With juvenile delight, the Huffington Post reports today the findings of a recent intelligence study: racists are dumb.

The report states:

Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified yes.

The study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood.

I.Q., or intelligence quotient, is a score determined by standardized tests, but whether the tests truly reveal intelligence remains a topic of hot debate among psychologists.

Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the university and the study's lead author, said the finding represented evidence of a vicious cycle: People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice, he told LiveScience.

Why might less intelligent people be drawn to conservative ideologies? Because such ideologies feature "structure and order" that make it easier to comprehend a complicated world, Dodson said. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice," he added.

Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, echoed those sentiments.

"Reality is complicated and messy," he told The Huffington Post in an email. "Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies."

But Nosek said less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal "simplifying ideologies" as well as conservative ones.

In any case, the study has taken the Internet by storm, with some outspoken liberals saying that it validates their suspicions about conservatives and conservatives arguing that the research has been misinterpreted.

Besides a hundred-year-old photograph of mostly out-of-shape Klansmen, a few things should jump straight out.

Firstly, notice the paragraph in red, containing an opinion that directly contradicts the thesis of both the article and the originating study: the second shortest, its low-key phrasing and location, just before an altisonant final paragraph with links to external websites (the second of which contains an anemic and muddled conservative quibble), has been clearly engineered to de-emphasise that contradictory opinion.

Secondly, and following from the first point, the article self-servingly ignores the fact that egalitarianism is a simplifying ideology, analogous to the worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, since it blames everything that goes wrong for coloured peoples in the West on White ‘racism’.

Thirdly, the study itself is ideological, for it equates prejudice with Right-wing ideology, when egalitarianism is probably the strongest form of prejudice in modern Western society. No egalitarian is ever willing to entertain any science or data that contradicts his prejudices on race or gender or anything else, let alone listen to any dissenting opinion: all such studies are biased, all such data lies, all such opinions racist or phobic.

Fourthly, remarks about socially conservative views show the level of narcissistic myopia that characterises the Left. In contemporary society, it is the liberal-egalitarian view that is normative and socially conservative, since for long now that has been the official establishment view and also the safe, socially acceptable position being conserved. Racial consciousness and traditionalism is the radical, anti-establishment position.

The existence of such biased, politicised studies and their concomitant reporting in the media are simply weapons in the establishment’s political arsenal.

The core message is: ‘only morons people disagree with us, so don’t openly disagree with us unless you want to look like a moron'.

Their aim is to encourage conformity and smooth the way for their rainbow dystopia.

 

 

Whenever the subject of intelligence testing comes up, especially in the context of racial and ethnic differences in intelligence, or disparate outcomes in education, liberals can always be counted upon for their skepticism towards the entire subject of IQ testing. They will usually claim that the tests are either biased or don't measure anything real - as in "IQ measures the ability to take an IQ test". This is of course ironic, since individual differences in intelligence as measured by IQ testing is the most established and robust finding of modern psychometrics, and liberals constantly proclaim their devotion to science, only inbred conservatives being opposed to scientific findings. 

But liberals become IQ believers when something like this happens: Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice.

Some of the quotes from the article show how a study like this operates. For instance:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

I guess smart liberals believe that a mother working outside the home full-time couldn't possibly have any downside for family life, and that their indoctrination of schoolkids in things like environmentalism, global warming, and the essential evilness of America's past don't constitute teaching children to obey their authority.

The essential point to make here is that the average Democratic Party member is very likely not as intelligent as the average Republican, since the Democratic Party contains more minorities, who on average score lower on IQ tests than whites. But once you point out something like that, liberals go into IQ denial.

Every couple of years or so, a “respectable,” Establishmentarian, Center-Left commentator will touch on the subject of racial differences in intelligence. William Saletan was the last. Andrew Sullivan is the latest. 

In the abstract, the fact that Beltway journalists would be interested in the subject of race and IQ should not at all be surprising. The evidence for racially defined and, more or less, intractable differences in General Intelligence (g) is mountainous. And race has tremendous predictive power when it comes to individuals and societies. (A report on an inexplicable achievement gap between Blacks and Asians might shock and dismay New York Times readers; among American Renaissance subscribers, it elicits a yawn.) The impact of racial differences in intelligence on international economies—and international investment—has yet to be fully explored.

Nevertheless, the reality of race undermines the civic religion of most Western societies—as well as almost every piece of socially uplifting legislation from the past 50 years—and thus has become the ultimate taboo.

And hesitant expeditions into the unspeakable by writers like Sullivan and Saletan usually evoke a quick, predictable response:

• The offender’s colleagues express outrage, and he is symbolically rapped across the wrist with a ruler;
• The offender’s critics eventually suggest ostracism as the only solution;
• The heretic relents, recants, and begs for forgiveness.

There’s no need for state intervention; journalists police themselves effectively.

But perhaps Sullivan will break the trend… In the mid-’90s, when Sullivan was Editor of The New Republic (and a neocon/neoliberal or sorts), he published an entire issue dedicated to sober commentary on Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Indeed, this issue—along with a non-hysterical review in the New York Times Book Review—marked the last moment in which racial differences in intelligence were discussed forthrightly in mainstream sources—before the door was slammed and bolted shut.

While little of what Sullivan writes will be surprising to readers in the AltRight sphere, he does make one important point that will touch fair-minded liberals: “The study of intelligence has been strangled by pc egalitarianism.” (Just ask Bruce Lahn, hardly a "White Nationalist" but simply a scholar searching for truth.)

Moreover, it came as no surprise to me that race realism is breaking out among liberals, who can no longer abide the cognitive dissonance between PC and their expressed support of the scientific method and empirical research—and not among conservatives and paleos. The “conservative movement” has fully embraced a kind of “Americanist Creationism,” in which everyone who believes in “equality” can be an American, and all earthly residents outside America's borders must be integrated into our One True Way. The paleos, it seems, have decided to take a pass on the central, most unavoidable geopolitical question of our time. This choice hasn’t granted them credibility...it's simply made them unthreatening. (Note that Charles Murray’s update on The Bell Curve, “The Inequality Taboo,” appeared in the neocon Commentary, not Chronicles.)

For years, Andrew Sullivan has been a reliable barometer of the social mood of America’s college-educated masses: that is to say, he’s flipped from being a neoliberal in the ‘90s...to a war-happy neocon after 9/11...to an anti-war “realist” around 2006...to an Obamaniac in 2008...etc. etc. etc.

Let’s hope that this time, he takes a principled stand.

A friend  and I were talking about Arthur Jensen–the psychologist who reignited the race and IQ debate with his 1969 paper “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” published in the Harvard Educational Review. My friend said that starting with that paper there had been a huge amount of supportive research published in reputable academic journals like Intelligence andPersonality and Individual Differences. There have also been major works like The Bell Curve that provoked a national discussion in newspapers and intellectual media. And there have been major works by J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn published by academic presses.

The thrust of my friend’s comments was that it was just a matter of time before it becomes standard wisdom, informing all respectable discussions of the issue, even among politicians and the mainstream media.

But it doesn’t seem to work that way. When it comes to a politically charged issue like the changeability of IQ, there is no necessary gradual path from being out in the intellectual deserts to acceptance among media and political elites.

I was thinking about that when I read Ronald Brownstein’s recent column, “King’s Echo: Why equal opportunity is now a competitiveness issue” (titled more appropriately, “Cashing the Civil Rights Check” in the print edition of the LATimes). The basic idea is that during the Civil Rights Era, the issue of equal opportunity was framed “in the soaring language of moral justice.” But now, with Whites becoming a minority, the rationale has changed: “The cause of providing an equal chance to all, which was historically framed as a question of fairness, has become an issue of economic competitiveness.” We need smart, educated non-Whites to fund Social Security and the rest of the federal behemoth.

After acknowledging that Blacks have made substantial advances, he deplores the fact that they haven’t caught up completely:

And yet the disparity between these groups and whites remains daunting. The median income for blacks and Hispanics is still only about three-fifths of the level for whites; the poverty rate for both is about twice that of whites. Perhaps most ominous are the continuing racial gaps in education. The share of blacks with four-year college degrees remains only two-thirds the level for whites; fewer than half as many Hispanic adults as whites hold degrees. That disparity helps explain why federal figures show that African-Americans still earn about 20 percent less in weekly wages than whites, and Hispanics make about 30 percent less.

For Brownstein, the obvious implication is that society (i.e., White folks) haven’t done enough to bring about equality. And that means more money for education. And that’s not all:

That isn’t just a matter of spending more money; it requires diligent education reform and finding more creative ways to compensate for the decline of the two-parent family, especially in the African-American community. Inevitably, it also means investment in schools, health care, training, and tuition aid for a diversifying future workforce that won’t meet international standards without it. Unless the nation honors that check, all Americans eventually will pay a price.

Notice that America has to “compensate” for Black family patterns–we have to adjust to the way they are rather than attempt to change their behavior. The problem is not Black teenagers having babies with no paternal involvement; it’s up to society to find a way to educate the children.

But when it comes to education, we have to move heaven and earth to change educational outcomes. This prescription assumes that Black educational achievement (unlike family patterns) is easily changeable if we just cough up the dough. It shouldn’t matter if a high school dropout has an IQ of 70. Her child would be able to be a rocket scientist if society just stopped being so racist and  provided more money for schools and the rest of his wish list.

Dream on!

Needless to say, Brownstein didn’t breathe a word about Arthur Jensen or anyone else in this line of research. No mention of the research showing that IQ and educational achievement aren’t so easily changed and that we simply don’t have such a technology.

It’s the same with the Israel Lobby. Despite the fact that academics with excellent credentials have shown that the Iraq war was the result of a campaign by the Israel Lobby and strongly identified Jews in the Bush Administration with close personal and professional ties to Israel, it’s rare indeed to hear such talk among elite politicians or read about it in the MSM.

Some things must be relegated to “extremism”–not fit for utterance by respectable people.

Perhaps there is some hope based on a recent paper modeling change of opinion. It found that if just 10% of a population strongly believes something and is impervious to opposed arguments, the population as a whole will swing to their position. It could be that race realism (and the ideas related to White identity and interests as well as beliefs that Jews are influential in ways that often are not in the  interests of Whites) are gradually percolating through the White population, soon to be followed by a tsunami of change.

We’ll see. But the problem is that the study didn’t model what happens when the current state of opinion is controlled by elites that are not open to opposing views; in the case of the American media this is at least partly because elite attitudes are intimately tied up with their perceptions of their own ethnic interests. That’s a tough nut to crack, although the Internet certainly provides an opening for skirting the MSM.

 

It sure seems like he did.  The following piece, on the "PISA Rankings and the Role of Schools in Student Performance on Standardized Tests," was posted by Posner on January 1, 2011, at his and Gary Becker's law and economics blog.     

International comparisons are tricky, as Becker points out, but the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), which tests 15-year-olds for proficiency in reading, math, and science by well designed standard tests conducted in thousands of schools all over the world, is a careful and responsible program, the results of which deserve to be taken seriously. The latest results (which are for 2009) reveal among other things that although the United States spends more money per student on secondary school education than any other country except Switzerland and Austria, Americans’ performance on the PISA tests is mediocre. In the latest tests Americans ranked 17 in reading, 24 in science, and 30 in math. 15-year-old kids in East Asian nations (including Australia and New Zealand), along with Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada, outperform the United States in all three subjects. Since 2000, when the PISA tests were first given, the United States has fallen in rank in reading and science, and is unchanged in math.

The rankings tend to be interpreted as measures of the quality of a nation’s pre-collegiate school system (primary and secondary education, since primary education influences performance in secondary schools). But this may be a mistake. Schooling is only one, though doubtless an important, input into performance on the PISA tests. Another is IQ. There have been some efforts to compare IQ across countries, notably by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen; see their 2006 book IQ and Global Inequality. Their results cannot be regarded as definitive, given significant limitations in the data, but they are suggestive. The authors find that the East Asian countries, which generally rank highest on the PISA tests (including reading—not just math and sciene), have the highest average IQs; the average IQ of Americans is lower because of our large black and Hispanic populations, which have lower average IQs than whites and Asians.

IQ is understood to reflect both genetic endowment and environmental factors, particularly factors operative very early in a child’s life, including prenatal care, maternal health, the educational level of the parents, family stability, and poverty (all these are correlated, and could of course reflect low IQs of parents as well as causing low IQs in their children). The case for very early intervention in children’s development, powerfully urged by the distinguished University of Chicago economist James Heckman, can be understood as an effort to lift IQs in the black and Hispanic communities and by doing so improve the educational performance of black and Hispanic children, including performance on the PISA tests. It is true that Heckman emphasizes noncognitive skills that facilitate learning, but these skills could also increase performance on IQ tests, indicating a positive effect on IQ.

The 2009 PISA test scores reveal that in American schools in which only a small percentage (no more than 10 percent) of the students receive free lunches or reduced-cost lunches, which are benefits provided to students from poor families, the PISA reading test scores are the highest in the world. But in the many American schools in which 75 percent or more of the students are from poor families, the scores are the second lowest among the 34 countries of the OECD; and the OECD includes such countries as Mexico, Turkey, Portugal, and Slovakia.

If IQ is playing a significant role in America’s mediocre showing on the PISA tests, improvements in secondary school education are unlikely to have dramatic effects. The white and Asian kids in American schools are already doing fine, for the most part; the black and Hispanic kids may not do much better until their early childhood environment is improved to the point at which black and Hispanic IQs are raised significantly.

Richard Posner is, by one estimate, the most frequently cited legal scholar of the 20th century; however one might view his jurisprudence, his willingness to quote approvingly from Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen carries immeasurable weight. 

The differences in average IQ among races has been fairly well-established, with Asians having the highest IQ scores, whites next, and blacks third. This order – Asians, whites, blacks – or the reverse order, can be seen in many aspects of life and society. For instance, crime rates show the reverse order (with blacks having the highest, Asians the lowest); in personality, blacks are more aggressive and more extroverted than Asians, with whites again in the middle. (These examples are all taken from Philippe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior, where many more examples can be found.) A perhaps less remarked-upon race difference is that of aging and longevity, where again we find the same order: Asians live longest, blacks the shortest, with whites in between. (Asian American women have the highest life expectancy of any group in this country, at 85.8 years.) Naturally, it might be expected that the various factors and outcomes which show racial variation and in the order described here will be correlated, and that is indeed the case. For instance, IQ has been shown to be correlated with longevity.

Why in fact does IQ affect longevity, or maybe vice versa? This is the subject of some debate among IQ researchers. It appears, for example, that those with higher IQ have better health practices (diet, exercise, etc.); they also are more likely to be better informed about health and illness and as such will seek a doctor's care earlier than others, as well as being better able to understand a doctor's orders and comply with them better. (Don't laugh: “26% of the outpatients at two urban hospitals were unable to determine from an appointment slip when their next appointment was scheduled, and 42% did not understand directions for taking medicine on an empty stomach.” [see PDF])

Serious discussion of the reality of genetic differences seldom reaches a mass audience, much less the largest one in talk radio, but Rush Limbaugh gave 20 million Americans a lesson in human biological diversity last Thursday.

On August 5, Limbaugh delivered the monologue “Life is Not Fair.” He was so pleased with the result he posted a transcript on his website. It revisited one of his favorite topics:

I've made the point throughout my career, the undeniable truths of life, many monologues on this program, that life is not fair by definition. Life isn't fair. I mean, it just isn't, and there's no way that you can change certain aspects that make life unfair to make them fair. Life is not equal.

He recounted economic, moral, and genetic disparities to show it is life, not the U.S. Constitution, that is unfair. Among his examples were professional sports stars:

Athletes are another thing. Champions are born. They are not made in the weight room. They are not made on the practice field. It's honed and it's practiced and it's improved, but champions are born. If you can't run a 4.2 40, nobody can teach you how. If you can't throw a baseball 100 miles an hour, nobody can teach you how. It's not fair. Some people can and some can't. It's not because the Constitution or the country's unfair.

Rush isn't speaking as a novice. He worked for the Kansas City Royals, lost his post on Monday Night Football for non-PC comments, and attempted to purchase the St. Louis Rams only to be blocked on the basis of lies about race. Rush knows sports.

Steve Sailer has an important blog at VDARE.com quoting  from Russel K. Nieli’s essay on No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. It’s no surprise that there is affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos: “To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.”

Unfortunately, the authors lump Jews and non-Jews into the White category, but combining their results with what we know about Jewish admissions to elite universities yields some interesting results.

In a 1998 op-ed (”Some minorities are more minor than others”), Ron Unz pointed out “Asians comprise between 2% and 3% of the U.S. population, but nearly 20% of Harvard undergraduates. Then too, between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish, while Jews also represent just 2% to 3% of the overall population. Thus, it appears that Jews and Asians constitute approximately half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America” (See also Edmund Connelly’s take.)  A 2009 article in the Daily Princetonian (“Choosing the Chosen People”) cited data from Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, that with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24% of Ivy League undergrads. (Princeton had only 13% Jews, leading to much anxiety and a drive to recruit more Jewish students. The rabbi leading the campaign said she “would love 20 percent”—an increase from over 6 times the Jewish percentage in the population to around 10 times.)

The book review section of American Renaissance has been particularly interesting of late, with a deconstruction of Nell Irvin Painter's History of White People in last month’s issue and in this month’s, a discussion of the life and work of the eminent research psychologist Raymond Cattell (1905-1998). (I wish I could link to these pieces, but Jared Taylor delays posting articles from the print edition online. AltRight’s review of Painter’s terrible book can be read here.)

The occasion for the Cattell piece is a recent biography of the man by anti-racist professor William Tucker, The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology, which, according to Jared’s review, amounts to a dishonest hit-piece, with some facts and a narrative of the man’s life tossed in along the way. What interested me while reading the review was the degree to which someone like Cattell is representative of a “Darwinian Left” -- even a “eugenic Left” -- a surprising, though not necessarily self-contradictory, position that Richard Hoste outlined not too long ago.

Eugenics and Social Darwinism are, of course, associated with Nazism and the “extreme Right” in the public’s mind nowadays (and are rejected by the mainstream Left and Right with equal vigor.) Moreover, “HBD” or applied Sociobiology (aka, The“Sailer-sphere”) is most definitely a phenomenon of the (alternative) Right. Even Steven Pinker, who, I would guess, is culturally and socially liberal, quotes approvingly from Thomas Sowell in The Blank Slate and argues that a “tragic” view of life befits those who are realistic about human nature.

Here's video of Richard Lynn's speech on "The Global Bell Curve" from Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2010 Property and Freedom conference. Needless to say, Hoppe is one of the very few libertarians, or "paleos" for that matter, willing to discuss these taboo topics; we're lucky to have him. Next up is the Q&A, which also features Hoppe, Paul Gottfried, and yours truly.

PFS 2010 - Richard Lynn, On Human Diversity: The Global Bell Curve. Updates and Critical Replies from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

PFS 2010 - Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Richard Spencer, Marco Bassani, Paul Gottfried, Richard Lynn, Discussion, Q & A from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.