Chris White:

In short, there may be many reasons beyond aggregate IQ why countries like Zimbabwe are hellholes compared to industrialized nations.

What you neglect is that all other wealthy countries bootstrapped themselves out of such circumstances.

Link.

In this memoir, the man most responsible for Singapore's astonishing transformation from colonial backwater to economic powerhouse describes how he did it over the last four decades. It's a dramatic story, and Lee Kuan Yew has much to brag about. To take a single example: Singapore had a per-capita GDP of just $400 when he became prime minister in 1959. When he left office in 1990, it was $12,200 and rising. (At the time of this book's writing, it was $22,000.)

No one gave cell phones to Singapore. The thing is, it *is* possible to keep high IQ groups down. Leftism has kept the North Koreans and the Vietnamese down for decades. Islam has kept the Iranians from achieving at the level of their expats.

The wrong culture can depress achievement. But culture can't get blood out of a stone.

There is no African Singapore. The wealthiest African countries in the world are Botswana and Barbados. They are managed by DeBeers and the tourism industry respectively:

But renewed economic growth has not entirely dispelled the unease of the early 1990s. Critics of the conservative Barbados Labour Party claim that it tolerates a small white elite, descended from the colonial planters, which wields disproportionate economic power.

Jewish Atheist:

I mean, it's interesting whether one race has, on average, higher IQs or better jumping ability, but the tone of so many?

Link.

J.B.S. Haldane's "four stages of acceptance" of a scientific theory:

1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.

Given the content of this thread, I guess we're somewhere between stages 2 and 3 -- an "interesting but perverse" point of view.

Intellectual Pariah:

but neighbouring Botswana is, by regional standards, prosperous and well-governed.

By regional standards? Ok, but that's not a very high standard:

Link.

Botswana is among the countries hardest hit by AIDS. In 2005 there were an estimated 270,000 people living with HIV. This, in a country with a total population below two million, gives Botswana an adult HIV prevalence rate of 24.1%, the second highest in the world after Swaziland. (An earlier UNAIDS estimate of 37.3% prevalence in Botswana is now thought to have been too high.)1

Life expectancy at birth fell from 65 years in 1990-1995 to less than 40 years in 2000-2005, a figure about 28 years lower than it would have been without AIDS.2 An estimated 120,000 children have lost at least one parent to the epidemic.3 In an address to the UN assembly in June 2001, President Festus Mogae summed up the situation by saying:

If you want to hang on to an African success story, you would be better off promoting Barbados for all it's worth. Barbados is to Haiti as Malaysia is to Indonesia; both countries have avoided the fate of their neighbor by allowing economic control by a market dominant minority (whites in Barbados, Chinese in Malaysia).

And as for this:

Even a dullish population (accepting that view for argument's sake) has enough high-IQ members to constitute a reasonably competent elite

That is sheer assertion. Reality is somewhat different.

Link.

South Africa matters, because if it fails, the rest of Africa hasn't a prayer. Yet if it booms, it could do for the poorest continent what Japan did for East Asia. It has Africa's most sophisticated economy, by far. The roads are smooth, ATMs work and, most importantly, it is the only sizeable country south of the Sahara where the rule of law prevails....

But still, there has been no take-off. Economic growth sputters along at a whisker above population growth. The poor have grown poorer since '94, partly because of AIDS, but also because about half of all blacks are jobless. Only rapid economic growth can solve that problem, but the government has not made this a priority. I once asked Mr. Mbeki if he thought South Africa could achieve double-digit growth like East Asia; he appeared not to have considered the possibility.

Instead, the focus is on redistribution. And not the conventional sort, from rich to poor, but from white to black, which is not the same. South Africa has embarked on probably the most extreme affirmative action program anywhere. Private companies above a certain size are obliged to try to make their workforces "demographically representative" (i.e. 75% black, 50% female, etc.) from factory floor to boardroom. This is not a minor irritant, like affirmative action in the U.S. The group which must be given preference constitutes a large majority. But because, under apartheid, blacks were deliberately deprived of education, there is a gaping shortage of blacks with commercially useful skills. Less than 2% of chartered accountants, for example, are black.

This can only be fixed by improving schools. But the ANC's first impulse, when it came to power, was to try to raise the proportion of teachers who were black, by paying a large number of the most experienced white teachers to retire. Scandalously, black pupils' exam results got worse in the early years after apartheid ended. They have since recovered, but still, barely 1% of black high school students pass higher grade math, and very few opt for tough subjects at university, such as science or engineering.

Link.

Zimbabwe turns back the clock

Harare - In this nation that once boasted one of sub-Saharan Africa's most vibrant economies, things have become so bad that people have taken to telling a wry joke: "What did we have before candles?" The answer: "Electricity." Four years of turmoil have turned back the clock here. Ambulances are drawn by oxen. Hand-guided cattle plows have replaced farm machinery. The state railroad uses gunpowder charges on the tracks to warn trains of danger ahead. The often-violent seizure of thousands of white-owned farms for reallocation to black Zimbabweans, coupled with erratic rains, has decimated Zimbabwe's agriculture-based economy. President Robert Mugabe argues that the land seizures have corrected ownership imbalances from British colonial days that left one-third of the country's farmland in the hands of about 5 000 white farmers. Many seized farms went to Mugabe's cronies and lie fallow. Ownership deeds were abolished, denying most new farmers collateral for loans for equipment and materials. Tobacco production - once the country's biggest hard-currency earner - has dropped by nearly 75% since the seizures began in 2000.

The economic free-fall has been marked by regular power blackouts and acute shortages of fuel, spare parts and new technology. Soaring inflation and a shortage of hard currency have made it impossible to import machinery needed to rebuild the economy. Once-fertile farmland now has the desolate look of a junkyard; farm machines that used to rumble through fields now stand idle, broken down or plundered for components.

Without IQ, advanced civilizations simply cannot endure. I'm posting this whole article as it appears to have gone down the memory hole.

Link.

THE NEW REPUBLIC

SOUTH AFRICA'S ENERGY MELTDOWN.

Power Crisis

by Joshua Hammer

Only at TNR Online

Post date: 04.10.06

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Sprawling on a sweep of rocky beach eighteen miles
north of Cape Town, the Koeberg Nuclear Power
Station has been a South African showpiece for
more than two decades. The white-minority
government opened the reactor in 1984, part of an
ambitious nuclear program that also included
uranium-enrichment facilities and a hydrogen-bomb
factory near Pretoria. The African National
Congress, which took power in 1994, abandoned the
weapons program but has relied on Koeberg as a
major supplier of energy for the 4.5 million
people of Western Cape Province, the
fastest-growing region of the country. ANC
leaders were not comfortable with their
inheritance from the apartheid-era regime, but
once they took over, one local journalist told
me, "Koeberg became their jewel in the crown."

Or it was until February. On Sunday morning,
February 19, a short circuit on a high-voltage
transmission line near Cape Town automatically
tripped the reactor's single functioning
generator, resulting in one of the worst crises
in South Africa's post-apartheid history. As
engineers tried to repair the damage and bring
the 900-megawatt generator back on line, Eskom,
the country's power monopoly, ordered rolling
blackouts that paralyzed Cape Town, South
Africa's second biggest city, and the rest of the
Western Cape for two weeks. Traffic lights went
dead, turning rush-hour commutes into nightmares.
Business ground to a halt. Gas pumps and ATMs
ceased functioning. Police stations, medical
clinics, and government offices were forced to
operate by candlelight. Fecal matter poured into
rivers and wetlands after the city's sewer pumps
were cut, killing thousands of fish and
threatening cormorants, kingfishers, and herons.
Tourists were stranded in cable cars hanging over
Table Mountain, and burglars descended on the
city's affluent neighborhoods, taking advantage
of disabled security systems. By the time Eskom
turned the lights back on across the province on
March 3, the blackouts had cost the economy
hundreds of millions of dollars. And there were
indications that worse was yet to come. The Cape
Argus summed up the fiasco with a front-page
banner headline: "WE CAN'T COPE, ESKOM ADMITS".

For South Africans, the power failures offered a
disconcerting glimpse of the fragility that lies
just beneath the country's prosperous surface.
The collapse of Cape Town's power grid unleashed
charges of cronyism, bad planning, and
mismanagement against the ANC--in short, of the
kind of bad governance that has undermined many
of South Africa's neighbors, such as
Zimbabwe--and caused some concern about South
Africa's role as an anchor on an unstable
continent. President Thabo Mbeki, who kept silent
throughout the crisis, exacerbated his image as a
detached leader afraid of dabbling in the messy
business of governance. "Mbeki is too insular and
has been for his entire presidency," the
respected Business Day newspaper editorialized.
The breakdowns have also laid bare long-simmering
racial grievances that the ANC has never
addressed: Many whites saw the power grid's
collapse, perhaps unfairly, as evidence that
Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE, the ANC's
version of affirmative action, has brought
unqualified people into key positions of
responsibility. "Given the mismanagement of this
economy à la Eskom, I am beginning to prefer my
oppressors to be white," one reader wrote to
Business Day, reflecting the racially charged
atmosphere. In the Western Cape Province, where
the ANC has never been
popular--Afrikaans-speaking Cape "coloreds"
rejected the ANC in favor of F.W. DeKlerk's
National Party in 1994 and have voted against it
ever since--the breakdowns may even have cost the
party its hold on power. Local elections took
place in the midst of the crisis (most people
voted in the dark), and the ANC received an
abysmal 38 percent of the vote, 2 percent less
than the white-dominated Democratic Alliance. "It
was a slap in the face," says Henry Jeffreys,
editor of Die Burger, an Afrikaans newspaper in
Cape Town.

I spent the entire two-week period of the
blackouts in Cape Town, watching as the city
descended into chaos. Frustrated commuters inched
through traffic-lightless intersections at rush
hour, slamming on brakes, narrowly averting
collisions, without a traffic cop in sight. Six
days into the crisis, I watched angry shoppers at
Pick 'n Pay, my local supermarket, ransack the
shelves in a futile search for gas stoves and
candles, which had run out days earlier. "What
the hell is wrong with this country?" one man
shouted to nobody in particular. "They send
electricity to Mugabe and they don't have enough
to take care of their own citizens." ( Eskom
exports some power from coal-fueled generators
across the Limpopo River to Zimbabwe, and last
month agreed to invest $37 million into the
expansion of Zimbabwe's Hwange Power Station, but
the deals had little or no bearing on Cape Town's
shortages.) Eskom's response to the crisis didn't
help matters. The power company insisted
throughout the crisis that the problems were a
minor glitch in the system, despite plenty of
evidence to the contrary. "Our computer indicates
you don't have a blackout in your area, sir," one
man at the 24-hour call-in center insisted, as I
stared down from my hilltop home at the densely
populated, and utterly dark, Constantia Valley.
After a week of assurances that power was about
to be restored, I followed the advice of other
Cape Townians and located a small generator. The
price was $2,000, and I had to commit to the
purchase on the spot. "They're gathering like
vultures," the dealer confided.

For such a prolonged crisis, the immediate cause
was almost comically trivial: During the
refueling of one of Koeberg's two generators last
December, an 80-centimeter-long metal bolt broke
off and got caught inside the cooling system. By
the time engineers realized what had happened,
the bolt had caused massive damage to the
generator's 200-ton rotor. Eskom managers
couldn't find a replacement in South Africa, and
they had to beg the French consortium that had
built Koeberg to supply one. The French claimed
they had none to spare. Koeberg was down to one
working generator. Then, on that fateful Sunday,
soot from brush fires damaged overhead power
cables that carry additional power to the Western
Cape from coal-fueled plants in distant
Mpumalanga Province. Koeberg's second unit
automatically shut down as a safety precaution to
avoid overload, and the worst-case-scenario
ensued. With both generators dead, Eskom was
forced to rely on inadequate supplies from the
coal-burning plants 1,000 miles away. Critics say
that both government and Eskom officials had
failed to carry out maintenance, safeguard
transmission lines, and take other precautions
that might have averted disaster. Thulani
Gcabashe, the beleaguered chief executive of
Eskom, admitted to me that the government never
envisioned that both of Koeberg's generators
could break down simultaneously. "We had a
contingency plan [for one generator's collapse],"
said Gcabashe, who has come under fire for
receiving $1 million in performance-pegged
bonuses last year. "But [the failure of ] two ...
wasn't conceived."

Yet the catastrophe clearly goes beyond poor
vigilance. During the past five years, the ANC
leadership has failed to expand the Western
Cape's power-generating capacity, even as rapid
population influx and a 5-percent-plus growth
rate were putting unbearable demands on the
system. "The ANC is a victim of its own success,"
says Henry Jeffreys. The trouble might have been
averted had the ANC privatized the power
industry, as it had talked about doing in the
late 1990s, but the initiative bogged down in
infighting between the pro-deregulation camp and
those who feared losing the government's monopoly
over electricity. In the Western Cape the ANC
leadership solidified its image as an
organization stuck in the past, prone to
exploiting old racial fears, when two top
officials implied, without evidence, that Koeberg
had been sabotaged by forces opposed to black
rule. The breakdown "did not [happen] by
accident," Alec Erwin, the Public Enterprises
Minister, declared at a press conference on
February 28. Coming the day before local
elections, the comments were widely viewed as an
opportunistic bid to stave off defeat at the
polls. (The officials later retracted their
allegations.) "It was a raw abuse of power," I
was told by Cape Town mayor-elect Helen Zille of
the Democratic Alliance.

Except for a few minor interruptions, the power
has been back on in the Western Cape for the last
month, and life has returned to normal. But
almost nobody believes that it's going to stay
that way. Gcabashe admitted to me that the region
faced a "short term" power crisis, and said that
Eskom would have to start calling for voluntarily
reductions of electricity use. A new rotor for
the other generator just arrived in South Africa
from France, but nobody knows how long it will
take to install the sophisticated piece of
machinery. The problem is that the second
generator is due for a mandatory shut down this
month for a once-every-20-years maintenance
routine. If the new rotor isn't in place by then,
"the Western Cape will have rolling blackouts for
two months, when it's getting cold," an Eskom
insider says. "This is a nightmare beyond
comprehension." For the ANC, the political
backlash from such a scenario would be
significant. In the meantime, we're hunkering
down for what could be a dark, cold winter. Our
Honda generator has been topped off with gasoline
and is ready to go. And unlike the Koeberg
nuclear reactor, all of the bolts are screwed on
tight.

JOSHUA HAMMER is the correspondent at large for Newsweek.

Posted by: gc on November 8, 2007 2:00 AM

gc:

I'd rather see you address Rick Darby's points rather than keep on hammering the same thing over and over again. We get it! Biology plays a major role in individual and group human achievement. No serious contributer here has doubted it. We may quibble as to the extent of it, and it's pretty clear you're on the rather reductive side of the equation, but okay, we accept that and we move on to, well, what is to be done?

From the looks of it, and correct me if I'm wrong, you suggest a sort of benign economic and political paternalism over less socio-economically achieving groups, with obvious paths for able group members to move up by their own merit if they so have it. After all, we're talking averages, and there are going to be Africans who are going to be able to become physicists, much less accountants, just not at the numbers of other groups.

Still, what troubles me about such a scheme is this: It looks all well and good on paper, perfectly rational given the facts on the ground, but almost like libertarian economic theory, anyone who's studied history can see that it's not going to work too damn well in real life. It's locus centers on areas where the average, much less below average human being hasn't much of a chance to neutrally weigh out the pluses and negatives of such a thing and act accordingly. Those in groups statistically lacking will see themselves as being patronized and having not much voice in their own affairs, and they're certainly not going to be happy with that. Would you blame them? Those in control run the risk of letting what is simply a statistical reality become a platonic norm. "Obviously, we shouldn't listen to X of tribe Y, tribe Y is a full SD in IQ lower than us, by sheer factor analysis he can't possibly bring anything to the table worth contributing. Why is that? Well because the vast majority of Even a higher achieving group is still going to be dumb-dumbs when it comes down to it. The folks actually doing the real headwork are in the top 10% of the population.

Of course, there's always what I consider the canard of "genetic engineering right around the corner". Sure, I agree we know a enough to cut back on retardation a good deal and in the not too distant future knock up everyone up a few points in I.Q., but what makes so many realists so sure that a magic bullet is coming real soon to get rid of this nagging genetic problem? Looking at the evidence at hand, I see nothing that points to us absolutely having that ability within 20 years, much less to say that somehow it'll obliterate group differences. If not, then we're stuck with this problem for awhile and we need to work out realistic solutions.

So, forget a moment about all the English Lit professors and cut rate journalists who are more or less cognitive blank slaters and address us, we who are convinced of the existence, but dubious about the "race realist" approach and solutions to the problem on a global and local scale. What is to be done?

Posted by: Spike Gomes on November 8, 2007 4:13 PM

"I am more suspicious of people who insist that scientific facts that make them uncomfortable must be suppressed, and anyone who points them out driven from respectable society."

Would that include the scientific facts about human contribution to global warming? How about evolution? Or are those not "facts" because there are a handful of dissenting scientists? If so, how many dissenting scientists need to be cited for scientific consensus to be unacceptable as a "fact"? Do ALL scientists agree with the Bell Curve theory and "g"?

What does one say about a metric (I.Q.) developed within a given culture (white academia) that uses questions based on that culture's biases and attributes to determine the supposedly "objective" intelligence of those taking the test?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I.Q. tests are useless or invalid, just that they need to be seen as having their own built in limits and biases. And when we then move on to blame lower I.Q. for the problems of a continent emerging from the colonial era, well, count me among those unconvinced it is "g" and not $$$$ and politics that accounts for most of the problems.

Posted by: Chris White on November 8, 2007 5:56 PM

I am at a loss to understand why people like Chris W. think they’re scoring some kind of point by claiming that IQ tests only measure academic smarts as defined by the white academy. Okay, grant that then. Does Chris think there would have been less of an uproar if Watson had said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their [academic ability] is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really”, and “people who have to deal with black[s in academic settings] find this is not true”?

What’s been gained here? Who would think that the black/white IQ gap doesn’t matter if it’s only a difference in academic smarts or even academic smarts as defined by white people? I don't think that CW and his ilk would be comfortable going to the public and saying, “Don’t worry about that pesky gap in IQ test scores between blacks and whites. All it means is that black people just aren’t as good at school as whites!”

And I don't think the public would be particularly comfortable hearing it, either.

Posted by: PatrickH on November 8, 2007 10:23 PM

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that if GC is right (and he probably is) we are going to have to consider some new, more benign form of "colonialism" in the sense of supplying trained personell from outside these regions. Maybe they could be genuine emigrants. Or some new kind of missionaries (Peace Corp. anybody?) or I don't know what. It's easy to jump up and down and cry paternalism, but maybe not so easy if you are the one wanting and needing help. This is going to be a real moral challenge for people who care.

P.S. One thing that definitely is NOT the answer is to invite the best trained and educated members of these unfortunate societies to immigrate to the West, thus stripping them even further of their precious human resources! That's an argument we haven't even begun to hear yet, whose truth seems almost incontrovertible, because too many timid souls are afraid of being shamed and bullied by PC bigots who could care less about what is going on in Africa.

Sorry to be so rude. This subject really upsets me.

Posted by: Luke Lea on November 8, 2007 10:54 PM

Spike:

It looks all well and good on paper, perfectly rational given the facts on the ground, but almost like libertarian economic theory, anyone who's studied history can see that it's not going to work too damn well in real life...Of course, there's always what I consider the canard of "genetic engineering right around the corner".

I've basically come to the same conclusion. I went into blogging with hope that truth and science could turn the West around. I stopped when I realized that the West is well and truly screwed. The contradictions run too deep, the center cannot hold.

The taboos that govern the West will increasingly come head up against science -- and the taboos will win, just as they have won in the Islamic world. Genetic engineering will happen, but not in the West. There will be no deus ex machina. The West will wane in importance as the East waxes. We have already seen it happening to outposts. Zimbabwe is gone, South Africa is on the way, the Southwest US is toast, and Muslims control entire cities in Europe. The cancer might be arrested, but it won't be reversed.

In the second half of the 20th century, the taboo could uneasily coexist with engineering progress, which was primarily focused on computers and communications technology. Today, though, the taboo on frank discussions of human biology simply cannot coexist with progress in genomics. We are going to see a high profile cut in funding to "racist" science. Watson and Summers are only the beginning. If necessary there will be a purge; more likely, as the fraction of the economically dependent increases in the US to 40% and beyond from its current 35% level, we will see ever more agitation for wealth redistribution.

The result: funding cuts as demagogues ask why white (and Asian) scientists should get money when so many blacks and browns are poor.

I mean, there are too many people who make their livelihood from the promotion of holy lies to give up now. Just think about it -- from the EEOC to Live Aid, from MTV to Harvard, every institution of importance has been irrevocably compromised. That was underlined when all those multinationals submitted briefs in *favor* of affirmative action in the 2003 Supreme Court case. The inmates -- or in this case, the Chief Diversity Officers -- have well and truly taken over the asylum.

The only possible out for the West is if someone who knew the score on h-bd -- and knew its relevance to every issue from subprime mortgages to mass immigration -- came to power and began using the powers of the state against the taboo manufacturers. That would mean not only an effective campaign of deportation of illegals, but overt and covert actions to reverse the trends in ethnic composition and socialism. The closest analogy would be Kemal Ataturk's battle for secularism.

This would be an incredibly difficult fight to wage given the entrenchment of these fallacies at all levels of society. Such a Prez would basically have to have iSteve/GNXP levels of knowledge/fanaticism about the issue, yet manage to keep silent about everything up to the point that he had ultimate power. It would be even more difficult to wage such a battle without the nervous system -- namely the media -- inducing paralysis and taking out the Prez like they took out Nixon.

Anyway, that's a highly unlikely scenario but the only thing I can think of at this late juncture. It would need to be someone highly placed, immensely powerful, and incredibly zealous, who had no qualms about using the state as a billy club in much the same way the left has used it against the people.

Chris:

How about evolution?

If you believe that the brain is off limits to selection -- i.e. that millions of humans spread across 5 continents and thousands of microenvironments evolved in every other way except above the neck -- then you do not believe in evolution.

What does one say about a metric (I.Q.) developed within a given culture (white academia) that uses questions based on that culture's biases and attributes to determine the supposedly "objective" intelligence of those taking the test?

It is incredible that those racist white academics made a test that the Chinese top year after year.

Link.

And when we then move on to blame lower I.Q. for the problems of a continent emerging from the colonial era, well, count me among those unconvinced it is "g" and not $$$$ and politics that accounts for most of the problems.

This quote is apropos:

More recently, commenting upon Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, (25) Lee told his authorised biographers:

" The Bell Curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more... the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow. " (26)

--Lee Kuan Yew, former president of Singapore

Plenty of other areas have "recovered" from colonialism.

Link.

The result is that 2.5 billion people have seen their standards of living rise toward those of the billion people in the already developed countries — decreasing global poverty and increasing global equality. From the point of view of individuals, economic liberalization has been a huge success.

"You have to look at people," says Professor Sala-i-Martin. "Because if you look at countries, we do have lots and lots of little countries that are doing very poorly, namely Africa — 35 African countries." But all Africa has only about half as many people as China.

There is, however, one large country where the poor really are getting poorer while the rich grow richer: Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.

Nigeria's economy has actually shrunk over the last three decades, and the absolute poverty rate — the percentage of the population living on less than $1 a day in 1985 dollars — skyrocketed to 46 percent in 1998 from 9 percent in 1970.

While most Nigerians were falling further into destitution, the political and economic elite grew richer. The problem is not too much liberalization but too little, a politicized economy with widespread corruption.

"The rich guys are doing well, therefore reforms will not come," says a pessimistic Professor Sala-i-Martin. He has begun studying Nigeria, trying to come up with ways around the political problem.

That country is typical of Africa, which is growing ever poorer. Fully 95 percent of the world's "one-dollar poor" live in Africa, and in many countries they make up the vast majority of the population. That poverty, not the rising wealth of Asian countries, is the global economy's real problem.

"The welfare implications of finding how to turn around the growth performance of Africa are so staggering," he writes, "that this has probably become the most important question in economics."

In any case, invoking white rule as a *negative* factor for prosperity fails to explain why South Africa is the most developed country on the African continent (and why Zimbabwe was rich when it was under white rule).

Posted by: gc on November 8, 2007 11:04 PM

I'm surprised at your pessimism, godless. Discussion of the 'Watson Affair' has proceeded with a degree of openness and with multiple POVs being heard in a way that makes me believe that the facade of PC/h-bd denial is cracking. More people are part of the Sailersphere than will admit it in polite company. But the word is getting out.

At least I hope it is. Sigh. I think you're wrong about the future of the West, godless. You're beginning to sound like Derbyshire, and you're too young for that. Cheer up!

Posted by: PatrickH on November 9, 2007 9:50 AM

gc:

See, the thing is I wouldn't want a guy like Steve Sailer or (no offense) you anywhere near the controls of the state. As you have noted, public perception is key in the endevour, and the problems I see with the realist position are thus:

1. It gives really bad news. News no one who's a decent human being would want to celebrate about. So bad, a lot of decent people would want to cover it up, due to the fact that many unpleasant episodes in history derived from it.

2. Despite this, those who take the realist position take the most blunt approach to the question, almost gleefully tromping on sensitivities. This is not condusive to getting others to listen to you, much less agree with you, compromise with you or work with you.

3. The realist position doesn't attempt to brush away the more odious elements of it's fanbase. One wants to take a bath after reading Steve Sailer's comment rolls and someone ought to yell at folks like Kevin McDonald that they're not helping.

4. The sheer breathlessness of the rhetoric is offputting. Yes, it is a serious problem, but it's one among many and not every single aspect is completely determined. Building mental images of uniformed police rounding up and trucking Mexicans back across the border en masse isn't a very good appeal, and come to think of it, and action like that isn't very feasible or realistic.

5. Drop the with us or against us crap. I'm "Left" by many indicators, yet I've come to believe. In some ways it validates my beliefs better than the egalitarian approach. It actually helped I belong to a group that's on the losing side of the Bell Curve. Why? Because I can accept it without being called racist. I want solutions, though. Feasible solutions, and a presentation that works! As long as the realists insist on being complete dumb-dumbs towards public relations and bridge building and being patently *unrealistic* when it comes to solutions, we're just going to keep spinning our wheels endlessly.

Posted by: Spike Gomes on November 9, 2007 4:08 PM

Hey, guess what! The evidence is in, and it confirms what we all know is true about blacks vis a vis whites and other groups. Gee whiz, did it hurt some feelings? Is that a big no no? It doesn't seem to matter much how non-whites portray whites as evil, constantly braying about thier historical wrongs, never focusing on all the good things we've done for other groups. Just a big mouthful of crap when it comes to overlooking our problems and giving us the benefit of the doubt. We're oh-so-evil, but everybody is flooding into our countries and never leaving, and demanding handouts to boot. Funny how that works out. I don't htink we need any more charity cases.

Hey, if you want to hate James Watson, be my guest. His lab in Cold Springs Harbor used to be home to the American Eugenics Office, which used to lobby for passing laws to sterilize the "unfit", which actually came to pass before WWII. Since Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, after WWII, the American Eugenics Office changed its name and its mission. See, its now the home of the Human Genome Project, and its aims are at direct manipulation of genes to bring about eugenics, rather than relying on selective breeding of the "good" people. The lab is also related to the Defense Department's program to develop race-specific bioweapons. All in all, a bunch of real nice folks.

Its supposed to be free country. Nobody is obligated to lie about inferior intelligence or give charity to a group of people who mostly hate whites and can't seem to ever get their act together. White people have no more obligations to minorities than they would have to one of their white neighbors that they didn't like who was running down the neighborhood and trying to bum money all the time. I'm all for individual liberty and willing separation if need be, but I don't advocate eugenics or the policies of eugenicists like Watson at all--he is pure evil. He shouldn't have lost his job for telling the truth--he should have lost his job because he is a eugenicist along the line of the Nazis. One is so much more important than the other.

P.S. If you can't stand people who tell you the truth, by all means, hang out with liars. If evaluating people as individuals is so important, then why won't you leftists let us ditch the quota laws? Put your money where your mouth is. Otherwise, you're a hypocrite, and I don't understand why anyone should take you seriously. This isn't the Soviet Union--we don't censor the truth, even if it is unpleasant. And I'll be damned if I give up my liberties in deference to your feelings. Its the truth--get used to it.

Posted by: BIOH on November 9, 2007 8:09 PM

Great post.

I tend to see IQ as a western construct that may be helpful in assessing whether non-westerners will be able to funtion in a western country, as immigrants, or develop their countries along a western path.

It does appear to have strong predictive value in assessing people's ability to do well in a western or East Asian-style classroom.

Having said that, I don't believe the demographic profile of a country, whatever its ethnic makeup, should be radically altered in the name of economic growth.

Similarly, IQ should be not used to rank people or other cultures per se.

As you say, people have evolved to suit different niches, and who is to say an Aborigine with a fairly low IQ is not as well suited to living in Australia as a high IQ Israeli is suited to living in competitive, densely populated Israel.

Posted by: mike on November 9, 2007 11:14 PM

Michael wrote:

"Some people I've met who work in the genetics field have assured me that tons of information about biological-genetic differences between the races is going to be emerging over the next few decades."

This is something you hear all the time (at least on the internet), but isn't it perhaps something impossible to assert? What I mean is this. Let's say we have good reasons right now to believe (a) there is a genetic component to intelligence (which seems like a reasonable assumption) and that (b) the distribution of intelligence varies among the races. I have no idea if this is true, but it is something often said or implied by the GXNP crowd. That is, let's say it is somewhat reasonable to make these statements based on evidence available now. Scientist or no, how can anyone, with any confidence, predict we will have better reasons for believing them in the years ahead? Presumably such a prediction means that, in the future, evidence for statements (a) and (b) will be so overwhelming that no disinterested person could deny they are reasonably warranted, or justified (or what have you), beliefs. But how can anyone say what new evidence will emerge? If we "know" there will be stronger evidence for statements like (a) & (b), doesn't that mean the evidence has in some sense already "emerged"?

(To put it another way: maybe all the scientific findings of the last 20 years -- maybe even from multiple fields, which would strengthen the case -- have gone in one direction. How do we know that it will continue to go in that direction, or for that matter, that there will be any new evidence at all?)

So it strikes me just now this is a surprising claim, but maybe someone more knowledgeable in the relevant science can explain we can confidently predict the future direction of that science. (Ongoing and slowly developing research programs, maybe?)

On a related note, do people who think that racial groups have different average intellectual capacities (so that some races are on average smarter than others) think it's fair to call this a kind of racism? Call it "racism-light" if you want, free from bigotry and based on the best current science, but why isn't it also fair to call it a kind of racism?

Posted by: Paul on November 10, 2007 3:14 AM

how can anyone, with any confidence, predict we will have better reasons for believing them in the years ahead?

Because a) we have multi-million person studies (here's just this one) which show that populations differ in IQ and b) the cost of genome sequencing is plummeting at an exponential rate (literally).

Thus as the cost of sequence data falls and more data piles up, it is quickly going to become *much* easier to determine the genetic determinants of complex traits. Just a big regression problem, P(Y|X).

why isn't it also fair to call it a kind of racism?

For the same reason it's not legitimate to call atheism a form of satanism. Disbelief in JC is not belief in the antichrist. Similarly, disbelief in PC is not belief in racism.

Had Watson called himself a believer in "racism light" in the sense of believing in population differences, all context would have been stripped and 80 point headlines would have read "Watson admits racism".

Bottom line is that the perpetrators of holy lies always do their utmost to cast dissidents as heretics -- as *bad people* -- and it is foolish to accept their labels or their frame on the world. It will get you ostracized and (in Europe) clapped in irons for "hate speech".

Posted by: gc on November 10, 2007 5:13 AM

Despite this, those who take the realist position take the most blunt approach to the question, almost gleefully tromping on sensitivities.

Come on Spike, we're talking about a selection bias. There's no way you would accept h-bd in the first place if you were someone who privileged sensitivity over truth. You know, "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns".

H-bd is an outlaw truth. Voicing it will land you in jail in Europe and out of a job in the US, especially if you are a white male who is not particularly verbally adept. This is why the distribution of h-bd believers is strongly left-shifted in terms of agreeableness.
And it is one of the reasons it's such a heavily male area: women are more practically minded, and hence put more stock in popularity than truth. The threat of ostracism is ever present to them and more important than some abstract standard of truth. Most males are similarly bound by convention, but there is a larger contingent of disagreeable insensitives. Such disagreeable, insensitive men are enri