And if it is here already, it doesn't hurt for it to appear again.
Posted on 04/09/2012 1:11:54 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Edited on 04/09/2012 6:18:18 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
I didn
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Note the line mentioning race versus culture. This is not a race problem, but a cultural problem. The problem is the black-urban-gangsta sub-culture and cultural identity, not race or racial identity.
You/re welcome! No trouble at all, and i hope you enjoy the article :)
Eric Holder said whites were too cowardly to have an honest discussion about race. I haven’t heard his comment, if any, on the sacking of Derbyshire.
Last year, a black robbery suspect was killed by police in my town. He repeatedly refused orders to get out of a car, then made a sudden move. Black eyewitnesses agreed with police accounts of what happened. An investigation resulted in a finding of justifiable homicide. The incident resulted in black leaders and others publicly sharing their experiences being treated rudely by police. It seemed a visceral thing for them.
The leaders and the white mayor agreed to have a multiracial honest conversation about race. Two weeks ago there were color photos in the
paper of smiling participants in the talks, oops, and their “facilitators.”
Come to find out, the U.S. Department of Justice got involved in the community brouhaha, and provided the facilitators. I’ll find out the local Interfaith Council representative’s take on the talks at a meeting tomorrow.
So writes John Derbyshire. I gather he has been expelled from NR. The reason is not exactly clear to me....
However, it was just such stuff as exemplified in the above italics that on occasion rendered Derbyshire utterly unappealing to me on the pages of NR. So often I could find myself in sympathy with his views; and then he'd pop out with a statement like the above....
Very off-putting. To say the least.
It seems that Derbyshire has succumbed to "the spirit of the age," characterized by (among other things) the common expectation that science alone has all the answers.
Which in the end would seem to lead to a reduction of everything that exists to the statements and techniques of science. But since science to very large degree is about rendering reality into terms of abstract language — thereby giving us a "once-remove" description of Reality itself — on what basis should we expect science to be "exhaustive" in its descriptions? If its method requires it to dispense with all things immaterial and/or spiritual, does this mean that all things immaterial and/or spiritual instantly disappear from the real a/k/a natural world?
For Derbyshire, I gather, there seemingly are no "upstream variables." The world exhausts itself in chemistry, mechanics, physics and nothing more.... In the end, we humans are effectively only highly sophisticated machines, "robots"....
And I gather that is the defining difference between the worldview of a John Derbyshire, and the worldview of a Mark Steyn....
Myself, I tend to be found in Mark Steyn's camp....
JMHO FWIW
Thank you ever so much for posting this thought-provoking article, reaganaut1!
This was such an excellent post by Steyn, that all I can really think to say about it is: totally excellent.
Steyn is so articulate he actually leaves blabbermouth me speechless. It’s very weird, it’s like he says it all and then there is nothing else to say!
His dig about Taki being on the Masthead is PRICELESS! I wonder how long that will last? But Taki must be funding them, no?
I don’t know why he associates with those wimps at NR. Oh well, as Dr. Johnson said, “A man is a fool who writes for anything but money.”
I'm surprised and disappointed that "Taki" is on the masthead of NR, though.
See 27 which was meant for you
Perhaps Steyn works through some introspection in this piece. He mentions that Derb fell outside the parameters that are mandated by our current culture. Suppose he feels that, being left behind, he fits snugly within that culture. Should he question his impact on that culture?
Steyn doesn’t need NR. I have a feeling that he’ll be making a move on principle.
I don’t agree with the premise of the Derbyshire article. Having worked with rural Appalachian whites who were diagnosed as retarded - back in the day when they used that word - because they were so severely culturally deprived that they could barely speak intelligibly and lived one step above chimps, if that, I think the black problem is basically cultural. Granted, the gene pool by now may not be at its greatest, so some of the raw material isn’t good to start with (just as among the Appalachian whites, many of whom were in fact the product of multi-generational incest). But if blacks learned standard English and thus could master the concepts for math, and were expected to behave in society just like everybody else, I think you’d see the supposed IQ difference disappear in a couple of generations.
However, Derbyshire wrote an interesting article, and it could provoke a good discussion. Steyn was absolutely correct in his comments on it.
You ought to read “The Bell Curve” from cover to cover.
Whatever you think you know about IQ testing and nature vs. nurture, will be useful to your understanding, but the book goes further.
In the end, how they got the way they are, doesn’t detract from the fact they are that way. And we are stuck with it.
The book even deals with public policy recommendations for the true situation.
Hint: They don’t recommend further dumbing down high school and college, so people with IQs averaging 85 can feel good about themselves.
To quote Tom West on Plato's Apology of Socrates:
Telling the truth is hard, for in order to do so, one must know what the truth is. The Apology of Socrates show that Socrates, more than anyone else in Athens, devotes his life to the task of seeking through conversation the truth about all things. Such an effort demands a rigorous and constant application of the mind and a renunciation of conventional pursuits. This is what Socrates calls philosophizing. . . . And since he insists upon speaking out publicly before the young men of the city, he will be perceived a a corruptor of the young. As if to show that it cannot after all be done, Socrates will half-heartedly try to bring together subtle truth and beautiful persuasion in his speech. His inevitable failure leads directly to condemnation and the death sentence.
And to quote Pope Benedict:
When one looks at the history of the dogma of the Trinity as it is reflected in a present-day manual of theology, it looks like a graveyard of heresies, whose emblems theology still carries around with it like the trophies from battles fought and won. But such a view does not represent a proper understanding of the matter, for all the attempted solutions that in the course of a long struggle were finally thrown out as dead ends and, hence, heresies are not just mere gravestones to the vanity of human endeavor, monuments that confirm how often thinking has come to grief and at which we can now look back in retrospective - and, in the last analysis, fruitless - curiosity. On the contrary, every heresy is at the same time the cipher for an abiding truth, a cipher we must now preserve with other simultaneously valid statements, separated from which it produces a false impression. In other words, all these statements are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.
I don’t like Derbyshire after reading some of his past comments about the Irish, of which I have heritage, which sounded racist. I think a lot of his NRO articles were somewhat silly. But it wouldn’t have mattered if he had omitted the IQ thing. Just mentioning the fact that crime among young Black males is almost out of control and a national disgrace is enough to get anyone censored.
You are thus far, one of the few who got it.
” Steyn doesn’t need NR. I have a feeling that he’ll be making a move on principle.”
Or at the very least, he is indifferent about his NR relationship.
The inability to grasp math concepts is not dependent on learning English. Math is a language, in and of itself. The failure to grasp math concepts is a specific learning disability, where numbers have no meaning, like phonics having no meaning for a dyslexic student.
It seems to be hereditary. I’m just saying that from observing kids with the problem, I don’t have any proof to back up the hereditary component. These kids can’t even count items without touching each one as they say the number. That’s basically how you tell if the kid has dyscalculia. That’s what it is called.
And if it is here already, it doesn't hurt for it to appear again.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.