Who can forget the Bowling Green Massacre? The horrible, horrible Trump genocide!
I said such pseudoscience could help. Not that it necessarily would lead to genocide and slavery.
This was an intrinsic part of Nazi ideology. I think that’s a pretty significant thing to worry about. You’re free to disagree, but you’ve offered nothing so far that challenges my notion that it’s reasonable to be concerned about and oppose racist pseudoscience.
People in Nazi Germany did not have the luxury of being able to fact check Hitler and his cronies on racist pseudoscience. Some believed it, some did not, and some just went along not thinking much about it.
73M people in the US heard Trump’s lies. Had every opportunity to fact check them (including the birtherism claims) but did not do so, or simply didn’t care and went along with them.
And before you say this doesn’t contradict anything you’ve said, it does. “Could help” and “pretty significant” qualifiers not withstanding.
Pseudoscience is bad because it’s bad science. It should be discouraged. But it is not the secret door to achieving a racist’s goals you think it is. For the overwhelming majority of people willing to hate, a lie repeated often enough against people they already hate, is more than enough. They won’t be fact checking it for scientific community consensus.
Some of those lies “repeated often enough” are racist pseudoscience. I’m not saying this is the biggest thing to fear in the whole wide world. But it’s still a real bad thing that should be opposed.
Racist pseudoscience is a useful tool for white supremacists and many others who want to do bad things and it should be opposed.
What part of this do you disagree with? I still can’t really tell what I’ve said that you have a problem with.
If only 1930’s Germans had Snopes to fact check ‘The Jews killed our god, Jesus’ . . . it would have made all the difference.
I just explained why it wouldn’t have helped. But don’t let that stop you. You’re on a roll.
Because the studies purporting to show a racial IQ difference are never comparing populations on the African continent. They are comparing African Americans to European Americans, with sometimes Asians and Jews thrown in. They always divide populations by socially constructed groups of Black, white, Asian.
There are real studies of distributions of different muscle gene distributions. The last one I read was about the fast twitch mutation and how it effected sprinters vs. long distance runners. If I remember correctly, both ends of the distribution were in the same African country. One group had the highest level of occurrence and the other the lowest. But those are two small populations within Africa. Both would belong to the socially constructed race referred to as Black, but they have largest variance in this gene expression.
But that is what we expect based on humanity originally evolving in Africa. If we ever do identify genes that directly correlate to intelligence, I would expect the same thing. The largest variations in distributions would be between groups within Africa. But that wouldn’t mean we should eliminate affirmative action or not try to improve struggling schools because it would be a waste of resources.
They wanted to believe what they believed and the ‘science’ justified them in believing what they already wanted to believe.
It’s a vicious circle. The ‘science’ was both critical and irrelevant.
I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it. Pseudoscience is bad science. Racist pseudoscience is bad science by association. We should discourage it. But you don’t need pseudoscience to justify a genocide. We didn’t need it in the past, and we don’t need it now, because lies and hate are easier to spread in 240 characters or less.
I have recommended it before, but I Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist convincingly argues that you are both wrong. That order goes:
- Person in power wants something that he can get by oppressing a group (slaves, land, resources, power)
- Racist policies are created to get that thing (Race based slavery, displacement of ethnic groups)
- Racist ideas are developed to justify these policies.
I think it can help (and part of the “lies and hate” you mention is racist pseudoscience). Apparently you disagree. I’m fine with leaving it there.
Any proposed connection between race and IQ is not a scientific theory since there is no way to test or refute it. No experiment that could actually be carried out can do that. Since this thread has gone off the rails on the subject, I am going to close it.