Well said, sir. I find the concept of takimag’s scribes discussing those questions among themselves rather refreshing, especially after having read Mr. Roach’s rather not inspiring piece.

IQ 93, if true, isn’t so bad - world median IQ is around 90, African-American median IQ is around 85.  It’s about the same as Bulgaria, a bit higher than Mexico.
Of course if West Virginia were richer or more urban, measured IQ would be higher.

Your link - http://www.whywehatebush.com/news/04_12_iq.html - appears to be to that well known hoax about Bush voters having low IQ.  The data is obviously false - Connecticut median IQ 113?  It’d be about the smartest place on Earth, putting Singapore in the shade.  You seem to have fallen for a hoax that was exposed years ago, Justin.

Yes, the data was debunked a long time ago.

I also think the whole thesis that the intelligence of voters is highly correlated to the correctness of their political beliefs is also highly suspect.  Taking a historical average, that would probably make Jacobinism and Communism the most correct political philosophies.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm

“Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders
In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.”

Scroll down to bottom to see black on white offenses are much higher than reverse.

Steve Sailer does not share Mr. Raimondo’s belief that people should be judged as individuals and not as groups. That said, the continuing degeneration of the white working class is a cause for alarm;however, they are nowhere near the sad state of American Blacks, if the official statistics on these matters are accurate.

The hoaxster Chris Evans was good enough to provide a link on his own website to a debunking by Steve Sailer:
http://www.isteve.com/Web_Exclusives_Archive-May2004.htm#38115.6465670139

“To give you a sense of why people familiar with IQ testing instantly scoffed at the validity of the hoax data claiming the average IQ in Connecticut was 113 and in Utah was 87, it’s important to understand how IQ tests are scored. The mean is typically set at 100 and the standard deviation at 15. This means that Utah’s average person would fall 1 and 11/15th standard deviations lower than the average person in Connecticut. Using the Normdist function in Excel, you can easily put this on a percentile basis. This hoax data therefore implies that a Utah resident of average intelligence (50th percentile) would be only at the 4th percentile in Connecticut. The average person in Connecticut (50th percentile) would suddenly be at the 96th percentile if they moved to Utah. Well, that’s nonsense.”

An accurate chart is here:
http://sq.4mg.com/IQpolitics.htm

West Virginia IQ is… 100!!!

And the black illegitimacy rate isn’t declining, it’s actually above 70% now:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_07.pdf

It’s true enough though the white rate of illegitimacy is increasing even faster.

And if you take a look at Mr. Raimondo’s other source for IQ stats, you will find a study that uses some highly dubious statistical methods to prove that Mississippi’s mean IQ is 15 points below the threshold for mental retardation. 

Wow, how can he even start to take that seriously? That would mean that approximately half the population of the state of Mississippi would be severely mentally retarded.  I guess it’s just more proof that some intelligent people can believe some awfully ridiculous things if they fit into their ideological preconceptions.

It might also show why some voters in places like West Virginia and Mississippi don’t want to elect Blue-state intellectuals who tend to explain voting patterns in these states by dismissing the residents as imbeciles.

“Numbers relating to voting, criminality, illegitimacy, IQ, and poverty also tell the story of our deep internal divide in an undeniable and often depressing way . . . if only we take the time to count.” In case you want more evidence supporting Justin’s argument about the “internal divide” between various groups being highly variable, do look at the criminality, illegitimacy etc. statistics of England, and, more recently, Sweden.  The same trend downward that Justin describes in West Virginian whites can be seen very clearly in these countries, with England in the lead.  The “internal divide” is closing, but unfortunately it is closing in the wrong way.  (The fact that these cultural norms can change in a few decades shows that their cause cannot be innate, i.e., they cannot possibly be racial.)

“Of course if West Virginia were richer or more urban, measured IQ would be higher.”

That’s completely backwards, of course.  I am sure the commenter meant to say ...
if measured IQ were higher, West Virginia would be richer.

“The same trend downward that Justin describes in West Virginian whites can be seen very clearly in these countries, with England in the lead”

Yes, I know, I live here (England). 

“The fact that these cultural norms can change in a few decades shows that their cause cannot be innate, i.e., they cannot possibly be racial”

Cultural norms can be variable, yet still genetically influenced.  Japanese culture can change a lot, yet still be affected by the inherent character of the population.  In the longer term, culture can affect reproduction, hence genetic evolution, hence culture - eg if the aggressive fail to reproduce the culture becomes more placid.  Culture interacts with genes both ways, it’s not simply that race determines culture, but race affects culture, and culture affects race - affects genes.

Uncle Kenny:
“That’s completely backwards, of course.  I am sure the commenter meant to say ...
if measured IQ were higher, West Virginia would be richer. “

No. Both are true. If you moved West Virginians to New York and employed them in decent jobs, in a few years or decades their measured median IQ would be several points higher, due to environmental effects.

I don’t think a truly open-minded person could confidently state that the issue of intelligence and racial genetics is in any way settled.  I personally am as open to the possibility that racial genetics don’t have a significant effect on intelligence as I am open to the possibility that they do.

But clearly intelligence does highly correlate to criminality, illegitimacy, and poverty.  Therefore, unless you completely deny even the possibility that racial genetics might have an effect on intelligence, you cannot confidently state that innate racial differences couldn’t possibly have had some effect on these cultural differences.

Humans have been able to sidestep the need of living species to filter the bad genes each generation.  The job of each species each generation is to produce more copies of good genes and let fewer copies of bad ones survive. Because of over 10,000 years of human population growth we have avoided developing an ethics to make this happen each generation.

Shifting course will not be easy.  People also do think and act racially.  Shifting to a new ethic will require whites working together in practice and maintaining white control of the advanced world.  The alternative is for humanity to go on a twisted sci fi type course from which it may never recover.

I’ll just say this: the poorest, most depressed, and least civilized white areas are still many times more functional and less screwed up as a community than black areas.  This is not to say individuals are not.  But we must judge individuals as individuals and groups as groups.

Take your statistics.

The average IQ in West Virgnia, you say, is 93. I’m not sure if this is true, but even if it is, the average black IQ everywhere is 85.

The illegitimacy rate in nearly all-white rural Maine is 33%.  Among blacks it’s “improved” since 2002 from 70% to 68% nationwide.

Why does this matter?  Because moral individualism does not require that we must ignore reality or natural, healthy, and necessary associations and distinctions.  Moral individuals must make decisions about who they want as neighbors, which political candidate represents their interests, which foreign immigrants must be allowed into our land (where, once in, they can’t be discriminated against by law for reasons of either race or national origin), and, finally, moral individuals are part of communities with attachments and values, including historical attachements to the distinctly Anglo-American mdoel of limited, self-government. This model and these communities will not survive without some notion of solidarity.  It can be on many axes--property vs. nonproperty, American vs. foreign, Republican vs. Democrat--but for most people, because of real group differenes in behavior, ethnicity and race figure prominently as part of identity. 

It’s laudable that whites are generally individualistic and avoid crude tribalism.  Some blacks reject this as well.  I certainly wouldn’t want whites to embrace their own Jeremiah Wrights.  But there is such a thing as suicidal individualism, the kind of thinking that sells guns to revolutionaries out of “rational, self-interest.” Our overrall political culture is a rigged con game, where blacks, Mexicans, and everyone else is banding together fighting for “what’s theirs,” and whites are expected to deny that they are a group with an interest as a group. 

Groups are real. It’s simply anti-intellectual to say everyone everywhere needs the same kind of government and we should ignore trends and statistics because these facts might interfere with (an apparently brittle) deductive philosophy of solipsistic individualism.

Justin is half right in his emphasis on the degenration or backwardness of certain
pockets of illiterate whites breeding children out of wedlock. There are clearly white people
and possibly Asians who fit this description. Yet the racial disparity between whites and blacks
can be seen even in the selected examples that Justin offers. Black illegitimacy rates are still
two to three times higher than the ones that Sailer finds in certain areas of Maine, and the
low intelligence quotients that Justin ascribes to white residents of West Virginia are still
higher than the figure of 85, which is the mean IQ for American blacks. Personally I’m happy to
treat all human beings, whatever their race, with the same dignity. But I do
get tired of what seems to be the left libertarian tic of beating up on people of my skin
color in order to show that one is not a racist.

Mr. Roach & Dr. Gottfried:  thank you for having the courage to stand up to political correctness.

One of the issues with rural small town America is that as the country has increasingly urbanized and suburbanized, rural areas have had a significant brain drain. Their best and brightest go off to college and never come back. Those who remain behind have a disproportionate amount of social pathology. This is an unfortunate thing, but it is reality. Back before modern deracination, most communities could be expected to have an average distribution of IQ, social pathology, etc.

This dynamic is less obvious in rural areas that the best and the brightest move into instead of away from or for whatever reason its citizens remain more likely to stay put, such as Vermont.

Mr. Roach has no intellectual integrity whatsoever, and he proved it today, by taking down a PART of my response to his bigoted broadside, but allowing another PART to be quoted by a member of his cheerleading section OUT OF CONTEXT. He is of the same ilk as those passing around the rumour that Obama is a Muslim and unpatriotic.

This “let’s treat individual as individuals” stuff seems moral and seems like a nice option for those who’ve seen the evidence but can’t get over the final PC mental burden.

I live in a liberal university town.  When I meet college faculty I assume that their politics is liberal until I have further evidence.  I’ve pretty much always been right.  If I’m walking home at night and see a guy approaching me on the street with a tatoo on his face, I assume him to be more dangerous then a clean cut man in a business suit.  I’m sure that there are a lot of law abiding people with tatoos on their fact, but it is what it is.  And nobody would suggest that a woman would be unjustified in being more careful about accepting a ride from a male stranger than a female one.

The fact is, judgements are a part of life.  We accept then for occupation, socio-economic status and even things people are born with like gender, but we make them.  The only reasons racial judgements are so much more horrifying to us then all others is PC conditioning. 

Here’s the wonderful Jared Taylor explaining it to Queen Latifa. 

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zY3Z0XYuSog

As usual, Pat Buchanan was way out in front on this issue, and instructive as to how it probably should be handled by paleocons:

---
“America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known…
Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants. Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks…
Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?
Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time? Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?”
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=969
---
How is this instructive? Black quality of life has dramatically declined since the advent of the Marxist welfare state, and black incarceration rates have skyrocketed. The left-liberals and their “programs”, supposedly black America’s best friends, are doing nothing but turning them into caged barbarians, either stuck in prison or mired in the welfare ghetto.

Only a rejection of the Marxist welfare state and a return to the Christian ethic will get black Americans back on the path of social ascendancy, as they were before the Marxists enslaved them on the welfare plantation and got them hooked, like a drug, on the State dole—all so they could then own their loyalties and pit them against white Christians.

Ironically, the only people in this country that can really do anything about the entrenched problems that afflict blacks are the Christians.

Has the help that blacks have gotten put mankind back?  If we help the weaker deer in a population do we help the deer population?  When we help the weaker genes survive in human populations, weaker in ethics, IQ, etc. don’t we weaken humanity?

In response to Ed.  I feel that the social programs that Pat Buchanan talks about are largely responsible for the predicament of black Americans, but then these programs are the work of white social scientists on the left.  I have never understood that blacks don’t seem to make the connection that these programs are self-destructive and poisonous to their communities.  Wright does make some valid points mixed in with his bluster about whites, but he is partly correct.  Blacks should be blaming white liberals but I don’t see that happening.

I’ve added an “update” above in answer to some of the criticisms leveled in the comments.

“I have never understood that blacks don’t seem to make the connection that these programs are self-destructive and poisonous to their communities.”

Responsible politicians, as opposed to our current lackeys for the two-party statist combine, would make the connection for them if they can’t make it themselves. That’s what leadership is supposed to be about. Unfortunately, we are at a stage in our political, social and economic development where all anyone cares about is power, Empire, and feathering their own nests. Is this history playing itself out, or a failure of character in the Bush-Clinton-Cheney generation to stand up to the Marxist demagogues and reverse the failed LBJ welfare state? The entire money-grubbing materialist trajectory of American society, which encourages dysfunctional behavior if there’s a quick buck to be made and reduces everything to a balance sheet, hasn’t helped matters much, either.

“As usual, Pat Buchanan was way out in front on this issue”

Ed, let’s hope Buchanan gets way out in front with a Baldwin endorsement, and doesn’t endorse McAmnesty. His reputation will not sustain another blow like the 2004 Bush endorsement.

The response to the update.

It isn’t race, but culture that is the determining factor in human behavior: not genes, but environment that forms the human character and allows us to interact with each other in a way that makes sense. IQ tests don’t measure only inherent genetic limits, but the quality of the environmental factors that have shaped individual characteristics—and, in any case, since the concept of “race” is so imprecise, the idea of racial superiority or inferiority is a meaningless floating abstraction.

If only there were some way to test your beliefs…

http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210795512&sr=8-3

To sum up, nature won.  IQ test scores, and everything else, of adopted children are closer to their birth parents than their adopted ones.  Identical twins reared apart are closer to each other then adopted siblings.  Some of us look at the evidence and others ignore it and continue to teach cultural anthropology courses and edit the New York Times. 

As for race specifically, see the work of Rushton or the Bell Curve.  East Asians have the highest IQs, followed by whites and then blacks.  When these groups are adopted into middle class white homes, the order doesn’t change. 

When half white/half black children are adopted into middle class homes, their IQ ends up exactly where the genetic hypothesis would predict. 

That’s why there is no “white solidarity”—people generally termed “white” are Italian, Polish, Greek, Scots, Irish, and whatever.

Go to any playground or prison in the nation.  There you’ll see human nature in its purest form.  Before PC conditioning and during times of survival.  The phrase “prison race riot” is part of our world while “prison class riot” or “prison religious riot” isn’t. 

In anser to Paul Gottfried’s remarks, I would add that the degeneration of the “white” (i.e. racially mixed) population in the US shows that my thesis on the environmental factors as determinative is correct. The welfare state has eroded values that were once considered unquestionable: it isn’t our genetic stock that is the problem, but our political and economic structure, which encourages—indeed, subsidizes—destructive social trends.

Welfare made the problem worse, I doubt anybody here would argue against that.  But you’ll have to explain why generations of the welfare state in Sweeden or anywhere else in the Western world hasn’t produced anything like the American black ghetto.

By the way, here’s the front page of CNN.com today, just in time for this debate. 

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/14/navarrette/index.html

The answer has to do with history. Over the decades, black Americans have had plenty of opportunities to vote for white people for president. And they have done so. But this is the first time that white Americans have a chance to vote for an African-American with a shot at the presidency. And what are they doing?

Many are responding quite well. Obama won the votes of many, to borrow a phrase, “hardworking white Americans,” in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming. But, elsewhere, as Obama said in a recent interview, people may need to get their head around the concept of an African-American even seeking the presidency, let alone winning it.

So how are you doing, white people?  Have you overcome your evil past yet?  Remember, no such thing as race, except when it benefits others at the expense of whites.

So I guess, according to Navarrette’s logic, we should see a lot of blacks voting for whites in their congressional and mayoral races, because they’ve had “plenty of opportunities” to vote for black people in those races.

So there must be a ton of white congressmen from black-majority congressional districts.

Just a comment to Samuel Moltke: “generations of welfare state in Sweden has not produced the same results”. I think this is a mistaken view of 20th century history: the United States was always at the forefront of progressive social engineering. The perception of this and the rethoric just changed in the 80’s, were for Cold War propaganda reasons Americans were led to believe they live in a die-hard capitalist society.

So basically, the United states and Sweden were neck to neck on building the welfare state in the 60’s. The Americans might have done it worse by concentrating subsidies to unmarried mothers, whereas Swedish welfare subsidies are more diffuse, everybody but the richest 10 % get some welfare, so the effects are not that visible.

And people with the least “social capital” suffer most from this kind of social engineering: there were no minorities in Sweden in the 60’s. Now there are muslims and the effects of welfare are just the same as to blacks in the U.S. Of course IQ is a real factor but there’s no reason to become tribalist if one wants to prevent crime.

I was about to spank Raimondo for his ridiculous (and racist) column but many here already beat me to it. One question I would add is this: Raimondo writes: “in the end we’re all going to be somewhat coffee-colored, and so the racial theorists are headed for the dustbin of history.”

Does this also apply to Rev. Wright, Obama and the black racists?

Tatu Vanhanen’s work on ethnic nepotism goes a long way in explaining the rationale for so-called ethnic solidarity and tribalism seen around the world.  Folks that share the same genes get along better and produce more open and trusting societies.  Robert Putnam of Harvard recently found this to be the case in his “Diversity, Immigration, and Social Capital.”

Folks should pick up Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment.  After perusing said work, I doubt any could honestly conclude that the accomplishments of the Western world over the last 2500 years were mere happenstance. 

Justin, you are the best anti-war writer in the world, there is absolutely no denying it.  But you really shit the bed on this one partner.

And slowly but surely the neo-nazis are marching in the comments section......

First to Mr. R.’s admirable and courageous article:
On to IQ scores: West Virginia, with an average IQ score of a piddling 93—a few grades above Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron—reflects the utter stupidity of its mostly white population. It is near the bottom both in IQ test scores and SAT test results.
What!  You mean the people in WVA aren’t BLACK or HISPANIC?????

Well, by my lights, none at all: people are individuals, not collective entities, and ought to be judged accordingly.
Indeed!  As a Catholic and Christdemokrat, I’d perfer “person” to the libertarian “individual”, but that’s just a quibble.

I deny the validity of the concept of “race.
I know what you Browns are thinking, but Mr. R and I were not separated at birth.

the racial theorists are headed for the dustbin of history.
– so let’s hurry them along the way Good King Ron, St. Maggie, Helmut the Large, and Mitterand the Commie-hater hurried along the garbage take-out of Leninism.

It isn’t race, but culture that is the determining factor in human behavior: not genes, but environment that forms the human character and allows us to interact with each other in a way that makes sense.
I’m bursting into the 150 Psalm!

And the writebackers:
Of course if West Virginia were richer or more urban, measured IQ would be higher.
Simon Newman proves Mr. R’s thesis: its nurture, not nature.  As for nurture effecting genes, Mr. Newman joins Stalin’s favorite biologist Lysenko in not knowing that Lamarckanism was rejected over 150 years ago, the rejection lead by two better biologists: Darwin and Mendel.  Old Atlantic preaches Lamarckanism too, when his nose isn’t immersed in Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts..  Of course M.A. Roberts will tell us that mentioning ol’ Al is “political correctness”.  Definition: Political Correctness for the Browns: anything anti-Brown – a tactic learned from Robert Welch.

It’s true enough though the white rate of illegitimacy is increasing even faster.
David Manley also proves that it’s Nurture, not Nature.

The same trend downward that Justin describes in West Virginian whites can be seen very clearly in these countries, with England in the lead. [...]The fact that these cultural norms can change in a few decades shows that their cause cannot be innate, i.e., they cannot possibly be racial
Kudos to Kari Konkola.

Black illegitimacy rates are still two to three times higher than the ones that Sailer finds in certain areas of Maine
Tell us, Paul Gottfried, What were “Black” illegitmacy rates in 1950, well before the sexual revolution?  And tell us, How did Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe score on Gringo administered IQ tests in 1917?  If you’re a man of intellectual integrity, and I believe you are, you’ll report this to us and cite your sources. The facts will prove nurture, not nature.  Paul Gottfried surely knows that a lot of this talk about West Virgininas, “Blacks”, et al. sound like a copy of what ol’ Joe over at the Reichspropagandaministerium said about Polish IQ and criminality in 1939.

As for race specifically, see the work of Rushton or the Bell Curve. – “Moltke”
And The Bell Curved said that Asians and Jews score higher on IQ Tests (at least in the 80s) than “White” people.  “Moltke” should draw the conclusion according to his own ideology and enslave himself to these two groups and be their step-and-fetch-it, and certainly welcome his exclusion from their lunch counters!  Rushton and Lysenko were separated at birth.  But at least Lysinko was a biologist, not a psychologist.  Pray tell, what institution granted Rushton his degrees in Organic Chemistry, Biology, and Genetics (Molecular and Mendelian)?

Go to any playground or prison in the nation.  There you’ll see human nature in its purest form.
So the kid and the criminal are pure nature!  Now we see where “Moltke” does his research, to say nothing of the shotgun marriage of Wordsworth and Hobbes!

But you’ll have to explain why generations of the welfare state in Sweeden [sic] or anywhere else in the Western world hasn’t produced anything like the American black ghetto.
Or West VA or Harlan County, KY.  The reason: the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft never crossed the English Channel. Nurture, again, beats nature.  Nor was the Swedish welfare state set up to deal with destitution or the effects of slavery and Jim Crow. 

Folks that share the same genes get along better and produce more open and trusting societies.
Brandan Ragle doesn’t know that Serbs and Croats, Orangemen and Irish-Irish, share the same genes.  Why, what wonderful and open and peaceful ethnic groups toward each other!

Jupiter is to be credit for his honesty: He openly admits he’s for waving the Brown flag.

Red Phillips will be chagrined to know that Sid Cundiff thinks he’s said something correct today, at least about the rural brain-drain.  (We also have another major brain-drain in Gringoland: law school.) Ed has some wisdom today also.

@M.Forss

“So basically, the United states and Sweden were neck to neck on building the welfare state in the 60’s. The Americans might have done it worse by concentrating subsidies to unmarried mothers, whereas Swedish welfare subsidies are more diffuse, everybody but the richest 10 % get some welfare,
so the effects are not that visible.

And people with the least “social capital” suffer most from
this kind of social engineering: there were no minorities in
Sweden in the 60’s. Now there are muslims and the effects
of welfare are just the same as to blacks in the U.S. Of course
IQ is a real factor but there’s no reason to become tribalist if
one wants to prevent crime.”

I agree with the above statement.

Regarding “nature” vs. “nurture” I believe that it is about 50/50.
I state this as a person who taught high school for many years.

One of the recommendations of the “The Bell Curve” authors was
to halt welfare ASAP for the reason that it encouraged those of
lower IQ to have children. However, there was another factor:

“...welfare programs for females had a doubly negative effect on aggregate IQ within the transfer group, by allowing the female partner to forgo a full consideration of the male’s ability to serve as a provider of familial resources, instead placing greater emphasis on
desirable physical or social characteristics (presumed to be not as positively correlated with IQ).”--wikipedia

When both nature and nurture are on the lower end of the
spectrum...we end up with a problem such as we have now.
I believe that this is what has happened to both lower-class
whites and blacks, in rural and
“ghetto” areas. Those who had the skills or luck have left.  The remainder are trapped.

So, as a society, where does that leave us?  What choices do we make?

“Furthermore, this is the natural historical trend: in the end we’re all going to be somewhat coffee-colored, and so the racial theorists are headed for the dustbin of history.”

A very adolescent statement.Oh gee, maybe someday we will be all the same. Wowee!

1) Recent study demonstrates that over last 40,000 years, human group genetic differentiation has been increasing, not decreasing.

2)I think I first heard Jesse Jackson respond to the following: Late at night, you come out of a theater or restaurant with your wife and daughter. To get to your car, you can either go to the corner on your left or to the corner on your right. At the left corner you see standing around a dozen young black males. At the right corner you see a dozen elderly oriental women. Are you going to go to the left, or the right? 
CONGRATULATIONS! You have just profiled for Race, Sex and Age. Welcome to the Human Race.

I apologize for the spacing in the above post...If a moderator is on duty; please feel free to fix the spacing. TIA. BB

If I have two types of plants--an oak and a maple, say--and expose them to three levels of some environmental difference, and the results are always consistently different, does this prove plants are affected by nature, nurture, or some combination?

For instance if I expose three sets of oak/maples to high light, normal, and dark environments and, in every single environment, the oak is tallker by 6, 4, and 2 inches respectively, does this conclusively prove “it’s nurture not nature” that leads oaks to be taller than maples?  No, it does not, for what I hope are obvious reasons to educated people. 

In our own lives, consider the following:  the sexual revolution (not government, including things like birth control and Playboy) coupled with legal reforms (expanded welfare, no-fault divorce) led to expanding illegitimacy and STDs among whites and blacks.  But these pathologies expanded much more among blacks. This suggests (a) we have many things in common, and bad things for whites may be doubly bad for blacks and (b) that we may have different sensitivities to changes in environment, culture, etc.  (Incidentally, black illegitimacy rate was in the 25-35% range in the 60s when Pat Moynihan wrote his famous report on the state of the black family.)

Either/or thinking about genetics, race, statistics, and the human conditions is the bane of real understanding.  Before we purport to moralize about politics, we should remember it’s a practical subject dealing with actual people situated in a particular place and historical condition.  It would behoove us to acquaint ourselves with actual people, through literature, statistics, and life in general, before “deducing” a fantasy, whether a libertarian one or a post-racial one or both.

And The Bell Curved said that Asians and Jews score higher on IQ Tests (at least in the 80s) than “White” people.  “Moltke” should draw the conclusion according to his own ideology and enslave himself to these two groups and be their step-and-fetch-it, and certainly welcome his exclusion from their lunch counters!

Yup, way to catch the inconsistency in my logic!  I believe in a connection between genetics and intelligence, but am not handing myself over to the Israelis or Japanese for slave labor!  What a hypocrite I am!

Is there any topic besides race where one can expect to so predictably and consistently deal with such histrionics?

Posted by Justin Raimondo,"Those exemplars of Middle American white-ness, the rednecks of West Virginia, are producing children out of wedlock at an alarming rate.”

For readers who aren’t sure why, but know that “rednecks” is a slur similar to the “N” word, check out the newest edition of Resisting Defamation at:

http://www.resistingdefamation.org/

The diverse white American peoples deserve better than name-calling. After all, US Senator Obama called for a national discussion on race...I don’t think he meant to demean the poorer and less educated among us.

on race, religion, immigration and homosexuality justin raimondo predictably takes sides with the left.

Chris,

The oak/maple analogy doesn’t really work.  There is simply no way to isolate the cultural factors the way you can isolate environmental conditions in your hypothetical tree experiment.  Even the cases of blacks adapted into white families were still likely influenced by numerous cultural factors that are difficult to account for, such as lowered expectations.

While this certainly doesn’t rule out the likelihood of some genetic racial differences in IQ, it does make it difficult to have any confidence in their level of importance.

Also consider the many examples of radical shifts in measured IQ among ethnic populations (the Irish for example, or the African-Americans versus the Africans), and consider that test taking is a largely learned skill.  Faced with all this uncertainty, I think that we are better off for now assuming that at least a large amount of the racial IQ gap could potentially be eliminated.

Of course this will be a difficult task if we aren’t even allowed to openly discuss the issue of IQ difference without facing accusations of Nazism.

“on race, religion, immigration and homosexuality justin raimondo predictably takes sides with the left.”

bullshit. On immigration, I support restrictions. On homosexuality, I am against “anti-discrimination” legislation and “marriage.” Both are state interventions in private matters. On race, I would contest the assumption that genetic determinism is “right"-wing, while economic determinism is the “leftist” explanation for why humans behave as they do. Both positions, you’ll note, are forms of determinism, and leave out one important factor: the soul.

Your damn right Justin!

God did not create our souls “black” or “white” or any other race.  He placed us in certain wombs at certain places at certain times, and we should all remember that God could just as well have placed us in the body of another race of another sex in another time period.  We would be wise to think of what we could have been and how they would feel if they heard our cuurent form talk.  I also strongly suggest reading Lew Rockwell’s most article on race:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/hegelianism-election.html

Justin if you have not already, I suggest you read the above article (and that goes for everyone else!)

Sid:
“Simon Newman proves Mr. R’s thesis: its nurture, not nature. “

It’s both.  The 17 point median IQ difference between Africans in African and African-Americans is mostly nurture.  The 15 point IQ difference between African-Americans and white Americans is mostly nature.

>> As for nurture effecting genes, Mr. Newman joins Stalin’s favorite biologist Lysenko in not knowing that Lamarckanism was rejected over 150 years ago,<<

*sheesh* This isn’t Lamarckism, it’s about Darwinian natural selection.  In an environment that favours reproduction by eg those of high IQ, genes for higher IQ will spread through the population.  There’s been recent work on this effect in England over the past 800 years.  The Ashkenazi are the most famous example.

Likewise in an environment that favours reproduction & survival by those of lower IQ, genes for lower IQ will spread through the population.  Sometimes this is claimed to be ‘dysgenic’, but in strict Darwinian terms fitness is measured only by what works.  If my high IQ prevents me having more than 1-2 children (worrying about the cost of rearing them, say), I am less ‘fit’ than my low IQ neighbour who has 6 and lives on welfare, assuming my neighbour’s children survive to reproduce.

Race plays a real role in the world, to the extant that it should be considered to some degree when crafting policy (for example immigration policy), but I agree with Raimondo that ideology is much more important.  It’s just that in the world outside of Europe, race is very intertwined with ideology, to the point where they’re inseparable (i.e. ethnic nationalism).

Race matters. Demography is destiny. Raimondo is a dunce on race. Forensic science can identify the race of a long dead skeleton. Race is not just skin color and it’s not skin deep. The claim that race does not exist is asinine.

Brain chemistry across the races obviously has a wide variance. Behaviors are common in some races and rare in others. Culture doesn’t account for it. Big deal. Is that so scary? Only if you’re a damn Marxist.

Holy crap, any animal breeder knows how intelligence and mental characteristics are inherited and unique to particular strains. Saying that race doesn’t exist in homo sapiens is the same as claiming that breeds don’t exist in any other mammal.

Race-deniers are flat-earthers. Race-deniers are deniers of basic Darwinian principles. What a crime it would be for the ancient isolated groups of homo sapiens to have evolved different brain chemistries and characteristics! NO, NO, NO! All strains of homo sapiens must be of the same intellectual abilities, sayeth Pope Justin.

And what an insult to say that we’re all going to end up brown anyway in the future. I thought diversity was strength, Commissar?

Shove it, Raimondo. Many of us here on the planet today are not brown and are not going to be brown in the future. We love who we are. We are going to preserve who we are, you vicious, anti-white jackass.

While Roger is out practicing his “Sieg Heil!”, I noticed he said: “Race-deniers are deniers of basic Darwinian principles”

Sorry Roger, but regardless of evolution and whether it exists or not, I could have sworn that conservatives were prone to being skeptical of what is called “darwinism”.  By Darwinism’s logic, the Spartan’s were right in letting the sick children being left to die, or simply throwing them off cliffs since they were not healthy enough.

jerry:
“By Darwinism’s logic, the Spartan’s were right in letting the sick children being left to die, or simply throwing them off cliffs since they were not healthy enough”

No, because they ran out of Spartans.  Their group survival strategy was un-fit.  They’d have done better to keep less perfect children, maybe hand them off to the Pereoeci, and take in capable Pereoeci youths as Sparteatei.  Darwin just says that the ‘fit’ - those well fitted to the environment - survive and reproduce, the un-fit die out.  In modern America or Europe the welfare mom with 6 kids is much more ‘fit’ to her environment than is the working stiff with 1.3 kids.

Thomas Fleming: “The laws and decrees enacted by human government are mutable and sometimes tyrannical,” yet “the laws of human nature, worked tight within the spirals of the genetic code, are unchanging and just.”

Thomas Fleming: “Race and ethnicity are partly rooted in genetics and partly social constructions..... Some notion of the people as an extended family is natural to humanity and makes an important part of any sane society.”

X and Y are not always mutually exclusive.  One can believe in the importance of genetics and their role, but not be a determinist.  Also, one can see race as both biological and social, and realize its importance, yet without subscribing to determinism.  I agree with the Fleming quotes above (from Wikipedia).  Between the two small islands of knucklehead neonazis and ideological race deniers there’s a vast ocean of moderation.

The illegitimacy rates in 1940 were about 17% for American blacks and around 2% for American whites. The black rate is not that bad. It was probably less than Sweden. The Swedish Rate today is over 50%. The Swedes, Norwegians and Danes seem to like dark sexual partners. It is pretty evident,[ to anyone who visits there], that these countries are headed the way of Brazil and the West Indies.People are mixing all over the world. What are we going to do kill them? The first thing Columbus, Cortes and Pizzaro did when they got here was to start screwing the Indian girls. We all know about African slavery in both the Christian and Muslim world. The men in these societies liked to mix. Now we have hundreds of millions mixed race people. The country we live in is irreverable. One third of the USA is now Hispanic, black or Asian.  a lot of old whitemen I kow have gone to the third world for sex partners and many marry young pretty mulatto or mestizo girls. The old white race codes are gone. To all sexually jealous white men who complain about race mixing, you may as well get different race girlfriend. It’s better than being alone on Saturday night. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep our borders under control, but the die is cast.

“I deny the validity of the concept of “race.””

The Flat Earth Society would like it to be known that we fully agree with Mr. Raimondo’s statement above.

Instead of everybody staking out their own bit of ground in this Big Controversy, how about looking at it from a different angle?  How far apart are Mr. Raimondo and Mr. Roach on their proposed government policy on race?  Yes, I know “policy” is a dirty word to some of the people here, but my guess is that these two guys are no more than a few millimeters apart.  Just guessing, but wouldn’t the libertarian Mr. Raimondo want to repeal the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, etc. etc., on the basis of “natural rights” or individualism or something?  And wouldn’t Mr. Roach find such a solution acceptable to the race problems he describes?  Seems to me this a perfect issue for a paleoconservative/paleolibertarian alliance.

RE:Thomas Fleming: “Race and ethnicity are partly rooted in genetics and partly social constructions…

Hear hear. The biggest social construction that is part of Race is the first language because the paternal language is a reflection of the soul.

While the familiarity of the physical characteristics of people who look like us may influence us into certain groups more probably than others it is the ability to communicate that is the more important factor in terms creating separate peoples.

Black Americans speak differently in their communities from Euro-Americans because of the different experiences and historical ties to their lands and families are reflected in the dialect/language itself because language is social construct which exist in order for people to have their shared lives.

God divided the world at Babel by language not skin tone or genes. As for Race and I.Q., I.Q measures the difference in verbal ability which is reflection of both individual capacity and social environment i.e. a reflection of the ethnic community that the individual is a member i.e. some dialects/languages are more intelligent than others.

Race is first a language/dialect and expression of a the soul before an expression of the genes in my opinion by the fact is race is both memetic and genetic. However, I think it is very likely genes and language create feedback loops which create emergent characteristics which may have complicated effects. 

That’s it for my two cent thoughts and it is probably not worth that but I think Taki can spare the server space.

So now Mr. Roach, with his foolish and false analogy to oaks and maples, thinks “races” are different species.  This is about as scientific as astrology.  It is also the ideology of the Untermensch. Mr. Manley does the rest of the job in demolishing Mr. Roach. The real flat earthers are our Browns. 

Jupiter now offers as reasoning the Tu Quoque fallacy.

Bo Sears would profit by reading David Hackett Fischer on the origin of “redneck”.

“francois” [sic], by calling Mr. R a Lefty, learned his polemics from Robert Welch.

Social Darwinism, Mr. Newman, was dismissed long ago as serious science.  “Survival of the fittest” is Spencer’s phrase, not Darwin’s.  “Natural Selection”, Darwin’s real phrase, removes genetic mutations, “variations”, that can’t live in a particular PHYSICAL environment, not a cultural one.  Darwin himself and the Social Darwinists hadn’t a clue about genetics.  The Social Darwinists still don’t.  Late in his life, someone told Darwin about a monk in Austria doing some experiments with peas.  But by then Chuck Darwin was too rich, famous, and lazy to look into it.  About The Reverend Greg Mendel, OSB, biologists today say that while is study is basically correct, he cheated a bit on his data, making the matter seem simpler than it actually is.  Molecular genetics came around only in the 1950s.  Neither Mendelian nor Molecular genetics has never endorsed Social Darwinism.(keep in mind, biology has two, not one, theory of genetics. To which one are our racialists appealing?

Most of the remaining writebackers who oppose Mr. R are risibly deficient in evidence and citations.  No effort, for example, is made to compare IQ among West Indian “Blacks”, pre-1808 Gringo “Blacks”, and African-Africans, or for that matter among Irish celts, Polish slaves, north Germans, Alpine Germans, etc. etc.  No effort is made to tell us the IQ difference between, say, Bantu, Nilolite, etc.  These are all very, very different groups, with very different folkways, yet are for our ridiculous racialists the same “race” – and they are different because their history is different.  Again, nurture, not nature. No effort is made to define just what intelligence is, nor what a “trait” is.  And no evidence is offered to tell us where in the DNA chain is the “smart” gene.

Sid:
“No effort, for example, is made to compare IQ among West Indian “Blacks”, pre-1808 Gringo “Blacks”, and African-Africans, or for that matter among Irish celts, Polish slaves, north Germans, Alpine Germans, etc. etc.  No effort is made to tell us the IQ difference between, say, Bantu, Nilolite, etc.  These are all very, very different groups, with very different folkways”

If you were actually interested, you could find out reasonable test-based estimates of all those group’s modern IQs by reading eg Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence.  I believe Wikipedia has the results up.  As I recall Bantu groups generally do a few points better than Nilo-Saharan, ca 70 to ca 66.  The overall IQ range in indigenous sub-Saharan Africa ranges from ca 54 amongst Khoi San (Hottentots & Bushmen) to the low ‘70s.  No data for pygmies though.

As I recall the figures are approximately - you can check them out yourself:

West Indian “Blacks”: ca 85 African-Africans: ca 85
Irish celts: ca 93 (in Ireland)
Polish, north Germans, Alpine Germans: all within 98-102 range. 
Bantu, Nilolite: both in 66-70 range, with Bantu towards the high end.

Sid Cundiff says, “Bo Sears would profit by reading David Hackett Fischer on the origin of ‘redneck’.” But that’s the problem, meanings change with time and demographic shifts. “Redneck” has had many meanings over time, but in 2008 its only meaning is embedded in class and race parameters. Referring to the origin of a word that is now a slur does not help us understand what it means today.

“In modern America or Europe the welfare mom with 6 kids is much more ‘fit’ to her environment than is the working stiff with 1.3 kids..”

Only because the fat lazy b*tch is stealing money (ie taxes)from the working stuff.  Get rid of that welfare whores income, have her lazy ass work, and THEN we will see which of the two is more “fit”!

Race is the fundamental building block of civilization. The left understands that if they can kick out that building block from underneath a society then they have won the whole ballgame.

There can be no political conservatism without racial identity because race leads to culture. The left is attempting to strip whites of racial identity as a means of radically deconstructing the civilization.

The concept of “conserving” a civilization that is being transformed racially is a joke. That is the neocon proposition nation fiction. By the time Raimondo’s sick dreams of a perfectly brown nation come true the Western traditions, the U.S. Constitution and the civic institutions will have long since been discarded.

The faux conservatives work to preserve the Western nations - only without Western Man. It’s all a Marxist big lie. No different from flooding Japan with aliens while proclaiming that Japan will be “conserved”.

Notice how important the left feels racial identity is for non-white groups. Notice the funding for La Raza. Notice the complete hypocrisy.

My previous comment on Darwin goes to the principle of adaptation, which is not apart from God.

It is a Marxist bullying tactic to claim that anyone who rejects this disgusting “soft genocide” of whites is a Nazi. Of course, by that definition all pre-1965 whites were Nazis, which is exactly the desired endgame. This foul koolaid is nothing less than a program to demonize all white civilization as a unique “cancer of history”. And that is a distortion so intellectually bankrupt and at odds with the facts that it can only described as a Marxist Big Lie.

Funny how the neo-nazis here claim there is a “ white genocide” working against them, yet men like Reverend Sharpton feel that there is a concerted campaign against black people, and I bet there are also some hispanics who feel that white and black america are secretly working against them too!

I guess stupid, paranoid minds work alike.....

The reason why blacks were relatively well behaved before the advent of the welfare state, was because Society wouldn’t take any of their bullsh*t.  Back then if they didn’t have a job they’d starve,and if they stepped out of line they’d be properly punished.

As soon as they were given a few rights and few dollars they started acting like animals because they could.

If whites were given tons of money by the government, I can assure you that it wouldn’t make them all sociopaths.

If you are going to blame the welfare state for black problems, it is still rooted in their inferior genetics.

“it is still rooted in their inferior genetics...”

Oh please O wise one, where is this proof of “inferior genetics”?

And would you say this to the face of Cardinal Arinze?

I could say that to his face.

Or I could ask him why the Catholic Igbo area of Nigeria is just as much of an AIDS ridden cesspool as the Protestant and Muslim Regions.  Somehow having some guy in a pointy hat telling them that using condoms is a sin doesn’t keep them from raping 10 year old girls. 

Or I could ask him “If Pope John Paul was twice as old as Benedict when Benedict was 7.  How old is John Paul when Benedict was 10”
and wait for him to say 20.

@ Jason, You wrote, “If whites were given tons of money by the government, I can assure you that it wouldn’t make them all sociopaths.”

Idiocy.

That “guy in the pointy hat” is a respected Cardinal, sir, and while he is fallible and is not beyond criticism, I have seen very few men as wise as Cardinal Arinze.

You will give that man the respect he deserves, otherwise I think we know the person here with the REAL inferior genetics!

I’d like to know what Raimondo meant by “they’re big on rape in Hillary-land”. The link underneath that text leads to a BOJ stats page. There we learn that West Virginia had a forcible rape rate of 21.4 per 100,000 people in 2006, the most recent year of statistics. If we go on and look at the statistics for other states, we find that West Virginia has a very low rape rate, relatively speaking. In fact, the 6th lowest in the country, and well below the national average of 30.9.

@ Jerry, Have you noticed how, when you ask some of the fools who post here to come up with something to support their unfounded claims, their typical response is to criticize something or someone else, to get off the point?  Just once, I’d like them to actually respond.............Nah, it wouldn’t be worth the wait.

Indeed, mcbrown, indeed

“In the process, they have essentially abandoned “paleolibertarianism”, the once-promising intellectual movement that stayed true to libertarian principles while opposing open borders, libertinism, egalitarianism, and political correctness.”

Vdare casts poor division bait and Justin bites? Rockwell and Rothbard are not the center of libertarianism for myself. I was a libertarian far before I knew who either was.

Racial thinking does not make one a libertarian or not.
This is simply meant to divide libertarian from libertarian.

Rothbard and Rockwell wrote Paul’s newsletters for a time. They wrote racist remarks. They ended Paul’s campaign for many. Rockwell should have made an apology. I still read lewrockwell.com. We’re still allied towards freedom as libertarians with minor differences.

I’m glad to see Raimondo isn’t pretending to be something he’s not.

It’s easy for racialists to confuse those who oppose Lincoln, big government, the Iraq War, etc. as being one of them. But a quick read of this essay should set them straight.

Regarding race… only a fanatic or a moron would believe there aren’t significant differences. One should prefer his own people though, not those with the best traits - just as one prefers his own relatives. And those bastards without a people shouldn’t, out of envy, wish to destroy those of us with a people.