Posted on 01/25/2016 1:57:46 PM PST by jazusamo
The latest tempest in a teapot controversy is over a lack of black nominees for this year's Academy Awards in Hollywood.
The assumption seems to be that different groups would be proportionally represented if somebody were not doing somebody else wrong. That assumption carries great weight in far more important things than Academy Awards and in places more important than Hollywood, including the Supreme Court of the United States.
In an earlier era, the groupthink assumption was that groups that did not succeed as often, or as well, were genetically inferior. But is our current groupthink assumption based on any more hard evidence?
Having spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups around the world, I have never yet found a country in which all groups -- or even most groups -- are even roughly equally represented in most endeavors.
Nor have I been the only one with that experience. The great French historian Fernand Braudel said, "In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally." A study of military forces around the world failed to find a single one in which in which the ethnic makeup of the military was the same as that of the society.
My own favorite example of unrepresentativeness, however, is right at home. Having watched National Football League games for more than 50 years, I have seen hundreds of black players score touchdowns, but I have never seen one black player kick the extra point.
What are we to conclude from this? Do those who believe in genetics think that blacks are just genetically incapable of kicking a football?
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
And all he is doing in this article is rehashing THE BELL CURVE.
In fact we could divide FR up into Forums dedicated to “only if you agree with this”.
So then what would distinguish FR from the du. :)
You mentioned IQ. And Sowell certainly has it in spades.
(Pun not intended)
I'd add a fourth category, which is the ability to think logically. It's not the same as IQ because, in my experience, plenty of people with average IQ's can think logically, while many people with 135+ IQ's (professors, artists, journalists) frequently fail the tests of logic.
Read some of the replies in this thread. ;)
Yep, I hear you and I’ve read them all. :)
Sowell was a communist in his 20s. Until he can explain his recent relapse in style and substance in his NRO hit piece against Trump, everything he writes will now be suspect.
It’s no secret he was a Marxist in his 20s, he’s written about it for many years and admitted the error of his ways.
Being technical about his NRO “hit piece” it has nothing to do with NRO, he’s a syndicated columnist and that piece and others regarding Trump are published weekly in hundreds of newspapers and websites weekly.
Because he has an opinion different than my own about Trump does not make his brilliance suspect to me.
He joined with the group of 22 for the NRO Special Edition that specifically targeted the Trump candidacy. His article started off with Alinskyite sophistry and logical fallacies, and only got worse.
I've read Sowell's articles since June of 1981, and that recent one was a plunge into the abyss for him.
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