If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

 

[CiG]

lmfao.

 

[Dak]

IB4 notrealsocialism.

 

[CiG]

inb4 "but the Nordic model..."

 

[Einherjar86]

Joke from a Venezuelan bartender:

An Englishman and a Frenchman are at a museum, admiring a Renaissance work depicting Adam, Eve, and the apple in Eden. The Briton observes that Adam sharing the apple with his wife shows a particularly British propriety. The Frenchman, unconvinced, counters that the pair’s obvious comfort with their nudity clearly marks them as French. A passing Venezuelan, overhearing, remarks candidly, “Sorry to intrude, caballeros, but these are obviously Venezuelans: they have nothing to wear, practically nothing to eat, and they are allegedly in Paradise.”

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/soviet-humor-protest-venezuela

These life-under-Marxism jokes, known as anekdoty to Russians during the Cold War, became an increasingly vital outlet for criticism during the period immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet system. The genre has changed little since those days, but it has travelled, seamlessly transcending culture and geography to underscore certain commonalities of revolutionary Marxist systems (scarcity, triumphalist propaganda, bungling government bureaucracies) and, sometimes, to highlight the amalgam of cleverness, patience, indignation, and despair with which people respond to such conditions.

That these are features of life in today’s Venezuela is incontrovertible. Even the usually Panglossian government media no longer seems to deny Venezuelans’ hardships, having shifted from the official line that the C.I.A. is carrying on a “media war,” aimed at bringing down the revolution with lies, to the idea that the C.I.A. is carrying on an “economic war,” aimed at toppling the government through manufactured scarcity and fake lines full of agents provocateurs. The Venezuelan economy relies excessively on petrodollars, and the country’s government has been funnelling oil rents into imports of the food, medicine, and other basic goods that it is incapable of producing internally. Having neither diversified economically nor saved much during years of high oil prices, Venezuela was already in recession even before those prices collapsed last year. Loath to admit defeat and officially devalue its fixed currency, or to abandon popular subsidies such as penny-priced gasoline, the government has remained mostly solvent by printing money to cover its domestic obligations, enforcing onerous price controls, and being increasingly tight-fisted with access to foreign currency. This has come at the cost of stratospheric inflation and harrowing shortages of basic goods. The appeal of Soviet-style humor in the face of such problems is obvious.

 

[Dak]

Brand's interview with Peterson was actually decent, probably because Brand interjects way less than I expected, and because it wasn't an interview just having Peterson rehash his book and normal talking points. Peterson's characterization (which Brand accurately summarized) of Right and Left political treatment of the problem of inequality was pretty accurate: The Left fails catastrophically and the Right doesn't care, and both get it wrong.

 

[CiG]

Russell Brand should actually become a professional interviewer a la Joe Rogan or something, he is good at stuff like that.

 

[Dak]

 

[Einherjar86]

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arguments-That-Harm-And/242543

Resonates with a workshop I attended earlier this week about addressing potentially offensive or uncomfortable views in the classroom (the article is behind a paywall, but here's a substantive chunk--for context, she's writing about philosopher Peter Singer, who defends infant euthanasia in certain cases):

People worry that grappling with offensive views gives those views undue legitimacy. But in the case of someone like Singer, the views have legitimacy whether or not I choose to engage with them. To state the obvious, the arguments of the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University are going to matter whether or not I pay attention to them. But, more important, Singer’s views already have legitimacy because people will continue to think about disability in ways directly relevant to his arguments regardless of whether progressive academics decide those arguments are simply too offensive to be discussed. (After all, as Singer himself wryly notes, the sales of Practical Ethics tend to increase whenever there are calls to "no platform" his talks.) Even Singer’s views on infant euthanasia aren’t a dystopian thought experiment. At least one major European country (the Netherlands) openly practices infanticide in some cases of disability.

Another reason sometimes given for not engaging with views like Singer’s is that doing so creates inequality in academic spaces. If we openly debate the value of disabled lives, for example, it creates a burden for disabled and caregiver academics that simply doesn’t exist for academics unaffected by disability. This worry strikes me only partly correct. Yes, debating the value of disabled lives does make things harder for disabled and caregiver academics, and that inequality isn’t fair. But it’s not quite right to blame Peter Singer. The idea that disabled people are lesser or defective is part of everyday reality for disabled people and caregivers — often under the surface, often cloaked in politeness and smiles — whether or not Peter Singer discusses it openly.

It’s true, though, that within academe we have the ability, much more than most, to shield ourselves from uncomfortable and prejudiced ideas. We can create contexts in which no one has to be directly confronted with the claim that they matter less, or that they are less valuable. I think such contexts can be enriching and important. But — and here I speak only for myself, since much of this is dependent on personal and professional circumstances — I think they shouldn’t be the only professional contexts I work in. As a full professor, I have a remarkable amount of social privilege compared with most disabled people (large percentages of whom are unemployed and live below the poverty line). I have about as much job security as a person can have, I make a good salary, I have great benefits. As academics, we tend to justify this cushy social position by appeal to our social value — we aren’t just educators, we’re people who think hard thoughts and try to change minds and change culture.

Given all this, it’s hard for me to justify the idea that I shouldn’t engage with Peter Singer. Do Singer’s views make me uncomfortable? Yes, deeply so. But probably not as uncomfortable as they make people living with spina bifida in the Netherlands, given the Netherlands’ policy on infant euthanasia in cases of severe disability.

And unlike others more directly affected, it is literally my job to think and talk about difficult ideas. The discomfort and hurt when dealing with views like Singer’s are real. But if I’m unwilling to take on a measure of discomfort, given how much privilege I have and how little I have to lose, then I’m not sure I’m using the privilege of an academic life the way I ought to be.

The value of struggling with Singer’s ideas doesn’t negate the real and material costs, but it does offset them. And in a piece of utilitarian reasoning that Singer himself would approve of, to me the trade-off seems worth it. Prejudice is often held subtly, implicitly, or without much reflection. By giving us clear and well-defined arguments, thinkers like Singer lay bare the case for views which many people hold. Once that case is laid out, it’s much easier to begin the work of pointing out its flaws.

 

[rms]

https://theundefeated.com/features/...anda-guarding-against-cultural-appropriation/

*black people buy the majority of tickets for black panther*

"why aren't there more white people at this movie?"

 

[Dak]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.2064/abstract

Despite methodological variation in the choice and number of toys offered, context of testing, and age of child, the consistency in finding sex differences in children's preferences for toys typed to their own gender indicates the strength of this phenomenon and the likelihood that has a biological origin.

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

Marcie Bianco The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement

There seems to be genuine confusion as to whether this is serious or not.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Doesn't sound like parody to me, social justice is timeless

 

[Einherjar86]

This is a welcome piece, and it lays out a lot of the methodological problems with race science. The resistance to genetic explanations aren't entirely political, despite what the race scientists proclaim. There's actually a lot of bad science in those studies.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science

A second plank of the race science case goes like this: human bodies continued to evolve, at least until recently – with different groups developing different skin colours, predispositions to certain diseases, and things such as lactose tolerance. So why wouldn’t human brains continue evolving, too?

The problem here is that race scientists are not comparing like with like. Most of these physical changes involve single gene mutations, which can spread throughout a population in a relatively short span of evolutionary time. By contrast, intelligence – even the rather specific version measured by IQ – involves a network of potentially thousands of genes, which probably takes at least 100 millennia to evolve appreciably.

Given that so many genes, operating in different parts of the brain, contribute in some way to intelligence, it is hardly surprising that there is scant evidence of cognitive advance, at least over the last 100,000 years. The American palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading experts on Cro-Magnons, has said that long before humans left Africa for Asia and Europe, they had already reached the end of the evolutionary line in terms of brain power. “We don’t have the right conditions for any meaningful biological evolution of the species,” he told an interviewer in 2000.

In fact, when it comes to potential differences in intelligence between groups, one of the remarkable dimensions of the human genome is how little genetic variation there is. DNA research conducted in 1987 suggested a common, African ancestor for all humans alive today: “mitochondrial Eve”, who lived around 200,000 years ago. Because of this relatively recent (in evolutionary terms) common ancestry, human beings share a remarkably high proportion of their genes compared to other mammals. The single subspecies of chimpanzee that lives in central Africa, for example, has significantly more genetic variation than does the entire human race.

No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all, and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.” Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single strand of DNA.

 

[Dak]

Afaik it's generally accepted that there's no intelligence gene, and genes rarely do one thing. Rather combinations of on/off genes that are present lead to what could be considered more emergent properties, one of which being whatever you want to call the cognitive performance we measure with IQ tests. Mutations have obviously occurred across many genes. Taking a distributed view of genetic intelligence, wouldn't it make sense that the multiple mutations/differences would also contribute to the variance across races in intelligence? There is variance within and between races. When we refer to variance between, you're looking at mean differences that don't take into account variance within. Graphically, this looks like the offset normal or Gaussian distribution curves. These curves can have radically different variance within, with either "fat tails", meaning higher variance, or clustering around the mean. Even if means perfectly lined up, you could still wind up with markedly difference results based on variance, since it's the right tail that is mostly responsible for humanity's advancement across all disciplines.

 

[Einherjar86]

Afaik it's generally accepted that there's no intelligence gene, and genes rarely do one thing. Rather combinations of on/off genes that are present lead to what could be considered more emergent properties, one of which being whatever you want to call the cognitive performance we measure with IQ tests. Mutations have obviously occurred across many genes. Taking a distributed view of genetic intelligence, wouldn't it make sense that the multiple mutations/differences would also contribute to the variance across races in intelligence? There is variance within and between races. When we refer to variance between, you're looking at mean differences that don't take into account variance within. Graphically, this looks like the offset normal or Gaussian distribution curves. These curves can have radically different variance within, with either "fat tails", meaning higher variance, or clustering around the mean. Even if means perfectly lined up, you could still wind up with markedly difference results based on variance, since it's the right tail that is mostly responsible for humanity's advancement across all disciplines.

If there's no intelligence gene, but intelligence is rather an emergent effect of various mutations across genes that inform other behaviors, then I'm not sure it makes sense to attribute variances in intelligence to genetic variations. One point the author made is that people of a particular race can have more in common (genetically) with the variation of another race than with their own, yet not exhibit the behavioral intelligence of that race (i.e. the one with whom they share genetic similarities). Given this, I don't see how intelligence derives primarily or even significantly from a genetic basis.

Furthermore, if we're saying that different races vary in genetic mutation due to their environmental conditions, then I don't see how we can differentiate between intelligence variation as a genetically-conditioned phenomenon versus a socially-conditioned phenomenon. If there's no intelligence gene, then there's no way to pinpoint the source (and it seems unlikely that it would be genetic, in that case). I think that the antagonism between "evolutionary" and "socially-constructed" has done more harm than good; that is, the distinction itself has taken on too political of a life to be significant.

I like how the author indicated that suggesting race is a "social construct" doesn't mean there aren't different groups who share genetic similarities, or that these groups can't be scientifically studied. Even if intelligence is socially-conditioned, that doesn't mean it's insusceptible to scientific inquiry.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Just because it takes a thousand planks to build a bridge doesn't mean that removing one won't compromise the structure. The author has a narrow view of what genes do and how they interact. The author is even wrong with his specific example; skin color is not determined by a single gene, despite a change in a single gene being sufficient to determine the skin color. Lighter skin is a result of decreased expression of melanin in skin cells, but the physiological process of said expression is not a single switch. It is a series of multiple switches, and a mutation at switch #1 or switch #4 could potentially mean a similar phenotype of lighter skin, despite being effected by a different gene. Caucasians developed white skin an estimated 10k years ago iirc, and I'd imagine that whatever mutation that causes Asian people to have lighter skin as well was at a different locus. (Even if that's not the case and it was coincidentally the same for both ethnic groups, I definitely know that the blue eyes of Europeans and of Australoids are due to entirely different genes being mutated.)

 

[Einherjar86]

To be fair, the author doesn't actually say that skin color specifically is the result of a single gene mutation. He gives a list of various morphological characteristics and says that "most" of them involve single gene mutations. He doesn't explicitly say that skin color is one of them, although he does include it in his list.

While the author may be reductive (almost a necessity in a piece this short that deals with a topic this complex), I don't think anything you've said refutes his major criticisms of race science, although I may be misunderstanding you.

 

[Dak]

I think you'd be hardpressed to say that the Maoiest regime was less oppressive in China than any form of colonialism in Africa, yet we remove Maoism from China in even a halfassed form and the Mandarins are killing it. Conversely, colonialism has been removed or rolled back in Africa and things have worsened in many respects in many instances. Separately, you'd be hardpressed to Jews had it "good" throughout Western history, yet they continue to dominate/are overrepresented in academica, banking, media, etc. We can blame it on genetics, we can blame it on culture, we can blame it on a combination, but nothing in history suggests that both all races and all cultures are relatively equivalent. There are measurable differences, they originate somewhere, and they have very stark material and ethical variance.

 

[Einherjar86]

nothing in history suggests that both all races and all cultures are relatively equivalent. There are measurable differences, they originate somewhere, and they have very stark material and ethical variance.

No one's saying there aren't measurable differences, and the author of that piece says as much.