I’m reading about the alt-right yahoos at Portland State University, and it’s horrifying. It’s a long story, focusing on a small group of admitted racist trolls who have absorbed 4chan/Reddit culture and have decided that openly parading their ignorance and bigotry is fun. What’s particularly appalling to me is that they claim that their views are scientific and rational…but when I read them, they’re just wrong about everything.
Well-read in the authoritarian right, Kolychev says he supports the liberal values of the Enlightenment.
This is a common refrain among certain kinds of conservatives. They claim they are the True Liberals, or neo-liberals, and they are simply returning to the original values of the Enlightenment. There is a grain of truth to that, but they’re doing it wrong. A central value of the Enlightenment ought to be the embrace of change, accepting the idea that we can learn more and become better; it’s not a fixed set of rigid values. You especially cannot support the liberal values of the Enlightenment by thinking that you should turn back the clock three or four hundred years.
The Enlightenment arose in the 17th/18th centuries. It was also a time of colonialism, empire building, racism, slavery, oppression of the poor, and vicious punishments. You don’t support the Enlightenment if you think everything about the past was virtuous, so therefore we should bring back public hanging, workhouses, and colonial exploitation.
Modern liberalism is different than 18th century liberalism. Ideas change. Seeking justification in the past is a conservative value.
He wraps liberalism around his advocacy against
forced segregation and forced integration,by describing it asfree association.He refers to white nationalist Jared Taylor as the source of his ideas. Taylor hit the spotlight in January by placing robocalls to Iowa voters in support of Trump. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Taylor wrote,Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears.”
This is just ahistorical crap. It was non-Europeans who first built civilization — all that stuff along the Nile, the Yellow River, the Indus, the Tigris & Euphrates wasn’t constructed by invading hordes of Germans and Celts. What about the kingdoms of Mali and Songhai, or the culture built up around Zimbabwe? Human cultures often arise, flower, and collapse, so pointing to the disappearance of the Mali empire is no more a sign that black people are incapable of maintaining a civilization than that the collapse of the Roman empire, the absence of a Visigothic empire, the destruction of the Third Reich are proofs that white people just can’t build anything that lasts.
It’s also the case that the aftermath of that Enlightenment, or concurrent with it, was a period of intense invasion and destruction of non-European cultures by us white people.
In addition to naming Jared Taylor as an influence on his ideas, Kolychev lists Ron Paul, Milton Friedman, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Thatcher, Joseph McCarthy, Pinochet, Spanish fascist Francisco Franco, South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, Zionist fascist Meir Kahane, and William Luther Pierce, an American neo-Nazi who influenced both Timothy McVeigh, who bombed Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168, and Thomas Mair, who allegedly murdered British Member of Parliament Jo Cox on June 17, 2016.
The jarring name in that long list of awful, horrible, no-good people is Thomas Jefferson’s. But it actually makes a useful point: you can’t simply say “Enlightenment” and claim unleavened virtue. Jefferson was a mostly good guy, unlike those others, but at the same time he was a slaveholder, he authored a flawed founding document for our country (the cowardly way it dealt with slavery and demeaned some human beings has poisoned our entire history), and of course he bought up a huge chunk of the North American west without a moment’s concern for the people who actually lived on it.
The most prominent face of Portland State Students for Trump, Kolychev says,
I have Black and Hispanic friends,and people should be judged as individuals not ongroup aggregates.
Except that he’s about to judge entire group aggregates.
.
He also says
There are biological differences between Blacks and whites. There are I.Q. differences, a lower ability to postpone gratification. A quicker gestational period.After receiving a quizzical look, Kolychev clarified,Blacks breed quicker.
This is simply racist nonsense. There are IQ differences, because IQ is a deeply flawed measure, and because it’s sensitive to cultural variation and environmental effects. The “gratification” crap I’ve heard before, but it’s just more pseudoscience.
The gestational period differences are actually kind of interesting, but they don’t say what Kolychev thinks they say. The human gestational period typically varies between 37 and 42 weeks; there is no real problem if birth occurs within that period. There have been a couple of statistical studies of gestation periods in black and white people in England and the US, and the average for white people is 40 weeks, and the average for black people is 39 weeks. However, there are a lot of confounding variables.
A bigger, more consistent factor in gestation is the number of children: primiparous (first child) births have longer gestational periods, on average, than multiparous or subsequent births. Birth is accelerated if the mother is a smoker. Timing is also associated with maternal weight. So this is a parameter that is all tangled up with issues of class, and the variation, what there is of it, is small and still within the normal range.
I know these goons are very concerned with being outbred, but reproduction rates are complex and associated with so many different factors that you can’t simply point to a small difference in gestational period and blame it on that. If you’re really concerned about black people outbreeding white people, there’s a simple solution: give black women more opportunities for education, provide adequate medical care, and stop killing their children, and they’ll voluntarily and spontaneously have fewer babies, same as white people.
Aping Taylor, Kolychev says,
Diversity weakens a country. When you have people of different cultures and ethnicities in the same place you have conflict. It’s natural.
Says the guy fomenting hatred and conflict in a diverse country. You know what would weaken our country? Electing a president who has announced that he wants to immediately deport 11 milliion people. You know what would strengthen our country? Encouraging cooperation and coexistence.
I really wonder what he’s going to say in another decade or so, when the US becomes a “majority minority” country — when white people of European descent are no longer the majority. It’s happening, the demographics are inevitable. Will he voluntarily get up and leave with all of his family, to avoid weakening the country with his admixture of minority racial characteristics? Where will he go?
If that happened, I can imagine the Swedes rising up in outrage at this influx of goddamned racist American immigrants flooding the country and bringing in intolerant non-Scandinavian values.
When asked about the socio-economic status of African-Americans, he said,
For some reason Blacks don’t accept American values and culture. There’s high ethnocentrism among Blacks. It’s natural. Bats are with other bats.For Kolychev race is biological destiny,Africans have an IQ of 70, Blacks in America have an IQ of around 85 because they’re one-quarter white. Whites have an IQ of 100, Asians 108, and Ashkenazi Jews are 117.Tylor Phelps struck a similar note about Mexico,
The I.Q. there is about 80,attributing it to a lack of resources.
Guess what, Mr Kolychev? Black culture is American culture. Why are you having such difficulty accepting that fact? Historically, socially, and politically, America is a complex gemisch, and you don’t get to single out one thread of the fabric and say “That is American”, while ignoring all the other threads as somehow irrelevant to the American experience. It’s particularly ironic, though, that an immigrant to the US from Russia is complaining about our lack of purity.
The rest is garbage, and makes my point that IQ is a lousy metric. No, most Africans are not mildly mentally retarded, barely able to function independently. Mexico is not a country packed with stupid people. I’ve been to Mexico City, and I rather doubt that a culture so full of art and music and great food and fabulous literature is the product of intellectually incapacited people.
This is one of those things racists often say that is patently false* — it’s literally anti-factual. You can’t simultaneously claim that IQ is an unbiased, fair measure of general intelligence and that the populations of entire nations are deficient in intelligence, because those nations are complex, thriving, generally successful groups of people.
What you have to recognize is what IQ is: it’s a measure of preparedness and ability to succeed in academics in a Western school. It is not a measure of general intelligence, but of a uniquely specialized kind of training. That’s how it can change in populations far faster than genetics would allow: because we can shape an adaptive intelligence, which all human races have, to perform well towards a specific goal with early childhood education.
That’s also how someone like Kolychev, who probably has an adequate IQ score, can get into an American university while being so lacking in basic humanity and understanding of the breadth of human experience. He’s not very smart. All of his intelligence is committed to meeting a narrow metric that doesn’t actually work very well, but is great for folding oneself into most conventional measures of success.
It’s a shame that Portland State University is afflicted with such vocal shitheads, but it’s also a problem in general that universities everywhere have entrance requirements, and strategies for success, that don’t necessarily encourage much variation in ideas. But maybe the metrics for admission ought to start including tolerance and cooperativity and openness, which, last I looked, are not measured on the SATs.
*This “African IQ is 70” is such obvious nonsense that even the racists have been trying to explain how their beloved IQ scores can be so at odds with the actual experience of meeting black people and seeing black societies function. If you don’t mind being sickened, google “winning personality” and IQ — the racist explanation is that black people are really dumb, but they’re also cheerful and extroverted and gregarious, so they fool everyone into thinking they’re normal.
ThanX! Just about as excellent a response to racist beliefs as I’ve ever seen. Scores 100 out of 100. There are differences between individuals, and group preferences and habits vary as well. But, to take these differences and make of them invidious distinctions is just plain wrong.
Wait, has he really nominated as “an influence” a man who was unknown to the wider world until he was arrested for murdering a politician a few days ago?
Congratulations to Kolychev on figuring out how not to be a shithead by a past century’s standards. Maybe he can apply his vast intellect on figuring out how not be one in this century; you know, the one he lives in. Has anyone else noticed a trend in their expectation of praise and admiration for barley vaulting over the low bar of any measure (while simultaneously espousing the virtues of their supremacy, of course)?
chrislawson at 2- I think it’s pointing out that Kolychev and Mair both found William Luther Pierce influential, not that Kolychev was influenced by Mair.
“Hey dudes, I’m not a regressive fool – 400 years ago, I would’ve been seen as a radical leftist!”
Hey, wow, go you!
It’s natural? Nothing to do with people being forced out of particular areas? Forced into others? No? I mean, I suppose it is natural that people forced into the same areas might be fairly ethnocentric, but I don’t think that’s what the guy’s saying.
So…… I don’t believe we should lock people up who haven’t committed any crimes, just in case they happen to be a threat… but… I think a case could be made.
From a German perspective it’s always interesting to see racist people of Slavic descent in America aligning themselves with “whiteness” as a matter of course…when to racists here Mr. Kolychev (weird Slavic name!) would seem about as dirty and vaguely subhuman as Mexicans do to him.
If he does emigrate to western Europe once the US becomes a “majority minority” country, he may be in for a rude awakening trying to bond with the other “whites” over their shared superiority.
OP about Jefferson:
“he authored a flawed founding document for our country”
Assuming you mean the Constitution, Jefferson had little to nothing to do with “authoring” the Constitution, being out of the country and not attending the Constitutional Convention.
Zeppelin@6, just like a lot of conservative Protestants in North America have made nice with Catholics, because of joint concerns like abortion, a lot of the racist right have decided Eastern Europeans are all right because some of them share the same views on non-whites. The strength of anti-communism in the ’50s probably didn’t hurt. There are still those who don’t like them, especially the older crowd.
The “Asians are slightly smarter that Whites” thing Kolychev mentions is a relatively new thing, dating back to the ’80s when “Japan Inc.” was supposedly going to dominate the world economically. If he went back to before WW2 he’d have trouble pushing that idea, since the common belief was that the Japanese were at best crafty copycats of Western creations, but not much else. Of course with a name like Kolychev he’d probably be a lot more likely to run into people who held prejudices against Eastern Europeans.
If US demographics change too much for their liking I can see these guys trying to get into Canada on the naïve assumption Canada is heavily white. They’ll be in for rather a surprise if they move to Toronto and Vancouver and see how ethnically diverse those cities are, and smaller Canadian urban areas are as well to a lesser extent.
Now *this* is how you rebrand a klan.
Tylor Phelps struck a similar note about Mexico, “The I.Q. there is about 80,”
Anyone who talks about IQ like it’s a serious thing can be dismissed out of hand.
I do wonder what Himmler et al would say about someone with a name like “Kolychev” …
The problem with racism is that it really takes only a little bit – like a squirt of diahrrea in your hot tub – to color and flavor your position. And, once you start down that path, you’ll inevitably find that at some point in time someone has thought that your ancestors were subhuman and therefore you, in their opinion, are too. Another problem is that the racists live in an imaginary world where there are “blood lines” that go conveniently back until, uh, convenient. Most of us have a mongol somewhere in their ancestry. Or a Roman. Or a slaver. Or a Babylonian. Or…
When I linked to this on Affinity, one thing I noted in the article was how many of these self proclaimed shitlords are the products of extreme privilege, many of them coming from wealthy families.
Marcus:
No, they can’t. Everyone thinks they won’t end up having their head cut off to prove the racist science theory of the day, but it has happened, continues to happen, and there’s no point being blind. Already, the white nationalists that were pushed back to the fringe a couple of decades are back, and back strong.
Like, ever heard the term “Flynn Effect”?
@Caine #12
Would you mind linking your post that referenced this? I wanted to read it and am having a little trouble finding it for some reason.
Sounds like Idi Amin. He kicked out all the East Indians from Uganda. Then the economy collapsed. Brilliant.
I’ve always wondered why people think the second sentence makes the first sentence true. Let’s grant that different ethnicities and different cultures in the same place will have conflict*. This does not mean you can assume that a homogeneous community is going to be without its own conflict. Think about it: if you want to maintain a single culture that everyone adheres to, you have to punish deviation from the norm. That is called totalitarianism.
Cultural conflicts between neighbors may also be minor and easy to resolve. They won’t all be flame wars.
*I don’t dispute it. After all, the culture here in Iowa drastically under-appreciates the importance of turn signals in my opinion.
I am sure he is just planning to become the mayor of Wayward Pines in the future, so.. hating everyone that’s different is err.. practice for the abbies, or something.
Brony, see the link at #13.
@Caine #19
Thank you. I missed that it was the same one and that that was the article in question while looking through the pages.
PZ, this is off topic, apologies for that, but there needs to be an outcry about this.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/06/19/teen-girl-bumped-from-national-masonry-competition.html#
Girl wins contest. Girl gets bumped for boy who came in third. Terrible excuses follow.
“Diversity weakens a country. When you have people of different cultures and ethnicities in the same place you have conflict. It’s natural.”
But this same person would have us believe that the most conflict and dysfunction occurs in places that are not diverse but just populated by the ‘wrong’ (to him, not white) people. There’s certainly less conflict in the incredibly diverse university communities I’ve lived in than there are in the US on average. It’s almost like economic security and education does something about conflict.
Also, it’s something to find a white supremacist talking about ‘high ethnocentrism’ among black people.
PZ, sorry for this being off topic, but there needs to be some public outcry about this.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/06/19/teen-girl-bumped-from-national-masonry-competition.html#
The story speaks for itself.
PZ: “If you’re really concerned about black people outbreeding white people, there’s a simple solution: give black women more opportunities for education, provide adequate medical care, and stop killing their children, and they’ll voluntarily and spontaneously have fewer babies, same as white people.”
There’s another simple solution: give white women fewer opportunities for education, deprive them of adequate medical care, and maybe kill a few of their children (pour encourager les autres).
I suspect Mr. Kolychev would prefer that one to yours. Just a guess, though!
Just guess who is invoking the conflict.
re 7:
I understand the confusion, I’ll just unleash my pet pedant.:–>
– Founding Document = Declaration of Independance.
– Constitution, the current one, was effectively v2.0 of the first Articles of Confederation.
– The Articles left too many loose ends that they had to call a Convention to write v2.0.
I too am vague on details, but it could well be that J was one of the authors of the AoC, which was clearly a flawed document that had to be completely rewritten into the Constitution of The United States.
—
or so I understood it… leashing the pet pedant again
I don’t know why Myers wastes his time with these easy targets. More
meaningful to go after the Charles Murray / Steve Sailer pseudo classical
liberals.
This is like a right-wing blogger going after some random Occupy Wall
Street protester instead of Chris Hedges or Naomi Klein.
Saying: “I want society to return to the values of Enlightenment thinkers” is like saying: “I want my house to return to the state it was in when I first decided to clean it.”
So how was he “good” then?
So Kolychev admires and was influenced by William Luther Pierce. Really!? Pierce is the man who wrote Hunter and The Turner Diaries. Hunter is a fictional celebration of a man who murders interracial couples and liberal journalists. The Turner Diaries is a wish fulfillment fantasy of mass murder. In The Turner Diaries Pierce fantasizes with joy and deep pleasure the extermination of Jews, Blacks, “Mongrels” etc., basically everyone who is not Nordic European. Pierce takes especial delight in murdering interracial couples in fiction.
I have little doubt that Pierce would have taken part, with gusto, in the murder of large numbers of men, women and children of the “wrong” sort if he had thought he could get away with it. As it is he instead satisfied his desire to exterminate by mass murder in fiction. And of course Pierce was a great admirer of Adolf Hitler.
I find it amusing has hell that this person admires Pierce, who was a frothing at the mouth genocidal anti-semite, and Meir Kahane a Jewish fascist.
Caine @#13:
Good point. Just because their arguments may be laughable doesn’t mean their actions are.
I’m surprised that the people who cite these racial IQ statistics (flawed as they are) don’t advocate for Jewish supremacism. Are they applying the “golden mean” fallacy to intelligence?
White Europeans had Christianity and guns, providing them with the justification and means to impose their colonial will on the rest of the world.
In the process they smashed entire civilizations into dust, irreparably destroying governments, societies, and religions that had functioned independently of outside influence for centuries.
@ #25
The DoI is irrelevant here, it was mainly a list of 25 or so grievances and a justification for rebellion. It said nothing about setting up government or about slavery. The Articles of Confederation were authored mainly by John Dickinson (Pennsylvania), and said the states would govern themselves, with little interference from the federal government, (no taxation, no national elections, etc.). It was basically thrown out and the Constitution written from scratch. Jefferson didn’t write it.
re 32:
thanks for the history lesson I lacked.
my only excuse is a looser definition of “founding document”.
the DOI was a document that initiated the founding of a new government for the colonies to now be called states. So it was a verb (founding) not a noun (foundation). or some such wiggle interp of the use of “flawed founding document”
flawed, in that it did not specifically oppose all the flaws within the colonies and focused solely on grievances against the crown.
sincerely thanks for the toleration. I did not mean for my pedant to attack, nor berate you in any way. Your feedback is quite useful. thanks
Or Louis XIV: he kicked most of the Protestants out of France: didn’t help much either.
Or the Spanish catholic rulers, who kicked the Muslims and Jews out of Spain… And since many among them were scholars and engineers, they went to the Ottoman sultans and helped devise the canons that were used in the conquest of the Balkans.
***
Yeah, while inbreeding and cultural stagnation, on the other hand, is guaranteed to bring eternal peace and unimaginable prosperity: just ask those insular ultra-traditionalist Mormon cultists…
***
Then you deserve to be outbred into oblivion
Because let’s be blunt here: the fear of being outbred by minorities is a bully’s terror: “The people I used to treat like shit may one day become stronger than me! and therefore capable of settling old scores“.
I’m going to be smug here and point out how much that benefitted England for taking both groups in. The Huguenots enhanced the cloth and lace industry in England in the 16th century, and the Ugandan Indians were a boost to businesses in the 1970s. I’m old enough to remember the racism which accompanied that last influx, but equally I can see that today’s generation doesn’t have that problem to anything like the same degree. Things do get better. It’s a long game, but a winnable one.
Kolychev should… no, sod it. I can’t think of anything to say which that arse might possibly interpret as constructive advice. Just fuck off, you ignorant, small-minded, bigoted piece of shit.
The Huguenot thing was one of the first times I started to really seriously doubt the official history. It sounded completely awful to me, with no redeeming features, just a raw genocide for no good reason. But history class was covering it rather sympathetically to the Catholic ruling class, as if it was just and right to murder all these people on religious grounds. Every presentation was from the perspective of the Catholic view of the issue, generally from the Royal view. And this was in officially republican France that I was hearing this!
My English history was much better taught: religious strife was a *bad* thing, obviously. It skimmed over the Irish issue (because genocide is a bit hard to discuss with eight graders), but in England proper every religious battle was seen as an unfortunate event that eventually the country got over. We were following a British curriculum on that, not the French curriculum.
Then back to Canada and I learned about 1755. That was in a francophone school in New Brunswick. Nothing happened in all of history except 1755. No other nation suffered so much as the Acadians in 1755. 1755. 1755. 1755. Oh, summer’s about to start — First World War sad, Hitler bad, ok that’s it for history.
He is from Ukraine, PZ. Not Russia. Right from the article. Maybe not critical, but deserves a correction.
reason and rationalization are not the same thing
uncle frogy
You think Murray and Sailer or more worth taking seriously? I don’t think so.
Drumpfh has caused/encouraged a bunch of these cockroaches to emerge from their hiding places.
It’s interesting that one of the students listed in the linked article gave his name as “Sam Hyde.” Sure, it’s possible that that’s his real name, but since “Sam Hyde” is an ongoing hoax in alt-right/GG/Chan circles every time there’s a mass shooting, it’s awfully coincidental.
Is that so? I got much better history classes: my teachers portrayed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes as a monumental blunder that led unforgivable exactions.
That’s why everybody knows the thriving Metropolis of Enkenbach-Alsenborn but nobody has ever heard of New York.
Where have you been during the EU referendum campaign and the assassination of Jo Cox MP by a neo-Nazi terrorist?
Further to #44,
And also the last election campaign, with the 16% vote for UKIP, the recent local and regional elections in which they made considerable gains (Scotland being a notable exception), the relentless anti-migrant lies of the right-wing press…
#30, MLP
There’s a lot of that about. Penis size is another favourite. The Japanese may be the smarter, but white men tend to have bigger peepees, so being white is clearly best. Black guys may tend to have bigger peepees still, but they’re obviously hella dumb and so despite being comparatively under-endowed, white people are still the best. I’m not totally certain about how this works. A guy named Richard Lynn is a fan of that position, if you had some morbid curiosity about who even comes up with these ideas.
Hey, white people are the whitest, so being white is clearly best!
I was wondering: what exactly is alternative about the alternative right? It all seems like the same old bullshit.
Thanks to a previous post, we can just classify these in the same category as “vagina bones biology”.
Less dog-whistle.
But wait until the alt-alt-right comes: their platform will be “We have more nukes than everyone else, therefore we are the Legitimate Lords Of Planet Earth and we’ll force the inferior races to pay us tribute with the threat of causing an extinction event“
I like to think of them as the “ctrl-alt-del right” or the “alt-F4 right.” Because their bullshit program needs to be interrupted and shut down as much as possible.
You think Murray and Sailer or more worth
taking seriously? I don’t think so.
Murray and Sailer are vastly more influential than a random Trump
supporter.
Murray (not so much Sailer) tries to mask his racism (e.g., by pointing out
that Asian quotas for college admissions are racist), and tries to feign
concern for the working class.
Neither one are openly praising dictators.
Kolychev here, completely randomly stumbled over this. This seems like an intelligent site unlike most that I usually see. Any questions for a neofascist reactionary?
Did somebody order a bulk delivery of popcorn?
He’s probably a troll unless confirmed by PZ.
Do you want proof that this is indeed me? My Facebook profile is http://www.fb.com/vdjstalin I can post a status that you want as evidence.
It wouldn’t hurt. If you’re going to be the entertaining clown tonight, we might as well know you’re the real deal and not a fake troll.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1044710012279820&id=100002224920332
Ok, I’ll bite.
Given that we’re coming close to 150 years of fascism as an overtly stated ideology, and bearing in mind that the myriad weaknesses and strengths of fascism have been well explored by various thinkers of many differing ideologies throughout the 20th century, what’s your favourite kind of pastry?
Anything that bakes well in an oven.
Unironically though, there’s a ton of questions above. For example how can I admire Pierce and Kahane. Quite simple the journalist concealed the massive list of influences I sent him. I like Pierce as a social theorist for example I believe he is spot on on democracy. I admire Kahane as a nationalist and ethnocentrist.
Meh, okay. To be honest, I don’t know why it would be worth while engaging with you. You are clearly scientifically illiterate and any meaningful discussion would require asking you to read up and to educate yourself first.
Is this about to become a white supremacist AMA?
I don’t think there is any chance we can learn anything useful from these guys. It’s not just that their beliefs are offensive and racist, but the main point is that they are outdated, wrong, unscientific, and absurd. We might as well debate phrenology.
lotharloo: Asking me to educate myself first? I went through the same public educations science classes and general requirement science classes in college as you did. Unless you are some sort of biochemist you have no right to claim to be more educated than me. I will inform you that unlike you I did not get subverted by the leftist bias however. Maybe you’re just scared that I can prove you wrong.
Saad: I’m not a white supremacist, to measure supremacy we need a subjective metric. What is your metric to measure “supremacy” by?
Yes, but just think of the wondrous knowledge we might glean about confectionery!
I have to run for the next couple of hours, but I have some pretty incisive questions about jelly tots lined up.
How concerned do I have to be about my grammar here. Do I need to proofread comments? Like against typos and make sure to punctuate correctly? Just a side question, to be honest.
I think you mean “objective metric” here, though I will admit that I’ve never seen any measurement claiming to show the superiority of one group of people over another that didn’t turn out to be entirely subjective. Astonishingly, the bias was always in favor of those who had invented the metric and used it to prove their own superiority.
You’re a white supremacist.
Is this also you?
Sorry, let me rephrase that. What I meant to say is that any metric invented by people to measure supremacy would be subjective. There is no way people could create an objective metric. So any supremacy argument will be subjective. Arguments about racial differences will be objective however. For example, the person above does confirm my claim(which I get from Rushton) that blacks have shorter gestational periods. There is no superior gestational period though.
Saad: yes that is me.
BS. Arguments about “differences” are subject to the same issues of subjectivity and confounding as arguments about “superiority”.
And I think you seriously misunderstood PZ’s statements about gestational period. Pregnancy length is influenced by a number of factors, including parity, health of the mother, various other external stresses, and quite a lot of things we don’t understand yet.
Dianne if races are not different
1) Why does the FBI approve drugs for certain racial groups
2) Why does forensic anthropology exist?
3) Why do people identify their race correctly more than they identify their sex with their gender?
0.14% of people in a study that had a sample size of over 4000 identified their race wrong.
Somebody hacked your Facebook account.
FDA, not FBI. I need to sleep.
Saad: that was a joke comment on my girlfriend’s post, the journalist is a leftist who will push whatever he wants. I’m alt-right I joke a lot, I don’t care about the whining from the left about it. No one can hack my facebook as I use a password manager for all my online activities.
PZ must be busy.
@laurentweppe #49 – So alt-right is more like “I’m no racist, but… because science”?
Isn’t that what racists always have said?
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Friend_argument
In the morning (mine), for fun I might go through and point out the huge list of logical fallacies this wanker employs.
and no, you’re only about half as educated as most of the commenters here.
not kidding. better know your shit.
1) There is no good definition of race.
2) Most racial differences are explained by environmental differences.
In what alternate universe does the FBI approve or not approve drugs? The FDA approved marketing of a specific hypertensive to blacks in the US, but it is looking like that was a bad idea. I think in fact the marketing approval was withdrawn though I will admit that I don’t know for sure. There are certain genetic polymorphisms that are more frequent in certain ethnic/racial groups and should be kept in mind when considering which drug to try first (best option: test for the polymorphism!) but these differences are about frequency in a given population, not some sort of imaginary absolute difference between races.
Because the study of humans (anthropology) is interesting to other humans? I’m not sure what the specific modifier “forensic” has to do with anything in this situation. Yes, people have different cultures. Sometimes people with no identifiable genetypic or phenotypic differences can have quite different cultures. Your point?
Um…what? I have no idea at all what you’re trying to say here.
The proper question, as any scientist will tell you, is why does the FDA also approve of drugs for treatment of people with various genetic markers? You lie if you think it is all do to race, bigot.
five bucks says we’re going to find out that one of the areas this guy has been poorly educated in is… statistics.
So it seems alt-right is what happens when the KKK disrobes and picks up on some scientific jargon.
*cracks knuckles*
I just joined FTB for this!
Kolychev:
1) Please define what factors influence intelligence (we’ll go with the IQ measurement).
2) Do we know more than we did collectively and scientifically since McCarthy’s time?
Ok #1 stop with the insults.
I have taken classes in statistics and will take more next term, I’m a mathematical Econ major. So stfu.
I corrected to FDA, go up and read. Idk if you can edit comments on here.
We are talking about differences in averages, yes there is a wide distribution within races but there is also a bigger difference in height between the smallest and largest male than between the average male and average female. Does that mean gender/sex does not exist?
And quite honestly this site outside the OP is quite likely full of liberal art majors who larp as scientists because “atheism”. And I say this as an atheist.
We obviously know more in absolute terms right now than 65 years ago.
He got mad.
That’s cute. I’ve coauthored over 40 papers on epidemiology.
Now that we’ve exchanged credentials, want to answer the questions that have been raised? @84 would be a good place to start.
Or we could discuss the genetics of hypertension and CHF and why BiDil’s marketing approval is looking like a dubious call.
First, gender and sex are far more complicated concepts than you seem to think and have a strong social construct component as well.
Second, you have not presented any evidence of any biological differences between “races”. I don’t mean no convincing evidence, I mean literally no evidence. Do try to at least make an argument.
In fact, why don’t you start with a definition of “race”. What makes someone a member of a certain race?
Not at all. I’m now retired, but worked for 40 years as a scientist. You have people here who have experience teaching science at the university level, and have published in the literature or with company reports.
You won’t be able to bullshit us. And we know how to find information.
So a guy who “jokes” that the Orlando mass shooting meant “50 less pedos”* wants us to “stop with the insults”? Poor baby. This is not a safe space for the likes of you.
(*It should of course be “fewer”.)
(Also, there’s a significant difference between “joking” and “being a stupid, hateful dick”. However, pathetic manbabies often have difficulty telling the two apart.)
I’d also like to know what VK thinks of the appropriateness of using cox analysis versus a shared frailty model when considering potential confounders to observed IQ differences. Assuming he can actually come up with any examples of IQ differences being observed.
@Kolychev – You seem to confuse “subjective/ relative/ more complicated than you think” with “does not exist”. Though you are right that sex, race and gender do not exist – not in the way rocks and trees exist. Sex, race and gender are generalizations and as such useful in certain contexts, but out of their proper contexts they lead to racism and sexism.
Hahahahaha. So funny. You have taken classes!!! I used various random sampling methods in my publications.
I know what the drill is. “Look over there! There are some genetic differences, therefore, whites are superior to blacks intellectually and it explains Western civilization!!!”
In other words, they think their opposition (that is, us) believe that there are no genetic differences between different groups of humans and that all the genes are uniformly distributed all over the world. They think if they establish that there are *some* genetic differences, then it becomes obvious that genetic differences can explain things such as civilizations! And then they wonder why we call them scientifically illiterate.
I dunno, folks, we may have scared him off.
Sad pants. :(
I guess I shouldn’t have made fun of him for “taking classes”. After all it makes him the most educated Trump supporter.
Somebody missed the “History of Science” classes.
@97: I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have brought up cox proportional hazard so soon. Maybe should have started with something easy like when to use a Fischer’s test for determining p-value.
@51
You do realize that is not uncommon among racist folk, right? Hell, if you’re a rich member of the privileged race, that’s how you maintain your position. Pit the poor of your own race against the other races, and their frustration is directed away from you. I’m no expert, but I don’t imagine slavery had much benefit to the working class white people in the Antebellum South.
I want to know how many races there are.
And what they are.
Psst, you can get a liberal arts degree in science. I have one and I’m still working as a scientist.
@Giliell #43
Could you please elaborate what your point here is? Because I do not get it. Last time (previous year) I was in Enkenbach-Alsenborn, there was turkish fastfood right next to grocery shop and I ate an excellent meal in a genuine italian pizzeria near to the footbal field. I also know (personally) people of following nationalities, who work in Enkenbach-Alsenborn: Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Bulgarian, Vietnamese, French, Spanish and US-American.
So from my experience, Enkenbach-Alsenborn and whereabouts certainly contains pretty diverse people and not only because of the relatively near french border and the US-base in Kaiserslautern.
Maybe I am just thick today, but I really do not get your point at all and I am curious.
Charly
Why didn’t you come over for coffee? I don’t live far from there!
What you say is true, but it’s also a very recent (like 50 years) development, much to the advantage of that place. But before that, those places were uniform, homogenous and frankly the places you left in order to get to more diverse places.
***** Affirmative Action and Asian Quotas as Leftist Racism.
“You do realize that is not uncommon among
racist folk, right? Hell, if you’re a rich
member of the privileged race, that’s how
you maintain your position. Pit the poor of
your own race against the other races, and
their frustration is directed away from
you. I’m no expert, but I don’t imagine
slavery had much benefit to the working
class white people in the Antebellum
South.”
The point was that Charles Murray employs the technique slightly more
skillfully, and therefore convincingly (for fools), than the typical Trump
supporter.
It is clear that the racists feel whites are persecuted. “Persecution”
defined as “not being given all the power.”
Similar thinking behind the alleged War on Religion.
***** Volodymyr Kolychev.
****** Shallow Discrimination
Why discriminate based on gender or race? These are such imprecise
categories. Why not discriminate based on musical taste? Or taste in
literature? Or interest in science?
Apart from morality, apart from accuracy, racism is shallow and
self-refuting.
****** Supposed Liberal Hypocrisies.
Liberals must tentatively recognize race and gender in order to properly
identify the victims of racism and sexism. That is the only reason. Your
reason is completely different.
I call bullshit on all your qualifications. You guys just use a bunch of science woo. I’ll put it this way since I no longer have any interest in arguing with morons. But I have two more questions. Why is it that blacks before colonization did not accomplish much of anything and why is it that Asians outperform on IQ tests that are biased for whites. All that matters is that black civilization has never amounted to anything empirically, your theories are utterly meaningless as anyone can see it if they drive through South Africa or a local ghetto. Good bye.
Because you’re historically illiterate.
Buhbye.
Eh I can never leave arguments. What did blacks accomplish before colonization, come on make a list, I dare you. Yea start with the Mansa Musa bullshit and maybe lump the Arabs in with the Subsaharans
Why should anyone bother, when you’ve already pulled the “you’re all morons not worth my time” card?
If we’re all liberal arts majors in disguise, is picking a liberal arts argument (i.e. over the history of Africa) really wise? I’ll leave it to the actual historians here to respond, though, since my knowledge of African and European history is sadly lacking.
I also notice your avoidance of any questions about actual science. Come on, bring on your evidence about race and intelligence. Heck, even IQ will do.
***** Black Civilization.
Picasso, arguably the greatest painter of all time, was heavily influenced
by African art.
African drumming is an enduring influence on music, and was indispensable
to the music of the 20th century, both popular and learned — in particular
the polyrhythmic drumming of technical death metal.
Plenty more could be cited, but that is plenty for now.
***** Why is it that Asians outperform on IQ tests that are biased for whites.
Asian scores confirm what you deny. Asian culture is more test-oriented
than Western culture.
Children are sent to cram schools at an early age in Singapore, China,
South Korea; parents put great pressure on their children to perform well
academically, pressure that would amount to child abuse by Western
standards (see Amy Chua’s The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother for an idea);
and Asians tend to perform better on the subtests that Asian culture
stresses (math / visuo-spatial); not so well on the sections they do not
stress (vocabulary, critical reading).
Also, part of the reason we see inflated test scores/college acceptance among asians demographically is because we combine a wide variety of disparate ethnic/racial groups under that single “asian” title.
For example, If I recall correctly, southeast asians tend to perform slightly below average on test scores. When broken down by subgroup, there’s a fairly more substantial degree of variance relative to the average.
There are also major disparities in IQ among Indians in India, very likely,
and most plausibly, due to environmental factors.
It’s also interesting to note that racists tend to talk about “Mexicans” having low IQs. The genetic makeup of Mexico is largely European and Native American, aka Asians who immigrated to the Americas early on. Wonder how that works if IQ is genetic and Asians have the highest IQs followed by Europeans.
Kept their cultures going for millennia. Next asshole question from a bigot?
What woo? Woo is presuppositional, which is YOUR ENTIRE BELIEF ABOUT RACE.
You are the woomeister.
Where is your scientific definition of race? (Hint, science doesn’t have one, as it is a social construct.) Where is your genetic data? Where are your links to the peer reviewed scientific literature?
I think this went the way most readers/commenters thought it would: a lot of bluster and unsubstantiated claims followed by not being able to answer basic questions about said claims and ending with anger. Does that sum up racism and/or bigotry to most?
I/we am/are looking squarely at you, Kolychev.
Bye, Kolychev.
(Picks up jaw from floor, tries to reassemble it…)
korv n;ll gyoo—(adjusts reassembled jaw…)
Not even wrong.
What sort of woodwork does this sort of stuff crawl out of??!?
That’s what you get from media constantly casting white actors as ancient Egyptians…
Jefferson’s first draft of the DoI mentioned slavery:
However, that passage was later abandoned to ensure the Declaration passes.
Despite on occasions declaring his opposition to the institution of slavery, Jefferson never freed his slaves, not even after Kosciuszko left him a huge sum of money dedicated to that end in his will.
Most of the time, TJ was a hypocrite who never followed on his ideals once it wouldn’t directly benefit him. Fits in with the crowd more than Thatcher does, I’d say.
No more chew toy? Oh, well, he wasn’t a very good chew toy anyway.
Goodness, all the maturity of a 5 year old told they can’t have any more sweets…
I don’t think anybody actually made that specific claim, but then we have no idea what sort of cockamamie racial schema you believe in… However, your assertion here is equally problematic – whilst the pre-dynastic cultures of Lower Egypt show links to the Levant, the pre-dynastic culture of Upper Egypt is practically indistinguishable from the A-group culture of Lower Nubia.
Then, of course, there’s the minor matter of the 25th dynasty…
However, if you really want to focus on the pre-colonial cultures of Africa, there are a great many to choose from, many of which were every bit the equal of their European contemporaries. Indeed, there were sophisticated trading cultures in Africa while most of Europe was still living in caves.
***** PZ Myers.
No need to block him. He’s not flooding the comments. Let him stay as
Volodymyr Kolychev.
***** Volodymyr Kolychev.
We keep answering your questions and you keep ignoring our answers. Perhaps
you are unfamiliar with debate etiquette. You need to directly quote a
statement and directly refute it before claiming to have engaged in a
debate.
I must conclude that either (1) you cannot refute our answers; (2) you
don’t think art and music count as culture; (3) you are not interested in
serious debate; (4) you only want to troll; (5) you are very confused in
general.
There is no (6) you engaged us in an honest debate.
I’m quite upset that he hasn’t bragged about being behind 15 proxies yet.
Meh. There comes a point in any discussion where the topic is played out and there’s nothing but an intellectual vacuum left. Fascism reached that point some decades before you were born. That you introduced yourself as a neofascist reactionary and expected to be taken seriously was silly enough – what questions did you expect we’d have for you? “Why have you chosen to align yourself with an ideology whose failure is baked into its foundational principles?” – but that all you have to offer to make your case is the same old PRATT nonsense? Meh. Bring something new to the table, or run off to 1920, when your ideas might seem somewhat original and challenging. If you feel like maybe that’s unfair… try attending a physics class and arguing in favour of the concept of aether, and see if you get a better reception there, or try a biology class, and argue that, actually, diseases are caused by demons. It’s not because they’re not open to discourse that you’d be laughed out of the room. It’s because the discourse has been and gone, and your side was found critically wanting of any grasp of reality.
Very predictable and very typical of racists assholes who think they can correlate civilizations with vague notions such as IQ. How many white people do you think are able to invent things such as Microwaves or have a command of things such as quantum physics at the research level? 10,000 will be a very generous upper bound which means 99.998% of the white people are unable to do things that their “race” gets credit for it. And it makes it stupid to credit a “race” for inventing things that the vast majority of them cannot fully comprehend or understand its “creation”. Given the means and the right environment, any large group of humans will produce brilliant mind who can invent things and move things forward.
Wyattest Man
Oh my gods.
You are so stupid.