Jim Goad wrote that the left have their heads “so far up their own asses with the idea that they are unimpeachably good, I suspect they may all soon suffocate to death”. As he admitted though, that was probably just so much wishful thinking. After all, Paddy Gower is somehow still drawing breath despite a career of thoroughly inspecting his own lower gastrointestinal tract.
Gower, of course, made a complete goose of himself when he tried to tell Stefan Molyneux what his (Molyneux’s) views really were. Of course, Molyneux rightly rejected Gower’s dunderheaded straw-man out of hand, but, four years later, poor Paddy still hasn’t sorted out his arse from his elbow.
Gower, stupidly, is still insisting that Molyneux believed in “racial superiority” – which Molyneux outright disclaimed – and keeps blithering on about “supposed racial IQ differences”.
The only problem for our IQ-challenged Paddy is that there is nothing “supposed” about it. As even Sam Harris admits, broad differences in average IQ scores between racial groups is about as well established a fact as there is.
The question is, then: are the differences innate?
Can racial gaps in cognitive skills narrow?
Possibly. After all, we have seen a number of historic examples of ethnicities pulling ahead of their neighbors by doing things smarter after they came to enthusiastically acknowledge the superiority of Western European modes of thought. Two famous examples of colonial collaborators were the Parsis of Bombay and the Igbo of southern Nigeria, who now score vastly higher on Nigerian college admissions tests than do the Muslims of northern Nigeria.
The most famous example is Japan’s sudden acquisition of the advantages of Western thinking after 1853. But perhaps the most historically significant is the Ashkenazi enlightenment that began in the second half of the 18th century. After centuries of being richer and more sophisticated than European Christians, Jewish philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn found their people falling behind, and thus advocated imitation of gentile breakthroughs.
There are other examples of racial groups who, in just a generation or so, similarly advanced their group IQ scores. Thanks to the US Army’s early adoption of IQ testing, America has a rich database of IQ data to draw on. As the data shows, Italian and Irish Americans have quickly advanced from the bottom of the IQ ladder.
As an aside, another mathematical basic the likes of Gower fail to grasp is that:
Statistical differences are not absolute differences. For instance, about 8 million African-Americans have higher IQs than the average white. But the fact that on average blacks have lower IQs is now considered unspeakable.
Still, unfortunately for them, other racial groups are not just indifferent to the advantages of the kind of Western thinking that so benefitted not just the Irish- and Italian-Americans, but the Japanese, Parsis and Igbo, and even allowed the famously highly-average-intelligent Ashkenazi Jews to outdo even the high-scoring Chinese and Indians. (So much for Paddy Gower’s assumption that the race-IQ data is a tool of “white supremacy”.)
In fact, the great and good of Wokeness are prescribing exactly the opposite behaviours of what would lift the depressingly lower average IQ scores of black Americans.
The purported solutions for black underachievement promoted by elites during the Great Awokening—blacks should be encouraged to resist arrest, to act out in school, to blame their failings on whites, to work less and nap more, and to demand cash without having to labor for it—are 180 degrees off target.
Our Establishment—rather than telling blacks that to avoid disciplining by the law they must self-discipline, that they need to inculcate their Weberian Protestant work ethic—has been egging on blacks’ worst lumpenproletariat inclinations, with predictable results, such as the black murder rate being up by approaching 50 percent since Ferguson in 2014.
Takimag
The question that terrifies the Wokesters is whether racial IQ differences are genetic or social. While there is some evidence for the former, the also-undeniable evidence that some racial groups have rapidly scaled the IQ ladder exists to falsify the theory.
In which case, the “progressive” injunction to “be less white” is possibly the most pernicious and destructive lie that the left are selling to black Americans.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD