If Mort Divine ruled the world

[arg]

<3 a strong republican woman

 

[Dak]

Ugh.

 

[arg]

Lol wat. Everything she said is great

 

[Dak]

But she's a stupid basic bitch who just says a bunch of shit that you only need two brain cells rubbed together to know, and says it in the most obnoxious way possible.

 

[arg]

I guess her voice is kinda shrill but whatevs she's hot. She's probably too successful / principled to let me lick her butt tho

 

[Dak]

she's hot...lick her butt tho

Yes we know where your priorities lie. Probably her only assets as well.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

That's still better than being a poor man's forum intellectual.

rms =/= any type of intellectual. The guys about as smart as a bag of hammers

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

<3 a strong republican woman

you just wanna lick her brown-eye.

 

[CiG]

Curious, why do so many of you guys hate Sargon?

 

[rms]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/03/08/iceland-require-firms-prove-equal-pay/98906702/

The government said it will introduce legislation to parliament this month, requiring all employers with more than 25 staff members to obtain certification to prove they give equal pay for work of equal value.

would love to see how the government defines equal value

"Equal rights are human rights," he said. "We need to make sure that men and women enjoy equal opportunity in the workplace. It is our responsibility to take every measure to achieve that."

wait a damn second. opportunity or forced equality?

Iceland has introduced other measures to boost women's equality, including quotas for female participation on government committees and corporate boards. Such measures have proven controversial in some countries, but have wide support across Iceland's political spectrum.

 

[Dak]

https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america

I don't know what's more amusing about this piece. Three contenders:

1. "Paid our own way"
2. Secessionist talk ("states rights")
3. Strong implicit racism

 

[Einherjar86]

Some truth there though.

 

[Dak]

There is a lot of truth there. But it's all wrongthink the blue states have vilified for years - and which this guy and others won't actually acknowledge as an about face.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Secessionism scares the shit out of me.

How does anyone know it won't lead to civil war, like it did last time? I don't want to see millions of Americans die just because people decided to stop tolerating political disagreement over the past couple decades. Especially if most of the intolerance has been manufactured by our shit media companies.

 

[rms]

well, I imagine representation in all military organizations is overwhelmingly red...just like a lot of the 'shitty parts' of contributing to a modern state

 

[Dak]

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2017/03/07/middlebury-violence-faculty/

The Higher Education Research Institute has asked tens of thousands of professors nationwide if they agree or disagree with the notion that colleges should prohibit racist and sexist speech on campus. Nationally, 33 percent of faculty strongly agreed with the idea of speech prohibition, while 12 percent strongly disagreed. The remaining 55 percent of faculty were in the middle, where they somewhat agreed or somewhat disagreed with the idea.

When I looked at the numbers for the private liberal arts schools of New England, however, things were different. I drilled farther into the data, focusing specifically on the academic departments of professors who signed the letter to Middlebury’s president. While I do not have data on Middlebury faculty specifically, we know which departments the signatories are from. Looking at those departments—sociology, anthropology, film and media studies, among others—almost 50 percent of faculty members from them strongly agreed that colleges and universities should prohibit speech on campus if it can be considered racist or sexist.

That so many professors who embrace humanistic inquiry would support restrictions on speech is simply astonishing and does a disservice to the academe and to the very students that they are supposed to educate.

 

[Einherjar86]

That article is disingenuous.

First, the letter doesn't use the word "prohibit" once. The professors are part of a community in general agreement that Charles Murray's work is outdated, unsound, and (at worst) prejudiced. And it is probably politically motivated, given Murray's track record. More often than not, his work is remarkably blind to verifiable historical reasons for imbalances in apparent intelligence (e.g. "Where Are the Female Einsteins?"). As far as the language of the letter itself is concerned, none of the signatories object to Murray's freedom of speech; they object to legitimizing his ideas in the form of a campus lecture introduced by the college's president.

The most you can say is that the letter asks that some form of response be issued by the college and the president, especially regarding the fact that Murray's originally controversial work did not undergo peer review or submit to the typical demands asked of scholarship. It is intellectually dishonest, dangerous, and misleading to promote Murray's work as an example of acceptable scholarship. This is what the faculty object to.

 

[Dak]

The portion I quoted is supposed to be from some research done by the HERI at UCLA. I tried to find the research as quoted but currently do not see it on their website (I may be looking in the wrong places). I found this:
https://heri.ucla.edu/monographs/HERI-FAC2011-Monograph.pdf
which doesn't break the data down the way it was reported in the article. Maybe the author requested the full data instead of just going off a press release.

I have not read any of Murray's work, but sample differences in mean performance by race on intelligence measures do exist. Separately, twin studies show that intelligence is roughly 50% hereditary/genetic. Anyone up in arms about even discussing these findings has a personal problem.

 

[Einherjar86]

The 50% marker is problematic, and more recent studies suggest the percentage is smaller (others, alternatively, suggest that it fluctuates and can even be larger):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-intelligence-hereditary/)

Researchers are now looking for the genes that contribute to intelligence. In the past few years we have learned that many, perhaps thousands, of genes of small effect are involved. Recent studies of hundreds of thousands of individuals have found genes that explain about 5 percent of the differences among people in intelligence. This is a good start, but it is still a long way from 50 percent.

Another particularly interesting recent finding is that the genetic influence on measured intelligence appears to increase over time, from about 20 percent in infancy to 40 percent in childhood to 60 percent in adulthood. One possible explanation may be that children seek experiences that correlate with, and so fully develop, their genetic propensities.

Murray's work makes use of significantly unsubstantiated and unverifiable data in order to present a deterministic/predictive argument about future social organization, hence his application of biological IQ to the rise of a "cognitive elite" (or some such nonsense). His work isn't in the name of science, it's in the name of political interests invested in rationalizing the conditions of the social demographic.

Serious research into the relationship between genetics and intelligence is ongoing, and in and of itself isn't controversial. Murray's work shouldn't be the benchmark for this kind of work. He gets press because his work is politically controversial, not because it's scientifically sound.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I don't see how the absence of intelligence genes is any more meaningful in an argument on the biological basis of intelligence than is the absence of a gay gene on sexuality. The simple fact is that IQ is hereditary and most children will be born with an IQ within a standard deviation of their parents. Not knowing the exact molecular mechanism behind our intelligence isn't needed to make that claim.