| View previous topic :: View next topic |
Chad
In: Ramsbottom
|
|
 |
|
| Mick Harper wrote: | | Ah, God is a liberal...I had long suspected. |
No... he's definitely a racist bastard.
Notice how he delivers his wrath disproportionately.
Recent earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes... all seem to affect areas where the population has a high proportion of dark skinned individuals.
He's even holding back on the big one in California, until the Hispanic population has grown sufficiently to make it worth his while!
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Mick Harper wrote: | | Leon has defended his position by first of all denying the concept of race and, when that didn't avail, |
Here's a résumé of the refutations presented to this point against my assertion:
Leon, since it is...accepted...that intelligence has a genetic component, it follows that different genetic populations will have different intelligences.
...all the evidence demonstrates that the theory [that races don't exist] is nonsense.
This is the trouble with intelligence: One is able to convince oneself of even the most outrageous nonsense.
To deny the existence of races just because of the formidable difficulties of defining them seems perverse.
Using that analysis the different dog breeds don't exist either.
So will I [doubt that intelligence is genetically determined]. When Kangaroos do calculus.
There's only one person here suffering from hallucinations.
The only argument there is the one about dog breeds, which I've answered. Ishmael's crack about kangaroos is very clever, but we were talking about human beings.
As far as availing is concerned, I didn't expect to convince anyone, since 99% of the world's population is under the spell of the race notion (and yet Grant calls my position "orthodox" - a kind of knee-jerk reaction here at AE to disqualify whatever gets your hackles up). But I did expect some reasoned argument. (Chad offers some at a later point, but up to here, there's almost none.)
| denied the concept of intelligence. |
| we should be as sympathetic as possible, [Leon] hasn't had our advantages. |
Thank you so much, you dear aristocrat, for your sympathies. That's real white of you.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ishmael
In: Toronto
|
|
|
|
| Leon wrote: | | I asserted that intelligence is not mechanical and compartmentalised, not merely an academic ability, not confined to narrow intellectual analysis. |
Someone has moved my goalposts!
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ishmael
In: Toronto
|
|
|
|
| Leon wrote: | | As far as availing is concerned, I didn't expect to convince anyone, since 99% of the world's population is under the spell of the race notion... |
Only a liberal can graduate from an institution of higher learning believing 99% of everything 99% of his professors believed, having been congratulated and rewarded for the correctness of those beliefs among 99% of his peers -- and think himself one of the avant garde.
How do you stay awake with a head full of ideas so mundane?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
|
|
|
|
This is quite wrong. Anybody leaving university disbelieving as much as one per cent of what he had 'leant' would be a full-blown Applied Epistemologist within months. The whole point of academic 'disciplines' is that, like religious dogmas, you have to believe every jot and tittle. And for the same reason: doubting an authority figure about anything , however trivial, rapidly leads to (or requires in the first place) the capability of doubt, which leads to intellectual engagement (as opposed to dutifully taking notes), full blown heresy, burning at the stake, failing exams etc etc.
I invite anybody here to volunteer one example of dissension they acquired as undergraduates. I also invite anybody here to tell us they were not told on day one that the whole point of university (as opposed to school) was that they had to think for themselves.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Brian Ambrose
|
|
|
|
| Or do you think there's a chess gene and a running gene? |
There is certainly a running gene (something to do with the type of muscle you're born with, no amount of training from any age will get you it).
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Chad
In: Ramsbottom
|
|
|
|
| Or do you think there's a chess gene |
Absolutely.
I've got it... so has the guy out of Wallace and Gromit... Can't get enough of the stuff.
Oh... sorry... thought you said cheese.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In short, Mick, your sympathy is nothing but condescending arrogance.*
You have a point: you do have an advantage over me: you've been trained in concision of argument, you get to the point with greater facility (and you have more information at your disposal: while I've spent my life studying literature, you've devoted yourself to science). I'm working on it.
Nevertheless, what is perverse here is the equation: intelligence = (exclusively) intellectual acuity, or even more perversely, = IQ result.
*The same arrogance that allows you to state (in the Linguistics thread Flying Chaucers) that no final letter in French words, consonant and vowel, is pronounced unless it is followed by an e. You don't have a clue, but being a polymath genius, as you never tire of telling us, you think you know it all. You could have asked a Frenchman. My refutation of this absurdity is found on page 21 of that long abandoned thread, so I won't repeat it here.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It's all very well to say that you don't accept racist assumptions, but when everyone complacently agrees that the chaos in Africa is due to a lower-than-European/Jewish/Chinese average IQ, the focus is racist, whether you intend it or not. (If you're not with the racists, why are you camping out in their territory?)
And it implicitly denies the role that colonialism and postcolonial imperialism have had in the situation. Africa was not in a comparable state of chaos before the massive European occupations of the last half of the 19th century. In case anyone wants to object that it wasn't a paradise even then, I'm not saying that: I'm aware that there is no earthly paradise. In addition, I hope I won't be told that I should start a new thread in New Concepts because I'm not sticking to the subject (The Troy Game?), as if anyone else here could keep to the same subject for more than one page.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
And why all this attention to supposedly racial averages? Very well, if the study was correctly conducted, African IQ results are lower than in other places, but this proves neither that race is a reality nor that intelligence (in your terms) is genetically determined.
Great geniuses like Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, Dante, Einstein more often than not come from lineages of ordinary burghers, or even dull-witted plebeians or horsefaced aristocrats who haven't shown signs of more than ordinary intellectual development for countless generations. How do you explain that?
Not to mention that the cultural universality and objectivity of IQ tests is highly questionable.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
But let that last observation go, it's not important. The point is that individuals, who are the possessors of life, don't live on the average. Humanity-on-the-average, whether we look at Jews or Hottentots, is a disaster, a mass characterised by the stupidity that results from cultural conditioning.
What use was the high average German IQ in 1933, when a majority of Germans were so enthusiastic about Hitler? -- and their enthusiasm continued into the curtailment of all civil liberties, concentration camps, mass murder and war, and only began to recede when defeat became evident. The high average Chinese IQ didn't prevent the population from idiotically following Mao into the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and the high average Jewish IQ didn't prevent the survivors of the concentration camps and their children and grandchildren from becoming Israeli fascists in their turn.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
|
|
|
|
| the high average Jewish IQ didn't prevent the survivors of the concentration camps and their children and grandchildren from becoming Israeli fascists in their turn. |
Jesus. Look at the history before making such a judgement. They were attacked first. From the Six Days War onwards. What do you want from Israelis? Lie down and let themselves be blasted unto Zion?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Ishmael wrote: | | Only a liberal can graduate from an institution of higher learning believing 99% of everything 99% of his professors believed, having been congratulated and rewarded for the correctness of those beliefs among 99% of his peers -- and think himself one of the avant guard. |
And the mass identification with race has not abated in the meantime. If many university professors have come around to my point of view you will know better than I, academia is not my stomping grounds. Just ask a few people on the street what race they belong to, and they'll tell you: Black (is beautiful), White (is right), British (rule Britania), Jewish (this land is mine, God gave this land to me), Hutu (what's their theme song?), etc.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Grant
|
|
|
|
| And this is the basis of the race mirage: the "German race" is good at mathematics and music, the "Jewish race" is greedy and good for dentistry, the "English race" is reserved and cold but inclined to drunkenness and hooliganism, the "black race" has natural rhythm and is good at sports. And we can distinguish these races by any criterion that suits us: nationality, language, skin colour, religion, head shape, you name it. Take away these hallucinatory inborn characteristics and the term doesn't mean anything. |
I didn't know that Jews were good at dentistry.
Please explain what is hallucinatory about head shape and skin colour.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Grant
|
|
|
|
| Great geniuses like Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, Dante, Einstein more often than not come from lineages of ordinary burghers, or even dull-witted plebeians or horsefaced aristocrats who haven't shown signs of more than ordinary intellectual development for countless generations. How do you explain that? |
You need to come up with better examples to justify your liberal nonsense. Shakespeare, Dante and Einstein all came from very aspirational middle-class families; Beethoven and Mozart came from families of musicians! Virtually no geniuses have ever come from aristocratic families or dull-witted plebeians. This is exactly what you would expect if intelligence is largely inherited.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
The Library Index 
FAQ 
Search
Register
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
