What If Black People Are Just Stupid?

The black writer below has a glancing familiarity with the research on his topic but fails to give sufficient weight to the fact that academic talk about IQ is concerned with AVERAGES

In everyday situations, averages hardly matter. What matters are the individual characteristics of the person we are interacting with. What group they belong to will not usually matter. But there are some situations where averages DO reasonably concern people.

A major example of that is Leftist concern about black educational attainment. For perhaps a couple of decades, Leftist psychologists and educators used all their ingenuity in an effort to overcome the "gap" between black and white educational attainment. And the gap was and is large. About a third of blacks do not even finish High School. They "drop out"

But no matter what the Leftist academics tried, nothing could budge that gap. Black education failure strongly validated what average black IQ tests showed: That most blacks are not very good at intellectual tasks.

And that was a concrning finding. The Leftist academics were understandably concerned. They were well aware of how important education is in our society. Educational failure predicts economic failure and a whole lot of other problems. It was reasonable to be concerned about that. But they found no solution to it. The low level of black educational attainment remained as average black IQ predicted it would be

So the characteristic Leftist dogma that all men are equal was greatly challenged. They were confronted with strong long-term evidence that IQ tests did in fact predict what they purported to predict. The differences were real and had real-life implications. IQ tests were highly valid in a psychomentric sense.

But that COULD not be accepted by Leftists. There HAD to be something other than IQ behind black life failures. And so we got a new dogma: Entrenched but covert white racism was behind black failure -- so called "Critical Race Theory"

But whatever the reason, the concern was with averages. Blacks were on average failures in much of life and that had to be explained. So for some people in some situations, averages do matter. So average IQ can matter too. The author below dismisses the importance of average IQ but the saga of efforts to close the black/white "gap" in education shows that it can indeed matter to some people

It is interesting that the concern about averages is mainly a Leftist concern. Conservatives just accept them without doing much about them. The members of the Ku Klux Klan were after all overwhelmingly members of the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans

In 1971, Michael Cole, and a team of his fellow psychologists, travelled to West Africa to settle a question about race and intelligence.

They gave members of the Kpelle tribe various items (food, tools, cooking utensils, clothing) and asked them to sort them into categories. They then compared the results to a group of American students.

The Kpelle failed miserably.

Or rather, instead of grouping the items by type, as the students had, the Kpelle divided the objects into functional pairs. Here’s how Joseph Glick, one of Cole’s colleagues, described the experiment:

When the subject had finished sorting, what was present were ten categories composed of two items each — related to each other in a functional, not categorical, manner. Thus, a knife might have been placed with an orange, a potato with a hoe, and so on. When asked, the subject would rationalize the choice with such comments as, “The knife goes with the orange because it cuts it.” When questioned further, the subject would often volunteer that a wise man would do things in this way.

When an exasperated experimenter asked finally, “how would a fool do it,” he was given back sorts of the type that were initially expected — four neat piles with foods in one, tools in another, and so on.

As Cole noted in his report, the Kpelle weren’t less intelligent than the students because they thought oranges should be paired with knives instead of potatoes, they’d just grown up in a different environment with a different set of cognitive and cultural biases.

Or, to put it another way, the Kpelle weren’t wrong, but they weren’t white either.

Racial intelligence is one of those topics that’s a trainwreck no matter how you approach it.

Virtue-signalling politicians like Kate Brown lower test standards to “help students of colour,” race essentialists like Nicholas Wade publish pseudoscience about racial disparities, sociopaths like Payton Gendron use memes about IQ to justify racist mass shootings, the topic is so radioactive that most people just avoid it.

So let’s get one source of confusion out of the way from the start:

There are obviously going to be IQ differences if you group people by skin colour.

I say, “obviously,” because there will be differences if you group human beings by literally any measure.

If you group people by hair colour, you’ll discover that one shade is statistically more intelligent than the others. If you group people by height, you’ll find that one height has the highest percentage of mathematical savants. Somewhere, if some maverick ever decides to search for it, is the most eloquent penis size.

But when we try to draw meaningful conclusions with this quirk of statistical analysis, we run into a few problems. The first of which is what a black person even is.

According to a 2015 analysis of genetic data, around one in 10 self-identified African Americans have less than 50% African ancestry. And around one in 50 have less than 2%. We’ve become so comfortable with the idea that people whose skin is a roughly similar colour are the same “race” that we forget that a good suntan can throw the whole thing up in the air.

But okay, let’s get all “one drop rule” about this, and say that a black person is anyone whose skin is “milk chocolate or darker,” and who has some African ancestry in the past few generations. Very scientific.

The next problem is figuring out whether IQ differences are genetic.

For example, in support of the idea that “racial” differences are genetic, it’s often pointed out that Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate long-distance running. And they do. But does this mean “black people” are better distance runners than “white people?”

Well, if we take a closer look at these dominant athletes, we notice that they come, almost exclusively, from just three tribes (specifically the Kalenjin, Nandi and Oromo). All of which benefit from low oxygen/high altitude conditions, in a country that has numerous programs designed to identify and nurture long-distance running talent.

So instead of, “black people are genetically better at long-distance running.” We get, “black people who grew up in certain high-altitude regions of Ethiopia and Kenya, and who were encouraged to nurture their long-distance running talents from an early age, are better than everybody, including other black people, at long-distance running.

I admit this is a bit more of a mouthful.

But none of this addresses the biggest problem with IQ differences; the concept of IQ itself.

I mean, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that IQ is a perfect predictor of culturally-neutral, genetically-predetermined intelligence. And let’s even assume that people with African ancestry have, on average, lower IQs than anybody else.

What do we do about this?

Should black people be shipped off to separate schools if our average grades are a few points lower? Should we be denied access to opportunities or jobs if a slightly smaller percentage of black people turn out to be geniuses? Is a high IQ more valuable than creativity? Or people skills? Or persistence?

Well, it turns out that Dr Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University and one of the pioneers of IQ research, had similar questions.

In 1921, in one of the longest-running studies on intelligence ever conducted, Terman began tracking the progress of 1521 children who scored highest on his intelligence test, confident that they would all be “at the top of their fields,” as adults.

But almost none of them were. Instead, “willpower, perseverance and desire to excel,” were far better predictors of success. As Terman concluded, “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”

Honestly? I’m surprised his IQ wasn’t high enough to figure that out in advance.

The controversy over racial IQ differences was born out of a desire to justify slavery and colonialism. But it persists because our obsession with this vague, unscientific concept known as “race” persists. It persists because the delusion that our skin holds some identity-defining significance persists. It persists because the belief that we’re divided by these arbitrary differences persists.

But why are we so focused on skin colour and not eye colour or ear shape or hand size? Why do we define ourselves and each other by the actions of people who died centuries ago? Why are we still talking about genetic racial differences when, thanks to the fact that we’ve decoded the entire human genome, we know there’s more variation within the “races” than between them?

Because instead of wasting time ranking ourselves by our skin or our hair or our other…attributes, maybe we should be fixing the impoverished schools that leave young children functionally illiterate. Maybe we should stop teaching kids that rational thinking and hard work is “whiteness.” Or better yet, maybe we should stop teaching kids to think about the colour of their skin at all.

Maybe we should follow the Kpelle’s example and sort ourselves into more meaningful categories.

https://steveqj.medium.com/what-if-black-people-are-just-stupid-8162b47199a6

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Conservatism reinvented

His name is Blake Masters, and he just won the Republican Primary for the Arizona Senate. At 36, he beat older and more experienced candidate Jim Lamon, and in September will face off against ex-astronaut and establishment Democrat, Mark Kelly. ‘I’m going to win,’ Masters said.

Masters is part of a movement known as the New Right. They are a group of young, ‘post-leftist, heterodox and dissident’ right-wingers who see themselves as ‘counter revolutionaries’ fighting against what they refer to as ‘the regime’ – the neoliberal, globalist world order’. Rather than preserving the status quo – which they’d consider essentially over – they see their role themselves as agents of restoration, building a new path forward.

James Pogue, one of the first journalists to cover the movement in more depth, told Vox recently:

‘Globalisation was sold as if it would make all of our lives better. But largely speaking, it has enriched a very small, well-connected, international, sort of, elite set of schools, elite set of institutions. This trend of “open borders” is pushed forward in the name of progress and liberalism.

‘But actually, what it’s doing is driving down wages and impoverishing people.’

Nate Hochman writes in the National Review:

‘There’s not a lot left to conserve in the contemporary state of things. Conservatism today means radicalism.’

This ‘fractious family of dissenters’ may come to represent a political shift that reaches further, runs deeper, and is more operationally effective than the Trump years (but don’t count him out yet). One that – thanks to its hipster, hyper-cool online following – may quickly spread abroad.

There is no New Right/America First playbook, but there are policies that have remained consistent, including stopping illegal immigration, dramatically cutting legal migration, and tackling big tech (including, interestingly, its addictiveness). On a domestic level, Masters wants a median wage increase so people can ‘raise families on one-single-income’ and to bring schools and universities ‘back to reality’. Manufacturing needs to return – ‘jobs, not iPhones, or pill bottles’, and on foreign policy, American families always come first – ‘I don’t care what happens in the Ukraine, frankly.’

From the outside, one key difference to Trump is that the New Right isn’t a one-man army, seeming to be far more organised. To the north in Ohio is JD Vance, the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy. He recently won the Republican senate ticket by taking on the ‘community destroying’ effects of globalism. To the south in Florida, there’s Governor Ron DeSantis – whose star is rapidly rising, thanks, in part, to his stance on lockdowns and mandates.

The New York Times put it this way: ‘One way or the other – whether he ever runs for president or not – Ron DeSantis is the new Republican Party.’

Behind the scenes, Curtis Yarvin, a tech-founder turned political theorist – considered by many as the philosophical heft of the group – lends intellectual insight and certainly interesting ideas with meandering Substack articles laden with internet-speak (he claims to have been the first to use the term ‘red pilled’ in a political context).

‘Basically, you’re looking at something that calls itself a democracy, and is actually an oligarchy,’ he told Unherd.

‘The administrative state has practical control over the ceremonial politicians. The politicians you elect are not in charge, so you are not in charge.’

This, he said, is thanks in part to what he calls ‘The Cathedral’: a complex explanation of why most of the media institutes and experts seem to say the exact same thing at the exact same time, despite there being no clear top-down directive.

‘The Cathedral is just a short way to say ‘journalism plus academia’ – in other words, the intellectual institutions at the centres of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the centre of medieval society.’

To simplify this, Yarvin’s idea is that the ‘Cathedral’ represents the brain, whereas the deep state – or administrative state – is the body.

‘The brain,’ he reminds us, ‘generally controls the body.’

And then there’s Peter Thiel. Both a major financial backer and controversial figure in his own right, Thiel’s involvement in right-leaning politics – backing Trump and now Masters – draws continued ire from America’s media class.

‘Thiel and Masters are willing to move fast and break things. But instead of disrupting taxi companies or hotels, they’ve got American democracy in their sights,’ wrote Mother Jones.

Thiel’s involvement is arguably less about gaining power and seems more out of fear of what is around the corner. His view is that the globalised world we now live in was arrived at absent-mindedly, expecting no consequences. With no plans for the future, mankind has unwittingly progressed itself into a corner with scarily few exit options. Mildly prophetically, he envisions either a monumental shakeup of globalism and politics, or ‘total war and annihilation’.

‘In every possible future, all of today’s bubbles will burst, and their ideological scaffolding will prove to be but lint in the winds of history…

‘The waning of globalisation in the near future will be a reaction to the excesses of the recent past.’

But his more recent comments have been more hopeful, or, at least, less biblical. ‘I think the tide of globalisation is just going out,’ he said.

‘Politics is becoming more important, it’s becoming more intense, the range of outcomes is becoming greater… we’re in a world in which there’s a bull market in politics that’s getting started.’

Thiel may be bullish on this brand of politics because, in people like Masters and the New Right, he sees a chance to arrest American decline. Many others hope he is right.

If these figures are anything to go by, the New Right is young, energised, digitally shrewd, highly intelligent, and not afraid to court controversy. They see globalism as a corrosive force on society, mainstream media outlets as elite self-serving institutions, and America as a nation in spiritual and economic decline.

‘It feels like everything is coming apart at the seams. If we don’t right this ship, America is gone,’ said Masters.

Maurice Newman, writing in Flat White, also acknowledges the dark turning-point the Western world has found itself in. He concluded by asking; ‘Do we have the courage to turn back?’

This, the New Right would argue, is the wrong way of looking at it. The idea of ‘returning to our roots’ or ‘turning back’ – though noble and true to the conservative instinct – doesn’t match the needs of the day. The Right today cannot just be the party for ‘less tax, more globalism’. Conservatives are fighting a cultural, economic, and spiritual civil war using Reagan-era weapons. They’re losing.

What Vance, Masters, and others on the New Right do is voice what many on the right-wing are thinking. First, the neoliberal world order that promised to make our lives better did the exact opposite, and second, that a globalist type of conservatism is indictable for this decline.

Vance put it another way:

‘We’re in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives are uncomfortable with.’

It’s time to get uncomfortable.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/australia-needs-a-vibe-shift/

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‘Woke’ Military Policies to Blame for Recruitment Crisis, Servicemembers Say

The U.S. Army is expected to fall nearly 40,000 troops short of its recruiting goals over the next two years. Fiscal year 2022 is expected to miss the mark by 10,000 troops, while the number in fiscal year 2023 could reach 28,000. These figures mean that this year is on track to be the Army’s worst recruiting year in almost 50 years.

The Army plans to circumvent the problem by offering $1 billion for its recruiting program and placing more emphasis on the use of its reserve units.

The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command for comment, and Maj. Charles Spears of the Combined Arms Center replied to various inquiries about the state of recruiting. Spears offered several reasons for the Army’s recruiting challenges in the years ahead.

First, he said, “only 23 percent of American youth are qualified to serve without a waiver, [noting that] obesity, addiction, medical, and behavioral health are the top disqualifiers for service.”

The Army is also competing with corporate America, he said, adding that “social media’s virtual public square shapes the values and perceptions of American youth, which is increasingly unfamiliar with the benefits of Army service.”

According to Spears, the American population is “increasingly disconnected” from serving in the Army and military service, Spears said. “Oftentimes, influencers [like parents, teachers, and coaches] do not recommend military service.” He also added that “the share of youth who have seriously considered military service is at a historic low of nine percent.”

Finally, Spears said, “the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited the ability of recruiters to interact with prospects in person, [and] also exacerbated academic and physical fitness challenges, limiting the pool of qualified applicants.” As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, there has been a nine percent decrease in Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) scores as well as increased applicate obesity.

In addition to these factors, servicemembers have expressed other concerns that they say have contributed to the recruitment crisis.

Army Boots on the Ground

The Epoch Times spoke to an active-duty Army soldier with over 15 years of service on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. He is gravely alarmed about the Army falling short on recruitment numbers.

“In the past,” he said, “the Army targeted a specific demographic of people based on their values, [and these recruits] were patriots and loved America.” In today’s general population, he doesn’t see the same interest in patriotism. “Much of the country doesn’t love America like it use to,” he said. “And with a military no longer upholding the values, the oaths, or the creeds it once did, what kind of new recruits should we expect [to join the Army]?” he asked.

“From a macro perspective, we had a significant breach of trust in the last election.” By oath, he said, the military swears to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But the U.S. military has said nothing about the previous election, according to the soldier. “I’m not saying there is a final answer, but as defenders of the Constitution, they owed open and transparent conversation to the force and to the American people,” he said.

Instead, he said, “they happily encourage mandated vaccines, back the transgender issue, and speak out in opposition to the Supreme Court of the United States in regard to Roe v. Wade—all of which are very political.”

In his opinion, “we now have a Department of Defense [DoD] that has taken various political positions that are very much opposed to the heart of America.”

All the while, he said, the size of battalions is shrinking. “Some are less than two-thirds of where they need to be,” he said. And many of those who remain are not “usable deployables.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/woke-military-policies-to-blame-for-recruitment-crisis-servicemembers-say_4664277.html

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Redefining ‘Recession’ for the Little People

On July 28, the Commerce Department announced that in the second quarter U.S. gross domestic product shrank by 0.9%. If that number isn’t revised upwards, it will mean that 2022 has been a year of negative growth. Two back-to-back quarters of negative growth, as we’ve now had, has long been considered the very definition of “recession.”

Preparing for the possibility of a second negative quarter of GDP with its negative implications for the midterm elections, Biden officials issued talking points to their minions that a recession is most definitely not two consecutive quarters of negative growth, but rather a complex combination of other factors that we proles needn’t concern ourselves with. However, “a recession by any other name” would smell as foul.

To be fair, maybe the classical definition of recession is a bit too simplistic. But it’s not as though GDP measures some discrete thing; GDP is whatever economists say it is. If they reconfigure GDP’s components, then its growth will be different.

The reason that the Bidenistas are so intent on redefining the word “recession” is because there is another economic indicator that cannot be redefined, and that’s “price inflation.” Though recession can be debated, the prices of energy and food can’t be; they are what they are, end of story. If a gallon of gasoline is $5, you won’t allow some pointy-headed policy wonk in D.C. to tell you different. That’s why the Democrats are so anxious to say we’re not in a recession, because having both inflation and recession going into an election smells too much like 1980.

Normal people might be a mite miffed at the Democrats for their infernal redefinitions. That’s because the Dems have been so consistently wrong lately about so many things that touch on the economy, especially their assurances that inflation would be transitory. Some analysts say that price inflation will be “sticky,” i.e. it will stick around for a while.

Recessions are officially dated by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Therefore, Biden can continue to deny that the U.S. is in a recession until the NBER chimes in, which, conveniently, won’t be until after the election.

The NBER may well side with Biden and rule that the U.S. was not in a recession during the first half of 2022. After all, it called the March-November period of 2001 a recession, despite its lack of two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. You see, the “Dot-Bomb [sic] Recession” of 2001 occurred under a new Republican president. And not only that, but the 2001 growth decline was only 0.3%, less than what we’ve had this year. One could be forgiven for wondering if the NBER has a bias.

Reminiscent of the stagflation of 40 years ago, Democrats are caught on the same sticky wicket of recession and inflation. But of these two, which is worse?

If one has lost one’s job due to recession and is standing in a breadline, one might think that recession is surely the greater evil. But inflation hits everybody, including those who have managed to retain their job. Inflation is a cancer that can metastasize throughout an economy, and even destroy a nation’s currency.

If inflation is the greater evil, how do we deal with it while creating less pain for folks? To kill inflation, former Fed head Paul Volcker triggered two painful recessions by jacking up the federal funds interest rate to 20%. This writer knows of no one advocating such a stratospheric rate.

On July 28 at CNBC, economics professor Frederic Mishkin suggested that the Fed hike the funds rate to 4%. Mishkin didn’t explain why that number should be the target, but noted that it’s twice the Fed’s desired inflation rate of 2%.

Besides raising interest rates, there are two other ways to tackle inflation. The first is to attack inflation head-on by reducing the money supply, which the Fed does by reducing its balance sheet. We’re talking QT here, quantitative tightening, i.e. withdrawing money from the economy. The Fed hasn’t had much experience at QT nor has it been very good at it.

As this writer noted in July, the Fed acquired assets in the early days of the pandemic at a rate that is more than ten times faster than the rate it plans to reduce its balance sheet. Also, the Fed is unwinding its position passively, by letting securities mature and then run off. It’s called “portfolio runoff,” which means that the proceeds of maturing assets aren’t reinvested, they’re destroyed.

The Fed could be more aggressive in reducing its portfolio. If the Fed tries to control inflation with only interest rate hikes and passive portfolio runoff, we may be in for a more painful recession than is necessary. Given that, shouldn’t the Fed also reduce its balance sheet actively, by selling its assets prior to maturity? That way the Fed would be taking even more money out of the economy to fight inflation, and perhaps have less of a reason to raise interest rates to ruinous heights.

The second way to fight inflation is with the elective branches of government. Congress could end its excessive borrowing and spending, both of which contribute to rising prices. But with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, members of Congress seem to think that they can spend their way out of inflation. Indeed, Sen. Chuck Schumer once said that “the Fed is the only game in town.”

The president could help on the inflation front by reversing his disastrous policies on energy, but his handlers might not let him. So neither Congress nor the president are likely to deliver any relief. It seems the Fed really is the only game in town.

In combating inflation, Prof. Mishkin opined that the Fed needs to establish some “credibility,” as it had gotten “behind the curve,” and had been insufficiently “aggressive.” Correctamundo!

The Fed has been wrong and it’s been tardy. With an inflation rate of more than four times the 2% desired rate, the Fed can’t continue to pussyfoot around our inflation problem. To lessen the pain of recession, the Fed shouldn’t rely on passive portfolio runoff. The Fed also needs to actively sell the assets it bought with money it created. And, as with portfolio runoff, the Fed needs to destroy the proceeds of such sales. The Fed should rev up QT to soften the recession.

Recession is the price we pay for living beyond our means. Recession is a necessary corrective. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the federal government has borrowed, printed, and spent trillions of dollars to prop up the economy and asset prices. It needs to end.

If we want to kill inflation, rather than deny that we’re in recession, we should embrace recession, painful though it be. We must disabuse ourselves of the idea that we can continue running trillion-dollar deficits and printing a trillion dollars of new money in a single month.

Normal people should resent the Dems for their transparent attempt to control them by controlling the language and redefining inconvenient terms. They tell us that the invasion at the southern border is not an invasion and that the raid on President Trump’s home was not a raid. Who are these mental defectives trying to take over the mother tongue? If we allow them, the Left may even try to redefine “redefinition.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/redefining_recession_for_the_little_people.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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