You do read a lot of opposition to the validity of IQ testing. There are also attacks on the notion of objective truth and objective standards from the far left fringe as well. Most of my life, I have counted myself as a part of the left, and my Political Compass test came up as center-left when I took it. It's the Far Left I would object to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwZ651i5vls
you definitely hear "Everyone has the right to a safe and stable home life" / "Kids deserve equal opportunity in schools" - all attempts at preventing the damage being cited here (or rather, getting the outcomes seen in the study)
Then why the opposition to school choice?
Because 'school choice' is a loaded political term for defunding the public school system these people depend on so that the money earmarked for these systems gets handed out to private or charter schools, thus leaving the public system in a worse place, especially when the public system must take the worst students while charters can dismiss them. In other words you're socializing your losses and privatizing your winnings.
Even then, the "opposition" is more like healthy skepticism. Even in liberal Chicago we have a charter school boom and thus far the results aren't impressive especially when you consider they benefit from the 'cream of the crop' issue defined above. They can dump the low performing students onto CPS while enjoying the test scores and metrics more motivated students or the students without learning disabilities or the students when more involved parents can produce.
But no, we're not going to defund CPS entirely overnight and hand out its budget in its entirety to charters. That's not "opposition" that's sane thinking. And yes, if charters can't deliver the goods and if they cannot deal with the worst students or improve them, then they have failed and shouldn't be subsidized by the taxpayer. My tax dollars shouldn't be an entitlement to those with experimental and untested educational theories who can fill out an application to create a school. You have to earn it by showing your methods produce results - with all the kids, not the cherry picked one. That's what they currently don't seem to be able to do. Even then we still give them money hoping they do someday or that the added competition creates a stronger educational dynamic.
That said, many charter schools are just a ploy to get taxpayers to fund weirdo religious schools. A lot of charters are extensions of churches/mosques/temples or ethnic groups (often with religiosity as the main motivator). That isn't exactly the education revolution you're looking for here in many cases.
The worst of the worst disruptive students have an outsized negative impact. If I were such a parent, I would want to have a choice of schools. You just want to sacrifice the choice of the economically disadvantaged for the sake of the existing school institution.
My tax dollars shouldn't be an entitlement to those with experimental and untested educational theories who can fill out an application to create a school.
Your tax dollars are already an entitlement. You're just restricting the degree of choice someone has about how it's spent -- especially economically disadvantaged people.
And yes, if charters can't deliver the goods and if they cannot deal with the worst students or improve them, then they have failed and shouldn't be subsidized by the taxpayer.
There should be schools that don't have to take all students. This puts market pressure on students to maintain a reputation which makes them eligible for charters, as well as market pressure on parents to influence their children to make them eligible for charters. If parents can get their kids into an environment away from disruptive students and more conducive to learning, and the parents are satisfied, then that should be enough.
There's a parallel here. If you aren't allowed to "fire" your politicians, then you can't expect good results from them. Likewise, if you aren't allowed to "fire" your educators, you can't expect good results from them either.
It's not against the narrative of the right in general. The US political right likes the narrative of the early 20th century. It's only the Far Right extreme which doesn't like it for going against the idea that race has a major influence on intelligence.
why doesn't it fit the 'left' narrative which seems to categorize humans based on their social class?
Well, for one thing, to accept it is to give credence to IQ and intelligence testing. Once that is done, then you have to give credence to a lot of other inconvenient studies. Also, it's part of a larger picture that supports the idea of assimilation over cultural isolation. It's also pro-military.
It doesn't really matter whether you give credence to IQ testing or not.
If you do: It's clear that african americans have been marginalized, seeing as the results are separate from ethnicity as proven by the earlier study.
If you don't: Square one of your given ideologies.
> It's not against the narrative of the right in general. The US political right likes the narrative of the early 20th century. It's only the Far Right extreme which doesn't like it for going against the idea that race has a major influence on intelligence.
It's against the narrative of the right as their platform is behind almost all of the marginalization of african americans.
Oh yes, it does. It points the finger at whose policies are to blame for the reversal of improving fortunes for certain communities in the US.
If you do: It's clear that african americans have been marginalized, seeing as the results are separate from ethnicity as proven by the earlier study.
If you study immigrant and ethnically/culturally separate communities all around the world and all across history, two clear patterns show through. 1) Often a minority group's leaders keep their group culturally isolated to keep their local power. 2) Economic success of a minority group is linked to the degree of assimilation and integration into economic and cultural life of the surrounding culture.
The pattern across history is often that groups marginalize themselves.
It's against the narrative of the right as their platform is behind almost all of the marginalization of african americans.
Many african americans would disagree.
Contrast that with the republican party, how well are poor whites represented in the party (aside from near-constant lip service)?
ETA: Unless, of course, you come at it from another angle that doesn’t acknowledge the race issues but tries to solve the resulting problems—“schools need funding”, “kids need school lunches”, “careless gentrification is harmful”, &c.
It’s also axiomatic on the left that all cultures are equally effective at raising successful, healthy children. The German study suggests that culture matters, which counters this axiom.
No, it's not. In fact, both results of studies showing such differences and the factors likely producing them are frequent matters of discussion on the left.
> It’s also axiomatic on the left that all cultures are equally effective at raising successful, healthy children.
Also not true, though the left (unlike the right) is unlikely to limit it's consideration of “culture” to a narrow set of values that parents of certain ethnic backgrounds are presumed to have or not have, and consider the sources of culture influences much more broadly than the right does.
> The German study suggests that culture matters,
It is quite consistent with the idea that physical and broad social context matters, and that broad aspects of the physical context to which various groups are selectively subjected, as well as elements of the broad US social context, are particularly harmful to and preserve the disadvantage of various historically disadvantaged groups is actually more widely accepted as established fact on the left than the things you mislabel as axiomatic.
That's because it's an irrelevant classification.
> It’s also axiomatic on the left that all cultures are equally effective at raising successful, healthy children. The German study suggests that culture matters, which counters this axiom.
Assume you would do these tests on Irish Americans in the mid-1900s, or Italian Americans in the late 1900s, and compare to other groupings of people. Assuming similar results:
Would you say the results say anything about Irish or Italian blood or Irish or Italian culture being less intelligent?
Or would you say that the results could be rooted in something closer to economic standing or housing area or a number of other factors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
However, even the above can just be used to maintain the tinfoil conspiracy theory about jews running the world. So.... you cant get any useful conclusion with this data, even if you use the data as it is (i.e. to say "on average", and never use it to guess a certain person's intelligence based on ethnicity).
Also, the genes responsible for skin color,afaik, has nothing to do with the intelligence of that human. Otherwise, there would literally be a cap on iq for whiter or darker skinned humans. But there is not, any ethnicity can produce stupid individuals and geniuses as well.
https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2002/10/01/race...
I am not well read enough on the subject to have my own opinion. My summary of his words: The average score of an IQ test is defined as 100, so the raw intelligence each score represents changes over time as population intelligence changes over time. Some nations have seen an increase in average IQ of 20 points. There is a difference of IQ between African Americans and the rest of the US population, but that can be explained as being socially isolated, and the same difference can be found in other socially isolated populations.
* Edit: I am embarrassed to have linked to such a publication, but will not modify my original words.
No, don't be. Don't be swayed by guilt by association. That is a tool of oppressors. Evaluate information and arguments on their merits. You can't keep ideologies honest if you're not allowed to evaluate and possibly "fire" them and seek alternatives.
Are you wedded to the "flag" or "label" or to the principles represented by them?
• Why Science and Experience Command That You Buy an 'Assault Rifle'
• An Eagle Scout Explains the Fatal Folly of Taking the ‘Boy’ out of Boy Scouts
• Liberalism Must Be Destroyed
Draw your own conclusions on bias.
Edit: To those downvoting, why? If I'm in the wrong to point this out and let people draw their own conclusions please comment and let me know why.
Simply because the website publishes other ideas that you disagree with, doesn't mean that the author is fundamentally incorrect in his reasoning.
Ad hominem attacks are never good.
Do you find context to be completely irrelevant when engaging in political discussion?
It's reasonable to evaluate a source before you trust what comes out of that source.
For example, I have ample experience being lied to by Donald Trump and therefore I feel comfortable ignoring most of what he says or assuming it's a lie.
There is too much information in the world today to not rely on filters like the reputation of and your experience with the source.
Only in that they reveal the intellectually dishonest.
It's mostly fear mongering under the pretext of "science" by using a medium article that attempts to estimate the likelihood of a group attempting to overthrow the US government based on the fact that two "overthrows" have been attempted (Revolutionary and Civil wars).
It also has a good amount of liberal bashing and partly through it we get to the real reason it was written which was to plug the authors book.
The summary on Amazon is as follows:
"America’s growing political and cultural divisions have finally split the United States apart. Now, as the former blue states begin to collapse under the dead weight of their politically correct tyranny, a lethal operative haunted by his violent past undertakes one last mission to infiltrate and take out his target in the nightmarish city of Los Angeles, deep in the heart of the People’s Republic of North America"
Basically the author is trying to scare me, justify those fears with "science", give me an enemy to focus my fear on, and then sell me a book which will both make the author money and give me the satisfaction of living out a fantasy scenario in which all of my fears were correct and I can feel like a good guy.
In summary, I would say that this article is far outside the bounds of reasonable discourse and should not be read by anybody.
I didn't know that, and apparently neither did the poster of that link.
> Or do you think those headlines are outside the bounds of reasonable discourse?
My only intention was to point out potential bias. Now that you mention it though, no, I don't think a headline like "Liberalism Must Be Destroyed" is making a good faith effort to start a reasonable discourse. I think it's pandering to the kind of destructive tribal political think that has rendered productive political discourse basically nonexistent these days. And I would say the same if the title was "Conservatism Must Be Destroyed"
Edit: I read the articles. Those headlines might honestly be understating the level of bias. I don't event want to sully HN with that level of pathological tribal political nonsense. For example, regardless of your opinion on guns (I own one personally), to pretend like this is what healthy political discourse looks like is completely unacceptable.
> Ignore the liberals who want an America where you disarmed and defenseless against the tyranny they dream of imposing. Ignore the hateful teens MSNBCNN spotlight and the Hollywood virtue signalers who harangue you from behind armed guards. Ignore the blue falcon Democrat vets who think their tour in Iraq means they earned some sort of moral authority to dictate to you what guns you do and don’t need. If that’s how it works, I did 27 years, so doesn’t my guidance that you should totally buy an AR-15 count? No? Oh, right – their vetsplaining is just manipulative liberal baloney.
> Instead, be guided by science. The science, supported by experience, make clear what you need to do. Buy guns and ammunition. Get an AR-15.
> Gee, why do liberals hate science so much?
Funny, but I've seen such headlines from the Far Left directed at centrist liberals!
To compound that, a lot of urban areas that are "controlled by the left" are at the mercy of their state governments for a lot of funding and the ability to make major changes. Some states are disallowing their cities from enforcing their own minimum wage increases while also enshrining discrimination as legal.
Expecting cities to be able to take on a national issue stemming from the enslavement of millions of people and the subsequent economic subjugation of said people is like expecting developers to be able to take on decades old technical debt while completing their day to day work.
Control of what, exactly? Inheriting a broken series of communities from the weight of the history of slavery? Let's remember the US's history of slavery and Jim Crow did to these communities and how hard the urban north fought against it while the south reveled in it.
Also let's remember northern urban African-Americans didn't live under the constant threat of lynching like their southern counterparts did, so the conservative handling of black communities was far worse historically and a lot of the northern urban systems were overwhelmed by southern migration to the north to escape these very social issues! Its like chasing jews out of your country than laughing at the jewish ghettos in the country next door.
>Poles and Italians were able to increase their average IQ's to parity with the US as a whole in that period.
People without a history of being slaves here and, of course, people with white skin. This isn't apples to apples.
I really think you're missing the forest for the trees here in some hamfisted attempt to blame everything on the bogeyman "of the left." You can't just dismiss racism and the legacy of the Jim Crow era as a non-existent factor in the lives of black communities.
As for progress peaking in the 60s lets remember how Republicans treated blacks during and after the civil rights movement. Its no coincidence.
Lee Atwater on using blacks as society's scapegoats to push for tax cuts and other unrelated policies by driving race hate as much possible in he GOP's Southern Strategy.
You start in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘Nigger.’ That hurts you. It backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff and you get so abstract. Now you talk about cutting taxes and these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that’s part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. Obviously sitting around saying we want to cut taxes and we want this, is a lot more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than nigger nigger. So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.
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Something we're doing to large numbers of urban children in the US is morally equivalent to putting lead in the water. It's largely been the political left in the US which has had control of large urban areas. The culture of the US in the 1st half of the 20th century wasn't harmful in this way. Poles and Italians were able to increase their average IQ's to parity with the US as a whole in that period. African Americans were also making progress in that period, but this stopped in the 1960's.
One of the historical patterns which comes across in Thomas Sowell's work is that of minority elites continuing the cultural isolation of their own group to maintain their own power. One of the chief tools of maintaining cultural isolation is identity politics.