You vouched for both Vox pieces. Not certain specific points they made, but in toto. So I don’t understand how my detailed rebuttal could be irrelevant to your point in posting it.
You’re doing the equivalent of some racist kid on Reddit asking someone to listen to a conversation between Hermann Göring and Josef Mengele. You’re going to get a lot of hateful responses, and few takers.
While I appreciate you put some effort into responding to those links, IMO you didn’t put much effort into responding to my specific criticisms of Harris. I wish you had. And I’m not sure how linking to something counts as “vouching” for it. I mentioned the points that I thought it reinforced well, but that doesn’t mean I agree with every single one.
I would be kinder to Peter Duesberg than that. He’s a great scientist with one utterly deadly blind spot.
Andrew Wakefield is a pure fraud, a criminal whose avarice drove his dishonesty.
Murray is probably just another racist true believer trying hard to justify his worldview. He is the enemy, like it or not, whatever his intentions.
Argument from authority, and authority in a fanboy’s eyes at that. Invalid.
Blue eyes are not an ethnic marker in the USA. Even if we treat grey and green eyes as “categories of blue,” lots of fair-complected persons have hazel or brown eyes. What is wrong with you?
That’s not hyperbole at all. :rolleyes:
It’s not.
You think you’re so generous to black people. Treat them like Little Fuzzies, don’t expect too much. That is a “soft bigotry of low expectations.” And it implies that they are apish, less than human. It is continuous with those in whose eyes half-breed Barack Obama must have been an idiot, because how could you know what you were doing with a half-monkey brain?
Of course, once you’re convinced that this is true, that blacks are even below the poor degenerate Irish :p, then you create an opening for the next twit who comes along and says that white people don’t need black people, that we can improve the race and human happiness by eliminating them.
You know and I know that that is utter nonsense. Of course sub-Saharan Africans have useful physical positive adaptations to hotter climates—climates like pretty much the majority of the USA. Any actual genetic “improvement of the race” is not to be found in “purity” but in interbreeding. But here’s how the racists will think: If even Ivy League-educated Barack Obama is necessarily an idiot like the guys down at the shop say, what kind of favor would I be doing my children to cut away half their humanity by breeding with a colored person?
And Charles Murray is there to tell them that intelligence is the most important thing! Why take chances mating with an Africanized hybrid of Homo sapiens?
The more we listen to him, the more white people keep sticking to their own kind, and the more likely it is that uppity darkies in politics get shot down as above their station and abilities, or just shot.
And sooner or later, because enough human beings are foolish enough to keep breeding above replacement rate, the blacks and the half-breeds will be the target of ethnic cleansing, in the name of improving the race, but really for Lebensraum. All for some nonsense about white superiority. I know white people; most of them are dumb.
I get where you’re coming from. But really, this is in nature if not extremity as I said: A naive kid on the internet referring us to a racist’s talk with a racist. It’s not hyperbole.
Your attacks on Snowboarder Bo are ridiculous, considering your insistence that Hillary was electable (no) and Trump was obviously not (well…) and your brilliant plan of voting for Trump to get the nomination because he was sure to lose even against the most hated political family in America (not how general elections actually work).
Bernie would have done better than Hillary simply by not being married to Mr NAFTA, you ridiculous fantasist. Compared to the virtual ream of paper you spent on tearing down the great populist hope, Snowboarder Bo’s posts were actually—pretty inoffensive and pretty normal.
You are straining at his gnats and swallowing your camels whole. Remember when the guy you voted for in the primary ended up hiring a Turkish agent for NSA, selling the State Department to oilmen and to Russia, and then criticizing someone over a dubious email server? Yeah, about that proportional difference in credibility. On a smaller and less important scale, mind.
So, really, be glad I’m way on the other side of the state and I don’t come over there and [del]throw you in a quarry[/del] kick your butt on general principle. Bernie could have won.
My god, the Bernheads never give it up. Just don’t go on a shooting spree like that Hodgkinson feller, k bud?
Eh, maybe. The effects of environmental pressure might be reflected in genes, sometimes.
There is no black clade. As for any negative correlation between dark skin and high intellect, I don’t see a genetic mechanism for it. It’s arguable that some very light-skinned people stay indoors out of the sun and read a little more? And bring up the average? Maybe? Eh…
OK, this bit I can agree with. Now, who thinks the Department of Education is going to do what you say because of Charles Murray? :dubious:
“Bernheads”? You mean progressives? Yeah, we don’t like being told to lie back and take it, especially not from some McCarthyite who helped Trump into the White House.
A point of agreement! Progress. [ETA: referring to the earlier post.]
Let’s be real: the Dept. of Education isn’t going to do things I would want until 2021 at the earliest. But after that point, I will be lobbying for them to more away from the punitive NCLB models, as well as all the other initiatives that throw teachers unions under the bus.
Always. To suggest otherwise is willful delusion.
Emphasis on deadly. Say what you will about Wakefield, but his testimony hasn’t led to hundreds of thousands of deaths (yet).
I can agree with you on policy, this far. But it does sound like welfarism with “soft bigotry” again. Pay the negroes their welfare, but don’t tell them they can get too high.
Also, we tried this before, you remember. Then Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich trashed it. I’m not sure that’s at all relevant; I just want to complain about Bill Clinton, really.
They would have been working with a narrower gene pool to start, though. That goes the other way. And then of course they presumably suffered malnutrition in environments far from the cradle of mankind. Even later, whites and Asians turned over the ages into less adventurous stay-at-homes, swamping the early “adventurous” advantage. And who says adventurers are even smarter than anyone else? Humph!
[bolding added]
I would expect these are major, major influences. In my own life, I know what it is to have certain handicaps including poverty; not to quite fit in with the dominant culture; and eventually decide that one can’t make it in certain career paths geared toward a different, privileged, subculture. And I had people trying to tell me I was smart. Growing up being told, “You ain’t shit”? Easy to give up. I’m pretty sure white basketball prodigies do this too.
Which wipes Charles Murray’s thesis out. Thanks for playing!
I don’t think this is about genetics so much as cultural difficulties. I could brainstorm the following hypotheses: [ul]
[li] low performance arising possibly from racial alienation and low expectations,[/li][li] maybe poor nutrition,[/li][li] maybe lead poisoning in cheap substandard housing,[/li][li] parents with lower educational achievement of their own, deriving from* their* parents having to work longer hours.[/li][/ul]Genetics are an easy answer, but not really a necessary nor particularly likely one.
I snipped this next bit out to respond to separately:
Wow. At the risk of sounding like a tool, I think your blue eyes maybe aren’t so smart. Hawking was seen as impressive because he came up with stuff that only a few highly educated specialists claimed even to understand. As cool, clever, and highly skilled as Art Blakey was, I don’t think that “A Night in Tunisia” is at the same level of arcaneness.
Meh, no, I’ll let that slide. I see your point. Hawking is Hawking not because he was intrinsically smarter than Art Blakey (or, say, GIGObuster), but because of the field he chose to focus on and the length of time that he did. The fact that both his parents went to Oxford and he was even born in Oxford probably made a difference as well.
Oh, forgot to add, I don’t really agree with the stuff about genetically engineering cleverer children. I think human gene variation doesn’t have that much to do with relative cognitive development anyway. And I have seen Gattaca. Bleh!
Yeah, the problem is, I can see people deciding that being musical is a genetic disease. (Heh.) Where will the next Mingus or Blakey come from when the Puritans try to use CRISPR to abolish jazz? You forget, people are stupid hateful shits who downgrade the intelligence of the Other.
What I like about this is the implication that maybe this kind of curve is true for white people as well. So “white people” get Hawking, Kepler, Einstein, Feynman, and Newton, but also more extremely pudding-brained people. Of course this longer, flatter bell curve will be even stronger in blue eyed people, whereas black-eyed people will have a shorter, steeper bell curve, tending toward the median. This of course would go some way to explain the remarkable career of Congressman Paul Ryan. [/bad joke]
Wait, are you saying 50-80% or is Harris? That’s a really, shockingly out there number.
You think there’s a cellist gene? What does that even mean?
On the contrary, Ockham’s Razor says not to needlessly multiply entities. We know there are sociological effects of racism and social alienation. Those are sufficient to to explain test scores and prison populations. It is not necessary to spin unsupported fantasies about how North American blacks are just dumb criminals.
Unless you mean you want to use the Razor on history, go whole hog and say that the Anglo-Saxon planters were right all along and the enslaved were dumb brutes who had it coming; in which case we have to assert that the Irish were dumb brutes also had it coming. I’m not sure what policy should come out of that, but I’m guessing we would have to basically turn the entirety of at least one Midwestern city into slaves for their own good. Sound about right? No?
Of course that’s ridiculous. Why would we assume that people who promulgated polygenism and normalized kidnapping persons for undercompensated labor really had some deep and true folk knowledge of racial potential?
“Absolute” is prejudicial. It serves a rhetorical purpose. It’s probably more like nearly perfect parity than absolute parity. Or just “parity.” Why is that any stranger than local human populations maintaining parity on the distribution of working thumbs, or range of hearing, or the ability to see the color green? Especially since the greater proportion of cognitive development happens in the experiences of a functioning, intact, conscious brain with sufficient stimulation and nutrition? Variation in cognitive ability is mostly due to non-genetic factors anyway, and if you think otherwise, just try neglecting a child of genius parents by mostly leaving him alone in the woods for a formative year or two.
OK, these paragraphs I think I can agree with.
Oddly enough, I think differences in height between local populations are now thought to have more to do with things like diet and infectious disease than genes as such.
Sure. What sub-populations see in the near infrared? Or lack the ability to cross their thumbs all the way across their palms? Or are all physically handicapped in some way? I mean “surely” variations could have developed, so we can assume they did! e_e
Complains about Chinese *lacking *tenses, and Russian having declensions. Then picks English over Spanish, which has relatively regular spelling, more tenses, and non-declining nouns. I can’t even.
You opened a Pit thread. You basically asked to be piled on.
I tried to raise this repeatedly, but was met with dismissal, even snorts of derision. It appears, actually, that blacks may be more sensitive to the effects of lead.
Great movie!
The thumbs thing is silly. But do you have a cite for the claims of parity for range of hearing, and color perception?
This was addressed many times, including by Harris and Murray, who talked about even the best corn seeds doing poorly if planted in the desert. “Necessary but not sufficient” is the key concept here.
I did not pick English over Spanish.
Somewhat off topic, but I’ve noticed that Hillary supporters have pejorative names for Sanders and Trump supporters (Such as “Bernie Bros” and “Deplorables”) but I haven’t heard the term “Hillary Sister” or “Hillaryhead” thrown about by those on the Bernie wing of the party. We certainly have criticized Hillary, but we don’t insult people who voted for her.
As a fellow Democrat, I politely request that you return the same courtesy.
Bernie himself is not a “fellow Democrat”. That aside, I remember seeing this kind of complaint a few times during the campaign, and it’s pretty hilarious. “Bernie bro” is an insult applied from without, by Sanders critics. “Bernhead” is not. It comes from hard-core Bernie fans themselves, calling themselves that. You know, like Deadheads?