In case you folks are confused (and it certainly appears to be the case)

Psst: you are responding to people who wrote many years ago. Also you are stupid. From this we can conclude that thepilatesbiz is for complete fucking idiots.

Look, I’m of east asian origin and this is the second time I’ve been slow off the mark to comment on a thread here. Suck on that fact, Murray.

not fond of bad science said,
Most of this settled science is by no means settled as far as most people know. That’s not because they are racist fucktards. That’s not because they are useful tools
I’m guessing that Bradrocket wrote this post in response to William Saletan’s column in Slate. In Saletan’s case, you can’t blame his ignorance about actual settled science on the failure of the scientists to spread the word fast enough. His position is that science has established the reality of white superiority, so if liberals don’t accept it, they must be willfully blind. He coins the phrase “liberal creationists” for people who reject white superiority — people like Gould or Ashley Montague. Ignorance is not enough to account for Saletan’s form of wrongness resting on cherry-picked factoids, but “racist fucktard” fits the bill.

The thread inspired me to hunt through the bookshelf and dredge out a couple of Analog magazines from 1976 (was it really been three decades since “Children of Dune” was serialised? Eeek). One of the issues contained a rant by L. Sprague de Camp on “The Breeds of Man”.

Now de Camp was starting from the same contrarian position as Saletan… he reckons that people opposed to the idea of a black / white intelligence difference are “sentimental egalitarians”, since the term “political soundness” was not around at the time. But he also had far more integrity. So at the end of his column, after weighing the evidence, he concedes that the sentimental egalitarians were right.

If people are still arguing 30 years later, it’s not because the science is in flux, or because the science is slow to disseminate into the circle of pundits, it’s because some journalists are fighting to keep it out. And as Noen said, there are “some people who use statistical analysis to massage their data into a form that confirms their racism.”

What do dark skinned people in Australia, Africa, South America, The Caribbean, The Arctic Circle, India, and the Polynesian Islands all have in common?
Umm, all colonised by Europeans?

It’s like the fucking Discovery Institute around here and people want to teach the controversy.

If a quantity failed any of these tests, then I suspect that people like Murray and Saletan simply would not accept it as a valid measure of Intelligence.

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Why is this hard? I got this in high school. “You mean the difference is that some people have more pigment in their skin? Yes. Oh, ok.” But apparently this is rocket science for you.

When you get down to it what we are talking about is some people who use statistical analysis to massage their data into a form that confirms their racism. Take for instance Rushton’s study on anatomical correlation between brain weight and penis size. Do you want to know how he conducted that study? He walked around in shopping malls asking men their dick size. He also asked his students how far they could ejaculate. Other studies of his have been found to source articles in “Penthouse Forum”. Yes people, we aren’t talking just bone stupid here, we’re talking fetish.

Do you notice a pattern here?

Just for the record, this isn’t a discussion of dogma, but tactics. Ilyka has no concern for tactics, because she is right.

Oh fuck off. Do the research or shut up about it.

You might enjoy Matchstick Men, of the scammer-gets-scammed genre, with a not so in-yer-face Nicholas Cage and Sam Rockwell as “salesmen”.

At someone’s blog yesterday (yglesias’?), it was noted that in 1985, only 17% of “educated people in fields that should know” thought that there was no such thing as race. By 1995, it was just a hair over 50% of anthropologists. It has only become a majority of anthropologists disbelieving in race in the past 10 years. And by majority, well it probably means it’s not too hard to find intellectually honest anthropologists that right or wrong, disagree.

Most of this settled science is by no means settled as far as most people know. That’s not because they are racist fucktards. That’s not because they are useful tools

That’s because that’s how scientific knowledge disseminates.

It’s also relatively unheard of to most of these people that well, any science can be considered settled science in such a short time. And we see researchers like Neil Risch saying it may not be that settled.

If you’re going to accuse people willy nilly of being racist fucktards and useful tools even though you admit you know nothing about them just because they are honestly trying to determine what is settled and what is not, well, I don’t think that’s going to be a winning strategy.

It may be the appropriate response to a few select individuals.

But I don’t think that’s the approach a blog should take to any person that stops by and asks questions honestly, and sincerely, in an attempt to determine for themselves what is known.

Not to mix metaphors, but the shout people down and insist any dissent was from fucktard sexists approach worked real well for Ilyka Damen. At the same time, her cries that any dissenters were whining angry white guys making bullshit claims of political correctness are also closely mirrored in this thread.

I graduated in the early 80s, with a heavy concentration in chemistry, biology, and even anthropology. I am not at all surprised to learn that either race or IQ is considered to be bullshit concepts scientifically. But while I understand the problems that “IQ” poses, I find it harder to think that there is not today, or will not be someday, various entities that strongly correspond to well developed intelligence. And while I see no reason to claim everyone who is black is of one race, and everyone asian is of another, I think the claim that there are no races at all, or even that there are no closely related and meaningful ways to distinguish between subpopulations is surprising and was not necessarily a given. And so I find it hard to fault people that aren’t sure which “good” scientists to believe. The guy from up above, or Neil Risch, or some of the other scientists in the field.

So I will end it by reiterating, shouting at people for all their assumed fucktard ways and thinking the worst of them just because you *know* you’re right, and their immoral bastards determined to do the world ill for their own selfish reasons, well, nice to meet you Ilyka, welcome back to blogging.