Glenn Loury and Charles Murray have a chat
Charles Murray has been characterized by the left for years as a dangerous far-right lunatic racist who believes that black people are inferior. Here the intrepid Glenn Loury interviews him, and you can see for yourself what Murray really thinks:
Charles Murray
Murray’s latest book (Facing Reality) is receiving disgracefully little attention from the cowards in the media, aside from a worthless piece, some days ago, at WaPo. His arguments are irrefutable empirically, massive amounts of evidence supporting his contention that black Americans commit violent crime at vastly disproportionate rates (nearly ten times the rate, for murder, rape, assault, etc, of white Americans, who are somewhat likelier to commit violent crime than Asian-Americans) and that black Americans consistently achieve far lower scores on tests of aptitude and intelligence (ranging from IQ tests to the SAT) than white Americans, who, on average, have somewhat lower scores than Asian-Americans. He is less interested in the possible causes of these disparities and more interested in the data undergirding his claims.
Huge difference between Charles and Douglas Murray.
Griffin; miklos:
Thanks, fixed!
I’ve made that error before, I think. I keep getting their names switched. Haste makes waste.
Although an interview with Glenn Loury and Douglas Murray would also be worth hearing.
Charles Murray has recently written a new short book on race which will be ignored. The egalatarians will continue to believe you an educate for intelligence even tho you can’t. As an eample, a federal judge took over the Kansas City school system and forced the city to spend millions of dollars improving it. You would have thought there would be an outbrake of intellectual excelence, but it didn’t occure. Instead the whites fled and moved to the suburbs. Just because you have the best schools and teachers doesn’t mean it will turn the students into grade A studentts,
https://www.takimag.com/article/a-book-without-an-audience/
a federal judge took over the Kansas City school system and forced the city to spend millions of dollars improving it. You would have thought there would be an outbrake of intellectual excelence, but it didn’t occure. Instead the whites fled and moved to the suburbs. Just because you have the best schools and teachers doesn’t mean it will turn the students into grade A studentts,
The doofus judge thought a deficit of things you buy with cash was the problem. The real problems are as follows: (1) lax discipline in the schools, (2) a failure to property track youths (which generates wretched waste as instructional pacing is not adapted to the absorptive capacity of students), (3) the devotion of instructional time at the primary level to useless mush, (4) the preference for half-assed liberal education at the secondary level in lieu of redoubling on basic education (for the slow) and voTech (for the middling student), (5) promotion without reference to performance (as manifest in impersonal examinations). The forces behind these phenomena include the teachers’ colleges (which do not provide proper training and which push an insipid if not vicious social ideology) and the legal profession (which try to hamstring any inclination to discipline students who are on the Anointed’s mascot list).
And, of course, there’s only so much schools can do to improve headline performance. What the student brings with him from home is responsible for most of the variation in observable performance. Nothing you can do about that.
His arguments are irrefutable empirically, massive amounts of evidence supporting his contention that black Americans commit
As long as you’re willing to set fixed, common standards and enforce them without fear or favor, all of that is irrelevant.
The thing is, the schools are filled with employees who are not goal-oriented. Or, rather, their goal is to manage their own emotions. Inside Higher Education used to employ a columnist named Susan O’Doherty. She’s a retired school psychologist, born in 1949. She whimpers (in response to complaints about one column she wrote about her work) “they’re disadvantaged, I was just trying to avoid making things worse for them”. So, the horrid kids aren’t shipped out and the ordinary kids from wage-earner families are harassed and cannot learn because of all the trouble the horrid kids cause in classrooms and in the halls. But Susan O’Doherty, PsyD is saved from being implicated in disagreeable tasks.
As for people divorced from palpable contact with youth, their object is to avoid injuries to their social ideology, which is part of their self-concept. So you must ‘teach every child’. You must also not show ‘disparities’ in the frequency of different sorts of discipline, because in so doing you acknowledge that different subpopulations have different properties. Note, the left is all about status considerations. On top are the clerisy, then the clerisy’s mascots, then the peasants. Peasants such as police officers, security guards, and (in a pinch) school teachers have no franchise to enforce standards on the clerisy’s mascots. Also, straightforward standards derived from the sensibilities of ordinary people are ‘simplistic’. Only the clerisy’s opaque floating standards are legitimate.
I noticed in passing that (C.) Murray has now, just in the last couple of weeks, been on podcasts or regular vlog shows with several of the significant non-conformist black intellectuals of the moment: Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter, Loury, and I think another, but that might be me confusing this with Loury’s appearance on Tucker’s show. And that’s not counting the other appearances by Murray recently, such as on the one show with that hipster dude of whom I’d never ever heard before. I had thought he was younger for some reason.
I’ve been listening to Murray’s newest on Audible today. He tries so hard to reach anyone who might still have an open mind.
John McWhorter has a recent response to “Facing Reality” on substack, titled “WHY CHARLES MURRAY’S NEW BOOK IS HIS WEAKEST…despite that he is 1) brilliant and 2) not a bigot.”
McWhorter basically accept the data-driven portions of the book:
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Yet “Facing Reality” is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his
___________________________________________
Nonetheless, McWhorter takes issue with Murray:
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Yet it’s reasonable to ask of Murray: Why are you airing this information? To what end? And it’s here that I find Facing Reality weak.
___________________________________________
Here’s where I lose McWhorter’s thread. He links to an article he wrote which appeared in National Review to the effect that he suspects that black IQ differences are based more in culture than genetics, while admitting that this more of a hope on his part than an argument currently grounded in data.
His final paragraph on substack:
___________________________________________
If [the conclusion] is that black people should be satisfied with getting little further than being America’s middle managers, grunt workers, athletes and singers, then I’m not with it. I dearly hope we can do better.
___________________________________________
Well, me too. But what if that’s reality in a strictly meritocratic world?
Murray used to believe you could improve peoples intelligence by schooling. He wrote, “I suggest that when we give such parents vouchers, we will observe substantial convergence of black and white test scores in a single generation.”
But a decade later in The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein concluded that the IQ gap was intractable. A quarter of a century later, no evidence has emerged against that conclusion.
Murray used to believe you could improve peoples intelligence by schooling. He wrote, “I suggest that when we give such parents vouchers, we will observe substantial convergence of black and white test scores in a single generation.”
That statement indicates he believed you could improve people’s performance by schooling. Which of course you can. The question is can you improve comparative performance between groups.
But a decade later in The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein concluded that the IQ gap was intractable. A quarter of a century later, no evidence has emerged against that conclusion.
It was their conclusion that measures of intellectual performance in individuals were hard-wired in at an early age. They were loudly agnostic about how durable were differences in intergroup performance.
The key takeaway, agreed to by both marvelous men, is that, in Bell curves assessing whatever variable (I.Q., basketball, whatever), small differences in means (averages) tells you nothing about the ends of the Bell curves, the leading and tail ends.
This is critically important for our nation’s future.
For example, most black males do not commit crimes. It is the end of the crime-committing Bell curve that tells the tale, and that shifts the average.
I hate averages. Medians are more useful as a rule.
I will get Murray’s book.
Thank you for finding this discourse between two septuagenarians, one black and one white, Neo.
I just finished Facing Reality and agree with John McWhorter’s criticism in one respect and that is that the data portion of the book is stronger than the last chapter on what can be done. I also think Murray is a little naive to think that in the current environment there is any appetite among academics to start considering cognitive differences between races in any analysis of racial disparities in outcomes.
I think over time it is possible that a future society will be less concerned about the concept of race and the differences of what we call whites and blacks will have about the same weight as differences between Belgians and Bulgarians but we are a long way from that day. With the adoption of CRT we are going as fast as we can in the wrong direction.
Murray and Loury both express concern about what happens when some portion of the 60 percent white population begin to act like a tribe and I share their concern. Blacks represent only 13 percent of the population but their share of wealth is much lower. There will be no winners if we continue to go down the path of racial tribalism but blacks will likely be the biggest losers.
Cicero:
It sounds like you listened to the podcast. Applause!
I’m about 15 minutes in, but I may not have the patience to continue. If you have more summary to offer, please don’t hold back.
Basketball provides an interesting metric. If our society were largely based on basketball skills as the key to overall success, we would have the same discussion with blacks and whites reversed.
I really don’t believe that the indisputable black dominance of the NBA comes down to B-Ball being cool with the Boyz in the Hood. I’m sure it helps but it’s not the answer.
I think over time it is possible that a future society will be less concerned about the concept of race and the differences of what we call whites and blacks will have about the same weight as differences between Belgians and Bulgarians but we are a long way from that day. With the adoption of CRT we are going as fast as we can in the wrong direction.
Gregory+Harper:
Quite.
If we weren’t so focused on race/sex/whatever and just saw that the people who were good at math were good at math, and the people who were good at basketball were good at basketball etc. but we are all human beings with our own particular gifts, dignity and place in the world … well that would be a better world.
The Seven Types of Intelligence
1. Linguistic
2. Logical-Mathematical
3. Bodily-kinesthetic
4. Spatial
5. Musical
6. Interpersonal
7. Intrapersonal
We all have an individual mix of the above.
Example; Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said Franklin Delano Roosevelt had “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament”.
It’s not how smart we are but what we do with what we have…
Huxley-
Thanks,
Murray says his new book, Facing Reality, is about “what”, not any “why”. It is data with which to form one’s own conclusions. The Loury/Murray discussion leads to some whys, which have reflected some of my own thinking, he said, modestly!
Those of our persuasion who can should move into the center of the country. Leave the bastions of blue, with their terrific problems including crime, primarily by POCs.
Do away with public unions, which do not give a shit for the kids.The public schools have primarily black and brown students in our big cities, and the AFT and NEA will shove CRT down their throats instead of decent history and STEM. So in some few years we will face many young male minorities who have been taught it is all Whitey’s fault, so go and shoplift, and rape if you want.
You need not fear legal punishment in those venues. Right now you can make a very good living as a daily shoplifter in CA. It’s being done by hoodies with calculators so they don’t exceed the free limit of $950 per event.
@Huxley:
“If we weren’t so focused on race/sex/whatever and just saw that the people who were good at math were good at math, and the people who were good at basketball were good at basketball etc. but we are all human beings with our own particular gifts, dignity and place in the world … well that would be a better world.”
Don’t know if you’ve read the Aubrey-Maturin Napoleonic Wars wooden ships novels, but whenever the Gunner needed to fire off a salute, he timed the interval between firings by marching along the line of prepared canons reciting “If I wasn’t a Gunner I wouldn’t be here.” Still a good half century and more before the Dollar Watch became a thing. And never let it be said that philosophy doesn’t flourish amongst the Unwashed.
Well if we weren’t Hyper-difference-discriminating, Kin-group belonging, Out-group slaughtering (their males) / raping (their females) Apex Killer Primates, we wouldn’t be here today.
No amount of K-12 and Pledges of Allegiance and Federalist Papers Imbibing is going to make one iota of difference to who we are inside. Only Time can. Lots of. Or, as you have pointed out in the past Transhumanism (which I am somewhat up in the air about).
What we can do is not make things worse. Agree with you of course that CRT makes things worse. But in many cases being in the same room or same suburb or same city or same country makes things worse… and we have to stop making things worse before stuff goes non-linear.
@Neo: You’ll be pleased to know that on the Actual Right, Charles Murray is regarded these days as a nice old punch-pulling gentlemanly swansong-singing coot who just wants to fit in and be liked by all the Good People.
David Reich has been writing more interesting stuff even if he stabs Watson, Wade, and others in the back in order to divert the Prog Mob from sacking his lab:
https://www.takimag.com/article/reichs_laboratory_steve_sailer/
I listen to Glenn’s interview plus the Coleman Hughes interview with Charles Murray. They are both good, but Glenn’s interview was excellent.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-coleman/id1489326460?i=1000527667400
Well if we weren’t Hyper-difference-discriminating, Kin-group belonging, Out-group slaughtering (their males) / raping (their females) Apex Killer Primates, we wouldn’t be here today.
Zaphod:
To a point. If we weren’t also moving beyond all your etc’ing, I say we wouldn’t be as advanced as we are today.
That inflection in human prosperity, after which we went exponential, came out of the Age of Enlightenment with its hallmarks of liberty, toleration and fraternity.
Then there’s the earlier explosion of Christianity which laid the moral underpinnings of the Enlightenment and makes no sense if it’s all a matter of getting over on your othered neighbor and killing him, if possible.
@Huxley:
Cannons, even. Creeping dyslexia will be the death of me.
Only other viable scenario is Aliens Invading per movie Independence Day — a movie which was a bit in your face about Stereotypical Human Group Differences if one had eyes to see. Even then the Aliens have to look pretty weird and different and be utterly hell-bent on our total destruction before Humanity would unite against them.
@Huxley:
We differ here. I single-mindedly and obsessively believe that the apparatus of Civilization (whether it be Christianity or Justinian’s Tables or Chinese Imperial Examination System) merely contained, channeled, and directed our more animal urges.
The USA didn’t go to the Moon with the help of Nazi Rocket Scientists for the Good of Mankind. The USA made a huge effort to beat the Soviets and their Nazi Rocket Scientists in getting to the moon. Sublimated Ape-Stuff. Velcro was a side-effect 🙂
I don’t deny that a strong legal system over some tens of generations can cull the gene pool of some undesirable traits for a while. Institutions can affect genetics. Whole other topic.
But at macro first order level we must have systems which mitigate against our innate nature and channel our interpersonal and intergroup competitiveness in the the optimal path to the stars between extinction and stagnation. Then we can have at those @#$%ing Aliens 🙂
And back when it really mattered, Christianity was an expansionist conquering religion. Like Islam had some cool code modifications allowing its followers to build bigger groups of Apes and get Memetically Mean on non-members. As plenty of Jews present here will gladly affirm.
The Angels of our Better Nature is Bunk. What we need are Elegant Hacks.
Re: Independence Day…
Zaphod:
I had a friend who had worked as a lawyer in a big LA firm but what he really wanted to do was Make Movies.
So at one point, while he was still young enough, he chucked it all, took some film-making/script-writing courses and set himself up as a producer with a friend. He says they were This Close to being greenlit on a Cold War thriller when the USSR collapsed.
Anyway. While their doors were open, my friend and his partner were approached by two guys who pitched “Independence Day” to them. To my friend the two guys looked and acted flat crazy. He exchanged glances with his partner and shuffled them out of the office as gently as possibly.
Later he was rather surprised by the success of “Independence Day.”
Art Deco:
Did you watch the video? In it, Murray says that he does not know how much of the variance is due to factors other than genetics. There’s a lot of arguing and division about that question, and he isn’t taking a stand on it in his new book. He is quite clear that he thinks at least a goodly portion of it is, and that’s what we need to work on.
@Huxley:
Can’t stress enough my belief that what is true for Individuals is not necessarily true for groups. For example the transformative effect of a religion on an individual in his/her life cannot be compared to the effects on a society in the same time period or again to the society over multiple lifetimes. Same goes for how that effects a person’s neighbour or a society’s neighbours.
A creed of personal tolerance for gross human differences can work well at small village or city block level and below. Beyond that in our present state of evolution this tends to break down. At scale need systems which are humane at scale but which would seem cruel if applied up close and personal. Very difficult to get right. If Only Stalin Knew and all that.
But Step One back from the brink is to throttle down the promiscuous mixing of incompatible peoples and the constant in-your-facery of atypical human behaviours — current promotion of Trans Worship, for example.
Zaphod:
You will be pleased to know that the vast majority of people on this blog (and me) are on the actual right.
You have no idea what the “actual right” is in this country. There are certainly small and very much more extreme factions – call them the “alt-right” or “extreme right” or any number of other things – but they’re not the actual right.
@Huxley:
Missing the Bus Bigly is all part of life’s tapestry… been there done that…. but I bet your friend has permanent heel prints on his behind from kicking himself!
David Reich’s book has some issues, but he’s honest about reporting his findings and there’s much to learn about our human past from him:
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/1101873469
Suggest anyone buying it should of course do so via Neo’s affiliate link and not the link I’ve given in this comment.
@Neo:
There’s a Mister Kerensky on the phone for you.
Poor sod ended up married to a vapid furniture store heiress from Brisbane, Orstrailiya. Here’s their 1935 Catalogue:
https://archive.org/details/TrittonsFurnitureFurnishingsCatalogue
And we’re told that Moderation is a Virtue.
Zaphod re:
“Well if we weren’t Hyper-difference-discriminating, Kin-group belonging, Out-group slaughtering (their males) / raping (their females) Apex Killer Primates, we wouldn’t be here today.”
If those were humanity’s dominant characteristics, civilization would never have arisen. And within civilizations, competition cannot exist absent cooperation. Societies in which consent of the governed is practiced do not make war upon other societies in which consent of the governed is also practiced.
Wars are initiated by the ambitions of the few.
“No amount of K-12 and Pledges of Allegiance and Federalist Papers Imbibing is going to make one iota of difference to who we are inside.”
The ‘Greatest Generation’ conclusively demonstrated otherwise. The principles upon which a culture rests are the primary determinate.
“I single-mindedly and obsessively believe that the apparatus of Civilization (whether it be Christianity or Justinian’s Tables or Chinese Imperial Examination System) merely contained, channeled, and directed our more animal urges.”
“Man does not live by bread alone.”
“Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” Rose Sayer, the African Queen
I believe the nature to which Ms Sayer refers is your “animal urges”.
Murray suggested long ago that people be allowed to go as far as their talent, drive and luck will take them without regard to race. No extra help, no higher requirements. That’s a dandy idea.
Problem is the racial makeup of various positions and levels in society will not be evenly mixed and the result will be….more contention. No matter how generous and unprejudiced all of society may be.
@Geoffrey Britain:
Virtually everything positive you see about you in your daily life was built by men in order to acquire wealth and demonstrate breeding fitness to females.
Bach composed transcendent music to fund his fecundity. Bach was an Animal.
Had there been no slowly and painstakingly evolved social structure / culture which channeled Bach into contrapuntal excursions, he would have likely gone with his cave mates and attempted to club to death the males in the next tribe over.
We are Animals. We can spend all our waking hours not contemplating this fact, but ***when we design artificial societies contra our innate animal nature***(1), There Will Be Blood.
(1) And we’ve been hell-bent on doing this and little else for last 100+ years.
Yes… we can Transcend. But not when there’s some kind of societal virus at work eating away at the mechanisms we had evolved *to* Transcend. i.e. Progressivism — which now runs deep and permeates and corrupts nearly all our Givens.
Another good article from Dan the Man:
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/07/how-civil-rights-made-america-critical.html
“The Nazis decreed theories and creative works off limits because they believed that ideas could not be separated from the race of their creators. Critical race activists agree that theories and works carry the race of their creators in their intellectual DNA. The Nazis banned some works over ‘Jewishness’ while critical race theory activists seek to ban them over their ‘whiteness’.
The most brutal theocracies are those which are the most pessimistic about human nature. The Nazis believed that people were animals who could never transcend their biology, Islamists believe that people must be ruthlessly conquered and ruled to bring peace, and leftists believe that power relations doom humanity to cycles of exploitation without an enlightened tyranny.”
Para 2 is a bit worrisome though. Apparently I’m a Theocratic Nazi Islamist and possibly even a Leftist on my more black pilled days. What to do?
“To paraphrase John Adams, “Civil rights was made only for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for any other.” Critical race theory is the inadequacy of a political society trying to come to grips with moral and religious questions, but with no other tools than power and the abstractions of a scientism that is suited to studying distant galaxies, but not people.”
Seriously it’s good. I’m going to re-read it several times until all of it sticks.
Can Do! just demonstrates a two part self own. Awesome, but not the first.
see this article by Thomas Sowell on IQ and race.
https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2002/10/01/race-and-iq-n1000028
As usual he brings a lot of clarity and common sense. I have not read Murray’s book. Does he refer to Sowell’s work? Here’s an excerpt from the column.
In recent years, research by Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate living in New Zealand, has shaken up the whole IQ controversy by discovering what has been called “the Flynn effect.” In various countries around the world, people have been answering significantly more IQ test questions correctly than in the past.
This important fact has been inadvertently concealed by the practice of changing the norms on IQ tests, so that the average number of correctly answered questions remains by definition an IQ of 100. Only by painstakingly going back and recalculating IQs, based on the initial norms, was Professor Flynn able to discover that whole nations had, in effect, had their IQs rising over the decades by about 20 points.
Since the black-white difference in IQ is 15 points, this means that an even larger IQ difference has existed between different generations of the same race, making it no longer necessary to attribute IQ differences of this magnitude to genetics. In the half century between 1945 and 1995, black Americans’ raw test scores rose by the equivalent of 16 IQ points.
Zaphod:
To me your argument is a sub-part of the general materialist argument that it all comes down to elementary particles, forces and physics, which somehow combined and recombined until et voila…here we are and that’s all we are.
Certainly that’s part of the story and we are wise not to ignore it. However, to some of us there is more, much more, going on, even if it’s not provable in debate.
Like Uncle Aldous, I’ve rolled my own Perennial Philosophy out of Christianity, hippiedom, Hinduism and Buddhism. Perhaps it merely comforts me to do so, though it seems more so to me. That’s the constellation which guides me.
@Bob:
Flynn Effect is like Lewontin’s Fallacy. Gets bandied about by Look, Ponies! people as a distraction for superficial folk who are just looking for an Authority to tell them it’s OK to go back to sleep.
The debate is a bit more complex:
https://quillette.com/2017/06/02/getting-voxed-charles-murray-ideology-science-iq/
“On achievement, the Black-White gap narrowed during the 20th century, but multiple indicators of educational achievement provide convergent evidence that the gap has stopped narrowing and, in some cases, is widening. Among the more optimistic assessments, Rindermann and Thompson, analyzing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), documented that the Black-White gap declined from 16.33 to 9.94 IQ points between 1971 and the early 1990s. However, they also noted that the gap has been stable since the early 1990s. Similar findings, with somewhat smaller convergences between Blacks and Whites, have emerged for the SAT, the GRE, and educational attainment, more broadly. Summarizing research on cognitive ability across the 20th century in employment and educational settings, Roth and colleagues concluded, “As a whole, these studies suggest that there are observed gains for both groups [Blacks and Whites], but the reduction in the between-group difference is either small, potentially a function of sampling error, or nonexistent for highly g loaded instruments.” (p. 323).
So, although it is reasonable to argue that the Black-White IQ gap shrunk a bit in the early 20th century, the claim that the IQ gap is now 10 points is only supported by a few data points. It seems to us more reasonable to contend that the IQ gap has stabilized near 12-15 points.”
That’s American Blacks who have some White DNA admixture as they will happily tell us when they claim reparations. Sub-Saharan Africa has even larger gap. So should not be importing more of them as ‘Refugees’.
See also this summary of Sowell’s review of Murray and Herrnstein’s Bell Curve book. The link to the actual review is broken. If anyone knows where the full review is I’d appreciate your posting it.
https://ricochet.com/archives/thomas-sowell-on-iq-and-race/
But the good news is that IQs are now dropping!
Ding, dong, the Flynn Effect is dead!
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/iq-scores-have-been-falling-for-decades-new-study-finds/
We will all meet at the bottom and Artificial Intelligence will have us for hors d’oeuvres.
@Huxley:
Yup. Ed Dutton has a book out on why we’re all becoming dummies:
At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07M8NG2CN
He posits that we peaked around 1880 if not a bit before and have been on downward slide ever since.
Dutton can be hilarious live. Not to everyone’s tastes though.
Zaphod seems to be our resident crank. As an example:
“Bach composed transcendent music to fund his fecundity. Bach was an Animal.”
Bach was a genius. Have you studied, played his stuff?
As a young cellist I could not master even the easiest part of one of his cello sonatas. The hard ones are the hardest to play in the solo cello repertory.
Bach was paid by aristocratic patrons. His wife had nothing to do with his income.
That his wife was perhaps more fertile, more lusty, than contemporaries does not apparently enter your mind. It still happens today!
Plus there was the then almost-inevitable loss of infants to infections, often acquired at birth. So high birth numbers offset that loss and were not rare as long as momma survived her delivery. Look up Semmelweis. All deliveries were with bare, unwashed hands. Puerperal sepsis was usually fatal to mom and newborn infant in the 1800s and before. Bach died in 1750.
@Cicero:
Obviously Bach didn’t sit there composing cantatas thinking “gotta keep the wife fed and happy or I’m not getting any tonight”. But the underlying drives are not spiritual. Spirituality and Transcendence are partly epiphenomena of more primal urges, I think. You’re welcome to differ and call me a crank.
Good of you to bring up Semmelweis. Ties neatly into the Dutton thesis that we’re getting dumber now that there’s better hygiene and less Darwinian Selection working on us. Semmelweis, potable water delivery, and sewage systems have probably done most to doom us 🙂
Semmelweis was right about hand-washing. Are you absolutely certain that had you been his contemporary colleague you would have been his supporter against all the Best People who knew because it was received wisdom that he was a crank and hounded him to a miserable ending?
Cicero:
A little tool, not a crank?
Geoffrey Britain,
Regarding your comment about societies in which consent of the governed is practiced do not make war on other societies in which consent of the governed is practiced.
Prior to , and during the Peloponnesian War, Athens was not only a democracy, it was an Empire – an Imperial Democracy. Now, I do recall that Athens would often side with the democrats in another city state to overthrow the oligarchs and then that city state became a vassal of sorts to Athens. On the other hand, In the long history of both the first and second Athenian Empires, I suspect we might find Athens waging war on another Democracy. But then again, I cannot point to a specific case as my memory of specifics of that period is sparse, in spite of reading Donald Kagan’s book, “ The Peloponnesian War” three times in about a fifteen year period.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/87539.The_Peloponnesian_War
Monomaniac, if you please.
One thread, 13 posts, and 1,800 words from one motormouth BS artist.
@jon baker:
When the Swedes and the Finns go to war with each other, I’ll be the first to jump on your case.
The problem is that Rabid Missionary ‘Democracies’ do unspeakable things to non-Democracies in order to drag them kicking and screaming toward the Luciferian Light of Liberalism.
Saints Abe and Woodrow will do to start this argument off.
Of course we could kill everyone who refuses to order their societies along the lines of Consent of the Governed (Do you consent to how you are presently governed? Separate question, sure.) and then everything would be just dandy.
Not convinced at all that Representative Democracy Abounding == Peace. And I don’t believe for one moment that Alcibiades couldn’t have talked the Athenian Mob into voting to attack a hypothetical Democratic Syracuse.
“One thread, 12 posts, and 1,800 words from one motormouth BS artist.”
It passes the time.
Make no mistake. Zaphod is preaching a gospel here.
It’s not his fault if he enjoys it.
Huxley’s smoked me out. I’m Malaprop the Younger.
huxley: “We will all meet at the bottom and Artificial Intelligence will have us for hors d’oeuvres.”
I worry about that. During the recent Colonial Pipeline shutdown, it became apparent that the people who knew how to run the system manually had retired or died. The gasoline was there; the company couldn’t deliver it and bill for it.
Zaphod,
“@Geoffrey Britain:
Virtually everything positive you see about you in your daily life was built by men in order to acquire wealth and demonstrate breeding fitness to females.
Bach composed transcendent music to fund his fecundity. Bach was an Animal.”
Thomas Jefferson strongly advocated for universal access to education. Thomas Sowell is perhaps the premier example of the societal benefits of such a policy. That brought Jefferson no wealth. Nor did it demonstrate a fitness to fertile females for breeding. You assign to all men, the motivations of some men.
Bach composed transcendent music because of an inner compulsion to do so and ‘animal urges’ do not explain his ability to masterfully play every instrument in the orchestra. When asked how he accomplished it, he dismissed it as a trifle, ‘you simply put the right finger, in the right place, at the right time’. People do not compose music to make money, they compose music because they have an inner compulsion to express themselves through that medium. So too with the artist, writer and singer.
When you categorically say that we are an animal, implying that to be the whole, you ignore the mental and spiritual realms, which have both driven the rise of civilizations and far too often produced wars. Shakespeare knew of what he spoke when he penned the line; “there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” he was speaking to men such as yourself.
There’s far more to our existence than simply what we can see, hear and touch. Wherein you err is in identifying yourself as having a body and maybe, perhaps having a soul though it cannot be “proven’ to exist. You have the cart before the horse; “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
Our bodies are the mechanism through which we operate in the physical universe. Your soul is the animating life force that seeks experience and meaning within your time in the physical universe.
@GB:
I recall reading Jefferson on Edumacation — IIRC he thought that Virginia might profitably sponsor perhaps one or several of the most promising sons of the Yeomanry per year through the gates of the University at the public charge. He was certainly in favor of a sound elementary education, and a bit more for the deserving poor with some brains, and the full shebang for the absolute cream of the crop who could not otherwise pay their way as any decent gentleman ought. Which sounds about right to me. We currently suffer from a surfeit of ‘Education’.
I’m all for Immortal Souls as a matter of principle. Definitely not an out-and-out materialist. Wrong camp for me here if I were. But whilst stuck in the mud in this Vale of Tears, it behooves ‘Conservatives’ as much as Deluded Leftists to pay attention to Man as he Is rather than as he ought to be. Leftists do the Procrustean Bed Thing and kill people quickly for not fitting their theoretical ideals. ‘Conservatives’ ignore male/female differences, racial differences, etc., because they don’t fit their theoretical ideals and hence they kill societies over decades to generations… but because it’s slower they get to preen about their superior morals and cleaner hands. Neither outcome is great in the longer run.
Do you believe, for example that Ferraris exist purely because the Telos of some Astral Being inhabiting Enzo was to go faster and farther all Bright Red Excelsior-like because the Music of the Spheres animated the Soul-stuff ever Onwards and Upwards? I think not. Don’t want to go all DH Lawrence and get about steaming up the greenhouse on you here to just to pound the point home. Would be Uncouth.
Speaking of which:
Inter feces et urinam nascimur — Saint Augustine. Paging Mister Chesterton for a witty ribbon of remarkable paradox invoking the Immortal Soul to tie in a cutesy bow around *that* nugget of truth 🙂
The gasoline was there; the company couldn’t deliver it and bill for it.
I think it was the billing system which was knocked out. They could actually deliver the product.
Another Can Do! tome built of straw, ” …. Man as he Is rather than as he ought to be.” As if Geoffrey doesn’t recognize man as he is.
Herein an example of wasted intelligence and education.
Zaphod,
We do indeed have a surfeit of indoctrination not education.
Jefferson’s thoughts must be viewed through the time within which he lived. 90% of Americans were farmers and the great majority of Americans never traveled further than 25 miles from where they were born. No machines meant that little time was available for educational pursuits. Those pragmatic realities limited Jefferson to advocating a basic education for the general public. His support for “the full shebang for the absolute cream of the crop who could not otherwise pay their way” was an indication that he recognized that intelligence and talent were not limited to the gentry and that it would be a societal benefit to provide assistance to those able to take advantage of it. Lincoln was the exception.
The wealthy, well off middle class and sons of successful preachers (supported by their flock) had the wherewithal to gain an education.
“‘Conservatives’ ignore male/female differences, racial differences, etc., because they don’t fit their theoretical ideals…’
You’re painting with far too broad a brush and assigning the left’s motivations to the right and drawing a false equivalence between the left and right.
RINOs may ignore those areas but not those interested in reality’s feedback. Traditional conservatism is based upon paying attention to reality’s feedback, rather than ideological dogma. Neither Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell were/are ideologues. On the other hand, religious conservatives who filter everything through biblical strictures are ideologues. Their focus is upon social conservatism as interpreted through the theological tenets they embrace.
Someone falls of the rails trying to be too profound.
“On the other hand, religious conservatives who filter everything through biblical strictures are ideologues. Their focus is upon social conservatism as interpreted through the theological tenets they embrace.”
If we wanted to check Murray’s work and perhaps answer some of the questions it raises, we could.
But new research along those lines is now all but taboo and CRT will make it racist and close to illegal.
I recently read McWhorter’s ‘Losing the race’, written some 20 years ago.
Though much of it is anecdote, I think he got it right.
It’s culture.
Black vs white IQ difference was diminishing until the Great Society legislation undercut the black family (and whites also, to a lesser percentage).
om,
I’m not trying to be profound. Just expressing my point of view. Do try not to be so threatened by disagreement.
M Williams. I believe–it’s been a while–that McWhorter referred to Ogbu’s work in Shaker Heights.
There are a lot of hits on that work and if you’re interested in the culture angle, it’s particularly rich. Some of the references are to parents and their concerns.
One of the benefits, to some extent, of the Shaker Heights location is that it is or was relatively–everything is relative says Alex Haley–homogeneous. That cuts out some of the variables we don’t want to vary.
As to anecdotes: Our daughter, teaching high school some years ago, had a black student who didn’t do any work. He wasn’t disruptive or personally annoying. He was just happy with zeros on every assignment and failing grades. He was going to go to Hollywood and be a celebrity manager. Possibly tha was how he explained whatever else he had going on or possibly he believed that. Nobody in his life straightened him out on the prospect. To expand on that, various beliefs more widely spread may affect the black kids’ expectation of the use of education. And where would those come from?
Geoffrey
I’m not threatened, you just seemed overreaching. Who is threatened by the dreaded “idealogues” (do they look like scarecrows) who go a thump thumping their Bibles?
Sometimes it’s easier if you use something that everyone acknowledges is mostly genetic but not fraught with baggage. So mentally make the appropriate substitutions and I am sure that 99.9% of people here will agree with all of these.
So let’s take height.
Can you measure “height”? Yes.
Does having a certain height measurement make you “tall”? Context-dependent.
Are tall people superior to short people? Only in height and closely correlated properties such as mas, they’re not “better” humans or even more “fit” evolution-wise (or there’d not be small animals). Are tall people at an advantage with respect to shorter people? Usually.
Can we arbitrarily define “tall” with a number like say 5’10”? Sure. If “tall” is arbitrary or context-dependent does that mean “tall” is a meaningless word or that height cannot be measured or that tallness has no objective advantage? No to all these.
Can you teach people to be taller? No. Can people learn to make the most use they can of whatever height they have? Yes.
Is height purely genetic? No, if you malnourish children they won’t grow, and there are accidents or abuses that can reduce their height. But feeding your children more only makes them fatter, not taller. There’s a certain level of environment needed to accomplish your full height and more than that is wasted from a height perspective.
Do different populations have different heights? Yes. Does the population average say anything about an individual human’s actual height? No. Men average taller than women but 5’11” Sally is taller than 5’4″ Hank. And this is not a contradiction. However, if you had no information beyond their sex, the smart bet would be that Sally is shorter. Once Sally is known to you her height is what it is and statistics on other people cannot change it.
Does society work pretty well for people near the average for height? Yes. Can people significantly shorter than average lead happy and productive lives? Yes. Are there workarounds in most cases for people who are too short for a specific situation? Yes, stepladders and such.
Are people taller than average ever disadvantaged? Yes, but less so than for short people. There is a level of “tall” that entails other serious problems, but the same is true for “short”.
Is height irrelevant in every meaningful human activity? No. Should it be? Very few people have ever said we could so order our society so that height was utterly irrelevant to every meaningful human activity. For example, there have been players in the NBA under the US average of 5′ 9″ but only 25, ever, which is much much less than 50%. Clearly height is relevant to success in basketball, and shorter players, all else being equal, are at a disadvantage. There is no popular movement to eliminate height advantages from basketball. It would be wrong and untrue to tell a short adult they can never play in the NBA but if they are short they will be at a disadvantage, it’s not a conspiracy of tall people to oppress short ones, and it’s wisest to be realistic about it.
Frederick, I liked that – that was very reasonable and rather crisply stated.
Frederick:
American kids have been growing taller for the past 150 years
(and menarche has occurred earlier and earlier). Who are you to say feeding kids only makes them fatter, though that may be true today in the ignorant lower class? In my view, it is the couch, TV, video games that have made kids fatter for lack of exercise. Do you know any kids that play outdoors all day long any more, getting vigorous exercise?
om:
I believe your “religious conservatives” are devout Christians and Jews. Christianity has been the major civilizing force for the past 2000 years. Which is why Marx, all the communist tyrants, and the postmodernists who disbelieve in truth as a reality are out to do away with Christians.
Cicero:
Absolutely, and the bible thumpers can be devout Christians as well. Something about objecting to those who are devout or stigmatizing them as “ideologues” may be a form of virtue signaling. “I’m not closed minded or rigid like those idealoges!” 🙂
@Cicero: Who are you to say feeding kids only makes them fatter
All else being equal, once their nutritional needs are met, then yes.
fatter for lack of exercise.
This is like saying you’re broke because you don’t make enough money vs you’re broke because you spend too much. Either (or both) can certainly be true but one is typically easier to control than the other, even if it’s by only a few percent.
Eat what you normally do in a day. Now add one donut. That’s 195 calories. You don’t want to get fat, so you do 30 minutes of stair climbing. For a single extra donut. Or you can walk 3-4 miles if stair-climbing ain’t your bag… for each and every extra donut you ever eat…. it’s way less physical and mental effort to not eat that donut.
And it doesn’t have to be a donut. Could be two extra apples or two extra slices of bread… if you want exercise to be the primary mechanism you’ll be doing nothing else.
The thing is it is very easy to overeat, even healthy food, beyond the time available for extra exercise.
Outdoor exercise for most kids is no longer heavy farm work from morning to night. You’ll get farther controlling their diet than you will with unstructured play outdoors. But both could work, sure.
Or we could all go read the voluminous Reading List first and then come back to argue (mostly) about irrelevancies:
http://www.humanbi0logicaldiversity.c0m/
You will need to alter the URL to replace ‘0’ with letter ‘o’ in two places. I had to do this because Owners of WordPress don’t want you to see this website. Well, of course.
McWhorter’s “final paragraph on substack:
_______________________________
If [the conclusion] is that black people should be satisfied with getting little further than being America’s middle managers, grunt workers, athletes and singers, then I’m not with it. I dearly hope we can do better.
________________________________
“Well, me too. But what if that’s reality in a strictly meritocratic world?”
So, McWhorter discovers Murray reports what the much reviled J Philippe Rushton knew, and David Lykken discovered and reported in the 1990s through his (still ongoing) Minnesota Twin’s Raised Apart program?
Among Jordan Peterson’s clips channel at YouTube you can get a quick and authoritative rundown on why IQ is to social science like supply and demand curves are to economic analysis: well-established givens.
And like both, something ignored at your peril.
The next biggest life-time determinant of success, says Peterson, is persistence!
Which is what Ben Franklin knew and what Booker T Washington Institutionalized as the foundation for black folks development.
CRT just shuts away and persecutes what’s known to work in favor of Power, just as Educrats have done with schools.
Gab vs Conservacucks on this topic:
https://gab.com/Alt-sociology/posts/106535702941514865
This is the thing. You can go outside the USA and dredge up plenty of cases of groups who have been smacked down far harder than American Blacks and bounced back in short order.
Sadly, most of them are limited in what they can do. They need structure and their own positive role models… and they need separation from Whitey because constant daily comparisons don’t give rise to happiness — quite the opposite. Or are you telling me the Arabs have legitimate reasons for hating Jews and aren’t just insanely jealous and humiliated by all that high tech and deserts blooming? 😀