“The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
– George Orwell
Well, even Thomas Jefferson acknowledged that Indians were as good as whites, by heredity, and looked forward to an amalgamated white-Indian American race, produced by interbreeding. Blacks, OTOH, should be freed and deported, precisely to prevent any chance of their interbreeding with whites (while Jefferson himself was doing some ahem interbreeding at home with his slave Sally Heming; so I guess he understood the temptation/risk of it). The history of racial pseudoscience is full of surprises.
Well, maybe, maybe not . . . At any rate, apparently you can get a Harvard MBA without being really smart.
Dance? Liberals are almost unanimous: improve the social environment. Build better schools, especially in majority-black districts. Push money into economic development of inner cities. Affirmative action. Directly and actively break the spinning-wheel of the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty.
A liberal, seeing something wrong, desires to make it better. No dancing involved. (Midnight basketball, sometimes.)
Yes. Most of us believe that shit deep down. There’s no intelligent, rational reason why they wouldn’t have the same intellectual capacity. Has nothing to do with being liberal and modern, just honest.
Don’t forget to maintain or even extend the federal school lunch program. Apparently, if kids aren’t starving, they do better in school. It’s one of the more provably effective (cost and outcome) uses of money we have.
That wasn’t the question. Those measure lead me to believe that liberals believe that American blacks are intellectually inferior to other groups. Programs like Head Start have had short-term successes but don’t translate into long-term intellectual parity.
Let me ask you bluntly, do you believe that American blacks today are intellectually inferior to most other groups today regardless of the reason?
We already have affirmative action programs and special focus on the inner city schools but the results still lag greatly. What is the next plan to remedy this situation? Again, it a completely honest question. I just to get away from the name calling and solve this problem. You hint you have the solutions. Let us have them.
You guys have failed to provide addresses, so where are they then? Huh? Answer that will ya, ya big LIBERALS!
Just because you can cherry pick a few of the best and brightest, it’s incredibly disingenuous to act like that’s a representative sample of the population as a whole. I wonder, of all the people who said “hey, I work with a black scientist/doctor/whatever” - how many of your co-workers are not black? Also, resorting to puerile name-calling sure does prove just how super-smart you are.
ETA: by the way, I voted for Obama. 
To be fair, you said something incredibly stupid.
Oh?
So what? Any group of physicists, doctors or whatever is going to be cherry-picking from the whole, dumbass. Those people are special, be they white, black, yellow or green.
And voting for Obama doesn’t get you shit for points. Not when he was running against Mittens. That just means you have slightly more brain power than lichen.
Yes, you said this:
That’s very stupid, and then you promptly were shown why. If you knew that there are actually plenty of black physicists, etc, then you shouldn’t have said that.
Once again: Start a GD thread; that kind of discussion belongs there.
Dude, I’m from Southwest Missouri, where every schoolchild goes to the G. W. Carver monument on a field trip at some point.
Joplin, Missouri’s most accomplished son was the poet Langston Hughes, whose parents fled a Joplin race riot when he was a baby. The streets in Joplin are named after forgotten German settlers and one figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
I don’t think white people are really as smart as they think they are.
Hey, I know that there may be some smart black people, but Black People are still dumber than me, natch! 'cause really, I see them all in the jails and shit, and down on the corner, so how can you tell me that they’re as smart as me!?
Shagnasty, if you can do a study that accounts for all of the social/cultural/environmental/economic differences between white and black skinned people in America, and still show that there’s a significant difference in some measure of intelligence, then come back with pie.
Chief Pedant is medical doctor a generally smart guy. I am following what he says in those types of threads and I don’t think it is the same thing people are translating it into. He is a strong proponent of affirmative action after all.
The study of human originals has exploded in the last five to eight years. One of my hobbies is reading about all the developments in the field through journal articles and popular media. If you want a somewhat outdated view of the field, but just by a few years, check out the National Genographic Project Human Family Tree on Netflix on demand. It is a long-term study summarized by Spencer Wells, one of the foremost scientists in the field of that research.
It summarizes all of the major human branches and sub-branches discovered so-far among all human populations from 100,000 years ago to the present day. It is true that the classical races are completely scientifically invalid but that doesn’t mean that somewhat distinct human populations don’t exist to this day or that there aren’t genetic gradients for different populations. Most of the distinct populations are within Africa even today. The idea that all people are the same except for skin color is completely false.
It is a fascinating field and and I can see both points of view. It is true that the classical races aren’t a valid construct but it is equally true that different human populations have have different genetic probabilities of getting certain genes and all human populations on earth are far from being equal in all measures.
Chief Pedant is being asked to provide specific genes that are distinct between groups that explain any differences. That science simply doesn’t exist yet but it will in 10 years. The experimental evidence is already there so I see it as much of burden of proof on the opposite side to explain the differences in say, standardized test scores or marathon times.
… or maybe it won’t.
No it’s not.
Like rich black children who went to private schools or disadvantaged black children adopted into white families? I am not sure how much more control you can achieve other than that.
They always come out much lower intellectually as a group according to any test ever invented. It has never been otherwise in any place on earth as much as I, or you, wish otherwise. Let me know how many cites you want and you will have them.
Cite?