Posted on 02/06/2004 1:30:19 PM PST by presidio9
AMERICAN academic Charles Murray is a real trooper. It doesn't matter how many people call him a racist, Nazi-esque brain-weigher.
He keeps churning out books that aren't afraid to call a spade a spade and a nigger a nigger.
Oh, I'm sorry. Did I just say nigger? How scientifically incorrect of me. What I meant to say was "biologically inferior".
This was the thesis of The Bell Curve, which was co-written by Murray in 1994. In it he scientifically "proved" that African Americans were dumber than whites or Asians for genetic reasons.
So what if the IQ testing he used to measure intrinsic intelligence included questions on trigonometry? Knowing about computational geometry is something you're either born with or you aren't. It has absolutely nothing to do with your level of education. In fact the word on the street is that Murray's first words as a little white infant were "cosine ratio".
Back in 1984, meanwhile, the academic shock jock caused a similar outcry with Losing Ground, in which he argued that the US government should abolish social security payments to poor adults because it encouraged intellectually inferior single mothers to reproduce.
Welfare schmelfare. Let them eat crack.
Chuck's new book, catchily entitled Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800BC to 1950, unites his low opinion of women and non-whites into a single mighty raspberry.
In it, he proves – once again completely scientifically – that the only people to have ever achieved anything of significant artistic and scientific worth are dead white males.
While it's a bold (and no doubt unit moving) thesis, critics who have accused Murray of repeatedly parading ugly old prejudices in pseudo-scientific drag will have a field day with this one. Human Accomplishment relies on a geriatric 19th century statistical method known as historiometry, which involves counting words in reference books to see who gets the most mentions.
As a result, 97 per cent of Murray's Top 4002 are male Europeans and North Americans.
What he refuses to acknowledge is that history tends to be written by the victors: as long as deadish white males rule the world, their lives will be over-recorded at the expense of their underlings.
An SBS documentary on the clitoris that screened last Friday night offered a fascinating insight into the political exclusion of the clitoris from medical and scientific manuals right up until 1948 when it was excised from Gray's Anatomy, the surgeon's bible.
Anyone for a textual clitorectomy? Given our combined interest in competitive events and extreme prejudice, it's not surprising people are pitting genders and races against each other in order to make a quick buck.
But even the tackiest reality TV programs offer a level-ish playing field. In Bumfights, for instance, desperate hobos are only filmed fighting other desperate hobos.
Murray, however, doesn't care that some sectors of society might have had trouble curing diseases, inventing polyphonic music or writing Macbeth because they weren't allowed out of their kitchens or their leg-irons.
White men are the winners, he trumpets, followed closely by a cackled "na na na na na naa".
It's telling that his survey stops at 1950 – just before feminism and civil rights gave non-dead, white males more room to flex their scientific and creative muscle.
Also intriguing is the notion that coverage automatically equals accomplishment.
While coverage might mean you are genuinely accomplished, it could also mean you have a good spin merchant, own the publishing company or happen to be Kylie Minogue's bum. As Iraq's gigantic stockpile of WMD shows, column inches are not necessarily the best indicator of substance.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'm off to use historiometry to prove that Charles Murray doesn't exist. I'm only going to use resource material written by Pakistani separatist lesbians, but I will make sure they're all familiar with the sine rule.
Absolutely NOT. More likely that he was ( is ) dark skin and dark hair. On early ikons from Orthodox Church he is almost black.
It's admittedly a difficult case to make absent of any accurate painting or other artistic record of Jesus by a contemporary. That said however, the simple and known fact of the region where he came from suggests with virtual certainty that he was neither black nor pale white blue eyed/blonde haired. If we assume Jesus shared the genetic traits of Mary, we can know for certain that he was ethnically Jewish and from the north of Israel, a region where the people of the time are known to have shared Jewish and Roman-to-southeast-European genetic traits.
So what is the most likely image? Brown or black hair and moderately pigmented though caucasian skin. Orthodox icons are also somewhat unreliable for the reasons that (a) the oldest ones have with time itself darkened in all of their shades due to about 1,800 years of candle smoke and (b) the art styles and paints at the time, as with most pre-renaissance paintings, paid substantially less attention to realism than the art of more modern periods. For this same reason, you can find all sorts of icons today of medieval saints from northern russia that appear black as well.
You have undoubtedly read about Alexander the Great. Egypt was one of his acquisitions. The place stayed in Greek hands until the Romans took over.
Being "Jewish" is not a race. It's a religion, a history, etc.
Pekinese and Greyhound dogs are of the same species, they can and do interbreed to produce viable offspring. But they are in no way equal physically and mentally.
Take a white "tribe" and transplant them into Subsaharan Africa around 2000 B.C., or a black "tribe" and transplant them into western Europe at the same time, and the geography, climiate and biology of the area would result in the black tribe behaving like whites and the white tribe behaving like subsaharan Africans.
So if I take a pack of Pekinese and let them hang out at the dog track, eventually they will become champion racers? That's absurd.
No, white folk only adopted Middle Eastern religions after Zeus and Odin failed them; white people did the same with gun powder, writing, medicine, and mathematics.
Regarding "pharoah", the Greeks eliminated the previous ruling family when they took over. The set up one of their own as pharoah. Many tens of thousands of Greeks moved into the country. Things happened.
Why would you demean yourself??? The reason Asians excel in CERTAIN subjects and not in others doesn't have to do with genetics. For example, the Japanese language and number system is ideal for learning and comprehending abstract mathematical thought in an economic manner, easier and faster to grasp than in English. If his theory held any salt, Eskimos would have an empire the size of China. The guy is a charlatan pedling snake oil to a thirsty demand of egotism and lack self worth.
Saddat's degree of pigmentation has no bearing whatsoever on Jesus'. In fact, recently reported genetic tests have determined that the Jews are, for the most part, identical to the Kurds (in the same manner that the Irish and the Basque folks are the same). The Kurds are an early Indo-European group.
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