Category Archives: Dominica

by | April 19, 2016 · 12:47 PM

Latin America Is a Very Socialist Region: The Caribbean

The Left has run Cuba since 1959. Most of the illegal opposition groups in Cuba are formally socialist (social democratic) The Left is only kept out of power in Haiti because the rightwing army and police have all the guns and the Left is not allowed to run in the fake elections. The Left president Aristide was overthrown in a violent, US sponsored coup. Jamaica elected a socialist in the 1970’s, Manley. His government was undermined by the US, and he was thrown out after a bit.

The Left held power in Grenada but was overthrown by a US invasion. Dominica is formally ruled by a socialist party which is also a member of the Sao Paolo Forum. The opposition is a party with “workers” in its name. Grenada has recently been ruled by a party that is a member of the Progressive Alliance, a split from the Socialist International. Trinidad and Tobago is now run by a formally socialist party. The two principal opposition parties are both formally socialist parties.

The Right stayed in power in the Dominican Republic by a dictator named Trujillo killing hundreds of thousands of people. In the 1960’s, they elected a socialist, Juan Bosch, who was quickly overthrown by Johnson with a CIA coup. The new rightwing government came in via the coup and stayed in power for over a decade. They stayed in power by murdering 11,000 people. For the last 20 years, the country has been ruled by the formally socialist party of Bosch. They are aligned with the Far Left Sao Paolo Forum. The opposition party has “revolution” in its name, is formally socialist and is a member of the Socialist International.

1 Comment

Filed under Americas, Caribbean, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Economics, Fascism, Haiti, Jamaica, Latin America, Latin American Right, Left, Political Science, Politics, Regional, Socialism, Trinidad and Tobago, USA

by | April 5, 2016 · 8:46 PM

The Flynn Effect in Blacks Is Ongoing

Jason Y: “Mark my word though, that a bad environment will see NO improvement even over a 1000 years!”

Phil: You forgot something, time is a resource. Second, it’s been noticed in the “Flynn effect” with Blacks that it stopped.

According to my latest information from Bermuda, the Bahamas, Dominica, Kenya, the US and the UK, the Flynn Effect, or whatever it is, is ongoing in Blacks.

Blacks now match Whites on an IQ proxy in the UK, and Half-Black mulattos now match Whites on an IQ proxy in Bermuda.

And in the Bahamas, more or less pure Blacks (9% White) seem to have made some serious IQ gains. Their IQ’s are now 93, whereas on a genetic basis, we might expect an IQ of ~78 or even lower. There also appear to have been actual IQ rises in the UK and Bermuda among Blacks and mulattos respectively.

These three cases actually expand on the Flynn Effect because the FE was previously simply showing rising IQ’s for all races, and while Black IQ’s were going up a lot, White IQ’s were going up by the same amount, so there was no closing of the B-W gap, and there was no actual rise in relative IQ.

In the Bahamas, there was a 15 point gain in relative IQ, that is, Blacks closed 15 pints of the B-W IQ gap.

In the UK, there was a 14 point relative IQ gain, and Blacks closed a 14 point B-W IQ gap.

In Bermuda, there was a 12 point gain in relative IQ, that is, Blacks closed a 12 point B-W IQ gap.

In the US, Dominica, and Kenya, we are still seeing Flynn rises among Blacks, but in the US and possibly in the other two places, there has nevertheless been no closing of the B-W gap.

While it benefits Blacks to get smarter, if Whites are rising at the same rate, some of the gains and all of the relative gains are wiped out.

After all, if there is a tiger chasing both of us, I don’t have to be faster than the tiger. I simply have to be faster than you.

With both Black and White IQ’s rising in tandem, the effect is simply one of an IQ arms race where neither side is gaining on the other while both become more heavily armed.

84 Comments

Filed under Africa, Americas, Bahamas, Black-White (Mulattos), Blacks, Britain, Caribbean, Dominica, East Africa, Europe, Flynn Effect, Intelligence, Kenya, Latin America, Mixed Race, North America, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, USA, Whites

by | August 18, 2015 · 12:24 AM

Caribbean IQ Scores

S. Lucia                 62
Dominica                 67
St. Vincent & Grenadines 71
Jamaica                  71.5
Barbados                 79
Dominican Republic       82* 
Cuba                     85** 
Bahamas                  93
Bermuda                  100***

*Dominican Republic is 20% White
**The Cuban genome is 50% White
***Bermuda genome is 45% White

Those scores do not make a  whole lot of sense. They are all over the place. The median score is 79. The mode is 71. The average is as same as the median at 79. That is a very low score, but it is not as low as Africa. The 62 and 67 scores are terrible. Only African and Caribbean Blacks seem to score in the 60’s (Papuans, Aborigines and Gypsies do also). If someone can find me a non-Black group or nation anywhere that scores in the 60’s, I want to see that score. If any group is regularly scoring in the 60’s, something is wrong with them.

On the other hand, we also have some quite high scores. Cuba scores only as high as US Blacks, yet Cuba is 50% White on genes. US Blacks are performing better than Cubans. In fact, US Blacks perform better than not only Cubans, but also the Dominican Republic, Barbados, St. Lucia, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines,  and Jamaica. US Blacks do have a bit more White in them 25%, but not much more. Jamaicans are 9% White. The additional White admixture in US Blacks is not nearly enough to explain their higher scores vis a vis Jamaica, Dominica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. These scores do not make sense in terms of hard HBD theory.

At the other hand, we have unexpected high scores in the Bahamas and Bermuda. The Bermudan genome is 45% White, but that should not be enough to get the score up to 100. By hard HBD theory, the score should only go up to perhaps 90 at most. Bermuda had four prior tests around 90-93, which seems to make a lot more sense such that hard HBD’ers like Jason Molloy are throwing out the 100 score as anomalous. At any rate, Bermuda is the highest scoring half-Black nation on Earth, scoring the same as the average White score. That right there is a blow to hard HBD theory.

The Bahamas also has an unexpectedly high score. The Bahamas is 87% Black. How is it that an almost all Black nation scores 93 on an IQ test? That doesn’t seem to make sense either by hard HBD theory.

The Bahamas and Bermuda are both quite wealthy which may explain the higher scores.

To sum up, the Caribbean is an odd place, with two of the highest Black IQ scores on Earth combined with some abysmally low scores down in the 60’s that seem to low to even be possible.

IQ-wise, the Caribbean doesn’t seem to make much sense, but there are a number of instances in this region that are impossible to explain by hard HBD theory.

67 Comments

Filed under Americas, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermudans, Black-White (Mulattos), Blacks, Caribbean, Cuba, Cubans, Dominica, Dominicans, Intelligence, Jamaica, Jamaicans, Latin America, Mixed Race, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, USA

by | May 25, 2014 · 9:42 AM

Blacks and Capitalism: A Bad Combination

Capitalist Caucasian wrote:

Exactly. Blacks work better under socialism because they have forced limitations on their ability to blow dough. In capitalism, the black mindset of “lets spend every fucking thing on hoes, blow, and clothes” causes a massive wealth redistribution from middle class blax to the elite who supply them with crack and silk clothes.

Well you know, in Cuba, your apartment, education, health care, transportation, cultural events, clothing, clean water, sewage system, roads, all of that, is pretty much taken care of by the state. Black Cubans would not be smart to blow all their money as nowadays the ration book will not take you far. Probably most Black Cubans have a job on the side selling this, that or whatever on the street. And for whatever reason, Black Cubans commit little crime.

Personally, I think that under capitalism, Blacks inevitably fall behind for reasons that we are all aware of. Capitalist society drums it into your head, Spend, spend, spend, and says that if you’re not a winner, you are a worthless piece of shit, but only a few people can be winners. Turn on the TV or open a magazines and it is just winners, winners, winners. Black people are sitting there, defined in capitalist society as losers, being bombarded constantly with Buy, buy, buy messages and the TV and media screaming at them 24-7 calling them losers and laughing in their face for not being rich and having stuff.

Blacks figure I am gonna be a winner one way or another, so they turn to crime to become capitalist-defined winners. Also Blacks being defined always as losers and ridiculed for that, while at the same time having their paths to winnerdom pretty much blocked, well, this makes Black people pretty angry. The anger and rage turns into crime, particularly violent crime.

The more equality, the better Blacks seem to do. Dominica, a pure Black country, has a homicide rate that is 50% of the US rate and Dominican Blacks’ homicide rate is 7% of US Blacks’ rate, of US Blacks have a 13X higher homicide rate than those in Dominica.

In Mozambique under Samora Machel, it was said that you could walk from one end of Maputo (a pure Black African city) to the other at 3 AM, and no one would bother you.

I would gather that the more inequality you have in a society, the more crime and especially violent crime the Blacks are going to commit. They are going to be on the short end of that skewed income distribution, and looking up at those rich people is going to make them pretty angry.

42 Comments

Filed under Africa, Americas, Blacks, Capitalism, Caribbean, Crime, Criminology, Dominica, Economics, Latin America, Mozambique, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Sociology, South Africa

by | January 21, 2011 · 4:50 AM

Time to Take Back “Nigger”

Repost from the old site.

Some Black folks been busy lately trying to bury the word “nigger” once and for all – recent months have seen symbolic funerals and burials of the n-word by mainstream Black organizations. This movement probably stems from the OJ Simpson trial in the mid-1990’s, when “n-word” was substituted for “nigger”.

Nowadays, nigger is as taboo as can be.

Can you say, “That racist jerk called a Black man, ‘Nigger!’?

Nope.

Can we use the word nigger to describe the word widely used amongst Blacks themselves?

Nope.

One may not use the word nigger under any circumstances.

This is strange.

First, it implies that nigger is either an obscenity or like one’s private parts, ok to be spoken or revealed in privacy but certainly not in public. But nigger is neither obscenity in word nor flesh.

Second, banning the word nigger implies that it is so horrible, and that Blacks are so sensitive, that even the sight or sound of the word will drive these oversensitive Black souls either to tears or to rage. Now, Blacks have never struck me as a cringing, hypersensitive race of inhibited crybabies.

The Black man can take an insult. Why not – we kept him in a cage for centuries, only let him out to be policed like an animal in an open air zoo for another 100 years, finally liberated him via bullets and water hoses 40 years ago, and oppression and discrimination yet linger.

Through it all, the Black man has stood up and taken it like a man. By implying that Black men can’t bear to see the word nigger without dissolving into wimpy tearfulness, we insult their masculinity and fortitudinous nature.

Now that we have settled the absurdity of killing, let alone burying, a word, let us see how we may resurrect the comatose patient.

Who should be allowed to use the word?

Obviously, Blacks will keep on using the word themselves, as is their right. Further, Blacks can decide how, where and why they use the word, if at all. It’s only fair to give Blacks ownership over this word, which is really their word.

Blacks are perfectly correct that Whites should not use this word, and don’t give us that phony, “Well, Blacks use it, so why can’t we?” nonsense.

Semantics is a subfield of Linguistics. In Semantics, we say that words mean whatever people who use them say they mean. End of story. Nigger has one set of meanings when Blacks use it and another set when Whites use it. That’s not Black hypocrisy; it’s the way humans use language.

Should racists be granted the right to use the word? No, they use it as a weapon to attack others.

I would like to request that we resurrect the word for journalistic and historical writing integrity. If a non-Black calls Blacks niggers, let’s write out the word. Forget this weasel-word “n-word”. We should have the right to say, “In the South 50 years ago, most Whites referred to Blacks as niggers.”

What are we accomplishing by refusing the write the evil word? Are we preventing its spread in society, sort of like a disease control agency?

Let’s let non-racist creative writers, journalists, social scientists, historians feel free to use the word, sparingly, like seasoning on food, as needed.

How about one more case? Why can’t we put the word nigger in the mouths of racists? Why can’t we refer to David “Send the niggers back to Africa” Duke? Or Newt “Cut the niggers off welfare” Gingrich? Or James “Niggers are stupid” Watson? Or Philippe “I like to measure nigger penises” Rushton?

Let’s boil down some of these racist arguments just a bit and give them some nigger-seasoning.

Why do the same racists who love to rant about supposed Black genetic stupidity love to rave on about Black basketball skills? What’s the real message here? How about, “Niggers sure are good at basketball! They better be, cuz they sure ain’t got no brains!”

What’s the real message of the scientific racism that says that Blacks are genetically stupid, that this stupidity is irremediable by any environmental means, and that attacks any signs of Black intellectual progress (Like, for instance, this vile and wicked blog, recently referred in an New York Times piece by Amy Harmon as a “popular science blog”)? Isn’t it really, “Damn, niggers are dumb!”

Why don’t we call the Jensens, Murrays, Rushtons and Lynns, the “Niggers sure are stupid” academics? After all, that’s the poison they are selling, right?

Have you noticed that endless obsession that the media has with Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe – formerly Rhodesia – used to be run by virulently racist White criminals who were then evicted by a Black liberation movement.

Zimbabwe did all right for quite some time – in fact, throughout the 1980’s, it was regarded as a model of democracy, good governance and multiracial harmony, and it weathered the African famines of the 1980’s quite well – until it started seizing the land of White farmers in the 1990’s. And why did it seize the land of the White farmers?

Because land reform was a necessity, but Britain had quit funding the “willing buyer, willing seller” fake land reform that never really worked well anyway, since so few White farmers were willing to sell land. 5,000 White farmers, a tiny percentage of the population, had almost all the good land, all stolen at gunpoint from Blacks decades earlier.

Meanwhile, Blacks had the worst land, and only tiny plots of it anyway, such that they barely had rocks to eat.

They were overcrowded onto this crappy land, so it naturally started to erode. The racist Whites then derided the Blacks for “poor nigger farming methods”. The racists then blamed the livestock of the Blacks for the erosion, and stole 1 million head of “the niggers’ (ill-disciplined) cattle”. The real cause of the land erosion was the racist feudal farming system.

After the willing seller, willing buyer game ended, it was replaced by a project whereby Zimbabwe tried to come up with money to buy out willing Whites. But an economic crisis occurred (caused by an IMF structural adjustment and the free marketization of the economy) during the 1990’s and Zimbabwe lacked the cash to purchase White farms.

Whites weren’t selling anyway, and the Brits were backing them to the hilt. Angry Blacks who had fought in the liberation war began clamoring for the land to which they were entitled.

Mugabe, suffering a crisis of legitimacy at the time, gave into them. Hence, the “land invasions” began. The media rails about how “all of the land went to Mugabe’s cronies” – the message here: “Niggers are lying, cheating thieves”.

To some extent, this is true (that land went to cronies). Initially, the land reform was decentralized and handed over to local party officials, which was actually a good idea. Unfortunately, the local officials promptly turned it into a spoils system, just like the corrupt cronyism we see in every African country!

For some reason, the cronyism of Mugabe’s party was worse than that of the rest of Africa, which is ignored by the imperialist media. The important point here is that Mugabe was not really involved in this corruption.

After a while of this, Mugabe got ahold of the process, and now most of the land is just going to poor Black farmers.

The next part of the media lie is that since all the land went to Mugabe’s buddies, the poor Black farmers crowded into the cities, where Mugabe promptly took them on in a fake urban renewal campaign called “Drive Out Trash”, which was really just a campaign to destroy the homes of his political opponents and render them homeless.

First of all, most of the land is now going to small Black farmers, so there is no need for landless Black farmers to crowd into the cities. This is why small rural farmers are one of Mugabe’s main support bases, the other being the Shona tribe, the largest tribe in the country.

Second of all, the unfortunately named “Drive Out Trash” campaign was really just an urban renewal campaign where horrible Black slums were destroyed to make way for 120,000 much better government housing units. The urban renewal campaign is going on right now and much nicer government homes are replaces squalid hovels. The urban renewal has been hampered by sanctions, though.

True, the land reform has been chaotic, as land reforms often are in the beginning, especially when too much land reform is done too quickly. The old system has been crushed, and the new one often has not yet gotten going yet. The result is sometimes one or more years of famine harvests.

But all this BS could have been prevented if Britain and the White farmers had gone along with a sane land reform program in the beginning.

At the same time, after Zimbabwe had been devastated by a decade of IMF-led imperialist looting, combined with terrible droughts of the 1990’s, Mugabe logically told the IMF to go to Hell, and refused to pay off his debts.

With the land invasions and the IMF nose-thumbing, all Hell broke loose in US and UK imperialist circles, especially in the former colonist, Britain, where the press went nuts and has never recovered. Devastating sanctions were quickly slammed on Zimbabwe. Foreign investment plummeted by 99% and Zimbabwe was essentially locked out of the world banking system.

Even UNICEF is in on the brutal punishment – whereas in other African lands, AIDS sufferers get $74 per sufferer per year, Zimbabwe only gets $4 from UNICEF. Then Mugabe, as AIDS devastates the land, the “dumb, murderous nigger Mugabe” morphs into “genocidal nigger Communist Mugabe”. Really it’s just an AIDS epidemic devastating the country, as it is wrecking surrounding nations.

The land invasions were a predictable mess, and a few Whites were killed.

These deaths have been insanely blown out of proportion by a leering media. In Britain, the media fairly screams “White genocide!” You can imagine the clamor on White Nationalist sites. In truth, a whole nine White farmers have been killed over an eight year period. The death of one White farmer yields vastly more breathless Western prose than the death of 30 Zimbabwean Blacks.

Another media obsession is “Mugabe the dictator”. Mugabe is authoritarian, but as such folks go, he is pretty lightweight. The opposition leaders regularly give interviews in which they call for armed struggle against Mugabe’s regime or invasion by imperialist countries. It is amazing how this “evil dictator” allows those who call for his very head to speak out and run free.

The West has funded the opposition, which has little support, for years now. The opposition is totally tied to imperialism, and pushes an extreme free market program that is not only the last thing that Zimbabwe needs right now, but is the very thing that caused so many problems for the nation in the 1990’s.

The opposition has led a number of violent campaigns, and some of their leadership has been arrested and beaten. The Western media has gone nuts over these minor transgressions.

The opposition has also historically allied at various with the White farmers in Zimbabwe, White apartheid supporters in South Africa, and the vicious, apartheid-supported RENAMO guerrillas in Mozambique. Obviously, they are rejected by the vast majority of Zimbabweans.

The main opposition party was clearly involved in a coup attempt that involved killing Mugabe in alliance with UK imperialism, but a court of the Mugabe “dictatorship” somehow refused to convict the plotters.

Truth is that the opposition is essentially run and funded by UK and US imperialism. Zimbabwe sees the UK and US as enemy nations, and in fact they are. As such, I would argue that the opposition are in effect traitors and spies for openly working the enemies of the nation. Mugabe is too kind. I am amazed he even lets the opposition walk around free at all.

Mugabe the “dictator” has held several elections, which are now monitored by international monitors, and monitors have upheld all of the results. At the same time, opposition protests caused the “dictator” Mugabe to cancel several proposed Constitutional amendments.

The sanctions are the cause of almost all of the economic decline and ruin that the country has suffered since 1999. There is no a priori reason to suggest that Zimbabwe should be the most devastated country in Africa. The nasty racist suggestion is: “Niggers can’t run a country.”

In particular, the suggestion is worse: “Niggers are so stupid and childlike that they are incapable of running a country and quickly destroy any country given to them. Look at Zimbabwe. It was doing great when the nigger children had White grown-ups to take care of them. Then they threw Whitey out and tried to run it by themselves and look what happened.”

The sneaky riff: “Niggers destroy any country they run. The only way that Nigger Countries can succeed is if the niggers are colonized by superior Whites.” The particularly nasty aspect of this vicious line is that it both supports White colonialism and White apartheid at the same time.

Another line is taken by many “race realists” such as the noxious crowd over at GNXP.

It is interesting that these “race realists” are almost always from the more “superior” races and rarely from the more “inferior” races.

Anyway, these folks take the objectively racist line that the chaos in Zimbabwe is because: “Niggers are too stupid to run a country!” IQ scores in Africa are then used to prove that idiocy is what is killing Zimbabwean Blacks.

It is true that, as James Watson noted, IQ scores in Africa are usually markedly low. These IQ scores are valid. However, IQ scores in Zimbabwe are about 67, which is precisely the African average.

The other African nations, despite their low IQ’s, seem to muddle along, and at least are not experiencing Zimbabwean disaster. Minus crippling sanctions, Zimbabwe would be expected to muddle along about as well as any African nation.

Another problem is that much of the chaos in Zimbabwe is being caused by one of the worst AIDS problems on Earth. This is conflated by imperialism’s media to mean that “socialist Mugabe is slaughtering his people.” Truth is, it’s mostly AIDS that is killing them, not Mugabe, and there is not much Mugabe can do about AIDS anyway.

Blacks did not destroy Zimbabwe – sanctions did. Zimbabwe was doing fine on its own for 19 years until it started grabbing the White farms. De facto White Supremacist countries like the US and UK then went nuts, slammed devastating sanctions on Zimbabwe, and it’s been screaming in the ruins ever since.

Viewed in this light, the destruction of Zimbabwe ended up being coded as a deliberate White Supremacist plot-scam to make Blacks look like genocidal incompetent children that need White adults to take care of them. I do not think imperialism intended the message to come out that way, but that’s how it comes across.

Even worse, the line is: “Look! Niggers are so stupid and incompetent they can’t even grow food!” Black people grow food all over Africa, and have been growing food for centuries. They don’t necessarily grown enough of it to feed their countries, but they do ok.

Africans are resourceful and hardy folks; humans have been there for 120,000 years and they have never gone extinct yet. Fire and tools came out of Africa, and 73,000 years ago, when a volcano killed almost all humans on Earth, only a small band of 600 or so survived and kept the human race going.

Guess where the holdouts were? Africa, near Mount Kilimanjaro. Afterward, these Africans underwent explosive evolutionary changes called the Great Leap Forward, probably invented art and language, and exploded out of Africa to colonize the entire planet.

Yet these same folks are so stupid they can’t even grow food! Come on.

There is yet one more snarky and wicked riff running through this whole imperialist aggression. It’s a lesson to the “niggers in South Africa”. It says, “Listen up, South African niggers! Look at Zimbabwe! This is what will happen to you if you try to do a land reform with those white farmers in your country! We will destroy you just like we did Zimbabwe! Don’t even think about it, niggers!”

Now, South Africa, which we will deal with below, desperately needs a land reform. 50,000 White farmers occupy 80% of the nation’s farmland. Millions of small Black farmers either scratch in the dirt like chickens or gave up the plow for a teeming urban hovel. Crowded onto poor land, small Black farmers have created an ecological catastrophe by deforesting the land. The resulting erosion has created huge gullies and dust storms.

In the end, there is no reason why Zimbabwe should not at least be able to do just as well as the rest of the Africa. Zimbabwe is a disaster not because it is run by Blacks, but because economic warfare has been declared on it.

Now let’s look at South Africa. Yes, the crime rate is very high. But it is in general much higher than the rest of Black Africa. Now why is that?

The racist line is: “Niggers are animals and criminals. They murder, rape and steal anything in their path, and their innate criminality destroys any country. They especially like to prey on White people because they are so hateful and racist towards Whites. And they love to rape White women because their own nigger women are so damn ugly. Look at South Africa, and look into the heart of the nigger criminal beast.”

But South Africa is anomalous. Decades of criminal White apartheid against Blacks built up mountains of hate and resentment amongst impoverished Blacks, who seethed with rage as the Whites lived in luxury while Blacks wallowed in miserable slums.

The insane gap between the rich and the poor in South Africa, and the Black face of the poor combined with the White face of the rich, insures racial-based redistributionist crime, often violent crime, for the foreseeable future. Barring South Africa’s unusual circumstances, we should not expect its crime rate to be much worse than the rest of Black Africa’s.

Once again, the nasty subtext: “Niggers need apartheid. The nigger can’t make it on his own. He’s an animal and he needs the White man’s paternalistic boot on his neck in order to survive and not destroy himself and his land.” As in Zimbabwe, it’s yet another argument to bring back settler-colonial apartheid and White rule.

Let’s take a look at another “race realist” obsession: Haiti. Haiti is said to be “the only Black country in the Americas” and it is rightly described as a devastated place. The subtext: “There is only one nigger country in the Americas and they have of course destroyed it.” But this is not the case.

First of all, most of the Caribbean islands are primarily Black or mulatto, including Cuba. A number of these islands are still colonies, but others are not. And while Dominica, Jamaica and Grenada have plenty of problems, they are not Haiti by a long shot.

The reasons Haiti is a wreck is due to its ultra-reactionary mulatto ruling class that has confiscated almost all of the wealth of the land since independence, in cooperation with frankly White Supremacist White countries like France, the US and Canada.

The elite have the army and cops and they have been slaughtering the people to keep their feudal stranglehold over the place for 100 years now.
France is still furious about independence in 1804, when Black slaves, under Desallines, rose up and killed all 25,000 White French slavers and their families on the islands.

Except for the kids and some crazy people, every one of those Whites got what they deserved. If you don’t want to get killed by an enraged mob, don’t enslave other human beings.

To this day, 200 years later, White Supremacist France demands reparations for this admittedly bloody episode. If the Haitian Revolution was a genocide, then maybe we need to think of whether or not mass killings are always such a bad thing. The Haitian Revolution was one of the most righteous uprisings in human history.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, the revolution was quickly usurped by a bunch of fake revolutionaries, who ended up turning it on its head and putting a version of the old system back in.

There were a group of light-skinned Blacks who were often freed slaves and had allied with the White slaveowners. These Blacks quickly wormed their way into power, installed feudal brutality over the wretched masses, and it’s been that way ever since. One more stolen revolution. Now this Haitian ruling class, in collaboration with imperialism, continues to keep Haiti under the boot.

Aristide was elected with 92% of the vote (despite fervent meddling by the comically-named US National Endowment for Democracy – NED) and a mandate to redistribute things a bit – a tiny bit, mind you.

He tried to raise the abysmal minimum wage, gave a million kids a lunch a day (probably their only meal) and built more schools in eight years than had been built in the previous 200. The people experienced real, tangible gains under Aristide, the best they had seen in two centuries.

For these crimes, imperialism (the US, France and Canada) destroyed Aristide and forced him to leave with a gun at his head. The imperialist operation may as well have been called Operation Enduring Sweatshop.

The only solution for Haiti is armed revolution. The army of the ruling class needs to be overthrown. Then the ruling class themselves need to be informed of the new program and encouraged to go along.

Those that do not need to be arrested, and then either thrown in prison or re-education camps, kicked out of the country or as a last resort for some of the most bloodthirsty and criminal Duvalierists and Tonton Macoutes, shot. Their hands are dripping with blood anyway, so it’s not like innocent people would be persecuted or killed.

A dictatorship of the proletariat may be necessary for a while, or at least a democracy with a well-armed revolutionary army, police and citizenry. This is one thing Hugo Chavez has right – arm the people and revolutionize the military.

Until that happens, Haiti will continue to be Hell on Earth.

When racists use arguments like these against Blacks and Black nations, they are not really talking of “Blacks” or “Black countries”. We give them too much credit when we say they are talking about Black people or nations – they are not – they are talking about niggers and nigger countries. Let’s shove the n-word in their mouth, leave it there for all to see, force them to eat it, and make them tell us what it tastes like.

Admittedly, we are taking some risks with this approach, namely the risk of legitimizing the term nigger. But most sane people already understand the difference between Blacks’ use of the word and Whites’ use of it. I don’t see why we can’t extend things a bit.

Note: Inspiration for this post came in part from a Michael Eric Dyson show on the radio. Dyson is a brilliant and gifted Black academic (though a bit too lenient on rap culture). Check out this great book, The Micheal Eric Dyson Reader , for more.

This guy is one smart dude and he will get your brain moving! A bit hard to read, but a lot of my readers can handle him, I think. Awesome stuff. I wish all these racist and White nationalist idiots who rant on about how stupid Black people are could read this most challenging Black scholar.

Thanks also to the outrageous Black blog Look at This Nigger for additional humor and inspiration along the same theme.

References

Elich, Gregory, Zimbabwe and Pan-African Liberation

Elich, Gregory, The Battle over Zimbabwe’s Future

Elich, Gregory, Zimbabwe’s Fight For Justice

Gowans, Stephen, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the “Politics of Naming”

Gowans, Stephen, Zimbabwe’s Lonely Fight for Justice

16 Comments

Filed under Africa, Americas, Blacks, Britain, Canada, Caribbean, Colonialism, Crime, Cuba, Death, Dominica, Europe, Europeans, France, Grenadines, Haiti, Health, History, Illness, Imperialism, Intelligence, Journalism, Latin America, Linguistics, Mozambique, North America, Political Science, Politics, Psychology, Public Health, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Semantics, Settler-Colonialism, South Africa, The Americas, US Politics, USA, White Nationalism, White Racism, Whites, Writing

by | January 19, 2011 · 3:51 AM

Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

Repost from the old site.

A recent post of mine noted that the Black IQ in the US has shown gains of about 5.5 points against Whites in both children and adults. At age 12, the Black IQ is now 90.5, as opposed to 85 30 years ago. Black adult IQ’s have risen from 79 to 84.5 during the same period.

At the same time, Blacks have shown major gains in achievement test results relative to Whites. They narrowed the achievement gap by about 30%, about the same degree to which they reduced the IQ gap. There is even some suggestive evidence that the Blacks who have experienced the most desegregation benefited most of all (Keita 2007). Integration seems to be good for the Black IQ .

Rising IQ’s over time are referred to as the Flynn Effect (FE).

In Britain, the results are even better. West Indian Blacks in the UK now have an IQ of about 93.5 at age 11. Scores for adult Caribbeans in the UK are not known. Studies from 1960’s-70’s showed an IQ of 85 for these same children, but now it has moved up by 8.5 points. Young Caribbean Blacks in the UK have closed the IQ gap by more than half.

Interestingly, this IQ increase has coincided with a spectacular increase in crime among these British-born Jamaicans. The first generation that came in the 1950’s and 60’s were mostly hard-working and law-abiding. But their offspring in many ways have been a disaster.

Here we see once again the phenomenon discussed on this blog before, that the male children of low-wage immigrants to the West are often criminals. This even held for the offspring of Irish, Italian and some Jewish Whites to the US over 100 years ago. With a rising IQ coinciding with a skyrocketing crime rate, again we see the disconnect between the simplistic game that White Nationalists play called “low IQ = high crime”.

Most Caribbean Blacks in the UK are Jamaicans. In Jamaica, the Black IQ is about 71.5.

A counterargument to these rising Jamaican IQ gains is that these Jamaicans are heavily intermarrying with Whites. In the first generation, up to 25% married Whites, and in the second generation, the figure is said to be up to 50%. These are just anecdotes, not hard figures. The claim is that all of the rise is due to White genes.

But let us look at the argument. If base Jamaican IQ is 71.5, then a 25% outmarriage rate in the first generation raises the IQ 3.5 points to 75. Instead, this generation had an IQ of ~85, 10 points higher than genes would have predicted. A 50% outmarriage rate in the 2nd generation should raise IQ by 6.25 points to 81.5. Instead, the figure is 93.5, 12 points higher than expected.

A good analysis of the UK Jamaican data is that, if assuming the benefit of increased White genes, the more complex modern environment in the UK is raising Jamaican IQ by 10-12 points.

In another study by Barbara Tizard (Tizard et al 1972), Jamaican children in the UK who were raised with Whites in an institutional setting had IQ’s of 108, mixed race children had IQ’s of 106 while White children had IQ’s of 103, at age 4-5. If anything, this study showed a slight advantage for the Black children.

Opponents say that these Jamaicans were selective immigrants – that is, they were the brightest of the bright. James Flynn argues in counterpoint that selective migration could not have raised IQ’s by more than a few points (Nisbett 1998). Figures for later ages were not available.

Black children in the US score 95 at age 4 and Blacks in Africa score 92 at that age, both scores in comparison to a White score of 100. The Black US score then declines to 85 (a 10 point drop) and the African Black score drops to 67 (an incredible 25 point drop).

Black scores decline as children age, and this recent post suggests that initial high followed by sharply declining scores are indicative of earlier maturation among Blacks. I do not know to what extent early Black maturation (Blacks do mature earlier, and this has a genetic basis) explains the strange phenomenon of high Black IQ’s in small children which rapidly decline into adulthood.

But it is interesting that Tizard’s group raised together in an institutional setting, the young Black kids had even higher IQ’s than the Whites.

In the Caribbean nation of Dominica, there has been a stunning rise in IQ over a 36 year period from 1965-2001. There was an 18 point rise during this period, which rose their IQ’s from 61 to 73 (the IQ’s did not rise by 18 points because other groups’ IQ’s were also rising during this period). This represents a gain against UK Whites of 12 IQ points.

The test used was Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is said to be the best available for measuring pure “g” intelligence.

 

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), if they do well on one test, do also do well on all other tests. The FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all.

Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects would seem to me to have quantifiable benefits in modern society, occupationally, academically and in other ways.

It also predicts success in life in various ways pretty well and is not culturally biased in any way. The researchers gave a vocabulary test to the group and found a similar rise of about 18 IQ points on that test.

Researchers tried to tease out which factors were most related to the IQ rise. The only factor that explained the rise fairly well was schooling, so it appeared that improved schooling was a major cause of the IQ rise. The IQ rise occurred at the time of a major expansion of the school system in Dominica.

Socioeconomic status of parents explained about 10% of the IQ gain. This shows that increasing incomes in the 3rd World may pay off in increased IQ’s in the children. Interestingly, researchers found no effect on family size, types of food consumed, head size or height. Mysteriously, researchers were unable to explain much of the IQ rise.

These findings are interesting for many reasons. This post suggests that most of the FE is due to increased caloric intake among children, resulting in earlier maturation. Improved nutrition has often been suggested as a reason for the FE, but did not seem to be a factor here.

Those who favor a genetic explanation for racial variations in IQ (nearly all of whom are White racists) disparage all societal interventions to increase IQ as worthless. In particular, they oppose spending any more money on educating “inferior” Blacks and Browns, as it is just throwing good money after bad. This study indicates that increased educational spending can indeed have IQ benefits for Blacks.

Some other findings in this study are of interest. One is that the rise is on the Raven’s test, which is the most heavily g -loaded test in existence. Critics of the FE claim that the rise is not on g, or general intelligence, and hence it is worthless. The Dominican rise was definitely on g.

In the West, while there have been major rises in tests of problem-solving, visual analysis, visual intelligence and verbal analysis, there have been little to no gains in general knowledge, vocabulary, arithmetic and mathematical analysis.

Some interpret this to mean that there has been no rise in general intelligence – only a rise in “factors subject to environmental bias”. Such an analysis is false – but it is interesting that in Dominica such huge gains are being seen in vocabulary, while in the West vocabulary gains have only been 4.4 points over 80 years.

A study out of Kenya in 2003 looking at 7 year old children found an incredible 26 point gain over 14 years from 1984-1998 in rural Kenya, leaving them with an IQ of 89 (Daley et al 2003). This apparently represented a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites from the previous IQ of 68.

The rise was correlated with schooling, family structure, nutrition and the health of the children. Schooling seemed to be the major factor and once again coincided with a major educational expansion by the government. The test used was the children’s version of Raven’s, the Children’s Progressive Matrices, once again a very g-loaded test, so the Kenyan rise was also on g.

The Kenyan, UK and Dominican studies are important because they show Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap by 10-21 points in a few decades. Hereditarians argue that the Black-White gap is permanent in all areas of the world, and that Blacks are a hopelessly stupid race – a drain on humanity. All money spent on raising Black IQ’s are wasted for this reason.

The three studies above show purely environmental factors causing major reductions in the Black-White IQ gap.

Another study found massive gains, that I have not been able to quantify, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, over a 72-74 year period. The gains were probably at least on the order of 20 points or so. Researchers suggested that increased cognitive stimulation in the form of a more complex world was responsible for the rise.

A common complaint of all of these studies showing rising Black IQ’s, both in tandem with Whites and closing the Black-White gap, is that the studies are done only on children. But most IQ tests are done on kids. Taking African studies as an example, we can see here that 69% of all tests in this series were done on kids.

In my opinion, testing kids is probably a better way to measure pure neurological efficiency without throwing in all sorts of potentially confounding extraneous variables.

Adults are much more likely than kids to have physical and mental diseases (schizophrenia and depression lower IQ), to be in jail, prison, or homeless, to abuse alcohol and drugs, or to have suffered serious head injuries. All of these factors throw a monkey wrench into tests that should be trying to show us real differences between races.

Just today, the White Nationalist blog Majority Rights posted a well-done article by Richard D. Fuerle, A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect. The article’s interesting premise is that the FE is due to increased caloric intake, and even increasing obesity, in our modern world. This increased food intake would result in earlier maturation and higher IQ’s among children, which would then level off in adulthood.

The author suggests that the FE is not really an IQ increase but an effect of this early maturation, and that people are getting less intelligent, not more so.

I believe this theory is wrong, though it has an interesting premise. James Flynn also disagrees with Fuerle’s article, saying that the author was led astray as he did not have good knowledge of the literature. Flynn also disagreed with the notion that the FE was only in children and that it leveled off in adulthood, saying that he had refuted this in an article his famous article published in JEM: The Journal of Educational Measurement, in 1984 (Flynn 2008).

Some of the comments following are also not correct.

First of all, IQ’s have been rising among all age groups, not just kids. It’s really a cohort effect. James Flynn agreed with me (Flynn 2007) that Black adults of today have the same IQ scores (100) as the Whites of 1957. Blacks of today have somewhat higher scores than the Whites of WW2.

This brings up a conundrum as one wonders if today’s US Blacks would have been able to beat the Japanese in WW2, since they can’t even seem to run Detroit (Taylor 2007). This long and rather involved post of mine deals with a lot of the arguments around the FE, including some of the misconceptions about it. My post theorizing that Blacks of today equal the Whites of 1957 is here.

Here, I show that Black children and adults have indeed made about a 5.5 IQ point gain on Whites over the past 30 years, coinciding with the liberation of Blacks via Civil Rights laws.

The notion that IQ has risen due to increased caloric intake is interesting, but probably invalid. Flynn himself says that after 1950, gains due to nutrition were minimal to nil in the West.

Furthermore, the gains should have been across the board, not just in the certain areas that the FE is in. As we see above, The FE is also occurring in 3rd World countries like Kenya and Dominica, where excess nutrition is certainly not an issue. In those countries, it is related to better education, if anything. Much of the FE remains mysterious.

The notion that gains are occurring only in certain areas that are “subject to environmental bias” is not correct. First of all, in Dominica, huge gains were seen in vocabulary, one of the areas that is not seeing much gain in the West.

Vocabulary, general knowledge, basic math, and mathematical analysis are all subject to environmental influence too, but Western society has not been promoting these areas so much.

The areas that the FE is occurring in – verbal analysis, analytical reasoning, visual analysis, visuospatial reasoning, on the spot problem solving for which no previous method was known, etc. – are areas that our increasingly sophisticated society has been promoting.

We have promoted this in terms of an increasingly complex society and the mass promotion of scientific thinking. The visuospatial aspect may be due to video games, cell phones, computers, and many things that need programming – boom boxes, car radios, microwaves, answering machines, thermostats, on and on.

My personal opinion is that TV has a lot to do with it. TV shows are increasingly complex, and kids sit in front of TVs with clickers clicking through 50 different channels one after the other. The camera usually only focuses on something for a short time, then moves on. Even jokes and dialog on TV come at a rapid pace. Movies seem to have gotten a lot more complex in recent decades too.

Lastly, the FE is only ending or reversing in Scandinavia. It is still going full blast in the US and in the 3rd world.

The notion that IQ is rising while “real intelligence” – general knowledge, math and vocabulary – is not cannot be supported. Those three things are no more “real intelligence” than the stuff that is going up in the FE.

Another argument advanced later in the discussion has to do with Malcolm Gladwell’s misreading of the FE. Gladwell says that the gains have been almost exclusively on a subtest of the WISC called Similarities. Although gains on Similarities reflect increased use of scientific thinking in our society, these gains are disparaged in the comments section as showing a phony effect of increased intelligence when there has been none.

First of all, the commenters are wrong in that gains on Similarities are a meaningless artifact. Similarities tests for the ability to solve problems on the spot without a previously learned method. Raven’s tests for the same thing – it is said to test for the “ability to make sense of the buzzing confusion of life”. Second, Gladwell is wrong. Major gains have occurred on many tests, not just Similarities:

Look at the gains:

Similarities         23.45
Picture Arrangement  21.5
Coding               18
Object Assembly      17.35
Block Design         15.9
Picture Completion   11.7
Comprehension        11
Vocabulary           4.4
Arithmetic           2.3
Information          2.1

A good summary of my current feelings about IQ and race are summed up here in this nice comment on Watson, Population Groups, Etc by Michael Blowhard on the nice 2Blowhards blog:

…”G” is just a correlation between a bunch of IQ test scores. IQ is about being a good abstract thinker, which (like all important skills) has a huge environmentally acquired component. It is taught from birth in our abstraction-saturated culture.

Even a cursory glance at history shows that the “achievement” levels of nations or civilizations change massively for purely cultural and situational reasons. Through much of the 20th century China was more of a hellhole than Africa is now, but I don’t think those guys are dumb.

Generally, people who make a huge deal about IQ are Mensa types without many achievements of their own to point to who like to feel superior to others. Such types are all over the net.

“If someone values modern-economy-type settings, and thinks only in terms of succeeding in such a thing, and orders all other people only according to how well they succeed in such a setting, this is OK of course.”

Maybe less OK if those who order others according to how well they succeed in a modern setting have a history of committing mass murder against those they consider to be among the lower orders.

Posted by: mq on November 10, 2007 4:42 PM

A nice photo of James Flynn, along with Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, from an obscure document reporting on a conference on intelligence in Amsterdam last year, is here. The link also features a short, interesting interview with Flynn along with some interesting abstracts on intelligence.

Some abstracts I found interesting were those showing that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to believe in God. Also, among believers, the more intelligent people were, the more liberal and less literal they were in their beliefs. These findings also applied at a national and ethnic level.

Other abstracts showed that the more intelligent people are, they longer they live and the healthier they are. A recent finding not in the document was that in the West, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a vegetarian.

References

Daley, Y. C., Whaley, S. E., Sigman, M. D., Espinosa, M. P., and Neuman, C. (2003). IQ On the Rise: The Flynn effect in Rural Kenyan Children. Psychological Science, 14, 215-219.

Flynn, James R. (November 2007). Personal Communication.

Flynn, James R. (January 2008). Personal Communication.

Keita, Lamin. (December 2007). Personal Communication.

Nisbett, R. E. (1998). Race, genetics, and IQ. In C. Jencks and M. Phillips (Eds.) Black-White Test Score Differences. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution.

Taylor, Jared. (December 2007). Personal Communication.

Tizard, B., Cooperman, O., Joseph A., & Tizard, J. (1972). Environmental Effects on Language Development: A Study of Young Children in Long-stay Residential Nurseries. Child Development, 43, 337-358.

20 Comments

Filed under Africa, Americas, Asia, Blacks, Brazil, Britain, Caribbean, China, Civil Rights, Crime, Culture, Dominica, East Africa, Europe, Europeans, Flynn Effect, Genetics, Health, History, Immigration, Intelligence, Jamaicans, Kenya, Latin America, Nutrition, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, South America, White Nationalism, White Racism, Whites

by | September 17, 2010 · 2:57 PM

Why America Sucks

All the voters are White. Of course the country is a reactionary nightmare.

As you can see, the overwhelming majority of US voters are White. It is US White voters and only US White voters who have sent America down the conservative and reactionary sewer pipe in the last 30 years. An operation that is yet ongoing, and that seems to be gaining quite a bit of steam. In the 2006 election, it was even worse. 79% of the voters were White.

The electorate also is overwhelmingly White.

The voter pool is also overwhelmingly White. So the argument that Blacks and Hispanics don’t turn out to vote is washed up. Even if they all turned out to vote, it wouldn’t matter much. It would only shift the electorate maybe -3% away from the reactionary Whites.

As long as America is overwhelmingly White, it will be a terrifyingly reactionary and backwards place, the laughingstock of the Western World. There is nothing inherently reactionary about White people. In Europe, they are reliably socialist. Someone show me a reactionary and non-socialist country in Europe please? In New Zealand and Australia, Whites are quite socialist, whatever their limitations in recent days with the horror specter of Mr. Howard.

In Latin America, it is true, Whites are reactionary, extremely so. Even in Uruguay and Argentina, they are reactionary. But these countries also have a revolutionary White Left that in the past has given the White elites the bullets and bombs they so richly deserve.

Argentina today, though a reactionary and Third World mess like the rest of the continent, at least has a Leftist President. A real Leftist, not an Obama rightwinger. The Argentine elite is alarmed about the Communist takeover of Argentina, Commies being coded as “fascists,” and are openly calling for the return of the fascist dictatorship. Fascist Argentines bashing Left opponents as fascists while calling for the return of Argentine fascism. Typical fascist obfuscation and mind-warping.

They claim that Kirchner had Commie “brownshirts” in the streets who have taken over entire zones. The Commie Kirchner is supposedly trying to “censor the media” by breaking up the reactionary media monopolies that own nearly the entire media of the land. But why should the Right own 90% of the media? By what rights? Capitalist rights? Hell with that.

Media should be delineated democratically according to predilection. If 30% of the population is Left, then 30% of the media should be Left. If that can’t be done, part of the Right media should be confiscated, at gunpoint if possible, and then turned over to folks representing 30% of the population. It’s only right and proper.

Uruguay elected a former Left wing guerrilla, but I’m not sure how much will change, as he is dedicated to following the neoliberal suicide model. Is Uruguay a more socialist state than the USA? An interesting question.

Costa Rica is a pretty socialist place, which is interesting since anti-Communist fools and liars always uphold Costa Rica on their social figures, comparing it to Cuba on the grounds that Cuba is not so hot. What these congenital liars don’t realize (Or maybe they do!) is that all of Costa Rica’s great figures are attributable to Costa Rican social democracy.

Those are the countries in which Whites are a majority.

In the rest of Latin America, Whites are a minority, and they are frighteningly conservative to reactionary. They have generally stayed in power through repression, fraud, imprisoning, assaulting, kidnapping, torturing and murdering the opposition. White elites have done this in most countries in the region: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico.

The implication is that Whites will only support any kind of socialism where they are a good, solid majority. They are only 65% of the US now, so this may be why they are headed this way.

The entire rightwing movement in the US for the last 30 years has been coming from Whites. Has it been coming from Hispanics? Of course not. Has it been coming from Blacks? Please. Has it been coming from Jews? Pull the other one. Has it been coming from Asians? Forget it.

So when you read that “the voters” are furious with Obama and support all sorts of reactionary monstrosities in opposition to him, it’s US Whites, and only US Whites, who are leading this Tea Party opposition wave to Obama. And much of it is undoubtedly racist, no matter how much they scream that it’s not.

US Whites, as a % of  the population, are declining. Every 2-3 years, they decline another 1%. That’s a pretty shocking decline. Progressives ought to celebrate White decline, in spite of all the negative consequences that go along with it. If Whites were progressive people, we could reliably oppose White decline. But they aren’t, and they will never be.

The other day, my mother (smartest women on Earth) told me that in the lifetime of my brother and I, we will live to see the US become a more progressive country. If all goes according to plan, I will take off around 2035 or so. The reason for this, she said, is the decline of Whites.

White nationalists have told me that a declining White America will lead to a more progressive place. Their reasoning for this is curious, and doesn’t make much sense. One guy told me that as Whites decline further and further, they will get more and more radical. As they dip below 40%, they will take up arms against any progressive regime seen as non-White. What he’s saying is that Whites will grow more violent and militant as they decline. I find this dubious. He also said that a majority non-White American government would be too incompetent to install a reliable and functioning sort of socialism. I find that dubious as well.

Will Hispanics, Blacks, Jews and Asians continue to be reliably progressive into the future? It’s an interesting question. Majority-Indian, mulatto and mestizo places like Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama are quite backwards and rightwing. A White minority in all places continues to rule to the detriment of everyone else. Usually they enforce their rule at gunpoint and often with deadly force. But they get the votes of mestizos, Indians and mulattos to do this.

In the Caribbean, Black and mulatto elites have treated their own people horribly. This is particularly the case in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most of the Black Caribbean is not very socialist, with the exception of Cuba. But Dominica is an equitable country, and Trinidad and Tobago has a decent amount of socialism. Socialism was arrested in Jamaica with the US assault on Manley, a White socialist.

The record in Black Africa is not good in terms of socialism. North African Arab states are much more socialist than Black Africa. True, there is not much to divide in the first place, but still. Even Black African countries that have fallen into some money are still horribly rightwing. Gabon, a wealthy African country, has nightmarish levels of poverty, malnutrition, maternal mortality, child and infant mortality. Apparently, as has always been the case in Africa, a tiny Black elite has grabbed control over the economy for themselves and possibly their tribe and is locking out everyone else.

Given that mestizos, mulattos and Blacks have a poor record of setting up socialist systems in their own lands, one wonders just how socialist they will be here in the US as they grow in numbers. So far, they have been realiably socialist, but what will the future bring.

The model in mulatto, mestizo and Black countries is typically astounding gaps between the rich and the poor, horrifying levels of poverty, and often an enraged, militant and sometimes armed but cash-starved Left minority battling the elite for power. In these countries, poverty is a big deal, the opposite of the US. So there, all parties, from Right to Left, run on reducing poverty and fighting for the poor, with a few overtly fascist exceptions in Guatemala, El Salvador, (Honduras?) and Colombia and a strange overtly rightwing government in Chile, increasingly a US model state in Latin America.

The Right has the entire media spectrum. In Honduras, a 99% mestizo country, a reactionary and murderous elite owns 99+% of the media. This is typical across the region. The assumption is that the non-White masses are simply badly brainwashed.

The ignorant mestizo, mulatto and Black electorate tends to vote for parties that often have progressive sounding names. In many cases, these parties are said to be overtly socialist parties. This is especially the case in the Caribbean, where almost every party has a socialist-sounding name. So down there, the Right calls themselves socialists, progressives and populists fighting for the poor while they implement reaction.

A similar dynamic is seen in Africa, where most parties have socialist-sounding names.

In other words, the US model of reactionary parties having open reactionary images, programs and politics is nonexistent in most of Latin America and Africa. No one would vote for it. In fact, it’s anathema in most of the world! It’s nearly nonexistent also in Arabia, South Asia, Europe, SE Asia and NE Asia. Turkey does have an overtly rightwing government.

Other than Turkey, show me one overtly reactionary party along the lines of the US Republican Party in power in any of these places.

One wonders if the model of the US reactionaries will change in the future with White decline. Will we see the rise of a backwards mestizo, mulatto or Black elite looking for votes possibly on an ethnic basis. Will we see the rise of fake populism and fake socialism, where the Right will operate rightwing parties with socialist and progressive sounding names campaigning on poverty reduction and helping the have-nots, to get the non-White vote? Will the Republican Party model of an openly and brazenly reactionary party become nonviable as non-Whites refuse to support it, according the model in the rest of the world?

16 Comments

Filed under Africa, Americas, Amerindians, Argentina, Asians, Australia, Black-White (Mulattos), Blacks, Brazil, Caribbean, Central Africa, Central America, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Democrats, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Economics, Ecuador, El Salvador, Europe, Europeans, Fascism, Gabon, Guatemala, Haiti, Hispanics, Honduras, Jamaica, Journalism, Latin America, Latin American Right, Left, Marxism, Mestizos, Mexico, Mixed Race, North Africa, North America, Obama, Panama, Peru, Political Science, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Republicans, Socialism, South America, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay, US Politics, USA, White Nationalism, White Racism, Whites

by | September 14, 2009 · 5:16 AM

The Flynn Effect and “g”

Repost from the old site.

Commenters recently have been bringing up the Flynn Effect (FE) of rising IQ’s in the past 80 years. There are many paradoxes and controversies over this effect that the commenters have been sharp enough to notice and point out. One argument is that the FE is not a real intelligence rise at all, since it is not on real g intelligence. In other words, the FE means nothing, and people are no smarter than before. The FE gains are not gains in intelligence at all, they are zero, nothing, null.

This is not correct, but the argument is very interesting. First we need to understand what the FE is and what it means. Then we need to understand what g is and what it means. The post concludes that there has indeed been an FE rise on g, but only on one component of g. Further, the post critiques the whole notion of seeing intelligence purely through the lens of g as senseless and meaningless, not to mention flat out wrong.

The subject matter is highly complex, but I tried to make it as simple as possible. My readers are a very intelligent bunch, and I think most of you should be able to follow this argument. You really need to read this slowly and take your time to try to understand what is going on here. It took me months of studying the FE before I finally started to get a handle on it.

The Flynn Effect (FE) is a secular rise in IQ over time that has been occurring throughout the West for 80 years now. All ages and ethnic groups are effected. Preliminary evidence indicates that it is also occurring in the Caribbean (Dominica), South America (Brazil) and Africa (Kenya).

An overview of the FE itself goes beyond the scope of this post.

The FE is quite complex, and many people do not seem to understand the concept properly, hence are not able to discuss it, much less debate it. However, most people of reasonable intelligence, if interested, seem to be able to grasp the basic implications of the FE.

Hereditarians, most of whom are White racists, are very upset by the FE (Talk about being opposed to human progress!) because they have a strong emotional investment in White intellectual superiority and the intellectual inferiority of Blacks, Hispanics and other groups. We know that the major hereditarian researchers on intelligence are racists because almost all of them support getting rid of all anti-discrimination laws.

The agenda is clear for both lab coat racists and White nationalists: if we can prove that Blacks, Hispanics and others are intellectually inferior to Whites, we can legalize discrimination, especially job discrimination, against them.

A particularly frightening lab coat racist endeavor is attempting to prove that Blacks are inferior employees to Whites on average. If they prove this scientifically, then they will have a logical reason to support discriminating against Blacks in employment.

Almost all of these folks are White, and most of them call themselves race realists. They spend a good deal of time screaming and yelling about why Blacks and Browns will not accept that they are intellectually inferior (Steve Sailer specializes in this). Why would anyone want to accept, or actually accept, such a thing?

Furthermore, given the nefarious agenda behind those promoting these theories that seeks to legalize discrimination against Blacks and Browns, any Black or Hispanic person who gets behind this would have to be out of their minds.

I have ritually added “Hispanic” after Black above, but in general, Hispanics are being left out of this debate. The real effort here is directed by racist Whites against Blacks, not Hispanics. It is against Blacks that these Whites seek to legalize the right to discriminate.

The Flynn Effect has been hard to argue against, but the hereditarians have tried hard. They have shown that the FE is not on g. G is a hypothesized common correlational factor that supposedly measures pure intelligence. Everything outside of g is “not real intelligence”.

However, according to one paper, the very concept of g is tendentious to say the least, and possibly nonsensical. The paper is titled G, A Statistical Myth, by an admittedly brilliant mathematician named Cosma Shalizi. I read through the whole thing but I couldn’t really make sense of it. Perhaps someone who knows math better than I do can have a go at it.

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G represents the totality of the areas where the purple subtests shade into the pink circle, and the degree to which they correlate (line up) with each other. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), if they do well on one test, do also do well on all other tests. The FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all.

Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects have quantifiable benefits in modern society, occupationally, academically and in other ways.

The argument of whether or not the FE gains are on g or not is very complex, about as complex as the FE itself. First of all, the FE gains have not been across the board. In general, they have focused on verbal analysis, visual analysis, visual intelligence and problem-solving. Gains have been few to none in basic things like general knowledge, mathematics, mathematical analysis, spelling and reading comprehension.

G is a hypothesized and problematic construct that is a correlational factor all of the subtests on an intelligence test. It is thought to be highly heritable and physiologically based, and this is why the hereditarians have gone nuts over it.

It measures how someone with a somewhat more neurologically efficient brain will tend to score better across an entire range of subtests than someone who with a less efficient brain.

The reason the FE is not on g is because it is limited to a subset of intelligence subtests, and gains have been small to none across another subset. Therefore, there is no g gain.

However, Raven’s Progressive Matrices has shown larger gains than any other test. Raven’s was designed to measure pure g and nothing else. Raven’s scores are not thought to be effected by environmental factors outside of pregnancy and the first few months of life, and are thought to be purely neurologically, physiologically or genetically based.

Given the pure g basis for Raven’s, the wild secular gains on it on the FE are most puzzling.

However, recently James Flynn has shown that the FE does show a .5 correlation on a factor analyzing fluid g.

There is fluid g and crystallized g.

Fluid g is thought to peak early in life. This is why things that require raw brain processing power tend to peak in young people: creativity – artists, musicians, poets, novelists, filmmakers, mathematicians, physicists – often do their best work as young people (usually as young men). Fluid g is really a measure of how well, fast or efficient your brain works.

Crystallized g is another matter altogether. Crystallized g may be seen as “what you know” as opposed to “how fast of a brain you have.” While fluid g peaks early, crystallized g often goes up throughout life, and people can still score high on crystallized g in their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s.

This is what we might call “accumulated knowledge” or “wisdom”. The old person’s brain does not work as fast, but the accumulated knowledge makes up for that in that they can see connections between things easier.

The young person’s brain works very fast, but with the lack of accumulated knowledge and life experience, they are not able to put things together as well to arrive at the correct conclusion. This is why no society has ever put the 18-23 year old’s in power, no matter how zippy their brains are.

Instead, the old men have always been put in power. The accumulation of a life of learning is thought to lead to a wisdom that will manifest itself as the ability to make “wise”, correct and proper decisions.

The concepts of crystallized and fluid g are complicated, but hopefully that explanation helped you understand it better.

The FE is on fluid g, not crystallized g. Visual intelligence and analysis, problem solving, verbal analysis analytical thinking in general, on intelligence tests, is in the realm of fluid g. Those are those little puzzles that ask you to decide which figure goes next in the series.

On intelligence tests, crystallized g measures accumulated knowledge and the degree to which one has learned basic tasks of modern life. The FE gains on mathematics, math analysis, reading comprehension, vocabulary and general knowledge are small to nil, and all of these tests measure crystallized g. To sum, these are the sorts of things you learn in school.

This is why, despite skyrocketing IQ’s, we cannot read a book, add and subtract, or do calculus any faster than our grandparents. We also do not know any more than they did, and we know no more words than they did.

This is obvious in the many reports on “idiocratic” state of high school seniors, college students or college grads. And this is how a puzzle is solved – how IQ’s are surely rising at the same time as idiocracy is.

From Flynn’s chapter summary:

IQ gains over time were calculated for each WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) subtest and the subtests ranked by size of gain. Verbal Similarities led at 20 points per generation – larger than gains on Raven’s Progressive Matrices.

Similarities measures on-the-spot problem-solving (something akin to fluid g); verbal subtests that do not measure this show low rate of gain. WISC subtests were also ranked by their correlations with Raven’s, the latter being used as a marker for fluid g. The r between the two hierarchies was calculated to approximate a correlation between IQ gains and fluid g .

The result of 0.50 contrasts with the negative correlation between IQ gains and the g generated by factor analyzing the WISC battery itself, which is generally viewed as predominately a crystallized g.

In sum, it appears that human groups can make massive fluid g gains in a period too short to accommodate radical change in the speed and efficiency of neural processes. Moreover, once gains in intelligent behavior over historical time are seen to be independent of brain physiology, does g really provide a criterion for assessing their significance?

Finally, not only a measure of fluid g (which is highly heritable) but also inbreeding depression are shown to be correlated with IQ gains – gains overwhelmingly environmental in origin. Therefore, correlations between such genetically influenced factors and the size of the black/white IQ gap do not show that the gap has a genetic component.

The Similarities test has risen faster than any other test. It measures analytical thinking and is thought to be a good measure of raw fluid g. The final paragraph is interesting. The Black-White IQ gap is correlated with something called inbreeding depression score, a purely heritable measure. Hereditarians use this to say that the B-W IQ gap is genetic.

But Flynn shows here that the FE (a purely environmental gain) also correlates with inbreeding depression, a purely hereditarian score. Flynn uses this to say that the B-W IQ gap is not necessarily completely genetic.

Flynn notes above that the FE cannot possibly be caused by brains that actually work better physiologically than the brains of our grandparents. Genetics doesn’t work that fast.

Therefore, what does the FE measure? Flynn says it measures “intelligent behavior.” So our brains don’t work any better than our grandparents’ brains, but we show improved “intelligent behavior” over them.

Therefore, another mystery is solved, how massive IQ gains can occur without concomitant improvement in the physiology of our brains.

Since hereditarians use g as a measure of physiological efficiency of our brains, Flynn calls this into question by noting that g gains can occur too fast to be accommodated for by physiologically improved brains. Therefore, Flynn suggests chucking g as a measure of pure brain physiological efficiency.

Therefore, the White nationalist and hereditarian argument that the FE is not on g has been proven wrong.

References

Flynn, James R. 2000. IQ Gains, WISC Subtests and Fluid g: g Theory and the Relevance of Spearman’s Hypothesis to Race, Chapter 12 in Bock, Gregory R., Goode, Jamie A., Webb, Kate. Novartis Foundation Symposium 233 – The Nature of Intelligence, pp. 202-227. Novartis Foundation. Published online.

39 Comments

Filed under Africa, Blacks, Brazil, Caribbean, Discrimination, Dominica, East Africa, Flynn Effect, Hispanics, Intelligence, Kenya, Latin America, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, South America, White Racism, Whites

by | July 7, 2009 · 12:24 AM

Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles

A commenter notes that genes provide a range of behaviors, and culture may not be able to move group performance much outside of that range. The suggestion by that commenter was that genes will predispose some populations to relatively high crime, and culture can only make it lower or higher, but it’s never going to be all that low.

Allow me to differ on that for a moment.

Check out my post on the Moriori.

In a nutshell, the Polynesians are widely regarded as extremely violent people. They were violent as Hell on contact, and their oral histories indicated a culture of extreme violence dating back as far as we can tell. They seem to have been some of the most violent folks on Earth.

The Maori were some of the most violent of all of the Polynesians. To this day, they have very high rates of general instability, drug abuse, domestic violence, and all sorts of crime, including violent crime. They are are regarded as having hair trigger tempers and for being highly aggressive. They have all of the social pathologies of US Blacks, though their IQ’s seem to be higher. (IQ = 91).

The Moriori were a Maori subgroup that colonized the Chatham Islands in the 1600’s. They started out being typically maniacal Maoris, but after a while of that, it become clear that they were going to massacre each other.

A leader came unto them and saw God. He became a religious leader, and all of the people followed him. He ordered them to renounce all violence. For the next 300 years, they were possibly one of the least violent people on Earth. Homicide was basically unheard of, and so was rape. Conflict was settled by a twig as wide as your index finger. At the first blood it was over and done with, and the conflict was buried.

Around the 1830’s, the Maori came to the Chatham Islands. They attacked the Moriori and the Moriori were so pacifist they would not even fight back. They were quickly massacred, enslaved and cannibalized. Few survived.

Now, how does the most violent tribe on Earth become the most pacifist tribe on Earth?

It’s clear to me that Polynesians are genetically primed for violence and aggression, but it’s also clear that a strong culture can completely overcome that.

Genes provide the clay, culture is the sculptor.

Now, the question is, how can these profound gene-warping cultures work? Sadly, I think they work best in small tribes and villages. In large cities and big societies, I don’t think these super-cultures can take hold. They just get washed out by the genes. So in large cities and with huge populations, genes will predominate, and maybe culture has limited effects. In very small populations, culture can be a super-warper.

There is also the possibility that some races are more “plastic” than other races. Polynesians may be a “plastic race” that is highly susceptible to cultural effects. Amerindians may be another one. There are Amazonian tribes right near the “most violent people on Earth”, the Yanomamo, that, like the Moriori, are some of the pacifist people on Earth.

A problem with Blacks is that they seem to commit lots of crime just about everywhere. I am willing to entertain the possibility that Blacks may not be as “plastic” or as effected by super-culture, as, say, Polynesians and Amerindians are.

The Dyula are an exception, and they are Blacker than people say they are. They are also subject to the profound gene-warping effects of a super-culture called Islam. In North Africa and the Arab World, Blacks and part-Blacks often have crime rates that are quite low, live in orderly and stable societies, are often employed, have fairly stable families, etc. I conclude that Islam is good for Blacks. The Dyula homicide rate is about the same as Japan’s. American Blacks have a homicide rate about 28 times higher than the Dyula.

In socialist societies, Blacks have low crime rates. Cuba is 37% Black, and Havana is probably the safest city in Latin America in terms of violent crime, but there is a lot of petty theft nowadays.

In Mozambique under Samora Machel’s Communist regime, anyone, male or female, could walk at 3 AM from one end of the 95% Black capital Maputo to the other with no problems.

Dominica, with an 89% Black population (the rest mixed race Black-White) has a homicide rate 68% that of the US, which has a 13% Black population. American Blacks have a homicide rate about 8 times higher than Dominican Blacks.

I conclude that socialism and relatively equitable societies are good for Blacks, and highly unequal societies seem to spur huge amounts of Black crime.

The reasons will be painful for Blacks but will make sense in a race realist sense. As we have noted on this blog, the US Black IQ is 89.8. That is 13.2 points lower than the US White IQ of 103. The Black IQ has skyrocketed by 22 points in 75 years, but it continue to lag behind the White IQ.

This blog takes no position on what is causing the deficit (Whether it is culture or genes or both, that is, but I will say that I do not think the gap is caused by racism.), and perhaps in the future, Blacks will close the gap partly or fully. But presently, the gap exists and is real; that’s all we need to know.

Blacks may also as a group have higher rates of genetic variables that make it more difficult to succeed in an advanced capitalist society.

Such a society rewards “nerdiness”, showing up on time, delaying gratification (often massive delay of gratification), ability to control one’s emotions in heated office environments, long attention span, etc. There seems to be evidence that Blacks on average have a more extroverted personality that finds these introverted type traits to be frustrating at best and idiotic at worst.

With an IQ deficit like that, Blacks will tend to lag behind no matter what.

Extremely competitive US capitalist culture (much more competitive than, say, European culture) continually blasts you with messages that you must be in at least the top 20% income bracket to be considered a “winner” in US society.

That means 80% of the population are “losers” at any given time. Many will be “losers” for life. US society foments extreme hatred and contempt for the 80% “losers” (particularly the males) and it reminds them of that every single day.

For people who already are handicapped in competition in such a society due to extroversion and lower IQ, who have a lesser ability to delay gratification, to have it hammered into their heads every day that they are failures and they need to be rich to be successful right now may be too much to bear.

If the standard way of getting rich doesn’t pan out, many will just say fuck it and turn to the easy cash of crime. This is my explanation for high Black crime rates in modern capitalist societies.

I suspect that this same dynamic may also effect other groups whose IQ’s, though not especially low, still put them at disadvantage against the higher groups.

Polynesians (IQ = 89), Amerindians (IQ = 90), Hispanics (IQ = 92, Arabs in Europe (IQ = 92), Inuit (IQ = 94) may be some examples. None of these IQ’s is especially low in global terms and neither is US Black IQ (IQ = 89.8).

The average human on Earth has an IQ of 89. I think it’s ridiculous to say that the average human is a moron, so I won’t say that. All of these groups, including US Blacks, have IQ’s near the global average. Melanesians (IQ = 89) in urban New Guinea have a similar IQ and reportedly have horrific crime rates.

In Europe, we have the Roma (IQ = 84), who have outrageous crime and social pathology rates.

Obviously, very low IQ groups like the poor Aborigines (IQ = 65), Black Africans (IQ = 70) and Caribbean Blacks (IQ = 74) are often going to be completely creamed in many highly competitive modern urban societies.

Indeed, Aborigines have off the charts social pathologies and presently nearly need to be taken care of like children for their own good by a paternalistic state. A near-70 IQ worked fine in African villages, but many African urban areas are sheer disaster zones. Urban areas in the Caribbean have some of the world’s highest violent crime rates.

33 Comments

Filed under Aborigines, Africa, Amerindians, Anthropology, Arabs, Blacks, Capitalism, Caribbean, Crime, Criminology, Cuba, Cultural, Dominica, Dyala, East Indians, Economics, Hispanics, Intelligence, Inuit, Islam, Left, Maori, Marxism, Melanesians, Moriori, Mozambique, New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Polynesians, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Roma, Russia, Socialism, Sociology, South Africa, Whites

by | July 3, 2009 · 6:09 PM

IQ Population Genetics – Not So Simple

Repost from the old site.

IQ Population Genetics: It’s Not as Simple as You Think. That’s the title of a very nice paper by Gerhard Gerhard Meisenberg, a professor at Ross University, in the Caribbean nation of Dominica. Meisenberg previously worked on a study in Dominica that found a massive 18-point IQ increase over 35 years on this small, almost all-Black island. It was published in the Winter 2003 issue of the Mankind Quarterly.

I believe that the Mankind Quarterly is run by the nefarious Richard Lynn, but in between the racist horrors, there is a lot of great academic work in there that you often can’t find in other places. Meisenberg in particular is an interesting scholar, fully open to genes for intelligence that vary by race but also a strong proponent of the Flynn Effect of strong environmental effects on IQ.

First of all, Meisenberg notes that IQ correlates fairly well with race, religion latitude and economic development. Other variables such as head size, type of economic system and history of colonialism do not seem to have much of an effect.

Most of the text is about IQ and genes, which I am not much interested in.

He does, however, uphold the supposed “Lewontin’s Fallacy”, which hereditarians love to thrash.

First of all, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has proven that 85% of genetic differences between humans is within races, 10% between races and 5% between ethnic groups within races. What is interesting is that Arthur Jensen, uber-IQ hereditarian, agrees with this assessment. He found that 15% of IQ variation in humans in his studies was between races. But this added up to a significant figure.

Skull shape has similar figures: 79% between individuals, 13% between races and 6% between ethnic groups within races.

So for genes, skull shape and intelligence, Lewontin’s analogy makes sense, and there is no need to conjure up “fallacies” about it. In terms of intelligence, Lewontin’s analogy ends up showing a significant Black-White differential.

In contrast, skin color is almost totally racial: 88% is between races, 3% is among ethnic groups in races and 9% is between individuals. There was very strong selection pressure for skin color due to the needs for Vitamin D and protection from UV waves – skull shape underwent no such rigorous selection.

This paper shows a substantial increase in the size of cranial vaults in the US from 1850-1975. The probable cause is general nutrition. Although the Flynn Effect has been ridiculed on the basis that we could not possibly be smarter than our grandparents’ generation, if our brains are bigger than theirs were, it makes sense that we could actually be smarter than previous generations.

The head size increase was consistent in both Blacks and Whites and males and females. This gives the lie to the hereditarian notion that the Black IQ has been a flat “85” for the last 100 years. Clearly, Blacks today have much larger heads and are much brighter than Blacks a century ago. Black skulls showed no change from 1850-1900, but after 1900, their size began expanding dramatically, an increase that is ongoing.

In particular and amazingly, Whites and Blacks in the late 1900’s had skulls that were closer to each other than either was to their ancestors! Especially, US Black skulls are now dramatically different from African skulls.

This study looked at Black and White skulls in the US through time. Colonial Black skulls looked very African. By 1900, they looked less African, though still retaining strong African characteristics. In both races, there has been a trend towards decreased prognathism and a receding lower half of the face.

Meisenberg also questions whether or not IQ actually drives economic development. If so, then why did the Industrial Revolution take place in Europe rather than in Northeast Asia? He questions the notion that genetic IQ differentials among races take thousands of years, shedding doubt on Lynn’s Ice Age Theory. Meisenberg suggests that the Asian advantage over Whites in IQ may have evolved in only the past 200 years or so.

There are problems with the latitude effect on IQ as a variable. For one, it has no effect among Africans. It seems to have had little effect in Amerindians either. Latitude also correlates with brain size and Meisenberg gives us the first data I have seen on head size in SE Asians. Malays have quite small heads and IQ’s of 92, whereas Koreans have much larger heads and IQ’s of 106.

Meisenberg also suggests that genetic intelligence and head size rises may work much faster than skin color changes due to complexity of the traits. Intelligence is probably acted on by many genes, whereas skin color is only controlled by a small set of genes. The greater the number of genes controlling an effect, the faster evolution can occur.

Meisenberg comes out strongly for a high standard of living as having a positive effect on IQ.

The massive rise of IQ that took place in many countries over the past century shows conclusively that environmental effects can have a powerful effect on the average intellectual level of large populations. Presumably one or another aspect of “standard of living” is responsible for this secular trend: education, nutrition, health care, mass media, or, most likely, a combination of all of these.Together with the Flynn effect, these results suggest that the causal arrow points both ways. High intelligence produces a high standard of living, which in turn raises intelligence even more. Thus intelligence and economic development are mutually reinforcing in a positive feedback loop.

This feedback loop explains two of the greatest mysteries of our time: the rapid progress of science, technology and economic development during the 20th century, which is indeed a major historical anomaly; and the rise in mental test performance that has become known as the Flynn effect.

This feedback loop between intelligence and standard of living can explain the great magnitude of the IQ differences between nations.

It predicts that even in cases where genetic differences affecting mental ability are small, the observed phenotypic differences become amplified because the slightly more gifted populations achieve a higher standard of living which raises their measured intelligence even more, which in turn raises their standard of living yet further.

Similar “amplifier effects” have previously been proposed as explanations for the Flynn effect.

Excellent stuff, huh?

First of all, let us elucidate who exactly those opposing the Flynn Effect so strenuously are. Other than hereditarians like Jensen with a deep career and theoretical investment in hereditarian views, the most vociferous opponents are almost all Whites, mostly Northern Europeans, creepily enough (Aryans anyone?). Almost all of them are racists.

Even Southern European White nationalist types tend to poo-poo IQ fetishism more than the de facto Nordicists.

Race realists seem more interested in the Flynn Effect. An environmental effect on IQ will mean that differences between races are not fixed by the genes, and these racists have a strong need to believe that Blacks, Hispanics, Amerindians, etc. are hereditarily inferior to European Whites in intelligence, and that no cultural variables can change this.

If environment effects IQ, then presumably Blacks or others could start to close the gap with Whites, and they want to maintain their superior position.

One of the principal arguments against the Flynn Effect is that we have not seen the expected Second Renaissance in the arts, sciences, etc. that we should have seen. Nor should we be seeing people railing about school failure and the ignorance of high school and college students. But these criticisms fail to understand the Flynn Effect.

The effect has been mostly on culture-free areas like abstract thinking, and much less to none on areas affected by schooling such as mathematics, vocabulary and general knowledge.

With school learning skills flat and many more poor students staying in high school and even trying to go college (students who would have dropped out of high school or never gone to college in my Mother’s generation), we should expect disconnects between expectations and scores.

On the other hand, Meisenberg suggests that the supposedly nonexistent Renaissance has in fact occurred. As he notes, the rapid progress of science, technology and economic development in the 20th century is historically anomalous. I would argue that it was a Renaissance, and would add that it took place in the arts also. Look at the explosion of creativity in literature, music, art and architecture in the 20th Century.

And he notes that this explosion in intellectual and societal development nicely mirrored a concomitant rise in both intelligence as measured by IQ and head size.

Further, the deniers of the Flynn Effect have a hard time explaining away the growth in head size in the last 150 years, which eerily parallels the Flynn Effect. If the Flynn Effect represents no real increase in intelligence, as the hereditarians insist, why did it parallel both a major technological and intellectual revolution and a striking increase in head size itself?

These scores are taken from this paper, and indicate varying scores for IQ tests and semi-IQ tests taken over about 30 years. As you move down in each individual row, you move into revised versions of the tests in more recent years.As you can see, White adult IQ (age 25+) in the US is now 102.9, or 103 rounded off. Black adult IQ (age 25+) has increased in recent years to 89.1 or 89 rounded off. There remains a 13.8 point gap between Blacks and Whites. It is no longer appropriate to say that Blacks have an IQ of 85.

A Flynn Effect and growth of US Black skull size explain nicely the relatively high IQ’s of US Blacks. By White percentages alone, US Blacks should have IQ’s of only 72 (native IQ of 67 plus 17.5% White IQ of 103 gives 67 + 5 = 72). With Black adult IQ (age 25+) in the US now at 89.1, that leaves 15.1 points of US Black IQ unexplained. Meisenberg’s theories laid out in this paper explain this well.

At the same time, there have been similar rises in IQ for immigrants from East India and the Caribbean to the UK and for North Africans to the Europe. Hereditarians such as Richard Lynn desperately try to explain these increases away as either selective immigration or increased miscegenation among UK Jamaicans, but given the parallel experiences of US Blacks, it seems we are dealing with a Flynn Effect in Europe also.

Meisenberg has an interesting take on contraception. In terms of selection for intelligence, widespread contraception use is dysgenic in advanced societies and eugenic in developing countries. Over time, population differences in IQ should narrow, something we socialists like.

References

Beals, K.L., Smith, C.L. & Dodd, S.M. 1984. Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, And Time Machines. Current Anthropology, 25:301-330.

 

Dickens, William T. & Flynn, James R. October 2006. Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples. Psychological Science.

Jantz, RL. July 2001. Cranial change in Americans: 1850-1975 . J Forensic Sci. 46(4):784-7.

Meisenberg, Gerhard. Winter 2003. IQ Population Genetics: It’s Not as Simple as You Think. Washington, DC: Mankind Quarterly, Volume XLIV, Number 2, pp. 185-210.

Truesdell, Nicole D. May 2005. Secular Change In The Skull Between American Blacks And Whites. MA Thesis. Baton Rogue, LA: Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Department of Geography and Anthropology.

38 Comments

Filed under Americas, Arabs, Blacks, Caribbean, Dominica, East Indians, Hispanics, Intelligence, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Whites