The Refuge of the Toads

[Steersman]

Finding out Wu is despised by the rest of the mean girls clique of name SJWs is a bit like the Carrier ousting. It makes it just a tiny bit harder to laugh at them, but I'll manage.

Spoken like a real trooper. :-)

[jet_lagg]

Really don't think jet_lagg "gets" population distributions and statistics and definitions - for starters. And I agree with you that, in general, the inability to get such nuances does make having a reasonable conversation rather difficult.

Aw, Steers. After I defended you and everything. :snooty:

[Spike13]

Has Peezie ever apologized to his SJW friends for loving a song which joked about Kent Hovind being raped in jail?

The only apologizing Peez does is of the meaningless virtual signalling type.

http://imgur.com/l8tmDkS.jpg

Note his self-abasement is a response to pedophile dog molester Sarah Nyberg. Peez is seriously fucked up in the head.

Is Peez saying that we here at the pit have no people of color nor females?

Is he claiming that the Pit is as white as Scepticon?

[Steersman]

Really don't think jet_lagg "gets" population distributions and statistics and definitions - for starters. And I agree with you that, in general, the inability to get such nuances does make having a reasonable conversation rather difficult.

Aw, Steers. After I defended you and everything. :snooty:

Didn't look like much of a defense - "I am saying you are NOT a racist. That is something I ALREADY BELIEVE." And it didn't show much evidence of even trying to address my argument - looked more like the proverbial "don't confuse me with facts".

[jet_lagg]

You wanted me to grapple with your argument that you aren't a racist in order for me to agree that you aren't a racist...? Maybe you're right and I really do have trouble grasping basic concepts.

[Steersman]

You wanted me to grapple with your argument that you aren't a racist in order for me to agree that you aren't a racist...? Maybe you're right and I really do have trouble grasping basic concepts.

You're entitled to decide after reviewing the facts and the argument, but not even trying to "grapple with [my] argument" kind of suggests a "pre-judgement", aka a "prejudice".

[jet_lagg]

It would have been a pre-judgment in your favor, in which case I'm not sure why you'd complain. Regardless, I have reviewed your arguments.

[VickyCaramel]

{snip}
But I do think we're talking past one another. As I noted at the outset I don't use the word the same way you do. I'm not talking about people like Steersman, I'm talking about people like Dylan Roof and would be Dylan Roof's.

The problem with your position is that you're keeping your use of a term so that you can yell at people that you know aren't going to listen to you while also pushing away people with whom you might have a useful discussion.

Or maybe I'm just playing the game of "marginalized" groups by taking back a term and flipping its stigma. Who knows?

You see a bug, I see a feature. I don't want actual racists to participate in the discussion, and I want them to know they'll get yelled at if they try. It creates a situation where the genuine racists know they must alter their external behavior to hide their internal beliefs, thus becoming functionally non-racist. Any secret racist clever enough to have any insights worth hearing will also be clever enough to precede it with, "now I'm just playing devil's advocate you guys, but what if..."

...and now I'm wondering how many engaging conversations I've had online with racists who were just very skilled at masking it :think:

I was watching something the other day about the way the burkini was handled by the French and something that got touched upon was "different kinds of multiculturalism". The basic premise of which seemed to be that the French try to force everybody to conform to a model, while in places like Britain, they let people do their own thing, in which case they generally form ghettos, which makes multiculturalism easier because it minimized contact between cultures. I see a certain amount of truth in this.

I remember the term, "racial tolerance". In my experience, black people became a hell of a lot easier to tolerate once we moved 40 miles out to the home counties. In fact they were so easy to tolerate that we didn't have to think about them any more, mainly because there weren't any here. I strongly suspect that people I knew who had moved out here in the late 1940s never ever had any problem with racial toleration and probably spent very little time thinking about it. I would be very surprised it many of them ever took a strong ideological position about race, which is in contrast to people I know who joined the National Front and went on patrols and protests in the name of self defense (which was entirely justified by the way). They had to approach this subject from a different perspective, and I suspect many think, "I don't like them, but it would be nice if we could get along, in theory".

I tend to think we are all racist even though some of us will actually have a positive prejudice. this is just a result of the cognitive biases we all have. I doubt you are ever far away from, "I'm not racist but..."

[Steersman]

It would have been a pre-judgment in your favor, in which case I'm not sure why you'd complain. Regardless, I have reviewed your arguments.

Hardly - not if you continue to insist that I'm a racist. And I rather doubt you've done much in the way of a review as both Billie from Ockham and Søren Lilholt have suggested or argued your understanding of the term is flawed or based on an ignorance of population distributions. Both of which were essential elements of my argument.

[Kirbmarc]

Anyway what I think that the discussions we're having on welfare, socio-economical considerations, along with foreign policy, should be what atheist/skeptics should discuss when it comes to society and politics. This is the stuff that social justice activists should care about. It's not necessary for people to agree in order for them to have a civil discussions on these themes: conservatives, liberals, libertarians can provide their ideas and their evidence to be discussed without considering their political counterpart evil.

SJWs are ultimately a waste of time and effort and occupy the discourse that should be focusing on the effects of policies and on socio-economics with first world problems like special pronouns, special identities, video games, toys or internet trolling (to say nothing of offers for coffee in elevators).

...and so say all of us!

Unfortunately, you understate this. The conversation we just had would be impossible for the left just on the basis that we are slut shaming single mothers, never mind the issue of race.

The real tragedy is that there are a great many people in poverty traps who really don't want to be there. I think there are probably a large number of people who probably don't understand the trap they are in but could be helped, and yet more who could be helped by getting them out of debt.

Maybe I'm a little too optimist, but I don't think that the conversation has to be impossible for the left. At least not everywhere. It depends on how it's made. If you write, as you did, that they shouldn't be "lazy sluts", then yes, you're alienating a lot of people. Not I'm blaming you for that, mind. This is an open forum and you're simply expressing an idea in a non-clinical way, and it's pretty clear you're not blaming everyone who's on welfare, and not even all single unemployed mothers, but expressing a general idea of holding people responsible for their choices. But in a leftist context it'd be a tactical blunder, especially these days.

If you instead avoid blaming people on welfare for taking advantage of a flawed system and instead frame the discourse as correcting the flaws in the system, as helping poor people to achieve independence through work and avoiding social isolation and alienation of poor children and of the mothers themselves, along with some emphasis on teaching better sex ed to prevent teenage pregnancies then you might (emphasis on might) win more friends and influence more people in some leftist groups (as long as radfems and the regressives aren't around).

Incidentally I really don't blame people for taking advantage of a flawed system. I blame the people who set up the system for not noticing its flaws and not trying to correct it when they became clear.

[jet_lagg]

It would have been a pre-judgment in your favor, in which case I'm not sure why you'd complain. Regardless, I have reviewed your arguments.

Hardly - not if you continue to insist that I'm a racist. And I rather doubt you've done much in the way of a review as both Billie from Ockham and Søren Lilholt have suggested or argued your understanding of the term is flawed or based on an ignorance of population distributions. Both of which were essential elements of my argument.

Steers. I'm going to ignore the rest of it because I know you're angry with me and it's coming from that place.

I. Do. Not. Think. You. Are. Racist.

I've told you this in the past. I repeated it again during my back and forth with Billie from Ockham (which you supposedly read). I repeated it AGAIN, because I really didn't want you to get the wrong impression and treat everyone to a wall of text.

[Billie from Ockham]

I tend to think we are all racist even though some of us will actually have a positive prejudice. this is just a result of the cognitive biases we all have. I doubt you are ever far away from, "I'm not racist but..."

There are several types of "cognitive bias" that can all appear to be racist and, IMO, it's important to distinguish between them. At one extreme are faulty forms of conscious reasoning that serve nothing more than a ego-protective function. At another extreme are heuristics that have been reinforced by actual experience. As I've mentioned several times, when a human meets another human for the first time, they usually classify the new person in terms of sex and race and age. This could easily be argued to be highly adaptive, as these attributes carry the most predictive value in terms of how you ought to behave.

When the typical or modal behavior of the races becomes equal (i.e., we become a homogenized society), then the adaptive value of classifying people in terms of race will no longer hold. At that point, people should feel free to refer to those who continue to use race to classify people as "racist" in the negative sense of word ... I will, too, as bad racism to me is taking race into account when it is irrelevant. The same goes for sex and age, but I can't see the differences between the sexes or as a function of age ever going away, so I refuse to hold my breath on these.

[AndrewV69]

The Irish are alcoholics.

I'm not sure if this is for genetic or cultural reasons. It may be neither, or a combination of both.

The statement could also be hyperbole.

Does holding this opinion make me a racist?

Stated as such, it's prejudiced and an ethnic slur. (Don't think the Irish qualify as a 'race'.)

OTOH, saying, "the Irish people have historically experienced a significant amount of alcoholism" is an accurate statement of fact, and should be uncontroversial. And that endemic alcoholism can be attributed to poverty and culture.

Now, Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, and American Indians are genetically less able to process alcohol. Which makes them rude party guests, promiscuous, and trouble-makers, respectively. ;)

Hmmmmmm? Irish not a race? Well they are an identifiable population group. Their history is, like everyone else written in their DNA and like everyone else is is quite bloody.

See Genetic structure and population history of Ireland: a comparison of blood group and anthropometric analyses. and Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome

Successive waves of conquest, the men and babies killed, the women breeding with the invaders, surviving groups fleeing and breeding in more remote areas and so on and so forth. It is all there in those two papers. Of course terms such as "introgression" are used to describe the rape, pillage and slave taking because, well we do have to maintain a certain decorum tone in these papers and so the end result is called a "regional population structure".

What is a race anyway? To me using the word race just confuses people. My preference is to describe the various population groups as "breeds".

<Redacted paragraphs about "mutts" and "heinze 57 varieties" on the grounds that it would cause probably cause unrest and wholly unjustified attacks upon my personage>

[Billie from Ockham]

Incidentally I really don't blame people for taking advantage of a flawed system. I blame the people who set up the system for not noticing its flaws and not trying to correct it when they became clear.

Serious (non-trap) question: would you continue to not blame the single unemployed mom with six kids if she had been convinced of the negative predictive consequences for her kids back when she had only one or two?

[Steersman]

It would have been a pre-judgment in your favor, in which case I'm not sure why you'd complain. Regardless, I have reviewed your arguments.

Hardly - not if you continue to insist that I'm a racist. And I rather doubt you've done much in the way of a review as both Billie from Ockham and Søren Lilholt have suggested or argued your understanding of the term is flawed or based on an ignorance of population distributions. Both of which were essential elements of my argument.

Steers. I'm going to ignore the rest of it because I know you're angry with me and it's coming from that place.

I. Do. Not. Think. You. Are. Racist.

I've told you this in the past. I repeated it again during my back and forth with Billie from Ockham (which you supposedly read). I repeated it AGAIN, because I really didn't want you to get the wrong impression and treat everyone to a wall of text.

Ok, you're right; mea culpa. I misinterpreted your "I am saying you are NOT a racist. That is something I ALREADY BELIEVE." Although the saying versus believing construction still looks a little ambiguous.

However, it still seems you're not taking due cognizance of population distributions and the implications of the standard definition, although I'll have to take a closer look.

[CommanderTuvok]

Another day, and regressive left and pro-Islamist cunt CJ Werleman is acting like a cunt. Again.

http://www.gspellchecker.com/2016/09/a- ... -werleman/

[jet_lagg]

Ok, you're right; mea culpa. I misinterpreted your "I am saying you are NOT a racist. That is something I ALREADY BELIEVE." Although the saying versus believing construction still looks a little ambiguous.

However, it still seems you're not taking due cognizance of population distributions and the implications of the standard definition, although I'll have to take a closer look.

I eagerly await your findings :p

[Cunt of Personality]

Another day, and regressive left and pro-Islamist cunt CJ Werleman is acting like a cunt. Again.

http://www.gspellchecker.com/2016/09/a- ... -werleman/

You'd be forgiven for imagining that cunts like Werleman do what they do because credulous idiots will reliably slap their flippers in appreciation.

[AndrewV69]

Well, I've had my epiphany for the day.

It's impossible to be racist against whites - not because Racism = Prejudice + Power - but because 'white' as a racial group has an ambiguous definition.

Also, without a clear concept of how to define race sociologically or scientifically - it is not possible to be racist. You have to know what it is you are hating before you can properly hate it.

As valid an argument against education (or perhaps in favour of Dadaist/Pomo education) as I have ever heard.

No such thing as a White race. Nor is there a Black race or whatever. There are population groups where they share common characteristics and others where they do not.

Think of the Golden Retriever vs the Labrador Retriever breeds. Golden come in variations of the same colour. Labradors however, have three primary colours Yellow, Chocolate and Black.

Of course they all share the common characteristic of being dogs, four legs, a tail, and the ability to express themselves by barking.

Incidentally, my neighbour has a Black Lab. And like other Labs I have been acquainted with has a distinct personality and "talks" to select humans all the time (Dog owners should know what I mean by "talk").

[Kirbmarc]

No such thing as a White race. Nor is there a Black race or whatever. There are population groups where they share common characteristics and others where they do not.

Think of the Golden Retriever vs the Labrador Retriever breeds. Golden come in variations of the same colour. Labradors however, have three primary colours Yellow, Chocolate and Black.

Of course they all share the common characteristic of being dogs, four legs, a tail, and the ability to express themselves by barking.

Incidentally, my neighbour has a Black Lab. And like other Labs I have been acquainted with has a distinct personality and "talks" to select humans all the time (Dog owners should know what I mean by "talk").

So I'm a mutt? I can live with that. :lol:

[VickyCaramel]

Anyway what I think that the discussions we're having on welfare, socio-economical considerations, along with foreign policy, should be what atheist/skeptics should discuss when it comes to society and politics. This is the stuff that social justice activists should care about. It's not necessary for people to agree in order for them to have a civil discussions on these themes: conservatives, liberals, libertarians can provide their ideas and their evidence to be discussed without considering their political counterpart evil.

SJWs are ultimately a waste of time and effort and occupy the discourse that should be focusing on the effects of policies and on socio-economics with first world problems like special pronouns, special identities, video games, toys or internet trolling (to say nothing of offers for coffee in elevators).

...and so say all of us!

Unfortunately, you understate this. The conversation we just had would be impossible for the left just on the basis that we are slut shaming single mothers, never mind the issue of race.

The real tragedy is that there are a great many people in poverty traps who really don't want to be there. I think there are probably a large number of people who probably don't understand the trap they are in but could be helped, and yet more who could be helped by getting them out of debt.

Maybe I'm a little too optimist, but I don't think that the conversation has to be impossible for the left. At least not everywhere. It depends on how it's made. If you write, as you did, that they shouldn't be "lazy sluts", then yes, you're alienating a lot of people. Not I'm blaming you for that, mind. This is an open forum and you're simply expressing an idea in a non-clinical way, and it's pretty clear you're not blaming everyone who's on welfare, and not even all single unemployed mothers, but expressing a general idea of holding people responsible for their choices. But in a leftist context it'd be a tactical blunder, especially these days.

If you instead avoid blaming people on welfare for taking advantage of a flawed system and instead frame the discourse as correcting the flaws in the system, as helping poor people to achieve independence through work and avoiding social isolation and alienation of poor children and of the mothers themselves, along with some emphasis on teaching better sex ed to prevent teenage pregnancies then you might (emphasis on might) win more friends and influence more people in some leftist groups (as long as radfems and the regressives aren't around).

Incidentally I really don't blame people for taking advantage of a flawed system. I blame the people who set up the system for not noticing its flaws and not trying to correct it when they became clear.

I have no problem with people playing the system, I even did it myself for a very short while. You would have to be nuts to let the 'labour exchange' bully you into taking minimum wage jobs on zero hours contracts 2 hours journey from home. I don't even blame people who find themselves on the dole for years, although I do wonder how they don't go stir crazy.
But I am aware that there are mothers who encourage their teenage daughters to go get pregnant and put their name down for a council property, who's whole life plan is to live of the state while supplementing this with some petty theft, fraud and drug dealing. This is despicable.

Seriously, go to an affluent town where the girls aspire to go to university... do you think they are having less sex than the fat ugly girls from the council estates? They don't get pregnant, and if they do they have abortions. And it has fuck all to do with education or access to contraception.

The Conservatives have been taking care of welfare reform, and it seems to be working. The other day I saw a guy I used to know driving around in a brand new Hilux wearing his work polo shirt. This is a guy who had been unemployed for over 10 years playing the system. The system seems to have gotten him off his fat lazy arse, and judging by his ride he is benefitting from it.
I'm sure the Conservatives have made some fuckups, but at least they are making a difference. There is no point in soft soaping the left at the moment, they are rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Frankly, the regressives aren't the left. People that I know from the left are working class and hold the underclass in as much contempt as I do.

[Steersman]

<snip>

<Redacted paragraphs about "mutts" and "heinze 57 varieties" on the grounds that it would cause probably cause unrest and wholly unjustified attacks upon my personage>

:lol: Besides, any who are interested could always search for your views thereon ... ;-)

Not that I entirely disagree, of course, although I think there's more of a "homogenizing" process with humans - lust and the lust for conquest being some aspects of that - that tends to minimize the differences.

[VickyCaramel]

I tend to think we are all racist even though some of us will actually have a positive prejudice. this is just a result of the cognitive biases we all have. I doubt you are ever far away from, "I'm not racist but..."

There are several types of "cognitive bias" that can all appear to be racist and, IMO, it's important to distinguish between them. At one extreme are faulty forms of conscious reasoning that serve nothing more than a ego-protective function. At another extreme are heuristics that have been reinforced by actual experience. As I've mentioned several times, when a human meets another human for the first time, they usually classify the new person in terms of sex and race and age. This could easily be argued to be highly adaptive, as these attributes carry the most predictive value in terms of how you ought to behave.

When the typical or modal behavior of the races becomes equal (i.e., we become a homogenized society), then the adaptive value of classifying people in terms of race will no longer hold. At that point, people should feel free to refer to those who continue to use race to classify people as "racist" in the negative sense of word ... I will, too, as bad racism to me is taking race into account when it is irrelevant. The same goes for sex and age, but I can't see the differences between the sexes or as a function of age ever going away, so I refuse to hold my breath on these.

It's interesting how this works in practice. I know many examples of people who generally are racists as blacks as a group, yet make exceptions for individuals who they judged on the content on the character. I have seen this come out as, "I hate the African blacks, but the West Indians are okay", and my favorite one is from South Africans, "The blacks you have here are okay, not like the animals back home".

[Billie from Ockham]

Being biased (in general) against people who have a certain attribute (which can be race, but can also be something like having tattoos ... my personal hang-up) while also having no negative views of a specific person with that attribute is very common and easily explained. We seem to apply stereotypes and heuristics when we don't have an individual representation for the person in question. As soon as we do acquire a specific set of beliefs about the person, the stereotype not only ceases to be applied, but we often enter a period (which can last a long time) during which a contrast effect is observed, such that we view the person more positively than we would a similar person who comes from a group about which we don't have negative views.

This has been used to argue that the solution to negative stereotypes etc is more exposure to people from groups about which we hold negative views. Problem is, forced exposure to these people often causes the negative stereotypes to become stronger. It can't be forced.

[Kirbmarc]

Incidentally I really don't blame people for taking advantage of a flawed system. I blame the people who set up the system for not noticing its flaws and not trying to correct it when they became clear.

Serious (non-trap) question: would you continue to not blame the single unemployed mom with six kids if she had been convinced of the negative predictive consequences for her kids back when she had only one or two?

I doubt that this happen very often. I think that most women who have six kids and are unemployed don't really know or care about negative predictive consequences. People who have many children in order to exploit welfare rarely are very rarely interested in socio-economics or in negative predictive consequences. They care mostly about the next government paycheck.

But just for the sake of the argument: yes, I would. She's given an opportunity to survive better through child-making than through work and she's choosing it. I might not approve of her decision or think that it's unwise but she's not directly harming anyone, she's just taking advantage of a system that rewards her for child-making rather than for work. The negative consequences for her children are indirect, and she can feel confident that she can avoid them. For all I know she actually can.

If the government paid people to get drunk then the blame for the increase in drunkenness would lie with the government, even if people know that getting drunk constantly is bad for you. Ultimately the bucks stop with the people who rule the system. If a social policy has bad consequences, you notice the problem and have the power to fix it but do nothing then you're to blame for the bad consequences of that policy.

[Steersman]

<snip>
...and so say all of us!

Unfortunately, you understate this. The conversation we just had would be impossible for the left just on the basis that we are slut shaming single mothers, never mind the issue of race.

The real tragedy is that there are a great many people in poverty traps who really don't want to be there. I think there are probably a large number of people who probably don't understand the trap they are in but could be helped, and yet more who could be helped by getting them out of debt.

Maybe I'm a little too optimist, but I don't think that the conversation has to be impossible for the left. At least not everywhere. It depends on how it's made. ....

Agreed. Though one of the major problems is that many on both sides are overly attached to certain premises - as suggested by that Quillette post on Bridging the Political Divide that we discussed - and seem incapable of taking them as less than the gospel truth.

Incidentally I really don't blame people for taking advantage of a flawed system. I blame the people who set up the system for not noticing its flaws and not trying to correct it when they became clear.

At least some truth to that. But while one might reasonably fault the designers of a system for not correcting it when the flaws become apparent, I think part of the problem is that it is frequently difficult if not impossible to know ahead of time what all of the consequences and downsides of any system are going to be. A classic in that genre being the French in Indochina who designed a system to reduce the rat population by putting a bounty on rat's tails, but which had the unfortunate effect of causing many to start breeding rats.

[Billie from Ockham]

Serious (non-trap) question: would you continue to not blame the single unemployed mom with six kids if she had been convinced of the negative predictive consequences for her kids back when she had only one or two?

But just for the sake of the argument: yes, I would. She's given an opportunity to survive better through child-making than through work and she's choosing it. I might not approve of her decision or think that it's unwise but she's not directly harming anyone, she's just taking advantage of a system that rewards her for child-making rather than for work. The negative consequences for her children are indirect, and she can feel confident that she can avoid them. For all I know she actually can.

Thanks for the answer. That's interesting. While I see this as being complicated and involving a trade-off between something that is pretty much guaranteed to happen (more money) and something that only has a higher chance of happening (kid ends up in jail), I would blame the mother if, after coming to believe in the trade-off, she went on to ignore one side of the argument because taking it into account would force her to do something that she did not want to do (e.g., use birth-control and get a job).

With that said, I am very much aware that people can rationalize that probabilistic consequences of an action or behavior might not effect them in particular ... and I have much sympathy for this irrational form of thinking even while I blame them for doing it. I think about this most often while standing outside, being mad at myself, while smoking a cigarette.

[Kirbmarc]

But I am aware that there are mothers who encourage their teenage daughters to go get pregnant and put their name down for a council property, who's whole life plan is to live of the state while supplementing this with some petty theft, fraud and drug dealing. This is despicable.

Seriously, go to an affluent town where the girls aspire to go to university... do you think they are having less sex than the fat ugly girls from the council estates? They don't get pregnant, and if they do they have abortions. And it has fuck all to do with education or access to contraception.

There is no such thing where I live. I've lived in the UK for a while but here in Switzerland getting pregnant to live off the state just isn't an option. You have to be disabled and completely unable to work in order to completely dependent on welfare. Otherwise you have to find a job, or have someone who has a job pay your bills.

You can get some help if you can show that you're actively looking for a job but haven't found any, but it doesn't last long and after a while you usually find a job through government agencies, even if it's just part time. You can actually lose custody of your children if you haven't been looking for a job for a while and have been abusing the welfare system: it's considered evidence that you're not a good parent.

It seems to me that if a similar system was implemented in the UK then those people would have to change their survival strategy.

[MarcusAu]

What's wrong with a nice moko?

http://tattoo-trends.net/wp-content/upl ... n-face.jpg

[Kirbmarc]

[At least some truth to that. But while one might reasonably fault the designers of a system for not correcting it when the flaws become apparent, I think part of the problem is that it is frequently difficult if not impossible to know ahead of time what all of the consequences and downsides of any system are going to be. A classic in that genre being the French in Indochina who designed a system to reduce the rat population by putting a bounty on rat's tails, but which had the unfortunate effect of causing many to start breeding rats.

Of course it's possible to mess up a policy, although in this specific case I think that the French could have realized that this wasn't going to work if they considered how incredibly easy it is to breed rats when compared to catch them. It's the first thing they'd have thought if they remembered how easy it was for their own peasants to pretend to have caught wolves by skinning dogs when their kings paid for wolf pelts in the 17th century.

But I guess that the French assumed that Vietnamese people weren't smart enough to figure out how to cheat the system. Racism bit them in the ass - blame the Patriarchy! :lol:

But I digress. You can implement policies with unforeseen consequences, and that's why you should be careful and keep a close eye on what's happening. But when you know that a policy isn't working you have to fix it. If we, a bunch of people on the internet, can see that some policies don't work, surely the leaders of a country can. I doubt that they don't know, it's more likely that they don't care.

[d4m10n]

[screwtape]

And, as sort of a case in point and relative to your "geniuses and cretins" comment, you no doubt know that Jews have garnered some 20% of the Nobel prizes that have ever been awarded despite comprising less that some 0.2% of the world's population. No doubt some of that is due to the culture, but hard not conclude that a significant percentage is probably due to genetics - and endogamy. That, of course, can lead to various genetic defects - seem to recollect that there is a higher than normal incidence of genetic diseases (Tay-Sachs for one I think) in the Jewish population, but it seems also to increase the incidence or frequency of very clever people in the population - longevity seems also to be a "positive" benefit.

Unlikely that in general endogamy, or in-breeding, significantly raises the average of course, but it seems likely to increase the population density at the positive and negative tails of the distribution.

I was thinking about that this morning as I read the posts on IQ. If European/Ashkenazi jews can, in effect, breed selectively for intelligence given the work they were allowed to do in Europe over the last 1000 years, and achieve a result in which they win far more Nobels etc then they show it can be done. The increase in autosomal recessive diseases rather aligns with endogamy, and while it doesn't prove they entered Europe at the diaspora already that smart, it shows the proposed mechanism for selecting intelligence was at play.

Now, the next step. Given that humans who left Africa have lived in a very different environment, and have hunted, farmed, and developed technology all different to their cousins who stayed in Africa, and have been living such different lives for tens of thousands of years, can we see any reason why they would not have developed differing intelligence? If the Ashkenazi can do it in one thousand, surely the goyim would manage to fumble their way into some sort of change over tens of thousands of years? I'm not saying this is necessarily for the better—after all, we may have managed to make ourselves more stupid just as easily as more smart. It may be a thought that no one wants to think, but it's pretty amazing to suggest that despite different environments all over the world, which have caused all sorts of evolved genetic changes in their human populations, the one thing that didn't change one bit was intelligence. It's ridiculous when you think of it that way. Granted, I fully believe that variation within a population is greater than variation between populations, and we must asses people as individuals rather than as members of a particular group. But as Steer's frequently posted graph showing two overlapping normal distributions shows, there can be population differences and they mean little when it comes down to individuals. Were I to be provocative, I could say that shows that stereotypes say truthful things about populations, but aren't helpful with individuals (actually, that's perfectly true, and is only unacceptable because 'stereotype' has picked up some negative connotations).

[Kirbmarc]

Thanks for the answer. That's interesting. While I see this as being complicated and involving a trade-off between something that is pretty much guaranteed to happen (more money) and something that only has a higher chance of happening (kid ends up in jail), I would blame the mother if, after coming to believe in the trade-off, she went on to ignore one side of the argument because taking it into account would force her to do something that she did not want to do (e.g., use birth-control and get a job).

With that said, I am very much aware that people can rationalize that probabilistic consequences of an action or behavior might not effect them in particular ... and I have much sympathy for this irrational form of thinking even while I blame them for doing it. I think about this most often while standing outside, being mad at myself, while smoking a cigarette.

The government paychecks are there, the negative consequences are in a possible future. It's easy to rationalize away something that just might happen in favor of something you're pretty sure it's going to happen. In this case it's especially easy since child-rearing is something very personal, so people see themselves as able to avoid negative consequences for their kids since they see themselves as good parents.

"Not my kids, thank you very much Mr. Billie. They're not going to jail, I raise them right. Now if you're talking about Mrs. Jones and her horrible brats you might have a point".

[Brive1987]

Greetings fellow pitters :)

I have a theory, newly formed...

A significant extended break from following the insane ramblings of internet mentalists, due to moving (20 metres) into our newly refurbished (10 years to get planning permission) barn has given me a new perspective on life.

https://i.sli.mg/PA3oX9.jpg

I'm not as angry now. I don't give a fuck what Armado Moorcock or PC Meers has to say about anything. They're insane and beneath contempt.

There is of course, here in France, more than a few reasons to be angry about regressive shitfuckery in all its modern manifestations (I would like to take this extremely belated opportunity to extend to Phil, his family and friends, my best wishes with regard to moving past the fucking insane bullshit that happened in Nice) but being eternally angry in advance does nothing but destroy your mind.

Be well everyone, you are the best of the internet - good people maligned by idiots. Never stop being who you are, but don't ignore the opportunity to take the time to consider what is important in your life.

Sorry for rambling. I shall now refill my glass. :cdc:

Oh very nice. Well done.

[Brive1987]

That Spidey kid in Civil war is great. The Peter Parker I pictured as a child.

But isn't this core Spider-Man ? I found the kid a pain in the arse. I found the the "civil war" meh because I knew no-one would die. I didn't understand what was going on with those blue packets of stuff or with the army of 5 which just disappeared. I didn't know whether Winter Soldier was a baddie or just another of the gang. And who is the old man who lives in a dank prison under the sea?

That said. Black Widow was spectacular and we got the "Only You" reunion. The attack of the 40 foot ant was funny. Just not in a way that helped the movie.

I think the colour and movement phase is over for me. I much prefered the morose angst of BvsS.

[AndrewV69]

The best way to frame the discussion is to keep it simple and keep assumptions to a minimum: "Black males are over-represented in prison. Why?"

Yep. And, if you're curious, the best answer that we have to date is: because black males are more likely to have been raised by a single, unemployed, opposite-sex parent who had several other children of about the same age. These are also the best predictors for white males committing violent crimes ... it's just that the odds of a white male being raised by a single, unemployed, opposite-sex parent with a bunch of other kids isn't as high as that for black males.

Warning: saying what I just said ... even though it does not blame the over-representation of black males in prison on race ... will usually evoke even louder accusations of racism against you. Because reasons. At best, you'll be given a few examples of black males who were raised by single unemployed mothers-of-many as a "disproof" and will then have to explain what an anecdote is.

My understanding is that is changing among Whites, including having multiple children with different men. Apparently, being raised in a stable Patriarchal family grouping has advantages and is a pretty good but not a perfect predictor for staying out of jail and doing well.

I suppose I should do a search ... lots and lots of papers out there on the subject. For example this Jstor article Premarital Predictors of Marital Quality and Stability takes it as a given, well established fact that :

The high rate of marital dissolution
in the United States has resulted in
high emotional, financial, and social
costs to adults and children. This obligates
family professionals to better understand
the premarital factors that predict
and influence marital quality and
better utilize this knowledge to provide
effective family life education (FLE) programs
and premarital counseling (PC)
for preinarital couples.

Send me a PM if you want a copy of the paper.

For example, McLanahan and
Bumpass (1988) and Glenn and Kramer
(1987) both demonstrated that Caucasian
women who spend part of their
childhoods in single-parent families are
more likely to have their own marriages
break up. Glenn and Kramer found a
moderate effect of parental divorce on
Caucasian males and African-American
females and males. They tested seven
possible explanations of parental divorce
effects on children's marriages
and found support for a lower commitment
to marriage and a tendency for
children of divorce to marry at an unusually
early age

I suppose I should have linked a paper with the statistics but I thought that this more effectively proved my point. That it is uncontroversial that unstable family arrangements have poor outcomes for the children involved and this article focuses on the predictors.

But you would not know this if you read for example this article in Scientific American which asks the question Is Divorce Bad for Children? and right from the start they say that only a small group of children will eventually have a poor outcome (so yes go ahead and divorce chances are you kids will be fine):

Yet parents who split have reasons for hope. Researchers have found that only a relatively small percentage of children experience serious problems in the wake of divorce or, later, as adults. In this column, we discuss these findings as well as factors that may protect children from the potentially harmful effects of divorce

And there are papers to support this view such as The Consequences of Divorce for Adults and Children including that the outcomes for the children may be mediated in time depending on the parents (again PM me if you want a copy of the paper). Well, I never! Only a small proportion of children never recover? Who knew? Only issue is what number does this work out to?

A large number of studies in the 1990s continued
to find that children with divorced parents
score lower than children with continuously married
parents on measures of academic success
(Astone & McLanahan, 1991; Teachman, Paasch,
& Carver, 1996), conduct (Doherty & Needle,
1991; Simons and Associates, 1996), psychological
adjustment (Forehand, Neighbors, Devine, &
Armistead, 1994; Kurdek, Fine, & Sinclair, 1994),
self-concept (Wenk, Hardesty, Morgan, & Blair,
1994), social competence (Beaty, 1995; Brodzinsky,
Hitt, & Smith, 1993), and long-term health
(Tucker et al., 1997). Furthermore, effect sizes in
the 1990s appear comparable to those of earlier
decades. For example, across 32 studies of children’s
conduct published in the 1990s, the mean
effect size was 2.19, which is not appreciably different
from the mean value of 2.18 for studies
conducted in the 1980s, as reported in Amato and
Keith (1991). Similarly, across 29 studies of psychological
adjustment published in the 1990s, the
mean effect size was 2.17, which is slightly larger
than the mean value of 2.10 for studies conducted
in the 1980s, also as reported in Amato and Keith.
In general, the small but consistent gap in wellbeing
between children from divorced and twoparent
families observed in earlier decades persisted
into the 1990s.

Note that the paper mentions academic success and and long-term health and nothing else explicitly.

So, with all that being said, the papers/articles focused on whites and divorce. When we look at CHILDREN IN SINGLE-PARENT FAMILIES BY RACE

I see that in the USA in 2014 that 66% of Black children in that category. Products of divorce or never married I dunno. But the number of children that represents is apparently 6,382,000. Whereas Non-Hispanic White are listed as 9,181,000 at 25%

To me those are significant numbers. So, given all that why is it that Black males disproportionately to the rest of the population wind up in prison?

[Shatterface]

That Spidey kid in Civil war is great. The Peter Parker I pictured as a child.

But isn't this core Spider-Man ? I found the kid a pain in the arse. I found the the "civil war" meh because I knew no-one would die. I didn't understand what was going on with those blue packets of stuff or with the army of 5 which just disappeared. I didn't know whether Winter Soldier was a baddie or just another of the gang. And who is the old man who lives in a dank prison under the sea?

That said. Black Widow was spectacular and we got the "Only You" reunion. The attack of the 40 foot ant was funny. Just not in a way that helped the movie.

I think the colour and movement phase is over for me. I much prefered the morose angst of BvsS.

SPOILERS

The army of 5 is a misdirect. You expect a cliched ending where the heroes slug it out, then team up to fight the Big Bad. Which is exactly what BvS does, rendering the previous 8 hours (well, it felt like that) pointless, which is what we'd expected all along.

Civil War doesn't cop out like that: you have two opposing forces who fundamentally disagree with each other instead of just 'misunderstanding'. And there are exciting bits, funny bits, and sad bits. BvS is just a dirge from start to finish.

[VickyCaramel]

But I am aware that there are mothers who encourage their teenage daughters to go get pregnant and put their name down for a council property, who's whole life plan is to live of the state while supplementing this with some petty theft, fraud and drug dealing. This is despicable.

Seriously, go to an affluent town where the girls aspire to go to university... do you think they are having less sex than the fat ugly girls from the council estates? They don't get pregnant, and if they do they have abortions. And it has fuck all to do with education or access to contraception.

There is no such thing where I live. I've lived in the UK for a while but here in Switzerland getting pregnant to live off the state just isn't an option. You have to be disabled and completely unable to work in order to completely dependent on welfare. Otherwise you have to find a job, or have someone who has a job pay your bills.

You can get some help if you can show that you're actively looking for a job but haven't found any, but it doesn't last long and after a while you usually find a job through government agencies, even if it's just part time. You can actually lose custody of your children if you haven't been looking for a job for a while and have been abusing the welfare system: it's considered evidence that you're not a good parent.

It seems to me that if a similar system was implemented in the UK then those people would have to change their survival strategy.

The Swiss model! I am going to copy/pasta this to my MP!

[VickyCaramel]

And, as sort of a case in point and relative to your "geniuses and cretins" comment, you no doubt know that Jews have garnered some 20% of the Nobel prizes that have ever been awarded despite comprising less that some 0.2% of the world's population. No doubt some of that is due to the culture, but hard not conclude that a significant percentage is probably due to genetics - and endogamy. That, of course, can lead to various genetic defects - seem to recollect that there is a higher than normal incidence of genetic diseases (Tay-Sachs for one I think) in the Jewish population, but it seems also to increase the incidence or frequency of very clever people in the population - longevity seems also to be a "positive" benefit.

Unlikely that in general endogamy, or in-breeding, significantly raises the average of course, but it seems likely to increase the population density at the positive and negative tails of the distribution.

I was thinking about that this morning as I read the posts on IQ. If European/Ashkenazi jews can, in effect, breed selectively for intelligence given the work they were allowed to do in Europe over the last 1000 years, and achieve a result in which they win far more Nobels etc then they show it can be done. The increase in autosomal recessive diseases rather aligns with endogamy, and while it doesn't prove they entered Europe at the diaspora already that smart, it shows the proposed mechanism for selecting intelligence was at play.

Now, the next step. Given that humans who left Africa have lived in a very different environment, and have hunted, farmed, and developed technology all different to their cousins who stayed in Africa, and have been living such different lives for tens of thousands of years, can we see any reason why they would not have developed differing intelligence? If the Ashkenazi can do it in one thousand, surely the goyim would manage to fumble their way into some sort of change over tens of thousands of years? I'm not saying this is necessarily for the better—after all, we may have managed to make ourselves more stupid just as easily as more smart. It may be a thought that no one wants to think, but it's pretty amazing to suggest that despite different environments all over the world, which have caused all sorts of evolved genetic changes in their human populations, the one thing that didn't change one bit was intelligence. It's ridiculous when you think of it that way. Granted, I fully believe that variation within a population is greater than variation between populations, and we must asses people as individuals rather than as members of a particular group. But as Steer's frequently posted graph showing two overlapping normal distributions shows, there can be population differences and they mean little when it comes down to individuals. Were I to be provocative, I could say that shows that stereotypes say truthful things about populations, but aren't helpful with individuals (actually, that's perfectly true, and is only unacceptable because 'stereotype' has picked up some negative connotations).

The interesting thing about the "evolution of Jews", is that it is arguable that they are actually a separate race by virtue that they are a mix of semitic and european bloodlines. There is nothing particularly unique about either, so what "goes in" is not exceptional.
Secondly, despite Jew's colourful history of pogroms and holocausts, it is fairly likely that over the last 1000 years, those that were less intelligent and not successful at being Jews, just stopped being jews!
There were of course forced conversions but if you were a Jewish butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, and you are surrounded by a largely mistrustful Christian community, there is no real advantage to being Jewish but some serious disadvantages. You could see why less intelligent Jews with average abilities, especially if they have no close access to their own community, might eventually opt out.

So if it can be proved that Jews have evolved to be more intelligent, then, this could be a very unique kind of self selecting evolution with an opt-out.

[Brive1987]

Well off to the funeral I go.

Stayed in a charming Inn.

http://i.imgur.com/FOBjyi7.jpg

[katamari Damassi]

.

I think the colour and movement phase is over for me. I much prefered the morose angst of BvsS.

BvS is just a dirge from start to finish.

I'm looking forward to Zack Snyder's Grey Lantern movie.

[AndrewV69]

I may have given FreeFromThought blogs a bump ... but that would be overestimating how much reach I have?

Plus the topic is not really a popular one.

[Steersman]

<snip>
.. as sort of a case in point and relative to your "geniuses and cretins" comment, you no doubt know that Jews have garnered some 20% of the Nobel prizes that have ever been awarded despite comprising less that some 0.2% of the world's population. No doubt some of that is due to the culture, but hard not conclude that a significant percentage is probably due to genetics - and endogamy. That, of course, can lead to various genetic defects - seem to recollect that there is a higher than normal incidence of genetic diseases (Tay-Sachs for one I think) in the Jewish population, but it seems also to increase the incidence or frequency of very clever people in the population - longevity seems also to be a "positive" benefit.

Unlikely that in general endogamy, or in-breeding, significantly raises the average of course, but it seems likely to increase the population density at the positive and negative tails of the distribution.

I was thinking about that this morning as I read the posts on IQ.
<snip>

Were I to be provocative, I could say that shows that stereotypes say truthful things about populations, but aren't helpful with individuals (actually, that's perfectly true, and is only unacceptable because 'stereotype' has picked up some negative connotations).

The interesting thing about the "evolution of Jews", is that it is arguable that they are actually a separate race by virtue that they are a mix of semitic and european bloodlines. There is nothing particularly unique about either, so what "goes in" is not exceptional.

Always moot how much homogenity there is in any given population, but more than a little to justify the argument there's a non-trivial amount among Jews; Genetic studies:

Reflecting on their findings related to the maternal origin of Ashkenazi Jews, the authors conclude "Clearly, the differences between Jews and non-Jews are far larger than those observed among the Jewish communities. Hence, differences between the Jewish communities can be overlooked when non-Jews are included in the comparisons. ....

Secondly, despite Jew's colourful history of pogroms and holocausts, it is fairly likely that over the last 1000 years, those that were less intelligent and not successful at being Jews, just stopped being jews!

Interesting conjecture, though I don't see much evidence to support it.

There were of course forced conversions but if you were a Jewish butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, and you are surrounded by a largely mistrustful Christian community, there is no real advantage to being Jewish but some serious disadvantages. You could see why less intelligent Jews with average abilities, especially if they have no close access to their own community, might eventually opt out.

No doubt some mixing and mingling, and the secular falling by the wayside. But there again, the question is how much of that has taken place.

So if it can be proved that Jews have evolved to be more intelligent, then, this could be a very unique kind of self selecting evolution with an opt-out.

Not really a question of "Jews have evolved to be more intelligent", but that there is an evolved difference in the percentage of the population which is more intelligent between Jews and other ethnic or racial groups; you may wish to take a look those population distributions for heights to appreciate the effects of slight differences in population averages. But I remember reading some Jewish scientist - Jacob Bronowski or Norbert Weiner, I think - who argued that one of the main reasons for that disparity was that in both the Jewish and Roman Catholic demographic, the smarter boys became priests - which is maybe moot - but the Catholic ones were precluded from passing their intelligence on to the next generation because of celibacy rules.

[comhcinc]

That Spidey kid in Civil war is great. The Peter Parker I pictured as a child.

But isn't this core Spider-Man ? I found the kid a pain in the arse. I found the the "civil war" meh because I knew no-one would die. I didn't understand what was going on with those blue packets of stuff or with the army of 5 which just disappeared. I didn't know whether Winter Soldier was a baddie or just another of the gang. And who is the old man who lives in a dank prison under the sea?

That said. Black Widow was spectacular and we got the "Only You" reunion. The attack of the 40 foot ant was funny. Just not in a way that helped the movie.

I think the colour and movement phase is over for me. I much prefered the morose angst of BvsS.

SPOILERS

The army of 5 is a misdirect. You expect a cliched ending where the heroes slug it out, then team up to fight the Big Bad. Which is exactly what BvS does, rendering the previous 8 hours (well, it felt like that) pointless, which is what we'd expected all along.

Civil War doesn't cop out like that: you have two opposing forces who fundamentally disagree with each other instead of just 'misunderstanding'. And there are exciting bits, funny bits, and sad bits. BvS is just a dirge from start to finish.

It really is a movie about friendship,and actual deep disagreements. Captain America is a soldier who believes that good has to be allowed to do what it can and in his experience sometimes people die. Tony Stark is a billionaire genius who is use to being the bright guy in the room. In his experience he can solve any problem and death is not something he has ever really dealt with well. Add in the fact that the dude is dealing with PTSD (he was called bad shit on Twitter) and you can see where there is real conflict.

It's true no one was going to die in the movie but no one is died in BvS either. Well except like thousands of people in the cities (I just don't believe all those areas of the cities were empty, that makes no sense) or those people Batman kill for no reason (Batman normally doesn't kill, Captain America isn't against it). To me at least WarMachine injuries felt like a real consequence. And btw that is just more guilt that Stark has to deal with.

While the next Marvel movie probably won't touch on the subject (Dr. Strange) the Avengers are now broke up with half of them criminals. Which again this is just me makes Antman a lot more interesting. Dude just got out of prison and has reconnected with his kid and now because he was doing what he felt was right he is a wanted criminal again. Cap, being a man out of time, doesn't really have friends and family, I suspect that Hawkeye would have some type of plan to get his family somewhere off the grid. Scarlet Witch and Black Window both have no family, not sure about Falcon, but Antman has lose access to his daughter for basically getting in someone's else fight.

[Really?]

You all better be grateful. I had to do a google search for "brown tampon" for this one.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/0 ... bathrooms/

Tampons are now a genderless necessity, according to Brown University, who have announced that they will be providing tampons for both men’s and women’s bathrooms across the university this academic year.
The tampons will be delivered to bathrooms by the university’s student president, Viet Nguyen, as well as 20 volunteers, with Nguyen claiming the initiative is a means of educating students that men menstruate as well as women.

In an email to the student body, Nguyen said, “There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action. We wanted to take it into our own hands.”

[comhcinc]

I thought Brown was an all woman's college?

[Sunder]

You all better be grateful. I had to do a google search for "brown tampon" for this one.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/0 ... bathrooms/

Tampons are now a genderless necessity, according to Brown University, who have announced that they will be providing tampons for both men’s and women’s bathrooms across the university this academic year.
The tampons will be delivered to bathrooms by the university’s student president, Viet Nguyen, as well as 20 volunteers, with Nguyen claiming the initiative is a means of educating students that men menstruate as well as women.

In an email to the student body, Nguyen said, “There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action. We wanted to take it into our own hands.”

Sounds great. I hope the men help themselves. Even if they're not currently menstruating, or haven't ever before in their entire lives, doesn't mean they shouldn't be prepared.

[comhcinc]

Just looked. Brown is not an all women's school.

Until now.

[fuzzy]

It all makes sense. Shit is brown because of dead red blood cells.

Human fecal matter varies significantly in appearance, depending on diet and health.[5] Normally it is semisolid, with a mucus coating. The brown coloration comes from a combination of bile and bilirubin, which comes from dead red blood cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feces
:hankey:

[fuzzy]

I passed some pretty bloody piss a few times when I had a 17mm stone in me kidney. I doubt a tampon would have fit into me Urethra Franklin, so I should hope Mr. Nguyen is distributing some of the external pads as well.

[John D]

I passed some pretty bloody piss a few times when I had a 17mm stone in me kidney. I doubt a tampon would have fit into me Urethra Franklin, so I should hope Mr. Nguyen is distributing some of the external pads as well.

What! a 17mm stone.... fuck me.... mine was only 3mm and I thought I was going to die.

[dog puke]

It cannot not be posted.

[comhcinc]

I passed some pretty bloody piss a few times when I had a 17mm stone in me kidney. I doubt a tampon would have fit into me Urethra Franklin, so I should hope Mr. Nguyen is distributing some of the external pads as well.

Having had my ass kicked a lot in my life I have had bloody piss a lot.

Also that's only 0.669291 of an inch. Using the metric system. :naughty:

[fuzzy]

I passed some pretty bloody piss a few times when I had a 17mm stone in me kidney. I doubt a tampon would have fit into me Urethra Franklin, so I should hope Mr. Nguyen is distributing some of the external pads as well.

What! a 17mm stone.... fuck me.... mine was only 3mm and I thought I was going to die.

In some ways I suppose it is nicer to get the ones that won't leave the kidney and torture the ureter like yours did. What they do is blast it to bits and hope the bits fall out. If they don't (mine didn't) then they go up the dick with tiny camera, grabbers, and bucket.

[Really?]

You all better be grateful. I had to do a google search for "brown tampon" for this one.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/0 ... bathrooms/

Tampons are now a genderless necessity, according to Brown University, who have announced that they will be providing tampons for both men’s and women’s bathrooms across the university this academic year.
The tampons will be delivered to bathrooms by the university’s student president, Viet Nguyen, as well as 20 volunteers, with Nguyen claiming the initiative is a means of educating students that men menstruate as well as women.

In an email to the student body, Nguyen said, “There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action. We wanted to take it into our own hands.”

Sounds great. I hope the men help themselves. Even if they're not currently menstruating, or haven't ever before in their entire lives, doesn't mean they shouldn't be prepared.

One assumes that all gynecological checks done at the campus health center will come with a mandatory prostate exam, just to make everyone comfortable.

[Steersman]

[At least some truth to that. But while one might reasonably fault the designers of a system for not correcting it when the flaws become apparent, I think part of the problem is that it is frequently difficult if not impossible to know ahead of time what all of the consequences and downsides of any system are going to be. A classic in that genre being the French in Indochina who designed a system to reduce the rat population by putting a bounty on rat's tails, but which had the unfortunate effect of causing many to start breeding rats.

<snip>

But I guess that the French assumed that Vietnamese people weren't smart enough to figure out how to cheat the system. Racism bit them in the ass - blame the Patriarchy! :lol: ...

:-) Universal scapegoat - covers a multitude of sins. Somewhat apropos of which, an interesting article I ran across recently, courtesy I think of a Cathy Young retweet, by one Greg Stevens ("ex-academic and research scientist who writes about sciencey things") on an analogy between "the Patriarchy!!11!!" and traffic jams, the common element being, arguably, that both are examples of emergent phenomena:

Patriarchy, traffic jams and complex systems

Before we get into the very complicated and messy topic of “patriarchy”, I’d like to share with you three fun facts about traffic jams. .... Traffic jams are what scientists call an emergent phenomenon: a collective thing that arises as a result of the interaction of a large number of parts. .... Traffic jams move backward even though no individual car in the traffic jam moves backward. This is common with emergent phenomena. Water is wet, even though no individual molecule of H2O is wet. .... The normal and obvious rules of cause and effect don’t apply. Instead, there can be massive effects that appear out of nowhere, because they are the result of interactions among a broad network of wide-spread and subtle causes. In this way, emergent systems are connected to chaos theory and complexity theory. They are difficult to predict and, in the case of traffic jams, they are difficult to avoid or fix. ....

I've periodically tried to argue with various "feminists" along the same lines, periodically suggesting their argument for it was little more than a case of the logical fallacy of reification - insisting on taking something as real that is largely though not entirely abstract; you probably won't be surprised to learn that it was to little avail. :-) But for example, here's part of a conversation that I had on the topic with Jadehawk, and company, some three years ago.

Kind of unfortunate in a way that many "feminists" refuse to even consider that perspective as I think it tends to limit their opportunities to solve some more or less real problems. As dogmatic viewpoints are wont to do.

[Steersman]

And, as sort of a case in point and relative to your "geniuses and cretins" comment, you no doubt know that Jews have garnered some 20% of the Nobel prizes that have ever been awarded despite comprising less that some 0.2% of the world's population. No doubt some of that is due to the culture, but hard not conclude that a significant percentage is probably due to genetics - and endogamy. ....

I was thinking about that this morning as I read the posts on IQ. If European/Ashkenazi jews can, in effect, breed selectively for intelligence given the work they were allowed to do in Europe over the last 1000 years, and achieve a result in which they win far more Nobels etc then they show it can be done.

Indeed, although that may only have increased the percentage of the "super-smart" in the population of Jews from the nominal average of, say, 0.01% to 1% - reflecting the 100x ratio of general population (0.2%) to the 20% of those winning Nobel prizes. But as I'm sure you know, there's some difference in knowing that there's some increase in a particular attribute to understanding and identifying the causal factors, the genes, involved. Which is, of course, entirely different from any ethical or pragmatic issues.

The increase in autosomal recessive diseases rather aligns with endogamy, and while it doesn't prove they entered Europe at the diaspora already that smart, it shows the proposed mechanism for selecting intelligence was at play.

Certainly seems to provide at least some fairly solid circumstantial evidence that such a mechanism and factor exists. One of the benefits I think for genetic studies of populations - tends to make finding the needles in haystacks easier if one has a bigger haystack to begin with. :-)

Now, the next step. Given that humans who left Africa have lived in a very different environment, and have hunted, farmed, and developed technology all different to their cousins who stayed in Africa, and have been living such different lives for tens of thousands of years, can we see any reason why they would not have developed differing intelligence?

Agreed, although there again the question seems to be how much those differences would have affected both the average intelligence, and the distribution which are, as you noted, entirely different kettles of fish. Seem to recollect having read recently a relatively scholarly dissertation on the evolution of intelligence - apparently a bit of a hot topic (for example) - which suggested that intelligence is a general toolbox which can be used in many different environments with very few changes so that there is, presumably, very little evolutionary pressure to change.

For instance, the motor skill set and "spatial intelligence" required to throw a rock or to fire an artillery piece or to throw a baseball is pretty much the same thing. No doubt some extra demands due to a modern and urban civilization, and the needs to develop the theories of mathematics and physics on which it rests. Remember reading a snippet somewhere on Einstein's brain which apparently was significantly larger than that of the average bear in the area that is normally associated with spatial intelligence, and which, the article argued, was central to his development of his theory of relativity.

.... Granted, I fully believe that variation within a population is greater than variation between populations, and we must asses people as individuals rather than as members of a particular group. But as Steer's frequently posted graph showing two overlapping normal distributions shows, there can be population differences and they mean little when it comes down to individuals.

Nice to see that someone has noticed my periodic posting of that. :-)

Were I to be provocative, I could say that shows that stereotypes say truthful things about populations, but aren't helpful with individuals (actually, that's perfectly true, and is only unacceptable because 'stereotype' has picked up some negative connotations).

Certainly agree with "truthful things about populations", although that seems more true about subsets of populations than entire ones: some blacks are X1 but most are X2; some Irishmen are Y1 but most are Y2, where X1, X2, Y1, & Y2 are true statements, accurate stereotypes, for the corresponding subsets. Really only crosses into the realm of stereotyping and racism, and sexism, if one insists X1 and Y1 apply to the entire population of each group - particularly if X1 and Y1 are deprecated attributes. Doing so is what I think leads to those "negative connotations" you referred to. But you might be interested in this paper on the accuracy of stereotypes.

[comhcinc]

Poop.

[paddybrown]

Greetings fellow pitters :)

I have a theory, newly formed...

A significant extended break from following the insane ramblings of internet mentalists, due to moving (20 metres) into our newly refurbished (10 years to get planning permission) barn has given me a new perspective on life.

https://i.sli.mg/PA3oX9.jpg

I'm not as angry now. I don't give a fuck what Armado Moorcock or PC Meers has to say about anything. They're insane and beneath contempt.

There is of course, here in France, more than a few reasons to be angry about regressive shitfuckery in all its modern manifestations (I would like to take this extremely belated opportunity to extend to Phil, his family and friends, my best wishes with regard to moving past the fucking insane bullshit that happened in Nice) but being eternally angry in advance does nothing but destroy your mind.

Be well everyone, you are the best of the internet - good people maligned by idiots. Never stop being who you are, but don't ignore the opportunity to take the time to consider what is important in your life.

Sorry for rambling. I shall now refill my glass. :cdc:

I'd have to agree. Avoidance is very underrated as a coping mechanism. Also, your barn looks fantastic.

I should have been moving into my new house today. Bought with my inheritance from my mum, more space and in a nicer area than I currently live in, all the legal niceties have been completed, and my lawyer told me today would be the completion date, except I spoke to him yesterday and apparently the other side's lawyer's conveyancing secretary is on holiday and no-one is returning his calls. Ah well. I'm sure it'll all sort itself out shortly.

[Dick Strawkins]

Greetings fellow pitters :)

I have a theory, newly formed...

A significant extended break from following the insane ramblings of internet mentalists, due to moving (20 metres) into our newly refurbished (10 years to get planning permission) barn has given me a new perspective on life.

https://i.sli.mg/PA3oX9.jpg

I'm not as angry now. I don't give a fuck what Armado Moorcock or PC Meers has to say about anything. They're insane and beneath contempt.

There is of course, here in France, more than a few reasons to be angry about regressive shitfuckery in all its modern manifestations (I would like to take this extremely belated opportunity to extend to Phil, his family and friends, my best wishes with regard to moving past the fucking insane bullshit that happened in Nice) but being eternally angry in advance does nothing but destroy your mind.

Be well everyone, you are the best of the internet - good people maligned by idiots. Never stop being who you are, but don't ignore the opportunity to take the time to consider what is important in your life.

Sorry for rambling. I shall now refill my glass. :cdc:

I'd have to agree. Avoidance is very underrated as a coping mechanism. Also, your barn looks fantastic.

I also agree (and about the barn!)

I do wonder if the many-year internet battles of our own John Greg exacerbated his depression to the fatal extent it reached.
I long ago realized that while the effects of SJWs are serious, they are not, as individuals, deserving of serious respect, merely of passing mockery.
The 'best' of them, like Myers and Carrier, dissolve under any sort of scrutiny, while the rest (Watson, Greta, Svan, McGabriel etc) are about the intellectual level of Nerd of Redhead and Cainaji but compensate by simultaneously having the entitlement levels of the Queen of England.