And as it seems, you are playing safe and pandering to the ruling taboos & cliches you are more likely to be a Zeta,Theta,Kappa or even an Omega male-hardly likely to be optimal breeding stock!
Better leave the black chicks ( & the yellow,browns & whites for that matter !!!) to me.

“”Well I… I would hate to have to decide who stays up and who goes down.”

“Well, that would not be necessary Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would bemuch time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.”

In fact I can assure you, that as an Alpha white male at the top of the pyramid, I’d have no hestitation in tipping you two out of the boat first. That way there’s more room for biodiverse breeding stock (ie: groovy black chicks.)

I know you guys won’t mind. It’s for the common good after all.

“Let aboriginals and others -Pacific Islanders, Muslims,- succeed or fail in their own indigenous cultures and ways of being.” – millipede

Alas for the noble savage. milipede clearly has not seen small children swarming with flies, has never been the victim of a drunken assault, has not had to face violent religious bigots, has not bothered to read enough anthropology and history to understand that life is in fact nasty brutish and short pretty well everywhere except where modern world capitalism and/or democratic socialism has held sway. If she saw the consequences of “failing in their own way” she would be much less complacent about it.

Now we’re really going off topic here but unfortunately for your theory, China *started off* being scientifically advanced (see the work of Joseph Needham) and then declined. it declined because it turned inwards and the emperor decide to end all major seafaring voyages. then after stagnation under a whole list of other emperors, it underwent a period of warlordism, and then when Mao took over it eventually went shithouse even more . have you become a communist now?

Oh, and if you were trying to stir me up with the foot-binding remark I should point out that I’m Hakka and so none of my ancestors can be indicted for foot-binding.

Perhaps a seemingly dumb question can really require some intelligent answering. Human progress has often hinged on that very process. What if a seemingly dumb hypothesis is true?

Perhaps you just might have considered how Chinese treated women Jason, instead of blocking your ears to a what if? You know Jason, things like feet binding and getting rid of girl babies. What about tribal Africa Jason? How do most African males treat women? I note that in America, 70% of Afro-American males grow up without a father. Any reason for that Jason? Do you think that might have some impact on generational development? It certainly seems to for white families. Yes and there is the question of Arabic/Islamic treatment of women. Food for thought or beneath the dignity of experts such as yourself Jason?

I do agree the average scores that Lynn has worked out for Aborigines and sub saharan Africans not just borders on the absurd but actually is.

You’re right. Except when intoxicated, the Aboriginal people that I know (and there are lots) all present as being of at least average intelligence. They’re certainly not borderline Down Syndrome! So either there’s something radically wrong with Lynn’s methodology or that of the psychologists who administered the tests, or (more likely) a much higher proportion of Aboriginal than Caucasian subjects say to themselves as they sit the IQ test: “This is just a heap of pointless whitefella crap. I’ll finish the questions just to be polite, but I’ll be stuffed if I’m going to expend any mental energy on bullshit like this“. Hardly an irrational response, and arguably more intelligent than any of us whitefellas who take such tests seriously.

Basically, IQ scores as low as they measure for groups like Aborigines indicate that the average Aboriginal has an IQ score little higher than the typical Down’s Syndrome sufferer. Assuming the average Aussie has an IQ of 100, that would mean that the average Aboriginal has an IQ higher (assuming I’ve done my maths right) than only about 0.5% of the general population. Now think of a sample of 200 random Australians. Do you really think the average Aboriginal person is dumber than all but one of those 200 random Aussies? To me, that indicates that there is either something radically wrong with their data collection, or something wrong with the statistic they are measuring. Or both.

Needless to say at this point, I find the title of the post quite offensive, because as I said, history has already demonstrated to us, that once you start proving that certain races are ‘dumber’ than others, it is only a short leap before judgements about other aspects of what makes a human human are brought into quesiton. These same sort of studies rendered the American Indians non-people and they form the basis for racism by giving it some sort of ’scientific’ validation. It is an extremely dangerous area of investigation when couched within these parameters. (Not to mention highly offensive to us dumbfucks.)

I have no delusions about us all being equal. I am all for improving people’s lot in life, but intelligence while it can be improved marginally by providing individuals with love, affection, attention and good nutirition, any mprovements are marginal. What one is born with is basically what one has by way of intelligence and none of us get to choose the circumstances of our birth.

My scorn at the monster of western capitalism is that it is flat out denying people these basic needs with greed and surivival of the richest as its driving force. If one is lucky enough to have been born bright- well and good, white and bright well then you’re really lucky, but dumb (by IQ test standards) and black well then you basically have no hope.

We did some IQ tests at school (I think they were IQ tests) I found them really difficult not to mention totally irrelevant. I have no idea what the results were. I noticed, however, intractable child that I was that the teachers gave up on me, post IQ testing.

“The skewed interpretations of people like Andrew Fraser can and should be countered and disproved on the evidence by people of goodwill, lest the racists win by default”.

A classic motherhood statement, but one which I feel compelled to qualify. Contrary to popular opinion, media (especially OpEd/academic) space is *not” an infinite resource. In the last decade, the Internet has admittedly enabled just about any First-Worlder with an opinion to self-publish it, but there is little overlap between blogs et al and serious media space. (A controversial comment I know, but the evidence of the Windschuttle fracas is instructive here: W’s theories on Tasmania’s Indigenes only it the spotlight in 2002 when they were published in a hardcopy journal, and then a newspaper, in 2002. Likewise his book (self-published, ironically enough) but never his blog took the Windschuttle publicity machine to a whole new level in 2003.)

A necessary consequence of media space being a scarce resource is that there have to be rules and so gatekeepers controlling access to it. Which concept is very easy to simply pejoratively label as “censorship”, but I don’t buy that.

As an example, in Dec 2002 a letter to the ed of the Australian, written by three academics including Melbourne’s Marcia Langton, shortly and simply stated:

“We are deeply concerned that Keith Windschuttle should be given space to attack the credibility of major Australian historians (Opinion 9/12)

Windschuttle has no reputation as an historian, having contributed nothing to the field except polemic.

It is a tragedy for Australian society that someone with such a twisted view of history, based on the flimsiest tinkering with the evidence, should be given any support or credence.”

IQ (or g) is simply a system designed by white capitalist males to confirm that white capitalist males deserve the fruits of their oppression.

I believe that so-called “Islamic extremism” is simply an expression of non white non capitalists reacting to the global hegemony of white capitalist males. Unfortunately they have resorted to violence out of frustration to prove their point, but that does not mean that their grievance is not real and also applies to other disenfranchised groups such as aboriginal peoples.

I will wager that if aboriginal or Muslim people designed a test and applied it to white capitalist males most of you would fail.

Australia has an opportunity, which we are failing to take, to break out of this hegemonous system.

We need to recognize that aboriginals (and others ) can not and should not succeed in the vain and inglorious western global capitalist economy.

Let aboriginals and others -Pacific Islanders, Muslims,- succeed or fail in their own indigenous cultures and ways of being. Don’t force them into the western capitalist mold. Give them the same resources that white capitalist have taken for themselves. Make sure that they have what they need and want out of life.

And let them design and test IQ for the rest and see how white capitalist males succeed in a world not of their own choosing.

I am simply being pragmatic about this issue, as Ken is. We can leave the debate about whether possession of higher IQ makes one a better human being to the theologians and other dealers in pointless metaphysics. Just about the only people who might believe this are those who use the research to justify their pre-existing racism and those people also tend to hate Jews and may therefore have issues with higher Jewish IQ. The genetic contribution to IQ may be of intrinsic interest to some researchers but for public policy purposes has little impact since we can only change our environment, and we have enough work in that department such as early childhood intervention programmes. What matters is that insofar as certain marginalised ethnic groups like African Americans and Aboriginal Australians score lower on this test which is, as Ken, points out, a good measurement of one’s ability to navigate the modern Western landscape, then there may be reason to believe that their poor outcomes in this landscape are partly caused by these low scores. This can and should be addressed by traditional liberal and social-democratic means and have no ‘Nazi’ implications as people like Link wish to suggest.

There is no link between IQ and real world achievement. It’s a pointless measure.

To which you wrote:
“Perpetuating and supporting this monster we call the dominant culture the vain and inglorious western global capitalist economy is, imo patently misguided’

So what do you mean by ‘perpetuating ths monster’? You mean ‘improving the skill levels of people to allow them to navigate the dominant culture’. What are these skills? Regardless of whether they are intrinsically ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than other skills or make people ‘better’ human beings than others is irrelevant metaphysics. These skills are skills which are captued in IQ tests – namely literacy and numeracy, and the ability to deal with abstractions, the sorts of skills that Clinton adviser Robert Reich dubbed the skills of ’symbolic analysts’.

And your response to all that? that no, we should bury our heads in the sand and sing Kumbaya and make dot paintings all day. Now no doubt some spolt Western hippie downshifting middle class brats can well afford to do that, and some Aboriginal artists have managed to make a living out of their paintings but to argue against improving these ’symbolic analyst’ skills which *are* of great utility, including for engineering the technology that allows hippie New Agers to spew bile about ‘capitalism’ through broadband, to scorn these skils on the basis that they are associated with ‘dumb white males’ and ‘multinational capitalism’ is ostrich-like in the extreme.

I should learn to be more ingratiating– grateful towards the stupid white men and all the marvels they have given me.

Know my place and keep me in it eh?