Being wilfully obtuse is that thing where otherwise intelligent White people believe things that make no sense – like Darren Wilson’s account of killing Michael Brown. It is where they fail to understand you no matter how patiently and carefully you try to make something clear to them. On this blog it comes across as a sudden lack of understanding of simple English, like their otherwise functioning brain has stopped working – because it has!
I call it wilful because it does not seem to be tied to a lack of intelligence, knowledge or education. If anything, more education seems to make them more obtuse.
Bell hooks calls it learned helplessness. George Orwell in “1984” called it protective stupidity or crimestop. Both see it as a feature of brainwashing by powerful interests – White supremacy for hooks, IngSoc for Orwell:
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc…”
Crimestop stops thoughtcrime.
People notice this sort of thing in me in regard to Catholicism and sexism.
In the US it is most noticeable in Whites on the subject of race, especially in those with better educations. That is no accident. University education in the US functions more as a form of brainwashing than of enlightenment.
I used to think that if I used the right words, the scales would fall from the eyes of White people. They would see what I see in regard to race. I thought I was just saying it wrong – until I noticed two things:
- Black people had no trouble understanding me, even those as young as 16.
- Many Whites, even those in their 40s or 50s, had trouble understanding me even though it was apparent from the words they used that they had a university education.
For example, I used to think that anyone in the US over the age of 30 had lived long enough to know how profoundly unfair US society is, that the Bootstrap Myth was just that, a myth. But that turned out to be true only for people of colour. Many otherwise intelligent White people, with a straight face, would say stuff that made them sound like an 11-year-old who had read the dictionary.
Wilfully obtuse Whites say that Blacks “play the race card” or “see racism in everything”, that Blacks are imagining racism. That is because the protective stupidity of Whites makes them blind to racism.
Deep down they know the truth. For example, when students tell bell hooks that race does not matter, she asks them whether they would want to come back to life as Black or White. Most, regardless of their birth race, say White – as if it does matter!
What this means is that no amount of facts or reasons, no matter how clearly, calmly and patiently you lay them out, is going to change the minds of the wilfully obtuse. They are too brainwashed. They are too far gone.
See also:
The Urban Dictionary uses the term willful ignorance.
(http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=willful%20ignorance)
Is it something that “conservatives” do more than “Liberals”? I would say it is both.
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@Jefe
Agreed.
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Man, this post need to be done this topic could be said about 89% of white Americans. They choose to keep their heads in the sand. I saw a quote by Benjamin Franklin that speaks to the polarization of our country. “Justice will not be served until those who are as outraged as those who are.”
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If it’s not affecting the segment of the population(dominant society) then they could care less.
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So what do you call it for otherwise uneducated white people? Can it not still be willfully obtuse as they seem to at least grasp the basics when it supports their own logic?
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UGH! I want to try again with the Ben Franklin quote, “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are”.
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@Jefe, those are good points.
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@Mary
Exactly. Many don’t care about white deaths until it becomes the “it happens to us too” excuse. I watched one guy use every possible fallacy in an argument once. When pointed out to him it went over his head constantly until finally he stated “well if I am so are you.”
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There are a couple of commenters on this forum that this topic fits them like a glove.
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I have discovered that, generally speaking, Education simply makes people better able to defend their prejudices.
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@Mary Burrell
Hence this post. 😛
@Abagond, You forgot to add this to your glossary.
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Education does not produce enlightened saints… but rather, only more clever devils.
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@King: Can i borrow that quote from you?
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For example, I used to think that anyone in the US over the age of 30 had lived long enough to know how profoundly unfair US society is,
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Gravity is unfair to fat people; should we have a march?
The sun hates white people; should we have a march?
Black people want to change everything but their behavior.
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Looks like we could also use a post entitled “Straw Man Argument”.
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Others use “Red Herrings”.
Probably need to be clear about which are straw man and which are red herrings.
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All yours Mary!
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“University education in the US functions more as a form of brainwashing than of enlightenment.”
I was listening to a radio show this morning in which the quest’s thesis was that the first thing the american colonist did {even before safety and while they where still in a precarious position| was start colleges and universities – financed primarily by black slave labor ,because they saw indoctrination of the native populations as a primary weapon as they knew they could not rely on military capability alone.
I’d also like to add that all this talk of white people only doing this is ridiculous ,I get it from everyone esp a large percentage of black people in regards specifically to racism ,not that its the only issue that people are defensive about.
It sounds to me more like a case of conflicting interpretations and conflicting self interests.
Why would i be interested in something that has very little if any upside and a whole lot of down.
and finally i find it mind boggling that any “intelligent” person could be a Christian these days much less a catholic – show how much I know or have interest in that interpretation of reality.
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Mbeti
and finally i find it mind boggling that any “intelligent” person could be a Christian these days much less a catholic –
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The foundation of modern science (Newton, Boyle, Kepler…) is based on the concept of a “personal God” making man in his image with a mind able to understand the universe God created; i.e, the difference between man and God is one of degree and NOT kind.
The Christian theists sought to reveal the laws of the universe because as Christians they believed in a transcendent LAW GIVER — GOD, whose proof of existence is seen in the rational intelligibility of all he created.
In other words, “nature” is a reflection of the mind of the Creator (God) and science allows you to know God BETTER by revealing the laws and rules that govern it.
Christianity is the reason European science left Chinese science behind in the 17th century.
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Another awesome post, Abagond. Vinaka! (Thank you)
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I’m not sure what purpose is served by bell hooks’ question to her students. If I had a choice to be reborn and come back black or white, I would still want to be black just like hooks’ white students would still want to be white. If we are what we have lived, I love being black because there is some degree of internal freedom to be authentic in ways that go beyond material measures.
And the fact is that despite white supremacy ideology being forced onto people, conscious people know that being black itself is not a problem — God made humanity diverse. Racism is the problem, which is a system to maintain privileges for some and disadvantages for others based on skin color.
Despite whiteness being associated with privilege, there is something very liberating when one knows truths at a soul level because once the mind and spirit have been stretched, it can be impossible to return to certain levels of ignorance.
You come to realize there is nothing magical about whiteness, that there is nothing particularly appealing or unappealing about white skin, and you begin to see the inherent weakness in people who need to bully others to feel better about themselves.
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GemGirl, I have a theory that many white pathologies are an unconscious response to the collectivism that is white supremacy– racism is a form of collectivism; ant like, robotic, mindless… remember agent Smith’s complaint to Morpheus in the Matrix?
(he made the other white male leave the room)
Agent Smith: Can you hear me, Morpheus? I’m going to be honest with you. I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it. I can’t stand it any longer…
Running the Matrix drove agent Smith crazy; so crazy he ended up wanting to destroy both machines and humans.
How crazy is that?
Never underestimate the burden white people carry keeping this racial system up and running.
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I sure would want to come back to live as black. I wonder does not
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thwack wrote: “Never underestimate the burden white people carry keeping this racial system up and running.”
I agree with you. Thanks for a great example.
But the toll must not burden or bother enough people yet?
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@thwack
wrong the foundation of modern science is the scientific method
which has consistently invalidated any claims of magic ,supernatural (another word for magic) or deities (magical beings)
and while some European scholars where religious others where not,
as now adays most all scientist are atheist which is just another word for honesty in my book as for most religious assertions there is no evidence and in many cases contradict logic.
as to european current ascendency in science I attribute this more to thier postion in history – the “last” or most recent distinct phenotypic group of our species ,which depended on and benefit from the accumulated achievements of our entire species.
@GemGirl
“You come to realize there is nothing magical about whiteness”
yep especially when you realize from science data that its the lack of pigmentation and a degree of inability to produce melanin.
that there is nothing particularly appealing or unappealing about white skin – unless yours is no white and whiteness is continually being shoved down your throat – then you may become bias for and against…
also
“God made humanity diverse” – nope evolution is the cause and at our earlier stages of development we created this fiction as a balm to our ignorance.
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@Mbeti — You don’t get to debate with me on spiritual beliefs. You can offer your different our views and these can co-exist, respectfully.
I am not religious but I believe in a universal force, higher power, be it called God or something else. I do not see a contradiction between evolution and evidence of Godly entities.
Humanity is diverse — neither you or I know why. It is what it is, just like plants and animals are diverse.
I don’t view God in a dogmatic, man-in-the-sky way — but you do not get to inform me of what I’ve experienced spiritually.
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Correction: You can offer your different views. We can have different opinions that can co-exist, respectfully.
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Mbeti
@thwack
wrong the foundation of modern science is the scientific method
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Exactly, a method dripping with FAITH in the rational intelligibility of the universe; you can’t prove it, but you have FAITH in it, thats why you use the METHOD. Thats why you do science.
This is a religious residue.
Mbeti: as now adays most all scientist are atheist which is just another word for honesty
Really?
Abiogenisis is nothing more than a fancy word for spontaneous generation– life rising from non life; Thats just as much a miracle as a transcendent being. For scientists, atheism is like communism, you hafta be one to get/keep your job.
Mbeti: as to european current ascendency in science I attribute this more to thier postion in history – the “last” or most recent distinct phenotypic group of our species ,which depended on and benefit from the accumulated achievements of our entire species
Thats only a partial explanation. Europeans made the intuitive leap to the abstract sciences because their Christian FAITH predicted everything would make sense if they did.
Islam? nope
China? nope
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GemGirl
I do not see a contradiction between evolution and evidence of Godly entities.
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Me either because they are BOTH religious views; especially evolution.
Evolution REQUIRES you accept the production of new information from random chance and that mind comes from matter.
Thats a miracle.
Mbeti, do you believe the universe is just a brute fact?
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@jefe
I actually thought abagond had done a post on Straw man or red herring. I think it would be interesting to do a post on a fallacy each week. I discovered a few in use that I had no idea were even remotely fallacy.
@Kiwi
I agree. Though I feel a bit bad assuming they simply have no brain. I always just think it takes a bit more time for it to sink in.
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@nomad
I agree.
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@King
Very wise words as usual.
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Kiwi — Race does not matter. Racism is the problem. Therein lies the difference. We need to fight systemic racism, not the reality that people are of different races.
Your logic makes it sound like most women would prefer to come back as men if given a choice. I totally love being female. Being a woman is not the problem. Get it?
I love and fully embrace diversity! I would not want to work or live around only one race of people. BTW, I’m black.
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Furthermore Kiwi, since white people have less melanin a dilemma exists for people making a choice. Coming back as white can result in becoming racially diluted into non-existence if the genetic attributes of white people are mixed with people from darker racial groups. It is an interesting consideration even with white social privileges due to systemic racism.
The primary reason whites can maintain all power through racist systems is because they have access to the weapons that can destroy other human beings, and have demonstrated willingness (through propaganda and intimidation) to use violence for any reason.
People who are generally peaceful would prefer to avoid bloody wars and co-exist with others. Unending conflict only appeals to those with blood lust.
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I think that racist white people are either Malignant Narcissists and that is why they can believe in things that don’t make sense.
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The primary reason whites can maintain all power through racist systems is because they have access to the weapons that can destroy other human beings, and have demonstrated willingness (through propaganda and intimidation) to use violence for any reason.
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Thats not enough to explain racism. You are confusing mechanism with agency. If you give a bunch of black people guns they will most likely shoot each other. The preliminary step to mistreatment is DECIDING the qualifications for mistreatment.
If you aren’t clear about that, you could be on the receiving end of your own mistreatment.
Black people are not a race because they lack an agreed upon foundation of value with which to base their function as one on.
The primary reason whites can maintain all power through racist systems is because they have one.
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Racism is the false ideology of white superiority and pushes the false notion of black inferiority. This is fact. Racism is not the same as prejudice. It is systemic oppression.
IMO:
Without guns and being shielded by the system, white policemen would not be able to easily intimidate and get away with murdering so many people from all backgrounds.
If the elite in power did not have militarized protection that could result in killing people, their bank accounts would be looted as payback for extreme income inequality.
Survival at a basic level and the threat to survival is why the order of things can still be maintained now even as more people are far more conscious of the unfairness of this system that attempts to enslave the masses.
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What are you gonna do about?
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I team up with diverse people who promote healing from racism (it has caused trauma for black people), systemic reforms and social justice in support of the notion that ALL LIVES MATTER…with Black Lives Matters leading the way.
I am honest and ethical. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But it contributes to cutting through the bullshit that I encounter when people try to make excuses for racism. I respect differences of opinion but also am willing to confront white people and black people such as blacks who get stuck on stupid shit like interracial dating when that is a minor issue compared to systemic racism. I’ve told plenty of white people to grow the f–k up, and that I don’t need them acting like they’re my savior since I am likely as smart as they think they are.
I’m 52 and a Boomer who embraces that I am imperfect, so others can’t use that against me. My response is: “So what?” if someone wants to distract and confuse issues about racism by informing me of how problematic black communities are. And I remind them of white dysfunction. We are all human with strengths and limitations.
I donate money to causes when I can. I am a good listener and communicator who becomes a healing force in some lives. I am more effective now than before because I’ve become more selective about who to invest time and energy with. I am willing to apologize and admit when I’ve done something wrong. My ego is less important than empathy. I give hugs just because. I have good boundaries and practice this in ways that help others realize my respect for self and others. And I can be a bitch when necessary, with a sense of humor to take the edge off of difficult situations.
And what are you doing for the cause, thwack?
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One of these days people are going to find out that a certain number of individuals will never give a damn about anything that is important to others.
“One just has to get over it!”
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And once I finally realized this fact. I discuss race type issues with white minded folks like they are in fact 11 yrs old. It saves me the headache! I’ve been taking notes *shout out to Henreith :)*
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* oopsy Herneith*
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@lifelearner
If you get a really bad one then you might need to talk to them as if they are 5. lol
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@GemGirl
Admittedly, you are expressing exceedingly dichotomous thinking. That might inhibit the ability to think about the issue from another angle and prevent you from avoiding the “race v. racism” semantics issue that Kiwi brought up. The following is just one example of the many dichotomous statements you already injected into this thread.
“Racism is the false ideology of white superiority and pushes the false notion of black inferiority.”
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@Sharina,
I think that it would be good for Abagond’s thread if he had a series of the common fallacy arguments commenters often use on this blog and then eventually save them in a tab for quick reference.
For example, he has a post on ad hominem.
It would be an effective way to control trolls, the willfully obtuse, and even the accidentally obtuse from derailing threads without waiting for them to break the rules and getting them banned.
At the very least, it would require one to require commenters to admit that an assumed fact is an unproved premise.
All the time we see straw man, red herring and base rate fallacies used as arguments in this blog all the time, but they have not been explained, so people continue using them, sometimes by accident, but more often than not in an attempt to derail threads.
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@ Sharina,
Yep, then put them in time- out until they get a clue or as I do ignore them altogether and continue to enjoy the various comments by the enlightened.
@ jefe,
Yes, it would be extremely helpful. Especially to those not familiar with formal debate.
@ All,
And at the end of the day, everyone is entailed to their own opinion. Just because one has a varying one doesn’t make it any more/less true or right. One of many things I’ve learned here on Abagond *thanks* 😀
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“People notice this sort of thing in me in regard to Catholicism and sexism.”
I really appreciate your saying this. I stopped reading your blog for a very long time after the Tommy Sotomayor post. It was not a conscious thing, like I walked off in a snit. It was more a gradual thing. Like with every post of yours I read, I felt like you were being hypocritical protesting racism and oppression while denying sexism, especially from the likes of that jerk. It really hurt and I couldn’t reconcile that feeling that I was being a hypocrite for supporting your writing when you had such antipathy, or disbelief of women’s struggles in general and black women in particular.
But overall, I do truly enjoy your writing and I refer people to some of your posts – and gradually, over the past few months, I’ve been reading again I especially enjoyed your posts on Latino heritage. I learned a lot and those posts have encouraged me to read a lot more on my own.
I like that you’ve grown into the sort of self-awareness that recognizes your personal biases. That kind of evolution speaks to your character and willingness to grow. Its admirable.
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I have learned that herd mentality is not good and there must be a dissenting voice in discourse.
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GemGirl
And what are you doing for the cause, thwack?
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First I must figure out what this “cause” is?
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“Being willfully obtuse is that thing where otherwise intelligent White people believe things that make no sense – ”
like evidence and the scientific method.
“For example, when students tell bell hooks that race does not matter, she asks them whether they would want to come back to life as Black or White. Most say White as if it does matter.”
I doubt anyone wants to be short, fat, bald, ugly or dumb either.
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Wow, so straw man. 😛
but, which, in fact, supports the premise of the post.
Brilliant!
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Interesting. I saw Abagond’s post and last night read Bobby E. Wright’s “The Psychopathic Racial Personality” It mirrors the essence of this post. I’m not sure this pathology is the primary domain of Europeans but there seems to be long history of such psychopathic behavior in European history and this same “Willful Ignorance” is part and parcel a trait of this type of behavior.
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What are you gonna do about it?
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@jefe
And it goes to show that some really don’t care if they use a straw man or red herring or anything else.
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Sometimes I feel like light skinned black folk or black folk that look more white can use kind of mock towards other races that are dark or have different features… Being called the full blown N to the ER in a public setting and laughed at by these folk that fit the earlier description puts more into question who is who?…..
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For those unaware, Bell Hooks is an unattractive, angry, black, man hating lesbian professor, with a chocolate chip on her shoulder.
Like many a breed of ridiculous pure bred dog; she is the product of unnatural selection and thus only exists in captivity.
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thwack, we differ on our views about bell hooks.
I think hooks is a socially-conscious intellectual. I was introduced to a very important and different worldview about the historical role of black women and womanist/feminist thought through her ground-breaking book, Ain’t I A Woman.
Is she angry? Maybe, but there is legitimate anger when one has to deal with all the nonsense of living in a sociopathic system with a hierarchy imposed on people to limit their mobility and options as blacks and as women.
Is she man-hating just because she is a lesbian? Not necessarily.
She is professor, which means she invested time and effort for her academic credentials. No matter how much we may disagree with someone, giving them credit where due for their legitimate contributions and accomplishments supports integrity. Far better than making people up as a figment of our imagination.
hooks is a multifaceted person like most thinking people. That is a credit to her and makes her less predictable than robots who refuse to think outside of the box, IMO.
She might have a “chip on her shoulder” occasionally, but I doubt that she never smiles or laughs.
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@ Gemgirl
“No matter how much we may disagree with someone, giving them credit where due for their legitimate contributions and accomplishments supports integrity”—Applause.
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Thank you, sharinalr. I can’t stand it when people attempt to discredit women and people of color because I know how hard folks have to work to get credentials, and then other folks don’t want to pay them the same salaries on top of it. Experienced that myself as a black woman with a master’s degree.
On another note related to tAbagond’s post about obtuse/will-full ignorance:
Charles Barkley’s recent ill-informed comments on slavery prompted Alabama Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, to write an open letter to the NBA Hall of Famer:
From Sen. Hank Sanders: ‘Legacy of slavery is everywhere’ http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/12/open_letter_to_charles_barkley.html;
Alabama Senator Teaches Charles Barkley How Bad Slavery Was In Epic Open Letter http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/12/26/alabama-senator-teaches-charles-barkley-how-bad-slavery-was-in-epic-open-letter/
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@Sharina,
Did you notice that after the straw man argument was thrown out there, it was followed by an ad hominem in a feeble attempt to discredit the argument of the authority opinion referred to in the blog post.
Unfortunately, this blog sometimes gets flooded with this stuff. Only thing to do — not respond to it. Those that try to respond to it will set them up for repeated deflectionary behaviour, only with themselves as the target of the ad hominems.
And notice that it was Bell Hooks, not George Orwell which has been attacked. (and a personal attack, not an attack of the argument).
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Most of the world actually thinks that Westerners are “willfully obtuse” for ignoring very obvious racial differences that have been recognized for thousands of years and are obvious to small children . “Equalism” is a modern Western invention and the moral successor to communism.
If you can understand and accept that not all men are created equal (even if they have equal humanity and are equally God’s creation), it is the key that unlocks everything. This explains the vast majority of the different outcomes we see in society.
However, modern Western civilization is willfully obtuse and has to make all kinds of ridiculous excuses to try to reach explanations (e.g., white people are responsible for all poverty in Africa and everywhere else in the world, even though they invented almost all modern technology.) Why has affirmative action mostly failed? Well, racism was just too strong. So the “racism” bogeyman can be blamed for everything everywhere. And it can never be defeated.
In America, it does not seem to be tied to a lack of intelligence, knowledge or education. If anything, more education seems to make American elites more obtuse. I used to think that if I used the right words, the scales would fall from the eyes of the leftists. They would see what I see in regard to race. I thought I was just saying it wrong, then I realized it was their religion and anything I said that indicated that some differences might be genetic was sacrilege to them and made me seem like an evil person in their eyes for daring to question their god.
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Anyone pick up the fallacy elements in the preceding? I see several.
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I assume you are kidding.
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@King,
No, I suspect he actually believes that.
One of the fallacy elements starts right there.
I suppose we had slavery, the middle passage and coolie trade, genocide, ethnic cleansing, exclusion acts, internment camps, Jim Crow, disregard for treaties and “stop and frisk” precisely because Westerners ignored “very obvious” racial differences.
On top of that, it seems that some believe children are born with innate knowledge and recognition of “obvious” racial differences that they seem to ignore or forget as they get older.
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“Anyone pick up the fallacy elements in the preceding”
Anything that offends the religion of equalism must be dismissed as a “fallacy”.
For instance, anyone who wants to look at a big picture perspective (e.g., why other peoples may actually do worse things than white people, generally) and not focus only on evil white people’s race crimes is guilty of “Arab Slave Trader” fallacy because equalism needs to always insult straight white males to explain the world.
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@thwack
” atheism is like communism, you hafta be one to get/keep your job.”
Tell that to my Lutheran boss (Ph.D. Analytical Chemistry), his Hindu boss (Ph.D., Pharmaceutics), or our Baptist CSO (Ph.D., Medicinal Chemistry. I was an atheist well before I took calculus or got my three biology degrees.
If atheism helped, I’d have had a much more successful career by now.
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@Petie Oh
Im trying to show how Darwinian evolution has become a religion every bit as intolerant as communism, national socialism or for that matter, the Roman Catholic church at points through out history; but only for certain industries such as education, media…
You can’t teach the theory of intelligent design in schools even if you are an atheist.
Most fields have a catechism and if you want to reach the top you have to confess to the faith. “Multiculturalism” and “gay rights” are the two most recent additions to the higher education catechism.
In the aerospace industry, doubting the Apollo moon landing is considered heresy.
Every “institution” has principles you are expected to accept on faith in order to be a member in good standing.
This blog is an example of the phenomenon.
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@ Jeffe
Fascinating.
@ biff
What most of the world thinks is that America is technologically advanced, but racially backward in her thinking. Also, no one is denying that ‘races’ look differently and share different cultures. That is the extent of what is obvious to any child and it is readily acknowledged by anti-racists as well.
Explain to me this “religion of equalism” that you refer to above.
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Finally a statement that is not an ad hominem, straw man, red herring, etc.
If only he could learn to do this more.
I actually agree that science takes a leap of faith that it will deliver the truth, and evolution is still a theory in many respects. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong in Science class.
I remember the original Planet of the Apes movie, where Dr. Zaius who was the minister of science and the defender of the faith stated that there was no contradiction between faith and science, REAL SCIENCE.
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biff
Most of the world actually thinks that Westerners are “willfully obtuse” for ignoring very obvious racial differences that have been recognized for thousands of years and are obvious to small children .
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hey biff,
wake me up when you get to the part that justifies mistreating and abusing people on the basis of obvious racial differences that have been recognized for thousands of years and are obvious to small children .
Thanx.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…….
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equal laws applied to different people who act different will lead to different treatment of those different people. it is this different treatment which often is called “mistreatment”.
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“equal laws applied to different people who act EQUAL will lead to different treatment of those different people. it is this different treatment which often is called “mistreatment”.”
There, fixed it for you.
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@thwack
do you actually believe that 17 year old african americans behave in the exactly same way like 17 year old japanese americans?
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No, but some of us behave in exactly the same way as 17 year old WHITE Americans; I know cause I used to be one of them.
Thanks to law enforcement officials, I quickly realized how suspicious this behavior was and altered it.
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King:
What most of the world thinks is that America is technologically advanced, but racially backward in her thinking. Also, no one is denying that ‘races’ look differently and share different cultures. That is the extent of what is obvious to any child and it is readily acknowledged by anti-racists as well.
Unfortunately this has a lot of truth to it. Racism still is prevalent in the UK but they tend to pride themselves that it is still not as bad and backward as the way that it is in the US and the fact that they ‘try’ to take strides to tackle it. Now, whether this always works in practice is a different story – attitudes have to change before reforms in societal thinking can take hold.
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“Also, no one is denying that ‘races’ look differently and share different cultures. That is the extent of what is obvious to any child”
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Im not so sure. I have experimental data that suggests all small children consider adults to be a different “race” than themselves.
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@thwack
“You can’t teach the theory of intelligent design in schools even if you are an atheist.”
Speak for yourself. I don’t believe in supply side economics, but I can certainly teach it to a high schooler. The same thing goes for intelligent design and creationism. Neither are knowable or testable hypotheses, and as a scientist I will therefore not allow myself be bothered by them nor tarry their expression in a science classroom. Evolution is both knowable and testable, and I use the theory to underpin my work every single day.
I think you’re confusing impatience with intolerance. Believe what you will, just don’t ask me for an endorsement or a job offer.
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@jefe
“I actually agree that science takes a leap of faith that it will deliver the truth, and evolution is still a theory in many respects. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong in Science class.”
Having high confidence in success based on past performance is hardly equivalent to a leap of faith. The modern scientific method requires that we be wrong in order to refine hypotheses. Being wrong is ESSENTIAL for scientific progress.
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People see what they want to see. Remaining objective, is difficult at best, even more so in a mob. Education should ideally impart to us the ability to view others as individuals and hold them responsible for their actions and response to the world. Generalizing and judging others for things beyond their control is idiocy and undisciplined thought.
Obviously, all of us need to work less on what divides us as a species and more on what brings us together and makes us stronger if we are to survive what our greedy, corrupt and evil politicians, bankers, media and corporations have in store for us in 2015.
They are the real enemies and they seek to control us by dividing us so we don’t hold all of them, as individuals who committed the worst treasonous actions, accountable.
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Petie Oh
@thwack
Evolution is both knowable and testable,
————————————————————————————————–
really?
SPONTANEOUS GENERATION is both knowable and testable?
really?
You are no closer to getting life from non life than you were back in 1953.
White men with billions of dollars and the full faith and credit of the entire white supremacists system cannot intentionally reproduce an event they claim occurred by an accidental, purposeless, mindless, random process in the distant past?
WHY NOT?
(((shakin my head)))
I don’t know who’s ass to kick. Yours for talking sh*t you can’t back up, mine for responding to it; or your white slave masters for feeding you it in the first place.
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King said: “Explain to me this “religion of equalism” that you refer to above.”
It’s the practically religious faith that all people must be the same (in the aggregate) regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. A true believer will throw away all test scores as racist (even while admitting their effectiveness when judging same race college applicants) and e.g., experiences in majority black cities or countries, because the worst thing you can be is “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic” (or “anti-semitic”). Nobody cares if you are a “heretic” or “blasphemer”. These names will just receive laughter. But no one is laughing if you accuse them of one of the above mentioned “anti-equalism” sins..
Thwack said: “hey biff,
wake me up when you get to the part that justifies mistreating and abusing people on the basis of obvious racial differences that have been recognized for thousands of years and are obvious to small children.”
Eh, it still matters a lot, even if it doesn’t justify “mistreatment” or “abuse”. Slavery was a moral evil. However, to have whites beating themselves up 150+ years after their great great great great grandfathers fought a massive civil war to end it is pretty silly. Would most American blacks go back in time and reverse American slavery if it meant they might not exist (their ancestors were captured by other African tribes, and might very well have simply been killed), that their ancestors might have been sold to Arabs instead, or that they would have to live their lives like normal modern day Africans? Nope. If people accepted observable aggregate racial differences, slavery couldn’t be blamed 150 years after the fact for poor behavior when Chinese and Koreans had ancestors who went through terrible mass-tragedies much more recently and are still able to do pretty well in American society.
But you are red-pill. You know all that. It doesn’t make it right for cops to treat you badly because of your race, but it provides context for why that happens.
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goodbye thwack. Get help.
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@Petie Oh
“goodbye thwack. Get help.”—-ROFL. Love it.
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@Petie Oh,
Yep, but I didn’t say that.
Having high confidence based on past performance – yes, this is hypothesis testing. The most we can have is a confidence level.
This high confidence will deliver you the truth – this is where the leap of faith comes in.
We can never get beyond “high confidence”. We will never know if it is the truth or not.
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You’re exaggerating your point. Of course, i suppose you can always find some people who believe almost any extreme, but for the most part, anti-racists do not believe that everyone in the world is operating on the same level. Of course there are a multiplicity of minds, talents, interests, and aptitudes. People are different. Everybody understands that. Their differences are simply not segregated based on their skin color. Come now, even you can admit that, biff.
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Ah, nice summary Kiwi, quite helpful.
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Interesting and enlightening post, as always. So, I’m a white dude. I want to say you’re not describing me. And, I hope I’m right. For me, personally, I can thank two things for this: my parents and the books I’ve chosen to read. My parents have always instilled in me that people are humans above anything and that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. Cheesy, I know, but sadly easier said than done for some.
Growing up, I never really saw race an issue. I guess I was ignorant to it (Side note: Kaffir Boy describes how easy it is to make an entire country of Whites ignorant and obtuse to something as horrible as South Africa’s apartheid). However, once I was aware of it being an issue, I thought the best solution would be to pretend I was colorblind to skin color – treat everyone the same regardless of their color. However, this was also ignorant in the end because, sadly, it’s simply not true in the United States. People aren’t the same. People don’t have the same life experiences. People don’t have the same narratives. And, often, this is because of their skin color. It shouldn’t be the case, but it is.
I’ll never be able to understand what it is like being black in America. No matter how much I read, who I talk to, what I watch … I’ll never know what it’s like. I believe I’ve experienced small, minute snippets of it living abroad, but that hardly compares.
At this point in my life, I’ve learned not to treat everyone like anything, but to treat each individual as just that. But, it’s hard. I wish it wasn’t. Growing up in the United States, you become so indoctrinated with this means that and that means this. And you know it’s wrong. But it feels like it’s in your DNA and you can’t escape it, you can only hope to contain and hide it.
I know I’m not a racist person, but I also know I have racist thoughts at times (and yes, there’s a difference). I hate when it happens, but it just does. And this leads me to my conclusion – sorry about the rant – I think the biggest problem in the States for White people and their racist-like attitudes and tendencies is that they are scared to admit to it. It’ll never change until they man up, admit it, and learn right from wrong. But, in today’s America, it’s too scary, too damaging to admit to something like that. Our society is all or nothing – you’re rich or poor, racist or not racist, sane or insane, etc. – and if you happen to fall on the wrong side, well, then, you’re screwed. People have to allow White people to come out as racists, to come out as people that feel racist at times. Otherwise, they will continue to harbor these feelings, and for many, they might grow into something very ugly, into what this post is describing quite aptly.
(sorry for any grammar/spelling mistakes)
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@ Kiwi
Excellent comment. Thank you.
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@ GemGirl
Hooks did not say EVERYONE wanted to come back as White, but MOST would. I did not say this in the original post, but she that was true regardless of the person’s birth race.
Another way to put that question is to ask Whites how much money they would need to be reborn as Black. Most say at least tens of thousands of dollars, showing that deep down they understand that they benefit from White privilege – even if they profoundly underestimate it, as Joshua Solomon found out when he tried to become Black:
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@ jefe
I updated the Glossary. Thanks.
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@ Jefe @ Sharina
A post on common logical fallacies that appear in comments is a wonderful idea. Thanks.
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@ Biff
You can understand an argument and still disagree with it. The wilfully obtuse are those who fail to understand an argument despite patient explanations, despite being otherwise intelligent. It comes not from holding a different point of view, but from being BRAINWASHED into that point of view.
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I agree with Thwack that Western science grew out of a Christian world view and shares some of its faith-based beliefs, like that nature is created by a mind somewhat like ours and is therefore understandable, that it is rule-based, that it is not an illusion or some cruel trick, that truth matters and is knowable, etc. You see this plain as day in a book by one of the founders of Western science: Descartes’s “Discourse on Method” (1637). Descartes saw science as helping and extending Catholicism, not as its opposite.
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@ Mbeti
I used to think that way too.
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Kiwi:
Your argument actually seems to be about why East Asians haven’t performed in accordance with their measured IQs, but they largely have. While maybe not as “inventive” by some measures, they can and have at least maintain sophisticated societies. Anyway, we’ve had these discussions many times, but it all comes down to you personally feeling that Asians are inferior to whites. Also, Eastern Europe is not as poor or crime ridden as you would like to think. The weight of the evidence clearly suggests that measured average intelligence is strongly correlated with societal outcomes.
King said:
“Differences are simply not segregated based on their skin color”.
Um, not what I’m saying. But, yes, different groups of people do tend to perform differently, and it happens that the skin color of a city or country may be a pretty good predictor of things like economic performance, crime rate, etc. (not perfect, but clearly statistically significant).
abagond:
Yes, people can disagree. However, many folks here are calling me “willfully obtuse”, as if I can’t understand what you are trying to say and haven’t had it jammed in my head by many years of politically correct education. I can and I have.
I will agree with you that many whites are unable to connect all the dots with respect to race. However, you and I would connect the dots in very different ways. For instance, you still insist that “how profoundly unfair US society is” to blacks, but you have in other places I think shown that U.S. blacks as a group are better off economically than blacks anywhere else in the world (excluding maybe a couple very small jurisdictions with very specialized economies not tied to labor supplies).
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White supremacy is all about whites telling the world what’s what and the rest of the world having to believe it because it came from whites. That is the insanity of white supremacy which most of the world subscribes to , if u r lucid and dispute anything being perpetuated by “global white supremacy” then ur “crazy” and whites don’t feel “safe” which means ur a direct threat to that illusory bubble whites exist within. “shrugs”.
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@biff
“Yes, people can disagree. However, many folks here are calling me ‘willfully obtuse’, as if I can’t understand what you are trying to say and haven’t had it jammed in my head by many years of politically correct education. I can and I have.”
“Willfully” alludes to a decision or intent, in this case, to reject logic and favour ignorance. So, it’s not that you “can’t understand” but that you choose to or pretend not to.
Who can blame you for trying to make yourself feel good about the benefits you have obtained in a white supremacist society? But it would be great if you could be honest and admit that you benefit from an unfair, unjust society that favours pale people with certain facial features/hair colours and discriminates against darker people with different features. But don’t worry, I don’t expect that much of you!
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@Gemgirl
It is strange to me, but in any debate I have been in or have witnessed the individual seems to attack the women on personal levels vs discrediting what they say.
@ Jefe
I did noticed, but why is it easier to attack Bell hooks woman as opposed to George Orwell, a man?
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Is this a decent illustration of willfully obtuse?
(http://youtu.be/mjEcj8KpuJw)
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This is interesting:
So I say, “Differences are simply not segregated based on their skin color”. To which biff replies:
And the follows up with:
Meaning that is EXACTLY what he is saying. Lol!
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@ Sharina
Yes, Monty Python’s Black Knight is a perfect illustration of the wilfully obtuse.
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@King
hence, perfect example of this post.
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George Carlin talking about being “willfully ignorant”.
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@Sharina,
it just is for certain commenters.
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@jefe
“it just is for certain commenters.”
I tend to look at it as a psychological disorder. Perhaps certain individuals feel they are restoring some type of lost manhood. Or this the idea that they believe women are too emotional and fragile for rational thought. hmmm….
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@Sharina,
So do you label them misogynistic psychopaths?
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@jefe
“misogynistic psychopaths”—I would have to say yes.
For example I watched a female on another blog present a very decent case in regards to mike brown. The rebuttals from not one but several male commenters was “stop spreading your legs and having all those kids on welfare” or just calling her the b-word.
On the other hand a male commenter made a comment with the gist of it being “kill white people” and male commenters took the time to try to reason and debunk his logic.
It seems to be this idea of “she does not know what she meant so I have to tell her what she meant.” Where as when a face off with males seem to be alpha male vs non-alpha.
If that makes any sense. Just a thought.
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Kiwi said:
“Assuming that intelligence is inherited and that it is the sole cause for societal outcomes, then we would expect children from families with the same income or education to obtain similar test scores, regardless of race.
Instead, we find that the children of even rich blacks do worse on the SAT than the children of poor whites. Mexican children also do worse than white children from families with the same income or education, although not as poorly as black children. ”
Are you serious? You don’t even understand the basics of intelligence testing. For one thing, similar income and education doesn’t mean that the parents were similarly intelligent. For example, black parents might have benefited from affirmative action. Second,the principle of reversion to the mean applies. The mean is just much higher for East Asians and whites (even more so for YKW).
SAT tests are actually a pretty good proxy for IQ, and I’m surprised you would even show this data here given what it shows about different performances of the races and the prospect that affirmative action can change that in a meaningful way.
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Kiwi said:
“Since blacks are highly segregated from whites, they disproportionately live in poorer neighborhoods with worse schools, irrespective of their educations or incomes, which results in lower test scores. The same situation applies to Mexicans, but because they are less segregated, the effect is not as great.
The children of poor Asians, consisting largely of Southeast Asians, lag behind white children, just like black and Mexican children”
Hillarious. I guess it’s the terrible segregation in Africa and Mexico that leads to similar test scores for students there. I suppose it’s just pure coincidence that all these results also strongly correlate with measured average IQs of the ethnicities involved.
Those schools in Appalachia for coal miners’ kids must be better than the ones that rich blacks in the big cities send their kids to. It must just be about the schools. However, even if you spend more money on the black schools than the white schools, for some reason the measured difference doesn’t go away…. but that can’t be right. All the races must be equally intelligent. Just the way all races must be equally good at playing basketball… Just the way that all dog breeds must behave the same, because Kiwi has proved that dog breeds don’t exist scientifically and all dogs are the same. It would be breedist to say some dog breeds are smarter or more aggressive than others (on average).
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biff it surprises me that you still believe in the concept of “race” as it it is real. I would have thought by now that you would have learned better than that.
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Dr. Joy DeGruy calls it “Cognitive Dissonance”
The reckoning with contradictory beliefs to ease the state of one’s conscious
I call it White Supremacy
White people are many things but ignorant about race is not one of them. They know exactly when and how to play “dumb” to keep the system going because if they never admit they’re terrorists then they never have to change anything.
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King:
I know you’re shocked, shocked I tell you. Surely no one believes in “race” anymore. I mean, why do we even use the terms “black” or “white” on this site? Oh, because a lot of ignorant people still use those terms, huh. Yes, I know dog breeds don’t exist either, but the kennel club keeps doing its thing because they are breedists.
Long story short, sure it would give us more info if we knew where exactly everyone’s ancestors came from (even down to the village level), rather than just a “continent”, but that’s not practically feasible for blacks or whites in America, and white and black have become useful descriptive terms for a reason. “Asian” is less useful because it encompasses different groups of people (more than half the world’s population) for whom average IQ, etc., are radically different, and it is still largely possible to tell if someone is, e.g., Indian or Chinese or Filipino.
Kiwi said”
“Yes, I’m sure affirmative action totally explains why blacks unfairly make tens of thousands of dollars more per year than whites of the same intelligence.”
“strongly correlated” does not mean exact equivalence and “affirmative action” doesn’t “totally explain” anything. However, when you systematically let people of a certain race into a college or graduate program with lower test scores (tracking IQ), then the graduates of that race end up being on average less intelligent (as measured by IQ and test scores). It’s not rocket science.
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Gee, Likening human races to dog breeds.
I suppose that thinking seems logical to a race realist.
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Biff, I can appreciate the snark of your hyperbole, but nevertheless, I’ m assuming that you know that there is a huge difference between dog breeds and humans—who are essentially just one “breed” with small variations in things like fur color, etc.
I’m also not saying that it’s necessary never to mention descriptors like Black, White or Asian. Just so long as you don’t believe that they are meaningful beyond a very general sociological context. But what I find is that people will open often acknowledge the vagaries of “race” when challenged on the subject. But will then go on to treat it as if it were somehow genetic and determinative when they are not being as guarded.
Surely you would not be one of those?
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jefe said:
“Gee, Likening human races to dog breeds.
I suppose that thinking seems logical to a race realist.”
This is an attempt at “outgrouping”, which is a standard leftist ploy that doesn’t require a substantive debate.
Of course, you know that outside of the West, and even in the West 50+ years ago, significant racial differences were accepted as a matter of course. Modern equalist thought is the true historical anomaly.
Kiwi said:
“Of course not. I’m sure you’d pay a premium to be brought back to life as a black man.”
An appeal to “fairness”–another standard leftist derailment. Note how it’s not relevant at all to the validity of the argument I was making. It’s like Kiwi wants to live in the world of Harrison Bergeron.
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King:
“Surely you would not be one of those?”
Another attempt at outgrouping. As I noted above, current egalitarian thought is the real anomaly. Of course there are very significant differences between different groups of people beyond “fur color”. What a ridiculous thing to say.
Race can be difficult to precisely define (in the sense that there are generally no clear cut edges), but at the same time very meaningful (e.g., significant measured differences in cognitive abilitiies between East Asians and South East Asians).
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“Cognitive” differences? Are you privy to people’s cognitive processes? Or are you talking about test taking? Or perhaps about the adoption of modern technology? Or what?
Explain.
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King,
Don’t be willfully obtuse. It’s intelligence as reflected in tests. As we all know, these tests are all biased in favor of ESL East Asians instead of ESL South East Asians.
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Test taking is not necessarily an indication of cognitive superiority. Obviously. And It certainly has nothing to do with racial superiority. But what I don’t understand is why you would think that races of people are somehow the same? Wouldn’t it make more sense to your theory to say that people who shared the same kind of environments were the same?
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“Wouldn’t it make more sense to your theory to say that people who shared the same kind of environments were the same?”
OK, now I think you’re just doing a fabulous troll job. Cheers and Happy New Year.
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Wow, that was a strange conversation…
But I’m beginning to understand why nobody takes you seriously. It’s all posturing, and misconstrued ‘logical fallacies’ from freshman debate class, all in an attempt to simply avoid to discussing the facts.
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Biff
You state on a constant basis that East Asians are “superior” due to the safety of their societies, yet the existence of the Yakuza & Triads says otherwise. You say that East Asian countries are supposedly advanced so please do tell us about the industriousness & technological advancements of Mongolia which is also one the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Tell us all about how North Korea sets an example for how to run a country, what when they’re not hacking Sony & committing every Civil Rights atrocity known to man against their own people. Please tell me & with great detail the genetic & so-called racial difference between them & their South Korean neighbors who as a rule thrive no matter what part of the world they’re in? Taiwan? Still a proto-colony of China so anything they do or don’t is irrelevant.
The answer is oppression, the same oppressive rule that White Supremacy places blacks under all over the world. Give everyone an equal chance and the results will be the same. You have displayed a constant failure to distinguish between Asians & Asian AMERICANS who are typically high achieving East & South Asian people with advanced degrees they obtained before they immigrated that America cherry picks from the top of their societies. Middle & Upper class people thrive in their homeland, they thrive here. Poor Southeast Asians struggle in their homeland & struggle here, what’s so difficult to understand.
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@ A
I agree with some of what you say, but I don’t think that I am totally in agreement with this. People are different, priorities are different. Cultures are different. So, results too are different.
But that has nothing to do with “intelligence” or advanced “cognition” as our rather sophomoric friend above has implied. Take a Native American culture for example. What if they considered their particular lifestyle to be sacred, and having been left alone all these centuries had opted to preserve it rather than advance it. Not because they are not smart enough, but because they simply valued their nomadic, connected, existence as it was. Now what if in 2014 the advanced Europeans came over the ocean with drones, and hellfire missiles, and helicopters with machine guns hanging out of them, and began to riddle their teepees with bullets and their villages with bombs? Would the world then conclude that the American Indians were simply stupid, and that the Europeans, by contrast, were wonderfully intelligent? Which of the two cultures do you think most people would think needed the most fixing?
The idea that the mere embrace of technology is somehow the ultimate signifier of human intelligence is both errant and juvenile. People may be just as intelligent, only in different ways. So I don’t assume that without oppression that everything would necessarily be equal across all cultures. People would still be free to choose their particular priorities. Some would be stronger in certain disciplines and others would be stronger in others.
But, of course we’ll never know because oppression does exist, and so it colors everything that follows.
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Hahaha! Kiwi’s truth van strikes again!
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@ Kiwi
Agreed. Its classic HBD ‘Rice Chaser’ logic.
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@ King
Agreed. What you stated is as a black person what I’ve told people who ignorantly assume that tribal Africans are less civilized. Aside from the obvious fact that most Africans live in urban areas I’ve just never been able to wrap my head around the ide that someone who decided to live a simpler life was somehow less civilized. If a tribal leader in rural Africa treats his people better than the rich shot callers in America treat the poor than whose uncivilized? The same technologies and advancements that they place on a pedestal also have hurt the environment & made us less connected as a society. Paved roads & skyscrapers don’t equal civilized, civility does.
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@ A
Well, that’s it in a nutshell, as you say. There have been plenty of people around the world who have chosen a simpler, lower tech, existence than the Europeans. The Native Americans—including the great city dwellers like the Aztec, Mayans, Toltec, and Inca, were all at a lower point of technology than the Europeans when they arrived. But so were the Polynesians, and the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. The East Asians were also fighting with bow and arrow, sword, and spear when the Europeans first arrived. Did that mean that they were “backward” and “uncivilized?” And later on when they purposefully acquired, and emulated western military equipment and techniques, did they suddenly become more intelligent because they switched from swords to guns?
It’s a ridiculous and conveniently self-serving vision which Whites impose upon the world in order to justify their legacy of using technology to cruel and abusive ends, mostly against other peoples.
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Nothing like a 3 on one to help ring in the new year.
King,
You managed to call me a “freshman” and then “sophomoric” a couple comments later. Seems I am moving up fast. Nice attempted disqualification, though. Anyway, sorry if you were trying to be serious, but my whole point is about the importance of hereditary/genetics/nature. Not to say that environment/nurture makes zero difference, but I have no idea why you would conclude “Wouldn’t it make more sense to your theory to say that people who shared the same kind of environments were the same?” unless you had no idea what “my theory”, as articulated in many different threads here, was.
A said:
“The answer is oppression, the same oppressive rule that White Supremacy places blacks under all over the world. Give everyone an equal chance and the results will be the same.”
Bravo, the plight of the black man everywhere is all the white man’s fault! As the population of Africa quadruples by the end of the century and white populations plummet, will black people be able to throw off the yoke of the white man? When blacks soon outnumber whites 5 to 1 worldwide will they be able to take the superior position in the world order? Or are whites just so crafty and evil that the ever dwindling minority will be able to keep the black man down and prevent Africans from having first world societies indefinitely?
Or, as King says, maybe Africans’ “particular lifestyle [is] sacred”, and they should continue living as they do, without needing all the junk that the first world has. The Native Americans didn’t invent the wheel because they didn’t want to become dependent on technology. It all makes sense now.
Kiwi:
You’ll notice I also don’t talk about “white Americans” vs. “white Europeans”. We are talking about race. This is useful in the American context, e.g., to understand why East Asians end up at ivy leagues and then tech companies, while Filipinos wind up as nurses. What you describe as “South Asians” are mostly high caste Indians. If you asked the high caste Indians whether high and low caste Indians have the same IQs they would laugh at you (at least those with knowledge of their homeland would).
The idea that because China or North Korea can be run into the ground because of communist dictatorships doesn’t prove anything. They don’t negate what has happened in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. No one said intelligence alone guarantees an advanced society. It is merely a required ingredient. This is why China’s long term prospects are better than those of Cambodia or Laos.
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Well, for example, wouldn’t it make more sense that people who lived at very high elevations would tend to be exposed the the same limiting factors, and as a result would also develop similar strengths? Not identical perhaps, but similar?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to think that high mountain dweller would be more similar—whatever their skin color—and that desert dwellers would be quite different, even if they had the same color skin?
Is that really so illogical?
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King:
I am more interested in currently observable data/group traits. I don’t have a strong opinion about human evolution (other than that I believe in a Creator), and I think most of this discussion is highly speculative. However, a number of geneticists believe the key difference between black and white development were the harsher temperature environments of Europe, as opposed to sub-Saharan Africa, which forced Europeans (i.e., whites) more towards a K selection system, instead of an r system.
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@ biff
Who are these geneticists? What are their names.
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They say that all Ashkenazi Jews can be traced back to a couple hundred ancestors, and the Amish similarly had a very limited number of founding fathers. Not gonna speculate re: early Romans/Etruscans and what selective pressures they might have faced, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Anyway, I realize I can never get the last word with you, Kiwi, so go ahead and take it.
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Ha-ha. Just like the “Asian Atrocity Argument” post, some commenters seem to find the thread with their name on it. 😛
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Eh, abagond, this is what I’ve heard, but this is not something I’m particularly interested in, as I’m not interested in discussing evolutionary speculation or spending time locating names that you can try to shoot down by calling the people “racist” or whatever–Even DNA co-discoverer/nobel prize winner Watson can see funding disappear if he says anything to offend equalism, and there are no shortage of people willing to act as the Inquisition to would be Galileos. You can google yourself and find specific names. I think the former main science reporter for the NYT is among them.
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biff, the logic works whether you want to talk about Evolution or leave that out of the discussion. It still makes sense to say that people who live in deserts (whether it be the the Sahara, the Pedirka Desert, or the Gobi Desert) would develop more similarly than people who shared the same pigmentation. Because the need for water and the lack of vegetation are obviously much more profound shapers of culture than are dermal coloration and hair texture.
That is like saying that you are not interested in knowing how the planet was formed and how it developed, you’re only interested in understanding it based on current observations. So, the seas were always salty, and canyons were always deep, and glaciers never melted, and erosion never wears. Its IMPOSSIBLE to understand the NOW without at least trying to understand how we got to NOW. Its anti-intellectual.
Actually that is not true. I don’t know of ANY *geneticists* who say that. That is specifically an HBD blogger’s theory posited by knuckleheads like Steve Sailer who have no training in genetics. It is not taught at any University in the entire world. It is not accepted by any accredited body of geneticists, anthropologists, or historians. And besides, it doesn’t make sense. There are climates in Africa today that are every bit as cold as many in Southern Europe. But if you look at the theories on the timeframe of human migration, you will also see that the planetary climate would have been much different than it is today anyway. Certainly it was more uniform in the past than it has become.
I’m afraid that your ‘cold brain’ theory is on very this ice…
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So is not answering questions the calling card of the willfully obtuse? I have seen two different commenters get asked questions and they both avoid it like the plague, yet want to ask a ton of questions and get upset when others refuse to answer.
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@Jefe
“some commenters seem to find the thread with their name on it.”——I agree 100%
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I know who these supposed ‘geneticists’ are; Summy Dummy Phuck and Billie Bob Jones! Cousins of yours bliff?
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Biff
Not sure if you paid attention to the history of the last 500 years so I’ll just give it a go-ahead.
West African slaves brought by force to America where a caste system was created based on skin color to create a buffer class between the rich slave owners & the slaves/indentured servants who were joining forces to rebel against them. It worked overnight & from it the anti-black attitude of the world today was born.
Later on Europeans went back to Africa & colonized every country with the exception of Ethiopia and instigated feuds between different tribes to get them to war with one another so that anyone from the outside looking in could say “its just the savage negroes killin each other.” While they stole the infrastructure right out from under them.
Meanwhile Europe and the West continually rape the continent of Africa for all its resources while not sharing any with the Native people it rightfully belongs to and mire in the hypocrisy of calling a people uncivilized and regressive while using resources that they forcefully took from said so-called savages as a means to create the very wealth they sit on today.
British & Dutch colonizers finally make their way out to the South Pacific in their last round of genocide (what I’m sure you refer to as the good old days) and encounter the Black people of Australia & Tasmania who while sharing nothing in common with Africans genetically share a superficial resemblance based on skin color which feeble minded individuals with their now centuries old anti-Black bias use as reason to “cleanse” them.
In the modern day nearly all of these people from America, to Latin America, to Africa, to Australia all now deal with oppressive treatment from White Supremacists who still promote the lie of inferiority of us to sheep like you who buy it hook, line & sinker. But what do I know, Iz jussa po’ ignant knee-grow who caint do nuthin witout massa tellin me which-a wayz to go!!…….Right?
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King said:
“It still makes sense to say that people who live in deserts (whether it be the the Sahara, the Pedirka Desert, or the Gobi Desert) would develop more similarly than people who shared the same pigmentation.”
King, to me it makes sense that people in the same geographic vicinity (e.g., Africa or Europe) might develop similarly, especially if they have ongoing interraction with one another.
Anyway, as I’ve made abundantly clear, I’m not interested in having a conversation about “evolution” (as a creationist, I don’t believe man sprang from nothing anyway). Therefore, I’m not trying to bring in specific cites (if I do links, most of the time they get my posts in moderation, from whence they may never emerge anyway). However, you are attacking the idea I mentioned in passing without any specific cites yourself. Sailer might highlight the research of others, but he doesn’t pretend to be a geneticist himself.
You appeal to authority. It’s 100% clear to me that mainstream academia is corrupted, and that they will hide any research that doesn’t support the Narrative. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They will always try to explain away, e.g., persistent gaps in intelligence, crime, etc. among races (if they don’t they get fired, ostracized, etc.). One of the ways is by trying to say “race” doesn’t exist, so therefore these readily apparent observations have no meaning. However, this is an abberation in human history–100, 500 or 1000 years ago, these same folks would be laughed out of the academy.
As a new year starts, I thought it would be a good time to examine my motives. What do I hope to accomplish posting on here? Well, I’m most concerned that whites seem to always be on the defensive and are not able to address their shrinking populations. At this rate, they will become minorities in their ancestral homelands (Europe), as well as in the U.S., Australia, Canada, etc. This is not something that will happen in hundreds of thousands or millions of years (i.e., supposed evolutionary timing). It will happen in the next couple hundred years if things don’t change. I don’t want to see the U.S. become a Latin American style cesspool. However, I can understand that for non-whites it’s less easy to care about these issues and harder to accept that the coming transformation may also be bad for your children. Actually, similar issues potentially affect East Asians, but they have national pride and are at least able to talk about these issues openly–and so far they have not tried to address their demographic problems by importing mass cheap labor who will replace them.
I know I sound like a mean, uncaring guy to many people here. However, I hope that some people will at least question the Narrative and ask themselves whether the West is going in the right direction and how that will affect future generations.
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ack, sorry for the double post. it told me the first post was in moderation, so I modified language and reposted.. (perhaps abagond can help me delete one of these)
A, OK, I apologize for some white people hundreds of years in the past (not my ancestors, as far as I can tell) enslaving some of your ancestors. Do I need to begin every post with that?
However, I think the effect white people have had is a bit more nuanced.
For instance, if you had a choice, you wouldn’t go back to being a hunter, gatherer in Africa would you?
If whites hadn’t interfered, the population of Africa would likely be much much smaller than it is today. Is it better not to have existed?
If there’s nothing special about whites, then as blacks in Africa become more and more numerous, surely they can discover ways to end perpetual white oppression, right?
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biff:
Well, I’m most concerned that whites seem to always be on the defensive and are not able to address their shrinking populations.
Are you not contributing to the shrinking of the white population by marrying outside your race?
Whilst the ‘white’ population as it exists now may have a different ‘face’ in the future I do believe that at some stage the numbers will sustain and then rise again. There will always be those who do not wish to ‘mix’ as it were.
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But that’s just it, biff. The people situated on what we call a ‘continent’ today did not have “ongoing interraction with one another.” For one thing, the World was a much smaller place in centuries past. The vast majority of people never travelled more than 20 miles from their place of birth, unless they lived in a perpetually migrating society (like the Beduins). In many places people groups were divided by great geographic obstacles, such as high mountain ranges, wide deserts, or impassable rivers. In other cases, people could not pass through lands inhabited by people groups hostile to their own. The idea that Africans in Ethiopia were being effected by the the peoples in the far south or vice-versa is simply incorrect. The same is true of the vast continent of Asia, and even Europe to some degree. There is absolutely nothing to tie all Africans together socially or culturally. Evidently you have always taken for granted ideas that were never so, and that do not make sense.
I’m not talking about the evolution of people, I’m talking about the evolution of cultures. People who are facing the same limitations, stresses, and benefits, would be more likely to develop similar cultures. People who have similar coloration but who live under disparate conditions on a huge land mass that they could never travel in their entire lifetime, are probably not going to develop similar cultural traits or values. Yet this is what your HBD religion has been teaching you for years.
Biff, if you don’t know what these ‘logical fallacies’ actually mean you should stop attempting to point them out. An Appeal to Authority would be me trying to make a point solely by pointing to one authoritative source and making the case that since they agree with my viewpoint that it must be true. But when I point to all the universities in the world, and all the accredited institutions of genetics and anthropology, it ceases to be an appeal to authority and instead becomes a statement of scientific fact. I’m not saying that scientific fact is always correct, but it simply is NOT an “appeal to authority.”
Secondly, you can’t have it both ways. You feel free to reference science whenever you wish to make some point about the inferiority of Blacks. But when 100% of the science refutes your HBD hogwash, you then say that mainstream academia is corrupted. So which one is it? Can academia and science be trusted? Or can it only be trusted when it’s being used to make a point against Black crime or Black test scores? You can’t have it both ways.
Is that an appeal to 1000 year old authorities I hear? What is your opinion of Leechcraft and Alchemy? I’ve got a lead bookend I’d love you to turn into gold with your ancient knowledge!
And besides the argument has never been that race doesn’t exist, it’s that “Race is a social construct.” And 1000 years ago, nobody believed in race as it is understood today. Nobody thought that all the lighter-complected people belonged to a massive race, called “Whites.” That is an invention. Are you prepared to be educated? Do you renounce your foolishness? Are you ready to join the 21st century?
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Biff.
I only used the past as a set up for the inevitable systems that were put in place in the present which effectively keep blacks enslaved. The fact that Blacks with better credit than whites still get turned down for loans more often. The fact that those with stereotypically black sounding names get fewer call backs for job interviews and opportunities. The fact that whites got FHA loans to bring them out of the great depression and into the middle class while Blacks for some strange reason were deemed unqualified. These whites paid off these cheap mortgages and passed the houses & wealth onto their children while blacks had to pass on debt. The fact that whites get paid more for the same job than Blacks, or white men with criminal records get jobs easier than a Black man without one. The fact that police profile and stop Blacks for no reason other than being black usually finding nothing after the search & seizure while whites are 10X more likely to be caught with drugs or guns when searched.
I merely hinted because I assumed that you need only look at the current situation of Blacks in America today & around the world where similar White Supremacists practices are put into place to know there is residue from the past. I didn’t think I would have to spell it out I thought the mere implication would be enough for you, what with you’re superior Caucasoid brain and all.
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Omnipresent:
Yes. From a white purity standpoint. However, I’m still spreading my genes (though obviously I can’t know whether my sons will have kids). A larger issue is the destruction of the traditional family unit. Western white women are not being raised and educated to be good wives and mothers and they (especially liberal types) just aren’t reproducing. The whole fertility issue (for countries like Japan and South Korea as well as Western whites) would make an interesting post, but not sure if it easily fits the ideological bent of this site.
King:
It doesn’t take a genius to see that what accepted academia is doing to race (i.e., ignoring and trying to explain away obvious differences) is not “science”. The Bell Curve, for instance, doesn’t need to address possibilities re: evolution to make valid observations about the society we now live in. I hear Gould referenced a lot, but he’s clearly a communist charlatan and his book simply seeks to discredit, rather than offering up any concrete evidence for persistent differences. For instance, why isn’t it possible to find any city in the world with significant sample sizes where blacks and/or Hispanics will perform equally with or better than whites on an overall basis? Not one.
It’s weird how people from the same continent seem to look a lot more like each other than people who grew up in similar environments, e.g., someone from African hill country looks a lot more like Africans from the valley than he does someone from Tibet.
A:
In 2000-2007, Hispanics and Blacks got all kinds of home loan approvals. Didn’t work out great for them. Trying to use white racism to explain persistent black poverty everywhere in the world just doesn’t fly with me. Why don’t people in Latin America, Asia or the Middle East buy into this thinking for instance (oh that’s right, they’ve also been brainwashed by the all powerful whites). It pretty much prevents looking at any other possible causes or explanations. Under this line of thinking, everything is white people’s fault and blacks and other people of color are literally powerless to do anything to help themselves.
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I don’t see this… I really don’t. Science pretty much notices the differences between peoples. Its just that the differences have not amounted to widely different “breeds.” The variations simply are not enough to warrant that.
The Bell Curve is quite steeped in evolutionary theories of human development. So you disagree with the evolutionary foundation of the book, yet still manage to remain trusting of its conclusions. Fascinating! I’ll keep it short, but suffice to say that the methodology used to support Herrnstein and Murray’s theories was hopelessly flawed on many levels. If you care to update your knowledge on a book that has been thoroughly rejected and disproven for decades now, do read Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve and also “Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth.” both have been published since the the mid 1990s.
That is far to general a question. You’re basically asking me to write a book. First, the statement is not absolute, and we’d have to address the criteria. But also we’d have to assume that “performing equally” is the same as being equal. I think I would have to answer you more fully later.
Hmmm… Well, maybe I should ask you what you mean? Do you think that Africans look alike? If so, can you tell me what particular features look similar?
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@ Kiwi
This is all one tremendous living example of the Title Thread. 🙂
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@Kiwi,
You basically highlighted why I felt it strange to liken human interbreeding to selective dog breeding. Humans are all mongrels and widely interbred. We would have to selectively breed humans for many generations before we would ever approach anything resembling a dog or cat breed.
And as I said, some commenters are drawn to posts with their name on it like bees to honey (or in this case, like flies to dead rotting organisms.)
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King:
These so called “scientists” will lose their livelihoods if they challenge the equalist paradigm. That is the world we live in. Steve Sailer couldn’t get a normal job with any mainstream publication.
So, yes, your views are the mainstream in the West. However, they are ridiculous on their face and are an historical anomaly.
Galileo may have also been “willfully ignorant” if he understood the teaching of the church re: the planets, but failed to heed it, because he thought the data disproved this, despite what everyone around him said.
Google pygmies’ wikipedia and check out the picture of an English explorer surrounded by them. Looks very similar to the dog picture you posted above.
Re: my question to you, I had meant to say “standardized test scores” (but you can pick income, crime rates, etc.). Why are all standardized tests, no matter what language or place, etc., biased in favor of whites, but especially East Asians and YKW, and against Blacks and Hispanics? And why does supposed intelligence as measured by these tests correlate so strongly to various life results? If there is no city anywhere where this is not the case, then how can we ever expect that there could be anything approaching equality? Abagond is apparently waiting for the Flynn effect to propel blacks to parity with whites. If that can happen great, but wouldn’t you expect that there would be at least one city (with a decent sample size) where we could prove this?
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But the bootstrap myth does exist, most successful immigrants are Nigerians.
90% of African immigrants are successful.
Over-representation of Africans in politics, even have a black president.
Economic situation keeps getting better for black people despite interestingly enough their being less specifically black business’es and black ownership of land.
Though maybe that’s the inevitable result of success; growth means change, movement and taking in more from the outside.
It you want to stay a “pure” culture you can only succeed so much and ultimately stagnate…..maybe that’s why white people are so prone to “cultural appropriation”.
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This is all neither here nor there. You blindly believe in a worldview in which
– All the major universities in the world are lying
– All of the major scientific associations on earth are lying
– All of the leading scientists in the field are lying
If such a world really existed, it would be difficult to believe in Science at all, wouldn’t it? I mean, if that much was wrong with the system, then how could you believe anything from it? Yet, as I pointed out above, you are just fine using science selectively when you think it makes a point that you might agree with.
And then people like Steve Sailer (who’s actual degrees are in economics and marketing) somehow becomes Galileo! Do you realize how stupid that sounds?
Are Pygmies a race? So we now have Caucasians, Mongoloids, Negroids and.. Pygmies? Oh, I almost forgot Hispanicoids. How many Races does that make?
I’ll have to answer this along with your other question later.
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What is the mental disorder? “psychopathic racial personality”? If so, he is not the only one. We have a whole army of them.
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@ biff
Galileo was not in any way being wilfully ignorant or obtuse. He thoroughly understood the arguments of those who opposed him, in the Church and in the universities, and cut them to pieces. The very reason they had to ban his books!
You, on the other hand, when presented with A’s account of the cause of racial inequality, dismiss the cause because it was in the past. Wow.
Galileo was a scientist. Your style of thinking, on the other hand, is that of pseudoscience. You start with conclusions and find the evidence that supports it. It is almost a textbook case, complete with the Galileo reference and your inability to name any current scientist working in the relevant field, not even a true Galileo counterpart. Your racism is on a level with ancient astronauts and creationism.
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“You start with conclusions and find the evidence that supports it.”
No, unfortunately, the opposite is true in this case. I was raised as an equalist and wanted to believe it was true. Experience and observation changed my thinking.
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O.K. biff so why aren’t Blacks flourishing in the same way as Whites?
Well let’s begin in the U.S. Of course, there was slavery. But few White people care to understand some of the longer-term effects of slavery and beyond.
Imposed racial inferiority complex Whites have imposed the idea upon both Blacks and Whites tin the U.S. that Black people are inferior, from slavery to this day. Even when resisted, this kind of brainwashing has an effect on people’s self confidence and success.
Miseducation Of course, during slavery, the education of Blacks was illegal—unlike in most places in the world where the education of a capable slave was seen as a sound investment. But In all the years following slavery, Blacks were given a far inferior education than Whites. Beginning with laws that first separated children by race and later by economic manipulations that accomplished the same end. If you don’t educate people they will not succeed. And the coup de grâce is to then pretend that Black people themselves are the ones who don’t value education, and that it had nothing to do with what White people did over the course of centuries.
Pressures upon the Black Family Of course, the ultimate warping of a culture is to attack it’s families. Slavery treated humans like unfeeling cattle and sold wives away from husbands and children away from their mothers. Sometimes slaves were not allowed to have real marriages, but were simply bred like animals. But even after slavery, Black men were often not given the means or opportunity to support their families. Black women typically made more money as maids, housekeepers and cooks, than Black men could as day laborers. This had ongoing and profound effects on Black marriages and the erosion of Black families at higher rates than that of Whites.
But that is just the beginning. Each of these developments have had long-term generational effects on How Blacks do in America. None of them is theoretical. There is no question that all of these things actually happened in America. If we had just these examples it would be enough to begin to understand why Blacks are not doing as well as Whites educationally and financially. But of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more to come.
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King:
I’ve heard all these and more. Doesn’t pass the smell test, given that it is not just in the U.S. East Asians and (Ashkenazi) Jews have been through a lot in the last century (in many cases at the hands of whites), but still manage to put up gaudy IQ numbers. I just don’t believe that every single black community on earth was irreperably damaged by white injustice.
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Wait for the rest, biff.
And at least acknowledge that these things actually did happen. That they were done to Blacks by White American society and that they doubtlessly would have had profound effects. I only began with the U.S. but we must be honest about the legacy of racism in the U.S. before we can move forward.
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King:
Let me put it another way. The differences in testing are so consistent and pervasive that it can’t be the result of specific mistreatment. If that were the case, we would expect to see a lot of variety, with some cases of near parity in mixed communities (with reasonable sample sizes). We don’t.
This is really basic. If there are physical differences (i.e., fastest sprinters and best long distance runners almost all being black), isn’t it possible that there could be mental differences? We can discuss what those are and what that means for society, etc.
But, if you can’t even get there, we’re probably both wasting our time with this discussion.
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You’re getting way ahead of yourself biff. You ask very big questions, and they take time to answer. I’m attempting to do that, but I can only type so fast.
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As I said, if you can’t even get to the step where you can acknowledge possible differences, we are wasting our time.
However, feel free to write down your answer for your own edification. I’m sure you could write an infinite number of pages about all the bad stuff white people have done which has caused blacks and other POC (exluding people of East Asian ethnicity) to have permanent IQ decreases for themselves and their offspring.
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@ biff
The smell test? Really?
According to your precious IQ tests the average IQ of Jamaica is like 71. Only a straight-up racist could believe in a test like that.
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I noticed that IQ test play a big role in the US. Not only among racists, but in the general discussion about education. That is very different from Germany and always baffles me. Does anybody know how important they are in other countries?
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@ Biff
Wow. Both King and A give you the history, or enough of it, but that still does not stop you from saying idiotic stuff like this. You are pretty much putting your fingers in your ears and going “LAH LAH LAH DON’T HEAR YOU!”
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Kartoffel
Please do elaborate. I am interested in further knowing.
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Biff
Yes. From a white purity standpoint. However, I’m still spreading my genes (though obviously I can’t know whether my sons will have kids). A larger issue is the destruction of the traditional family unit. Western white women are not being raised and educated to be good wives and mothers and they (especially liberal types) just aren’t reproducing.
By eck. You really dont like ‘strong’ women and by that, I mean women who have an opinion do you lol. These are the very women who keep homes going, the women behind the successful men etc. Not some timid bird who wouldnt say boo to a goose. You must really find these women intimidating, so much that you would rather have offspring that are not considered white which for you must cause a lot of inner conflict.
This was lifted from another thread by another commenter and was not aimed at you or this discussion in anway shape or form but it is significant I thought it you think about what todays women want:-
any way, i was just thinking about this post because of how effeminate and wimpish men have become. i was thinking back to my grandfather’s era and men were so much more manly back then it seems. They looked manly and they acted like men. Granted they were mostly all in the military because of second world war so no doubt that had an influence, but men today…arrrgh.
but it got me thinking about your intital response in this post and you know what, I think you want people to just accept their lot in life and try to tell them that they are not really so hard done by (even though not so deep down you dont really believe that ). Because you cant cope with discord, it scares you a lot. You sound like a reasonably intelligent person so I dont believe you actually really think the absolute b0lloxs you say on here at times. You’re another commenter who is running scared, like that david guy who puts stuff on here.
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@ sharina
I hoped somebody else would eloberate, because I don’t understand the issue. I just noticed that Americans often talk seriously about IQ scores (or am I mistaken?). That is definitly not the case in Germany. IQ tests are considered a joke, you do them so you can brag about a high score. But I have never heard anybody base a serious argument on it.
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@Kartoffel
Sorry then I misunderstood. I live in the US and I am not sure either. I view it as a bragging right as well, but not something to take extremely serious.
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Okay I always viewed biff’s post as creepy, but have I just not been paying any attention to them. I am really a bit surprised at the current arguments he is putting forth.
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@Sharina,
I think that there is some attitude or viewpoint in the USA that believes that intelligence is innate or genetic, and can be measured by IQ or aptitude tests.
Other places have testing, but the viewpoint is that they do not measure IQ or aptitude, but knowledge and competency, which is something you can actually study for, or be trained to succeed at. That also is not always 100% ideal either, as students focus more on passing tests based on theoretical problems, rather than on actual real-life problem solving.
But in the end, the belief in the second case is that succeeding academically depends more on study and training than purely on aptitude.
Just maybe … the focus on IQ and aptitude in the USA helps to fuel race based education channeling, that certain students naturally have less (or more) aptitude and get tracked into different programs. It also helps to reinforce segregation in otherwise desegregated schools.
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Some people are drawn to posts with their name on it like moths to a flame.
Some of those moths end up getting burnt.
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@Jefe
Thank you for explaining.
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I think this is part of what Abagond means when he talks about being “willfully obtuse.” It is the tendency of Whites to ask accusatory questions about the inferiority of Black culture, and yet lack the patience or inclination to even wait for the answers.
The fact is that some of the reasons are complex and multi-faceted. If someone asked me why most Americans live in cities today it would take time to explain that this has not always been the case, how and why it changed, and over what period of time.
You are asking about a global observation that can’t just be explained in two paragraphs. But you don’t seem to really want the answer. You’re looking for some kind of sound bite that can explain everything in a few sentences. The problem is that your way of not allowing thorough answers means that the conversation can not be methodical. We simply jump from accusation to accusation without ever getting the larger picture. But some things NEED the larger picture in order to be properly explained.
Here is an example:
No, actually its not. It’s quite complex when you take the time to really look at it.
No, because what you are saying doesn’t make sense. So, lets put the running shoe on the other foot for a minute. Let’s say that all of the fastest runners in the world came from western Poland, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. Should I then conclude that fast running is a European racial feature? So Frenchmen, the English, Italians, Swedes are all fast runner because people with light-colored skin in Bulgaria are fast sprinters? This now proves that ‘White People” have a fast running gene?
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@ biff (continuing…)
But the system of White Supremacy continued to operation profound ways to assist and elevate Whites and to deny and subjugate Blacks.
In the early years of the 20th Century wealth was distributed among very few in the U.S. population and there was a lot less wealth in the Country as a whole. But during the last century the wealth of the common citizen skyrocketed as the economy shifted from agrarian to industrial and as populations shifted from rural to urban/suburban.
As the industrial base of the U.S. grew, it attracted workers from the farm belt, the western ranches, and the fishing towns. These workers moved to the cities and clustered around the plants and factories where they worked. The vast majority of people rented flats and small houses owned by the wealthy. In cases where workers were able to buy houses, they were typically quite small, and located in working class neighborhoods where the equity did not appreciate dramatically.
Then World War II came along and this changes American society and economics dramatically in it’s aftermath.
The GI Bill
Once the soldiers came home from the war, they were rewarded with the G.I. Bill which allowed veterans to attend college with government subsidized tuition. This helped both Black and White soldiers but of course had a MUCH bigger effect on Whites. Firstly because Blacks were not allowed into the armed forces other than service rolls for most of the war. Therefore there were a lot less Black servicemen in the first place.
But even for those few Black soldiers who did return from the war, it was more difficult to take advantage of the GI Bill.
Not to say that SOME Blacks did not benefit educationally and that some doors were certainly open that had been firmly shut before. But there is no denying that Whites benefitted from the GI Bill to a FAR greater extent than Blacks were ever allowed to, because of White prejudice.
To make a long story short,suffice to say that the same discrimination was evident with the Veteran’s Home Financing arm of the bill. Banks simply would not make loans to Blacks. They considered all Black people to be a bad risk regardless of service, background or achievement. So Whites became homeowners while most Blacks still remained renters and were shut out from accumulating real estate wealth.
Now as it turns out, real estate accounts for nearly 80% of all personal wealth in America. So when you shut people out of buying a house, you have shut them out of a chance to move from working class to middle or even upper class. You have designated one class of people to succeed
– not because of their hard work
– Not because they have better habits
– not because they value education more
– not because they obey the law more stringently
– Not because they have better family values
– Not because they have better genes
but because one race has gamed the system and loads the deck in favor of their own, and stacked the cards against those who don’t look like them. REGARDLESS OF THE FACT THAT BLACKS HAD TO PAY THE SAME TAXES AS WHITES DID.
So why do Whites have higher rates of education and more wealth? Answer: Mostly because they stole it by using unfair policies to take from others for their own benefit.
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Biff
I know this might be hard for you to comprehend since your type are usually as anti-Semitic as you are anti-black but Ashkenazi Jews like all Jews are (wait for it)………White.
That means even in the most openly anti-Semitic areas of pre-civil rights America (think Five Points in NYC) a Jewish man could simply change his name from Klein to Smith & be more or less done with white folks bullshit. That same option was & is obviously not available to us.
Your “Super Asian” theory still falls flat & I gave you the answer in an earlier comment as to why that is. Southeast & East Asians are more or less genetically identical & to the ignorant such as yourself physically so. Yet the rates of poverty, wealth, Iq, & education differ vastly between these 2 regions & from country to country within them.
I’ve already pointed out the totalitarian state of North Korea, the sock puppet proto-colony status of Taiwan & the rural majority of Mongolia as reasons to show that your idea of East Asians being superior based on biased Western & White Supremacists standards is ridiculous. An average is just that, an average, not a whole number. So even if East Asians have a higher Iq on average it still doesn’t break the numbers down into sub-groups, trends & clusters. The types you would get if you judged the Iqs of different East Asians based on economic background, ethnic group, country etc. Do you honestly believe Hmong people from the hills of South China have identical Iq’s to people from the uber-capitalist Hong Kong? Do you think the village dwelling Burakumin have identical Iqs to the educated & fast moving people of Tokyo?
Even better tell us what your accredited geneticist’s who you’ve yet to name give you on the biological differences between them. I asked you this question earlier & you failed to answer it so lets expand & have another go;
Please explain to me & with detail the genetic difference between North & South Koreans that leads one group to thrive in different countries all over the world & one to stay imprisoned & disenfranchised in one? The genetic difference between the aforementioned Burakumin & ethnic Japanese? The genetic difference between Koreans in the diaspora who thrive & Koreans in Japan who struggle mightily? The genetic difference between Hmong & ethnic Chinese? It couldn’t be oppression……could it?
This is why I can only Lol to people like you and your arguments because they don’t stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny or exploration. Your literally putting the willfully in willfully obtuse. I, like Jefe, King, Kiwi & Abagond am still waiting patiently on those geneticists who prove black & brown inferiority but I have a strong feeling we won’t get a single name. Just a hunch is all.
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Abagond my comment is stuck in moderation, did I violate a rule? My apologies if so.
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The GI Bill: one of the loopholes they had to put in to get support from White southerners was to make it locally administered. That allowed Blacks to be largely shut out in certain parts of the country, just like with the right to vote.
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@ A
Your comment seems to be okay. There are certain harmless-seeming words I moderate to catch trolls.
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Wow, waking up to at least a 6 on 1. And I have stuff I need to do with my family, so no way I can respond to all.
abagond, re: certain harmless seeming words, seems there is no way to use the t word for instance, which is only a part of white t@@@@. It would be nice to have a list of harmless seeming words that are separately moderated, e.g., I can’t say refer to my b*ys, so I have to say my sons.
King, I promise you. I’ve heard these things before. If it were all societal, you absolutely would see certain regions that shook the trend, but you don’t. You can’t name a single city with a reasonable large sample size where that is the case.
Now I’m being asked to supply info re: geneticists? I thought, per the title of this post, all I was supposed to have to show was that I really believe in racial differences, and am not just being “willfully obtuse”. As I’ve said, many people on the other side would view you guys as being willfully obtuse and believe that deep down most POC actually believe in HBD.
King, if you think the only differences between Africans and Europeans is skin pigment, you haven’t looked into this. Research muscle types and composition. They do vary by ethnic groups. The events different countries win at the Olympics are pretty consistent. You seem to believe this is a coincidence… really the first time I’ve met someone like that.
I can provide a list of reviews of a Troublesome Inheritance, a recent book by the former science writer for the NYT documenting the reality of race. There are a lot of positive/or largely positive reviews, and a lot of the negative attacks are against Wade’s speculative portion of the book, not the main section where he notes racial differences generally. 100 scientists wrote a letter condemning his book. He doubts that most of them even attempted to read his book and believes the issues were political. Here is an excerpt from one of his letters defending his work:
“The issue is how best to sustain the fight against racism in light of new information from the human genome that bears on race.
My belief is that opposition to racism should be based on principle, not on science. If I oppose racism and discrimination as a matter of principle, I don’t care what the science may say because I’ll never change my position. As it happens, however, the genome gives no support to racism, although it does clearly show that race has a biological basis, just as common sense might suggest.
Many social scientists, on the other hand, have long based their opposition to racism on the assertion that there is no biological basis to race. I doubt they personally believe this and suspect that they oppose racism on principle, just as I do. But they believe that other people, less enlightened and intelligent than they, will not abandon racism unless told that everyone is identical beneath the skin. So whenever someone points out that race is obviously biological, defenders of the social science position respond with attacks of whatever vehemence is necessary to get the inconvenient truth-teller to shut up.
For many years this tactic has been surprisingly effective. It takes only a few vigilantes to cow the whole campus. Academic researchers won’t touch the subject of human race for fear that their careers will be ruined. Only the most courageous will publicly declare that race has a biological basis. I witnessed the effects of this intimidation during the 10 years I was writing about the human genome for The New York Times. The understanding of recent human evolution has been seriously impeded, in my view, because if you can’t study the genetics of race (a subject of no special interest in itself), you cannot explore the independent evolutionary histories of Africans, East Asians and Europeans.
The attacks on my book come from authors who espouse the social science position that there is no biological basis to race. It is because they are defending an ideological position with a counterfactual scientific basis that their language is so excessive. If you don’t have the facts, pound the table. My three Huffington Post critics — Jennifer Raff, Agustín Fuentes and Jonathan Marks — are heavy on unsupported condemnations of the book, and less generous with specific evidence.
Despite their confident assertions that I have misrepresented the science, which I’ve been writing about for years in a major newspaper, none of these authors has any standing in statistical genetics, the relevant discipline.”
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Here’s the link. I suspect it will get this post in moderation, so I include it separately.
There are quite a number of positive reviews. Many by scientists. However, as noted above, to endorse these views publicly can be ruinous to a career.
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biff spelled backwards is ffib.
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Hearing something is not the same as understanding it.
I was going to talk about Africa next.
Well I can’t be sure what you mean when you say “the trend.” What would be the exact parameters for breaking the trend. in your view?
But to speak in general, there are certainly plenty of Blacks who are educated and successful, if that is what you mean. Why are you focused on regions instead of people? Please elaborate.
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Kiwi said: “East Asian and Jewish IQ: Not mentioned by biff is that Japanese-Americans and Jewish-Americans have suffered drastic decreases in IQ by the third and fourth generation, even among those that are not mixed race. But I’m sure he will attribute these IQ changes to genetics, anyway”.
Though I am not particularly interested in engaging in engaging in lengthy debates with you, I would be interested in reading your cite for this. As you know, Japanese Americans in the U.S. are largely descendants of imported laborers to Hawaii, so their average IQ would likely be a little lower than Japan’s average. Also, not sure about the selection pressures for the minority who didn’t intermarry after 4 generations. As for YKW, they seem to be doing just fine in U.S. society, so I’m not aware of any huge decrease in their IQs, though the testing for Ashkenazi average does seem to vary between 107-115.
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King:
The trend of blacks testing lower than whites. Of course there are individual blacks who test better than individual whites. However, you can’t name one city in the world where blacks or Hispanics test better than (or equal) to whites. That pretty clearly demonstrates that this difference is not just environmental.
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Biff you stated
“However, you can’t name one city in the world where blacks or Hispanics test better than (or equal) to whites”
You also can’t name a country that Whites, Blacks & Hispanics all inhabit where White Supremacy isn’t present either. Not sure why you would leave that little tidbit out.
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Kiwi said: “But you don’t even like Asian men.”
Dude, back off. I’m seriously not into you or other men, Asian or otherwise, that way.
As for the article, yeah I do remember reading that now. Doesn’t mention a huge IQ drop off, just academic drive. Not sure what bearing it has on black/ white differences or global patterns.
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ROFL!!!
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Actually it doesn’t.
Historically, White American banks, realtors, businessmen and politicians maneuvered Blacks into living within their own ethnic enclaves—denying them access to buy or rent in other areas. it wasn’t until the Fair Housing provisions within the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that it became possible for Blacks to live where they desired and could afford. Of course, it took many more years for the actual housing practices to catch up with the letter of the law.
So something new began to occur. Today if a Black person goes to university, he or she will doubtless be surrounded by people of every hue and nationality. What’s more, if they work for a large corporation, they will very likely continue to be surrounded by many different ethnicities. So when they go out to buy a house, most Black college graduates do not go specifically looking for a place where they must be surrounded by other Black people. Blacks feel free to move into mixed neighborhoods that sort themselves more by income than by race.
So, if you are asking why there is not some high concentration of Blacks all living together in a single place so that you can have a statistic of Blacks doing better than Whites in one particular spot, then the answer is that it doesn’t work like that anymore. Blacks are only about 12.5% of the U.S. population, and when dispersed throughout pluralistic neighborhoods, we are not going to present you with a single regional example.
But, as I said before, many Blacks have achieved and tested well as individuals. And it takes time. The Civil Rights marchers are not even all in their graves yet and you expect for the centuries of systematic abuse and under-education to be already remedied. So why aren’t Blacks testing at the same or higher rates than Whites? Give it time.
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@ Kiwi Lol!!
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@ Kiwi
I think we’d have to see a study specifically dealing with Blacks who graduate from university, and especially those who go on to work in the corporate world. I would expect to still see large concentrations of Blacks together, but the trend would be that the more materially successful, the more likely that they would live in a location where money makes more of a difference than skin color.
I don’t know any successful Blacks these days who are asking, “Where is the Black version of Beverly Hills?” They generally just move to Beverly Hills.
But I’ll read your sources and investigate. Thanks!
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@ biff
As for Troublesome Inheritance, your book by Nicholas Wades, it is yet another example of a non-geneticist trying to overthrow the conclusions of the entire collective work of REAL GENETICISTS worldwide. Its as if a proctologist suddenly decided to write a book denouncing the Theory of Relativity in his spare time. I’m sure that those who have an axe to grind with ‘the Jew’ Einstein might seize on the opportunity to denounce his work. And when all the physics professors, researchers, and theorists, began pointing out how our proctologist had misconstrued the science, Einstein haters everywhere would point out that they were only being ‘politically correct’ because Einstein was a Jew! If Jews didn’t control everything then Einstein’s theories would clearly be abandon! That is why the entire world of physics is dismissing the hard work of our intrepid proctologist! Give me a break.
When evaluating this kind of ‘ground breaking work’ that overthrows all of the conclusions of the entire field of scientific consensus, I consider the following:
1) Does the author even have a background in the field he is writing about?
2) Has the author actually done supervised field work in this field
3) Have the author’s conclusions been peer-reviewed by others in the field?
4) If conclusions are drawn from the work of others, do the originators of that work agree with the second-hand conclusions drawn from their data.
5) Was the work presented to fellow scientists or was it immediately sold for profit to the untrained public?
How did you put it? I don’t think this passes the smell test…
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@ King
Awesome link! Thanks!
Nicholas Wade, just like Biff, ignores the arguments of others, dismissing them as politically motivated, as if he himself is politically unbiased.
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@ Abagond
Agreed! Wades responses have been all been made under the theory that being against the vast majority of scientific consensus can only be proof that he is a political martyr.
He doesn’t really address the science of the criticisms in a straightforward way.
Click to access biological-races-in-humans.pdf
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@kiwi
“Are you still looking for your “geneticists” or are you booking tickets for your family trip to the Creation Museum?
I’ll help:
http://creationmuseum.org/plan-your-visit/“—
ROFL!!!
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King:
So, wait. I am trying to show that people in academia can’t publicly challenge equalism, and I have a quote from the former science editor of the NYT showing how he was attacked and his opinion of the nature of that attack and the lack of qualification of his 3 attackers.. and you provide a link to one of those attackers citing the letter I referenced?
Wow… shocking.
Wade further said of the letter. “This letter is driven by politics, not science. I am confident that most of the signatories have not read my book and are responding to a slanted summary devised by the organizers”.
Now, maybe Wade is delusional and/or lying, but many of his attackers (those who know Wade personally) admit that he is actually a nice, honest type of guy… hmmm so why would he say that?
But put yourself back in Galileo’s shoes? Why was he attacked? Does the overwhelming force of the attack make it correct?
Anyway, the list of 50+ largely positive reviews of Wade’s book I provided, including from James Watson, Nobel prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA, isn’t good enough for you guys because you don’t think the credentials are impressive enough, even as I have shown why people in the establishment (with the relevant credentials) would be extremely reluctant to openly support Wade…
so, whatever..
and you still can’t provide the name of one city with blacks or hispanics performing similarly with whites. Doesn’t need to be a 90% black city… even a 20% black city where the schools have discovered that black students test equally well as whites. Since even successful blacks are forced to live with poorer whites (as has been noted above), you’d think it would be easy to find examples where their children perform at least equally well as whites, but you can’t. Not one. If there is no progress after 50 years, how long do we have to wait? 500 years? 1000 years?
Why does any of this matter? Well, just because the policies being persued are making the U.S. more divided and stratified and will not even achieve their stated goals of making the U.S. a more just, equal place.
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^Which leads us back to my criteria:
1) Does the author even have a background in the field he is writing about?
2) Has the author actually done supervised field work in this field
3) Have the author’s conclusions been peer-reviewed by others in the field?
4) If conclusions are drawn from the work of others, do the originators of that work agree with the second-hand conclusions drawn from their data.
5) Was the work presented to fellow scientists or was it immediately sold for profit to the untrained public?
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Anyone can build a bubble around their pet theories by simply claiming that the opposition has impure motives. I’ve already said as much above.
“Its as if a proctologist suddenly decided to write a book denouncing the Theory of Relativity in his spare time. I’m sure that those who have an axe to grind with ‘the Jew’ Einstein might seize on the opportunity to denounce his work. And when all the physics professors, researchers, and theorists, began pointing out how our proctologist had misconstrued the science, Einstein haters everywhere would point out that they were only being ‘politically correct’ because Einstein was a Jew! If Jews didn’t control everything then Einstein’s theories would clearly be abandon! That is why the entire world of physics is dismissing the hard work of our intrepid proctologist! “
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@ biff
Wow. Did you even READ this page that King linked to:
People whose work Wade builds on are against him, saying that Wade is twisting their research. And these people are actual geneticists. Does that not concern you at all??!!!
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^The perfect example of being “Willfully Obtuse.” I ask you, how could it better be demonstrated???
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abagond:
Scientists create papers, etc. Other people use them. The original authors don’t control this. If Wade specifically mis-quoted them, they haven’t pointed it out.
The second half of Wade’s book is largely speculative. He acknowledges that. It’s not surprising that people could disagree with those conclusions.
What he is saying is that the letter condemning him is mostly political and ideological. I believe this because I experienced it first hand while at elite schools for many years.
King:
I think Wade’s background gives him a unique ability to synthesize information from different fields. Comparing him to a proctologist is pretty ridiculous. Maybe he wasn’t qualified to work for Nature, Science or the NYT during his 50 year career, either.
The faculties of Colleges/Universities in the West are dominated by leftists. If you believe they don’t think of advancing their ideological agendas as one of the main goals of the “education” they provide, you haven’t got a clue.
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biff, HIS BACKGROUND DOES NOT QUALIFY HIM TO DISREGARD THE COLLECTIVE CONCLUSIONS OF THE ENTIRE FIELD OF GENETICS!
What you are saying is that the only guy who has the truth about genetics is the guy who doesn’t have a degree in genetics. Are you REALLY this deluded????
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King, we disagree. I don’t think degrees themselves are worth much. I think many fields are corrupted by leftism/politics, including “genetics”, “evolution”, etc.
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King:
If I showed you what leading scientists said 50-100 years ago re: race, guess what? You would claim they were all corrupted by their predjudices. Why is it hard for you to believe that could be the case today. Because it’s the present and these things just don’t happen anymore?
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Wow. Just wow…
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If you really feel like that then I cannot see why you don’t simply reject modern science as a authoritative source. I mean, in any field, the people studying a hundred yeas ago might have had the correct conclusions.
But you seem to think that you can accurately navigate which parts of modern science are corrupt and politicized and which parts are true and correct. Do you truly not see the slippery slope of this argument?
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King, if you have a working brain and open your eyes it’s not that hard.
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The fact that there is not a single Black city on a hill that is currently outperforming White cities is proof to you that Blacks are genetically inferior academically.
Yet the fact that there is not a single geneticist on a hill who endorses racial genetics as valid is NOT proof of the inferiority of your views.
Fascinating!
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As I have explained above, Blacks do not necessarily flee to color coded enclaves as they once had to do. So, successful Blacks may be part of any neighborhood or school district in 2014.
But the wheels of progress do turn slowly. There are still some vestiges of the old ‘separate but equal’ affluent Black neighborhoods around. But they still are likely not to give you the kind of block data that you think would prove the point because it is almost never as simple as you seem to think it is.
Take Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles. The neighborhood is 78.5% African American, is low crime and high income. Residents have included Tom Bradley, Ray Charles, Michael J. Fox, Jimmy Pardo, John Singleton, Tina Turner and Nancy Wilson.
So, is Baldwin Hills the city that finally outperforms Whites? Well, no… because even though it has a population of about 33,000, it is only about 3 square miles and is part of South Los Angeles. So their numbers get mixed in with all the residents of Los Angeles.
But what if we just had a look at their school district? Well, the way that Baldwin Park’s school district is zoned, it includes the poorer land tracts down the hill, so again, the higher testing numbers are diluted. Add to this the fact that like most rich people, the Blacks of Baldwin Hills mostly send their kids to private schools (in this case out of their neighborhood) which further effects the local public school district’s numbers See the attached article.
http://hechingerreport.org/content/can-magnet-programs-lure-affluent-african-american-families-back-to-their-neighborhood-schools_13239/
So, even though there is a rather large concentration of Blacks who tend to test high and achieve academically, they are invisible to demographic test score radar because they are attending private school miles away in every direction.
Yet, if I was a White ‘race realist’ I would now be reporting to you how even rich Black kids perform very poorly according to the FACTS (= misconstrued data). You would be surprised to learn how often such misunderstandings like this happen… particularly when amateurs are trying to use the data to come to professionals conclusions.
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King,
I normally disregard posts dealing with IQ and Biff because it’s a theme that has been cooked, roasted, burned, flipped over and then re-marinated… I just can’t anymore.
But, I will say, “Hats off to you” (Kiwi and others)— you have presented your statements with such clarity and on point conciseness, that even a blind man could see.
but unfortunately, as the title of this posts states: the willfully obtuse like Biff is not here to see, he just wants to be heard
God Bless you for the time you have expended in order to educate the ignorant and educated “willful obtuse”.
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@ Linda
Thanks!
There are none so blind as they who will not see!
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@King: Brother,Hat tip to you i am just beyond amazed at your skill with blood clots that have the mindset like Biff and his ilk. Major Hat tip to you and Kiwi. Look up the word willfully obtuse and quite a few posters who’s names i won’t name, this topic fits them like a glove. SMDH.
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Biff
King, we disagree. I don’t think degrees themselves are worth much. I think many fields are corrupted by leftism/politics, including “genetics”, “evolution”, etc
Wait a minute. Havent you been trying to make the point on this and other threads that PoC are woefully behind their white counterparts and that this is measured by thing such as IQ’s and now you are saying one often essential part of academic measuring before going off in to the big wide world, a degree, is not worth much! Its like you are moving the goal posts and your inconsistency does not make your posts come across as lucid or reliable.
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A high five to King for taking the time to break things down. I admire your perseverance even when confronted by someone who has majored in the title of this post.
Good on ya
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thanks Mary… But Im sure that biff will be back with more nonsense as soon as he can find more explanations for the inexplicable.
Omnipresent, I don’t understand how if biff doesn’t believe in evolution how he manages to believe that Whites have somehow evolved beyond Blacks? Any real evolutionary scientist will tell you that the human race has not been around long enough for to support the kind of multiple race evolution that biff believes in. But if you don’t believe in evolution,in the first place, how do you get to the idea that races become superior or inferior to one another within a short a timeframe as 2000 years?
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Speaking of. Did someone run Randy off?
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Thank you King for pointing out the affluent Baldwin Hills neighborhood. I’d like to add in with them the neighboring communities of Ladera Heights, Leimert Park, View Park & the Fox Hills section of Culver City which combine to make one of the most affluent black sections of any major US city. Your point about the schooling distric issue of South LA is something a lot of people aren’t aware of. Racist policies see to it that Black children who live in neighborhoods wealthier than Beverly Hills go to school with kids from Watts, Compton, Inglewood etc.
Not that I want to come off as classist but the status quo is that the more wealth a neighborhood has the better the schools will be. Its got to be a shock to wealthy kids who HAPPEN to be Black leave million dollar homes in the morning on their way to school driving luxury cars & seeing inner city kids with far less. Some who are even in gangs & flag/wear colors/throw up sets to go along with it. Again, I don’t mean to come across as classist at all but White kids that lived in a rich neighborhood that happened to be adjacent to a poor neighborhood full of meth addicts & dealers would never have to deal with something equivalent.
Biff is going for the Gold with his obtuseness on this one, If I pointed out the also extremely affluent suburbs of Atlanta & DC he might have a heart attack. He says on one hand that Blacks are less intelligent but then says the opinion of geneticists with degrees from around the world matter less than a non-accredited or certified White Supremacist…..WTF?!
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King:
I don’t understand how if biff doesn’t believe in evolution how he manages to believe that Whites have somehow evolved beyond Blacks? Any real evolutionary scientist will tell you that the human race has not been around long enough for to support the kind of multiple race evolution that biff believes in. But if you don’t believe in evolution,in the first place, how do you get to the idea that races become superior or inferior to one another within a short a timeframe as 2000 years?
Whats that saying – The truth is stranger than fiction? I would say that part of being wilfully obtuse is that you have to have some ‘other’ reality that you understand.
Anyway, what you wrote will be there for a long while for others to chew on before they start in with the cr@p.
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@ Kiwi
Wow. Yet another glaring inconsistency that I missed. Great point!
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King, responding to biff is like farting in a wind tunnel, all you get is so much putrid air.
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@thwack
@gemgirl
in regards to your comments on the origin of science coming from white Europeans of primarily religious specifically christian background,
I have and am continuing to do research on this subject
however I would like put forward a tentative hypothesis to explain both the development of science coming from its precedent religion as well as the data that shows a good 30 to 40 percent of scientist still maintain religious beliefs.
1.its seems consistent with the general pattern of evolution that the early stages of our cognitive evolution with lacked both the resources as well as the ability to view and interpret
reality scientifically – meaning without reference to beliefs and ideas that are bias toward what we want and guess as opposed to science as its currently practiced ideally.
an analogy – around december especially on the 25 date two fictional magical white males are worshiped – one for children and one for adults
the adults tell a lie a fiction to their children knowing full well it is just a story ,a
fairy(another imaginary being) tale
they do it primarily to entertain as well as manipulate their children,
and primarily because most children lack the cognitive ability to comprehend and process more complex information about reality.
whereas the one for adults is actually believed by most adults for many of the same reasons – entertainment and manipulation due to the difficulty in comprehending and processing as well
as even accessing a more complex and in some aspects less entertaining explanation of reality.
As to the issue of a certain percentage of even scientist holding religious beliefs re gemgirls
comment that she/he does not see a contradict between belief in a deity and evolution,
I assert that this is due to the inherent nature of science – its like all its products – all the machines and devices we all use – does not depend on what you think about it just as your computer ,watch ,car etc does not care indeed does not even have the capacity to care what beliefs or ideas you have when you use it, you either use it according to the way it functions
or it does not work,same goes for science and the scientific method follow and apply it correctly regardless of whatever beliefs and ideas you have and it will produce certain results which may or may-not conflict with your beliefs.
and finally I commented that I thought it mind-boggling that someone like abagond indeed any catholic could remain a catholic not just in the face of the achievements of contemporary science
but as well due to the overwhelming “evidence” that having a male only leadership that specifically requires that its members reject sexuality for life ,is not only sexism but will inevitably lead to sexual pathologies.
Then after some recent study and thought I came to a conclusion that I think many atheist including some very famous ones fail to take in to account and which may explain my own experiences as a atheist scince childhood.
The conclusion is this – most religious people (the vast majority of our species by the way)
are not i repeat not persuaded by evidence or logic, objective evidence and logic is irrelevant indeed antithetical to religious belief.
Thus now I understand my sense of futility in trying to convince a religious person of the illogical nature of or lack of evidence for their beliefs ,that’s not how it or they work.
so having said this and reached these conclusions I consider my mind much less boggled;-/
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@ Herneith
Even so, every now and again you just need to cut the cheese. 😉
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Mbeti
@thwack
@gemgirl
in regards to your comments on the origin of science coming from white Europeans of primarily religious specifically christian background,
——————————————————————————————–
I never said the origin of science came from white Europeans; matter of fact, to the contrary they originated very little.
I credit them for the discovery and exploration of the abstract sciences and the resulting “explosion” of technology, inventions that resulted from it in the 17 century.
Islam had the lead but the way I understand the theology of the time; Islam considered God as so great as to be knowable only thru complete submission to his mystery. Using numbers, and abstractions to know the mind of God became associated with a kind of sorcery.
This type of thinking was not limited to Islam. Up until the 19 century theology was still considered the queen of the sciences in Europe and people like Newton, Kepler, Copernicus… had to be careful not to get accused of apostacy.
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@King, Kiwi, A, etc.
Sorry I am late to give you kudos. You guys did well.
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Thanks jefe, and thanks also to Kiwi and to A for their comments.
I think what is really sad is that I’m 100% sure that biff is already spinning in his own mind what happened here on this post. He will look back on this post as simply the day he decided that he had been casting his pearls before swine… and what was he really trying to accomplish, debating with these hopeless people who refuse to see the world through 100 year old science?
Of course, he will continue reeling and stumbling through life, making his dubious choices with all of his previous misconceptions still intact. We didn’t even get to Africa, the IMF and World Bank…. oh well.. not like he would have really listened anyway.
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I don’t think the foregoing discussion has fazed him one bit. He will go on believing what he believes, regardless of how self-contradictory it is. He probably just got tired of this thread (for the time being).
In any case, when lurkers stop by here in the future, they can witness the topic in action. This ended up being one of the better threads.
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If nothing else, it certainly now fully demonstrates the very art of being willful obtuse. (as I believe you were the first to point out upthread)
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@GR
Tell me you have never seen or heard white people (and this means “some” not “all”) do that in the USA all the time.
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speaking of IQ and educated people remaining “willfully obtuse” in order to keep the status quo
I found this article with John Katzman to be very interesting. John Katzman is the founder The Princeton Review and in his own words
“I taught America to beat the SAT. That’s how I know it’s useless.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/interviews/katzman.html
What does the SAT measure?
The SAT is a scam. It has been around for 50 years. It has never measured anything. And it continues to measure nothing. And the whole game is that everybody who does well on it, is so delighted by their good fortune that they don’t want to attack it. And they are the people in charge.
Because of course, the way you get to be in charge is by having high test scores. So it’s this terrific kind of rolling scam that every so often,
somebody sort of looks and says–well, you know, does it measure intelligence? No. Does it predict college grades? No. Does it tell you how much you learned in high school? No. Does it predict life happiness or life success in any measure? No. It’s measuring nothing. It is a test of very basic math and very basic reading skill. Nothing that a high school kid should be taking.
Is it an IQ test?
No.
Why isn’t it an IQ test?
It’s not an IQ test because it doesn’t measure IQ. It is used that way. And it was developed from the army IQ test. But even the College Board will refuse to say that this is an intelligence test. And I’d love to see them say it. I’d love to see them say anything because then you can attack it. But there’s this kind of mushy response that when you work your way through it, there’s sort of nothing left. Well, it has a slight predictive validity to freshman year grades in college. We spend a 100 million dollars a year for that? You know, your grades in high school predict college grades better than this and we didn’t have to spend anything.
The College Board originally marketed the SAT as an IQ, or aptitude, test.)
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George Ryder:
i once heard biff make an argument that there are entire nations where the populace as a whole has an average IQ of 70 (maybe that wasn’t the exact number, but it was along those lines).
i have no idea how he comes up with this stuff.
I have seen other people say it on this forum too, so dont be too hard on him, if his peers are saying it so it must be true musnt it. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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i have no idea how he comes up with this stuff.
He does so after smoking spliffs and drinking copious amounts of liquor.
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@Linda
Awesome source. Thanks for providing.
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So, what then CAN we do? Do we attempt to reach younger people before they are corrupted by society? Do we just stay silent around older white folks and their racism? I am honestly having an issue with how to deal with people on this matter, since so many sources give me conflicting information.
Some places on the web say we must confront bad behavior, so not to endorse it with our silence
But what is the point, if the racists won’t ever budge on the issue?
Obviously we need to focus on giving colored people a lift up, so they can be on equal footing with white people, and an increase in diversity in any career or public space would be incredibly good at allowing more interracial interactions, and thus work to undermine prejudice
But I feel like that isn’t enough. What has happened in the past that allowed white society to be less racist than it used to be in the 50s?
I know the end to segregation, and programs to end poverty, as well as prominent public figures bringing these conversations into the public attention, are enormous benefits that helped chip away at racism
But lately, I feel like we as a society has backslid. Or maybe I am more aware of this crap.
But I am not a public figure. I am an American expat moved to Finland…WTF can I even do? I want to blog about this so bad, but I feel annoyed at my inadequacy.
But then again, the internet has been such a great tool for education and social change, so maybe blogging is good enough for someone in a limited position such as myself?
I just cannot stay silent, while my own people are the ones who created this mess. i am responsible for helping to clean it up.
But I really really need someone more qualified than I to give me advice.
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@ Chantal
There is no one answer. Like most big questions, many people see the solution in many different ways. No one person is going to be “qualified” to tell you what you should do.
But people can, of course, give their personal advice or opinions. You must ultimately decide what you can and will do. You cannot personally fix this problem, centuries in the making. But you can do a small part, as we all can do.
In my own opinion, anti-racist pressure within the White culture has still not reached the point where it is truly effective. Too many Whites can retreat into their cultural enclaves and feel perfectly comfortable carrying on with racist speech and attitudes. It’s still too easy for Whites to see any criticism as being “political correctness” or “oversensitivity” or ethnic “whining.” More people within the White community challenging these actions would help. People of color can’t do that job.
And lastly, people of color can be wrong too. There is nothing magical about being Black that makes you automatically right about racism. Sometimes it ACTUALLY is “political correctness” or “oversensitivity.” You have to be prepared for non-Whites to be as flawed and fallible as Whites in some regards.
But if you want to make difference then you are, at least on the right track.
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@Chantal Sorrentino,
We need to teach and learn history.
Do you mean to say that you do not know the truth? Can you give an example of what you are confused about? There might be a post about it somewhere on this blog already.
If you learned history in the USA, they probably stopped at the era around 12-15 years before you were born, or about 30 years before high school. So, if you were born, say, in
1960 – it stopped with WWII and the Holocaust – However, some items might be absent (eg, the Japanese-American internment camps). Jim Crow is not discussed. Immigration exclusion laws based on race are not discussed.
1970 – It stopped with post war prosperity and baby boom, Brown v. board and Elvis Presley,
1980, you would learn a little about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the beginning of the Vietnam War, the repeal of segregation and the repeal of immigrant exclusion laws.
After 1990, it is OK to discuss the Japanese-American internment camps (by the time they enter High School).
1990 – You would learn about desegregation, Affirmative Action and the Cold war and the normalization of relations with China and the legalization of Abortion
2000 – You would learn about how America is now colour blind, and how the Cold War ended. You probably have already internalized the Model Minority and black thug stereotypes (as well as entitlement programs) promoted in the 1980s.
History that occurred before 30 years ago has been rewritten. History in the past 30 years is not taught. Where do you fit in?
So do you now know what replaced society’s racial hierarchical paradigm since the 1970s? What did you learn about the history of End Poverty programs in the USA?
Who might those people be?
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I notice this kind of willful ignorance in the comments section of the New York Times whenever the topic of white privilege comes up. None of the privileged white readers can be bothered to take 5 minutes and google white privilege. They keep raising the same objections of “I’ve been poor so I don’t have privilege” and can’t be bothered to google class privilege or intersectionality. The New York Times can’t be bothered to directly explain class privilege and intersectionality in its articles about white privilege. It seems that the mainstream media is willfully publicizing the concept of white privilege in a way designed to make whites aware of and disdainful of the term, trying to diffuse its power for people of color. You see the same crap going on on twitter with the #whiteprivilege.
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@Kiwi
To me it seems that a big reason for white people refusing to accept that white privilege exists is that they don’t want to admit that everything they are and have is based on lies (they wouldn’t have their job, their wealth, etc. without it).
Plus as others have written white people can’t stand allowing people of color to shape the dominant discourse in any way.
It’s disgusting though how they say crap like, “What about Asian privilege then?” I’ve even seen them talk about “Black privilege”. They’re trying to co-opt the term.
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@Kiwi,
We need to see Speak Out and Randy battle it out. 😛
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@thwack
Petie Oh
@thwack
Evolution is both knowable and testable,
————————————————————————————————–
really?
SPONTANEOUS GENERATION is both knowable and testable?
really?
You are no closer to getting life from non life than you were back in 1953.
White men with billions of dollars and the full faith and credit of the entire white supremacists system cannot intentionally reproduce an event they claim occurred by an accidental, purposeless, mindless, random process in the distant past?
WHY NOT?
(((shakin my head)))
I don’t know who’s ass to kick. Yours for talking sh*t you can’t back up, mine for responding to it; or your white slave masters for feeding you it in the first place.
——————————–
The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection =/= abiogenesis. I can’t believe no-one else corrected this.
As for ‘white men with billions of dollars…’, the hilarious attempt to insert racism into this gave me the biggest laugh of the day. I do hope you’re still not this ignorant thwack.
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@ Rook
Comment deleted for use of racial slurs and calls for violence.
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One of the worst bits of garbage I’ve read in awhile. What’s your excuse for other minorities flourish, but yours performing so poorly? White racism? The crucial forensic evidence supported Darren Wilson’s story completely, while complete discrediting the ‘hands up and he got shot for no reason’ bs. Have you ever heard of projection? Well, that’s you… projecting your ‘wilfully obtuse’ bullshit onto other people. You have a spin on everything, but you won’t look at any real evidence with any serious objectiveness whatsoever. I don’t even know why I bothered. There’s no getting thru to race baiting hate-filled low lives like yourself.
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@YeahNo
“One of the worst bits of garbage I’ve read in awhile.”–Then clearly you didn’t read your comment before submitting it.
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A good example of willfully obtuse would be the huge segment of the dominant culture refusing to grasp Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee protest is about and being stupid and burning their Nike gear just because they didn’t have any crosses handy to burn.
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@Sharina: HA! LOL, that was a good one. 😂
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@YeahNo
” One of the worst bits of garbage I’ve read in awhile. What’s your excuse for other minorities flourish, but yours performing so poorly? White racism?”
Yep.
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I have no idea why I ended up on this forum? But my bishop is being willfully obtuse, and not only did he not take it as an insult, he didn’t even know what I meant. That’s obtuse!
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This did not age well. Lol. If you chose the other side…then yes. But apparently the author chooses to be willfully obtuse in that regard.
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There once was a thug named Brown
He bum rushed Wilson with a frown
Six bullets later
He met his creator
And his homies burnt Ferguson down
Mike Brown was not innocent you fucking moron
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@ Lester
Your comment is a classic example of what it means to be wilfully obtuse.
Poor thing
LMBAO!!
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“They are too brainwashed. They are too far gone.”
no you me they we are not
its simply a power imbalance combined with limited intelligence and therefore options.
Example
Lester (highly probable a white American male)
posts a extremely insulting and therefore abusive comment to a obscure african american topics blog.
why?
the response
a regular commenter to this blog (due to name and content of comments highly probable a black american female)
indicates that lester’s comment is a classic example of what it means to be wilfully obtuse.
i disagree
I tink lester is very angry which means lester is is in pain, lester is hurt and has just committed a public irreversible error in judgement and responsibility.
why
because he can
and because he does not expect to suffer any immediate or long term consequence for his actions.
he does not have any valuation of the idea
that he should even consider dignity honor truth or restraint in dealing
with other members of his own species much less all of life.
but atlas it is with both pity and sorrow that I must own this
anger and hate
as a male
as a human
as a animal
as a biological organism – that did not choose to be in whatever this is
and will leave the same way
wanting pity filled with sorrow even if my end is just and necessary
but knowing at this point
that i will die never knowing how or why
but having a reasonable expectation that one day
the goal we all are forced to strive for
success and happiness
will be achieved for all
and we will know and understand why we are here
and choose how and when we leave.
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by the way way
who the f – sexual intercourse unfairly and harshly is
Kiwi ?
and where the f – sexual intercourse unfairly and harshly
are her comments?
and how do I just know its a female?
and i would never want to have sexual intercourse unfairly and harshly
that’s obviously very pathological behavior
however the fact that
most americans esp use the word without insight or reflection
may be indicative of pathological social outcomes.
not that Im above it
Im just capable insight reflection and restraint to a greater degree than other members of my species maybe
and in my judgment and deepest sexual fantasy
tenderness and consent equals love
and consideration is respect
notice how i didn’t say love is love
because no word can be used to define itself
anyway
is kiwi
another blunki phenomena?
I will make a prediction
if Im still alive and doing well;-)
in 5 years
how likely will it be that I know the
first and last name location alive or dead when and how picture and video
of every person that has ever commented on this blog?
also how important is that information?
and that five year thing
me becoming famous alive or dead just might accelerate that process
depending on how famous and when and why
the truth is inevitable.
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