Apparently, I’m “Somalia-oriented,” because I don’t share Trump’s bigoted views about entire nations.
In Minnesota, it’s very Somalia-oriented. These people come from a crooked country, disgusting country, one of the worst countries in the world. They come to our country — low IQs — and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.
Although I agree that there are cases where deeply stupid people rob American citizens blind, I’d point my finger in a different direction, at the Epstein class of rich exploiters. Trump is unbelievably stupid and bigoted.
He’s regurgitating the claims of another notorious racist, Richard Lynn, who published papers from the safety of his Ulster residence stating utter bollocks about the intelligence of people in far-away lands, entirely on the basis of apocryphal reports, poorly sourced anecdotes, and “data” collected in prisons and mental institutions and refugee camps, when it suited his biases. This is some of the worst data that ever got accepted for publication. Here, for instance, are his estimates of regional IQ, both “estimated” and “actual”.
Lynn loved his imaginary statistics. Note that what this says is that on average, African peoples exhibit a mild intellectual disability of the sort that would require significant educational accommodations, and would need substantial vocational rehabilitation and training for them to be able to live independently. Although, apparently, they’re still smarter than a large fraction of the American citizenry, and are capable of robbing them blind with their cunning schemes. I’d argue that this is a problem exacerbated by the fact that American dupes, marks, and victims have taken to advertising their status by putting bright red caps on top of their gullible brains.
Trump went on to say that we have crooked politicians and dirty cops
, and that something should be done
about our attorney general, Keith Ellison. Ellison has fired back.
“If Donald Trump thinks Minnesotans will turn on our neighbors, he doesn’t understand this state,” wrote Ellison. “When he surged ICE here and killed two Minnesotans, we stood up for each other, not against each other. Trump’s racist tirades can’t distract from the fact that his reckless and deeply unpopular war is driving up inflation, raising gas prices, and making life unaffordable for Minnesotans.”
It is indisputable that Trump is a goddamn racist bigot, and it is also indisputable that his policies are bankrupting the USA. But he has the support of the stupid people and the rich people, so he gets to stay in office.
I’d like to see a debate on any topic between a Somali-American, Ilhan Omar, and a demented, corrupt old parasite, Donald Trump. Let’s see who actually has a higher IQ.
At least he hasn’t called them rats or cockroaches – yet.
@1 Militant Agnostic
I think that the rats and cockroaches would be gravely offended.
..by being associated with Donald Trump in any way whatsoever.
To see a preview of the proposed debate just rewatch Harris run circles around Trump in the Presidential debate. Did not change anything.
PZ – But he has the support of the stupid people and the rich people, so he gets to stay in office.
While taking some blame, stupid people, well they are just stupid. Rich people on the other hand should know better, but when the President’s policies send money upward at the expense of average Americans, they will keep funding him.
Dumpster is a racist jerk. That’s one of his appeals to other racist jerks, like those in the South where I’m from (northeast Florida). What’s amusing is that he’s everything Southerners hated about “Yankees”…obnoxious, arrogant, self-centered, con man. They would happily send that jerk to Somalia.
Do not forget the contributions by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch They correctly assumed the elderly, and the low-information voters was a field ripe for picking.
So they designed a TV channel purpose-built for the task with one (heavily biased) news channel, and one more insidious ‘entertainment’ propaganda branch with hosts like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, the bald guy who was let go after sexual harrassment, and wossnamw the earlier dude who turned out to have been into white supremacy.
(By contrast, Geraldo Rivera was practically honest- he disagreed with the party line maybe 10% of the time)
.
By the 2000 election they got the big payoff, with Dubya losing the election and becoming president.
From all available evidence, the race of Keith Ellisons is smarter than the race of Larry/David Ellisons.
7 birgerjohnhanson “ By the 2000 election they got the big payoff, with Dubya losing the election and becoming president.”
Not true . Bush would have won without the Supreme Court stopping the recount . 3 teams of 3 news organizations adterwards went to Florida and recount in all possible ways. In each case they all found that Bush would have won in the count had continued.
and from this
“…Mr. Buria chastised the Army secretary for selecting Maj. Gen. Antoinette R. Gant, a combat engineer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, to take command of the Military District of Washington, said three current and former defense and administration officials familiar with the exchange. The command provides security and performs ceremonial duties in the nation’s capital, and its commander often appears alongside the president at Arlington National Cemetery. … Mr. Buria told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, the officials said.”
I presume you mean Richard Lynn the psychologist from that ugly British excrescence on northern part of Ireland. That and his support for the Brutish equivalent of the Republican Party explains his racism. The Brits do not like the Irish. I know from the experiences of my Irish ancestors in that other Brutish colony, Australia. I remember during research for an assignment on “scientific” racism coming across a diagram of human profiles carefully drawn to show “advanced vs. primitive” racial features drawn of course by an early Victorian Era Brit. They were arranged to show the most advanced first and the most primitive last. At the top was a Grecian profile. Not the modern Greeks of course. They were thinking of Aristotle and Plato when they drew it. Of course it was closely followed by the British. I don’t remember where the French and Germans fitted in but the Irish profile was second last, just ahead of, no surprises, the African one. What Trump thinks of the Irish I don’t know but there is one Scottish farmer who gets up his nose every time every time Trump visits his Scottish golf course.
@11 garydargan
He lived in Ulster but wasn’t from there. He’s a Cambridge educated Englishman, a group many scientific racists belong to and also (coincidentally of course) place at the top of their hierarchy.
,a href”https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/03/the-lowest-white-man”>Trump isn’t the only one.
@ 8. Pierce R. Butler : “From all available evidence, the race of …”
From all available evidence, there’s no such thing as race really. Humans don’t have sub-species* and race sia socio-cultural construct NOT a scientifically valid category. People are all equally people.
(Tho’ too many people believe in racism and sadly act accordingly rather than treating all other humans as such and as individuals.)
Keith Ellison is a smarter and betetr person and individual than thsoe I think yeah.
.* We maybe used to have Homo neandertalis and H denisova Homo floriensis and others but no more?
@6. robro : “They would happily send that jerk (Trump -ed.) to Somalia.”
I’d happily send Trump to Somalia alone and without his money & political power. How would he do there without those, living as ordinary Somalis do I wonder? I’m guessing not well at all.
It’d be great to see Trump actually visit that country and see Somalia and meet Somalian people first hand – for him to stay there for a while and see it and learn – but I don’t think he’d ever choose to do so or is capable of actually learning or empathy especially now his senility has become so very blatantly obvious.
It would also be extremely intresting to drop Trump alone & without phone or contact with others into the inland Guban plain in the local Summer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guban ) and see how long he lasts.. Such a tempting prospect if only it could be done..
That Lynn table is a perfect example of giving a wall of data to distract from the fact that the data itself is worthless. By definition, IQ in a population has a mean of 100 and an s.d. of 15 and comparing across different groups using tests standardised on a tiny subset of one culture is a foolish exercise.
Stop understating things, chrislawson. You’ll make people think that IQ tests are in fact worthwhile measures across distinct linguistic and even social groupings.
In my (thoroughly reprehensible and at least racist-tolerant) school district just north of PZ at about the same time, it was highly distressing to see often-ill-educated teachers treating Southeast Asian refugees as stupid because they wouldn’t speak up in class or interact all that much with the non-refugees… and giving them IQ tests in English, or badly translated into Vietnamese without considering cultural issues, would have proven nothing. Except that the tests were worthless. Just because you can establish a measurement doesn’t mean that it’s measuring anything of import (or accurately).
Jaws–
I completely agree with your arguments and have made them before. As you say, IQ is a poor measure of human intelligence, prone to bias, and has a long history of being used to justify abuses against marginalised groups.
I brought up stats in this case because that’s what the scientific racists keep basing their “reasoning” on. It’s astonishing to me that they demonstrate so little understanding of statistics, test validation methods, or standardisation, concepts that one would expect to be foremost in their minds given the central role the give it in their arguments. And in this particular example, you can see Lynn’s presentation designed to give the impression of statistical weight. I was trying to point out that his reasoning fails on its own statistical terms, not that those other arguments don’t also apply.
And perhaps I didn’t make myself clear that IQ tests having a mean of exactly 100 and an s.d. of 15 is not a sign that it is an accurate or useful test. The test scores are standardised, meaning the raw data is forced onto the normal curve. No raw population measure is ever a perfect normal distribution, and using normalised tests outside the tested population is as foolish as a laboratory calibrating only one of their instruments and copying that setting to all the others.
We can take the world’s worst test and standardise it to a normal distribution. The fact that it follows a normal distribution after standardisation tells us nothing about the prior distribution, let alone the validity or reliability of the test. So when Herrnstein and Murray deified the normal distribution in The Bell Curve as some sort of deep, intractable cosmic truth about human abilities that bleeding-heart pinkos refuse to accept for ideological reasons, it just goes to show how badly they misrepresented reality.
Yeah, the math behind IQ (or any other single-constrained-boundary) testing is somewhere between fragile and misleading; but that’s just the “analysis.” I’m at least equally concerned with data-input flaws as anything else.
Consider, for example, the most obvious constraint on comparative “intelligence” testing across cultures: The physical health of testee samples (they’re nowhere near rigorous enough to be populations). In the simplest possible terms, long-term malnutrition, especially in childhood, significantly alters brain and social “development” in ways that “intelligence testing” can’t measure. The ability to recognize and exploit food sources in one’s environment is not something that Stanford-Binet even pretends to measure… and anyone who thinks the brain doesn’t rearrange its priorities through neural plasticity and other mechanisms is completely discounting the pretty irrefutable evidence that it does regarding sensory loss (the “blind people hear better” phenomenon, which seldom relates to greater actual capability) and a host of other examples.
And even within “intelligence testing” itself, both the math and the meaning of the data are so culturally bound and antinuanced that it makes me want to puke. Consider the actual “difference” between a measured 68 and 71 IQ, versus the actual “difference” between a measured 129 and 132 IQ. (Don’t be too dismissive, or confident that such small differences aren’t meaningful: In current US jurisprudence, that first one is directly concerned with “can (s)he be executed after conviction for a death-penalty offense?”) The former is more-commonly-than-not traceable in individual instances to specific prior traumatic events; the latter is more-commonly-than-not traceable in individual instances to specific prior learning opportunities… combined with the coincidental presence/absence of direct relationship to the test questions (it helps to have read widely and encountered unusual words in use before being “tested” on their meaning — which rather runs into the problem for the blind of the pace of data intake being physically constrained).
Jaws@19–
Agree. Your point about tiny differences in IQ being treated as absolutes is an example of the misuse of stats by scientific racists. In any other field, scores come with +/- error margins. But no, IQ scores are given as exact integers without error margins, which helps buff the big lie of scientific racists and biological essentialists that IQ is a fixed, unpractisable trait that directly measures intelligence with precision.
I should point out that I am talking about individual IQ scores coming without error margins, not population scores in the example above.