Can't you just see the engineered society of all such elitists fighting over who gets to do the manual labor...
Bono's BS
- Thread starter Pa(b)st Prime
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I said I was out of time, but it was more like I was out of energy. It's a demanding task, having to summarize extensive views into a few paragraphs, and a disheartening one, knowing that they will be scoffed at derisively by people who would rather bask in the glow of their self-righteousness than rationally consider views that so grossly contradict their own [ZZzzzz].
I do understand the point about treating people as individuals. It's a very important point and one of the finest contributions made by western civilization to moral philosophy. Nothing that I have said precludes treating people as individuals. As I said in the previous post about liberty, treating people as individuals does not require you to consider every individual as an equal to yourself, nor as a member of a group equal to your own.
Some people may claim that 'inferior' people or members of 'inferior' groups ought to be treated differently, but there claims are hardly irresistible. Just because groups can be discriminated against based on differences in average abilities, doesn't mean that they should be, and, more to the point, such a possibility says nothing about whether groups do differ in abilities or not--ie, just because someone might find in IQ a reason to hate blacks doesn't mean IQ differences don't exist.
I agree with all that. To say that one person is of lesser ability than another person isn't the same as hating that person, or liking the other better; it's saying that one is more able, nothing more, nothing less. And society already makes distinctions--"discriminates"--based on capability. Driving licences, suitability for adoption, eligibility to hold office, are all examples where society has decided to set a minimum bar. I'm just saying that procreation should be another area of life where standards should be applied. One such standard, the most obvious, is the ability to provide for your own offspring; those that cannot afford to raise children should be discouraged from doing so.
For anyone that understands the argument about civilization (to say nothing of mere civility) being dependant on intelligence, the alternative to the above (or variations on it) is to do nothing and simply watch civilization decline as 'white trash', black crack-whores and mexican gang-bangers outbreed the doctors and lawyers in society. The stakes, as I see them, are thus.
I do understand the point about treating people as individuals. It's a very important point and one of the finest contributions made by western civilization to moral philosophy. Nothing that I have said precludes treating people as individuals. As I said in the previous post about liberty, treating people as individuals does not require you to consider every individual as an equal to yourself, nor as a member of a group equal to your own.
Some people may claim that 'inferior' people or members of 'inferior' groups ought to be treated differently, but there claims are hardly irresistible. Just because groups can be discriminated against based on differences in average abilities, doesn't mean that they should be, and, more to the point, such a possibility says nothing about whether groups do differ in abilities or not--ie, just because someone might find in IQ a reason to hate blacks doesn't mean IQ differences don't exist.
I agree with all that. To say that one person is of lesser ability than another person isn't the same as hating that person, or liking the other better; it's saying that one is more able, nothing more, nothing less. And society already makes distinctions--"discriminates"--based on capability. Driving licences, suitability for adoption, eligibility to hold office, are all examples where society has decided to set a minimum bar. I'm just saying that procreation should be another area of life where standards should be applied. One such standard, the most obvious, is the ability to provide for your own offspring; those that cannot afford to raise children should be discouraged from doing so.
For anyone that understands the argument about civilization (to say nothing of mere civility) being dependant on intelligence, the alternative to the above (or variations on it) is to do nothing and simply watch civilization decline as 'white trash', black crack-whores and mexican gang-bangers outbreed the doctors and lawyers in society. The stakes, as I see them, are thus.
It's not 'relative' dumbness that's the problem, it's 'absolute' dumbness. A person with an IQ of 65, who has trouble spelling his name is a person with an IQ of 65 who has trouble spelling his name no matter what the world around him is doing.
And it's not just about IQ. Proclivity towards certain kinds of behaviors is also inherited and, as cruel fate would have it, undesirable proclivities are associated with low IQs.
So is that an implicit admisssion that manual labor is only fit for deadheads?
Such questions are inevitable in a society that values 'making it' above all else, and equates 'making it' with making lots of money. It doesn't have to be so. Living a good life can mean a lot more than simply making a lot of money.
Personally, I would prefer to live in a society where people were obsessed with morality rather than obsessed with making money. Teaching people to live morally seems to be a lot easier than teaching people mathematics and English, too, so although moral behavior (and moral concerns--which lead to moral behavior) are correlated with IQ, we could still make large headway even without instituting programs such as I those I favor.
Remember, blacks, despite greater discrimination and poverty, weren't always quite so unruly. Of course, that was in an era when morality was much more in vogue. Today, trendy liberal intellectuals revel in mocking ideas about traditional morality. Luckily for them, they can hide away in gated neighborhoods while the rest of society endures the chaos such trendy views unleash.
No, it goes to the nature of elitists and their sense of entitlement based on intellectual development and sense of superiority as a human being...not any comment that any particular person is not fit for manual labor.
Quote from spect8or:
So is that an implicit admisssion that manual labor is only fit for deadheads?
Such questions are inevitable in a society that values 'making it' above all else, and equates 'making it' with making lots of money. It doesn't have to be so. Living a good life can mean a lot more than simply making a lot of money.
Personally, I would prefer to live in a society where people were obsessed with morality rather than obsessed with making money. Teaching people to live morally seems to be a lot easier than teaching people mathematics and English, too, so although moral behavior (and moral concerns--which lead to moral behavior) are correlated with IQ, we could still make large headway even without instituting programs such as I those I favor.
Remember, blacks, despite greater discrimination and poverty, weren't always quite so unruly. Of course, that was in an era when morality was much more in vogue. Today, trendy liberal intellectuals revel in mocking ideas about traditional morality. Luckily for them, they can hide away in gated neighborhoods while the rest of society endures the chaos such trendy views unleash.
aha. so our problem is that the bright choose the brightest
profession, physics, and there are not enough of them
for the rest, including social policy. why do i think this
is little ... too easy ... well, maybe because the most
prominent physicists that come to my mind are einstein,
bohr, planck, gell-mann or some mathematicians like
gödel, wiles. and they all seem to be brilliant but as
well seem to lack some quality i see in leaders like
kennedy, martin luther king, gandhi ... just to pick
some we might not have to dispute on. now do i think
that einstein could have been president? or that
gell-mann could qualify for such job? sorry, sir, no i
don't. i am afraid your argument collapses at second
review.
i am afraid we have more problems in the world with
"smart" people than with the dumb. having said that
i guess you are aware that your point of view is in
direct line with fascist doctrine of races, unworthy life
and so forth. and that, even if you were right, the
prospects of a society whose only target is intelligent
breed, is very, very depressing. well, at least for me,
you might find it being eldorado. until you realise that
correlation and causality are two different things. and
that intelligence and well-doing are two different things
either.
Your words are comforting. But they're not true. Even geniuses cannot make a communist system work.
Yes. I've summarized those views earlier. I'd really like to hear why you diasgree with them.
What I said was that in the presence of racial differences, cultural similarities are required to build a sense of unity. That doesn't mean that cultural differences are easy to overcome. So while one would be hard pressed to reliably tell Greeks and Macedonians apart--ie they are racially similar--cultural, well, actually, political, differences cause problems between them. The examples you chose are quite close to home to me, so let me expound. Many of today's Greeks were once "Macedonians", or rather, slavic speaking people who inhabited what eventually became a part of Greece. These people had their names changed to Greek names and the use of their language banned and told they were Greek. Naturally, at the time, many objected, and some immigrated rather tolerate circumstances, but those who stayed underwent a rather complete change in cultural identity; at least their descendants did, anyway. There are many families, therefore, who have relatives on either side of the border with often completely and stridently different cultural identities. Would any of this have been possible if the slavic speaking peoples who came to be transformed into Greeks looked vastly different to 'actual' Greeks, if they looked Chinese, say? That is exceedingly unlikely to have happened. The cultural transformation worked because Greek elites, who directed the Greek nationalist consciousness movement, were able to convince Greeks that those slav speakers were 'really' Greeks; Greeks who simply happened, for a variety of reasons, to have adopted a slavic tongue, and were termed 'slavophone Greeks'. What if those 'slavophone' Greeks looked Chinese? How many Greeks would have bought into the idea that those were, despite linguistic differences, their Greek bretheren? Well, in liberal fantasyland it might have worked, but back in reality, such a cultural assimilation not only wouldn't have worked, but wouldn't have even been attempted. Those people would simply have been expelled or claims about the extent of Greek territory would have been drawn differently on the map so as not to come to include such people.
Well, that was the Greece of the early 20th century. The Greece of today does believe that Chinese--and Pakistanis and Nigerians and whatever else--can become 'Greeks'. Some Greeks believe that, anyway. The Greeks that I talk to, yocals in the small towns of northern Greece, think it's all perfectly nutty. They seem to prefer a Greece where people, at a minimum, actually look Greek. Not all of them put it in such terms, of course. Most simply prefer a "Greece for the Greeks". But, of course, people have 'become' Greeks in the past, and will do so in the future, but those people looked 'enough like' Greeks that once they (or their children) learnt the language and the customs no one was the wiser.