there is no evidence that is not the case.
culture and race or even more tightly defined beyond race as specific ethnicities easily becomes chicken and egg circular...which is a product of which...and what about geographic isolation...and if groups have distinct physical differences then why not differing IQ aggregates....there is plenty of data to support that
likewise, I have known all my life that poverty may make achievement harder but is no rationale for culture implosion.
my own ancestors were utterly destroyed and hungry, destitute and broken after the Civil War and during Reconstruction but they never became predators nor embraced serial illegitimacy....never....it took two to four generations to recover the wealth that was lost but they never disintegrated and went feral culturally
to believe that IQ and achievement are cultural driven alone mostly is wishful thinking....even Sowelll knows this and has stated as such
I thought buyawa was actually supporting your basic argument that there are stocks who will strive and those who won’t without artificial intervention. There are indeed four or five races on this planet with wildly different capacities of intellect, physicality, durability and procreativity. I, like you, am very disturbed that the least intelligent have an edge on that last one but take some comfort that their inherent stupidity limits their survival (cold as that may seem).
It’s only when those folks are tolerated in an environment as welcoming and supportive as ours (state of the art medicine, welfare state, traitorous lawyers, vast subculture of Spanish-only speakers insisting we conform to them) that I have to put my foot down and say “Sorry, amigos. Borders closed. Take it up with Calderon if you’re Mexican. Be glad we don’t treat you like the Mexicans do if you’re from somewhere else. Fill these REAL forms out and file them.”
Our country’s greatest weakness is everyone’s tendency toward kindness - which extends to our representatives trying to please everyone all the time. If we don’t cut Mexico off the tit now it may become impossible once the corruption creeps way down into the local governments.
I’m for Duncan Hunter’s wall regardless of who gets the Presidency: it’s already passed and we want to know why it isn’t near completion yet.
(yes, CB, I’ll be back out on time. Gnight)
Any book Thomas Sowell recommends is definitely worth a look.“Flynn provides the first satisfying explanation of the massive rise in IQ test scores. He avoids both the absurd conclusion that our great grandparents were all mentally retarded and the equally unsatisfactory suggestion that the rise has just been in performance on IQ tests without any wider implications..” N. J. Mackintosh, University of Cambridge
I suppose it depends on how one defines a generation - I look at the change in the general status of the overseas Chinese as a phenomenon that I can perceive as happening, for the most part, within my lifetime.
The truly interesting aspect of it is not that there have always been wealthy Chinese merchants, but that the mass of this population, formerly poor as dirt, is no longer poor. This change only happened in the last fifty-sixty years.
I know the overseas Chinese case intimately. When my father (class of 54) went to engineering school in Manila, nearly all his classmates were Filipinos. When I went to the same school (class of 82) nearly all were Chinese. My classmates fathers nearly all started as garbage-pickers, tinkers, street vendors, and the like. When I was little you could still find rickshaws in Manilas Chinatown, a job no Filipino will do; it seems that today it may be impossible to find a poor Chinese in Manila. I find this astonishing.
The same thing happened in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, over the same period and to about the same degree. Economic policy and social-political conditions and policies vis-a-vis the Chinese, ranging even to overt persecution, varied greatly in all these places over that post-war period. But yet the Chinese succeeded in all of them. This also is astonishing.