So, according to Stephens, there are the people who can build things and do things in the real world. They can perform feats of engineering or devise military strategy. But those things are "prosaic," and — in Stephens blunt view — not what Jews do with their "prodigious intellect." Jews — in Stephens view — stand apart from these practical things and "question the premise and rethink the concept," they "ask why (or why not?)," they see absurdities and "maintain[] a critical distance." It may be good to value different kinds of intelligence and to roughly opine that there are the people who do things in the real world and people who stand back and observe and critique everything, but it's a big problem to put a group — even your own group — in the second category.I was focusing on the danger to Jews that was inherent in the praise Stephens was attempting to offer. The outrage on Twitter (and elsewhere) was more about the use of IQ data from a paper co-authored by the anthropologist Henry Harpending. Hinderaker is critical of that outrage:
[L]iberals promptly swung into action, in many cases weirdly accusing Stephens of perpetuating an anti-Semitic stereotype.Hinderaker quotes "Bret Stephens under fire for NY Times column on Jewish intelligence" (Jewish Telegraphic Agency):
But the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Harpending was an anthropologist who possessed a white nationalist ideology and promoted eugenics, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis.Hinderaker comments:
I would’t take the SPLC’s word for anything, and there is something laughable about a supposed pro-Nazi who publishes an article finding that Jews have high IQ scores.Wow! I do not find that laughable at all. Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending, it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that Jews are especially intelligent! Bigotry takes many forms, and the stereotypes about some groups include the notion that they have lower intelligence, but other stereotypes — for other groups — have the idea that they are more intelligent. That can be a basis for admiration, but it can be — and has been — a source of fear and the desire to disempower the people who you might imagine are deviously arranging the world to hurt you.
And let me add this passage from the Wikipedia article on Harpending:
Harpending's hypothesis about Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence has attracted both praise and criticism, with some scientists regarding the theory as highly implausible, while others regard it as worth considering. According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, this theory "meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken."The theory, described at that internal link is:
From roughly 800 to 1650 CE, Ashkenazi Jews in Europe were a mostly isolated genetic group. When Ashkenazi Jews married non-Jews, they usually left the Jewish community; few non-Jews married into the Jewish community. During the same period, laws barred Ashkenazi Jews from most jobs, including farming and crafts, and forced them into finance, management, and international trade. Wealthy Jews had several more children per family than poor Jews. So, genes for cognitive traits such as verbal and mathematical talent, which make a person successful in the few fields where Jews could work, were favored; genes for irrelevant traits, such as spatio-visual abilities, were supported by less selective pressure than in the general population. Given the high heritability of IQ, 800 years is more than sufficient time for the selective pressure on verbal and mathematical intelligence to produce a 16-point increase in IQ.
Posts
195 comments:
The prejudice against the smarter group isn't about them being smarter but about oppressing your group, as shown by them having more stuff than you. Oppression is taken as the only explanation.
I wouldn’t take the SPLC’s word for anything.
comb the tangles out first. That's first.
That was before birth control. After birth control the high IQ couples have no children.
That’s the beauty of empirical data, even humans subject to human emotions can understand data, regardless of their objectivity. It takes a whole new level of stupid to then claim empirical data is somehow tainted by the people accumulating and presenting it. What we have here is the progressive plot to deny any discussion of demographics unless it supports Rhardin’s premise “must make chicks look good” or disparages whitey. No other legitimate uses for demographic data will be tolerated by the rational and tolerant left.
I spelled rhhardin wrong. Oops.
I have just proved that nothing on this planet is laughable. Droll but lofty planet. - Lautreamont
I thought of something last night. While cooking, I repeated a mantra that has been stuck in my head for 30 years. "Hot pan, cold oil, the food won't stick."
I learned that from Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet. He was on PBS long ago and I thought maybe he was one of the very first victims of the cancel culture.
Now granted, what he did involved the abuse of children. At least that is what was hinted. Back then, everyone just kind of talked around the issue using vague euphemisms, so I never really heard the specifics. Still, he was yanked off PBS stations so fast it made your head spin.
He died not long after.
As Ann points out, anti-Semitism and belief in Jewish intellectual superiority are not mutually exclusive. See Mein Kampf, for example. That said, it is absurd to call Harpending a Nazi. He believed (a) that race exists; (b) that there are average differences in behavior and temperament between races; and (c) that these differences are largely based in biological differences. He has also been called that most useless of phrases, a "white supremacist."
On the subject of Jews and anti-Semitism, Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique trilogy puts a lot on the table, though I wasn't ultimately convinced by his thesis, and his work becomes increasingly strident as it goes on.
But the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Harpending
Until he unfortunately died, Harpending shared the Westhunt with Greg Cochran, which I've read every day for years.
was an anthropologist
They got that part right.
who possessed a white nationalist ideology and promoted eugenics, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis.
That's (racially!) pure garbage.
My Harvard MBA daughter, age 37, has 3 children. Most of her friends, all highly successful, have 3 or 4 children. Most are Republicans
I worked as a techster for just about every corp law firm in NYC in the 70s and 80s.
Partnership in every one dominated by Ashkenazi Jews.
I worked for half a dozen start up law firms that morphed into giant firms. Virtually every lawyer present at the creation of those start-ups was an Ashkenazi Jew.
I believe my lying eyes. Stereotypes become stereotypes because they are usually true.
In the case of Ashkenazi Jews, the stereotypes are resoundingly true. I suspect that the corp law firm you worked in was also dominated by partners who were... well, Ashkenazi Jews.
This is a bullshit post, prof. Here are some bullshit buzzwords I suggest you make a New Year’s resolution to ditch... stereotypes, sexism, homophobia and sex object. None of these terms have any substantive, honest meaning. Like your laughable complaint that U.S. women are or ever have been, subordinated or second class citizens, this stereotype thing of yours is absolute bullshit.
You have a great legal mind, prof, but you’re not even in the same league as the great Ashkenazi Jewish stars of corporate law that I worked for. They were the most awesome intellects I’ve ever encountered. The stereotype is, as usual, true.
After birth control the high IQ couples have no children.
That's the premise of Idiocracy (2006).
My Harvard educated daughter, age 37, has 3 children. Many of her friends, all highly successful, have 3 or 4 children. Of course, most of them are Republican
What is intelligence?
For the life of me, I couldn't do surgery. Or wire a house. Or fix an auto transmission. Or shoot at least 40% from the field on a Division I basketball team. Or hit a Division I curve ball.
But I can write an Academy Award winning script: "Bride of Frankenstein."
Bigotry takes many forms, and the stereotypes about some groups include the notion that they have lower intelligence, other stereotypes — for other groups — have the idea that they are more intelligent. That can be a basis for admiration, but it can be — and has been — a source of fear and the desire to disempower the people who you might imagine are deviously arranging the world to hurt you.
True, any observation about a group can be used for bad purposes. We can ban observations, or try to be careful. I think Stephens was as careful as you can be while still making an observation worth the price of a newspaper subscription.
To me, this hyper-vigilant protection of Jews in the U.S. and worldwide does more to feed dangerous stereotypes than praising their high IQ. It amounts to, 'It's absurd to argue that Jews hold some special power in society. And if you argue it you'll find yourself destroyed.'
For most of my life, I never noticed the disproportionate success of Jewish citizens. When I did notice, I chalked it up to hard work and didn't give it another thought. The folks policing this discussion are going out of their way to get people to think about why we can't talk about this like grown-ups.
Oh! Oh! The NYet censored out the info from Harpending, post-publication.
As Sailer quotes from 1984:
"As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead."
Not only censoring, but their abject fear of genetics reminds one of Lysenkoism.
I've been reading a lot of anthro-genetic stuff lately and apparently these gene sweeps were pretty common when the successful people had more children and the lines of poor/unsuccessful ones died out.
Instead of Fake but Accurate, it's True but Dangerous!
The Jews problem boils down to real fear of the Messiah. The old Testament prophet's words are still feared among the heathen. Add to that, a clear set apart from other people by Orthodox Judaism's special rules dietary and worship traditions(Torah), and then no matter how great a man or woman is in person in real life , there lurks a knee jerk condemnation merely for being a Jew. And that spills over to Jew lovers like the Southern Baptists.
Harry Truman, where have you gone when we need you the most.
In The 10,000 Year Explosion," the book Harpending wrote with Greg Cochran, they also attribute lethal genetic diseases, like Tay Sachs, to the evolutionary pressure on the European Jews.
Most of the talk about IQ is by people who do not understand statistics.
Also from the wikipedia link:
Harpending did fieldwork in Southern Africa (Botswana, Namibia) and spoke the !Kung language.[3][9]:24 In 1981, while with the University of New Mexico, Harpending studied the group during the South African Border War. Harpending described the !Kung society as "like Rorschachs" because anthropologists could draw contradictory conclusions.[10] His fieldwork was the basis of the 1993 monograph The Structure of an African Pastoralist Community, with Pennington.[11][4]
Harpending also did extensive fieldwork on the Herero people, a cattle-herding group in the Botswana area. Herero are locally known for "their traditionalism, their wealth in cattle and their dominating older women". Harpending's previous experience with the !Kung people was useful because many Herero are bilingual in !Kung. Harpending had previous contact with Herero from earlier research trips.[9]:xxii
I suppose it's distnatnly possible that a "white nationalist" and "pro Nazi" would choose to research and "extensive fieldwork" (which most likely amounts to spending huge amounts of time among) on several groups of Africans, but
In 1973, Harpending helped start the Kalahari People's Fund. The KPF was an outgrowth of the multidisciplinary Harvard Kalahari Research Group led by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore. Newsweek described the KPF as one of the first people's advocacy organizations in the US with professional anthropological expertise behind it.[12]
certainly doesn't seem like something a "white nationalist" would do.
What Hitler disliked about the Jews is that you could argue with them and win and then the next day they're saying the same things and won't admit your having won at all.
According to Mein Kampf.
Here’s where the great Ashkenazi Jewish intellects that I worked for separated themselves out from you, prof. It wasn’t in academic work.
They were incredibly creative intellects in creating business, real estate, financial concepts, etc.
They dominated the real estate business in Manhattan. They created the concepts of leaseback agreements that financed the fleets of airlines. They created the legal strategies behind massive discovery in corporate litigation.
In general, I really liked them. I adopted many of their strategies about working and taking care of money in my personal life.
I particularly admired the way they did business. That really amounted to paying top dollar for those who provided great service to them, and maintaining an arm’s length relationship with employees.
Question: is high IQ inherited? Must the children of high IQ parents also have high IQ? Maybe not. One could cite examples of stupid children of brilliant parents, or brilliant children of ordinary parents.
One way to escape the leopard is to be faster than the leopard. That's why we still have gazelles — they're faster than leopards. Another way to avoid the big cats is to be smarter than the cat, especially when you have no hope of outrunning him. That's why we're here — Homo sapiens, not so wise as we would imagine, but brainer than cats for the most part.
The same selective pressure has operated on the Jews since the Diaspora, but especially in Russia from the time of Ivan IV and his Black Hundreds to the final Romanovs and their Cossacks. The horseman cannot be avoided by running.
What is intelligence? Ability at complex abstract tasks, rated by complexity.
Etymologically choosing between things.
Nobody does a counterintelligence quotient.
Dylan is, I believe, an Ashkenazi Jew.
The Left hates IQ tests, our friend rhardin loves IQ tests, and I'm kinda in the middle, I think they are "soft" indicators of intelligence. It's really hard to get a high score if you are a dumbshit.
And, the data is pretty clear no matter how you slice it or dice it, that IQ scores are not equally distributed among various races. If that makes certain folks uncomfortable, sorry, it is what it is.
As for Bret Stephens, though, No, he's certainly not an anti-Semite, nor is he promoting stereotypes about Jews. That's hogwash, and I would defend him from such criticism.
But, he is a weenie #Nevertrumper, and I don't care for those folks, so have fun defending yourself Bret!
“As Ann points out, anti-Semitism and belief in Jewish intellectual superiority are not mutually exclusive. See Mein Kampf, for example”
German Anti-Semitism is arguably one of the reasons why we won WW II, and the Germans and Japanese lost it. The Germans were trying to build an atomic bomb, and one of the reasons that they failed, is that they had killed so many of their Ashkenazi Jews, and had not prevented many of the rest from fleeing to this country, where they were instrumental in building our own A Bombs. To probably no one’s surprise, these Ashkenazi Jewish survivors, and their descendants, have been instrumental in gaining, and maintaining, our leadership, and esp our technological leadership, in the years since then.
“and promoted eugenics, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis.” If that’s the standard, then Planned Parenthood is white supremacist, as its founder, Margaret Sanger, was a leading eugenicist and you only have to look at the data on abortion to see that it privileges white people.
The Southern Poverty Law center is a leftist joke. It's like Maddow and the whole of CNN wrapped in "You're all white supremacists!" bullshit.
The Center for Slander and Victim Mongering - that would be an honest corporate name for SPLC.
Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending, it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that Jews are especially intelligent!
I mean, sure. You could also say that it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that the sun rises in the east.
That (Ashkenazi) Jews are especially intelligent is a plain fact. And you don't even have to look at the dreaded IQ scores to know it. Look at Nobels awarded, or any other measure of intellectual achievement that you care to use. They are overrepresented to an extraordinary degree in all kinds of fields that require high intelligence.
I won't go anywhere near this topic, unlike Althouse.
Nobody does a counterintelligence quotient.
It's probably top secret.
Question: is high IQ inherited? Must the children of high IQ parents also have high IQ? Maybe not. One could cite examples of stupid children of brilliant parents, or brilliant children of ordinary parents.
It's much like any other inherited trait. Tall parents don't always have tall children, but the children of tall parents are generally taller than average.
The NFL is about 70% black. Is it racist to point that out now?
I'm going with "random chance" for the acceptable explanation.
"who possessed a white nationalist ideology" I'd like to see the definition of that term. "White nationalist" is a modern-day phrase that has little meaning other than "bad," but I'm open to learning what it actually means/meant, especially as applied to the subject of the discussion.
"...and promoted eugenics, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis."
That's quite the slick little segue! Did the subject actually "promote eugenics?" On the order of Margaret Sanger, or was it something else? Either way, you could take the first part of that phrase and use it to smear just about anyone.
Rocket science, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis
Socialism, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis
Highway construction, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis
Mongering has gotten a bad name. It just means being a middleman. Buy stuff from where it is cheap and sell it where it is worth more. What Amazon more or less replaces, by letting buyers self-select.
Question: is high IQ inherited?
IIRC, Hsu figured the regression to the mean would average out to be
IQ.kid = .4*IQ.group + .3*(IQ.father + IQ.mother)
(about half-way between parents' IQ and their group's IQ)
The 'group' for IQ.group might be vaguely defined, but usually as your race.
To paraphrase Hsu, "This is why the kids of physicists are only lawyers".
...which was studied and practiced by the Nazis.
Yeah, the Nazis tainted everything they studied and everything they practiced was false. That jet that flew you to Phoenix for Thanksgiving with Cousin Jane and her idiot husband and their obnoxious daughter was a fraud. When you weren't looking they replaced the fake engines with good old Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasps, the only kind aircraft engines that work. And that "turkey" you ate was just a sack of minced chicken because the turkey eugenics that made the bird tasty and tender are false and evil and therefore banned by all right-thinking people. And the Moon landing was a hoax as is the entire NASA edifice and all its works — too many Nazi connections for rockets to ever fly beyond the atmosphere.
We live in a time of “let’s pretend to believe.” In the past, we humans may have believed some really stupid stuff, but we really did believe it, we didn’t pretend to believe it.
rhhardin said...
What Hitler disliked about the Jews is that you could argue with them and win and then the next day they're saying the same things and won't admit your having won at all.
According to Mein Kampf.
Are you Jewish? Because you do that ALL THE TIME.
SPLC has parked tens of millions of dollars off shore. What happened to the "Poverty" part?
1) As others have noted, anyone using the SPLC as an authrative source is behind the times at best.
2)Bigotry takes many forms, and the stereotypes about some groups include the notion that they have lower intelligence, but other stereotypes — for other groups — have the idea that they are more intelligent.
If the stereotypes are true, are they still bigotry? What if we discuss the "fact" that different groups have different IQs instead of using terms like "idea" and "notion". There is literally no social science measure that has been validated more (across time, language and culture) than IQ.
Jews who suffered discrimination and persecution could rather easily stop being Jewish. They could drop out of their religion and blend into the dominant Christianity or Islam.
Evidently, Jews with lower intelligence were more likely to do so, and Jews with higher intelligence were less likely to do so.
Jews with higher intelligence were more invested in their youthful intellectual studies of Judaism. In contrast, Jews with lower intelligence were less interested in such studies, acquired less knowledge of Judaism and therefore were more willing to abandon Judaism in order to escape discrimination and persecution.
Gradually during the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, Jews with less intelligence left Judaism, while Jews with higher intelligence remained in Judaism.
@tcrosse:Question: is high IQ inherited? Must the children of high IQ parents also have high IQ? Maybe not. One could cite examples of stupid children of brilliant parents, or brilliant children of ordinary parents.
IQ is about correlation. It's about the way to bet.
@Dave Begley:What is intelligence?
For the life of me, I couldn't do surgery. Or wire a house. Or fix an auto transmission. Or shoot at least 40% from the field on a Division I basketball team. Or hit a Division I curve ball.
But I can write an Academy Award winning script: "Bride of Frankenstein."
A high-IQ person, all else being equal, is more likely to succeed at these things that a low IQ person.
"all else being equal". "More likely".
@Michael K:Most of the talk about IQ is by people who do not understand statistics.
Boy have you got that right.
I think Scott Alexander is an Ashkenazi Jew, and his IQ is supposedly genius (even with that name).
As far as why they are so smart, why has no one else talked about their connection to Hungarian Martians?
"German Anti-Semitism is arguably one of the reasons why we won WW II, and the Germans and Japanese lost it. The Germans were trying to build an atomic bomb, and one of the reasons that they failed, is that they had killed so many of their Ashkenazi Jews, and had not prevented many of the rest from fleeing to this country, where they were instrumental in building our own A Bombs."
Were the Germans trying to build an atomic bomb? They had plenty of big brains, but I think history has shown that they were concentrating more on other areas [citation needed]. The Japanese also had many big brains, but virtually no Jews at all.
A Jew did invent Zyklon, the main ingredient in Zyklon B, so there's that.
If jews are so smart why do they support politics that lead to their destruction. They were in the forefront of Marxism that lead to the Nazi extermination effort. They helped birth and supported the Soviet revolution which lead to the discrimination and isolation of the Jewish citizens.
They now support Labour in GB which imported millions of anti-Semitic Muslims.They support and protect the universities which are hot beds of antisemitism. They support the Democrats and BLM crew. Now they are being attached in their synagogues and then blame Trump.
So not impressed with their alleged intelligence.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a leftist joke.
It's much more sinister than any joke. The SPLC is a fascist organization promoting fascist ends by fascist means. Years before the Nazis started herding them into ghettos National Socialism practiced "cancel culture" against the Jews by getting them fired from newspapers and teaching positions, by banishing them from the mass media, by burning their books, by banning them from public speaking, and from even having private conversations with Aryans. Before they were murdered they were silenced.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is in the business of silencing people, and there's nothing more Nazi than that except gas chambers.
Sorry but I'm not going to fall into the ridiculous trap that we shouldn't say or write X because [insert bad group ABC] likes it. That's childish and totalitarian. NOr do I care that a left-wing organization thinks so-and-so is a [insert bad think label].
Lets deal with what people actually say, on a stand alone basis. And not dismiss it as bad-think because so-and-so says the writer is a blahblahblah.
"That can be a basis for admiration, but it can be — and has been — a source of fear and the desire to disempower the people who you might imagine are deviously arranging the world to hurt you."
You mean like that shithead Bloomberg?
It is difficult to completely separate culture, societal norms and genetic component in the measurement of IQ.
A culture that prizes and rewards certain types of mental prowess over physical achievement will create more of what it rewards. So it isn't much of a surprise that Asian cultures like Japanese or Chinese in America tend to have higher proportions of their ethnicity in higher education and in the STEM fields.
It is higher IQ or training by their cultural norms? Is it both combined?
Jewish people who have been raised in a culture that prizes critical thinking are going to gravitate to fields where that skill is important. Science, law, medicine. How can this be considered racial or racist, IF the same results in any other ethnicity can be produced. Like Jesuit training instead of the Rabbinical training.
Keep it up long enough and you ARE likely to also produce a genetic component of intelligence in the subject group.
None of this is surprising in the least.
The Hasidim in Williamsburg, near where I first lived in Brooklyn, dominate the 48th St. diamond district in Manhattan.
They face constant attack and harassment from the black gangs in the surrounding areas.
Anti-semitism is not the correct name for what is behind this battle that has been going on for decades.
It's just plain jealousy. The blacks see how helpless they are in pragmatic, economy competition and they hate the Jews for it.
Some thirty years ago, I used to work in group homes that housed mentally retarded adults. I remember we were sitting around discussing the preponderance of Jews in this population - it was manifest.A Jewish friend and co-worker had an interesting take on it. His theory was Jewish IQs were more widely dispersed from the mean - which meant that Jews were more likely to be very smart or very dumb.
I don't know if he was just being polite because it was a roundabout way of saying that Jews, on average, are no smarter than the rest of us. Anyway, Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve say that British and American Jews have an average IQ somewhere between a half and a full standard deviation above the mean. So there goes that theory.
Stephens is so cloistered he doesn't realize that the same set of facts he uses to praise his fellow Jews excite those who resent Jews, let alone that many of those facts are tendentious. Overweening pride in Jewish achievement, call it Jewish supremacy, and resentment and fear of Jewish achievement are more or less the same thing, presented with a different spin. Kevin MacDonald, the most prominent academically oriented Jew-resenter, for example, takes roughly the same set of facts presented in a philo-Semitic text like The Jewish Century, e.g. Jewish achievement in science and politics in particular, and bases his Culture of Critique and other works containing his critique of Jewishness in the Diaspora, developing a hypothesis around group evolutionary strategy that advantages Jews in highly individualized, high-trust cultures like Western Europe and the US, at the expense of the dominant white people. Sounds like even J. Farmer doesn't find this hypothesis wholly persuasive, and MacDonald goes further to advocate that whites in America proceed according to a similar strategy to advance their group interests making him a rare example of someone you can call a white nationalist in good conscience. Still, there's not a lot of daylight between MacDonald's recitation of the facts about Jews and Brett Stephens'.
Here SPLC describes Harpending's "eugenics", which is killing criminals:
Harpending claimed that “[w]hat happened in medieval Europe was brutal enforcement of laws. We didn’t go to the movie on Saturdays, we went to the public hanging. Criminals were treated without mercy.” He added that “this is eugenics. … [W]e killed off the violent folks, we replaced poor folks with the offspring of the prosperous… . Most of us are descended from exactly this process, another point being that the rest of the world isn’t like us.”
Question: is high IQ inherited? Must the children of high IQ parents also have high IQ? Maybe not. One could cite examples of stupid children of brilliant parents, or brilliant children of ordinary parents.
Inheritance (Nature) provides a floor and a ceiling for IQ, as far as we know. Smart parents (Nurture) also raise their children in a different manner than dumb parents. (Jewish kids that I grew up with tended to have much more stable and supportive parents than I did).
The last part of your statement is addressed by the concept of regression to the mean.
So Ann you say it's a problem to ascribe a high intelligence to Jews. But you never go into detail what are the problems. Spit it out.
Also are you denying that A Jews have statistically the highest IQ of all groups.
Do you think it is random that in a free capitalistic society that the wealthiest group for the last half century are Jews?
Be honest.
It is difficult to completely separate culture, societal norms and genetic component in the measurement of IQ.
Agree. Having highly educated parents that take an active interest in a child will add some IQ points. Growing up in an environment where book learning is frowned upon will hinder all but the smartest or most determined.
A careful reading of "The Bell Curve" by Murray and Herrnstein is recommended before holding forth on IQ and group differences.
IQ is essentially a hypothesis to explain systematic differences in group performance when normalized for factors like education, socio-economic status, etc. You can "believe" in the IQ hypothesis or not, but the observational facts remain.
That last statement explains the careful tiptoeing and hedging whenever the expression "IQ" comes up.
Nothing will be gained by denying reality, but that's never stopped people from doing so.
...so according to SPLC, Harpending's "eugenics" consisted of killing Europeans.
Were the Germans trying to build an atomic bomb?
Yes the Germans were trying and the allies were trying to hinder them. Thus the repeated attacks against the heavy water plant in Telemark, Norway.
From what I read the Germans weren't that close. Partly because they rejected the knowledge of Jewish physicists and also because they didn't have the resources needed to do it.
@DBQ:
"It is higher IQ or training by their cultural norms? Is it both combined?"
Clearly (at least to me), it's both combined. Innate intelligence and your cultural norms/environment produce "you". I am surprised that so many supposedly intelligent folks get hung up on the "either or" proposition. It's both!
Were the Germans trying to build an atomic bomb?
Yes, but not very hard. Germany did not have the energy resources to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium. A project like the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion facility was beyond Germany's capabilities unless vital war industries like steel production were starved of electricity. This is why the Germans were interested in the heavy water produced by the Vemork hydroelectric plant in Norway. Deuterium oxide can be used as a neutron moderator in a uranium-fueled reactor to breed plutonium.
Though much of the Vemork heavy water was denied to the German by sabotage actions carried out by Norwegian patriots, enough reached Germany for a small-scale heavy-water reactor experiment designed by Werner Heisenberg, the Uncertainty Principle guy.
Unfortunately for National Socialism Heisenberg's criticality estimates were off by a factor of ten. If his reactor had ever been fuelled up it would have exploded, killing everyone in the laboratory and scattering highly radioactive material over a wide area. It would have been a mini-Chernobyl.
Progressives are out to perfect mankind, or in a great phrase to “immanetize the eschaton.” They must believe that everyone can achieve perfection. There must be a blank slate that is empty at birth that they can fill up with their directives for behavior.
The only difference between rich and poor, moral and criminal is that the undesirables were not given the right programming. IQ is anathema because it reduces the value of their efforts. The core standard is that, at the end of the process no one should be better than anyone else.
Then we can truly enjoy diversity because everyone will look different, but behave the same.
There was an antisemitism related blog post yesterday that drew in some lesser Sailer-commenters (Matt and whitney). Althouse is wading into dangerous territory. Speculating about the genetic or biological basis of any behavior, or even just noticing that others are doing such speculating, is about the quickest way to get de-legitimized, de-platformed and forever branded a racist. At this point the only interesting discussion on the internet related to human biodiversity (itself now a code word to many people for white supremacy) has been relegated to deep, dark crevices of the web that attract all kinds of ugly alongside the occasionally brilliant observations and speculations.
"turkey" ... Nazi
Ever had burgers made from "Nazi Super-Cows"? They're so good that it's impossible to buy them in Hamburg.
'Were the Germans trying to build an atomic bomb?'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_program
Diversity. Jew privilege. The Jews have too much. Redistributive change. Social justice.
@Dust Bunny Queen:It is difficult to completely separate culture, societal norms and genetic component in the measurement of IQ.
yes, it is, that's why all the twin studies and the calculations of correlation coefficients. IQ is about 70% heredity. Provided there is not actual severe abuse, neglect, malnutrition, disease, parenting and environment has almost no correlation.
You create control variables for these things. It's been done for a century, and it's pretty solid, because everyone hates IQ and attacks it, basically just the way you did, it's the first thing everyone thinks of.
promoted eugenics
Normalized. Planned parenthood, selective-child, one-child, etc.
"It is higher IQ or training by their cultural norms? Is it both combined?"
Nature and nurture. The former establishes a bias. The latter affects its realization.
It's strange the Jews didn't invent Kwanzaa. More days off.
Harpending's "eugenics" consisted of killing Europeans.
Competing interests. Social instabilities. Burdens. Then there were the Mengele experiments or clinical cannibalism. So monotonic.
Every sprint race is dominated by those of sub-Saharan, specifically west African descended people. Every distance race is dominated by eastern (Rift Valley) descended Africans.
The cheapest sport (aka not requiring expensive equipment or higher income to practice) is running. So it’s pretty clear that in all distances, two different African populations dominate the ranks.
Given the lack of class bias for running participation, it is likely that there is a genetic component. So in the past 50,000-150,000 years, humans in other regions of the world gained/lost traits that added up to a worsening of running ability.
Is it so strange to imagine that the same might be true of intellectual talents?
Gabriel You create control variables for these things. It's been done for a century, and it's pretty solid, because everyone hates IQ and attacks it, basically just the way you did, it's the first thing everyone thinks of.
?? WTF ??
How was anything I said an attack on IQ?
Festivus, rhhardin.
THE ATOMIC BOMB CONSIDERED AS HUNGARIAN HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT
From the inimitable Scott Alexander. Read down to get to the part about Ashkenazi jewish intelligence.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
"Jewish people who have been raised in a culture that prizes critical thinking are going to gravitate to fields where that skill is important."
I have no clue that would lead me to an answer on the nature/nurture debate. I'm what Scott Adams would call an artist (only without the artistic ability), but I think the story of Mo Berg is of interest.
Berg had a lot of skill, both as an athlete and as a linguist. He knew enough German, and JUST ENOUGH physics to determine that the Nazis weren't about to create an atomic bomb. Then again, with Heisenberg, you never know.
As I understand it, his father, and maybe others close to him, thought Mo was wasting his time with baseball, and should have been using his big brain for big brain work. I can just imagine my midwestern gentile father lamenting the sad loss to baseball it would be if an athlete gave it up for an academic career.
I guess I'm lucky that I never had to make a choice between playing major league baseball and being a linguistics professor ;)
Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi or a true believer.
It was clear that he was only trying hard enough to keep himself in charge of the project, so that he could control progress. Every once in awhile, something to show his handlers. And keep his family alive and living relatively well.
Races have means and standard deviations. The percent inherited and percent cultural is within one race's bell curve, not across bell curves.
Which bell curve you're in is 100% inherited. That's how you got your own race's bell curve.
concentrating more on other areas [citation needed]
The area of flying saucers. And super-cows, of course.
Image Credit: CIA. - that's how you know it's real.
After birth control the high IQ couples have no children.
Ironically, dodo dynasties. Perhaps we underestimated the species that preceded us, or impute positive qualities to intelligence without basis in pursuit of wealth, pleasure, leisure, narcissistic indulgence, and secular parity.
Wow! I do not find that laughable at all. Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending, it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that Jews are especially intelligent! Bigotry takes many forms...
But what's even less funny is that the SPLC, which peddles the fallacy that the above is *proof* of anti-Semitism (not just not inconsistent with it), is allowed to slander people like Harpending while being taken as the go-to source on "hate" by U.S. government agencies and tax-payer funded non-profits.
That being the case, I do find it laughable that anybody would get all "wow just wow" about the logical defect in Hinderaker's slam at the SPLC, while letting the SPLC's long career as an officially sanctioned purveryor of vicious and stupid slander pass unremarked.
P.S.: Re "...Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending": it's not true. Just FYI.
Nice take, Althouse. Everyone who breeds is performing a one off eugenics experiment.
Wait - I'm an Ashkenazi Jew! This is awesome. Why aren't the rest of you listening to me?
rhhardin said...
It's strange the Jews didn't invent Kwanzaa. More days off.
I think your programmer took a few too many days off. Hanukkah is eight days, Kwanzaa is seven. I don't know about Kwanzaa but Hanukkah days are not taken off from work. As a rule, Jews like to work.
Blogger Annie C. said...
I thought of something last night. While cooking, I repeated a mantra that has been stuck in my head for 30 years. "Hot pan, cold oil, the food won't stick."
Actually it was Yan Can Cook who said that. Similar era of cookery shows though. I always thought to myself that hot pan, cold oil, food won't cook...
Harpending was definitely a supporter of eugenics, whatever you think of his theories. He wrote for the journal of the American Eugenics Society
1991 R Pennington, HC Harpending. The effect of infertility on the population structure of the Herero and Mbanderu of Ngamiland. Social Biology 38:127–139
And for the Journal of Biosocial Science which has always been edited by a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society.
2007 H Harpending et al. Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. J Biosocial Science 38(5):659-93.
"Bigotry takes many forms" It can be anything that confirms your belief that what you are looking at is bigotry.
tcrosse: Question: is high IQ inherited? Must the children of high IQ parents also have high IQ? Maybe not. One could cite examples of stupid children of brilliant parents, or brilliant children of ordinary parents.
Presenting those examples as evidence against the heritability of IQ shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how heredity works.
@DBQ:How was anything I said an attack on IQ?
I should have said the "heritability" of IQ, and if you like a less aggressive word than "attack" feel free to substitute "questioned" or "challenged" or what you like, when you said things like "A culture that prizes and rewards certain types of mental prowess over physical achievement will create more of what it rewards. So it isn't much of a surprise that Asian cultures like Japanese or Chinese in America tend to have higher proportions of their ethnicity in higher education and in the STEM fields."
My point is, and is only, that the heritability of IQ is always challenged in the same way, and has been for a century, and has always held up under that challenge. Because there are statistical techniques and control techniques that let you estimate what percentage of IQ is associated with what.
Here are examples from speeches made by Harpending which led the SPLC to, for once, correctly evaluate a intellectual position as white supremacy.
“The reason the Industrial Revolution happened in 1800, rather than the year one thousand, or zero, which it could have, the Romans certainly could have done it, is that a new kind of human evolved in northern Europe, and probably northern Asia. And that this led to the Industrial Revolution—this new kind of human was less violent, had an affinity for work. When you view your parents or grandparents, and you know that they're retired, they could relax. But afterwards they can't just sit on the couch and relax, they've got to go and get a shop and work on a cradle for their grandchildren… I've never seen anything like that in an African. I've never seen anyone with a hobby in Africa. They're different.”
—“Preserving Western Civilization” conference, 2009
"Group differences, as far as we know, are in the DNA. Nobody yet has found any credible environmental effect on IQ or academic achievement. And believe me, people have been frantically looking for one for sixty, seventy years. Nothing. If you look at the quantitative genetic analyses, they’ll talk about a contribution from genes, and a contribution from environment. What that contribution from environment is, is random error."
—H.L. Mencken Club meeting, 2011
I disagree with these conclusions for the following reasons.
1. The field of IQ studies was formed and dominated by members of the English and American eugenics societies (Galton, Yerkes, Spearman, Terman, Thorndike, Burt, Jensen, Eysenck, Lynn, Brand) or by those who write for the eugenic society journals (Kanazawa, JP Rushton) and mostly they were funded by the Pioneer Fund, formed and dominated by members of the English and American eugenics societies. (Harry Laughlin, Frederick Osborn, JP Rushton, Richard Lynn). This who made the link between genetics and IQ. So the fact that they all say the same thing doesn't mean as much as people think.
2. In the Seventies, the field was shown to be dominated by fraudulent statistics on twin research published by Cyril Burt and used by all researchers up till then. The research since then has still been dominated by students of Burt still reaching the same conclusions. They have not been willing to publish their raw data so that their conclusions could be compared with their data. So why believe them on their link between genetics and IQ?
3. Isn't it in fact the case that at this present moment success in our literate technological society is going to those who developed it (Europeans) and those whose previous culture emphasized literacy - the Jews and the Chinese?
Harpending claimed that “[w]hat happened in medieval Europe was brutal enforcement of laws.
Brutal enforcement of laws predates medieval Europe by 5000 years, give or take.
"If anyone is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death." — Code of Hammurabi
Pretty damned brutal, especially compared to the 21 years in prison (and out in 7) handed down to Anders Behring Breivik for murdering 77 people. Obviously, the medieval Europe bullshit was inserted by SPLC's professional bullshitters as a means to drape Harpending's argument in white supremacist clothing, ignoring the decidedly brownish inventors of brutal law enforcement.
Actually, the whole notion of law enforcement as a means of eugenic control is utter bullshit and has been from time immemorial. Criminally inclined men are more likely to reproduce than law-abiding men. You'd have to hang them as soon as they reach puberty to make a dent in their genetic footprint. Law-abiding men are more inclined to weigh the economic cost of pregnancies they engender, than violent men who are more impulsive. Take a survey of incarcerated males. How many "baby daddies" are in prison compared to a similar population of law-abiding men? It's a safe wager that the progeny of jailbird unwed fathers out-number the otherwise decently bred bastard by ten to one.
I think your programmer took a few too many days off. Hanukkah is eight days, Kwanzaa is seven.
I think he was implying that they would then take both the eight and the seven...more as in additional to, rather than more than.
My education was in the military and in chemistry. Both taught me to try to be objective and datacentric in my thinking. After my chemist job I went into business which is both analysis of data and connecting with people on a person level. Now that I'm older I rely more on instinct and the remembrance of experience for understanding.
My first experience of a Jew fully representing his religion (as opposed to guys I served with in the AF or guys in my chemistry lab or guys who just liked to have a beer) was an Orthodox rabbi. One of my jobs was to make sure the chemicals we produced would have the kosher stamp. The stamp had to be renewed annually and cost the company money.
I also looked forward to the annual visit from the rabbi. He would always say he was too busy during the day, so I would meet him in the office after business hours. After his analysis of the chemical formulation and answering all his kosher questions to the best of my ability, we would talk. The talk was, long into the night, about religion and politics. I loved the guy, even though Jesus (the center of my faith and Anglican tradition) seemed to be a taboo subject.
Jewish people who have been raised in a culture that prizes critical thinking are going to gravitate to fields where that skill is important."
As a kid, I went to Jewish friends houses for dinner. There was commonly a discussion of topics that required critical thinking. When I went to non-Jewish houses for dinner, we usually watched TV or talked about school.
When my ex-wife and I invited Jewish colleagues and their teenaged kids over for dinner, there was almost always a discussion of current topics. Non-Jewish colleagues usually talked about work.
Culture plays an important role in developing critical thinking skills. Genetics gives you the ability, but you need the right experiences to develop the skills. Some kids get a head start (pun intended) by having families that nurture critical thinking. Some kids get the opportunity in school. Some kids get that opportunity much later in life (i.e., late boomers).
Some kids get the opportunity, but don't have the ability to make use of it.
All men (people) are not created equal in that sense, only in God's eyes.
My kids were in gifted programs, and we parents of those kids talked a lot about our offspring. With many of the kids, we had a saying: Math smart, life stupid. IQ is just one component of your makeup. It might give you an edge here or there, but it might be holding you back somewhere else.
"It is higher IQ or training by their cultural norms? Is it both combined?"
Clearly (at least to me), it's both combined. Innate intelligence and your cultural norms/environment produce "you". I am surprised that so many supposedly intelligent folks get hung up on the "either or" proposition. It's both!
Plomin's book, "Blueprint" makes the case that adult behavior is 50% genetic. Children can be affected by environment but by adulthood, 50% is genetic.
Some of Murray's later work is concerned with "assortive mating" in which the high IQ population marries each other and the low IQ population has lots of babies.
It's strange the Jews didn't invent Kwanzaa.
Actually, they did. Kwanzaa--created by American black separatist Maulana Karenga in 1966 was a Leftist that used Marxist principles for its foundation. The Soviet Union had buildings full of creative writers coming up with schemes and scams to destabilize Western nations under the supervision of Soviet Intelligence and stirring up dissent in America's Black communities (and division from US values) was an important part of that program since the USSR used scarce real money to finance these operations. Karenga most likely used the materials the Soviets provided, including the Swahili words.
"Wait - I'm an Ashkenazi Jew! This is awesome. Why aren't the rest of you listening to me?"
It's called statistical distribution. Sorry you are -3 sigma. |:)
The most interesting thing I remember from the Bret Stephens article was when he talked about differences in mindset and related them to religious thinking. I think he mentioned that in Judaism there is a lot of creative thinking, interpretation, and bargaining with God, that you don't necessarily see in many other religions. I think this is related to the fact that all religious law originates from the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible. All those laws are 4500 to 5000 years old. But then in and around the time of Christ Judaism went through a reformation of sorts with the Talmud, where Rabbis reinterpreted the old laws to try and make them fit in the then modern times. I think this carries forward today and does contribute to not a difference in intelligence but a difference in mindset. In contrast most Christian theology seems much more top-down and authoritarian, not much wiggle-room. Even the Protestant reformation wasn't categorized as a rethinking of reinterpretation of religious thought, but more of a return to the roots. Of a pruning of non-authentic Christian practices that had accumulated over the years.
I get the push back on the left about anything related to IQ. Because if you tend to think of people in groups of people and not as individuals, and if IQ turns out to be an important characteristic in people's lives then there is some uncomfortable data to deal with. But ignoring the information doesn't seem like a good idea. Also the current practice by some on the left of creating circumstances where that data isn't produced anymore, (creating privilege indices for standardized tests, or doing away with standardized tests altogether) seems very counter-productive for society. It might be ok to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book, but if your putting together the Manhattan project you need to find the smarty-pants nerd types and get a bunch of them together.
Stephens wrote something sloppy and was heavily criticized, but who was "cancelled"?
Stevens still has a head full of hair (and a job at the Times) so the Powerline headline is false.
Other than that, I accept the Althouse assertion that regarding Jews as more intelligent can, and has, led to antisemitism in thought and deed.
This especially applies when the people being told they are inferior are fucking Germans, whose unparalleled arrogance is not justified by an equal level of competence and intelligence.
There may be individual exceptions.
After birth control the high IQ couples have no children.
tcrosse said: "That's the premise of Idiocracy (2006)."
And C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" (1951)
https://mysite.du.edu/~treddell/3780/Kornbluth_The-Marching-Morons.pdf
OK, now do women.
Apparently, Hanukkah in Israel was born with a militaristic spin as part of the Zionist enterprise. And it's considered the least important of the festivals, because it was instituted not by YHWH but by men (IIRC Martin van's recent post).
Here's one from my Ancient Civ class, circa fall 1972 (MT 110 MWF 0910-1005 JOHNSON)-- it was known that it took two Greeks to cheat a Jew, and two Jews to cheat an Armenian. But that was well before the Ashkenaz-Sephard days, so . . .
Speaking of Armenians, when I was a young library clerk I had the assistance of an even younger guy, who was an Armenian Christian and Turkish citizen. He was earnestly pious and delighted that I knew or cared anything about Armenian history. I Googled him about five years ago and danged if he wasn't then the Mesrob (patriarch more or less) of his piece of Armenian Christendom. He died about a year ago.
Narr
He owed none of it to me (I was reading Jac Weller on Wellington about that time)
It's true that you can be racist and still acknowledge that group is superior in some way, but not in intelligence. That just hits too close to home. I could see an anti-Semite saying Jews are smart but only in an evil way, but not the way it's claimed here. It's offered as a good thing, or at least not negative.
A racist might say they have great hair, but they're stupid. A racist is not going to claim
that those people are smarter than my people, but they have bad hair.
It doesn't mean much to me, but are we really forced to say that all races are equal in average intelligence even though the science say otherwise. If I was going to challenge an accepted scientific fact, I'd choose to deny that race is even a real thing. That might do some good, and it's becoming increasingly true anyway.
In his anti-Semitic rant in the Nixon White House, Billy Graham said Jews have a “strange brilliance” as seems in his view to be acquired satanically.
As I recall, Nassim Taleb takes the position that a high IQ indicates the traits necessary for high powered paper-shuffling, something useful in a bureaucracy but of less importance in making things, understanding the world, and succeeding in life as a human being.
Although I am not sure he has that exactly right, empirical observation tells me that many people of low to average intelligence lead happy, fulfilled, rewarding lives, while many people with high IQs are neurotic messes.
If I were Stephens (or Althouse), I wouldn't go anywhere near this topic.
I'd choose to deny that race is even a real thing. That might do some good, and it's becoming increasingly true anyway.
Actually science has pretty much confirmed that there are (were?) three distinct genetic populations (races) of modern humans. The key genetic distinctions have to do with whether or not your ancestors interbreed with extinct types of humans, and if so, which ones.
Is moderation back? My comment at 2:18 just disappeared.
Perhaps not a "genius" move by Bret.
Shouting Thomas said...Dylan is, I believe, an Ashkenazi Jew.
--
Semi-TIC.
Bigotry takes many forms, and the stereotypes about some groups include the notion that they have lower intelligence, but other stereotypes — for other groups — have the idea that they are more intelligent.
"We're in trouble. I just checked with the guys at the Jewish house. They said every one of our answers on the psych test were wrong."
Armenian Christian - tautology. Armenia was the first country to declare it was a Christian nation ~ 300 AD. Composition - Eastern Orthodox 90%, Catholic 5% and Protestant 5%.
This trope is getting way out of hand. Hopefully, there is a chance, for good, to put this entire Jewish Genius bullshit to rest. It is bad for Jews; it is bad for society, especially in the US where we should ascribe to Jefferson's state in the Declaration of Independence that we are all endowed by our Creator equally with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This theme has been a sociological theme, beaten to death, repeatedly most forcefully (with data and rigorous analyses) by Stephen Steinberg in his work: "The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America, 3rd edition" which can be purchased through the Meadehouse Portal to Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Myth-Ethnicity-Class-America/dp/080704153X
The control variable that reduces the correlation between the categories of Race and Status Attainment to nil is the timing of an ethnic group's arrival in the US. For Jewish immigrants arriving at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the expansion of the University system into the PhD levels with new research links between "science" and "industry." Moreover, research assistants at the PhD level were paid positions. Middle class immigrants from the Old Country were able to rapidly integrate into new positions and demand from an expanding economy.
A similar idea, perhaps one might say confirmation, was demonstrated by Thomas Sowell in his dissertation and first publication: the timing for upward mobility among blacks came when they moved from rural based economies into urban economies. In fact, he found that recently arrived blacks performed equally with Italians from rural based economies. Cities, he argued, are better suited to learn how to survive in market economies.
Growing up in Florida after Castro took power, I saw the same phenomenon with Cuban immigrants from the middle classes. There was a noted lack of middle class demand in Floridian economy so doctors, lawyers, and professors had to work menial jobs before they learned enough English to retake their professional examinations to rise rapidly to their former position of social status.
The same can be seen with immigrants from East and South Asia. These cases are also discussed by Steinberg.
Alas, most of the true champions of this trope have been secular Jews popular in the generation of Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and on up to and including Rob Reiner, Billy Crystal, Jeremy Epstein, the Weinstein Boy. Predatory behaviors toward the Shiksa has been standard (Consider the Billy Joel's song, Come Out Virginia) because the Shiksa is easy.
It is really offensive, let alone bullshit. It goes against one of the core ideals of the Jewish Tradition that commands us to Lights Unto The Nation--examples of Good not haughty predatory supremacists.
None of this should be glorified in rhetoric.
ENOUGH
PC running amok again. Why are we afraid to point out positive characteristics of non-black/brown ethnic groups?
One theoretically be an antisemite and still say that the Jews were of superior intellect, but that's not what the Nazis claimed, and Ann's suggestion that this was sorta on their minds is simply false. They were shocked when their math departments at their universities could no longer function properly.
Rhardin is essentially correct in all his comments here. For those who do not believe that IQ measures intelligence, or that the racial breakdown for IQ is (approximately) Ashkenazi 115, NE Asian 105, NW European 104, Igbo (Nigeria) 100, Other Caucasian 99, Middle Eastern 94, Hispanic 91, Native American 90, African-American 85, Other African 75, I suggest that you stop arguing about it here and explaining very patiently to the rest of us what your little theory is and actually read the scientific data. What a thought, eh? Your really cool thought that people with high IQ often can't throw a baseball? That they might not be good at sales? That you knew a high-IQ guy who was a jerk and didn't work so hard and wasn't a success? That "intelligence" is somehow this elusive idea that no one has ever been able to define? Guess what? Those brilliant ideas of yours have also been thought by others who actually put in some effort into thinking about it and running some experiments and looking at data.
Read Plomin, read Reich, read Jensen, Harpending, Cochran, Murray, Wade, Tierney, Pinker, Hsu, Thompson. Scott Alexander, as above, great choice. Yes, read his essay about the "Hungarian Martians." They often talk in code because they don't want their careers destroyed, but it's right out there for the taking. Look very carefully at the evasiveness of the supposed experts who tell you it's not so. Just be alert.
This has been going on for decades, and people just don't want to hear it. They want to explain their little theory about how all the other people just haven't thought this through, but they have this killer idea that explains it all. What is intelligence? Maybe it's culture. Maybe it's test anxiety. Jewish parents just reward hard work. Lots of smart people aren't wise. The tests are biased. THESE HAVE ALL BEEN STUDIED AND ANSWERED, DAMMIT!
Actually, National Socialist anti-Semitic propaganda claimed that Jews were disproportionately idiots and retarded and of course evil. The idea that Jews were sub-human was a constant National Socialists theme. Every well-informed person would know that if it wasn't the case that most records of what the National Socialists said haven't been destroyed due to, I think, their remarkable resemblance to what Marxists have said in the past and in fact what their modern versions say today.
In fact I bet I can predict the future from that. It is just a matter of time before the politically correct are claiming that white Republicans are disproportionately idiots and retarded, evil, and a sub-human population that should be kept away from children and isolated from the rest of the population.
Since the left has already replicated 95% of what the Nazis said, the remaining 5% surely is becoming increasingly probable.
"German Anti-Semitism is arguably one of the reasons why we won WW II,"
It's a delicious irony! Those evil fools destroyed and evicted their Jewish population...and many of those who survived came here and developed missiles and the Bomb. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
I just want to say that I love the SPLC - they are always right. No matter what.
And Nazis are always bad.
The world's No. 1 problem is antisemitism. Get rid of that and we would be solve all the problems - even climate change.
Thanks!
Maybe abortion isn't that bad. According to QZ.com:
It’s one of the best-established relationships in economics: as women’s education and income levels go up, the number of children they have goes down. But something happened to the American family over the last three decades: that downward slope became a U-turn. Women in families in the top half of the income spectrum are having more kids than their similar-earning counterparts did 20 years ago.
tcrosse,
Yes, intelligence is inherited. However, like most characteristics, it is not caused by one or a few genes but by hundreds (or maybe thousands). Two smart parents will still have lots of genes that lead to high intelligence. If a kid gets a lot of them from both parents, she may be a lot less smart than the parents. Also, things can happen between zero and nine months that swing her toward greater or lesser intelligence than her genes would indicate.
Mr. Narr, the saying is:
“It takes ten Turks to cheat one Jew, ten Jews to cheat one Greek, but twenty Greeks assisted by seven Jews and five Turks to cheat one Armenian.”
The Armenians were the sarafs, or money-lenders, of the Ottoman Empire. They were thought of as both unscrupulousness and clever.
There's another explanation for Ashkenazic Jews' success in academic fields. All boys were required to attain literacy in Hebrew, to chant the Torah, read and understand the Talmud, etc. Those who struggled and failed were more likely to drift away from Judaism. Conversely, those who succeeded brilliantly were deemed prize catches as sons in law for wealthy merchants and were encouraged to have large families.
I didn't realize that it's some sort of dirty secret that Jews tend to be extremely intelligent. Here's a real-life, naturally-developed example: I spent almost 30 years in a large city prosecutor's office; the city has a sizeable Jewish population. My first 15 years were in the trial division, trying cases. The average experienced and successful trial attorney was extroverted, smart, confident, and not likely to be Jewish. Then I transferred to the appellate division where it was all about smokin' hot brain power and writing skills. The average experienced and successful appeals attorney was introverted, extremely smart, and very likely to be Jewish.
As for me, I was more intellectual and introverted than my average trial attorney co-workers. But I lagged noticeably behind the best minds in the appellate division yet was about ten times more outgoing and assertive in court than they were.
In conclusion, science suggests we have the anti-semites to thank for the increased IQ among Jews. I can imagine rhhardin now thinking, "Those darn Jews, even when they lose they win." On the other hand, as that interesting article by Scott Alexander suggests, too bad Hitler killed all those Jews. Who knows how much further technology would be by now, which the human race so desperately needs?
One thing I notice among the comments is the lack of appreciation for the fact that Jews' realization and devotion to "God is one" and "God is our loving father" and a powerful life-supporting philosophy, predated Christianity by about 1500 years. When your ancestors were worshipping stones and indulging in orgies the Jews were contemplating laws and ethical behavior.
Usually, the way around saying a group you hate is smart, is to say they are clever or sly. Animal cunning, rather than human intelligence.
There are a lot of very smart Jews. Brett Stephens isn't one of them.
Glad you still deign to associate with us mere ape-men, Rosalyn.
I have long reached the point where I think one gets the culture the population has the intellectual ability to build and maintain. I think if you data dug down deep in cultures across the globe, you will find that the right tails of the Bell curve are the basis of everything in the individual cultures. 90% of any population are just smart enough to not off themselves doing stupid stuff, like crossing against traffic or diving head first into the shallow end of a pool, and just smart enough to serve as useful implements for the smart segment of the society that actually builds and runs stuff. The advance of one culture over another all comes down the right tail- how big it is between, let's say between IQ 120- and the upper boundary. Cultures with higher relative lots of such people- Western Europe, North America, Eastern Asia are likely to advance and maintain high levels of civilization. Those areas with relatively few such people are likely to remain at the edge of subsistence.
I have often pointed out that if a plague wiped out the 5% of the brightest people in the United States or Western Europe, we would revert back to the preindustrial age within 20 years- you wouldn't have enough capable people to maintain any of the infrastructure. If a plague wiped out the 5% of the brightest people in the Sudan, you wouldn't notice the difference all that much since they have no infrastructure.
Rosalyn C. wrote:
"In conclusion..." Nope, it doesn't conclude what the commentators have written.
"I can imagine rhhardin now thinking..." don't try to imagine what other people think. That imagination leads to mental illness. Ask people what they think.
"When your ancestors were worshipping stones and indulging in orgies" Not a good assessment of anyone's ancestors. Even if partially true, the stone and orgy folks were transformed by Christianity.
I listened to Jordan Peterson on IQ and he has made the same point about the A. Jews. I guess the Woke Warriors were too busy attacking him on personal pronoun compliance to bother with the IQ issue.
THEOLDMAN
Not Jewish, but "I'm spending Hanukkan in Santa Monica" -- actually just listening to Tom Lehrer's song.
you have a culture that maximizes the comparative advantages of certain groups, I would have preferred that stephens had focused on that, but he's not that smart,
We Jews actually exhibit more Christian virtues than given credit for.
Not in defense of anything written here, but I wonder how many of the "scientific" findings of the 2000's will be discredited because the authors were Marxists, or identitarians, or any other ideology which tends to bias or shape research.... We'd all do well to keep our biases in perspective.
I think he was sharper when he was at the Jerusalem post, then he got lazy when he ended up at the journal,
but the foundations of Christianity are in the old testament from genesis to Isiah, and beyond,
apropos of nothing,
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2017/04/peter-brown-late-antiquity
let's say between IQ 120- and the upper boundary. Cultures with higher relative lots of such people- Western Europe, North America, Eastern Asia are likely to advance and maintain high levels of civilization. Those areas with relatively few such people are likely to remain at the edge of subsistence.
Yes and inbreeding like the Arabs do, is not good for IQ. The royal families of Europe began with huge advantages and inbreeding did them in.
Iran actually has great potential in its population. It's Islam that has held them back. Lots of Persians in the US who do very well.
Limited Perspective usually correlates with limited sense of humor. In conclusion referred to the conclusion of the inquiry about the Ashkenazi Jews, not the comments here. rhhardin made a joke about Jews creating Kwanza, I was making a joke back, not serious about claiming to mind read him. Finally, my point was that some people have still not caught up even after all this time, which is probably the true source of their anger and hatred. A limited perspective does illustrate that point nicely.
Rosalyn C:
When your ancestors were worshipping stones and indulging in orgies the Jews were contemplating laws and ethical behavior.
****************
Meh. So were the Hindus in the Rig Veda.
Look how far *that* took them.
why I call it the basilisk, the creature that turned people to stone,
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2019/12/31/what-the-unholy-hell-daily-beast-columnist-vomits-up-dumpster-fire-of-an-article-attempting-to-rationalize-left-wing-anti-semitic-violence/
I think one gets the culture the population has the intellectual ability to build and maintain
Yes. That is why it was the Scots who invented the modern world, according to Arthur Herman.
The Norwegians certainly helped.
It is mere coincidence that I am Scots-Norwegian.
Although anti-semitism and a belief in high Jewish IQ are compatible, they're compatible under the traditional European version of anti-semitism - the Jews are scheming away to take our stuff, betray us to our enemies etc. ie we hate them because their cunning schemes are dangerous. We fear them.
Hitler's (and hence Nazi) anti-semitsm was not the same. Nazi anti-semitism rested on disgust rather than fear. The Jews as a disease, a plague, an infection. As mandrewa has pointed out, Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as dirty, inferior, parasitic. As rats.
Nobody fears that rats are going to trick them out of their birthright. They're feared as carriers of disease.
So Althouse has mistaken Nazi anti-semitism for the more traditional version.
Just to throw in a new thought on a topic, we've been round and round on, I've been reading very early histories such as Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation. The conclusion I'm drifting toward is that, for some, the vision of American history changed in the 1880's. Influenced by Darwin and Galton, some began to picture national or personal success as racially based. This was a general trend in England Germany and France as well as America. This new history just isn't true to how a group like the Pilgrims saw their place in the world. And enterprises like the NYT 1619 have bought into the idea that the historians of the 1880's and after represent the thinking of the Revolutionary-era Americans or the colonial-era Americans or the English settlers of 1620 in Plymouth. But the people who brought in Jim Crow in 1880's did see American history as progressive (the exact word they used) and progressive because led by the "white race." All immigrants to America have three generations of struggle before the majority of the group makes it into the middle class but the blacks after nine or ten generations are just now getting in; and that is due, in my opinion to Jim Crow and Jim Crow history coming in in the 1880's. So that version is important to the history of that group.
I'm reading The Strange History of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward and Who we Are and How we Got Here by David Reich as well as very early colonial history. To me it all suggests a more complex history - genetically and intellectually - than the various versions of history as white supremacy allow.
"Yes and inbreeding like the Arabs do, is not good for IQ."
I wonder how the Rothschilds are doing these days.
Amadeus, the most useful thing I took away from Nassim Taleb's colorful series of denunciations of IQ and psychometrics and psychology and its practitioners was his point about IQ correlations not bearing out at both ends of the IQ spectrum. He was on solid ground there in criticizing it from a psychometrics perspective. IQ is much better at predicting things for lower IQ ranges, where the correlations are very high and more or less monotonic: at lower IQs, say below the average, as IQ declines the correlation with poor outcomes is strong: less wealth, less achievement, etc.
On the other hand, for people above a certain minimum IQ, say 115, IQ is very poor at predicting relative success, and by the measures we use for success it does not increase along with IQ. At the high end of the spectrum in particular, the correlation between IQ and positive outcomes such as wealth, professional success/achievement, happiness/family formation, etc. completely break down above a certain IQ. Not that there are sufficient data typically for statistical significance, but an IQ of over, say, 150 is less likely to correlate with all the good stuff one is likely to see for a sample of people at IQ 130 (too smart for their own good...).
I think this was Taleb's strongest point in terms of the data: IQ is not a measure of intelligence, he said, but should be more properly called a measure of stupidity, at least in terms of its reliability as a metric.
Roslyn: When your ancestors were worshipping stones and indulging in orgies the Jews were contemplating laws and ethical behavior.
Observations of the "when your ancestors were swinging through trees my ancestors were..." genre are not a good look, Ros. One generally associates them with touchy members of has-been or never-been groups whose arrogance far exceeds any personal merit, not with mankind's A-listers.
We Jews actually exhibit more Christian virtues than given credit for.
Which ones? (Are there some that you think you personally are exhibiting here, lol?)
Btw, could you point out which of rhhardin's comments could possibly justify your mystifyingly idiotic remark about "those darn Jews"?
Now, Nichevo's rejoinder to rh - "Are you Jewish? Because you do that ALL THE TIME" - was hilarious. 'Cause dead true.
I said "Armenian Christian" and was dinged for tautology. Fair enough; I wondered about any Cath/Prot representation among them, and the fact about the Armenians being the first nation to adopt Christianity was the first thing my assistant told me (and one of the things I had already learned from JOHNSON in Ancient Civ).
As for wildswan's observations, by 1900 or so the national mythos (as wholesaled in textbooks particularly) was that American democracy arose from the bases of Christian (sometimes sorta-kinda Judeo-Christian but that's more from post WWII) ethics, Greek and Roman law, and the Germanic custom of elective kings.
No, really.
Narr
No worse than a lot that has replaced it, in truth
Obviously, the medieval Europe bullshit was inserted by SPLC's professional bullshitters as a means to drape Harpending's argument in white supremacist clothing, ignoring the decidedly brownish inventors of brutal law enforcement.
Not really. (Not defending SPLC, though. CRs added fr shrt atn spns)
"In this newly published paper, two anthropologists, Peter Frost and Henry Harpending, argue that the last thousand years have seen a radical change in the legitimacy of personal violence.
Previously, every man had the right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, even to the point of killing, and it was only the threat of retaliation from the victim’s kinsmen that kept violence in check.
This situation began to change in the 11th century throughout Western Europe with a growing consensus that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th, decreasing forty-fold. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress."
Annie C.,
Really, the news out your way only "hinted" about Jeff Smith's activities? Wow... everybody around here sure got the full story. (I personally know at least one of his victims.)
THESE HAVE ALL BEEN STUDIED AND ANSWERED, DAMMIT!
It's pretty amazing, isn't it?
This summary of APA's "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" is pretty fair.
BTW, do you think the moon is held in its orbit by the same force that makes things fall on the ground?
"The Soviet Union had buildings full of creative writers coming up with schemes and scams to destabilize Western nations under the supervision of Soviet Intelligence and stirring up dissent in America's Black communities (and division from US values) "
That must have been a fun, though immoral job. A vice.
Worshipping stones ain’t so great.
But orgies?
That’s bad?
Why do Jews win a disproportionate number of Nobel prizes, especially in the sciences?
As June Allyson said to Gen. Curtis LeMay in an old movie, "I don't care about your little problems, I want results!" I don't care about IQ I want smart people who get results. As James Campbell said "I don't need faith, I have experience." I value folks who I know can achieve. I don't value Archimedes, Tartaglia, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Von Newman, Godel for their IQ number, but for their unique masterful solution frameworks.
Everyone has creative moments, but some have magnificent creative moments.
IQ is useful to identify kids that need help (either remediation or escape from the boring) but is useless after school. I don't need to employ a high IQ moron.
According to the USMC my dad’s IQ was in the high 150’s. He was a very troubled individual. When I think of his life I am saddened. I have a lower IQ than my sister. Of the three of us (father, sister, and I) I am the only one that has been able to maintain a long term relationship and achieved contentedness.
The moral of my story is that there is a lot more to life than IQ. Also, your permanent record is real! I worked part time at the District Office for our school district. I found this information when I pulled my sister’s and my files.
The Nazi attitude towards the Jews was sui generis among the fascists of the first half of the 20th century. The hatred was all-consuming. You didn't see this in fascist regimes that were not directed by the Nazis.
Both the communists and the fascists believed that conflict was the engine of history. Communists believed that the conflict was between economic classes. So if you eliminated class conflict, you eliminated all conflict.
Nazis believed the conflict was between the races (or nations). Conflict with other races was the expression of the race. It really is not true that the Nazis were the mirror image of the communists, at least not in theory. Communists saw violence as the result of a tension that was illegitimate. Nazis saw violence as an essential activity of the nation-state.
Mussolini saw the fascist state as an end in itself. It was an efficient means of social organization because it recognized that the nation was the primary unit of social organization. The Nazis saw the socialist state as the best way to organize the nation for conflict and war with other races.
The Nazi's thought that the Jews were an abomination. They were a nation without national territory. Nations were defined by their territory. Jews had no territory, and therefore they were a parasitic people that thrived by corrupting other nations to suit their purposes.
osephbleau said...
As June Allyson said to Gen. Curtis LeMay in an old movie, "I don't care about your little problems, I want results!
************
Erm...an actress may have said that to a fake LeMay in a movie, but in real life he brought Japan to its knees with relentless B-29 firebomings, and then Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Them there are....results.
I don't criticize LeMay, or even Bomber Harris, my comment was in the context of a movie that did not insult LeMay at all.
There's another explanation for Ashkenazic Jews' success in academic fields. All boys were required to attain literacy in Hebrew...
Evidence suggests that this trend of widespread literacy dated all the way back to the first half of the first millenium B.C. The jury of commenters here is apparently still out on whether that's a good or bad thing.
Cancel culture, abortion culture's wicked cousin.
If jews are so smart why do they support politics that lead to their destruction. They were in the forefront of Marxism that lead to the Nazi extermination effort.
What a bunch of BS. Hitler could and did rail against whatever he wanted to in Mein Kampf and while in office, but without Germany's economic collapse there would have been no Hitler, let alone whatever he put his henchmen up to. And Germany's economic collapse was caused by a combination of the reparations of the Versailles Treaty and, you guessed it - the 1929 global crash of the markets caused by America's high on the hog wild capitalists. No doubt most of whom were actually as likely to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as anything else. Making America great and all.
They helped birth and supported the Soviet revolution which lead to the discrimination and isolation of the Jewish citizens.
And yet, this was a much more survivable fate than what the Soviets' fascist and Nazi antagonists did to them on the rest of the continent.
Previously, every man had the right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, even to the point of killing, and it was only the threat of retaliation from the victim’s kinsmen that kept violence in check.
Previous to what, and where?
I figured I would ruffle a few feathers by making light of the pagan forebears of Christianity, call it a little bit of pay back for the dozen or more insults, ridiculous and hostile things which have been said here against Jews and the general attitude that Christianity is superior to Judaism. There are many times I could have gotten into major battles with people here but chose not to engage with Christians who have no qualms about not acting Christian, which is funny. However to set the record straight, I personally do not consider myself superior to anyone because of my background. It's the history of our world I was mentioning, not a competition and certainly not a personal one. Christians have made their brilliant contribution.
Some of the "Christian" virtues which Jews display -- kindness, forebearance, forgiveness, non-violence, care of the less fortunate, charity("The average annual Jewish household donates $2,526 to charity yearly, far more than the $1,749 their Protestant counterparts give or the $1,142 for Catholics, according to data from Giving USA.")* Despite centuries of persecution Jews did not react by becoming a nihilistic or perpetual underachieving underclass prone to destructive actions (faith in things not seen). When faced with violent acts historically Jews do not strike back with violence or revenge, only in self defense. We do not see gangs of Jews sucker punching people on the street in NYC or going into black neighborhoods to commit murder.
Some commenter(s)' reaction to the attack in Monsey was that Jews are just complainers, whiners, why didn't they get together and repel the attacker? The reputation of whining (I think repeated numerous time by rhhardin to suggest an antipathy to Jews) even though in fact a young Hassidic man did run back into the Rabbi's home and used a table to bash the man slashing people with a machete causing the lunatic to flee the scene. Defying the horrific event and all the other recent violent attacks, those Orthodox Jews did not go underground, Jews in Monsey continued their Chanukah celebrations, and held a large public march the following day. (faith)
rhhardin's joke "It's strange the Jews didn't invent Kwanzaa. More days off." Snide reference to all those Jewish holidays.
"rhhardin said... What Hitler disliked about the Jews is that you could argue with them and win and then the next day they're saying the same things and won't admit your having won at all. According to Mein Kampf." Is Mein Kampf held in high regard by rhhardin or he enjoys the suggestion that he does?
How could I possibly think he has negative feelings towards Jews?? Seriously?
"by 1900 or so the national mythos (as wholesaled in textbooks particularly) was that American democracy arose from the bases of Christian (sometimes sorta-kinda Judeo-Christian but that's more from post WWII) ethics, Greek and Roman law, and the Germanic custom of elective kings."
But there were historians who, beginning in 1880s-1890s, saw all that past as coming into focus as the rise of the progressive white race, (meaning, BTW, the English part of that race, not the Irish.) This particularly affected the African-Americans since the idea of Africans as particularly non-progressive genetically, was a key element in the success of the Jim Crow movement which was rising at that same time. Now it's the white race which is particularly non-progressive genetically but the two version of American history are the same school but simply reversed. I mean, a study of history would regard the two as two versions of a simplistic, false version of history, the progressive racial version. Woodrow Wilson, Cornel West - black and white to each other.
Rosalyn, chill.
The only thing rhhardin takes seriously are his chickens and whether the hardin family females are staying virtuous enough to steer clear of this new-fangled feminism stuff. Trying to find a Nazi in him is barking up the wrong tree.
Happy New Year to the crazy Althouse blog gang! Don't forget to use the Amazon portal!
What mainstream historian, believed that, some cranks like lothrop stoddard amd madison grant did.
I wonder how the Rothschilds are doing these days.
Read the chapter on the Jews of Europe in "The 10,000 Year Explosion." It's been the topic of this thread.
One could cite examples of stupid children of brilliant parents, or brilliant children of ordinary parents.
Highly intelligent people often do stupid things. Some stupid things lead to quick death.
Intelligence and stupidity are highly distinct axes.
There were Jewish Italian fascists early on, and right-wing German Jews such as Ernst Kantorowicz who would have made pretty good Nazis if they'd been eligible.
Rigg estimates that there may have been as many as 100K (100,000) half- or quarter-Jews in the Wehrmacht at peak. Hitler personally reviewed files for combat awards like the Ritterkreuz recommended for such mischlinge (there were many), and approved most of them IIRC. Rigg has stories, and photos, of part-Jewish Wehrmacht veterans living in Israel.
Hitler's genetic theory was lumpen-mendelistic. In his view, Aryan-Jew mixes could produce Aryan (or Aryan-enough) offspring, but within a generation or two full- or 3/4 Jews would "Mendel out."
Narr
And eventually predominate
I have asked Ann to explain why she feels identifying A. Jews as being smarter than any other group ,as Stephen’s did,leads to anti-Semitism.
Since she hasn’t responded I will give my interpretation of her statement and if I am wrong she can respond.
First the term anti-Semitism has become too general and has changed over time .
In early history anti -Semitism was based on religion. However The old Spanish inquisition meme has been dead in Christian doctrine for centuries not withstanding that top - rated NYT Christian wife commentator lamenting that her Jewish husband remembers being taunted in his youth by bullies shouting “Christ killer”.
Then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries anti- Semitism in America was where Jews were denied or had limited access to better schools, neighborhoods and high social organizations like country clubs.
I will leave Overseas anti-Semitism to the scholars.
Now since the Jews have flourish here in America for well over a half century anti-Semitism has a new meaning and Shouting Thomas hit on it earlier. He called it jealousy as manifested in blacks and he gives reasons why. That is part of it but I think Ann’s reasoning is more encompassing. I call it by the human sin called covetousness. Now when you are habitually poor and hear a guy "bragging" how superior a group is over you and you see them living a rich life, your covetousness can get ugly. That’s what Ann fears. Being a secularist and not believing in sin her only recourse is to try and deny the superiority of the A. Jewish intellect. She thinks labeling or propaganda will squelch covetousness.
Oh how we need the Bible to guide us.
Have at it.
We watched a program on the discovery of Bayer Aspirin.
I kept this post in mind watching it, because the credit could have been to a chemist who was Jewish, but gave up his religion years before. That did not prevent him from going to the Camps.
The things that man discovered.
""there is something laughable about a supposed pro-Nazi who publishes an article finding that Jews have high IQ scores."
Wow! I do not find that laughable at all. Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending, it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that Jews are especially intelligent!"
Actually, it is laughable to think that a modern "Nazi" would devote his academic research to proving that Jews are more intelligent than all others by virtue of genetics. Until this kerfuffle, I had never heard of any. You?
She thinks labeling or propaganda will squelch covetousness.
Oh how we need the Bible to guide us.
Have at it.
I think you have utterly misunderstood Althouse.
Utterly.
To be completely clear, I read Althouse to accept, at least plausibly if not proven, the IQ superiority of A. Jews. Statistically, not person by person.
Having worked in a career which amounted to "selling IQ", it's certainly been my experience that Jews are over-represented in such a field.
The Nazis talked up eugenics, but didn't really practice it--in the sense of improving the gene pool of the German people. They required SS officers to fill out paperwork, before marriage, certifying that neither they or their brides had any Jewish or feeble minded relatives. They killed off the feeble minded in custody for the convenience of the government. They had no chance of reproducing anyway. What the Nazis practiced was brutality, not eugenics.
I have never met a Jew named Stephens, so he may well be a Jew-hater. Seriously, I really don't think that way, but we have a president whose apparently finds enemies everywhere. " Ashkenazi" always ends up Nazi, you know.
The Jewish Fritz Haber developed a process to synthesize ammonia, without which many scholars believe Germany could not have lasted more than a few months in WW I.
Jewish soldiers of the Kaiser served and died, and were awarded for bravery, in higher proportion than Gentiles (they checked). Many factors contributed to this, foremost that feeling among many German Jews that they were partners in the creation of a modern, scientific and artistically brilliant culture based on the greatest European (that is, mostly German) traditions.
It's hard for many moderns to grok the regard in which German cultural and military achievements were held by many Europeans across the spectrums. By 1900 or 1910 the emancipated Jews of Germandom had moved into the arts and sciences with a speed, thoroughness, and success that has no parallel in world history. They knew it and were proud of it--modernity itself had become very much a German, Jewish, German-Jewish affair in many minds.
Anti-Semitism didn't go away (and never will) but Germany around 1900 was a huge magnet for Jews from the East who had it worse than most German Jews could imagine, and some German Jews viewed them as virtually, well, barely human.
Such are people.
Narr
To be continued . . .
In that interim these events happened
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-prague-cemetery
Nicholas meyers latest holmes tale in more than 40 years also elaborates
The US military used IQ tests in WWI, but especially in WWII, to sort recruits into suitable occupations if possible. Needing a shitload of technicians (hell, they invented a rank) and other specialists whose work couldn't be done by any old doofus, a lot of men were sent to school(s) all over the country for months or years of rigorous training and education in programs like the ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program OWTTE).
The PBI didn't get dregs--the dregs of American society didn't make it into the armed forces in notable numbers, that being one point of the IQ tests--but even among ground forces the artillery, engineers, and tanks stripped off some good soldiers.
It was realized as early as July-August of 44 I think, that infantry losses were far outstripping estimates and by fall things were getting bad. When the Germans hit in the
Ardennes it became a crisis and a lot of really smart guys in school in the US found themselves as infantry replacements.
It may or may not surprise anyone that overall they proved more effective soldiers than most of their buddies.
Narr
And the buddies were already better than their enemies
Jews seem to suffer from Bad Luck as defined by the Dean of science fiction writers, Robert Heinlein:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
gadfly said...
But Truuuuuummmmp!
The attack on Stephens over the IQ aspect of his article was a complete diversion, given that he was not arguing the DNA explanation. He was offering a cultural explanation or Jewish success (could be for Asians as well), and it is this that makes him an enemy of the left. Moreover, the attacks on Stephens are a diversion from the nature of anti-Semitism, which is NOT another form of the same sort of bigotry as racism or sexism. Anti-Semitism is on the rise now on the left BECAUSE of the obsessions on the left about the victim hierarchy of marginalized identities. Jews complicate that narrative. They are a marginalized group, in one way, but successful and therefore "white" in another way. The attacks on them reflect the growing need to demonize them as white in order to protect the bogus victim hierarchy for the right victims. THAT is what this attack on Stephens is all about. Defending correct victim privilege.
@ Jon Burack: Bravo & D'accord
Here's a partial list of main Nazi messages:
1) capitalism is evil, and the corollary that almost everything should be run the government;
2) individualism is selfish and evil and anyone who is politically incorrect is evil;
3) Jews, and many other races, but Jews in particular, are evil;
4) there are too many people and mankind is destroying the natural world.
And actually I have probably left out something important, since there are a whole lot more Nazi messages than those four.
People in the comments above are thinking that National Socialism was just about anti-Semitism. That idea is appealing to them in part because that means since they aren't anti-Semitic then they aren't Nazis. But it's not that simple.
Post-war the left insisted that the Nazi error was their nationalism. (As if anybody else was different!) Well why didn't they emphasize anti-Semitism? Well because it would have been a laughable distinction. Back in the 30s, and the 40s, the left was full of Jew haters and most people knew that first hand.
The reality is that it is ordinary people that made up the bulk of the Nazi party. The things they believed were on the same wavelength as the progressive left today. And if you know people on the progressive left you know that most of these people have a lot of virtues. They are good people in many respects.
And that's part of the tragedy of all of this, all that the horrible things the Nazis did, they came in a sense from ordinary people that still had many virtues.
I'm Jewish and I have not read any of this literature that Harpending wrote. I also haven't bothered to read Bret Stephens' column.
I have a couple thoughts about the concept of the "Jewish Genius" though:
1) Remember, 6 million Ashkenazi Jews died in the holocaust. Looking at my own family history, the family members who were able to leave Germany in the 1930's were the ones who could get visas to other countries. How could they get visas? Well, they were the medical doctors, the scientists, the academics, the people with connections abroad. Family members who were farmers or carpenters in the rural part of Rhine/Westphalia could not procure visas. Their land was confiscated and they were sent to the concentration camps.
It's like the Syrian refugee crisis. The ones who were able to escape are the ones who had the connections or the means to do so.
2) Ashkenazi Jewish literature is full of stories about foolish people and foolish villagers. See: Stories of Chelm, and schlemiels and schlemazels. I'm not really sure what that says about Jewish "Genius", other than the fact that fools have played an important part in our culture.
I won't speak for others, but I exclude myself from "thinking that N-S was just about anti-Semitism."
Narr
just so you know
President Toilet Paper Shoe's Perfect Phone Call said...
Rosalyn, chill.
The only thing rhhardin takes seriously are his chickens and whether the hardin family females are staying virtuous enough to steer clear of this new-fangled feminism stuff. Trying to find a Nazi in him is barking up the wrong tree.
Can confirm. RH is barely human (I half think he's an AI beta, possibly an alien) let alone ideological. It would be interesting to know his life history and see if he could at any time have been fixed, but he is what he is. Harmless, and probably could be helpful if he chose.
The Hanukkah/Kwanzaa days off thing is just the kind of incoherent mishmosh that comes out of him sometimes. Since he pretends to a fabulous education including a thick paste of DWEM philosophy, as realized in music, math, programming and piloting, it's either trolling or scrambled databanks.
We Jews invented the original day off. It's called Shabbos or the Sabbath. There are funny jokes about Jews taking off work - here's one: on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, many Jews if they don't or can't take the day off will want to leave early, so what did my Gentile boss call it?
Rush-a Home-a!
Outrageously funny. Outrageous, and funny both. RH's jokes are not funny like that. It's exactly as if a computer was trying to synthesize jokes.
I don't think RH has any actual malice for us poor humans. If so, probably not more for some than for others. It's a pity on womanhood that RH never met any counterexamples to dissuade him from his programming, though.
well the first world war, shattered a generation, the cenotaph, for a victor like the uk, Russia suffered a great deal, as well as germany, the cultural backlash was addressed in sacred places, in eastern Europe and the southern Mediterranean it led to clericist regimes like franco and Horthy,
I think it was George Steiner who set up a "man from Mars" scenario--asking the alien in 1910 whether France or Germany seemed more likely to take anti-Semitism to the limit, and not being able to say, well, obviously, Germany.
One 20th century myth, assiduously put about by the USSR, Reds, and pinkos, is that Germanophilia, and violent anti-Semitism, were always and everywhere in Europe before 1914 or 1940 phenomena of the political right. (This is not a variant of the sterile and pointless "Naziism is Left Wing!" argument, so save your cheers/hisses.)
Imperial Germany, by unleashing the talents (is that an allowable term?) of German Jews, vaulted to the forefront of European science and scholarship in only decades, and helped make the German economy and technical base a world leader in many fields. The German Socialist Party was the world's strongest, and there were the beginnings of a serious gay-lib movement (in Berlin of course). Max Reinhardt revolutionized theater, and not just in
Germany. Not that the German traditional elites much liked the last few.
One interesting consequence of the post-1918 settlements that I never glommed to before my recent trip was that of the A-H successor regimes in Central Europe, Czechoslovakia was the only one that chose to be a republic from the gitgo (Adm Horthy being regent for a non-person monarch of course).
Narr
it's been fun, but enough for now
Post a Comment