Arnold wrote "The problem with realism (Scissors) is that it uncages the demon of racial stereotyping and prejudice." There is no good reason why that should be so. To anyone not stupid there is no connection between a group average and any particular individual. For example, there are roughly 40 million blacks in America. Even though th…
Arnold wrote "The problem with realism (Scissors) is that it uncages the demon of racial stereotyping and prejudice." There is no good reason why that should be so. To anyone not stupid there is no connection between a group average and any particular individual. For example, there are roughly 40 million blacks in America. Even though they average a standard deviation, or 15 points below the norm, there are still a great many (around 6 million) who are smarter than the average white. I am fortunate to have been acquainted some extremely bright blacks. It's a matter of simple math that they represent a much lower percentage of their group than high IQ persons of groups with higher averages, but they do exist.
We shouldn't deny realism just because some might try to improperly seize on it to support their specious beliefs. The Left's devotion to identity politics blinds them to the fact that the group average says nothing about any individual. They are the ones committed to racial essentialism, not the realists or individualists.
Imagine the line, "The problem with realism is that it uncages the demon of people believing that the sexes are really different in lots of ways and then - get this - acting in accordance with those accurate beliefs."
The "every stance has a weakness" seems like sneaky language to me.
When someone says, "This argument has a weakness" they never mean, "This argument uses logic and evidence in a valid, rigorous way and comes to a conclusion which is accurate, however, lots of people really don't like that conclusion."
See the word game here? A "rational weakness" in an argument's validity or accuracy is a completely different matter than the "political weakness" of a truth's unpopularity.
Ugly truths are unpopular, duh! That's the Orwellian joke behind "Hate-facts". Now we can add "Weak-Truths". Good grief.
Unfortunately it is not at all difficult to imagine. In fact, I am positively certain that some such lines have been written in books on -isms by prestigious modern American intellectuals. Poe's Law strikes again! As for genetic/biological factors causing men to be more violent, they are passed over in silence as being both embarrassing to bring up in the light of other group differences (same happens with dog and cat breeds, by the way) and too obvious to mention. People a generation or two out may no longer "get the joke" and believe sincerely (to the extent that one can talk of "believing" - cf. doxastic voluntarism - and "sincerity" - see Randall Collins - in these matters) that it's all socioeconomic factors.
This hits the nail on the head. We already know there are genetic/biological factors that lead men to be more violent, and yet no one has a problem treating men as individuals.
We also don't have a problem with limited discrimination against men (women-only gyms).
And while more recently people have been questioning whether the legal system is unfair to men in some ways, no one is under the delusion that we need to pretend men aren't more violent in order to fix that unfairness.
I think you hit on the exact problem. "Race realism" isn't wrong inherently, but what people do with the information varies, and drifts into bad territory quickly. I have argued with self defined race realists claiming that since blacks are lower IQ on average they will never be as successful as whites and so will be a limitless sources of social conflict, and therefore must be expelled from the country, with the corollary that all nation-states must be mono-ethnic states. Even putting aside the... well everything there... it never seems to occur to them that the problem is that people find infinite ways of dividing themselves into groups, and so there will always be group differences, and the only practical way to deal with the situation is treating people as individuals. That's the point of doing that: it stops the infinite regress of ever smaller groups.
You act as if your treating others like individuals means they will return the favor, rather then pocket your concession and gang up on you as a group.
You act as if there is a practical alternative to treating individuals as individuals, or that doing so is a "concession." One doesn't treat their wife based on her group membership after all. One might start from a broad group membership approach when they know very little about a person, but as they learn more they focus on the reality of the individual. To do otherwise is madness, and would result in e.g. treating your wife as though she were the average for her race and sex, and not a particular person. Or her refusing to share a room with you because she should treat you as she would the average man. Presuming she hasn't slept with the average man, that is.
Of course all of that is beside the point I was making in my post you responded to, but what can you do.
I think the issue is that people with strong aesthetic preferences for Rock would rather lose beautifully then win with the slightest stain of impurity.
The Bell Curve *could* be used in a manner to deny individualism, therefore it must be rejected.
In fact one could easily argue it should! The Bell Curve itself noted that the IQ of immigrants should be taken into account in immigration policy, and of course immigration policy being a national policy is going to have to engage in some "lumping". It's not possible to split public policy all the way down to the individual on every issue.
There is no doubt at least one innocent person in Bukele's jails, and yet everyone seems to think that treating people with tattoos as a hostile race that is guilty until proven innocent is mostly a good thing. He won ugly, some people would rather lose in buetifal purity.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. From purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, and there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting.
Ultimately, any system of merit based immigration, besides needing to stop illegal immigration, is also going to run face to face with family re-unification.
Let's say you have a smart third world computer programer. He's got a wife and a cousin and a nephew. They are going to have cousins and nieces too, etc. He's going to have kids one day who revert to the mean, etc.
What we find in practice in the first world is that we get chain migration. It's just very hard not to unless you are going to have people live in dormitories are second class citizens on temp visas that get cycled back every five years, and most high IQ productive people aren't going to put up with that.
It could be done in theory, but in practice it's just very difficult to say "no". The sob stories write themselves and the immigrants, who are citizens with rights and votes now, have a strong incentive to push policy in that direction.
Perhaps LKY had that iron in him but western democracies do not.
Yes, that is a good point about family reunification. However, not that long ago immigration did not used to be run that way in western democracies, so the problem seems to be with the lack of counterweight to the sentimentalism which makes sob stories work politically rather than western culture or democracy as such. E.g. I gather (I have not studied this in detail so any of this may be wrong; please correct me if so) that there was no such thing as family reunification in the Ellis Island period: you could bring your wife and children over only if you could prove you could support them and even then they had to pass muster at the immigration counter. Men came alone, worked and saved for many years in order to be able to bring their immediate family over. They routinely spent a decade or so as non-voting aliens, assimilating to the American way of life, before they were allowed to naturalize, and for that they had to have behaved and acquitted themselves reasonably well. The strong pressure to assimilate, together with the earnest desire of most immigrants to become Americans, combined with American individualism to reduce the problem of voting for more relatives to be allowed to come over. Japan's skilled immigration policy is run on similar lines today. They do have the temp visas cycled every five years thing, too, but that is for menial labor and these are not allowed to bring even their immediate family.
The problem is there are no rocks on the left - the left has a clear aesthetic preference for "the lump" that is the criminal underclass. Rap music, most obviously. You mention tattoos. I think of this whenever I see a picture of some degenerate, as I did just the other day, when my husband who has a little bit of a hate-addiction to CNN, said, "Oh, they found that little girl" [her body] and I didn't know about any little girl and looked it up, and there is her murderer entirely covered in tattoos. Which is exactly the aesthetic the left celebrates; given a choice between two pictured dudes, tattoo-announcing lowlife or cleancut and employable, and they will choose the former every time.
No they won’t, only when they personally aren’t hurt, or lose money. This is exactly a luxury belief aesthetic. See who they choose as neighbors whenever the college educated Dems move, it’s always to the least tattooed neighborhood near their job that they can afford.
You’d have a long search, in many locales, to find an American woman not tattooed in the manner of - the kind of dude in prison for rape//murder of women. This is too commonplace to not include many fairly normal women, some of my friends even, back when my friends tended to be people I worked with. Not to mention virtually all Hollywood actresses, etc.
Sure, it’s still a class marker, to an extent - but it is the unmarked who are the irrelevant and vanishing class.
It does depend a bit on the place. Tattoos have become very common, but then in upper middle class areas they are still pretty rare (or easily covered up.) It is mostly the under 30 crowd that seems to have a lot that are foolishly visible, and the lower class.
I wonder if tattoo removal businesses are a good business investment going forward :D Even my young kids look at most young people with tattoos today and comment on how ugly they are.
I was being sarcastic (that's what /s means, in case you don't know). My point was that this particular belief is actually very costly for its holders and imposes real hardships such as ridiculous commutes in bad traffic, and can only be called a luxury belief in the sense that far from everybody can afford it. It is not in any way like a Gucci bag or a Lambo.
Arnold wrote "The problem with realism (Scissors) is that it uncages the demon of racial stereotyping and prejudice." There is no good reason why that should be so. To anyone not stupid there is no connection between a group average and any particular individual. For example, there are roughly 40 million blacks in America. Even though they average a standard deviation, or 15 points below the norm, there are still a great many (around 6 million) who are smarter than the average white. I am fortunate to have been acquainted some extremely bright blacks. It's a matter of simple math that they represent a much lower percentage of their group than high IQ persons of groups with higher averages, but they do exist.
We shouldn't deny realism just because some might try to improperly seize on it to support their specious beliefs. The Left's devotion to identity politics blinds them to the fact that the group average says nothing about any individual. They are the ones committed to racial essentialism, not the realists or individualists.
Imagine the line, "The problem with realism is that it uncages the demon of people believing that the sexes are really different in lots of ways and then - get this - acting in accordance with those accurate beliefs."
The "every stance has a weakness" seems like sneaky language to me.
When someone says, "This argument has a weakness" they never mean, "This argument uses logic and evidence in a valid, rigorous way and comes to a conclusion which is accurate, however, lots of people really don't like that conclusion."
See the word game here? A "rational weakness" in an argument's validity or accuracy is a completely different matter than the "political weakness" of a truth's unpopularity.
Ugly truths are unpopular, duh! That's the Orwellian joke behind "Hate-facts". Now we can add "Weak-Truths". Good grief.
> Imagine the line
Unfortunately it is not at all difficult to imagine. In fact, I am positively certain that some such lines have been written in books on -isms by prestigious modern American intellectuals. Poe's Law strikes again! As for genetic/biological factors causing men to be more violent, they are passed over in silence as being both embarrassing to bring up in the light of other group differences (same happens with dog and cat breeds, by the way) and too obvious to mention. People a generation or two out may no longer "get the joke" and believe sincerely (to the extent that one can talk of "believing" - cf. doxastic voluntarism - and "sincerity" - see Randall Collins - in these matters) that it's all socioeconomic factors.
This hits the nail on the head. We already know there are genetic/biological factors that lead men to be more violent, and yet no one has a problem treating men as individuals.
We also don't have a problem with limited discrimination against men (women-only gyms).
And while more recently people have been questioning whether the legal system is unfair to men in some ways, no one is under the delusion that we need to pretend men aren't more violent in order to fix that unfairness.
I think you hit on the exact problem. "Race realism" isn't wrong inherently, but what people do with the information varies, and drifts into bad territory quickly. I have argued with self defined race realists claiming that since blacks are lower IQ on average they will never be as successful as whites and so will be a limitless sources of social conflict, and therefore must be expelled from the country, with the corollary that all nation-states must be mono-ethnic states. Even putting aside the... well everything there... it never seems to occur to them that the problem is that people find infinite ways of dividing themselves into groups, and so there will always be group differences, and the only practical way to deal with the situation is treating people as individuals. That's the point of doing that: it stops the infinite regress of ever smaller groups.
You act as if your treating others like individuals means they will return the favor, rather then pocket your concession and gang up on you as a group.
In other words your not being realistic.
You act as if there is a practical alternative to treating individuals as individuals, or that doing so is a "concession." One doesn't treat their wife based on her group membership after all. One might start from a broad group membership approach when they know very little about a person, but as they learn more they focus on the reality of the individual. To do otherwise is madness, and would result in e.g. treating your wife as though she were the average for her race and sex, and not a particular person. Or her refusing to share a room with you because she should treat you as she would the average man. Presuming she hasn't slept with the average man, that is.
Of course all of that is beside the point I was making in my post you responded to, but what can you do.
I think the issue is that people with strong aesthetic preferences for Rock would rather lose beautifully then win with the slightest stain of impurity.
The Bell Curve *could* be used in a manner to deny individualism, therefore it must be rejected.
In fact one could easily argue it should! The Bell Curve itself noted that the IQ of immigrants should be taken into account in immigration policy, and of course immigration policy being a national policy is going to have to engage in some "lumping". It's not possible to split public policy all the way down to the individual on every issue.
There is no doubt at least one innocent person in Bukele's jails, and yet everyone seems to think that treating people with tattoos as a hostile race that is guilty until proven innocent is mostly a good thing. He won ugly, some people would rather lose in buetifal purity.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. From purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, and there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting.
Ultimately, any system of merit based immigration, besides needing to stop illegal immigration, is also going to run face to face with family re-unification.
Let's say you have a smart third world computer programer. He's got a wife and a cousin and a nephew. They are going to have cousins and nieces too, etc. He's going to have kids one day who revert to the mean, etc.
What we find in practice in the first world is that we get chain migration. It's just very hard not to unless you are going to have people live in dormitories are second class citizens on temp visas that get cycled back every five years, and most high IQ productive people aren't going to put up with that.
It could be done in theory, but in practice it's just very difficult to say "no". The sob stories write themselves and the immigrants, who are citizens with rights and votes now, have a strong incentive to push policy in that direction.
Perhaps LKY had that iron in him but western democracies do not.
Yes, that is a good point about family reunification. However, not that long ago immigration did not used to be run that way in western democracies, so the problem seems to be with the lack of counterweight to the sentimentalism which makes sob stories work politically rather than western culture or democracy as such. E.g. I gather (I have not studied this in detail so any of this may be wrong; please correct me if so) that there was no such thing as family reunification in the Ellis Island period: you could bring your wife and children over only if you could prove you could support them and even then they had to pass muster at the immigration counter. Men came alone, worked and saved for many years in order to be able to bring their immediate family over. They routinely spent a decade or so as non-voting aliens, assimilating to the American way of life, before they were allowed to naturalize, and for that they had to have behaved and acquitted themselves reasonably well. The strong pressure to assimilate, together with the earnest desire of most immigrants to become Americans, combined with American individualism to reduce the problem of voting for more relatives to be allowed to come over. Japan's skilled immigration policy is run on similar lines today. They do have the temp visas cycled every five years thing, too, but that is for menial labor and these are not allowed to bring even their immediate family.
The problem is there are no rocks on the left - the left has a clear aesthetic preference for "the lump" that is the criminal underclass. Rap music, most obviously. You mention tattoos. I think of this whenever I see a picture of some degenerate, as I did just the other day, when my husband who has a little bit of a hate-addiction to CNN, said, "Oh, they found that little girl" [her body] and I didn't know about any little girl and looked it up, and there is her murderer entirely covered in tattoos. Which is exactly the aesthetic the left celebrates; given a choice between two pictured dudes, tattoo-announcing lowlife or cleancut and employable, and they will choose the former every time.
No they won’t, only when they personally aren’t hurt, or lose money. This is exactly a luxury belief aesthetic. See who they choose as neighbors whenever the college educated Dems move, it’s always to the least tattooed neighborhood near their job that they can afford.
You’d have a long search, in many locales, to find an American woman not tattooed in the manner of - the kind of dude in prison for rape//murder of women. This is too commonplace to not include many fairly normal women, some of my friends even, back when my friends tended to be people I worked with. Not to mention virtually all Hollywood actresses, etc.
Sure, it’s still a class marker, to an extent - but it is the unmarked who are the irrelevant and vanishing class.
It does depend a bit on the place. Tattoos have become very common, but then in upper middle class areas they are still pretty rare (or easily covered up.) It is mostly the under 30 crowd that seems to have a lot that are foolishly visible, and the lower class.
I wonder if tattoo removal businesses are a good business investment going forward :D Even my young kids look at most young people with tattoos today and comment on how ugly they are.
Of course the least tattooed neighborhoods near their jobs also tend to be the cheapest, so they personally don't lose any money. /s
[up*. Oops, didn’t register the /s . Thought is was just a typo, and am busy with long reply to Arnold.]
I’m sure the least tattooed places are more expensive, more tattooed are cheapest.
I was being sarcastic (that's what /s means, in case you don't know). My point was that this particular belief is actually very costly for its holders and imposes real hardships such as ridiculous commutes in bad traffic, and can only be called a luxury belief in the sense that far from everybody can afford it. It is not in any way like a Gucci bag or a Lambo.