irrelevant to the question of whether God exists.
Show me how or why the Bell Curve is not collectivist by other means, in this case via statistics.
Dude, you don't actually think Ricky Gervais originated that old chestnut do you? You don't have to credit it to him, he got it from somebody else, who got it from somebody else, who got it from somebody else, etc.
Lord knows it was knocking around back when I was arguing for the non-existence of God, but I never used it. I had intellectual integrity.
Or is the problem that, in our society, thanks to historical oppression they have been the major victims of LBJ’s War on Poverty, which, in essence, subsidized fatherless child rearing?
Larry Elder has been quoted as saying that when there is no father in the home, boys will find a father in the streets,
Blogger buwaya said...
Yes of course there is a possibility of a genetic component of intelligence (whatever its complexity) that correlates with race.
It's not just race. Greg Cochran, in his book, "The 10,000 year explosion," postulates an evolutionary selection among Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages when they were not allowed to have any occupation except money lending and related fields. It resulted in a higher IQ, at least with regard to mathematics.
It also may be responsible for a couple of lethal mutations in neural phospholipids, like Tay Sachs.
Klein repeatedly stated that Harris refused to recognize that "one plus one equals two" - i.e., America has a terrible racist past and that we need to keep that in mind when discussing issues like race and genetics and intelligence - and Harris repeatedly agreed that it was. Harris acknowledge this history, i.e, the racism of America, before in prior conversations with Klein and he said it with his conversation with Murray. Although Harris admitted that he should have been more explicit in admitting it.
It eventually reached a point where Harris didn't know what to say. How many times could he agree that "1+1=2" before Klein would stop asking him the question? He was at a loss at how to say, again, that "Yes, 1+1=2".
How many times can Harris admit/acknowledge the terrible injustices perpetrated on black people before Klein would stop demanding he did?
Klein wanted to shut things down, obviously.
By not permitting it to proceed beyond his talking points.
How many times can Harris admit/acknowledge the terrible injustices perpetrated on black people before Klein would stop demanding he did?
Klein is simply trying to signal to Harris that he needs to shut up about the subject or he will be excommunicated from the left. Its that simple. Hell, I've seen a leftist deny that DNA exists. Just another reason worked up the "The Man" to keep people down. Obviously that's a fringe opinion, and nuts. But, its more acceptable on the left than the idea that IQ is genetic in origin.
I have thought for a long time there are 2 types of atheist: those who are anti-religion, especially anti-Catholic. And those who don’t care about religion at all. The former group is way larger than the latter. Many of the anti-religious are communists who are not exactly atheists. They are more non-religious than anything but hate religion. And there are religions that teach hatred of atheists. So it all comes out pretty even.
RK also points out the inbreeding within Indian castes, which modern genetic testing shows has been remarkably disciplined over the last 2000 years or so, with very little leakage.
This goes a long way to explain, perhaps, limited Indian average intelligence overall vs rather large, discrete communities of the very intelligent.
India it seems has several castes of "Jews", or rather in their case perhaps you could call them "master races", because unlike Jews in Europe these castes have actually, historically, run everything.
For that matter, a lot of leftists deny that IQ is a real thing that can be measured and correlates with success. I remember seeing an episode of Good Times back in the 70s that argued that IQ tests are culturally biased. Which they probably were, to some extent, back then. However, its not the 70s any longer and IQ testing has come a long way since then.
Prejudice can clearly distort one's view of an alien race, but why can't you factor in the resentment to prejudice as itself a kind of prejudice?.... The Jacobins and Bolsheviks were more bigoted than their oppressors..........Most black people have some white ancestors. Intelligence may or may not be genetic, but it's clearly not an overwhelmingly dominant gene. Einstein's kids reverted to the mean.
IQ tests have been identifying high intelligence in Asians in Asia for a very long time, and I can't imagine an "cultural bias" that would not affect such very foreign people much more than it would any category of westerner.
Who here wouldn't mind shaving a few points off their IQ in return for being given the athletic ability of Michael Jordan or the good looks of Brad Pitt or the family connections of the Windsors? A high IQ will get you through the physics exam, but it's not so much help in solving life's other problems.
The problem of low mental capacity populations has been solved long ago. Asimov suggested drastic population reduction followed by a selective sustainable community of the mind. Heinlien preferred transportation to new planets so they could bravely establish pioneer farms in the face of adversity and become healthy people.
Einsteins two sons seem to have been very intelligent, certainly way beyond the mean (even of Ashkenazi Jews), if not at their fathers level.
One son became an academic who taught hydraulic engineering at Cal Tech and UC Berkeley. Seems to have had a deal to do with California's great water projects of the day.
The other son was on his way to a medical degree when he became schizophrenic.
His one grandson was a physicist with several patents in night-vision systems, etc.
One of his great-grandsons is a physician practising in California.
This is a very high-level mean.
Sam Harris gets into trouble for from the left of speaking the truth. You should see the hornets nest he kicks up on Bill Mahrer show when he says the Koran is incompatible with western values. God love him for trying to have a rational discussion with a p.c theologian like Ezra Klein.
You must look at the whole population with respect to IQ as an asset. This is really a communal trait.
The inbreeding in India may be most evident in Brahmins who have 25% of IndoEuropean genes.
Morality and altruism is generically engineered by evolution plus deep time. Intellegence as well, however, the phat tails of the IQ bell curve are cultural artifacts. As far as invadiduals go, your millage may vary.
I can't imagine an "cultural bias" that would not affect such very foreign people much more than it would any category of westerner.
I wonder if the "Mandarin class" had enough evolutionary pressure to affect IQ ?
It probably has a role to play in myopia. 75% of Chinese teenagers in Singapore have severe myopia, while Chinese teenagers in Australia have only a 25% incidence.
It may be outdoor play in Australia that is a factor with kids focusing on distant objects vs constant book reading.
Genetic and culture interacting. I would like to know the incidence of severe myopia in US army recruits in WWII compared to today.
That is probably cultural with video games and smart phones.
Morality and Altruism may be remnants of hunter-gatherer social linkage.
William: A high IQ will get you through the physics exam, but it's not so much help in solving life's other problems.
Nope. In general high IQ is an advantage in solving life's non-physics-exam problems, too. Lower IQ people have more difficulty "solving life's other problems" than higher IQ people. Anecdotes about one's absent-minded genius nephew without a lick of street-sense notwithstanding.
"America has a terrible racist past and "
...and...?
...and...?
...and... so, therefore, what?
"America has a terrible racist past and "
The world had slavery as a common practice for thousands of years.
The American South fought a Civil War over slavery and lost.
600,000 men died to free the slaves.
The radical Republicans, in a war with Johnson that resembles the present day Democrats, punished the South for slavery and as a result, the freed slaves had 100 years of segregation and terrorism.
The "terrible racist past" is common to the entire planet.
The American blacks need to get over it.
Vicki Hearne wrote that IQ test essay comprehension questions test how quickly you can believe things.
There's some smart people here which is, perhaps, why you're all so idiotically freighting IQ over other desirable traits. Germans are not generally considered stupid or lazy, but look where their intelligence and energy led them. Right off the cliff. Twice.......Russian Jews in some areas of human endeavor are remarkably stupid. They were right to judge the Czar as their enemy, but they were foolish beyond measure to judge Lenin as their savior. I know the Chinese score high on IQ tests, but they don't have much of a flair for recognizing despotic rulers......I'm not especially smart. It's got me out of a lot of trouble.
“A high IQ will get you through the physics exam, but it's not so much help in solving life's other problems.”
The other problem there is that our economy and society has gotten progressively complex, and one of the things that comes from a higher IQ, on average, is a better ability to handle complexity. Or, even to enjoy complexity - which is arguably why our laws have gotten so complex.
Am I getting this right ... Higher IQ does not mean talent for keeping ideas and things simple
Or ability to suss out strawmen.
Or charlatans.
“Russian Jews in some areas of human endeavor are remarkably stupid.”
They tend to vote, very strongly, for Democrats, despite it having become the party of antisemites, esp in regard to Blacks, and now Muslims. They may support Israel, but then almost automatically vote for the party and candidates least willing to support it, and most willing to sell it out to the Muslims. Any bets on whether Crooked Hillary would have moved the US embassy to Jerusalem? Esp with the long term ties between the family of her closest advisor and the Muslim Brotherhood? Yet I have good friends who are strong supporters of Israel, have been there a bunch of times, and still continue to justify their votes for Clinton. The woman whose policies destroyed peace in Lybia, gave the Muslim Brotherhood (temporary) control of Egypt, and helped cause the refugee crisis in Europe (where antisemitism is on a rapid increase, as a result) with her policies in Syria. The smartest demographic, according to the Bell Curve.
Mike K ...
It's the American liberals who need to stop piously rending the social fabric over past slavery.
“Am I getting this right ... Higher IQ does not mean talent for keeping ideas and things simple”
Yes. Not only is higher IQ correlated with handling complexity better, but making life, society, and the economy more complex advantages those who handle complexity the best. Which is a good part of the rise in economic inequality.
High IQ helps, a lot.
Jews are remarkably wealthy and disproportionately powerful.
They have been so all over Western Europe since the early 19th century.
This emerged everywhere once they were no longer actively persecuted in more backwards lands.
They ran into serious bad luck with the Nazis - but note - most German Jews (of those resident in 1932 say) actually survived, because they had the brains and resources to leave.
German Jews had one of the highest Holocaust survival rates of any national community.
Polish Jews though got it bad.
The Jews the Nazis killed were, nearly all, those in foreign countries the Nazis overran, where they had not been appraised of the dangers of their situation, had not counted on their apoarently invulnerable country falling (such as France), and especially where they had much more recently emerged from official persecution.
William said...
"There's some smart people here which is, perhaps, why you're all so idiotically freighting IQ over other desirable traits."
Where do you enjoy all this Lo-Q desirability, William? South Chicago? Baltimore? Philly? Detroit?
In the case of Einstein, his IQ (whatever it was) did mean a talent for keeping ideas simple.
Could it be that what is denominated "complex" is a matter of success in persuasion/teaching?
So that failure in this endeavor / responsibility is explained away?
With Don't bother your pretty little head about it?
“Atheism” is properly regarded as being a kind of religion, just as zero (nothing) is properly regarded as being one of the numbers.
Atheism may be technically a lack of belief (rather than belief per se) in a diety or dieties — but that supposed “lack” comes with a huge amount of baggage — including, oftentimes, a (positive) belief in such things as the regular order of the world, on which e.g. science depends. What both religions in general and (e.g.) atheism — supposedly the exact opposite — have in common is that they are all ideologies, and hence far more similar than either would care to admit.
Indeed, I’m reminded of physicist Niels Bohr’s famous quote (paraphrased) that Great Ideas are not like lesser ideas, because — unlike ordinary ideas which are either right or wrong, and whose opposite is therefore (oppositely) wrong or right — the opposite of a Great Idea is another Great Idea.
Part of the atheism baggage is a high IQ which over-complicates the world.
But then don't Great ideas attempt induction/integration of myriad facts and previously great (now diminished) ideas.
Diminished does not imply irrelevant or incorrect .
"It's not just race. Greg Cochran, in his book, "The 10,000 year explosion," postulates an evolutionary selection among Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages"
Yes, Jews hand in-built advantage when the world started to urbanize and industrialize in the 19th century. Many of them had been urban dwellers, bankers, businessmen, etc. for hundreds of years. Few were illiterate.
Quite an advantage over a farmer or a illiterate blacksmith - who moves to the big city and has to adjust.
The basic message of The Bell Curve is not that complicated. Basically it says that low IQs suck big time and correlate with a large number of negative behaviors. For instance, there's a correlation between IQ and physical violence. Most people, including most low IQ people, manage to make it through life without murdering someone. But although a particular low IQ person is not likely to murder anyone, the odds that they will are much higher than for a high IQ person.
The Bell Curve also says that none of these negative consequences are explained by any of the factors independent of IQ that they thought to look at. For example, poverty matters, but it is possible to separate this from IQ and IQ correlates far better with the negative behaviors identified than poverty.
What makes the text complicated is that it's largely a discussion of the statistical evidence for their assertions. Since most people don't get statistics that makes the book complicated for most people. But for the many people that don't follow the statistics, it's worth pointing out that it's rare to see The Bell Curve criticized on statistical grounds.
We are obligated to take a huge number of things on faith. There is not enough time in a life to think through and analyze all the different things we believe. No one has ever done this. It doesn't matter how smart they are. Most of what anyone believes are things that they were taught as children and that they have never looked at again.
There are a huge number of different possible starting assumptions. This is most of what makes groups of people so different. If you grew up in Bolivia, then it's likely you have some different starting assumptions than someone growing up in the United States. It's difficult for people to even look at this sort of thing because some of the most important assumptions are things you never even think to question.
When a significant number of people share a large set of assumptions, I would argue that they all belong to the same religion. Maybe there's a better word for this than religion, but offhand I don't know what it is. Or maybe my argument would be that it's not useful to distinguish assumption sets that include some idea of God from those that don't.
"Maybe there's a better word for this than religion, but offhand I don't know what it is. "
It's culture and in the sense of Bourgeois Culture, a pattern of behavior that is more successful in civilized society.
A Shame- Honor Culture can work pretty well in primitive societies where there are only corrupt authorities.
The Ottoman Empire was one such and, in "Black Lamb and Gray Falcon," Rebecca West explains how that led to tribal behavior among Serbs. They had no protection of law, only by the clan.
The same applies in Arab countries.
"This post made me glad I used the portal today."
Thanks!
Another term is a "High Trust" society, which we are in the process of losing.
"America has a terrible racist past."
No, we don't. Or rather we do, but no more than practically anyone else, and much less than many.
The reason we know about our "terrible racist past" is two-fold: first our American ancestors were proud of what they had done; and second our American ancestors had a religion that put a high value on the truth, regardless of whether it was ugly. (The truth shall set you free.) And that is not a universal human value by a long way.
To put it in context, at the time of the American revolution, most of the world practiced either slavery or something not that far removed from slavery. Every Islamic nation practiced slavery. Every black nation practiced slavery. Every South and Central American nation practiced slavery. I'm not so sure with Asia, but I'd be astonished if most or even all of Asia had slavery, more-or-less, at the end of the sixteenth century. Most of Europe had serfs. And serfs are just one step removed from being slaves. Feudalism is based on slavery. It's complicated because according to Christianity, slavery is wrong. So admitted and acknowledged slavery was uncommon in Europe, but approximate slave-like status was not at all unusual.
Between now and then, almost all of these cultures have given up slavery, but at the same time, virtually all of them have wiped out any common awareness that they even practiced slavery in the recent past. Thus for example Mexico imported almost exactly as many African slaves as the French and English colonies that would later become the United States. Yet even though the problem was of exactly the same size, or actually proportionately far larger, given that what was to become Mexico had a smaller population, it is extraordinarily difficult to find a Mexican today that is aware of any of this.
A similar pattern occurs in country after country around the world.
The United States is different because aside from the unusual value its religion put on the truth, it fought a long, difficult, and bloody war on the subject, which obviously everyone else was smart enough not to do.
Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?
Do you not know any leftists? It is their prime article of faith that they are "the good people". That's why they act so shocked when Republicans do to them what they did to the GOP. "Of COURSE it's different when we do it. we are 'good people'!"
See all the Democrats who got bent out of shape about Garland, even after Democrats invented borking, and filibustered Estrada et. al. for years
The shameful part of America's past isn't just slavery of blacks.
Blacks were shafted *again*, after they were freed from slavery.
After the Civil War, Southern blacks were faring fairly well under Reconstruction. They were working as freemen, and a few blacks even got elected to Congress. The US Army kept the peace in the South.
Then came the presidential election of 1876, the closest Presidential election in American history (closer than Bush-Gore 2000). Hayes was the GOP candidate and Tilden was the Dem candidate. Multiple recounts and investigations failed to resolve a winner in the Electoral College.
Ultimately, the election was settled by a crass, dirty political deal: The Dems would allow Hayes to be President. In exchange, the Republicans would end Reconstruction and withdraw the US Army from the South.
Blacks were abandoned to their fate. Soon they would be terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan and by Jim Crow laws.
That 1876 election set back the cause of black civil rights in this country by decades.
And while enslavement of blacks was due to a mistaken but widespread belief in white supremacy, the only reason they got shafted a second time was for a dirty political deal, just like the Czechs got shafted by Neville Chamberlain. ("Nothing personal, you understand, BUT...")
gregq: " the Democrats who got bent out of shape about Garland"
Robert Bork got a hearing before the Senate. Indeed, it was after he testified that the Dems threatened to filibuster.
In contrast, McConnell never even allowed Garland to speak to his own ideas before the Senate and defend his own track record before the Senate.
Garland is not a conservative, but he is a distinguished jurist and he didn't deserve to be humiliated like that.
You're happy because the Dems didn't replace Scalia with a moderate. Fair enough. But simple decency would require Republicans to apologize to Garland for the way he was shafted and make it clear that his treatment *had nothing to do with him personally*.
"Garland is not a conservative, but he is a distinguished jurist and he didn't deserve to be humiliated like that."
Ask the guy who nominated him at the end of his term to apologize.
After the Civil War, Southern blacks were faring fairly well under Reconstruction. They were working as freemen, and a few blacks even got elected to Congress. The US Army kept the peace in the South.
Do you know any history ? Reading would be good for you. Ron Chernow's biography of Grant would be a start.
The radical Repubicans treated Johnson like the Dims are treating Trump.
If Lincoln had lived, he would have acted differently. Booth was the worst thing to happen to the South since 1860 and probably before that.
the only reason they got shafted a second time was for a dirty political deal, just like the Czechs got shafted by Neville Chamberlain. ("Nothing personal, you understand, BUT...")
You forgot Wilson but I understand why.
I'm sorry, I should not have said that. You obviously know some history but we disagree. I think the die was cast before 1876.
in contrast, McConnell never even allowed Garland to speak to his own ideas before the Senate and defend his own track record before the Senate.
Garland is not a conservative, but he is a distinguished jurist and he didn't deserve to be humiliated like that.
It was not an uncommon event in Supreme Court history. There are at least a half dozen examples of Supreme Court nominations that were never acted upon by the Senate.
Not marking people by race at all would do it. There'd just be Americans with a wide spread in IQ, like always. We've always managed. Go on good character.
The answer is something like that. But as rhhardin suggests, our society is nowhere near being able to think and act that way.
You're overlooking, or ignoring, the fact that much of today's population is also lacking in character.
American eugenics always has a majority and a minority group struggling for control of the American eugenics society and this is what is going on in the debate between the Charles Murray version of eugenics and the Eric Turkheimer version.
Murray's description of genetics and its relation to IQ and race is based on work by eugenic society members going back to Francis Galton (founder of eugenics). On p. 19 of the Bell Curve Murray says that he draws most heavily in The Bell Curve and in his conclusions on "the classical tradition." The previous pages define "the classical tradition" as one going back to Galton continuing through Charles Spearman and Cyril Burt and then on into the Nineties in the work of Arthur Jensen, HJ Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Sandra Scarr, Linda Gottfredson. These were all English or American eugenic society members and most were supported by the Pioneer Fund. They were successfully challenged in the 70's and again in the Nineties by Richard Lewontin and Jerry Hirsch - who themselves were eugenic society members but of a different faction, a leftist minority faction. In terms of scientific disciplines Murray's scientific sources were psychologists studying IQ whereas Hirsch, Lewontin and their allies were behavior geneticists.
Eric Turkheimer is a behavior geneticist whose intellectual background is found in the Behavior Genetics Association (BGA). This group was founded by the dissident minority in the American Eugenics Society which included Jerry Hirsch and which had a strongly leftist orientation. The BGA President in 1995, Glayde Whitney, told the group that an honest study of behavior would look into the genetic roots of black criminality, a well established scientific finding (he said.) He repeated this and more in an introduction to the work of David Duke, leader of the KKK. The BGA and its members, like Eric Turkheimer (BGA President 2012), have ever since been trying to live this episode down. Meanwhile the views of the eugenic society members of the BGA have risen to be a section of the majority view of the American eugenics society. The current name of the group is The Society of Biodemography and Social Biology. They have taken down their website but their journal is online.
I'm making one simple point. Murray's form of eugenics isn't the only one. There's another which is more acceptable to leftists. This eugenics rests on new work done in the field of behavior genetics. Vox itself says:
"Our bottom line is that there is a responsible, scientifically informed alternative to Murrayism: a non-essentialist view of intelligence, a non-deterministic view of behavior genetics, and a view of group differences that avoids oversimplified biology.
Liberals make a mistake when they try to prevent scholars from being heard — even those whose methods and logic are as slipshod as Murray’s. That would be true even if there were not scientific views of intelligence and genetics that progressives would likely find acceptable. But given that there is such a view, it is foolish indeed to try to prevent public discussion."
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech
You see? [There are] "scientific views of intelligence and genetics that progressives would likely find acceptable."
These "progressive" views are roughly speaking based on epigentics, more than on genetics. I say, these views are just as ugly as the views of Murray or the KKK but they are more acceptable to "progressives" because the insults to the blacks are prefaced by "Due to white racism, good genes have become bad and so blacks [KKK-type statements]. Due to white racism, blacks have altered genes and hereditarily [can't take tough subjects], [can't compete with white men] blah, blah.
Woke eugenics is still the same shit that eugenics has always been.
@Wildswan
Give a couple of examples of Murray's ugly views.
Eugenics implies trying to do something to alter outcomes.
Murray is observing.
Not the same.
The left is fighting to suppress information.
The Luddites lost.
Sinz52 ... How did Dems make the deal stick?
sinz52 said...
gregq: " the Democrats who got bent out of shape about Garland"
Robert Bork got a hearing before the Senate.
Yes, he did. After the Democrats spent months lying about his record and slandering him.
Being decent human beings, the Republicans did not lower themselves to Democrat sleaze. They just noted that the Democrats had changed the rules, and the GOP was going to follow the new rules.
You know, like when the Democrats filibustered Estrada and Janice Rodgers Brown, because conservative "minorities" aren't allowed to have positions of power.
Garland is not a conservative, but he is a distinguished jurist and he didn't deserve to be humiliated like that.
Which is why the GOP simply refused to vote for him, instead of Borking him.
But simple decency would require Republicans to apologize to Garland for the way he was shafted and make it clear that his treatment *had nothing to do with him personally*.
Borks Borking didn't have anything to do with him personally, neither did any of the Senate Democrats' filibusters of Bush judicial appointments. They just had to do with politics.
When you admit that every single one of those was the wrong thing to do, and apologize to every person nailed by them, we'll be happy to return the favor.
You created the new rules, you don't get to complain when they hit you.
"enslavement of blacks was due to a mistaken but widespread belief in white supremacy,"
I think your arrow of causality is backwards.
RE: "Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?"
Short answer: yes. He's not afraid to take on tough topics (e.g. gun-control and Islamic fundamentalism), but he stepped on a subject that is radioactive.
"Was Harris so lost in self-love — thinking he's one of the good people — that he didn't see how mean his seeming friends would be if he questioned one of the Good People's Articles of Faith?"
Welcome to the 21st century where protecting the 'agenda' and the 'narrative' are the priority because power over others is all that matters. Very odd that the preferred label for that sort of thing is 'progressive.'
If you're implying that Harris' bewilderment is a conscious pose ... of course it is. And he's right on substance and right on style.
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