I think Bob is dead wrong. What he said (re: the Nader example) can be boiled down to: "demagoguery is powerful, so we have to engage in it. Being the adult in the room just doesn't yield the results." The moment you take that route, you cede all moral authority, all claims to integrity.
We know that race is a poor proxy for breeding groups. We know that it has no basis in reality. But we're going to treat with it anyway because that's what we've always done? I simply cannot buy that. I would rather work with a tough truth than a convenient fiction. To paraphrase the great Roland Fryer, I'm a data nerd. I will go wherever the data leads, regardless of whose narrative it steps on.
"We know that race is a poor proxy for breeding groups. We know that it has no basis in reality." Uh, no. The roof is about to crash in on those who insist on a purely environmental explanation of all sorts of ethnic differences, not just intelligence. Since the decoding of the genome, it has been securely established that race is not a social construct, evolution continued long after humans left Africa along different paths in different parts of the world, and recent evolution involves cognitive as well as physiological functioning. The best summary of the evidence is found in the early chapters of Nicholas Wade’s recent book, “A Troublesome Inheritance.” We’re not talking about another 20 years before the purely environmental position is discredited, but probably less than a decade. What happens when a linchpin of political correctness becomes scientifically untenable?
The PC problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits. Soon there will be dozens, then hundreds, of such links being reported each year. The findings will be tentative and often disputed—a case in point is the so-called warrior gene that encodes monoamine oxidase A and may encourage aggression. But so far it has been the norm, not the exception, that variations in these genes show large differences across races. We don't yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be, but we have to expect that they will be many. It is unhelpful for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that "race is a social construct" in the face of this looming rendezvous with reality. And the people who hate the word “race” might consider focusing their rage against institutions more influential than people who comment here. For example, the federal government spends billions to collect and make available Census data sorted by race and the once President of the United States, Barack Obama entitled his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."
Thanks for your powerful response. Today I listened to the episode again for the third time, and I have decided to concede. You and Shelby are right. You have to fight situations like that on a human level like they did during the Civil Rights Movement with King. Everyone together. It means more to fight racial demagoguery with an army standing on Truth regardless of what the soldiers look like. It means more to your enemies and the rest of the world.
The Poetic Truth is what many blacks and liberals build on and it breeds corruption. But the Literal Truth unites and is undefeated. It transcends beyond this world. Thanks for challenging me, Michael.
Ah, but Martin Luther King Jr. viewed equality in a definite way. To him, black people were deserving of equality because they were human beings, not because they were black.
Fellow subscriber here to disagree! :P
I think Bob is dead wrong. What he said (re: the Nader example) can be boiled down to: "demagoguery is powerful, so we have to engage in it. Being the adult in the room just doesn't yield the results." The moment you take that route, you cede all moral authority, all claims to integrity.
We know that race is a poor proxy for breeding groups. We know that it has no basis in reality. But we're going to treat with it anyway because that's what we've always done? I simply cannot buy that. I would rather work with a tough truth than a convenient fiction. To paraphrase the great Roland Fryer, I'm a data nerd. I will go wherever the data leads, regardless of whose narrative it steps on.
"We know that race is a poor proxy for breeding groups. We know that it has no basis in reality." Uh, no. The roof is about to crash in on those who insist on a purely environmental explanation of all sorts of ethnic differences, not just intelligence. Since the decoding of the genome, it has been securely established that race is not a social construct, evolution continued long after humans left Africa along different paths in different parts of the world, and recent evolution involves cognitive as well as physiological functioning. The best summary of the evidence is found in the early chapters of Nicholas Wade’s recent book, “A Troublesome Inheritance.” We’re not talking about another 20 years before the purely environmental position is discredited, but probably less than a decade. What happens when a linchpin of political correctness becomes scientifically untenable?
The PC problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits. Soon there will be dozens, then hundreds, of such links being reported each year. The findings will be tentative and often disputed—a case in point is the so-called warrior gene that encodes monoamine oxidase A and may encourage aggression. But so far it has been the norm, not the exception, that variations in these genes show large differences across races. We don't yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be, but we have to expect that they will be many. It is unhelpful for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that "race is a social construct" in the face of this looming rendezvous with reality. And the people who hate the word “race” might consider focusing their rage against institutions more influential than people who comment here. For example, the federal government spends billions to collect and make available Census data sorted by race and the once President of the United States, Barack Obama entitled his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."
Thanks for your powerful response. Today I listened to the episode again for the third time, and I have decided to concede. You and Shelby are right. You have to fight situations like that on a human level like they did during the Civil Rights Movement with King. Everyone together. It means more to fight racial demagoguery with an army standing on Truth regardless of what the soldiers look like. It means more to your enemies and the rest of the world.
The Poetic Truth is what many blacks and liberals build on and it breeds corruption. But the Literal Truth unites and is undefeated. It transcends beyond this world. Thanks for challenging me, Michael.
"the Civil Rights Movement with King"
Ah, but Martin Luther King Jr. viewed equality in a definite way. To him, black people were deserving of equality because they were human beings, not because they were black.