As professors like E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker learned the hard way, the Blank Slate is the most sacred piece of dogma for Leftists (and for the liberals who are usually also fundamentalists when it comes to racial issues).
The Blank Slate is the skeleton key for the Left project of "socialist liberation", which is predicated on the idea that we're all interchangeable meat widgets that can be properly programmed with "critical consciousness" as long as a Left commissar can sink their teeth into our brains at as young an age as possible.
They will never relinquish it, no matter what facts intervene, and will viciously attack anyone who threatens it, because the Blank Slate (in their minds) gives them carte blanche to reprogram all of us into members of their cultish political project.
I think this is a right-wing view. The more correct view is that they hold adherence to the blank slate as being synonymous with a good person, and opposing it as being synonymous to a Klansman or Nazi the most ferocious demons of their mythology.
2. Neither Wilson nor Pinker are right wing, and noticing habits of authoritian thinking among Left academics—which often boil down to controlling language in order to control thought and action—doesn't necessarily equate with "right wing".
There are many different kinds of people who oppose the Left project for its dangers to freedom of thought and expression, and not all of them/us are "right wing".
There is more than just genes or environment. There is also culture, which has the properties of an inheritance system. Performance in academics or aptitude tests are affected by motivation. Students who try hard will perform better than those who do not, all else being equal. Jews come from a group who faced various degrees of discrimination. Those who managed to thrive in such societies necessarily developed a culture of accomplishment and this shows up in test scores. East Asians living in Confucian societies lived in a world where the only way to get ahead was to do well in school, if one got the chance. So, parents push the kids harder, and it shows up in performance. Among white Americans you have a whole range of motivation, from very achievement-orientated households to households where academic performance is discouraged. Hence their performance is intermediate between that of Jews or Asians and those of blacks or Latins.
As for the descendants of slaves, many inherited a culture in which it was adaptive to not be ambitious (uppity) because that could get you killed. Even after emancipation, lynching was a consequence for the uppity for eighty years. Jim Crow was only lifted in the mid-1960's, but the prospects for economic advancement for black and white working-class men were sharply diminished around 1973 when the long-term rising trend in real wages stopped. This "escalator out of poverty" ended. Meanwhile, those blacks who had done fairly well despite Jim Crow could access affirmative action programs and rapidly advance. Such an environment was not conducive to the evolution of a culture of academic effort (athletic effort is a different story) among either poor blacks or those in the working and middle classes. We see degradation of white performance over this time in lower income groups.
Also, just because a trait is highly genetically heritable doesn't mean that population differences reflect genetic differences. For example, height has a very high genetic component, higher than IQ. Ad yet the primary determinant of height differences among populations is nutritional, not genetic. In the 19th century, Dutch people were much shorter than Americans, today they are the tallest people in the world.
It's a lot easier to "fix" this problem if people accept the genetic explanation. Imagine people like Michelle and Barack Obama having 5 children instead of 2. And Floyd Mayweather having none instead of 5. The problem will fix itself within a few generations.
It’s statements like this that are the primary concern here. Eugenics is not a very good solution because it bleeds out into multiple subjective values of morality. Galton wanted to discourage low and middle class whites in Britain who scored lower in IQ measurements from reproducing. One could also use eugenics for those predisposed to crime, infidelity, conscientiousness, mental impairment, and the list goes on. Essentially no one escapes it’s clutches. And if one agrees with the claim that race differences in IQ are an issue the implication is that black or Hispanic individuals would be discouraged from having children and only the comparatively few gifted ones would be permitted to do so. Similarly in the case of China which supposedly has much higher levels of intelligence, whites could be inhibited from reproductive freedoms. Thus, it’s obvious why people fear the potential misuse of these results.
The problem isn't that it doesn't work; the problem is just that SOME ways of enacting it are coercive, cruel and/or unjust.
Be that as it may, it is just a fact that whatever traits are most correlated with fertility will be more prevalent in future generations. You can decide that we should not take any kind of action to deliberately influence that, but you should face the reality that in so doing you may be enabling some of the outcomes you claim to want to prevent. And maybe that's the right decision. Everything is about trade-offs.
But there doesn't seem to be any other plausible way blacks can be made to be as successful on average as other groups. (And it's not just about blacks; there is overwhelming evidence from behavioral genetics that genes affect outcomes far more than anyone wants to acknowledge, for everyone.)
I think there's a named fallacy for this, where X has a universally negative denotation, so we argue about whether a particular action should be considered an instance of X and therefore bad, instead of arguing about whether or not the particular act was bad and why.
The problem with forcibly sterilizing the disabled etc. isn't that it's "eugenic" (intended to improve the health of the population in the future by improving its gene pool); the problem is that it's coercive and cruel. The problem with murdering such people isn't that it's eugenic; the problem is that it's murder. Etc etc.
It's inane to say that eugenics necessarily always leads to genocide because the Nazis did it. That's a worse slippery-slope argument than saying gay marriage necessarily leads to plural pedophilic bestiality marriages. In the non-hypothetical real world, blank slate ideology was at least as culpable in the mass murders of Communist regimes, which murdered many times over more people than the Nazis did (and in peacetime).
My hope is that in the near future technology will make this irrelevant when genetic engineering advances to the point that people can choose to improve traits of their own children. The left-wing elites who typically screech about how everyone is a Nazi will suddenly be silent, or maybe write op eds about how it's about reproductive freedom, my body my choice, etc, because they never pass up a chance for their own children to get ahead. Then people will complain about how it's unfair that it's only available to the wealthy, so it will state subsidized and available to all. Which won't make everyone equal, but it will make everyone better (smarter, healthier, etc) on average, which will be good for everyone. And without sterilizing or murdering anyone, we'll have successfully implemented eugenics, except we probably won't call it that.
This is perhaps THE topic that adversarial collaboration would help elucidate. We need a study(ies) written and conducted by people who fall on all levels of the opinion spectrum to come together and design agreed upon experiments to try and get to the bottom of this.
I'm pessimistic it'll be happening anytime soon though.
There’s a brand of conservative policy that recognizes the significance of luck in social outcomes. It is the basis for conservative subsidy for kids and healthcare. To my mind, high or low IQ is another variety of luck, and could justify conservative subsidies, if a readily available proxy for individual IQ was identified. Earning are probably a rough proxy, but I don’t have any notion of how rough that would be.
That can be taken to absurd lengths. A tendency to grab your opportunities with both hands is probably heritable. A bright person who follows up his lucky breaks would be doubly lucky.
When do we admit that these high achievers are valuable people who should be rewarded for the things they do for the rest of us?
"The importance of race differences is evident at an intuitive level. Whether fear of black crime is legitimate depends on whether blacks do in fact commit more crime, and, if so, why. Whether black poverty and academic failure are the fault of whites, and therefore impose compensatory obligations on whites—perhaps to be discharged by racial preferences—depends on why blacks fail. Received opinion not only ascribes black difficulties to oppression, black attainment is so far below white that, if blacks are as talented as whites, oppression seems the only explanation. And for decades just this conclusion has been drawn."
"The basic argument for studying race differences is that racial outcomes are currently viewed though a lens of guilt, and it is important to know whether this lens is distorting. One result of racial guilt feelings, already alluded to, is the idea that blacks deserve compensatory preferences in employment and education. Another is use of a “disparate impact” criterion for bias, according to which a standard or practice discriminates against blacks if blacks do not do as well as whites with respect to it. Since whites usually do outperform blacks, seemingly rational practices are besieged throughout society. One example is the cancellation of the presumption of innocence by the 1991 Civil Rights Restoration Act,6 under which an employer accused of bias for hiring disproportionately few blacks bears the burden of proving that he did not discriminate. This use of numbers to create a presumption against the defendant is reasonable (if constitutionally objectionable; see Epstein 1992) only if there are in fact proportionately as many able blacks as whites in the workforce."
"Finally, although this would be difficult to document, whites appear increasingly averse to norms intended to apply to society as a whole, or just to themselves, lest they be “racist” by implication. Whites when interviewed will refuse to condemn black youths who won’t take low-paying “dead end” jobs, a hitherto unacceptable reason for idleness. There is a tendency in discussions of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and illegitimacy to insist that teenage girls are going to have sex, and that talk of abstinence is foolish, intolerant, and repressive—a puzzling tendency, given that no previous Caucasoid society accorded teenage girls sexual liberty, or failed to condemn illegitimacy. I suspect that a major contributor to this sea-change has been fear of offending blacks, whose behavior often violates white sexual norms. In fact, mentioning the greater casualness of black sex invites retaliatory diagnoses of prurience and sexual problems"
100 years of throwing money at trying to improve outcomes for blacks only lowered meritorious outcomes for other races and made the black community dependent on the state, while overall lowering the average IQ in the country. If you keep trying to lift someone up that isn't trying to lift themselves up you are only putting them on a pedestal and if they are demonstrably lessers (iq, crime rates, nuclear families, social cohesion, charitable contribution, drug use, abortion)......why are you lifting up mediocrity? Look around at the results of lifting up mediocrity, from from a utilitarian perspective, you fucked over the minority for the majority, by pretending the majority was the minority. Europeans are a "world wide minority" while negroid africans are the 3rd largest global majority.
He seems to be avoiding differences in crime between the races and Jewish ethnocentrism/safety concerns that has led Jews to promulgate blank slate nonsense in the social sciences and push for mass non-white immigration, which brings more crime and political externalities.
A good example for many would be that god doesn’t exist. Even if that was indeed true, it would likely have a net negative effect on well-being and social cooperation
As professors like E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker learned the hard way, the Blank Slate is the most sacred piece of dogma for Leftists (and for the liberals who are usually also fundamentalists when it comes to racial issues).
The Blank Slate is the skeleton key for the Left project of "socialist liberation", which is predicated on the idea that we're all interchangeable meat widgets that can be properly programmed with "critical consciousness" as long as a Left commissar can sink their teeth into our brains at as young an age as possible.
They will never relinquish it, no matter what facts intervene, and will viciously attack anyone who threatens it, because the Blank Slate (in their minds) gives them carte blanche to reprogram all of us into members of their cultish political project.
I think this is a right-wing view. The more correct view is that they hold adherence to the blank slate as being synonymous with a good person, and opposing it as being synonymous to a Klansman or Nazi the most ferocious demons of their mythology.
1. I agree with your "more correct" view;
2. Neither Wilson nor Pinker are right wing, and noticing habits of authoritian thinking among Left academics—which often boil down to controlling language in order to control thought and action—doesn't necessarily equate with "right wing".
There are many different kinds of people who oppose the Left project for its dangers to freedom of thought and expression, and not all of them/us are "right wing".
With how far left the Overton window has moved they're now a species of right-wing IMO. People on the Left will not claim them.
There is more than just genes or environment. There is also culture, which has the properties of an inheritance system. Performance in academics or aptitude tests are affected by motivation. Students who try hard will perform better than those who do not, all else being equal. Jews come from a group who faced various degrees of discrimination. Those who managed to thrive in such societies necessarily developed a culture of accomplishment and this shows up in test scores. East Asians living in Confucian societies lived in a world where the only way to get ahead was to do well in school, if one got the chance. So, parents push the kids harder, and it shows up in performance. Among white Americans you have a whole range of motivation, from very achievement-orientated households to households where academic performance is discouraged. Hence their performance is intermediate between that of Jews or Asians and those of blacks or Latins.
As for the descendants of slaves, many inherited a culture in which it was adaptive to not be ambitious (uppity) because that could get you killed. Even after emancipation, lynching was a consequence for the uppity for eighty years. Jim Crow was only lifted in the mid-1960's, but the prospects for economic advancement for black and white working-class men were sharply diminished around 1973 when the long-term rising trend in real wages stopped. This "escalator out of poverty" ended. Meanwhile, those blacks who had done fairly well despite Jim Crow could access affirmative action programs and rapidly advance. Such an environment was not conducive to the evolution of a culture of academic effort (athletic effort is a different story) among either poor blacks or those in the working and middle classes. We see degradation of white performance over this time in lower income groups.
Also, just because a trait is highly genetically heritable doesn't mean that population differences reflect genetic differences. For example, height has a very high genetic component, higher than IQ. Ad yet the primary determinant of height differences among populations is nutritional, not genetic. In the 19th century, Dutch people were much shorter than Americans, today they are the tallest people in the world.
Only, recently, the Dutch are deemphasizing meat and dairy products in their diet, and so the average heights are falling again.
It's a lot easier to "fix" this problem if people accept the genetic explanation. Imagine people like Michelle and Barack Obama having 5 children instead of 2. And Floyd Mayweather having none instead of 5. The problem will fix itself within a few generations.
Re: Michelle and Barrack reproducing. There are those who argue that can’t and never happened.
and those people themselves tend to have a low IQ and are the types who shouldn't be reproducing.
It’s statements like this that are the primary concern here. Eugenics is not a very good solution because it bleeds out into multiple subjective values of morality. Galton wanted to discourage low and middle class whites in Britain who scored lower in IQ measurements from reproducing. One could also use eugenics for those predisposed to crime, infidelity, conscientiousness, mental impairment, and the list goes on. Essentially no one escapes it’s clutches. And if one agrees with the claim that race differences in IQ are an issue the implication is that black or Hispanic individuals would be discouraged from having children and only the comparatively few gifted ones would be permitted to do so. Similarly in the case of China which supposedly has much higher levels of intelligence, whites could be inhibited from reproductive freedoms. Thus, it’s obvious why people fear the potential misuse of these results.
The problem isn't that it doesn't work; the problem is just that SOME ways of enacting it are coercive, cruel and/or unjust.
Be that as it may, it is just a fact that whatever traits are most correlated with fertility will be more prevalent in future generations. You can decide that we should not take any kind of action to deliberately influence that, but you should face the reality that in so doing you may be enabling some of the outcomes you claim to want to prevent. And maybe that's the right decision. Everything is about trade-offs.
But there doesn't seem to be any other plausible way blacks can be made to be as successful on average as other groups. (And it's not just about blacks; there is overwhelming evidence from behavioral genetics that genes affect outcomes far more than anyone wants to acknowledge, for everyone.)
I think there's a named fallacy for this, where X has a universally negative denotation, so we argue about whether a particular action should be considered an instance of X and therefore bad, instead of arguing about whether or not the particular act was bad and why.
The problem with forcibly sterilizing the disabled etc. isn't that it's "eugenic" (intended to improve the health of the population in the future by improving its gene pool); the problem is that it's coercive and cruel. The problem with murdering such people isn't that it's eugenic; the problem is that it's murder. Etc etc.
It's inane to say that eugenics necessarily always leads to genocide because the Nazis did it. That's a worse slippery-slope argument than saying gay marriage necessarily leads to plural pedophilic bestiality marriages. In the non-hypothetical real world, blank slate ideology was at least as culpable in the mass murders of Communist regimes, which murdered many times over more people than the Nazis did (and in peacetime).
My hope is that in the near future technology will make this irrelevant when genetic engineering advances to the point that people can choose to improve traits of their own children. The left-wing elites who typically screech about how everyone is a Nazi will suddenly be silent, or maybe write op eds about how it's about reproductive freedom, my body my choice, etc, because they never pass up a chance for their own children to get ahead. Then people will complain about how it's unfair that it's only available to the wealthy, so it will state subsidized and available to all. Which won't make everyone equal, but it will make everyone better (smarter, healthier, etc) on average, which will be good for everyone. And without sterilizing or murdering anyone, we'll have successfully implemented eugenics, except we probably won't call it that.
This is perhaps THE topic that adversarial collaboration would help elucidate. We need a study(ies) written and conducted by people who fall on all levels of the opinion spectrum to come together and design agreed upon experiments to try and get to the bottom of this.
I'm pessimistic it'll be happening anytime soon though.
Thanks for the laugh about that hilarious “ study “ on black brains. Going to assume there’s a few Jews involved in this sham study.
There’s a brand of conservative policy that recognizes the significance of luck in social outcomes. It is the basis for conservative subsidy for kids and healthcare. To my mind, high or low IQ is another variety of luck, and could justify conservative subsidies, if a readily available proxy for individual IQ was identified. Earning are probably a rough proxy, but I don’t have any notion of how rough that would be.
That can be taken to absurd lengths. A tendency to grab your opportunities with both hands is probably heritable. A bright person who follows up his lucky breaks would be doubly lucky.
When do we admit that these high achievers are valuable people who should be rewarded for the things they do for the rest of us?
"The importance of race differences is evident at an intuitive level. Whether fear of black crime is legitimate depends on whether blacks do in fact commit more crime, and, if so, why. Whether black poverty and academic failure are the fault of whites, and therefore impose compensatory obligations on whites—perhaps to be discharged by racial preferences—depends on why blacks fail. Received opinion not only ascribes black difficulties to oppression, black attainment is so far below white that, if blacks are as talented as whites, oppression seems the only explanation. And for decades just this conclusion has been drawn."
"The basic argument for studying race differences is that racial outcomes are currently viewed though a lens of guilt, and it is important to know whether this lens is distorting. One result of racial guilt feelings, already alluded to, is the idea that blacks deserve compensatory preferences in employment and education. Another is use of a “disparate impact” criterion for bias, according to which a standard or practice discriminates against blacks if blacks do not do as well as whites with respect to it. Since whites usually do outperform blacks, seemingly rational practices are besieged throughout society. One example is the cancellation of the presumption of innocence by the 1991 Civil Rights Restoration Act,6 under which an employer accused of bias for hiring disproportionately few blacks bears the burden of proving that he did not discriminate. This use of numbers to create a presumption against the defendant is reasonable (if constitutionally objectionable; see Epstein 1992) only if there are in fact proportionately as many able blacks as whites in the workforce."
"Finally, although this would be difficult to document, whites appear increasingly averse to norms intended to apply to society as a whole, or just to themselves, lest they be “racist” by implication. Whites when interviewed will refuse to condemn black youths who won’t take low-paying “dead end” jobs, a hitherto unacceptable reason for idleness. There is a tendency in discussions of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and illegitimacy to insist that teenage girls are going to have sex, and that talk of abstinence is foolish, intolerant, and repressive—a puzzling tendency, given that no previous Caucasoid society accorded teenage girls sexual liberty, or failed to condemn illegitimacy. I suspect that a major contributor to this sea-change has been fear of offending blacks, whose behavior often violates white sexual norms. In fact, mentioning the greater casualness of black sex invites retaliatory diagnoses of prurience and sexual problems"
--Michael Levin, "Why Race Matters"
100 years of throwing money at trying to improve outcomes for blacks only lowered meritorious outcomes for other races and made the black community dependent on the state, while overall lowering the average IQ in the country. If you keep trying to lift someone up that isn't trying to lift themselves up you are only putting them on a pedestal and if they are demonstrably lessers (iq, crime rates, nuclear families, social cohesion, charitable contribution, drug use, abortion)......why are you lifting up mediocrity? Look around at the results of lifting up mediocrity, from from a utilitarian perspective, you fucked over the minority for the majority, by pretending the majority was the minority. Europeans are a "world wide minority" while negroid africans are the 3rd largest global majority.
human dignity
One reason to not talk about something is that it keeps exploitation of the thing from being discussed as well.
"Plenty of things, after all, are true that prudent people may find too offensive or too trivial to write about."
Is there an example of something that is true that you would find too offensive to write about?
He seems to be avoiding differences in crime between the races and Jewish ethnocentrism/safety concerns that has led Jews to promulgate blank slate nonsense in the social sciences and push for mass non-white immigration, which brings more crime and political externalities.
A good example for many would be that god doesn’t exist. Even if that was indeed true, it would likely have a net negative effect on well-being and social cooperation
You'll have my favorite polemic gentrified by normal-one-havers.