Studying race differences (even in relation to IQ) doesn't make one a racist or supportive of racism any more than studying sex differences makes one a sexist or supportive of sexism. Only through understanding the true causes of differences can we get away from the blame game being pushed by critical race theorists.
It is anti-intellectual and also ironically insulting to intelligence. Let’s say I was raised to believe that I was so athletic that I could compete with men. If I would ask “… but why can’t I try out for the men’s team?!” and was told, “We prefer not to discuss our reasons,” I am bright enough to figure out that the dark cloud around the very question tells me everything I need to know.
Or, even worse, they waived the standard and let me play on the boys team. I am an abject failure and blame myself; or I’m an abject failure, and become bitter because the supposed adults have stood back and allowed me to orient my life toward an utter mirage. It’s fake-nice on a grand scale. The whole thing is an affront to human dignity.
And there’s a name for this focus on the individual – – it’s called meritocracy. There seems to be this idea that binning racial preferences would mean the poles would reverse and whites would get preference in hiring and admissions, etc. But it doesn’t. It just means focus on the individual. You link to Steve Sailer’s great book; in the book he points out that there are 8 million black people with an IQ higher than the white average. In this meritocratic world, Clarence Thomas would still be a Supreme Court justice. it’s just we could save billions of dollars on school programs and such that rest on false premises.
The real question is whether we are using the right categories and methods. Race is a social label that mixes ancestry and environment. Sex is usually a clearer biological category. Treating them as the same leads to mistakes about cause.
Seeing a gap between groups does not prove why the gap exists. Simple comparisons show correlation, not cause. If we want real answers, we need stronger methods like long-term studies, natural experiments, adoption or sibling studies, and trials that test what changes outcomes. Until we have that, calling structural explanations a “blame game” ignores a lot of research on early life, schools, neighborhoods, wealth, discrimination, and how genes and environments interact.
Now that would be an interesting experiment. I would also like to see what would happen if only the over-50's voted, as it seems to take the average human being fifty years to distinguish their backside from their elbow.
"That's pretty much what the EU was designed to do. Brexit, Le Pen, AfD, all the products of diseased minds."
and your "that" refers back to this clause, in the comment you replied to:
"every major individual decision should be dictated in advance by >top 10 percent IQs..?"
Do you:
1. believe that the EU is actually led by persons from the top decile?
2. (even assuming the truth of 1) believe that intelligent people meeting in committee make decisions that are at least as intelligent as the individuals? - even when the consequences of bad decisions will not affect those individuals?
All the evidence stacks up on the other side.
In case you don't know, EU officials lose their entire pension if they are found to reveal anything about their work that would be in any way damaging to the image of the EU; for this reason, whistleblowing is almost non-existent.
Bo, thanks for an excellent rebuttal to Pinker's stand on IQ and race. I have been an admirer of Steven Pinker, and I find his recent stand puzzling.
"Race is both a biological and social reality, a product of evolutionary history and a salient marker of human identity. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, is strongly predictive of life outcomes, including educational attainment, income, rates of violence, and even marital stability."
These points are demonstrably true, and I would expect any rational, logical-thinking person to concur. Therefore, I suspect a political ideology narrative is involved.
"Since color-blindness will not happen in contemporary America, we must face reality as it is."
This is the case not only in America, but throughout Western Civilization, Asia, and even sub-Saharan Africa.
Pinker is a Jew who flew on fellow Jew Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express to an island to rape white children.
He is nobody's hero.
Unless you're a Jew, too. That would make a lot of sense. Israel shelters pedos and won't extradite them for trial, because raping white children isn't a crime there.
It's been my lifelong observation that all discrete racial groups note and are aware of racial differences both physical and behavioral. But their response to these observable traits tends to differ, and I further speculate that these *responses* are also rooted in evolutionary necessities. I think it boils down to how existentially important is the intact propagation of one's racial type and associated behaviors, which are dictated by evolved response to an environment? If of deep importance, rejection of other types is stronger; if less important, what is labeled "racial tolerance" is more commonly found.
Really speculative, but it's my current default position in that part of my worldview.
These woke centrists always speak as if the harms of accepting the truth are certain and severe, while the harms of perpetuating the lie are mild and hypothetical at best.
On the one hand, their fears are exaggerated... The Holocaust didn't happen because the Nazis believed the Jews were less intelligent (in fact I watched The Eternal Jew, and there was an entire section about how Jews were overrepresented in various professions, exactly the same as the anti-white rhetoric today). The total number of lynchings over almost a century were not very large, did not exclusively target blacks, and certainly not "just for being black"; they were lynched for alleged crimes, some of which may have been exaggerated or fabricated, as the justice system is fallible in the best of circumstances, certainly more so in cases of mob justice. But given the disparities in rates of violent crimes, it would be astonishing if they were all innocent.
Etc etc. We could cover dozens of other examples...the narrative is superficially plausible but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. History is full of cruelty, but an accurate understanding of the causes of group differences isn't the primary causal factor.
Otoh, their ideology blinds them to the mountain of skulls they are standing on. South Africa and Rhodesia, the most advanced flourishing countries on the continent, even for the blacks. But they didn't have equality, so the race communists and literal Communists worked together to bring them to ruin, poverty, famine, ethnic cleansing, dispossession (of people who's ancestors had in some cases been there for half a millenium, originally settling land that was at the time uninhabited)... In America, children forced at gun point to go to school with blacks...and it did not even improve the education of blacks as intended. All the white victims of black crime. In the UK...white girls, children, raped in numbers comparable to the rape of Nanking, systematically targeted for their race, and the country is being deliberately given over to foreigners, as is every country in Europe...it is as if they are absolutely determined to burn civilization to the ground to prove their faith in race communism.
We should no longer accept this smug pretense that they hold the moral high ground. It is the race communists who have blood on their hands. Their ideology is incompatible with the future of civilization. It is not "nice" or "empathic"; it dangerously delusional. We can't afford to live with the lie anymore.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this. I grew up near the ruins of Detroit. The two-facedness of this entire charade has always made me angry.
There is an old recording floating around from when Pinker did actually go there and openly discussed why Ashkenazi Jews have higher intelligence at a conference. These "let's get back in the closet" folks are making fools of themselves and are ruining their legacies. When the truth becomes mainstream* in a few years, they will look like cowards.
* I've seen many different intellectual movements start on the internet over the years and can tell when they start gaining more traction with the public. I believe I'm seeing this with HBD - so many random comments on social media touch on HBD themes now, something that just didn't happen ten years ago.
Jews ARE more intelligent, because it's a heritable trait and they inbreed to keep their race pure. That's why they're always so ugly, with those hooked noses, and also why they have genetic diseases specific to them like Tay-Sachs Syndrome.
Miscegenation is illegal in Israel.
Instead of using their intelligence for the betterment of mankind, they use it to live without working on the backs of the rest of us.
Sending bombs to Israel is like sending C-17s full of machetes to the Hutu in Rwanda.
I am a black person who agrees with the hereditarian argument and I could not stop laughing when I was reading this review. A lot of people really don't care that iq gaps are genetic. Black people are quite ok with themselves and are over confident. White egalitarians are the problem
"Race is contentious because multi-racial societies are fragile, perpetually threatened by resentment and conflict."
This is the whole point. Whites are only significantly net harmed by diversity. This is the elephant in the room. Not only is diversity itself always bad, but forcing Whites to live with Blacks is a one way significant harm. This fact is unfortunately almost entirely absent from Bo's otherwise excellent (as always) article. We should care because we are the ones paying the significant, even existential cost. It is evil to demand we sacrifice ourselves for their benefit in this way, and to remain silent not only while we are victimized, but while we ourselves are falsely blamed to justify the harms being done to us. Let's not beat around that bush.
We have a natural right, and even a moral obligation to our posterity, to fight back against what is being done to us and the lies being told about us to facilitate it. Exploiting our better nature to get us to remain silent as we're victimized and replaced, and to add insult to injury, while being wrongly blamed for what is being done to us.
That Chomsky would make such an evolutionarily ignorant argument is perhaps forgivable (but not really), given his fields of research and ideological priors, but for Pinker to repeat it, without admitting that skin color doesn't cause IQ, but that both traits coevolve due to specific underlying selective pressures, and thus by all evidence we do have appear to be strongly evolutionarily correlated in an extremely meaningful way… Pinker should be openly scolded for such a failure of reasoning and intellectual honesty. He does know better and should be held to account for parroting such a disingenuous and intellectually bankrupt excuse. He knows better.
We might even note how the aforementioned diversity itself is a driver of increased authoritarianism to try to keep the inevitable loss of social trust and cohesion suppressed. As society balkanizes as it always does in the face of these visually different groups with different IQs, behavioral traits, and in-group preferences, we see more and more restriction on free speech, academic inquiry, more unequal enforcement of the law, rising anarchi-tyranny, etc. Basically what you're watching happen in real-time in the British Isles today.
Lying about this reality does not help us. It only very seriously harms us for the benefit of a distant out-group. That is an intolerable and inexcusable crime against us. That is the main point here that was completely absent from Bo's discussion.
Objective facts, disparate harm, our right of self defense, etc. These matter, and I would be far less diplomatic about it than my more polite and collegial friends at Aporia are, with all due respect to them.
I think that the biggest problem of not being able to talk about or research the actual causes of inequality is that it will inevitably lead to very bad public policy. Given that government social spending amounts to trillions of dollars every year, this is not a trivial issue.
“But what if we change the example to two black men or two white men. Suddenly we pause. It just seems wrong to judge individuals based on group characteristics!”
It is wrong from a moralistic/logical viewpoint. There is always error possible/probable in such judgements. However who has been wronged here? Is there a “right” for these two men—Black or White—to demand that a woman get into an elevator with them? Of course not. Therefore the woman in question has injured no one and made the best choice (for her) possible with the evidence available. Pinker would take away that choice.
If only Iryna Zarutska had the foresight to take a seat a few rows further forward in the rail car, and away from an unknown Black man seated immediately behind her, she’d be alive today. She is not just a victim of crime, but a victim of “ignorance of Blacks” and their propensity for violence. She can be excused for such given that she grew up in a country without such a “problem”. Pinker would have us all grow up as poor Iryna did…sigh.
If we should not let generalisations about groups inform our priors about hiring people for jobs, then why should we have a prior that hiring a person from a different group will lead to a better outcome for our firm?
What could we expect a person from a 'disadvantaged' group to bring that a person from another group would not also have?
My own approach to this fraught issue is to try to think past the realities involved by proposing a society in which anyone, regardless of intelligence who works had and plays by the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, a society that fits the human material that actually exists.
My underlying assumption is that a lot of the racial resentment that exists today is a result of the fact that we do not live in such a society today, but rather one in which differences in intelligence very much influences who will achieve (or at least appear to achieve) richer and more fulfilling lives.
Given racial disparities in intelligence this understandably leads to resentment and charges of unfair discrimination precisely among the most gifted -- who are also often also the most aggressively outspoken--members of the less favored groups.
This raises the question of whether it is even possible to imagine, let alone achieve, a society in which anyone--including those of only average or even below average intelligence--can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life.
That the higher intellect prospers more in this country is a function of how a first world technological society rewards individual efforts. Manual labor not so much, products of the mind much more so. If you want to balance out the unfairness of Nature, then we revert to a communist society quickly. We saw how that worked out for Russia. Somewhere there is a balance, but we won’t get there until all accept the truth of the above, rather than search for boogiemen such as “racists” behind every disparity.
Why are the contingencies of our specific type of economic structure and ownership and expected wages framed as "Nature"?
For 200,000 years, basically until yesterday, someone who labored instead of doing abstract intellectual work had something meaningful to contribute and was compensated and honored in society thusly.
Point taken, but this is now—that was then. The age of the Industrial Revolution began a 200 year change, which culminated in the technological age we are now within. Manual labor, particularly unskilled manual labor, pays what amounts to survival wages as compared to say a physician which requires special and advanced education not which everyone can master.
Now I know you’ll say we had physicians millennia ago. Correct, and they were basically charlatans and worthless wrt curing most diseases. Therefore of little more worth than a common laborer and certainly a craftsman. Again, this is no longer the case today.
Perhaps you take my “higher intellect” comment too literally. Navel contemplators aside, my reference is more towards engineers, scientists, physicians as well as perhaps philosophers and the like. Those folk represent the upper intellectual societal tier and are rewarded for such ability as they’ve mastered.
And yet, ironically, we are entering a new era where the mental things humans do is more easily automated than the physical. It is already worth asking ourselves if compensation in line with “natural” dictates like labor supply and demand curves should be reconsidered given the dynamics.
We have already changed the natural rewards for the highly skilled when we invented and legally protected financial derivatives, lending instruments and credit, limited liability corporations, etc.
We clearly do have the means of redefining the game when there is a strong interest in doing so.
Well, perhaps, but that might overlook what physical aspects of employment have *already* been automated. Consider automobile manufacturing. Once the sure fire stepping stone to a middle class existence, now still good, but with much smaller numbers of employed. And of course, such crude robots as used in manufacturing today are being perfected/improved by companies such as Tesla who are working on human-like robotics that will have movement quite like humans. But I agree we may never have robotic yard maintenance. I actually saw a video the other night of a pair of robotic hands sewing together a tiny slice of a kernel of corn. So fine a suture as to be almost imperceptible on the kernel.
However, to address your point. When you say/imply—that labor’s worth (recompense) needs to be reevaluated such that the difference between manual and intellectual efforts is reduced (pure communistic dictum), then you will get less folk spending the time to pursue intellectual efforts than those who pursue manual labor efforts. Hence we wind up with the old USSR where a crane operator was paid the same as a physician. To me that’s a recipe for mediocrity as an advance technological society.
The best solution IMO is to let the free market decide labor’s value and folks are free to pursue whatever career goals they can obtain with their innate abilities. I definitely agree that the wage/wealth gap you decry is unacceptable, but I would first address this by simple supply and demand actions. The first would be to cut off immigration as we now have such. The second would be to balance the national budget such that inflation does not destroy the wage gains made by those on the lower SES rungs of this society. For example, in my State 10 years ago, min wage was $8, today $15. Yet the starting rate for hamburger flippers is $18-20–and still we have an inability for our youth to afford housing, a vehicle, or pay off student loans. The wealth disparity widens despite these attempts at closing the wage gap.
The best solution is to grow the pie, not to reapportion/resize slices. Of course, I’m not optimistic given human nature.
My preferred method for reevaluating labors compensation is along structural things that you’ve mentioned such as border/trade policy. We also are in a wage housing inflation spiral due to our insane housing affordability crisis in cities. Minimum wage should pay the costs of renting, and with it not keeping up, I mostly blame the price of rent rather than the minimum wage. Lots of structural fixes there.
While I also prefer avenues for more worker vesting into company equity, and not just more rewards for financial elites on the take (and parasitic high wage, high bonus managerial elites), redistributive efforts HAVE to be a factor in preservation of a healthy society. Markets are an absolute requirement for prosperity, but every functioning society has strong elements of charity, and ideally these are predictable and stable over time. The degree of this is where we likely disagree, as I am quite to the left and I suspect you are more market driven and less hands on.
Yea, there is a kind of capitalist naturalism that the right engages in, wherein even the most fanciful dreams of entrepreneurs are a phenomenon of nature but the government implementing seatbelt laws are social engineering.
My reflexive response is that a rich and fulfilling life for all makes the initial error of failing to recognize that some individuals, no matter their levels of achievement and acquisition of assets, will never be happy. It's not in them to ever feel positive satisfaction for long.
"My reflexive response is that a rich and fulfilling life for all makes the initial error of failing to recognize that some individuals, no matter their levels of achievement and acquisition of assets, will never be happy."
One should distinguish between 'levels of achievement' and 'acquisition of assets'.
The truly great thirst for knowledge and truth, not wealth and power.
I, myself, had been motivated for years by early financial insecurity, and the deep calmness of having adequate resources was a huge source of fulfillment, and especially in terms of trying to set up a sound and sustainable material legacy for my family.
So there's that.
And as you say, the great and enduring satisfaction in problem-solving, of all kinds, cannot be over-rated. It was doubly fulfilling to be able to gain assets as a result of problem-solving, to the modest degree that I could.
I possibly do not see "truth" in the same fashion you do. Truth to me is independently demonstrable fact. All else is personal preference, opinion, or speculation, and if preferences are in conflict, the side with the most power "wins". Seems like physics, to me.
There are sometime effective ways to subvert such power covertly, in my opinion.
"I, myself, had been motivated for years by early financial insecurity, and the deep calmness of having adequate resources was a huge source of fulfillment, and especially in terms of trying to set up a sound and sustainable material legacy for my family."
I agree that the quest for financial security is paramount. My point was the distinction between 'financial security' and abject rapaciousness.
"I possibly do not see "truth" in the same fashion you do. Truth to me is independently demonstrable fact."
Of course I do, why would you think otherwise? I believe in empiricism.
I say "possibly" because many people I encounter/exchange with see truth as a selective argument from authority--they lean on experts, studies, books/essays, and the like. Since I run into this a lot, and since I don't know you, that's why the "possibly".
I have to work thru stuff. It's hard and takes time, so I triage incoming info so as to work only on the stuff that I think will affect us materially, then if I have extra juice, things that interest me. An extreme example of the latter is the object 3I/ATLAS. Meaningless in a practical sense, but fun.
The relationship between race and IQ only makes sense within the wider frame of civilizational morphology — the study of how cultures take shape, flower, and decay according to their inner form. Detached from that, it’s a dead end.
The fixation with intelligence is itself a symptom of civilizational sterility. The West’s greatness lay not in its IQ, but in its will; in the spiritual and creative impulse that once animated its form and faith. There are plenty of 'intelligent' peoples who have nothing but ruins to show for it.
Well put, and a counterpoint to the technocratic solutions of those who want the Earth to have "a million Beethovens" by getting population to 100B.
We have done more with less in the past, applying genius to new discovery and deeply meaningful art. How do you even weigh 1 Da Vinci vs. 1,000 programmers working on maximizing click engagement, or working on the latest fintech upgrade that shaves nanoseconds off of some trading process. We're applying genius to maximize earnings for earnings sake, and rarely use that built up store of capital to spend it on things that matter, because we believe in nothing, and are willing to sacrifice nothing.
"The West’s greatness lay not in its IQ, but in its will; in the spiritual and creative impulse that once animated its form and faith."
Other human traits indeed contribute to the greatness of a civilization, beyond intelligence. Here are a few: Integrity, inquisitiveness, intuitiveness, industriousness, insight, inspiration, imagination, inventiveness, and intentness. Nonetheless, intelligence ranks near the top.
I don’t dispute that intelligence matters. My point is that no enumeration of traits can explain why a civilization rises or falls. Morphology concerns form — the inner law that binds disparate traits into a living unity. Without form, intelligence and industriousness are ultimately sterile.
John McWhorter made a similar case a few years ago. I said at the time and still believe I could go along with that, were it not for the continuing efforts of people who believe it untrue and that nearly everything is environmental to enact their beliefs into policy. We get worse firemen, worse doctors, and worse pilots, and it matters. We spend enormous sums in education on programs that we know in advance will not succeed and have a deleterious effect on NAMs. It is cruel to keep implying to them that they would succeed if they only tried harder, if they only had better character, etc.
I am below average in athletics, art, and learning languages. It is quite clearly true in all three that others simply have more ability than I do. It did not help me learn to try harder in school to be told I was just not trying hard enough and didn't care. Such attitudes sap the will rather than invigorating it. The wonderful stories that we hear about young people who would not be denied are all about older children who had some skill already.
The Papua New Guineans have a word - 'mokita', meaning that which everyone knows, but nobody says. It certainly makes for good manners, but I don't know about good science.
Nobody comments on the fact that blacks are over-represented in the NBA. Race hustlers make an issue of their being underrepresented in cognitively demanding fields. There’s nothing to talk about. The results of ending DEI and making selection the main barrier to entry into such fields will speak for themselves.
When you say race hustler you loose credibility. Race Hustlers are mostly racist whites that see every black person as an unqualified menace. You sound like one of them.
Ruling out a priori relevant factors (such as IQ) is a defining irrationality - ideological blindness. Voluntary blindness is not harm free - it creates a perpetually resentful victimhood. Pretence of uniformity damages its supposed beneficiaries. Today's example: our government proposes to damage children by preventing teaching that is adaptable to the local intake.
There's no better justification for your argument than googling Steve Sailer's name: the 'summary' thrown up labels him 'far right' & the 1990s originator of 'scientific racism' (by him coining the concept of *human biodiversity*).
Studying race differences (even in relation to IQ) doesn't make one a racist or supportive of racism any more than studying sex differences makes one a sexist or supportive of sexism. Only through understanding the true causes of differences can we get away from the blame game being pushed by critical race theorists.
It is anti-intellectual and also ironically insulting to intelligence. Let’s say I was raised to believe that I was so athletic that I could compete with men. If I would ask “… but why can’t I try out for the men’s team?!” and was told, “We prefer not to discuss our reasons,” I am bright enough to figure out that the dark cloud around the very question tells me everything I need to know.
Or, even worse, they waived the standard and let me play on the boys team. I am an abject failure and blame myself; or I’m an abject failure, and become bitter because the supposed adults have stood back and allowed me to orient my life toward an utter mirage. It’s fake-nice on a grand scale. The whole thing is an affront to human dignity.
And there’s a name for this focus on the individual – – it’s called meritocracy. There seems to be this idea that binning racial preferences would mean the poles would reverse and whites would get preference in hiring and admissions, etc. But it doesn’t. It just means focus on the individual. You link to Steve Sailer’s great book; in the book he points out that there are 8 million black people with an IQ higher than the white average. In this meritocratic world, Clarence Thomas would still be a Supreme Court justice. it’s just we could save billions of dollars on school programs and such that rest on false premises.
The real question is whether we are using the right categories and methods. Race is a social label that mixes ancestry and environment. Sex is usually a clearer biological category. Treating them as the same leads to mistakes about cause.
Seeing a gap between groups does not prove why the gap exists. Simple comparisons show correlation, not cause. If we want real answers, we need stronger methods like long-term studies, natural experiments, adoption or sibling studies, and trials that test what changes outcomes. Until we have that, calling structural explanations a “blame game” ignores a lot of research on early life, schools, neighborhoods, wealth, discrimination, and how genes and environments interact.
So you don't believe in democracy, and think every major individual decision should be dictated in advance by >top 10 percent IQs..?
That's a big jump
Meritocracy over democracy.
It's pretty much always been that way. The people vote, but what they believe comes from that top 10%.
Now that would be an interesting experiment. I would also like to see what would happen if only the over-50's voted, as it seems to take the average human being fifty years to distinguish their backside from their elbow.
Yes, but the age increases every year… and it seems to have started increasing when the Baby Boomers came of age in the late 1960s.
It does indeed!
Go old skool and tie the right to vote to property ownership and eligible experts and professors?
Yes. Universal suffrage is synonymous with idiocrasy and adopting it has been the biggest mistake the West ever made.
If you want to vote, you should at least pass a proxy IQ test (say, calculus) to prove you understand at all what it is you're voting for.
Certainly, people who fail basic reading comprehension and oral understanding tests should not have a say in decisions.
That's pretty much what the EU was designed to do. Brexit, Le Pen, AfD, all the products of diseased minds.
"That's pretty much what the EU was designed to do. Brexit, Le Pen, AfD, all the products of diseased minds."
and your "that" refers back to this clause, in the comment you replied to:
"every major individual decision should be dictated in advance by >top 10 percent IQs..?"
Do you:
1. believe that the EU is actually led by persons from the top decile?
2. (even assuming the truth of 1) believe that intelligent people meeting in committee make decisions that are at least as intelligent as the individuals? - even when the consequences of bad decisions will not affect those individuals?
All the evidence stacks up on the other side.
In case you don't know, EU officials lose their entire pension if they are found to reveal anything about their work that would be in any way damaging to the image of the EU; for this reason, whistleblowing is almost non-existent.
Bo, thanks for an excellent rebuttal to Pinker's stand on IQ and race. I have been an admirer of Steven Pinker, and I find his recent stand puzzling.
"Race is both a biological and social reality, a product of evolutionary history and a salient marker of human identity. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, is strongly predictive of life outcomes, including educational attainment, income, rates of violence, and even marital stability."
These points are demonstrably true, and I would expect any rational, logical-thinking person to concur. Therefore, I suspect a political ideology narrative is involved.
"Since color-blindness will not happen in contemporary America, we must face reality as it is."
This is the case not only in America, but throughout Western Civilization, Asia, and even sub-Saharan Africa.
Pinker is a Jew who flew on fellow Jew Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express to an island to rape white children.
He is nobody's hero.
Unless you're a Jew, too. That would make a lot of sense. Israel shelters pedos and won't extradite them for trial, because raping white children isn't a crime there.
You know what is a crime?
Miscegenation!
Desperate cope by a mid-IQ malcontent
So miscegenation, a Jew marrying a non-Jew, isn't illegal in Israel?
Of course it is. To keep their race pure.
Alexa, what is a "shiksa"?
Speaking of Baysean...
It's been my lifelong observation that all discrete racial groups note and are aware of racial differences both physical and behavioral. But their response to these observable traits tends to differ, and I further speculate that these *responses* are also rooted in evolutionary necessities. I think it boils down to how existentially important is the intact propagation of one's racial type and associated behaviors, which are dictated by evolved response to an environment? If of deep importance, rejection of other types is stronger; if less important, what is labeled "racial tolerance" is more commonly found.
Really speculative, but it's my current default position in that part of my worldview.
Yes, it depends on your threat perspective.
These woke centrists always speak as if the harms of accepting the truth are certain and severe, while the harms of perpetuating the lie are mild and hypothetical at best.
On the one hand, their fears are exaggerated... The Holocaust didn't happen because the Nazis believed the Jews were less intelligent (in fact I watched The Eternal Jew, and there was an entire section about how Jews were overrepresented in various professions, exactly the same as the anti-white rhetoric today). The total number of lynchings over almost a century were not very large, did not exclusively target blacks, and certainly not "just for being black"; they were lynched for alleged crimes, some of which may have been exaggerated or fabricated, as the justice system is fallible in the best of circumstances, certainly more so in cases of mob justice. But given the disparities in rates of violent crimes, it would be astonishing if they were all innocent.
Etc etc. We could cover dozens of other examples...the narrative is superficially plausible but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. History is full of cruelty, but an accurate understanding of the causes of group differences isn't the primary causal factor.
Otoh, their ideology blinds them to the mountain of skulls they are standing on. South Africa and Rhodesia, the most advanced flourishing countries on the continent, even for the blacks. But they didn't have equality, so the race communists and literal Communists worked together to bring them to ruin, poverty, famine, ethnic cleansing, dispossession (of people who's ancestors had in some cases been there for half a millenium, originally settling land that was at the time uninhabited)... In America, children forced at gun point to go to school with blacks...and it did not even improve the education of blacks as intended. All the white victims of black crime. In the UK...white girls, children, raped in numbers comparable to the rape of Nanking, systematically targeted for their race, and the country is being deliberately given over to foreigners, as is every country in Europe...it is as if they are absolutely determined to burn civilization to the ground to prove their faith in race communism.
We should no longer accept this smug pretense that they hold the moral high ground. It is the race communists who have blood on their hands. Their ideology is incompatible with the future of civilization. It is not "nice" or "empathic"; it dangerously delusional. We can't afford to live with the lie anymore.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this. I grew up near the ruins of Detroit. The two-facedness of this entire charade has always made me angry.
There is an old recording floating around from when Pinker did actually go there and openly discussed why Ashkenazi Jews have higher intelligence at a conference. These "let's get back in the closet" folks are making fools of themselves and are ruining their legacies. When the truth becomes mainstream* in a few years, they will look like cowards.
* I've seen many different intellectual movements start on the internet over the years and can tell when they start gaining more traction with the public. I believe I'm seeing this with HBD - so many random comments on social media touch on HBD themes now, something that just didn't happen ten years ago.
I think the fact that Pinker felt the need to write a book arguing to keep the subject taboo testifies to your hunch.
Jews ARE more intelligent, because it's a heritable trait and they inbreed to keep their race pure. That's why they're always so ugly, with those hooked noses, and also why they have genetic diseases specific to them like Tay-Sachs Syndrome.
Miscegenation is illegal in Israel.
Instead of using their intelligence for the betterment of mankind, they use it to live without working on the backs of the rest of us.
Sending bombs to Israel is like sending C-17s full of machetes to the Hutu in Rwanda.
Here is a 2007 article by Pinker on the same subject: https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes
Ten years ago was 7 years' worth of Obama.
Cooincidence? ;^)
I am a black person who agrees with the hereditarian argument and I could not stop laughing when I was reading this review. A lot of people really don't care that iq gaps are genetic. Black people are quite ok with themselves and are over confident. White egalitarians are the problem
You're an underground gem (which I guess is kind of redundant)
Thank you for your excellent articles at Aporia (and at mises.org).
I hadn't noticed until I saw your comment just now that you have a Substack, where I've just started reading.
"Race is contentious because multi-racial societies are fragile, perpetually threatened by resentment and conflict."
This is the whole point. Whites are only significantly net harmed by diversity. This is the elephant in the room. Not only is diversity itself always bad, but forcing Whites to live with Blacks is a one way significant harm. This fact is unfortunately almost entirely absent from Bo's otherwise excellent (as always) article. We should care because we are the ones paying the significant, even existential cost. It is evil to demand we sacrifice ourselves for their benefit in this way, and to remain silent not only while we are victimized, but while we ourselves are falsely blamed to justify the harms being done to us. Let's not beat around that bush.
We have a natural right, and even a moral obligation to our posterity, to fight back against what is being done to us and the lies being told about us to facilitate it. Exploiting our better nature to get us to remain silent as we're victimized and replaced, and to add insult to injury, while being wrongly blamed for what is being done to us.
That Chomsky would make such an evolutionarily ignorant argument is perhaps forgivable (but not really), given his fields of research and ideological priors, but for Pinker to repeat it, without admitting that skin color doesn't cause IQ, but that both traits coevolve due to specific underlying selective pressures, and thus by all evidence we do have appear to be strongly evolutionarily correlated in an extremely meaningful way… Pinker should be openly scolded for such a failure of reasoning and intellectual honesty. He does know better and should be held to account for parroting such a disingenuous and intellectually bankrupt excuse. He knows better.
We might even note how the aforementioned diversity itself is a driver of increased authoritarianism to try to keep the inevitable loss of social trust and cohesion suppressed. As society balkanizes as it always does in the face of these visually different groups with different IQs, behavioral traits, and in-group preferences, we see more and more restriction on free speech, academic inquiry, more unequal enforcement of the law, rising anarchi-tyranny, etc. Basically what you're watching happen in real-time in the British Isles today.
Lying about this reality does not help us. It only very seriously harms us for the benefit of a distant out-group. That is an intolerable and inexcusable crime against us. That is the main point here that was completely absent from Bo's discussion.
Objective facts, disparate harm, our right of self defense, etc. These matter, and I would be far less diplomatic about it than my more polite and collegial friends at Aporia are, with all due respect to them.
I think that the biggest problem of not being able to talk about or research the actual causes of inequality is that it will inevitably lead to very bad public policy. Given that government social spending amounts to trillions of dollars every year, this is not a trivial issue.
“But what if we change the example to two black men or two white men. Suddenly we pause. It just seems wrong to judge individuals based on group characteristics!”
It is wrong from a moralistic/logical viewpoint. There is always error possible/probable in such judgements. However who has been wronged here? Is there a “right” for these two men—Black or White—to demand that a woman get into an elevator with them? Of course not. Therefore the woman in question has injured no one and made the best choice (for her) possible with the evidence available. Pinker would take away that choice.
If only Iryna Zarutska had the foresight to take a seat a few rows further forward in the rail car, and away from an unknown Black man seated immediately behind her, she’d be alive today. She is not just a victim of crime, but a victim of “ignorance of Blacks” and their propensity for violence. She can be excused for such given that she grew up in a country without such a “problem”. Pinker would have us all grow up as poor Iryna did…sigh.
If we should not let generalisations about groups inform our priors about hiring people for jobs, then why should we have a prior that hiring a person from a different group will lead to a better outcome for our firm?
What could we expect a person from a 'disadvantaged' group to bring that a person from another group would not also have?
My own approach to this fraught issue is to try to think past the realities involved by proposing a society in which anyone, regardless of intelligence who works had and plays by the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, a society that fits the human material that actually exists.
My underlying assumption is that a lot of the racial resentment that exists today is a result of the fact that we do not live in such a society today, but rather one in which differences in intelligence very much influences who will achieve (or at least appear to achieve) richer and more fulfilling lives.
Given racial disparities in intelligence this understandably leads to resentment and charges of unfair discrimination precisely among the most gifted -- who are also often also the most aggressively outspoken--members of the less favored groups.
This raises the question of whether it is even possible to imagine, let alone achieve, a society in which anyone--including those of only average or even below average intelligence--can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life.
I've spent my entire adult life thinking about this issue. Here is what I came up with: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
That the higher intellect prospers more in this country is a function of how a first world technological society rewards individual efforts. Manual labor not so much, products of the mind much more so. If you want to balance out the unfairness of Nature, then we revert to a communist society quickly. We saw how that worked out for Russia. Somewhere there is a balance, but we won’t get there until all accept the truth of the above, rather than search for boogiemen such as “racists” behind every disparity.
Why are the contingencies of our specific type of economic structure and ownership and expected wages framed as "Nature"?
For 200,000 years, basically until yesterday, someone who labored instead of doing abstract intellectual work had something meaningful to contribute and was compensated and honored in society thusly.
Point taken, but this is now—that was then. The age of the Industrial Revolution began a 200 year change, which culminated in the technological age we are now within. Manual labor, particularly unskilled manual labor, pays what amounts to survival wages as compared to say a physician which requires special and advanced education not which everyone can master.
Now I know you’ll say we had physicians millennia ago. Correct, and they were basically charlatans and worthless wrt curing most diseases. Therefore of little more worth than a common laborer and certainly a craftsman. Again, this is no longer the case today.
Perhaps you take my “higher intellect” comment too literally. Navel contemplators aside, my reference is more towards engineers, scientists, physicians as well as perhaps philosophers and the like. Those folk represent the upper intellectual societal tier and are rewarded for such ability as they’ve mastered.
And yet, ironically, we are entering a new era where the mental things humans do is more easily automated than the physical. It is already worth asking ourselves if compensation in line with “natural” dictates like labor supply and demand curves should be reconsidered given the dynamics.
We have already changed the natural rewards for the highly skilled when we invented and legally protected financial derivatives, lending instruments and credit, limited liability corporations, etc.
We clearly do have the means of redefining the game when there is a strong interest in doing so.
Well, perhaps, but that might overlook what physical aspects of employment have *already* been automated. Consider automobile manufacturing. Once the sure fire stepping stone to a middle class existence, now still good, but with much smaller numbers of employed. And of course, such crude robots as used in manufacturing today are being perfected/improved by companies such as Tesla who are working on human-like robotics that will have movement quite like humans. But I agree we may never have robotic yard maintenance. I actually saw a video the other night of a pair of robotic hands sewing together a tiny slice of a kernel of corn. So fine a suture as to be almost imperceptible on the kernel.
However, to address your point. When you say/imply—that labor’s worth (recompense) needs to be reevaluated such that the difference between manual and intellectual efforts is reduced (pure communistic dictum), then you will get less folk spending the time to pursue intellectual efforts than those who pursue manual labor efforts. Hence we wind up with the old USSR where a crane operator was paid the same as a physician. To me that’s a recipe for mediocrity as an advance technological society.
The best solution IMO is to let the free market decide labor’s value and folks are free to pursue whatever career goals they can obtain with their innate abilities. I definitely agree that the wage/wealth gap you decry is unacceptable, but I would first address this by simple supply and demand actions. The first would be to cut off immigration as we now have such. The second would be to balance the national budget such that inflation does not destroy the wage gains made by those on the lower SES rungs of this society. For example, in my State 10 years ago, min wage was $8, today $15. Yet the starting rate for hamburger flippers is $18-20–and still we have an inability for our youth to afford housing, a vehicle, or pay off student loans. The wealth disparity widens despite these attempts at closing the wage gap.
The best solution is to grow the pie, not to reapportion/resize slices. Of course, I’m not optimistic given human nature.
My preferred method for reevaluating labors compensation is along structural things that you’ve mentioned such as border/trade policy. We also are in a wage housing inflation spiral due to our insane housing affordability crisis in cities. Minimum wage should pay the costs of renting, and with it not keeping up, I mostly blame the price of rent rather than the minimum wage. Lots of structural fixes there.
While I also prefer avenues for more worker vesting into company equity, and not just more rewards for financial elites on the take (and parasitic high wage, high bonus managerial elites), redistributive efforts HAVE to be a factor in preservation of a healthy society. Markets are an absolute requirement for prosperity, but every functioning society has strong elements of charity, and ideally these are predictable and stable over time. The degree of this is where we likely disagree, as I am quite to the left and I suspect you are more market driven and less hands on.
Yea, there is a kind of capitalist naturalism that the right engages in, wherein even the most fanciful dreams of entrepreneurs are a phenomenon of nature but the government implementing seatbelt laws are social engineering.
My reflexive response is that a rich and fulfilling life for all makes the initial error of failing to recognize that some individuals, no matter their levels of achievement and acquisition of assets, will never be happy. It's not in them to ever feel positive satisfaction for long.
"My reflexive response is that a rich and fulfilling life for all makes the initial error of failing to recognize that some individuals, no matter their levels of achievement and acquisition of assets, will never be happy."
One should distinguish between 'levels of achievement' and 'acquisition of assets'.
The truly great thirst for knowledge and truth, not wealth and power.
Try this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE2Gnz-ilwg
Actually, I was trying to cover most bases.
I, myself, had been motivated for years by early financial insecurity, and the deep calmness of having adequate resources was a huge source of fulfillment, and especially in terms of trying to set up a sound and sustainable material legacy for my family.
So there's that.
And as you say, the great and enduring satisfaction in problem-solving, of all kinds, cannot be over-rated. It was doubly fulfilling to be able to gain assets as a result of problem-solving, to the modest degree that I could.
I possibly do not see "truth" in the same fashion you do. Truth to me is independently demonstrable fact. All else is personal preference, opinion, or speculation, and if preferences are in conflict, the side with the most power "wins". Seems like physics, to me.
There are sometime effective ways to subvert such power covertly, in my opinion.
"I, myself, had been motivated for years by early financial insecurity, and the deep calmness of having adequate resources was a huge source of fulfillment, and especially in terms of trying to set up a sound and sustainable material legacy for my family."
I agree that the quest for financial security is paramount. My point was the distinction between 'financial security' and abject rapaciousness.
"I possibly do not see "truth" in the same fashion you do. Truth to me is independently demonstrable fact."
Of course I do, why would you think otherwise? I believe in empiricism.
I say "possibly" because many people I encounter/exchange with see truth as a selective argument from authority--they lean on experts, studies, books/essays, and the like. Since I run into this a lot, and since I don't know you, that's why the "possibly".
I have to work thru stuff. It's hard and takes time, so I triage incoming info so as to work only on the stuff that I think will affect us materially, then if I have extra juice, things that interest me. An extreme example of the latter is the object 3I/ATLAS. Meaningless in a practical sense, but fun.
"I run into this a lot, and since I don't know you, that's why the "possibly".
Read my bio, I'm a scientist.
"It's not in them to ever feel positive satisfaction for long."
But that is one reason some are driven to greatness.
Can be.
But also can be like my first wife...
I did say 'SOME'.
The relationship between race and IQ only makes sense within the wider frame of civilizational morphology — the study of how cultures take shape, flower, and decay according to their inner form. Detached from that, it’s a dead end.
The fixation with intelligence is itself a symptom of civilizational sterility. The West’s greatness lay not in its IQ, but in its will; in the spiritual and creative impulse that once animated its form and faith. There are plenty of 'intelligent' peoples who have nothing but ruins to show for it.
Well put, and a counterpoint to the technocratic solutions of those who want the Earth to have "a million Beethovens" by getting population to 100B.
We have done more with less in the past, applying genius to new discovery and deeply meaningful art. How do you even weigh 1 Da Vinci vs. 1,000 programmers working on maximizing click engagement, or working on the latest fintech upgrade that shaves nanoseconds off of some trading process. We're applying genius to maximize earnings for earnings sake, and rarely use that built up store of capital to spend it on things that matter, because we believe in nothing, and are willing to sacrifice nothing.
"The West’s greatness lay not in its IQ, but in its will; in the spiritual and creative impulse that once animated its form and faith."
Other human traits indeed contribute to the greatness of a civilization, beyond intelligence. Here are a few: Integrity, inquisitiveness, intuitiveness, industriousness, insight, inspiration, imagination, inventiveness, and intentness. Nonetheless, intelligence ranks near the top.
I don’t dispute that intelligence matters. My point is that no enumeration of traits can explain why a civilization rises or falls. Morphology concerns form — the inner law that binds disparate traits into a living unity. Without form, intelligence and industriousness are ultimately sterile.
John McWhorter made a similar case a few years ago. I said at the time and still believe I could go along with that, were it not for the continuing efforts of people who believe it untrue and that nearly everything is environmental to enact their beliefs into policy. We get worse firemen, worse doctors, and worse pilots, and it matters. We spend enormous sums in education on programs that we know in advance will not succeed and have a deleterious effect on NAMs. It is cruel to keep implying to them that they would succeed if they only tried harder, if they only had better character, etc.
I am below average in athletics, art, and learning languages. It is quite clearly true in all three that others simply have more ability than I do. It did not help me learn to try harder in school to be told I was just not trying hard enough and didn't care. Such attitudes sap the will rather than invigorating it. The wonderful stories that we hear about young people who would not be denied are all about older children who had some skill already.
The Papua New Guineans have a word - 'mokita', meaning that which everyone knows, but nobody says. It certainly makes for good manners, but I don't know about good science.
This whole thread has been great but yours might be my favorite comment :-)
Why thank you!
Nobody comments on the fact that blacks are over-represented in the NBA. Race hustlers make an issue of their being underrepresented in cognitively demanding fields. There’s nothing to talk about. The results of ending DEI and making selection the main barrier to entry into such fields will speak for themselves.
When you say race hustler you loose credibility. Race Hustlers are mostly racist whites that see every black person as an unqualified menace. You sound like one of them.
Ruling out a priori relevant factors (such as IQ) is a defining irrationality - ideological blindness. Voluntary blindness is not harm free - it creates a perpetually resentful victimhood. Pretence of uniformity damages its supposed beneficiaries. Today's example: our government proposes to damage children by preventing teaching that is adaptable to the local intake.
> Like a war on noticing.
There's no better justification for your argument than googling Steve Sailer's name: the 'summary' thrown up labels him 'far right' & the 1990s originator of 'scientific racism' (by him coining the concept of *human biodiversity*).