Good and bad ideas are fairly equally distributed across the political spectrum.
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I'm not even going to attempt any nuance here: I despise this person possibly even more than I despise Trump. They both dish out huge sloppy servings of cringe whenever they open their mouths. Harris might not be as corrupt and boorish as Trump, but her mediocrity is unbearable.
Or:
"As a Mormon, I believe in Jesus and accept him as the Son of God.
So let me ask you Catholics something.
If I can accept Jesus, why can't you consider Joseph Smith as a prophet?"
Or:
"As a Christian, I believe in the Ten Commandments.
So let me ask you Jews something.
If I can accept the Ten Commandments, why can't you consider Jesus as the Son of God."
Here's how it works, Maliq: If it preceded and was incorporated into my religion, it might be OK. But if it came after my religion, it's heresy, or worse. That's just how it works.
But what has made American music the most influential and popular music in the world is precisely this lack of a single defining tradition.
American music is restlessly dynamic and has constantly taken on new forms, which bump against each other and produce hybrids which are often more interesting than the original forms themselves.
It can be thrillingly innovative or rooted in deep tradition, low brow or high brow, universal or niche, rural or urban.
Sure, American music has often copied and stolen from elsewhere, but mostly it gets copied and stolen.
Just as the dollar is the world's currency, American music is the world's music.
I like Vivek and was pleasantly surprised when he started following me (especially since I am one of his few non-conservative follows).
He has faced a disgusting amount of racist and religious hate, and handled it as well as anybody could under the circumstances.
But his decision to run the recent "mother-daughter" ad against Amy Acton feels like a terrible mistake for his campaign — an unforced error.
It's all so tiresome. Public service advertisements in the UK have replaced their usual "safe" villain (the middle-aged white male) with a member of a group that's even less likely to engage in antisocial mobile phone behavior on public transportation: The East Asian female.
This is a rarefied level of pandering that not even Joe Biden would aspire to.
Based on what limited data we have (mostly test performance results in the Minneapolis school system) Somalis in the US appear to have one of the lowest average group IQs (around the mid-80s) in America.
Their median household income is the very lowest, among all groups, in the US.
They are — as they are almost everywhere in the West — arguably the lowest-performing immigrant group in the country.
(Note: That 67 IQ figure EW references isn't based on good Somalia data, and doesn't reflect their test performance here, which is influenced both by an immigration selection effect and a likely Flynn effect.)
This is probably the least original observation anyone can make, but it really strikes me how unlikeable most people running for political office are.
Do these jobs attract a specific darker or weirder psychological profile or do the mechanics of modern elections reward bad behavior and poor character? Probably at least a little of both.
It's likely true that running for high office requires an abnormal baseline of ego and ambition, if not narcissism. The realities of campaigning in a deeply polarized society seem to filter out likeable and relatable people.
But even if an agreeable person enters politics, the fact that primary elections are dominated by the most ideologically active and extreme voters, makes it difficult for them to win on a platform of nuance and goodwill.
Instead, performative outrage seems to be the ticket to success at the primary level, and a politician who acts reasonably or empathetically toward an opponent is often punished by their own base as being weak.
i/o retweeted
The standard establishment position on evolution and racial differences in IQ had two connected elements, both driven by "antiracist" ideology:
(1) There has been no biological change in humans (especially in the brain) since we all left Africa
(2) around 50,000 years ago.
Both of these claims have been now demolished in research conducted by the world's foremost population geneticist (as well as other scientists): Not only have there been recent evolutionary changes in the brains of West Eurasians and East Asians, there were also significant and successful human migrations from and outside of Africa going back at least 300,000 years.
The goodthinky position in academia for decades, as expressed Marxist biologist and "antiracist" Stephen Jay Gould: "There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”
New from David's Reich's lab: "In the past ten millennia [in Europe], we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection," including those influencing human intelligence.
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
The standard establishment position on evolution and racial differences in IQ had two connected elements, both driven by "antiracist" ideology:
(1) There has been no biological change in humans (especially in the brain) since we all left Africa
(2) around 50,000 years ago.
Both of these claims have been now demolished in research conducted by the world's foremost population geneticist (as well as other scientists): Not only have there been recent evolutionary changes in the brains of West Eurasians and East Asians, there were also significant and successful human migrations from and outside of Africa going back at least 300,000 years.
What's most extraordinary about this clip from the 1950s are the goodthinky liberal claims made about race which we now know are scientifically unsupported.
He says brain size is meaningless as an indicator of anything — a view held by almost no scientist today. (Brain size correlating with intelligence is a highly-replicated and robust scientific finding.) He goes on to confidently claim that any such correlation would only be believed by "ignorant people."
He argues that all races are "functionally equal" — another ridiculous claim that can be easily rebutted today by millions of data points, such as those showing that no white guy has appeared in a non-boycotted Olympic 100 meters final in 50 years.
He argues that you "can't tell by looking" at a person whether they are going to be more likely to commit a crime — a rather odd argument given that, at least in contemporary America, for example, black people commit murder at over 20 times the rate that Asian Americans do.
He goes on to attribute racial differences in crime purely to the effects of racism, denying that differences in culture have anything to do with such discrepancies, and he makes the super-helpful recommendation that law enforcement remove any mention of race from wanted posters and that we "do away with the idea of skin color" altogether.
My lifelong support for draconian gun control laws was weakened during the 2020 riots when, watching helicopter footage of mobs roaming freely through Philly neighborhoods and attempting to enter homes, a journalist reported that homeowners had told him that when they called police begging for protection they were told that law enforcement personnel were overwhelmed and homeowners were "on their own."
