excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 17,958
- 34,012
- 2,290
Facts are facts, here they equal truth.
Yet we still waste our time with egalitarianism, which is an impossibility.
Egalitarianism is one of the cornerstones of the hard left, of 1789. Today's American Marxists are the offspring of 1789. And how did that work out?
We are in a very dangerous place and time in America right now.
www.takimag.com
Yet we still waste our time with egalitarianism, which is an impossibility.
Egalitarianism is one of the cornerstones of the hard left, of 1789. Today's American Marxists are the offspring of 1789. And how did that work out?
We are in a very dangerous place and time in America right now.
...
In January 2020, Murray published a long, scholarly book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, a meta-meta-analysis of the latest meta-analyses in the human sciences. It received virtually zero publicity.
Now he’s back with a more polemical, less daunting read about the essential factors influencing society: intelligence and violence.
The two realities that are fundamental to understanding the headlines of 2021 are that, on average, blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics are more crime-prone and less smart than whites (much less Asians).
Lately, though, these facts seem inconceivable to most conformist Americans. Still, lying is bad for the soul. So is losing because you are too cowardly to tell the truth. Murray explains:
In his section on IQ trends since The Bell Curve 27 years ago, Murray briefly notes the decline of the once-dominant centrists who assumed that any gaps between whites and blacks could be eliminated with whatever their favorite one weird trick was. In his 1984 book, Losing Ground, the libertarian Murray himself wrote:
But by The Bell Curve a decade later, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein had concluded that IQ gaps were “intractable.”
More than a quarter of a century afterward, not much evidence has since emerged against that conclusion. Although Murray argues in Facing Reality that the white-black IQ difference might have fallen from over fifteen points in the past to just twelve points during the thirty years (he estimates from federal NAEP test scores over the last decade that on an IQ scale with the national average at 100, blacks average 91, Latinos 94, whites 103, and Asians 108), the narrowing seems to have stopped in the later 1980s. I’d add that, following the optimistic Cosby Show era of the mid-1980s, these years saw the rise of crack cocaine and gangsta rap, interrelated scourges that appear to have done long-lasting damage to African-American culture.
After The Bell Curve, the great and good made immense efforts to Close The Gap, if only to prove Murray wrong. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, pushed by George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, mandated the Lake Wobegonization of America: Every single public school student must score “proficient” by 2014
That didn’t happen.
Similarly, Bill Gates poured huge sums into, first, the “small learning communities” fad of the 2000s and then the “Common Core” whoop-de-do of the 2010s. Neither accomplished anything noticeable.
Today, after 55 years of vast spending to eliminate the race gap on tests, the optimistic centrist education reformers of the “All We Have To Do Is Implement My Favorite Panacea” school are finally out of fashion, leaving Ibram X. Kendi and Charles Murray as the last men standing. One or the other must be right: either Murray (blacks, unfortunately, have problems because they tend to be less smart and more violent) or Kendi (any disparities demonstrate that whites are evil and therefore must pay).
To you or me, this might seem like an unfair fight: Murray is one of the great public intellectuals of my lifetime, while Kendi barely broke 1000 on his SAT.
But, The Establishment no longer really believes that race gaps can be reduced. Instead, the new conventional wisdom is Kendi’s: Tests must be abolished. This will make the problems caused by lower black intelligence go away for Underpants Gnomes reasons. As Murray explains:
Despite its short length, Facing Reality uncovers some important data that I’ve never seen before. For example, as I’ve often complained, the well-known FBI crime statistics inextricably confuse white and Latino criminals so that it’s been best just to look at black vs. nonblack rates. For instance, blacks were 8.2 times as likely as nonblacks to be known murder offenders in the federal 2019 stats, but we can’t figure out from the FBI numbers the black-to-white ratio that everybody is most interested in.
Murray, however, has uncovered newly available arrest statistics from the Open Data Initiative by race (with Hispanics usually broken out) and type of crime for thirteen cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
For property crime, Murray finds, Latinos were arrested 1.5 times as often as whites, a modest difference especially considering the disparity in average age. My vague impression going back to the 1970s in the San Fernando Valley (a surprising number of my memories from that decade involve my long search for an uncuttable bicycle lock) is that Mexicans used to have a worse thievery problem than they do now.
Perhaps Mexicans have evolved cultural norms over time against burglary because so many are now employed working in homes and yards and they don’t want to tarnish their people’s reputation for being trustworthy enough to let onto your property?
If so, good for them.
Groups can sometimes change for the better, if they want to enough.
But nobody anymore asks blacks to do better.
Blacks in these thirteen cities were arrested for property offenses five times as often per capita as whites.
...
In January 2020, Murray published a long, scholarly book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, a meta-meta-analysis of the latest meta-analyses in the human sciences. It received virtually zero publicity.
Now he’s back with a more polemical, less daunting read about the essential factors influencing society: intelligence and violence.
The two realities that are fundamental to understanding the headlines of 2021 are that, on average, blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics are more crime-prone and less smart than whites (much less Asians).
Lately, though, these facts seem inconceivable to most conformist Americans. Still, lying is bad for the soul. So is losing because you are too cowardly to tell the truth. Murray explains:
In his section on IQ trends since The Bell Curve 27 years ago, Murray briefly notes the decline of the once-dominant centrists who assumed that any gaps between whites and blacks could be eliminated with whatever their favorite one weird trick was. In his 1984 book, Losing Ground, the libertarian Murray himself wrote:
But by The Bell Curve a decade later, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein had concluded that IQ gaps were “intractable.”
More than a quarter of a century afterward, not much evidence has since emerged against that conclusion. Although Murray argues in Facing Reality that the white-black IQ difference might have fallen from over fifteen points in the past to just twelve points during the thirty years (he estimates from federal NAEP test scores over the last decade that on an IQ scale with the national average at 100, blacks average 91, Latinos 94, whites 103, and Asians 108), the narrowing seems to have stopped in the later 1980s. I’d add that, following the optimistic Cosby Show era of the mid-1980s, these years saw the rise of crack cocaine and gangsta rap, interrelated scourges that appear to have done long-lasting damage to African-American culture.
After The Bell Curve, the great and good made immense efforts to Close The Gap, if only to prove Murray wrong. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, pushed by George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, mandated the Lake Wobegonization of America: Every single public school student must score “proficient” by 2014
That didn’t happen.
Similarly, Bill Gates poured huge sums into, first, the “small learning communities” fad of the 2000s and then the “Common Core” whoop-de-do of the 2010s. Neither accomplished anything noticeable.
Today, after 55 years of vast spending to eliminate the race gap on tests, the optimistic centrist education reformers of the “All We Have To Do Is Implement My Favorite Panacea” school are finally out of fashion, leaving Ibram X. Kendi and Charles Murray as the last men standing. One or the other must be right: either Murray (blacks, unfortunately, have problems because they tend to be less smart and more violent) or Kendi (any disparities demonstrate that whites are evil and therefore must pay).
To you or me, this might seem like an unfair fight: Murray is one of the great public intellectuals of my lifetime, while Kendi barely broke 1000 on his SAT.
But, The Establishment no longer really believes that race gaps can be reduced. Instead, the new conventional wisdom is Kendi’s: Tests must be abolished. This will make the problems caused by lower black intelligence go away for Underpants Gnomes reasons. As Murray explains:
Despite its short length, Facing Reality uncovers some important data that I’ve never seen before. For example, as I’ve often complained, the well-known FBI crime statistics inextricably confuse white and Latino criminals so that it’s been best just to look at black vs. nonblack rates. For instance, blacks were 8.2 times as likely as nonblacks to be known murder offenders in the federal 2019 stats, but we can’t figure out from the FBI numbers the black-to-white ratio that everybody is most interested in.
Murray, however, has uncovered newly available arrest statistics from the Open Data Initiative by race (with Hispanics usually broken out) and type of crime for thirteen cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
For property crime, Murray finds, Latinos were arrested 1.5 times as often as whites, a modest difference especially considering the disparity in average age. My vague impression going back to the 1970s in the San Fernando Valley (a surprising number of my memories from that decade involve my long search for an uncuttable bicycle lock) is that Mexicans used to have a worse thievery problem than they do now.
Perhaps Mexicans have evolved cultural norms over time against burglary because so many are now employed working in homes and yards and they don’t want to tarnish their people’s reputation for being trustworthy enough to let onto your property?
If so, good for them.
Groups can sometimes change for the better, if they want to enough.
But nobody anymore asks blacks to do better.
Blacks in these thirteen cities were arrested for property offenses five times as often per capita as whites.
...
