[beebuster2000]

bt

[Dudoight]

Pretty interesting. I don't disagree with his observations at all.

[IronJack]

The entire socialist structure is founded on denial, most egregiously, the denial of fundamental biological inequities that manifest in divergent social and economic strata. To the Left, these are signs that the system is wrong, and that all must be adjusted on its Marxist, procrustean bed. So-called "affirmative action" (which is neither, by the way) is a sterling example.

[Dust in the Wind]

Dumb as dirt bump

The elite do not understand, or perhaps more correctly refuse to admit, how very limited are the dull.

Lack of common sense is inherent in all IQ ranges.

[vanmorrison]

I agree with Reed's observations. The first time I encountered the ideas Reed describes was when I saw the film "Zardoz" in college. I later learned that the movie was based on the play "Return to Methuselah" by GBShaw. Readers here might find Shaws' conclusions shocking, yet inevitable.

Consider that, in the US, more people are murdered in cities like Detroit every year than the number of soldiers we've lost in Iraq. Who is the real enemy here?

[The Good Doctor]

And of course much of the "intellectual elite" and much of the social underclass comprise the Democratic party. (Warren Buffet, Rodney King etc.)

People with lots of brains and lots of money "team with" (i.e. use) people with little brains and little money to get the votes to reach into the pocket of people with regular brains and regular money (i.e. the rest of the Country).

[LeGrande]

I couldn't disagree more with the post. With only a few exceptions, most of the highly intelligent (educated) people that I know, are specialists. In their field of expertise, they are very good, but once out of their area of expertise they are generally below average in ability.

In my work I routinely run into highly intelligent people who suffer from severe tunnel vision. If their area of expertise can't fix the problem then as far as they are concerned there is discernible solution. They have to hire me to fix the problem :)

I have yet to meet the person who is equally at home with nano technology, Navajo, plumbing and climbing.

[bert]

Then there is Anita Hill. She was one of the bright cowboys. Discovered on the Oklahoma plains, declared to be a prodigy she was lauded with affirirmative action boosts up the chain to Yale and then to employment in DC.

When she arrived there and was cast out unprotected into the real world, there was a revelation. She was not bright. she was not any where near the equal of the really bright who congregate in DC. Really bright, black and otherwise got the promotions.

Anita Hill was at best only ordinary. She was used and then discarded by the mill that grinds up and discards what ever is politically expedient.

[schu]

Bump for later

[TN4Liberty]

The author assumes that "intellegence" is a single factor. I would argue that intellegence has many facets, and most people have specific areas in which their native intellegence is above average. Some intellegent people cannot "do math," but somehow manage to understand and troubleshoot mechanical systems better than the "math intellegent" people.

The second factor that the author ignores is the culture of hard work. Less gifted people can surpass more gifted people simply by working harder. The motivation to work hard is taught by the community, and may explain any stratification of results better than some assumption about somehow inbreeding groups based on intellegence.

[Agnes Heep]

I would tend to dispute the idea that people from the "underclass," as this article puts it, are somehow below average in intelligence. I think they confuse intelligence with knowledge. I've often said of this person or that, "Oh, he's very intelligent ... he just doesn't know anything." People who grow up in a one-parent environment devoid of intellectual stimulation where learning is stigmatized become deprived of the resources that make future learning difficult, if not impossible, and develop worldviews that are decidedly antisocial. Many of them have very high intelligence indeed, and unfortunately that intelligence gets used in the service of some rather undesirable goals.

[bd476]

Interesting read or food for thought before lunch?

The following statement is bothersome:

"...The cognitive elite tend to favor diversity and affirmative action. They say that they believe that all groups are equally intelligent, and furiously resist evidence to the contrary..."

One might wonder if the above statement is an educated reflection or could it be a personal, all encompassing condemnation of senior classmates from the editorialist's past?

[Tax Government]

If, generation after generation, the smartest take themselves out of the gene pool, the results will be just what we see.

The implication appears to be that smart people might isolate themselves, creating a distinct, self-sustaining high-IQ population.

About this, I would say: 1) it would take a very long time -- more than a few generations; 2) the genetic pressure for selection is low -- a lot of non-genetic factors, including birth-time events, help determine whether a particular individual is "intelligent"; 3) natural forces opposite it -- the process of sexual attraction causes complementary and opposite people to marry, and acts a leveling force; 4) trying to do this is not new -- humans have been self-selecting desirable traits forever; 5) let's try to do it -- self-selection should be encouraged; 6) the supposed winners may really be losers -- complaints about stratification are laughable, because what people usually call "intelligence" is more like a set of shared beliefs or social relationships, than any native ability that could be inherited.

Now, will somebody please bio-engineer inheritable genes for language learning and homemaking? I want my kids and grandkids to mine for spouses the world's pool of "unintelligent" people supposedly left behind by this intelligence-stratification process. By doing this, they will avoid marrying into the increasingly inbred, self-declared "intelligent" class, and help ensure genetic diversity for their own offspring.

[MissAmericanPie]

This is kind of a sky is falling senario. Actually, some of these thugs are keenly intelligent. I have found they have a keen sence of self preservation. It is the middle class that suffers, not the gated community elite. Attacks on their kids at school, in their own neighborhoods, at the mall, parks, etc.

Twenty of them arrived to attack my son one sunset evening, his crime? Returning their taunts over his sixth stolen bike. Fortunately, I had just pulled out of my driveway to pick him up from a friends house twelve houses down.

He was running down the street, leaned over, holding his side, the gang right behind him on their stolen bikes. I pulled up and he screamed, "Kill them Mom, kill them all". He had obviously been beaten, I asked if he was stabbed or shot, he said no. Interestingly enough, the gang leaders mom had followed to watch, what she was doing there I can't guess, they were blocks from their home. Maybe she was there to instruct, or admire, or protect.

I remember those possibilities going through my mind as I left my car and chased her and her brood down a drainage ditch, as they attempted to lose the enraged beast, loose on the street and closing the distance, me. The end result of this encounter was several of the group following the example of the ring leaders family, they moved from the area, in search of a far safer, more peaceful, neighborhood.

The middle class, can handle it, and so far, are doing a pretty good job of standing up and teaching some manners to gang members and their families. It use to be that these little encounters could be avoided. There was flight from the cities to the suburbs, now flight from the suburbs to the country or small towns. Now neighborhoods are uniting in neighborhood associations against gang impact and to preserve some resemblence of their normal quiet standard of living. Gangs are confronted whenever they show up on a block. They are questioned about what they are doing on that block if they are obviously not just passing through.

Not many can make the commute from country to city job, so the confrontations and incidents are growing. So far, the old belief about gangs has proven true, they are cowards that can't cut it one on one. They melt away when confronted and their loose association with each other isn't based on strong enough stuff to afford a solid foundation. Everyone in the area is determined that our neighborhoods will not be given over to them, period. With the unfortunate middle class as a buffer, the elite will be safe in their gated communities for a long time to come.

[boris]

In "The Marching Morons" by C. M. Kornbluth, a seedy salesman from our century is reawakened two hundred years in the future. He was frozen in a dentist's chair after an accident. The salesman, Barlow, quickly comes to learn that over the years intelligence was bread out of the human race by macho men and buxom women who cared more about looks then smarts. By now the vast majority of the people are idiots who are being controlled by the few intelligent people left. Barlow, who could sell ice to Eskimos, concocts a scheme to get rid of the losers. A sales campaign will promote Venus as a beautiful place to start a new colony. Those stupid enough to fall for the pitch will die aboard the phony spaceships (and probably burn up on reentry). The plan is clean and easy to implement. Barlow's price for all this is fair: absolute dictator of the whole world. He is given his share until the last of the morons is gone from Earth and then he himself is put aboard one of the ill-fated ship. After all, a mass murderer such as Barlow can not be left to live among the better people now left. The "Marching Morons" was the funniest story as Barlow, the mad salesman, learns about the new world he's stumbled into. One must suspend belief a long way to accept the fact that one man could do so much in a world gone so mad.

[doug9732]

Our highly intelligent people who do not reproduce ( like Condoleeza Rice for instance ) are gradually being replaced by immigrants, many of whom are also very capable people.

[LS]

This isn't a very logical argument. (I do tend to accept most of the "Bell Curve" evidence, BTW):

As much as AFF ACTION is wrong, if indeed there is "intellectual stratification" going on, does AFF ACTION not, in fact, counter that by putting people at Yale, Harvard, etc., who otherwise would never have gone there?

In the past, the kids of rich alumni could get in, regardless of grades. This made for a SOCIAL stratification, but an intellectual diversity. That is increasingly disappearing, in favor of INTELLECTUAL stratification and social diversity. Don't know which is better or worse.

It is absolutely clear--I teach at a midwest private U, probably what you'd call 4th tier (Ivys, large research Us, large state schools, small private Us). The intellectual level here is quite poor. There is little curiousity; less voluntary reading; and very little ideological diversity.

BOTTOM LINE: I don't think there is any question that the top-tier schools are, through testing, getting less and less intellectual diversity. A Yale kid doesn't have to deal with people who aren't his "brain" equals---and that's bad, because that's who he will employ. Ironically, AFF ACTION has, in fact, kept this from being worse, but for all the wrong reasons. AFF ACTION has put all sorts of, well, incompetent people into top universities for "diversity" purposes. So to a small degree, what the "brainiacs" are being exposed to is some kids of much lower intellectual abilities, but under the pretense that they are being exposed to different "races" and "cultures." But because the "diversity" kids are so weak academically, all it does is reinforce stereotypes that, in fact, these ethnic groups are stupid and incapable---which isn't the case.

[Cultural Jihad]

If, generation after generation, the smartest take themselves out of the gene pool, the results will be just what we see. This is the underclass. It exists. It is larger than most people suspect. It is dangerous.

Such conjecture belongs in a science fiction novel rather than a political discussion. H.G. Wells wrote of such a scenario in his "The Time Machine" wherein the intellectual and plutocratic elites became illiterate cattle for the illiterate, productive, cannibalistic workmen.

[Travis McGee]

If the dam finally breaks, what then?

CW2 Ping

[tpaine]

bumpkin