Sorry in advance for long post.
Quote:Excelsior Wrote:
They insist that those environmental factors simply aren't a big contributor (if they contribute at all) to the differences we see.
So, follow the path:
-Different races have significant differences in IQ
-IQ is the primary and most useful determinant of capability with regard to anything that matters in society (ex: building and maintaining complex civilization). IQ is the most important reason why some do better than others.
-Differences in IQ are mostly or entirely genetic; environmental factors can make, at best, a very small impact on those differences.
You've followed the path, so where are you now? There's only one destination: some groups are inferior by nature and are always going to be.
Ok, following you so far, but here's where you go completely off the rails:
Quote:Quote:
There's nowhere else for that logic to go. And once you've gotten there, there's really no room for any other conclusion other than "this is supremacy". You're smart enough to see that too, but you're ignoring it. I'm not going to keep speculating as to why you choose to do that.
This is absolutely wrong. There is most definitely somewhere for that logic to go:
Use the individual not the racial identity group as the preferred basis of comparison. That is the essence of Western Civilization. Individualism has been the basis of Western philosophy for a very long time. Certainly, that's the philosophy embedded into the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. This philosophy led to the first
anti-slavery society in Britian. I recall my first experiences learning about how the Japanese viewed Americans, and though there were many the most fundamental and memorable thing they seemed to note was Americans' individualism. Moral Psychologist Jonathan Haidt
has confirmed this phenomenon and found that in that most cultures in the world have a group-based outlook on morality that broadly covers all aspects of life while Westerners tend to have a more limited and individualistic view of morality.
Practically speaking, what does this mean? It means stop using racial disparity statistics as a priori evidence of discrimination. It means stop bitching about over-representation or under-representation in X. It means stop appealing to black identity for political purposes. It means being open to the possibility that if no evidence of discriminatory behavior has been shown, discriminatory behavior may not be there. It means stop using the term "dog whistle" to make everything about racism. Stop getting indignant over minor social faux pas and trivial, easily corrected ignorance. Stop trying to turn these "microaggressions" and "everyday racism" from simple misunderstandings between individuals into a narrative of group-based conflict and oppression.
It means judge someone by the content of their character not the color of their skin. People forget this that goes both ways. Don't identify with Michael Brown just because he's black. Don't ignore his anti-social behavior or call people racist for pointing it out. Don't side with Islamists on the basis that anything Whites want must be bad for Blacks.
Sometimes, grouping is unavoidable. Political boundaries, for example, tend to be clearly if arbitrarily defined. Group identities, negotiated to an equilibrium, are real and can't simply be ignored either. But the point of individualism is that you avoid them when you can and only discuss them when there's no better way to do it.
A State's border and its citizenship are two political boundaries that divide people into groups that can't be ignored. One of the purposes of a state is to protect the individuals inside its borders, and that includes some degree of protection
against the unknown. Thus the conservative position often defaults to "no immigrants, except for good reason" while the liberal position defaults to "conservatives are racist xenophobes." Liberals love the unknown. To a liberal, the unknown is full of possibility. To a conservative, the unknown is death, disease, and destruction. And the fact is that right now, if you were to divide potential immigrants into two different categories, one being "already shares values and will fit in quite nicely" and the other being "unknown values and who knows WTF could go wrong" then you'll find that one group is going to be heavily white and the other group is going to be heavily non-white. That doesn't automatically mean racism.
There's no right answer. You have to recognize that conservatives concerned about unknown threats might not be able to perfectly articulate those concerns, especially when to a liberal, who takes her civilization for granted, it just looks like prejudice against brown people or hijabs or alarmism about an imminent European Caliphate which would never happen. Conservatives meanwhile, have to recognize that their fears may not be founded. They should be careful not to fall for scaremongering propaganda. Do you
really care about FGM? Is it really worth your time to be worried that a tiny minority is having a conflict over a barbaric practice in one small jurisdiction? What is the truth about the threat posed by Islam? What is the actual connection between terrorists and regular Muslims? Apart from probably truthful observations that tighter immigration controls in the past would have resulted in less terrorism, many attempts to link terrorists to normal Muslims seem like propaganda to me. It seems to me that there are plenty of Muslims who are willing to cooperate with the government and alert them to suspected terrorists.
So while liberals need to cut conservatives a break when it comes to dismissing their concerns outright, conservatives need to make a real effort to articulate their concerns as realistically as possible so that the liberals can understand, and not merely engage in relentless attacks against the religion.
The concern that Islam is not compatible with western values is legitimate. In that Cernovich interview I linked earlier, the Muslim subject admitted that there are many reasons why Muslims should try to live in Muslim countries. I forget which poster it was in another thread complained about how the call to prayer disrupted his sleep: but that is not a trivial concern. Having calls to prayer blaring over loudspeakers would be a major change to the existing social order.
That Islamist terrorists are, in fact, Muslim is also something liberals need to accept. Moderate Muslims may point out the extremist interpretation is against modern Islamic scholarship, but it's very hard to deny that they're still motivated and unified by religion in a way that does not happen with any other religion in the world. We can't let our desire to protect moderate Muslims from having their feelings hurt get in the way of legitimate criticism of the religion's connection to terrorism.