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 enriched for felons and the kinds of Tourette's syndrome animals you see at VNN and Stormfront. But they are also enriched for the few people capable of thinking new thoughts and unpopular truths.

So bad, a lot of decent people would want to cover it up

We need to distinguish between two kind of "decent people". There are (1) the women and men who reiterate what the media says, and (2) the actual media themselves. When you think of "decent people" who want to cover it up, you're thinking of the PTA soccer mom who just wants everyone to be happy. You're not thinking of the NYT reporter who consciously omits the critical demographic detail from a report of unprovoked murder, so as to fool the rubes.

The former class -- the PTA moms -- will believe whatever the media tells them to believe. They are decent insofar as they are conformists who will do what the most powerful elements in society instruct them to do. For an example of this, see the Metafilter
thread on the Ashkenazi IQ paper. Note: no denunciations of the scientists involved as racists. Why? The frame imposed by the media was (for once) *not* loaded and defamatory against the science of individual differences. Though the concept that "members of population Y tend to be smarter than members of population X" is exactly equivalent to the inverse statement which is so denounced (namely that "members of population X tend to have lower IQs than people from population Y"), people in the thread mostly did *not* make this syllogistic leap. This is because the capacity for syllogism, let alone statistical reasoning, is stunted in most people. They believe what the media tells them to believe.

As for the latter class, the media, are they decent people? The only way to maintain a holy lie is by persecuting the truth tellers. Such persecutors are not interested in the long term fate of Western Civilization, but only in short term stability. They are like people who "protect" a dying patient from the bitter medicine that will cause momentary discomfort but lasting remission.

The priest class which controls the media and which coordinated the attack on Watson and Summers is not making a hard decision to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. After all, they have promoted ideologies and policies like no-fault divorce and forced busing that have caused untold misery for millions. They care not about the plight of the vast majority of inhabitants of the country; they care about the stability of their sinecures.

They only fetishize blacks and Hispanics in order to use them as a battering ram against the historic population of the US. They do not live near blacks and Hispanics and their children do not marry them. They live in gated communities and send their children to private school. The mandarins of the media are immune from the consequences of the lies they voice. They are not decent people.

After all, what do they risk when their job consists of crying at the top of their lungs for the witch Watson to be dipped in boiling oil?

As long as the realists insist on being complete dumb-dumbs towards public relations

Actually, the realists have been getting smarter about public relations recently. Haven't you seen an uptick in these kinds of issues? The half life between public floggings of apostates is getting shorter.

More to the point -- no matter how sensitively it's phrased, a taboo violation is still a taboo violation. There have to be people like Sailer on the ramparts because without him no one can voice a more "measured" opinion. You can't triangulate without someone to triangulate off. Atheism is not Satanism (and Darwinism is not Nazism) makes this point clear. You wouldn't see the phenomenon of so many lefties and righties surreptitiously reading Sailer (a Brooks here, an Yglesias there, a Tierney here, a Drum there) if the need for triangulation was not a reality.

I should note that Sailer is just about as measured as you can possibly get when dealing with such a sensitive topic. It's fine to castigate him all you want, but it's clear that there isn't hate in his heart.

due to the fact that many unpleasant episodes in history derived from it...Building mental images of uniformed police rounding up...

But here's the thing. You've seen hundreds or thousands of hours of footage of events in which rightist ideas of one stripe or another are causing harm to minorities. The Holocaust, My Lai, Bull Connor, the Japanese internment, Operation Wetback, Columbus, Guantanamo, etc. Literally trillions of dollars in capital investment has resulted in a reflexive, emotional association of rightist action by whites with mass murder in your mind. I know it has because I have the same association. How could you not, when you have been strapped into a chair with the Holocaust beamed into your eyes for the K-12 years and beyond?

But bear with me for a second and imagine what would happen if the polarities had been reversed, if the footage on TV was of the people manning the White
Sea Labor Camps, of the Killing Fields and the laogai, of South African crime and Saudi Arabian fanaticism, of Mexican illiteracy and pre-Columbian savagery.

In short, imagine if the Blank Slate Asymmetry were inverted -- if the footage were intended to spur the immune system of Western Civilization to action (and overaction) rather than to disable it. No doubt such a world would be blinkered and biased in many aspects...but it would in major respects be closer to reality.

It's a vertiginous thing to even contemplate, because it makes you realize the extent of the unreality you've internalized. For example, everyone has been told -- over and over and over again -- that blacks are victims rather than victimizers when the reality is the complete opposite. The realization that the media has been lying to you comes too late, only when you or your loved ones have become the victims...only when your
friend is lying dead on the ground and there is no TV camera to put falsehood before your lying eyes.

The 19-year-old victim was walking with a group of friends on Old Heston Road, part of a campus driveway that loops around the multi-story Triad building, when he was approached by a group of four or five males asking for the location of a party, Weisenfeld said. After providing the directions, Farrell was attacked by two of the men. He was punched once or twice in the face and suffered injuries to the abdominal area, possibly from being kicked, Weisenfeld said. The victim suffered severe stomach and head trauma [and later died] as a result of the attack, according to Joe Cardona, university spokesman.

The suspect is described as a black male in his late teens or early 20s, approximately 5-feet-10-inches to 6-feet tall with a thin build, a medium skin tone, slightly "scruffy" facial hair and acne scars or pock marks on his cheek.

That's my definition of an unpleasant episode in history. Of course, the most
important detail is intentionally omitted from the NY Times article. I would not call the person responsible a "decent person".

Yes, it is a serious problem, but it's one among many and not every single aspect is completely determined.

The whole point is that h-bd is the one determining aspect which is not publicly discussed. Of course marginal tax rates affect tax receipts. But so does IQ. Of course bilingual policy affects immigrant assimilation. But so does IQ. Of course the educational curriculum affects achievement. But so does IQ.

Yet IQ is the factor that cannot be publicly mooted, let alone debated. And as for the reason that it cannot be debated -- that reason is even more doubleplusungood.

Anyway, by now it's a moot point. These taboos are not going to change anytime soon. Civilizations *do* die. The West had a 500 year run in which it was characterized by being the most willing to jettison holy lies in favor of truth. That willingness to embrace truth, regardless of where it may lead, lead to world beating power and unmatched material wealth. And eventually, it lead to contentment, relaxation, and subsequent immunocompromisation.

In addition to the admission of millions of illiterate migrant workers, the West has now admitted groups that are in some respects symbiotes, but that have now well and truly sabotaged its immune system and its nervous system. Not just the Ashkenazim, but the South and East Asians as well -- my people. If the numbers were manageable that would be one thing; the symbiotes might eventually be integrated into the
host. But the numbers are not manageable. Everyone is now in the ethnic activism game, intent on suppressing the immune response and preventing frank discussion of truth.

"Ask not what you can do for your country, ask how the country can benefit your ethnic group". Look at Racialicious or some of the posters on Sepia Mutiny for examples of this attitude; Racialicious in particular is written by a modern-day Torquemada.

Bottom line -- like a man with a sabotaged immune system, the West can no longer make self/nonself
distinctions:

At the heart of the immune system is the ability to distinguish between self and nonself. Virtually every body cell carries distinctive molecules that identify it as self.

And like a man with a damaged nervous system, the West's internal perceptions are out of sync with the external reality. Consider a hand on a hot stove. It does not matter if the lowly epithelial cells are burned by the million if the nerve cells refuse to communicate this truth to the seat of conscious action.

Similarly, the media is the nervous system of a civilization. The signals it chooses to amplify, dampen, or interpret control the response of the body. If paralyzed, it matters not if the body is hale and hearty and theoretically capable of action. A malfunctioning nervous system will leave an otherwise healthy body jerking around in response to phantasms of racism -- or directing its efforts against its own cells.

But sawing off heads is a bit of a chore. Parasites are not accustomed to exerting themselves if they can coerce a stand-in. My favourite character in Wilson's The Insect Societies is Monomorium santschii. This species, over evolutionary time, has lost its worker caste altogether. The host workers do everything for their parasites, even the most terrible task of all. At the behest of the invading parasite queen, they actually perform the deed of murdering their own mother. The usurper doesn't need to use her jaws. She uses mind-control. How she does it is a mystery; she probably employs a chemical, for ant nervous systems-are generally highly attuned to them. If her weapon is indeed chemical, then it is as insidious a drug as any known to science. For think what it accomplishes. It floods the brain of the worker ant, grabs the reins of her muscles, woos her from deeply ingrained duties and turns her against her own mother. For ants, matricide is an act of special genetic madness and formidable indeed must be the drug that drives them to it. In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal's behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is benefiting.

link

Witness the reaction to Katrina: the fact that whites had to defend themselves against black looters somehow became an indictment of white racism. The obvious facts on the ground, the facts sensed by those lowly epithelial cells, were simply inverted by a compromised nervous system.

By selective signal amplification or damping one can make overlaps appear to be equalities. The signals exist -- they need not be made up out of whole cloth. One need only turn up the volume on (say) poor migrant workers stranded in the desert and turn down the volume on (say) anchor babies to achieve the desired effect without obvious fingerprints.

...anyway, I've gone on long enough. The West's time in the limelight is fast coming to an end; the West will be known for fractious infighting in the years to come, with the taboo looming above like a solar eclipse, with "decent people" tasked with blotting out truth for as far as the eye can see. Hate speech legislation will come to the US. Sensitivity demands it.

And as America continues its descent into Mexico Norte, I will mourn the civilization that produced Bach and Beethoven and Shockley and Watson. It doesn't matter if immigration is cut off; America is already screwed:

Stats Census statistics also show that 45 percent of children under age 5 are from a racial or ethnic minority.

Most of those of course are not Asian immigrants (though see my comments above re: symbiotes). When the proportion of blacks and Hispanics in an area reaches critical mass -- and roughly 50\% is certainly critical mass -- you start to see things like Salinas:

Beleaguered Salinas plans to close its libraries

Officials slashing $8 million from annual city budget

The life-size statue of author John Steinbeck that stands in front of this city's main library wears an exasperated expression, and no wonder. This agricultural city of 150,000 is so broke that city officials plan to close all three of its libraries in January -- an act that surely would try the patience of its most famous literary son.

It would also make Salinas the biggest city west of the Mississippi, and possibly in the United States, with no public library.... Salinas' financial problems have been building for years, a combination of rapid residential growth, falling sales tax revenue, 10 years of state raids totaling about $32 million and rising health care costs for workers.

Last year, the city cut 52 jobs and $8 million in spending, eliminating crossing guards, paramedic services, graffiti abatement, most recreation programs and many other services. "My feeling is that this city is dying," said Greg Meyer, a 25-year city maintenance worker who was given a layoff notice in September and will be unemployed in January. "We are opening the gates to urban blight and increased crime. Taking the libraries out of service is like a trumpet blast heralding the coming of our fall."

Hmmm. How could residential growth be coupled with falling revenue? And what will society be like when libraries are replaced wholesale by telenovelas? Thanks to the efforts of the "decent", America is about to find out.

Posted by: gc on November 10, 2007 6:27 AM

Mike:

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.

If we were talking about the Australian Outback, you might have a point. But Sydney is closer to Tel Aviv than it is to a featureless desert.

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

This is a way of minimizing its practical importance. IQ is not just about solving "culturally biased western or East Asian (!) classroom problems". It is about being able to build societies that have running water, working electricity, functioning roads, and the rule of law. That's really the nettle that must be grasped. Without IQ, you have disasters like the articles I posted on South Africa and Zimbabwe above. All traits are not of equal value.

Patrick H:

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.

Ah, Patrick, I wish you were right. The thing is that if you pride yourself on hard headed realism there comes a time when one has to face facts. Hope for the West -- for America in particular -- was my last bastion of idealism.

People compare PC to the Soviets, and say that it will fall like the Berlin Wall fell. But the Soviets faced opposition! There *was* a competing message out there, and it wasn't from a Nobel Laureate and a Harvard Presidents who could be isolated and then eliminated. That competing message was coming from the most powerful civilization in the world, one that was even more wealthy and armed with nuclear weapons to boot. And even when *no one* believed in it anymore, with Radio Free America pelting the airwaves and breadlines in the streets, it took decades for Communism to collapse.

But what civilization today is fighting against PC? Why would it collapse?
It controls the military, the media, the government, the corporations, and the universities. All of Western Civ has been compromised. You try to fight it publicly, and you will be quickly deprived of a job and (perhaps even more importantly) of access to mates. If you live off the grid (something almost impossible to do nowadays) you are a person of no relevance, while if you live on the grid you are vulnerable. You can't even go meta and ask who is pushing PC and why. The penalties for asking such questions are even more severe.

The left has learned from Communism. No more weak-kneed Gorbachevs to compromise the revolution. This is Death Star version 2.0, without
the critical design flaw: namely centralized advocacy by an identifiable country. In its place we have a mutated PC of many varieties: from the racial Marxists at Harvard to the Chief Diversity Officers, from the Christian Commander in Chief to the dedicated cadres of ethnic activists...we face a decentralized PC of many colors, spending billions of dollars a day to fill the airwaves with lies, without any one target to organize against. A customized lie for every ear, for every group, to pit all vs. all.

America is done for. Some European states may survive, but in 10 years approximately half of America's high school grads will be black or Hispanic, even if immigration is stopped today. In 20 years that is going to be more than half of people under 30. That's murder she wrote for American capitalism, entrepreneurialism, and technology. The name of the game will be racial Marxism and Salinas.

Oh well, I console myself with the knowledge that history is not over. "Go East, young man".

Posted by: gc on November 10, 2007 7:09 AM

gc:

GC, you've got to learn the key to making a good point is to condense, man. Trust me, most of the stuff you could trim would really improve appeal. Like I said, the breathlessness of the rhetoric? Lose it.

Now on to your salient points.

I suppose I do value truth over *internalized* sensitivity. I was rather depressed a week after finally more or less accepting the realist points. Thing is, truth is truth. I certainly don't agree with it to the extent you do, namely as the sole locus on which the future of which this nation turns, some of which I'll give reasons for in a bit.

Despite this, I recognize that sensitivity towards others is a key part of the human experience. I can't make people see a world shattering truth if I come to them acting like a raving crank. If I'm not out to convince them by seeming like a reasonable, *calm* person, then I might as well get off the pot, eh? Proclaiming the truth without giving a crap about convincing anyone who isn't already a believer is simply preaching to the choir, and if that's all it's going to be, one might as well shut up.

[Trim a whole bunch of non-salient stuff that alienates the average person.]
Calm down. If you realize it, you're also building a strawman here. If you want any hope of convincing others of something like hbd, your argument has to be as rhetorically tight as possible. If you're feeling livid and going to post how godawfully wrong I am and it's simple truth and perfect examples, well it kind of proves the point, ya know? Note what you bolded in your passage. Extrapolate off of that.

Oh, I agree the realists have been getting better at public relations *despite* their current approach. I've probably done more to convince white liberal grad students that there is some truth in this stuff than the entire output of VDare.com! I'm literally triangulating off of you!

Of course one could say that the hbd position is evolving, from the die-hard first adopters to folks like me, who are convinced, but see y'all's rhetoric and claims and say "Whoa, Nelly, this ain't gonna work and it's not necessarily completely correct either.

[Clip a whole bunch of stuff that would inadvertently offend me if I wasn't a calm person, as it claims I'm either brainwashed and/or ignorant of history]

Getting my point yet? Browbeating and insulting your audience ain't going to win you friends and influence people, particularly when you miss what I was trying to say entirely with my point!

As for minorities of every stripe destroying America with their ethnic communities and identification? Dude. Chill. I'm from *Hawaii*. Ever look at the demographics here? It's not the end of the world if people can come to an accommodation, cooperate towards shared goals and construct an overarching identity and goals above their separate ethnic groups and political goals.

I agree with you, post-colonial and ethnic revanchist politics is poisonous and destructive, but ethnic tribalism is part of human nature and can be worked with. Hell, I come from a place where it worked for decades.

Like I said, I'm against mass immigration due to economic concerns and to a lesser extend hbd ones. I really don't care that America isn't as uniformly white as it used to be and the culture changed. It happens. You can't turn back the clock. Painting a future where everyone is at each other's throats just because we're up against each other isn't a forgone possibility.

Granted to get a workable solution out of it, it requires action taken ASAP, no doubt there... but it's also going to take accommodation with a changed reality and finding workable solutions.

That, or you can keep on preaching to the choir. It's a hell of a lot easier to be outraged and inflammatory than to meet people halfway for a dialog.

Posted by: Spike Gomes on November 10, 2007 2:25 PM

Bizarre. "G" is just a correlation between a bunch of IQ test scores. IQ is about being a good abstract thinker, which (like all important skills) has a huge environmentally acquired component. It is taught from birth in our abstraction-saturated culture.

Even a cursory glance at history shows that the "achievement" levels of nations or civilizations change massively for purely cultural and situational reasons. Through much of the 20th century China was more of a hellhole than Africa is now, but I don't think those guys are dumb.

Generally, people who make a huge deal about IQ are Mensa types without many achievements of their own to point to who like to feel superior to others. Such types are all over the net.

If someone values modern-economy-type settings, and thinks only in terms of succeeding in such a thing, and orders all other people only according to how well they succeed in such a setting, this is OK of course.

Maybe less OK if those who order others according to how well they succeed in a modern setting have a history of committing mass murder against those they consider to be among the lower orders.

Posted by: mq on November 10, 2007 4:42 PM

Spike -- If you have taken offense, I assure you that none was intended.

In these comments I've just been freestyling, writing without editing, pasting in the links as they come to mind. As the aphorism goes, "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." Just sort of an intellectual stretching of legs if you will, talking mostly to myself to sound some things out.

I'd only given up on the West relatively recently, but I hadn't yet put finger to keyboard to articulate those thoughts till this thread. Hence the stream of consciousness.

Anyway, if my goal in this thread was conversion, rest assured that this is not the delivery I'd use in the outside world or when talking to a fresh convert. I understand that they need to be brought gently blinking into the sunlight from their dark caves.

The arguments here are old ones, easily swatted away and dealt with on autopilot. For example:

mq:

Maybe less OK if those who order others according to how well they succeed in a modern setting have a history of committing mass murder against those they consider to be among the lower orders.

You seem to be aware that millions died in China. However, you fail to admit that they died because of the Blank Slate:

www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001871.html

Point: IQ denialists do not hold the moral high ground.

Even a cursory glance at history shows that the "achievement" levels of nations or civilizations change massively for purely cultural and situational reasons.

A cursory glance at history also shows that literacy and technological development have not been equally shared among all regions. Africa has never led the world technologically or even been close. China has. China's recent dark period was an historical aberration. Africa's is not.

In other words, this is "overlap does not imply equality" again. Showing an overlap between the East Asian civilizational low end with the African civilizational median would be much more convincing if you could show an African country which was technologically competitive with the East Asian high end. But you can't.

Posted by: gc on November 10, 2007 6:13 PM

If you want any hope of convincing others of something like hbd,
your argument has to be as rhetorically tight as possible.

Oh, of course, of course. If you look at the history of GNXP
I think I've got some pretty measured, careful posts (like
the Atheism is not Satanism one) which stand up pretty
well even today. But it gets tiresome to hem and haw and make
a big show of wringing your hands after a while, because
you yourself get desensitized and don't want to take the
effort to recall what it was like when you were actually morally conflicted.

That said, it's not too hard to
put yourself back in the shoes of a fresh victim about
to be deprogrammed if you think about how you might explain
this to your girlfriend (a hopeless task in general -- after several fruitless attempts with several different long-term women, I have decided once and for all that discussing
abstract ideas with your girlfriend is a waste of time. Abstraction
is not the recommended conversation topic, fluffy bunnies and goddamn
baby showers are. Oh well, as long as the apartment smells nice.)

Now where was I? Ah yes. Not only am I not in the business of persuading my real life woman, I'm not in the business of persuading random people on the
internet anymore. Gave up blogging. Once in a while
I come out and stretch my legs on a comments thread.
However, there are more efficient ways of changing the world
than playing conversational whack-a-mole
with the same tired tropes ("race doesn't exist!", "IQ is all cultural",
"MRI measurements prove nothing",
"people who believe IQ is important are Nazis",
"people who believe human intelligence influences society are reductionists", etc.).

Sometimes I just play that whack-a-mole game out of habit,
like in this thread, though it's kind of like beating up on kindergartners
or playing a familiar video game. You know what argument is going
to be deployed and when before they do. As you say, that's boring, so what now. "What is to be Done", as ol' VI Lenin would say, or "Who Whom" if you will.

As for minorities of every stripe destroying America with their ethnic communities and identification? Dude. Chill. I'm from *Hawaii*. Ever look at the demographics here? It's not the end of the world if people can come to an accommodation, cooperate towards shared goals and construct an overarching identity and goals above their separate ethnic groups and political goals.

Hawaii is really not the best example. I assume you're aware of this?

http://www.nationalcenter.org/PR-Native-Hawaiian_Government-102407.html

Washington, D.C. - The U.S. House of Representatives today approved a far-reaching bill that would create a race-based government with substantial power over the affairs of the state of Hawaii.

The "Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007" (H.R. 505, also called the "Akaka Bill") was adopted by a 261-153 vote.

Members of the Project 21 black leadership network say the legislation directly conflicts with the spirit of inclusion and equality that civil rights activists fought so hard to create.

"It is contemptibly dishonest, not to mention completely disingenuous, for the very politicians who are best known for decrying racial division to eagerly push legislation to institutionalize race as the guiding principle for a body of government within our United States," said Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie. "Surely, such a radical proposal deserves more attention and certainly a lot more debate."

The Akaka Bill, which has not been adopted by the Senate, would create a native Hawaiian government with sovereign immunity akin to that enjoyed by Indian tribes. This proposed government is likely to be determined on racial terms, restricting eligible voters exclusively to those of Hawaiian ancestry. Experts say this limits the voting pool to approximately 400,000 Americans nationwide - roughly 160,000 of whom do not even reside on the Hawaiian Islands. Critics say the proposal would create a virtual caste system on the Hawaiian Islands and might even allow those affiliated with this race-based government to ignore various laws and safety regulations.

President Bush has said he will veto the measure should it reach his desk.

Gerald Reynolds, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, has said the Akaka Bill "would authorize a government entity to treat people differently based on their race and ethnicity... This runs counter to the basic American value that the government should not prefer one race over another."

The U.S. Supreme Court overwhelmingly ruled in 2000 that a similar "Hawaiian only" provision for voting for the trustees of the state's Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) was unconstitutional.

A May 2006 poll commissioned by the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii found almost 67 percent of the population of Hawaii opposed the Akaka Bill as introduced in the previous session of Congress, while over 80 percent generally oppose race-based preferences. Almost 70 percent of Hawaiian residents also preferred a statewide referendum on such a proposal rather than having it decided by the U.S. Congress.

Regarding this point:

I really don't care that America isn't as uniformly white as it used to be and the culture changed. It happens. You can't turn back the clock.

Demographic transformation was not an act of nature, but the result of specific policies. It can be reversed by other policies. It is unlikely to be reversed for the reasons mentioned above, but history has very few examples of successful multicultural societies and even fewer examples of successful multiracial societies.

That, or you can keep on preaching to the choir. It's a hell of a lot easier to be outraged and inflammatory than to meet people halfway for a dialog.

I dunno about that. Who will "raise awareness" of h-bd if it's considered 6th on the priority list after relative ephemera like waterboarding or abortion? The first people who want to push this into the public sphere must be outraged. Outrage gets people's attention. The left effected their civilizational takeover by using outrage as a weapon. Unapologetic moral indignation must be the start. Only then can compromise be the endpoint.

If you start by offering a sotto voce compromise, you will just be ignored.

Posted by: gc on November 10, 2007 6:44 PM

Gc,

I wrote:

"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."

you wrote:

"If we were talking about the Australian Outback, you might have a point. But Sydney is closer to Tel Aviv than it is to a featureless desert."

I was referring to the outback. As I said, I believe different races of people have evolved to suit different environments.

Being rationally intelligent and curious has led to the death of many a white man in the deserts of Austalia.

"There must be a river over the next horizon, surely..."

The down side of a high IQ is the temptation to become excessively optimistic about technology.

For example, if you were to ask a high IQ East Asian about how many people Australia could comfortably support, you would probably get a very unrealistic answer (thats if the opinion columns in the Singapore Times are anything to go by.)

I suspect that the coming age of Asian dominance, will be characterised by even greater environmental problems in areas like North America, Australasia and Central Asia.

Another point, if IQ is the only important factor in intelligence, why do countries like Argentina and Russia lag behind countries like Germany and Sweden?

This question is conspicious for its absense in right liberal discussions about IQ - it needs explanation, as does the difference between men and women in terms of intellectual curiosity.

Posted by: mike on November 10, 2007 8:42 PM

gc:

Now we're cooking with fire! This is kind of how I'd want the dialog to proceed. I have to say though, you are right, the convincing of others is impossible over the net. I've not had any success with it, even with my much more measured and gray area tinged tones. Still, I think the whole face to face part of it seems to work well. As for myself, I do have an advantage of being from a lower cognitive achieving group who is clearly proud of the better aspects of that culture if dismayed by the lack of a healthy intellectual tradition (long story there on how the Hawaiian thinking caste married itself white, but that's neither salient for the topic at hand).

Good catch on the phrase I used, though Lenin actually nicked it from an earlier writer. The title was the only good set of words in the godawful socialist tome so bad that made "Atlas Shrugged" seem like a novel of lyric and subtle prose. Still, I think some of your pessimism can be allayed by the fact that now its getting to the point where slowly hbd is cracking into the wider domain and we can talk seriously about the nuances of it in abodes of open thought such as here.

If I were to make an analogy (a somewhat unpopular one I would think), the hbd debate is somewhere in the area of where homosexuality was sixty years ago, where careers and lives were destroyed over what we now know is simple biological reality. Even though we're much more accelerated nowadays, I still think the debate would proceed much more slowly than you'd like it to, but its better we start a ball rolling for our descendants to pick up than to not try at all because we don't get to see the fruits of it. As someone who's given up on the West, I urge you to look at an example from the East, where long term thinking is part of a cultural norm, in particular what the Singaporean Minister of Culture said on the timeframe of Anglicization in the country.

As for the Akaka Bill, well that's a very long story that would take several blog posts if I had a blog. While ethnic tribalism has always been around in Hawaii, it didn't get poisonous until the introduction of Western Style Identity Politics in the 1970s, before that it was a Byzantine machine in which all the various groups fit into particular niches. It's a lot easier to organize a multiracial society when everyone takes it for granted that race does matter and acts in a mature way about it.

Identity Politics introduced a certain essentialist romanticism combined with historical revisionism into the whole matter that upset the balance of Hawaii. While the tensions are nowhere near as bad as the mainland, there is more intercommunity strife (and as perhaps a small positive effect of social change mixed-race group middleman folks like myself. Dude, I'm *bred* to build bridges).

Long story short, kill the bastard beast of identity politics and you have less malignant ethnic group relations, and that doesn't require a hard-core acceptance of hbd at all. Hawaii isn't the best example for sure, I reserve that for Singapore, but it's a damn sight better example, particularly compared with similar situations in Fiji and Guyana. I have some ideas why that is, though I'm running a bit short of time here, so I'll say it relies on a critical mass of cognitively achieving groups, a combo of certain key Eastern and Western sociopolitical values and release valves of meritocracy for able members of lower achieving groups.

As for outrage, I deplore that the level of political discussion has descended to such on all levels. I may be on the left, but I still hate the damn hippies for doing that. I was always more of the old school blue collar type. I figure that bringing back measured and rational debate into the political culture of the nation is a key component of bring the hbd debate to the fore (and its good for a lot of other reasons as well).

Posted by: Spike Gomes on November 10, 2007 9:08 PM

gc: there were two places where civilization broke through very early to mass agriculture, Mediterranean North Africa (the fertile crescent, basically) and China. Literacy and the habits of urban civilization spread from those centers around the world. Every "advanced" country today was in the path of the direct spread of literacy and mass urban civilization from those centers outward.

Currently "high-IQ" nations were primitive and illiterate before this spread occurred. For example, before the Roman conquest of Britain, all of the British Isles were as poor and primitive compared to the Mediterranean world as Africa is compared to us. It took over a thousand years after the Roman conquest before the English could compete for a world leadership role. Now, of course, England is much wealthier and more powerful than places like Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, which were absolutely at the center of the invention of civilization. Are we looking at a historically rooted story of cultural / technological evolution here, or some kind of biological essences?

Sub-Saharan Africa was isolated from those two centers because of natural barriers. Because of this, it did not develop sophisticated urban civilization or literacy on its own. It was then victimized by predation from Europe (mainly) and North Africa through the slave trade. We have no idea what it could have accomplished had it not been isolated, any more than we know what would have happened to Northern Europe if it had been isolated from Mediterranean influences.

Point: IQ denialists do not hold the moral high ground.

The point is that nobody in Western civilization holds the moral high ground. "High-IQ" civilizations have not just been the most advanced, but the most murderous and destructive of all human societies. (This is of course partly because of their technological prowess and creativity but the point still stands). Such civilizations may yet destroy human life on earth, they have the capability and have threatened to before.

IQ triumphalism is not about modest science, but about asserting the superiority of high IQ cultures to others. This is both false and dangerous. Modesty is in order.

Posted by: mq on November 10, 2007 10:57 PM

I must say, there's nothing quite like a gc rift! They are breathtakingly virtuosi performances of linking and extrapolating, and I enjoy them immensely. I mean this and I am not being sarcastic. May I suggest however that you might employ that fantastic cranium of yours to spin some more optimistic scenarios with happier endings. I know it can be done. For example, the fact that Mexican- and African-Americans will be half the working population in a generation doesn't have to spell the end of any possibility of happiness for the cognitively gifted minorities you speak of. I believe smart-fraction theory says you need only 15 percent or so of the population with IQ's over 106 to keep the trains running on time. Maybe we can reach a point of urban devolution into smaller towns and local communities in which the high-performing minorities will actually be welcomed with open arms and genuine respect, the way star athletes are welcomed onto a team that suddenly sees it might have a change to win against the opposition. You might be worshiped like stars, the beautiful women will secretly wish to be impregnated by you and others like you, so that there children will be smart too; the life of a travelling lothario in the springtime, when the weather is good, wouldn't be such a bad vacation. Now granted there is likely to have to be a lot of economic redistribution -- wage subsidies for them, graduated consumption taxes for you. But don't worry, you'll still possess a plethora of cool status symbols. And when you finally find that woman you are looking for, you know, "the one" you dream for, whose carnal attractions and fabalicious kisses draw you in, it won't be long before you start having children -- make it at least 3, you'll have more fun -- and suddently your whole outlook on life will begin to turn around. Of course you will have to find your community, your spot, and no doubt a number of others like you, sympatheic nerds, for real time conversation on your favority geeky topics. If we/you can get away from the race hustlers and the guilt mongers, either because they either melt away or go away to their onw special corner of the universe, you might find your self in a like-minded community that is big enough to meet you main professional and socializing needs. But first we've got susidize the wages of the blacks and brounds to the extent that if they work and live right they can live a good life too. It means a graduated consumption tax for us, though, to pay for those subsidies:which will bring about a rectification of status stymbols of sorts -- somethink like Confucious did I heard tell -- but will only make those symbols somewhat smaller and less expensive.Private jets and multiple residences are probably not in the cards for your happy future. But not to worry, the kids will do it. You've got no idea how much fun they are going to be. Make computer games look sick, television pale. Fact is, you've barely begun to live, GC. Just imagine the possibilities and color them red, yellow, orange, and all the colors of the rainbow. Cheerst, to you. You're going to be find.

Posted by: Luke Lea on November 11, 2007 2:57 AM

Spike:

My work here is done.

Posted by: gc on November 11, 2007 4:08 AM

Typical Israeli Jews could learn the skills of desert survival in a few months. They also could develop and use advanced technology to make survival a lot easier than it is for even the most talented aborigine. But typical aborigines have serious difficulty acquiring the skills needed to function in a modern urban society.

"g" is universally valuable. That's why its unequal distribution is so frightening.

Incidentally - does anyone here believe that childhood environment affects intellectual development? Next: were the childhood environments of today's black African adults, _on_ _average_, equivalent to those of today's white American adults? Next: which set of environments were, _on_ _average_, better for intellectual development? Don't say they'd be the same - nutrition and health care certainly differed. Next: does the set of adults raised in the more favorable environment have, _on_ _average_, greater intellectual ability?

Ugly answer, isn't it?

Posted by: Rich Rostrom on November 11, 2007 4:18 AM

I thought I'd pull a few pertinent quotes from gc's last link that seem to shed some light on the conundrum we face as genetic research continues to discover "marker" genes for everything from a predisposition to breast cancer to a racial component related to high I.Q.

----------

No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means “the egalitarian theory,” that all races are equal, “is proven false.”

“There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,” said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. “It’s not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.”

Dr. Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be exceedingly hard to pin down.

“I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic variability there is between populations,” said Dr. David Altshuler, director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. “But living in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small.”

Posted by: Chris White on November 11, 2007 11:49 AM

gc:

Your work here is done perhaps, but the work in general is just beginning.

Chris White:

I don't deny the importance of environment, but I do think that the genetic component is greatly underestimated and the debate is stifled by those who'd rather not look into its implications.

For years I refused to look into this stuff myself, but when I finally did look into it in depth, I found I couldn't explain it all away. It's in a larger cultural matrix for sure, but to act like its not an important determinant in the success or failure of a society in general is ludicrous.

Posted by: Spike Gomes on November 11, 2007 1:38 PM

gc in full throttle turbocharged tempest:
a hopeless task in general -- after several fruitless attempts with several different long-term women, I have decided once and for all that discussing
abstract ideas with your girlfriend is a waste of time. Abstraction
is not the recommended conversation topic, fluffy bunnies and goddamn
baby showers are.

as the bog of biomechanics is my witness, this is SO fucking true. and before the nerds chime in that there are nerdgirls who will not only tolerate such scintillating abstract chit chat on explosive topics but will breathlessly take your ball and run with it, i have this to say:
the chick's still gotta look good, know wut i mean?

if there's one conversational theme that'll make a girl run faster than asking her if she takes it in the ass on the first date, it's anything remotely to do with unchangeable faintly deterministic human characteristics. seriously, i think all women are born with an innate reflexive counterpoint that begins "it's not biology, it's social conditioning..."

Posted by: roissy on November 12, 2007 1:14 AM

That's funny: I'd begun to wonder if GC and Roissy might be one and the same person. I still wonder, I guess.

Incidentally, I agree with both of you about how rare it is to find a woman who's got something on her mind besides her looks, her feelings, her domestic plans, and her "career." Back in my dating days I would often find myself sitting in a bar opposite the woman I was dating, listening to her self-centered babble, and thinking, "Getting laid is worth a lot, god knows. But is it worth enduring *this* much boredom?"

Signed,

One Who Despite the Odds Has Managed to Find and Marry a Smart and Interesting Woman Who's Also a Looker ... (They really do exist, even if they're few and far between. I was 35 and was confident I'd be a lifelong bachelor when I ran across my own example.)

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on November 12, 2007 2:50 AM

how rare it is to find a woman who's got something on her mind besides her looks, her feelings, her domestic plans, and her "career."

I'm lucky like you Michael in marrying a Smart and Interesting Woman Who's Also a Looker. And also warm, giving, and fun to be with.

A word of general caution: careful what you disparage. I'll take women who are into bunnies and baby showers anytime over women who are preoccupied with "issues." Therein lie Nanny State Tyrant Socialists.

Posted by: PA on November 12, 2007 8:51 AM

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder how the #@%* "gc" finds the time and motivation to write such long comments? I've written hundreds of blog comments over the past couple of years and the longest ones probably aren't more than a couple of paragraphs.

Posted by: Peter on November 12, 2007 10:11 AM

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder how the #@%* "gc" finds the time and motivation to write such long comments? I've written hundreds of blog comments over the past couple of years and the longest ones probably aren't more than a couple of paragraphs.

First of all the answer is he doesn't much anymore. There was a time starting 4.5 or so years ago and lasting for two or three years when he did a lot on GNXP at its startup and early years, but not since except episodically. Yeah, I've been reading him for years.

Second I think the fact must be faced that GC is simply awe inspiringly brilliant. I mean REALLY brilliant. Just about all the regular bloggers at GNXP now or in the past have been damn smart and to a one original thinkers, but GC and Razib are simply brilliant - and completely and totally original thinkers.

Posted by: dougjnn on November 26, 2007 7:26 PM






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