Watch the news, follow politics and pay some attention to the hate community, of which I am a part, and you have to deal with the disconnect. That is the weird feeling you get when watching a newscast, seeing confirmation of something you read on a hate-site and then the newsreader explains it all away with appeals to magic. The rioters hunting down whites are not the racists. No, the newsman tells you. the honkies are the racists, because they failed in some way to do right by the dusky fellows chasing them.
Watch the Olympics and you see the commentators in a life and death struggle with reality, forever fearful that the audience may notice what’s happening in the events. Because reality simply refuses to comport with the approved narrative, the broadcasters create short documentaries to be played during the coverage, explaining how the events you are seeing do not contradict the one true faith. In fact, they confirm it! The black people winning all the footraces really just train hard, despite racism and Hitler.
I’ve been reading Steve Sailer for decades and he loves commenting about the Olympics because it confirms much of what the biological realists have to say about the human animal. Boys are bigger, faster and stronger than girls. West Africans are faster on average than everyone else. He’s right, of course. When the finalists for the 100 meter sprint have all be of West African origin going back nine consecutive Olympics, nature is telling us something. Or at least trying to tell us something.
Sailer has often argued that many in the cognitive elite see the same things he and the other HBD’ers see, but they prudently refuse to mention it. Instead, they rely on esoteric language and alternative social constructs to arrive at the same point, but without openly challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. A guy like Ross Douthat, for example, is not going to throw his career away by pointing out the obvious, so he crafts social constructs that give his coevals a way to express reality within the confines of the faith.
I must admit that it feels like it is true in certain cases. I enjoy reading Mark Krikorian, who does the Lord’s work in the area of immigration studies. He often says things that suggest he accepts the basics of human biology, but he always stops short, way short, of running afoul of the morality police. I follow him on twitter and it often feels like he slams on the brakes as soon as he gets near that electrified fence that divides orthodoxy from heresy. I wonder. Is this conscious or subconscious? Does he know or is he simply trained?
This may not seem like an important question, but it is probably the most important question. The cognitive elite in Europe knew Galileo was right. It was not like he popped out of nowhere to announce his new model for the solar system. The image of the churchman as a narrow minded fanatic is pretty much of the opposite of reality in the Middle Ages, or any other age for that matter. For most of Western history, the church was the storehouse of human knowledge and the engine of intellectual progress.
Progressives have retconned Galileo to claim the Church was too enthralled with oogily-boogily to understand him, but that’s nonsense. They knew he was right, at least many in the Church knew, but they did not know how to proceed with the new knowledge coming from guys like Galileo. The Church, as well as the civil authorities, were primary concerned with civil order and making sure people had food to eat. The practical challenges came before the theoretical ones.
The emergence of genetics, as well as evolutionary biology, which is increasing reliant on genetics, certainly is comparable to the emergence of science in the late Middle Ages. The main point of comparison is that science discredited much of the prevailing orthodoxy about the natural world and genetics is discrediting the blank slate orthodoxy of today. Egalitarianism will only survive if the study of human biology, particularly genetics, is shut down and that’s not going to happen. The question is whether anyone in the cognitive elite knows or accept this.
Watching the Olympics the other might I was struck by the sense of desperation during one of the Girrrllll Power! segments. This is where the males are forced to tell the audience about how wonderful it is that so many women are competing in sports. I concluded that you have to be a true believer to participate in the making of such nonsense. Only a sociopath could fake that much enthusiasm for something they think is wrong. That or the presenters are so dumb they are incapable of self-awareness. Either way, the people in charge are in no way prepared to surrender to reality.
That does not really answer the question posed here. I think guys like Steve Sailer are, despite their chosen fields of study, optimistic about humanity. They hope there are some sensible people in the ruling elite who will, in the fullness of time, find a way to incorporate the reality of biology into their policy making. Any hints that suggests someone is in on the gag, so to speak, is held up as proof. Maybe he is right and maybe their use of esoteric signalling is so advanced that rubes like me can never see it. On the other hand, the shrillness of the screeching from the media suggest they really, really belief their nonsense.
Why do male Olympic athletes think it’s swell that women are competing? Simple: it means the Olympic Village is full of high-quality, perfectly-toned women. You think they want to be stuck banging chubby local fangirls?
Modern life causes a lot of people to become mentally damaged, to become disconnected from reality. They may not be raving all the time, but they are insane none the less. Just like you can’t sit around all the time and not get physically weak, you can’t stay in a fantasy state permanently without becoming mentally weak.
Late to a great conversation. There are undoubtedly thought leaders. Do they communicate and coordinate enough to constitute an inner party? Is there a set of agreed upon goals? It’s all pretty opaque and while I can infer some things from journal articles and news stories, I probably don’t really know enough to give an unqualified yes. Following Zman’s hypothesis — that this is a religion and is descended from late 1800’s American Protestantism — I would guess that they are effectively organized along the lines of American Protestant sects with different synods and factions constantly splitting off and coalescing. The universities have become the theological seminaries and the foundations, NGOs, and think tanks are the councils.
I was thinking today about Muslim immigration today and it struck me that they are the venomous snakes of the new cult. For the cult to prove that its belief system is correct, then they have to challenge the beliefs to see if they are true. Like the snake handling cult, someone has to get bit by a snake every once in a while and live, else faith waivers. The progressive cult’s venomous snake is Muslim immigration. If their notions about tabula rasa and environment completely trumping inheritance are true, then they should even work for a culture as regressive as Islamic culture. They are putting their faith to the test.
In one on one sessions, I used to be pretty good at talking progressives out of some of their more outrageous beliefs. The problem was, they would then go back with their buddies, who would subtly (or not so subtly) remind them of the articles of the faith and pressure them back into the belief system. I don’t bother anymore.
Interesting post and comments, but why does nobody deal with the statistical arguments and questions from Sailer and John Derbyshire? Because genetics appears mostly to be a form of chemical statistics, and the issues are how many blacks are physically gifted at and how many are mentally useless at y, all in comparison to whites, chinese etc. etc. Because I know some pretty sharp hard working black guys and some god awful stupid feckless whites.
There is also the issue of proportions. What I see is a small number of specially gifted people guiding a larger number of otherwise gifted people guiding …. schmucks. Can we do without schmucks? Who’s going to mow my lawn?
I also fear many white, intelligent commenters are as smitten with their own world view and self esteem as the silliest moonbat cloud person. What evidence is there that intelligence, civilization and their baggage will aid the long term survival of humanity? That violent and stupid will damage the long term survival of humanity?
Me, I like intelligent white guys with good impulse control who act like me, I think we’re the salt of the earth and the best thing ever, but that is evidence of nothing.
“Because I know some pretty sharp hard working black guys and some god awful stupid feckless whites.”
Arguing from the exception is no way to go through life.
“Can we do without schmucks? Who’s going to mow my lawn?”
Well, you could pay a neighbor’s kid a few bucks to trim your grass, which is how a lot of lawns used to get mowed, according to scholars of ancient history. Or given that you think that only schmucks–i.e., foolish or contemptible persons–perform physical labor, you should mow it yourself, since you appear to be qualified.
Nobody in the cloud does their own scut work any more. They eat in restaurants, they pay people to watch their kids and fix their stuff and drive then to the airport and everything else. I blame it on cheap labor encouraging laziness
Our desire for cheap labor will be our downfall, no question about it.
The evidence is all around you. Intelligent white guys with good impulse control, built, designed, discovered, created, managed, grew and developed the modern world we enjoy today. It was NOT a women who designed the dishwasher, it was NOT a negro that invented ah … well pretty everything …. medicine, chemistry, engineering, smart phones etc …. central heat, automobiles, airplanes … television … I could go one, but you get the idea …. White men have been, at least up until now, the superior animal on planet earth. And now we are supposed to be embarrassed and feel guilty about that? Screw that!
A few know and keep their mouths shut to for a variety of social and economic reasons. The majority though just goes along with it because its the mainstream orthodoxy they’ve been educated to and believe in. Its just the water people swim in. There’s also the matter of incentives; if you’re high enough up the ladder, even on the off chance you realize something, why exactly are you going to bother to rock the boat? Everyone with an incentive to change things is someone who has something to gain from overturning the current status quo in a way that someone in the elite doesn’t. Alternately a simpler answer is that most people at the top are a bunch of dull idiots who’d go along with any view if it was the acceptable “authorized” view of the majority. So if colleges for instance taught something other than outrage and communism, they’d go along with that something else.
Want to get even more scientific sampling of the dominance of West Africans and their Western hemisphere descendants in the sprints — Wiki up “10 second barrier.” There you will find the list of all runners who have broken the ten second barrier in the 100 meter dash; listed in the order they did it. There are now 116 athletes who have done this; 113 of whom are from West or South Africa or who are descended from same. Of the remaining three, one is a Frenchman, one is Chinese and one has Australian aborigine ancestry ( another group that is probably genetically blessed with the gift of speed. Now what are the odds of that happening at random, given that the group in question is only about 10% of the world total. I’ll bet that number has a hell of a lot of zeroes in it. I’ll bet it’s close to the threshhold of “statistical significance” .. hey, Doc?
Now if you had looked at the first 98 athletes to cross this barrier, you would have found that 95 of them were from West Africa alone or whose ancestors were taken forcibly from West Africa. Now you are talking about 5% of the world’s population. But hey, let’s not jump to any conclusion and suggest there’s a genetic link here.
And while we’re at it, let’s not look at the explanation that these athletes are gifted with greater mass of fast twitch fibers. No it’s all in their work ethic. But gee whiz, Wally, if there’s so hard working and stuff how come they completely disappear when the distance increases to 800 meters and more; cuz isn’t that what you’d expect of people with greater than average fast twitch fibers — that they’d be at a disadvantage as distances get greater cause they’re lacking in aerobic, slow twitch fibers?
That seems to be the perfect explanation. So how come Miss Landers calls me stupid and racist when I bring this up in class?
An interesting column, particularly as we learn today that the only USMC female infantry candidate dropped out (per CNN today). I mean, if they all want to go on a bender in a meaningless sporting event that’s one thing, but when it becomes a public policy imperative, sooner or later difficult choices must be made.
All is not lost on the elites though:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/we-thought-female-athletes-were-catching-up-to-men-but-theyre-not/260927/
There’s just a reality that some people are unwilling to accept. Such as the fact that boys HIGH SCHOOL track and field records surpass the Women’s Olympic and World Records. (Somebody told me that once, and I didn’t believe it, so I just googled it and compared the two…and voila!)
As far as Galileo goes, the sun-centric model actually held a considerable amount of sway in the church until a small group of robed insiders decided to push Galileo’s heresies on the Pope who obliged. There’s a fascinating back-story to the politics of the whole thing. I once took the time to write about it, but I’ll just let everybody else do a little research. But it is quite fascinating how a small cabal of church leaders practiced anti-science to advance a political agenda…much like what we are seeing today from the Left.
Just so, but it’s fun to watch the women compete. It’s the only time one can ogle the female form for extended periods without transgressing current social mores.
“The emergence of genetics, as well as evolutionary biology, which is increasing reliant on genetics”
There was a writer some years ago (might have been H.P. Lovecraft) who noted that the 19th Century showed us the horrors of chemistry, and the 20th Century was showing us the horrors of physics, and guessed that the 21st Century would show the horrors of biology, and they would put the other two to shame. Certainly seems that biology is going to create an awful lot of problems in the coming years.
I live among the Cloud people, both my home and my work are in cloud- cuckoo land. They are mostly nice people, and they really do believe the things that we haters do not. Blank slatism, which absolutely dominates my profession (I’m a HS teacher) and attendant mania for equality are killing us. And most won’t admit it, even if they deep down, know it’s true.
Just ran across this. His bio is at Wiki and I’m surprised they treat him in such an evenhanded manner. Grew up in the South during Reconstruction. This guy was brilliant.
Sums TNB up pretty damn well…
*******
“Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the continent of Africa; rich beyond the poet’s fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a White man showed him its light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never built a harness, cart or sled.
A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber, he never carved a block, sawed a foot of lumber or built a house save of broken sticks and mud.
With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for 4,000 years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizons calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed of a sail.
And this creature, half child, half animal, the creature of impulse, whim and conceit, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw; a being who left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger – they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people … Merciful God … it surpasses human belief.”
— Thomas Dixon, Jr.
*******
Negroes may never have dreamed of sails but now they have the reality of sailfoams, free sailfoams.
Poetry. Really sad poetry.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. At my advanced age I don’t much care but the next 30 years are going to be tough sledding for the Blank Slaters. They may have to resort to force.
When it comes to the Cloud People and their Devoted Minions, the truth is always that which best explains what they wish to be true in order to satisfy what they believe. Like a snake first swallowing its tail, then it’s mid-section and finally its head, at which point reality doesn’t matter. This is why on a perfectly clear day there are no Clouds. It is all very scientific No doubt.
Moreover, since reality is no respecter of persons, there is always an underlying eugenics at play.
What we have in the end is the result of math and consequences. It is a numbers game whereby multiplication is exponential but subtraction is not. Therefore, the Law of Averages is denied any chance to maintain balance.
Furthermore, this may represent the scientific explanation behind why “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth Is putting on its shoes.”
So it is with Bullshit and Cloud People.
They know, at some level they know. The shrillness that a well reasoned counter argument provokes in them is a good indication of the lack of confidence in which they hold their own. Much, or most, of their layers of social constructions are based on a horror of the hand nature dealt to the subjects of their intervention. Nothing could sustain their motivation to the cause short of that conviction.
Z – They know. They (scientists) see the wall and brake and swerve. All research funding beyond mere subsistence is dependent on Federal funding, and acquisition and continuance of funding is dependent on compliance with the current weltanschaung. The lawyers (essentially ALL of our governing bodies), on the other hand, are much harder to read, and it is very difficult to understand if any of them don’t see? Or just refuse to look to avoid the cognitive dissonance…
With regards to comments by TPDoc, you and Severian, I have observed that it takes a measured IQ half an SD above the mean for effective functioning as a “maker” of value. That means that approximately 67% of the population are passengers or externally guided muscle at best. The incineration of our secondary and collegiate education on the altar of ‘tabula rasa = equality of capabilities = equality of outcomes’ could only be accomplished by removing as much content as was necessary to permit the ignorant multitudes to finish HS and College. A process initiated and driven by consistent rulings from the Federal bench that inequality of outcomes could only be caused by discrimination… And the federalization of education, and of various and sundry standards meant that oases of classical HS and Colleges could not survive. This was driven by, again the bench, rulings that any federal monies to any participant in education (loans, meals, etc.) made that system subject to Federal regulation and decrees.
As Ollie used to tell Stan, “Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into”
Lawyers suffer from Dunning-Kruger like no other group. Their high verbal skills enable them to score high in social settings where competitive verbal jousting is prized. This leads them to assume they are brilliant and know everything. I have a lot of stories about stupid lawyers. I used to fish with a guy who sold high end cars for a living. I think he was at Mercedes at the time. He loved lawyers and stock brokers. The former were dumb enough to fall for everything and the latter were rich enough to not care.
My completely unscientific opinion is that Dunning-Kruger is an acquired illness. I base this on years of watching freshmen become grad students become professors. At each level, it takes more and more effort to avoid the obvious, such that the only sure way to avoid career-ending badthink is to actually get dumber. The Newspeak word “crimestop” describes a real process, and the people teaching your kids at $40K a pop are all McGruff: “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, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short….protective stupidity.”
You are correct Nicainhouston, that effective functioning as a maker of value requires a higher IQ. However, I detect a bit of superiority in your comment about those who provide the “externally guided muscle.” Of course, those with lower IQ don’t rise to the levels of “makers” but conversely, not all those with higher IQ aspire to that definition. Maybe they take on the role of a craftsman or journeyman tradesman, or some other kind of worker. In my younger years, I worked the trades and saw some very smart people who would “fix” the designs of those “makers of value.” I guess what I am getting at is not confusing the issue of “making value” with some kind of class of people.
Another issue is respect. Whether an officer of the company or the janitor, I have always made it a point to show respect for people and their work. An architect might create the greatest skyscraper design but it all starts with someone selecting a site, digging a firm foundation, laying rebar, and pouring cement. Making the design a reality is no less a feat and requires no less intelligence than the original design. Of course, not all the workers know what they are building or care. It is only enough that they know their trade and do it well.
Regardless of what people might tell themselves, egalitarianism does not exist, except in someone’s mind. Reality proves otherwise. Not all can or should go to college. Not everyone can be a CEO. Not everyone can become a billionaire. But what everyone can do is become the best at what they do and keep on improving day in and day out. It is too bad that the government does not share that belief.
LetsPlay, I think you misunderstand his meaning.
Put plainly, I would certainly support the idea that the skilled tradesmen that you’re talking about ARE the “Makers of Value” that are being referenced here, or at least a large part of them.
Sure, there will be a lot of engineers and inventors in there too, software people, even poets and playwrights, but a great lot of what Value gets produced in this world gets produced by skilled tradesmen.
Not to confuse them with factory line workers, laborers, mailmen, deliverymen, etc, etc. Those people are “Externally Guided Muscle”, and there’s nothing wrong with them either, ’cause there aren’t enough “Makers of Value” in the world to do every bit of the actual work that needs to be done. Someone’s gotta fill in the gaps, or a lot of people starve.
At least those folks can take instructions onboard and carry out their assigned tasks (for the most part).
The bottom rung of folks who function more or less on instinct and external feedback alone are the real problem. Not only do they not contribute to their own upkeep, but they are also almost universally an active drag on whatever productive work is being done, usually through brutish nonsense and impulse crime.
“The cognitive elite in Europe knew Galileo was right. It was not like he popped out of nowhere to announce his new model for the solar system.”
Actually, they didn’t, because at the time he was writing, all of the available scientific evidence contradicted him. The lack of observed stellar parallax and repeated failure to observe Coriolis in falling objects were (rightly) considered damning evidence against the idea of a moving Earth. Only much, much later did scientists realize that the lack of observed parallax was the result of stars being much greater distances away from Earth than previously thought, based on evidence not available in Galileo’s time. Likewise, Coriolis was eventually observed in falling objects, but not until long after Galileo’s death. In any case, Galileo’s preferred Copernican model was almost as klugey as the old Ptolemaic system; only Kepler had it right, but until Isaac Newton explained gravity and all that, nobody could explain what possible reason the planets would have for elliptical movement.
Back when I was a small being, we would laugh at people who thought milk came out of bottles raised in the supermarket. The concept of cows in fields was pretty much as alien as it got to them.
Now we see lots of people not even knowing milk comes from bottles in supermarkets. Milk comes from cardboard boxes, doesn’t it?* Whoever heard of glass bottles for milk, lol!
*(or as they say in London, innit?)
Another Sailer bugaboo, cognitive stratification, explains some of the true believer behavior among the elites. Especially at elite schools, the “smart” kids are smart all right, IQ-wise, but they know nothing… except taking tests, and since they’re aces at that, they presume doing well on tests IS knowledge. I used to ask my frosh history classes to tell me something from the time period we’re studying that they’d like to know more about. Unless we were covering the American Civil War — where the obvious, test-approved answer is “slavery” — nobody ever said anything. It’s a version of Newspeak — if you lack the very concept of contradictory facts, forbidden thoughts cannot arise, and all that’s left is increasingly elaborate hermeneutics within the corpus of official facts. Yes, this will be on the test.
I never studied in high school and did the minimal number of assignments to get by. But I read incessantly. The only time people took notice of me was when I got the highest PSAT score in my class. My grades didn’t change, and I realized that I needed to get out as quickly as possible. Graduated early my senior year with the proviso that I start college immediately that spring semester. I went on to have to learn the techniques that the ace students use to get high grades and study for tests. My GPA was not fabulous but good enough to get in to med school, however retention of facts and concepts remained way above the norm. I could do math problems years after taking the courses, and scored very high on the MedCAT. Most of the people you are talking about do not have this retentive ability and I think much of their so called achievement is based on an advanced ability to ape what they read and see.
Can confirm. While most of my college experience isn’t at the elite level — so maybe there are some whiz kids there after all — I’ve been at just about every other level, and can tell you that kids struggle mightily with even simple re-phrasings of the pre-canned material. Tell them “George Washington was at Valley Forge” and they’ll write it down. Ask them “_____ was at Valley Forge” or “George Washington was at ____” and they can spit it back. Ask them “name the commander at Valley Forge” and they’re totally lost. The significance of Valley Forge? Fuhgettaboutit. That’s not fair! It wasn’t on the study guide!!
I’m fond of telling a story about teaching an intern how Google worked. I had assigned him the task filling out some basic data using research on-line. I figured it was the perfect task for a young person who spent all day on-line. Instead, it was like watching the opening of 2001. He had no idea what questions to ask or even how to think about forming questions. It was very strange to have to explain such things to an adult, even a young adult.
Every time I tell this story, people who work with young people laugh and tell me that I simply experienced the new normal.
One of the best things I ever taught my own kids was to make good decisions. To do this, they first had to ask the right questions. The right questions, they found, most often answered themselves.
This works on startpage.com as well because I hate Google.
Years back, I was at Yale visiting a friend and we were drinking beer with a bunch of grad students. Two things struck me. One is I was like a visitor from another galaxy to them. I knew a lot about their world and I was properly curious to know more. But, they knew nothing about my world and they were afraid of it. It was the inverse of smug self-assuredness. The other thing was the strange lack of curiosity. They were bright and polite, but incredibly boring people.
I’ve had beers with Yale grad students (at their exclusive pub, no less). Fun times, but can confirm everything you said. The real world? What’s that? Do you have footnotes and a bibliography?
I sometimes think The medical profession trains specialists to Know Nothing outside of their field. I am an old engineer type and am interested in a wide variety of subjects. I like to be able to ask the occasional question in the other persons field just to keep a conversation going. The reactions vary quite a lot. Some stop at the stone wall of their knowledge base and a few look out the window.
Life is over when you quit learning.
Yep. I’m also an old (50) engineer, presently in medical school. The majority of my fellow students are happy, incurious regurgitation machines, following the well-worn path to social standing and financial security. A handful have some real-world experience and have read a non-school book within the last few years. It’s quite entertaining to watch the former in our clinical reasoning sessions, struggling to find some template or fixed algorithm to go from ambiguous clinical presentations to a diagnosis.
Teddy Roosevelt found business men in his era boring and incurious. He preferred to spend his time with cowboys, academics, and politicians. I think the situation has reversed itself in the past century. While I don’t mind hanging around cowboys, modern academics and politicians are narrow-minded idiots. Many of the people I meet in the business world are open-minded and curious in general. They are willing to question assumptions and often pursue intellectual interests outside of their jobs.
The businessmen of that era were the most interesting people in the world, hands down. What you fail to understand is the degree to which Teddy Roosevelt was in fact a progressive. Of course he was more interested in the academics.
“The practical challenges came before the theoretical ones.”
So should it still be, but alas it appears it no longer is, as there is no question that ” the people in charge are in no way prepared to surrender to reality.” I’ve accepted this with chagrin, but at 70, that’s not so difficult. I’ve long since given up trying to reason with zealots (and they abound) of any stripe: smile, nod and avoid occasions of personal aggravation is my way of dealing with cognitive clutter. Tucked away on my farmlette, I have better and more productive uses for my time.
“I concluded that you have to be a true believer to participate in the making of such nonsense. Only a sociopath could fake that much enthusiasm for something they think is wrong. That or the presenters are so dumb they are incapable of self-awareness. Either way, the people in charge are in no way prepared to surrender to reality.”
As part of my work, I analyze climate change issues for the Federal Govt. You’ve basically just summed up the entire discipline with these 4 sentences.
I’m willing to believe that there might be some inner party types who are in on the joke and using it for the eternal purpose of holding and wielding power.
But probably the majority really believe all the guff. I have a young millennial across the hall at work whose worldview and mien periodically fill me with fury I cannot always articulate and in any case cannot do so in a professional environment. There is no way he is just playing a virtue signalling game. He doesn’t otherwise come across as all that bright, is informed within a narrow range. He is an “ardent feminist” [literally the only English phrase in which the term ‘ardent’ can now be used, and cannot be omitted] and everything is ‘culture’ or environment.
I assume all the media people of various kinds are true believers. They aren’t that bright. And to be fair, most people in most times and places do just accept social norms regardless, so this is to be expected. In an age when reality is kept at remove by stupendous wealth [of which I too am a beneficiary, I don’t want to live in a survival situation], it is easy to keep it out of mind.
I don’t think there is a way out.
Good point on Galileo. I’d even go farther- to the extent the churchmen were enthralled with oogily-boogily, it was Ptolemaic and Aristotelian classical oogily-boogily, the original foundation of the renaissance, being defended either by clerical scholars who had hitched their wagon to the old theories in particular, or their followers who imagined Galileo attacking the intellectual foundations of their world. Not too different from scientific disputes today, apart from the prison cells.
I remember some movie depiction in which a cardinal attacks Galileo on the principle that “if we are to believe your novelty, it would have been impossible for the prophet Joshua to do what he did”. I have no idea whether any such biblical arguments were used against Galileo. I would have assumed so. But I can never quite figure out why. If the sun goes around the earth, and Joshua has been given divine powers to slow it, he does so. If the earth goes around the sun, then Joshua just slowed the movement of the earth. Once you accept the idea of a god who can grant such things to his earthly representative, the celestial mechanics make no difference. It is as possible, or as crazy, regardless of the structure of the solar system.
I guess it’s ultimately a different state of mind being a modern. I don’t even really get why changing understanding of the structure of the solar system [Galileo was just changing the workings of a group of bodies already known for millennia] had to be assumed to change the nature of God or man’s relationship to him. He merely moved things from one self-governing mechanical system [with epicycles] devised by a pagan to a newer self-governing mechanical system [without need of epicycles]. He didn’t even alter the known scale of the universe. I can see why the discovery much later of the idea of galaxies or the true scale of the universe would alter man’s idea of what God might be like or our relationship to him [although not necessarily how- if we are alone in this immensity, we must be really favoured…], but Galileo’s system implied nothing like that.
Hi Z, they know, or they should know. It does not take too much exposure to those of other races to figure out that we differ greatly. But have our rulers had this normal exposure? I suspected the races differed in important ways, when attending elementary school with mostly white kids, the dinndus were NOT with the program. After serving a hitch in the US Army I was a firm believer in the differences between the races. No matter where you are if there are negroes there will be negro monkeyshines, often known as TNB or Typical Negro Behavior.
I wonder if our kind and benevolent rulers have had this type exposure? Is it possible they look upon negroes as some type of exotic well tanned whitey with big lips, kinky, wooly hair and a speech impediment? I was not a racist before exposure to negroes, perhaps our big people are pre-exposure.
I, too have observed many things since I emerged from the warm isolation tank of suburbia at age 18. Human biodiversity is self evident and obvious. When I judge based on content of character or behavior or results, I invariably reach the same conclusions.
One thing that’s very hard for me to do is to imagine how someone with a 70 IQ thinks about problem solving or abstract ideas. Or if they even can.
Science, math, engineering, chess, etc, all require an ability to imagine several possible scenarios of future moves in order to select the best one.
If you only live in the moment, consequences really don’t exist. ‘Unexpected’ things then just happen to you.
That could explain a lot of what goes on.
My cat lives in the moment. No concept of the passing of time or what may happen next.
Ever read this one?
https://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-africans-may-differ-from-westerners/
I read that. Good Lord! It’s depressing. Makes perfect sense, though.
Key takeaway:
One explanation for this lack of abstract thinking, including the diminished understanding of time, is that Africans evolved in a climate where they could live day to day without having to think ahead. They never developed this ability because they had no need for it. Whites, on the other hand, evolved under circumstances in which they had to consider what would happen if they didn’t build stout houses and store enough fuel and food for the winter. For them it was sink or swim.
And there you have it. Humans 1.0 just don’t do abstract thinking. No gettin around it. Dammm.
I’m interested in homesteading and one thing that becomes apparent when you start reading about this stuff is how easy it is to produce food in warm areas. You could grow your own produce and have a tank to farm tilapia year round in the Caribbean and produce almost all your calories on a small plot with little effort. Farming New England’s cold and rocky soil is an ongoing challenge in breaking and enriching the crappy soil and preserving food for over the winter. It’s a vastly more complex problem.
A pet peeve: this idea that Negroes are “the oldest race”.
That’s a miscegenated cludge of Leakey and Old Testament- and when Lucy lived in the Olduvai, it was a swamp. (We can climb the tree or dive in the water to escape predators.)
According to pre-PC physical anthropology, the Congo Negroid is the youngest variant, having only arisen near the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago, with features adapted to strong, direct sunlight.
They wiped out the older inhabitants, the Capoids (Bushmen, Pygmies, Hottentots) because of an extra quadraceps muscle and increased testosterone. (Why their women get fat and their men have heart attacks.)
They were faster and more aggressive- so they never had to get smart.
Note that none of the Southern Hemisphere populations developed so much as an alphabet, because of their more benign climate.