Before the last AR Conference I attended, arguably the most prestigious MAINLINE psychology journal in America had a LEAD article by Arthur Jensen and Philippe Rushton spoke at the AR meeting.
Recently the New York Times had a lead article about Shockley, the inventor of the transistor and someone I knew, and it talked about his taking Jensen’s side on the race-IQ issue. It is hard to do a hit piece on the man who undeniably invented the transistor, but the NYT did it. They had to strain to do it.
The NYT made an astonishing admission, “The hereditarian view is now far more acceptable than it was in the 1970s when Shockley championed it.” No pessimist would ever notice that sentence. His eyes are too full of tears. I would never have IMAGINED it could appear in the NYT. But I also never imagined that one of my articles would ever be published in Pravda. So I live in a much different, and realer, world than the ones who call themselves “Realists.”
The NYT went on to quote JENSEN to prove their point.
“Realists” forget what Jensen’s reception was when he did an issue of the Harvard Psychology Review (?). He had assumed, like everybody else, that “modern anthropologists had proven that the races were equal in innate abilities.” He was to do an article on this. Then he found that there was NO evidence AT ALL of this. The fact that EVERYBODY believed it is shown by the fact that he devoted the entire issue 200-page issue of the journal to this subject.
Harvard tried to get all the copies back and burned the ones they did get back.
Book burning. Openly.
Many a time I was told that the hereditarian idea was hopeless. Now the pessimist side, and it DOES seem to be a SIDE, screams that no one can know it.
In the early 1960s I was in grad school in economics. One of my professors was Warren Nutter, one of the top specialists in Soviet economics. The CIA and academia agreed on one thing: the USSR was catching up with the US in production. If you were the CIA and your budget depended on the Soviet threat, would you have called it a paper tiger?
Long before the USSR fell, pretty well everybody was on board with Nutter. As one fellow-student used to say to pro-Communists, “You mean you want the whole ECONOMY run like the United States Post Office?”
No, contrary to what the New York Times will tell you and pessimists will swear to, Nutter did not win this alone, nor did Jensen.
In the long run, in the real world, “Realists” are always wrong. Like futurologists, they play for the market NOW. Their tummy hurts so all is lost. Futurologists say what will get them grants in Futurology NOW.
I base my futurology on the futures I remember living through.
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
#1 by Mark on 03/26/2007 - 4:49 pm
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“The CIA and academia agreed on one thing: the USSR was catching up with the US in production. If you were the CIA and your budget depended on the Soviet threat, would you have called it a paper tiger?”
One thing I’ve learned on here is that to trust anyone with a vested interest in their job, don’t trust what they say. I see the same scenario being played out with terrorists and our present CIA’s claims of the massive, indestructable terrorist threat we now face. If they weren’t getting paid to single people out as terrorists then maybe I would believe them.
#2 by Trager Smith on 03/30/2007 - 5:40 pm
Bob, the left is quietly giving up on equality, like it quietly gave up on central planning. I was in the Revolutionary Book Store in Manhattan, proudly Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, in September and asked to see the books beating a drum for central planning. There were none. There were plenty of books accusing “capitalism” of trying to force a universal McDonalization and Disneyfication on the world and as causing increasing inequality. Yes, the leftist belief in equality continues. When I told the proprietor my observation about the lack of panting for central planning and said that leftist today are opposed to capitalism because of its universalist ambitions (and that the opposition to the war in Iraq made them mad because they would be quite content if the Iraqis choose whatever form of gummint they want and most definitely did not want America imposing “democracy” upon them, the proprietor was quite interested.
But he’s not quite ready to give up on equality. When I told him that the left would abandon equality, too, as having failed just like central planning, he suddently became “busy.”
Watch for the little signs. Notice that antt-war rallies have fewer “Against War and Racism” banners.
The left will side with the particularists, the right with the universalists. The only serious racial egalitarians are on the right. They want us all to be saved, irregardless of race. The left just wants to have jobs promoting equality. Remember, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were more commies in West Germany (mostly professors) than in East Germany (zero).
Sure, the past success of 20TH CENTURY leftist rent-seeking for equality continues in the present. There are more than zero true believers among the left. This is called culture lag. And there’s a whole industry still living off it. (Didn’t a certain book, A Plague on Both Your Houses, once say something along these lines?) It’s the passion that has left the 20TH CENTURY left.
Bob, join me in being a 21ST CENTURY leftist.