Friday, October 24, 2008

Pigmentocrats

DAVID SAID:

“Racial differences caused by climate variations are not restricted to climate adaptations. For example, cold weather played a role in increasing the brain size of European hominids, but once the extra cerebral matter was there, natural selection found ways to put it to work that had nothing to do with the weather.”

I’d like to see your evidence that encephalization is a climatic adaptation, not to mention your application of that claim to white superiority.

i) If encephalization confers a survival advantage, then how did hominids survive before they evolved bigger brains?

ii) "Hominids” occupy inhospitable regions through out world. If encephalization is an adaptation to environmental challenges, then that would apply with equal force to many different races, not just “European hominids.”

“Mixing races undoes the natural process of genetic mismatch weeding and "sets the clock back" by a dozen generations or more, since it will take that long, assuming that no more racial mixing occurs in the family line, to recover the inner harmony of the genotype.”

I also don’t see how your appeal to evolution justifies your opposition to interracial mating. As one evolutionary biologist explains:

“Physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, shape of the incisors, and stature vary geographically in humans, and they have been used by various authors to define anywhere from 3 to more than 60 ‘races.’ The number of races is arbitrary, for each supposed racial group can be subdivided into an indefinite number of distinct populations. Among Africans, for example, Congo pygmies are the shortest of humans, and Masai are among the tallest. Variation in allozyme allele frequencies among villages of the Yanomama tribe in Venezuela is as great as it is among the Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid ‘races” taken as a whole. The pattern of overall genetic variation among human populations, determined from proteins and other molecular markers, differs substantially from traditional racial divisions. Genetic differences among human populations consist of allele frequency differences only: at no known loci are ‘races’ or other regional populations fixed for different alles,” D. Futuyma, Evolution (Sinauer 2005), 220.

Continuing with David:

“There is no such thing as a ‘biracial child.’ Children who are called that actually have no race at all.”

Which just goes to show the fairly arbitrary character of racial classifications.

“If you changed your race, either of two things would happen to your IQ. If you remained at the same percentile in your new race as your old race, then you'd either be smarter or stupider, depending on whether the new race's average IQ was higher or lower than the other race's average IQ.__On the other hand, maybe you figure you can keep the same IQ by having a different spot on the "bell curve" of the new race than the one you had on the curve for the old race. In the latter case, you're not only changing your race, you'd also be changing your LUCK, and if you could do that, why not wish genius upon yourself while you're at it? And a pile of money. Wings, too.”

You’re confusing individual identity with group identity. A human being is not a statistical mean. My membership in a particular social group tells you precious little about my unique, individual characteristics. I might be a member of a football team. That tells you next to nothing about my athletic ability. I’m might be the star player or a backbencher.

“Your family is more closely related to you than most of your race is.”

That’s true with reference to offspring. However, families include in-laws as well as blood-relatives. Husbands and wives, mothers-in-law and fathers-in law, in addition to parents, children, and siblings.

Therefore, your racial argument breaks down since in-laws need not be members of the same race.

And, of course, a child can be related to more than one race if his parents belong to two different races.

“But the hominids of our times are largely characterized by race, which is proved by the fact that more hominid populations are found in clumps than between them.”

Of course, people tend to “clump” together for reasons of nationality or locality rather than race, per se. We generally prefer to live with the people we grew up with, went to school with, people of the same social class, people who speak the same language, &c.

This “clumping” can occur, by turns, in a racially homogenous environment (e.g. Norway) or a racially heterogeneous environment (e.g. New York, SoCal).

“Race is why emotional bonds evolved.”

I can’t form a close emotional bond with member of another race?

“Love evolved as an emotional pressure to remain in the service of someone else, or several someones else, when it would be contrary to your personal interest to do so.”

So I fall in love with a girl to remain in her “service”? It’s contrary to my “personal interest” to fall in love with the girl in question?

“It came from natural selection with events in which a person sacrificed his own interests to those persons most nearly related to him, so that his genes (incorporated in the bodies of those other people) would gain an advantage that they could not gain if the sacrifice had not been made.”

I don’t know what planet you live on, but in my world mating criteria have far more to do with who’s good looking, and not what race they are. Another criterion has to do with one’s bank account.

“That's why love causes people to do ‘crazy’ things, like willingly dying to save their children, to name an instance that might not seem all that crazy to most people. Biological relatedness is intrinsic to an emotional bond, and anyone who denies it is kidding someone... perhaps himself.”

What about military heroism—where one soldier will die for his biologically unrelated comrade?

“Being close to your White family members does not mean that you are AS CLOSE to the members of a different White family. But you are indeed ‘closer’ (emotionally) to that other White family than you could ever be to a Black family.”

You have a habit of making dogmatic assertions without any empirical evidence, and in the teeth of empirical evidence to the contrary. It’s perfectly absurd to say that a white man will be emotionally closer to any white family than he’ll be to any black (Asian, Latino, Indian, &c.) family.

“Being White DOES mean that you are related to me.”

By that token, I’m also related to Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Josef Mengele. Sorry to disappoint you, but that doesn’t begin to create an emotional bond.

“If your best friend is someone of another race, then you have had a very unusual life.”

An unusual life where? Iceland? Tibet? Paris? New York? SoCal?

“Cultural conditioning for White people is all about dispossessing them of their racial identity.”

Which doesn’t mean we should adopt your reactionary alternative.

“To the extent they still have it, they've had to oppose the conditioning of the parts of the ambient culture (which is created by Jews and disseminated via the media) that would have them discard it. The culture tells White people that race does not matter, that it's only skin color.”

To the contrary, the liberal establishment is fixated on race. And you are the mirror image of the liberal establishment. You share the same obsession with identity politics.

“There's a correlation between race and culture because culture originates in race. That is, a culture grows out of a race as your hair and fingernails grow from your body.”

That’s another absurd statement. Culture originates in many things—not least of which is geography.

In addition, Western civilization has many different cultures and ethnicities feeding into it. Same thing with the ANE.

“America originally was composed of White free citizens. Negroes did some labor, but the did not count insofar as America's founding went. All the Founding Fathers were White, not just some of them. Negroes neither made the decisions, nor participated in choosing the men who did make them. And because America was White, it prospered and grew strong enough to throw off colonialism and become independent - and do even better independent than under colonialism (something that not all former colonies can truthfully claim).”

Other issues to one side, let’s take two issues:

i) Western Civilization is a cross-cultural amalgam of Greco-Roman culture with Judeo-Christian culture. Do you include the Jewish input in your definition of “White”? Where does a Jewish book (i.e. the Bible) figure in your cultural synthesis?

ii) What about Latinos? What about Latin America? That was settled by another European colonial power. Is that white or non-white in your book?

“A grave mistake was made in the middle 19th century, when leaders in the North and in the South permitted Jewish bankers in Europe to turn America against itself in a bloody war, out of which both sides emerged burdened with war debt in the Jews' favor.”

Ah, yes, the International Jewish Conspiracy. Odd how that failed to prevent the Holocaust.

“But those mistakes occurred because Jews were not kept out of the United States, as they should have been.”

That “mistake” probably occurred because white settlers had a nasty habit of reading a book by Jews about a Jewish messiah. It’s set us back centuries from our noble Nordic-Teutonic pantheon. No wonder Thor no longer answers our prayers.

BTW, why do you have a Jewish name, David?

“Letting Jews come into America along with White immigrants was the original mistake of the United States, the mistake that led directly to the others.”

Notice that David is switching horses in midstream. All this talk of white bonding, but he complains that we allowed the wrong white immigrants to settle here. There are good white immigrants and bad white immigrants. And here I thought we were all one big family.

Isn’t in time that we identify the phenotype which distinguishes the right kind of white immigrant from the wrong kind of white immigrant? Without these genetic markers, how can we prevent ‘mismatches’ between right whites and Jacobite whites?

“Without the Jews, the Negroes would have been shipped back to Africa in the last half of the 19th century (at which time, they were willing to go).”

And I’m sure the Iroquois would be more than happy to ship you back to wherever your ancestors originally came from.

“There has been limited racial interbreeding, and although White people have been intimidated (with laws) to the point of fearing to show their distaste for mixed children (and for the White parents who helped to produce them), that distaste has not gone away. It remains, and you can see it in glances followed by a quick look-away. Once it was followed by a frown, but as I said, laws have intimidated White people to the point of making them fear to show what they really think.”

You mean, like the reaction many people have at the sight of skinheads and Klansmen and other “white nationalists”?

“Anyone who refers to White nationalism as supremacy has been getting too much misinformation from Jewish TV.”

Yes, the Mossad is beaming Zionist signals to my satellite dish. I think I’m watching a commercial for Count Chocula, but it’s really a subliminal message to vote for neocon candidates.

Speaking of which—why is the "Jewish media" so hostile to Bush's neocon foreign policy? And why isn't it doing more to support McCain's neocon foreign policy?

11 comments:

  1. No wonder Thor no longer answers our prayers.

    Priceless.
    Man, where do you find these guys?
    Oh yeah, the Internet.

    ReplyDelete
  2. then that would apply with equal force to many different races

    It does. Certain Asians and jews.

    “Physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, shape of the incisors, and stature vary geographically in humans, and they have been used by various authors to define anywhere from 3 to more than 60 ‘races.’ The number of races is arbitrary, for each supposed racial group can be subdivided into an indefinite number of distinct populations. Among Africans, for example, Congo pygmies are the shortest of humans, and Masai are among the tallest. Variation in allozyme allele frequencies among villages of the Yanomama tribe in Venezuela is as great as it is among the Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid ‘races” taken as a whole. The pattern of overall genetic variation among human populations, determined from proteins and other molecular markers, differs substantially from traditional racial divisions. Genetic differences among human populations consist of allele frequency differences only: at no known loci are ‘races’ or other regional populations fixed for different alles,” D. Futuyma, Evolution (Sinauer 2005), 220.

    Type: Lewontin's Fallacy into Google and see if that don't rebut this.

    Which just goes to show the fairly arbitrary character of racial classifications.

    How can we classify anything then?

    Everything is arbitrary in a certain sense. There can be no effective discourse when you continually resort to this type of tactic:

    The sky is blue.

    No, it's azure.


    That tells you next to nothing about my athletic ability. I’m might be the star player or a backbencher.

    You knew all about the distribution along the bell curve earlier and now you are pretending it doesn't exist!

    If you are on a football team I know you are a lot more athletic than the average Joe and it certainly tells me a lot about your athletic ability.

    That’s true with reference to offspring. However, families include in-laws as well as blood-relatives. Husbands and wives, mothers-in-law and fathers-in law, in addition to parents, children, and siblings.

    Therefore, your racial argument breaks down since in-laws need not be members of the same race.


    He was obviously talking about genetic family Mr. Carroll.

    That’s another absurd statement. Culture originates in many things—not least of which is geography.

    Yeah, that is why Black and White culture in America are soooo similar, because of similar positioning on the face of the globe.

    Notice that David is switching horses in midstream. All this talk of white bonding, but he complains that we allowed the wrong white immigrants to settle here. There are good white immigrants and bad white immigrants. And here I thought we were all one big family.

    Read him again.

    He was simply saying jews shouldn't have been allowed in.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow.

    A Reformed Protestant skinhead.

    ...

    I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that someone just might have a slightly deficient view of the implications of union with Christ.

    Enough said.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow!

    A Reformed Protestant Name Caller!

    Is that all ya'll are capable of?

    I used to be a SHARP and that was the only time I was ever a Skin.

    Also, please refrain from utilizing a term with which you are entirely unfamiliar. You obviously know nothing about Skins.

    In all of our discourse here, you can consider me unsaved and unreformed if it helps.

    Best,
    D

    ReplyDelete
  5. DANIELJ SAID:

    “It does. Certain Asians and jews.”

    That’s your claim, not David’s. How is your claim pertinent to David’s? It’s not.

    And you don’t bother to explain your restriction of the principle to “certain Asians and Jews.”

    Adapting to environmental changes isn’t limited to parts of the world inhabited by “certain Asians and Jews.”

    “Type: Lewontin's Fallacy into Google and see if that don't rebut this.”

    No, the onus is on you to turn that into an argument against Futuyma’s statement. And even the Wikipedia article you reference says that “Lewontin’s Fallacy” may not be a fallacy after all.

    “How can we classify anything then? __Everything is arbitrary in a certain sense. There can be no effective discourse when you continually resort to this type of tactic.”

    Some classifications are merely convenient.

    But if you’re going to argue for segregation based on your theory of race, then you need to come up with principled criteria for your classification scheme.

    “You knew all about the distribution along the bell curve earlier and now you are pretending it doesn't exist!”

    How is that relevant to segregation? It isn’t.

    Even if, for the sake of argument, we say that one race is smarter than another race, how does that justify segregation?

    To begin with, even if, ex hypothesi, whites on average are smarter than blacks, some blacks are smarter than some whites. So the mean average is irrelevant to individual comparisons.

    Moreover, how is that relevant to miscegenation? Are you claiming that a man and woman should not be allowed to marry (or mate) unless they both have the same IQ? A husband can’t be smarter than his wife, or vice versa?

    “If you are on a football team I know you are a lot more athletic than the average Joe and it certainly tells me a lot about your athletic ability.”

    Now you’re equivocating. It possibly tells you something about the difference between an athlete and a non-athlete.

    (Even that is deceptive since someone with athlete ability might not be an athlete. He didn’t try out for the team. Football bores him.)

    It tells you precious little about the difference between one athlete and another.

    “He was obviously talking about genetic family Mr. Carroll.”

    And what he was obviously talking about involves a major oversight and exception to his theory. He is claiming a correlation between degrees of consanguinity and emotional bonding.

    That’s obviously false. On the one hand, blood relatives can dislike each other. Some children hate their parents. Some kid brothers hate their big brothers.

    On the other hand, a man can love his wife (to whom he’s unrelated) more than he loves a blood relative.

    Pity you can’t keep track of his argument.

    “Yeah, that is why Black and White culture in America are soooo similar, because of similar positioning on the face of the globe.”

    Are you just playing dumb, or does this come naturally to you? To begin with, blacks and white didn’t originate in America. We’re immigrants.

    They brought their culture with them to America—a culture which originated in different lands with different environmental challenges.

    At the same time, it would also be simplistic for you to claim that colonizing the American wilderness didn’t modify their hereditary culture.

    You’re problem is that you’re a world-class twit. Instead of having a serious discussion, you content yourself with cutesy one-liners to deflect your opponent. You’re welcome to fritter away your vapid little life in trivia, but don’t waste my time with your aimless existence.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Pigmentocrats said, "I’d like to see your evidence that encephalization is a climatic adaptation, not to mention your application of that claim to white superiority."

    That the environment (i.e., the climate) played a role in the larger brain size of races evolved in Europe and northern Asia, is a reasonable inference. The brain is an organ vulnerable to freezing, and enlarged size is an adaptation in defense due to the higher ratio of mass to surface area. Likewise, the need to plan for winter's food scarcity would require planning and foresight, which are functions of the brain that a larger brain might do better than a smaller one.

    However, whether the cold winters had anything to do with it or not, it is a fact, observed in nature, that the races that evolved in colder climates have larger brains than do those that evolved in the tropics.

    You're not going to escape the truth of that important fact by questioning the theories that try to account for it.

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  7. Pigmentocrats said: "If encephalization confers a survival advantage, then how did hominids survive before they evolved bigger brains?"

    The same way other animals survive. By fighting when they can win. By running away when they cannot win. By hunting small game. By picking the fruit off trees.

    Larger brains brought new options, a greater range of adaptive responses. But that OBVIOUSLY does not mean that the adaptions of smaller brained species aren't sufficient to let them survive.

    The sheer strawman-ness of your arguments, and the gullibility of those who accept them, is amazing.

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  8. Pigmentocrats said: "Hominids occupy inhospitable regions through out world. If encephalization is an adaptation to environmental challenges, then that would apply with equal force to many different races, not just European hominids."

    Not all inhospitable regions are inhospitable in ways that are as readily improved by larger brains. For example, in much of Africa there are wet and dry seasons. But during the dry season, luck in hunting isn't worsened: it is IMPROVED. The hunters know that their game must go to the water hole to drink. So the hunters get there first and set up an ambush. During the rainy season, the difficulty of hunting goes back to what it normally is, and there is more starchy food for the African diet.

    In the cold northern climates, however, the hunter is in danger of freezing to death. A larger brain promotes survival simply because it has a higher mass to surface area ratio, meaning it retains heat better. And in the north, winter does not bring about improved hunting. There is nothing analogous to the watering hole where animals can be predicted to come.

    Hence, in the north, intelligence is a more felicitous redress to the environmental inhospitality than it is in Africa.

    So, you see, the hypothesized explanation for the larger brains of European hominids is reasonable. But WHETHER IT IS RIGHT OR WRONG, it remains true that European hominids DO have larger brains than African hominids. The difference in brain size has been scientifically established, and it does you little good to quibble over the reasonableness of the theories that are advanced to explain why that difference exists.

    You may PRETEND that you are refuting the difference by refuting some of the explanations for them, but you aren't going to fool many people that way.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Pigmentocrats said: I also don’t see how your appeal to evolution justifies your opposition to interracial mating. As one evolutionary biologist explains:

    QUOTE: “Physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, shape of the incisors, and stature vary geographically in humans, and they have been used by various authors to define anywhere from 3 to more than 60 ‘races.’ The number of races is arbitrary, for each supposed racial group can be subdivided into an indefinite number of distinct populations...” D. Futuyma, Evolution (Sinauer 2005), 220.
    ----- END OF QUOTE.

    Note that Sinauer is saying that the racial demarcations are matters of convention, but he is NOT saying that race itself is an artifact of those conventions. No, race is a real physical phenomenon, even though drawing up racial categories can be done in many ways at several different levels of genetic resolution.

    Suppose that Sinauer were speaking of color (as in the spectrum of light), as opposed to race. He might have said something like this:

    “The frequency of light varies continuously as one goes across the spectrum, and this has been used by various authors to define anywhere from 5 to more than 60 ‘colors.’ The number of colors is arbitrary, for each supposed color group can be subdivided into an indefinite number of distinct sub-colors...”

    Notice that none of that denies the existence of colors. It merely points out that categorizing colors is subject to convention, to agreement about the terms to be used.

    You have tried to make a specious, invalid argument from the words of someone whom you hold up as an authority.

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  10. Earlier, I said: “There is no such thing as a ‘biracial child.’ Children who are called that actually have no race at all.”

    Pigmentocrats said: "Which just goes to show the fairly arbitrary character of racial classifications."

    Correct. But that isn't the same thing as saying that race doesn't exist. The number of colors that can be recognized in the spectrum of light is likewise arbitrary. That doesn't mean that color doesn't exist.

    I'm not sure whether pointing this out is going to do you any good. You have a self-imposed blind spot on the subject of race. If I use the color spectrum analogy, you'd probably have no trouble grasping the principle that arbitrariness in convention is not the same thing as disproving the existence of the physical phenomenon to which the conventions apply. But the moment I change the subject back to race, you immediately forget that principle and resume your ignorant intransigence.

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  11. Earlier I said: “If you changed your race, either of two things would happen to your IQ. If you remained at the same percentile in your new race as your old race, then you'd either be smarter or stupider, depending on whether the new race's average IQ was higher or lower than the other race's average IQ. On the other hand, maybe you figure you can keep the same IQ by having a different spot on the "bell curve" of the new race than the one you had on the curve for the old race. In the latter case, you're not only changing your race, you'd also be changing your LUCK, and if you could do that, why not wish genius upon yourself while you're at it? And a pile of money. Wings, too.”

    Pigmentocrats said: "You’re confusing individual identity with group identity. A human being is not a statistical mean. My membership in a particular social group tells you precious little about my unique, individual characteristics. I might be a member of a football team. That tells you next to nothing about my athletic ability. I’m might be the star player or a backbencher."

    No, I did not get individual identity and group identity confused. I put them in proper relation to each other. I'd supposed that we were discussing individuals who were at the same percentile for IQ for their race. Since the races have different averages in IQ, a 97th percentile White is smarter than a 97th percentile Black. The odds of them both being at the 97th percentile are the same, but the White person is smarter than the Black one.

    There's another physics analogy I could make to demonstrate how a statistical quantity, regarding a great number of individual objects, would affect how you ought to treat the collective which a great many of such individual comprise.

    Consider a tank of compressed gas. Inside that tank, gas molecules are moving around, bouncing off each other and the canister walls. Of course, they aren't all moving at the same speed. Some of moving slowly. Some are moving faster. But their average speed is measured statistically as the temperature of the gas, or, if it is at thermal equilibrium with the gas, the canister which contains it. No matter the behavior of the individual atom, if the temperature of the collective is not within a safe range for you to handle the canister with your bare hands, then you had probably better wear gloves, or else leave it alone.

    This is again the same kind of decision you would have to make when trying to decide where to send your children to school, or where to settle with your family. You don't want to be harmed because you neglected to take precautions regarding the temperament of the races in your environment.

    ReplyDelete