Racism

[kwc57]

Reagan was a hateful bigot.

Don't be an idiot.

Cant help it, she's of your ilk.

 

[kwc57]

Statistics are facts that can be perverted and twisted to serve any purpose and support any idea. These stats you and your ilk always use, you use it to advance your race. You use them to attack other races and you use it to blame other races for your failures.

Facts aren't racist, you are right. It is in the presentation where you and your teaper ilk fail.

Ilk? Isn't ilk a group? You know, a group like a race? What are you, a racist? I like this liberal logic.

Teaper logic to justify disgraceful teaper racism. Nice job!

Pathetic.

I'm not tea party moron, I just have an unbiased understanding of their principles. Give it a try.

 

[Nutz]

Ilk? Isn't ilk a group? You know, a group like a race? What are you, a racist? I like this liberal logic.

Teaper logic to justify disgraceful teaper racism. Nice job!

Pathetic.

I'm not tea party moron, I just have an unbiased understanding of their principles. Give it a try.

Their principles are fine. They are just low information, uneducated lemmings who use race and hate to somehow espouse their views of financial conservatism. What have the teapers accomplished besides creative monkey pictures of our ****** President?

 

[Ernie S.]

Statistics are facts that can be perverted and twisted to serve any purpose and support any idea. These stats you and your ilk always use, you use it to advance your race. You use them to attack other races and you use it to blame other races for your failures.

Facts aren't racist, you are right. It is in the presentation where you and your teaper ilk fail.

Please show me where I have used facts to support any racist agenda. I'll wait.

Keep on waiting, I'm not searching anything. You will define yourself soon enough.

I have defined myself here for nearly 4 years. I've had dozens accuse me of racism but far smarter people have failed to prove it. I hold zero faith in your ability to find your ass with both hands, much less prove my supposed racism.

 

[Nutz]

Please show me where I have used facts to support any racist agenda. I'll wait.

Keep on waiting, I'm not searching anything. You will define yourself soon enough.

I have defined myself here for nearly 4 years. I've had dozens accuse me of racism but far smarter people have failed to prove it. I hold zero faith in your ability to find your ass with both hands, much less prove my supposed racism.

Stick your head out of your bubble every once in a while.

 

[Ernie S.]

Reagan was a hateful bigot.

Ravi is a useful idiot.

For what? A hat rack?

 

[Ernie S.]

Keep on waiting, I'm not searching anything. You will define yourself soon enough.

I have defined myself here for nearly 4 years. I've had dozens accuse me of racism but far smarter people have failed to prove it. I hold zero faith in your ability to find your ass with both hands, much less prove my supposed racism.

Stick your head out of your bubble every once in a while.

What you're saying is: I can't prove you're a racist so I'll mumble about bubbles and attempt to sound profound. You really should wear a bib.

 

[kwc57]

Teaper logic to justify disgraceful teaper racism. Nice job!

Pathetic.

I'm not tea party moron, I just have an unbiased understanding of their principles. Give it a try.

Their principles are fine. They are just low information, uneducated lemmings who use race and hate to somehow espouse their views of financial conservatism. What have the teapers accomplished besides creative monkey pictures of our ****** President?

Except for the fiscal conservatism, you sound like an eminently qualified candidate for your pretend tea party given your posts.

 

[kwc57]

Reagan was a hateful bigot.

Ravi is a useful idiot.

For what? A hat rack?

Only for pin shaped hats.

 

[Bush92]

Liberals are the most racist people in America. They feel that Blacks are so inferior to other races that they need big government welfare and affirmative action programs.

 

[Bush92]

Everyone should be treated equal regardless of race. The best way to lift someone out of poverty is to impress upon them the concepts of family values and hard work. Don't give them a handout. It will destroy them.

 

[Ernie S.]

Teach a man to fish.....

 

[Rikurzhen]

Before anyone can argue that IQ tests demonstrate a difference in intelligence between individuls or groups, one must understand that few, if any, IQ tests actually measure intelligence. Mostly, they measure knowledge and intelectual training.

Let's work through your points, item by item. The US Army is an organization with one of the most extensive testing regimes on the face of this planet. They don't lack for data. Here's Slate talking about the studies using Army data:

In a RAND Corp. report commissioned by the office of the secretary of defense and published in 2005, military analyst Jennifer Kavanagh * reviewed a spate of recent statistical studies on the various factors that determine military performance—experience, training, aptitude, and so forth—and concluded that aptitude is key. A force "made up of personnel with high AFQT [armed forces aptitude test] scores," Kavanagh writes, "contributes to a more effective and accurate team performance."

The evidence is overwhelming. Take tank gunners. You wouldn't think intelligence would have much effect on the ability to shoot straight, but apparently it does. Replacing a gunner who'd scored Category IV on the aptitude test (ranking in the 10-30 percentile) with one who'd scored Category IIIA (50-64 percentile) improved the chances of hitting targets by 34 percent. (For more on the meaning of the test scores, click here.)

In another study cited by the RAND report, 84 three-man teams from the Army's active-duty signal battalions were given the task of making a communications system operational. Teams consisting of Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Those consisting of Category IIIB (who'd ranked in the 31-49 percentile on the aptitude test) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IV personnel had only a 29 percent chance.
​

Intelligence is an inate trait, that can be improved by education and training, but it has to be there in the first place. Some humans are born more intelligent than others, but that fact has nothing to do with race, nor ethnic background.

This point speaks to an ignorance of how evolution actually functions. That's not meant to be an insult, lots of people never lift the hood and poke around in the engine compartment to see all the moving parts of evolution.

Evolution can't function without differences to exploit. Once a difference arises, and you do acknowledge that there is individual difference in intelligence, then it automatically follows that all groups cannot have IDENTICAL distributions of intelligence. We see some families, generation after generation, are more intelligent than the norm and other families, generation after generation, are less intelligent than the norm. Well, for our purposes we can think of a family tree as a nano-scale race. A racial group is like a family but everything is scaled up and on steroids. A racial group arises from the group being reproductively isolated and inbreeding within that group. Native Americans were isolated (check on the reproductive isolation) and if they wanted to mate they could only mate with others from that group (check on the inbreeding). Same too with sub-saharan Africans. The Sahara Desert was almost as effective a barrier as the Pacific Ocean, so both conditions are met. Now all that is needed for intelligence distributions within these two groups to diverge is for the balance within the group to shift over time. If more intelligent people within the Native American breeding group have more children, generation after countless generation, then their less intelligent peers then the mean IQ of that group will slowly rise. Now we're looking at the rate of the rise. We can even point to the very same dynamic taking place in Africa - more intelligent people had more children than less intelligent people, but all that needs differ is the "number of children" delta between intelligent parents and less intelligent parents and we'd see a slower rate of increase. If one group is increasing it's IQ by 2 points every millennium, and the other by 1 IQ point, then a 10,000 year period of isolation would result in two groups diverging by 10 IQ points.

This is how racial groups form, how species form. There needs to be a difference that selection effects can exploit and then we're off to the races.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

There's a bit of a problem with your formulation. You seem to disavow the notion that generalized knowledge has any value and instead you privilege specific knowledge as being the only useful type of knowledge.

Stereotypes embody vast amounts of useful knowledge. If you and I engaged in an experiment where we faced 100 different situations and were forced to make a choice between two options and I was permitted to use stereotype information about each scenario and you were denied the use of ANY knowledge at all and simply had to guess at an answer, I'd come out with the higher number of correct answers about the specific correct answer for each scenario. Does that make sense?

Stereotypes deal with probabilities. When people face a situation where they have NO SPECIFIC information about an individual, their next best option is to rely on the probabilities embedded within stereotypes rather than merely choosing randomly.

If you see a man approaching you and he draws his knife, you don't have SPECIFIC information as to why he drew his knife when he approached you, so how should you react? If you relied on stereotypes you'd bank on the probability that this man intends you harm and react accordingly. You could certainly be wrong, he could walk past you and not stab you.

So to swing this around to race. There is a stereotype that black men are more likely to be criminals than white men. If that's all the information you have, you'd be very wise to pay attention to it. However, if you have specific information about that approaching black man, say it's Barack Obnama, then you could ignore the general information and instead rely on the specific information and you'd make the wiser choice.

Specific information always trumps the general information but when no specific information is available then general information trumps random choice.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control.

You're a little bit pregnant on this, kind of correct. The central issue which defines racism is the belief that there is some blanket-like quality which assigns to race, for instance, ALL black men are criminals because of their race. It's a very cartoonish way to model humanity. The way you wrote your description you focused on the inherited qualities but you divorced them from race, which creates the odd construct of inherited qualities being sufficient to define racism. If you inherit height from your father and someone notices this, then the person is a racist for noticing. If you inherit a bad temper from your mother, and so on. These two descriptions have nothing to do with racism. To cross over into racism territory you need to attach the component of race in blanket form - ALL Chinese men are short and ALL Italians are hot tempered.

Now you've probably noticed that I capped ALL and others in this comment have noted that liberals are quite prone to screaming "RACIST" at those who note that human metrics need not be distributed equally across all racial groups. Sportscasters have been suspended and fired for noting that every Olympic marathon champion over the last 50 years has been an individual descended from East African population groups. To notice racial differences is seen by liberals to be racism. It's nothing of the sort.

 

[Erand7899]

Before anyone can argue that IQ tests demonstrate a difference in intelligence between individuls or groups, one must understand that few, if any, IQ tests actually measure intelligence. Mostly, they measure knowledge and intelectual training. Intelligence is an inate trait, that can be improved by education and training, but it has to be there in the first place. Some humans are born more intelligent than others, but that fact has nothing to do with race, nor ethnic background.

bingo

Sorry. Take 500 kids from the same school system and test them. the disparity will hold up.

Take 500 kids from any school system, and you will have 500 completely different lives, with a multitude of variations in interests, experience, and learning.

There is no test that can compensate for all those variables. Not to mention variations in memory that affect the test answers.

 

[Rikurzhen]

bingo

Sorry. Take 500 kids from the same school system and test them. the disparity will hold up.

Take 500 kids from any school system, and you will have 500 completely different lives, with a multitude of variations in interests, experience, and learning.

There is no test that can compensate for all those variables. Not to mention variations in memory that affect the test answers.

In my neighborhood there are many families. When I look about I don't see 500 totally different families. I see many families have SUVs, I see many families with multiple vehicles. I see many two career families. I see many one-career families.

Take 500 kids and you get 500 results, but within those 500 kids are factors which have high frequency and which correlate to the 500 results.

Of those 500 kids, say 250 are boys and 250 are girls. If the girls score 10 points higher than the boys, this result is NOT something that is likely to arise from mere chance. Now choose another factor, say parental education. If the kids whose parents are professors score higher than the kids whose parents are accountants, then this too is highly unlikely to be solely due to chance.

You don't need tests to compensate for individual differences (one kid likes the beatles and another kid likes Tupac) because most of the differences have no bearing on test outcomes.

So what we want to isolate are the factors which correlate with outcomes. Now that fact that those 500 kids have 500 different lives becomes meaningless, because the fact that one kid out of all 500 had pizza for dinner that night has no effect on his testing results. We reduce those 500 different lives down to 20 different lives, where there are 20 factors of significance which explain almost all of the differences between the 500 students.

 

[Ernie S.]

bingo

Sorry. Take 500 kids from the same school system and test them. the disparity will hold up.

Take 500 kids from any school system, and you will have 500 completely different lives, with a multitude of variations in interests, experience, and learning.

There is no test that can compensate for all those variables. Not to mention variations in memory that affect the test answers.

Of course no test can compensate for all variables. The only variable in my scenario is race.
Taake 250 white kids and 250 black kids from the same school system, taught the same curriculum and test them. I guarantee the black kids will score lower.
WHY? is the important question.
Income may have some bearing if there is a large dietary difference, but other than that, not much.
Parents' education level. Certainly a factor, but I'd bet you still would see a disparity in white and black kids who's parents had a similar education.
Major factors would be the value parents place on education and whether or not the child comes from a single parent family.
Government can't fix the disparity. Only a group that culturally discourages effort at education and raises kids in single parent homes can change these factors.
If Al Sharpton really wanted equality for his race, he would be encouraging young blacks to excel in school and go on to college or learn a trade. If the attitudes changed, the IQ disparity could all but close in 2 generations.

 

[Ravi]

To a point, you're right, but tests are based on age and one would assume that white and black students in any given age group have been exposed to the same curriculum.

Except they haven't nor do their parents have the knowledge or even extensive vocabulary to enable their children to excel. Poverty and lack of education are both vicious cycles.

They are, and that is a factor. What do you propose we do to fix that?

first, stop pretending that iq tests "prove" anything about racial intelligence.

 

[Ravi]

Reagan was a hateful bigot.

Is that your argument?

Just a factual statement.

 

[Unkotare]

Reagan was a hateful bigot.

Is that your argument?

Just a factual statement.

"Let us work to build a nation that is free of racism, full of opportunity, and determined to loosen the creative energies of every person of every race, of every station, to make a better life."

-Ronald Reagan
Remarks in Denver, Colorado, at the Annual Convention
of the NAACP, June 29, 1981