"Race and gender redefining are not dialectics to discover truth or bring diversity, equity and inclusion. They are designed to foment division, chaos and confusion. It's a communist thing."

I don't think they need to be mutually exclusive. The Hegelian dialectic used by the lefties to foment division, chaos and confusion in attempt to reach utopia of diversity, equity and inclusion claiming its the truth. Are they not? It is a lefty thing, a communist thing you might say.

"The perpetrators of this, unfortunately, do not see that they will suffer any ill effects from their actions. BLM/ Antifa, are given free reign to to wreak as much havoc as they can."

The brown shirts. Little Red Guards. A controlled opposition yes. What Yuri Bezminov would call "Useful idiots".

"Under communist rule there are no "special' people needing rights; everyone conforms and we are all one. This was Jim Carey's epiphany. We are all one. We're not."

Yes under communism everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. For most its a shared misery and for few its a constant power struggle inside the party.

@Krunoslav Make no mistake, the Marxist tool to foment division, chaos and confusion is the Hegelian Dialectic. Marx expounded upon it in defining the proletariat and bourgeoisie. In this he had the opposing terminals, the thesis/antithesis. They co-existed in the social structure and all Marx needed to do was define one as an oppressor and the other as a victim. Bringing into question why some should be the haves and some the have-nots and who should determine that. Of course, the masses were clearly the have-nots and if roused by being defined as victims could overwhelm by sheer numbers the de-humanized oppressors, now painted as inhumane. Once in political control they could start the purge and the seizing of the means of production. Synthesis - Utopia.

Today many victim classes have been identified in western society and each victim group indoctrinated in how they are oppressed. There is only one oppressor group, probably the white, cis-gendered male - that seems to be the target, since they engineered the society that is systemically racist. They are increasingly dehumanized.

Marx, in his political application of the Hegelian dialectic, did create a means to destroy a society or nation, which will always contain inherent inequalities in a social structure simply because there are inherent qualities of individual character, purpose, interest and ability.

A society gets in trouble when that social structure is immutable. An hereditary monarchy, a religious caste system, a socialist dictatorship - All will be short lived if the inequalities are highlighted as oppressive and a dehumanization between the classes foments hatred.

America has a mobile class structure which is why it has risen to the heights it has in the world and its government was constrained until recently.

The Hegelian Dialectic employed today is contrived of false dichotomies, not a natural dichotomy. These false dichotomies are not created to bring about a synthesis, a neutralization of opposing forces. They are created to destroy the extant social structure and replace it with a centralized authority that promises to whither away. By what course of nature does any authority ever whither away?

"From the scientific perspective you would suspect that the old racial concepts were trying to identify subspecies of humans based on skin color and other morphological features. Even from that primitive approach it seems odd that the same people would not consider the various breeds of dogs subspecies."

I disagree. People since we spread across the world, have been able to use their power of observation to spot those not like them because the physical characteristics were clearly not the same.

Color of skin and other facial and physical features can easily be recognized visually by people. A guy from Western Africa will stand out in Iceland as much as the guy from Siberia will stand out among Han Chinese. Some physical traits are quite easy to see, just like we could recognize easily who is a male and who is a female. Around those traits stereotypes develop, just like stereotypes develop over many other similar traits in life in order to quickly focus on averages and make decisions more efficiently and then adjust later if needed. If someone looks a particular way, you take a brief look, you use a stereotype to assign characteristic to the person and you try to take it from there. If we did not do that, socially complex life would be virtually impossible. And that is why humans have developed this way of making judgments about the world they inhabit.

The idea that we need DNA testing is absurd. Because it clearly did not make social relations any better, in fact it made it more divisive. So we can say as is the case with many of the terms historians use, the phenomenon existed before the coinage of the word used to describe it. But people understood there there are differences between various racial groups simply by looking at one another. And because usually different groups developed different cultural values, stereotypes were effective way to judge the collective or member of the collective, quickly and adjust later as needed.

“...obscurantist feature in social scientists who are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, the self-described social justice warriros reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For social "Scientists", nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so.” ― Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State

We have to remember stereotypes serve a purpose – they are cognitive shortcuts which make negotiating the world that much quicker. Sometimes they can be self-reinforcing. The existence of stereotypes in normal and useful and we have all evolved to use them. To try to get rid of stereotypes is foolish. And its also Sisyphus task. In other words its pointless. What really matters is the context under which particular stereotypes have emerged and context in which they are used. To try to get rid of stereotypes as whole would be going against human nature.

The concept of racial oppression is virtually non existent in societies that don't have a diverse set of groups in it. It is attempt to group people and pretend that visual cues like color of skin do not matter to people is the problem.

This is clearly seen in American prison system, How do inmates divide into gangs? By color of skin. simple. If you are a white guy and you see bunch of black guys attacking a fellow white guy you don't even know, you better help him because being also white the other white inmates will attack you.

What does that tell you? When things are tense , the most easy way to divide yourself is by color of skin since its a big visual cue. This is deeply ingrained in human instincts. Trying to live up to liberal ideals of pretending that is not the case, does not work very well. As United States has demonstrated. And Western Europe now with open border policy is showing the same bad signs.

That being said, discrimination is not limited or exclusive to race differences. Slavery and all manners of discrimination exist in all shapes and sizes that have nothing to do with color of skin or many other physical attributes.

In fact, a multi racial society is doomed to fail because when economy and other aspect of civil society are stressed, it is easy to divide people and conquered them based on racial differences.

Once again America is perfect example how if you can't win against it in military or economic terms, you can simply agitate racial tensions and bring it down from the inside. You could not do that in Japan or China.

"Race as a public policy issue is proving counter productive. It's time for less social engineering and more moral sophistication."

I agree with that. Its a high order in a multi racial society, though, hence one race, easier to solve this. In fact it would not even come up. In mostly single race country like Croatia, growing up I've not heard about racism until I saw it in American movies. And still it was strange. I could not understand it. It was forign. And yet I could claim that in all boys white Croatian school I was bullied and discriminated against by the teacher as if I was black guy in white school according to American movies. So for me color of skin and discrimination are correlated, but one is not the cause of the other. Which is the current dominant narrative in the west. With the gender and class added to it where the race card does not work.

"No discussion of race would be complete without discussing the contentious issue of differences in ethnic IQs. Most people today seem inclined to just dismiss IQ as a valid metric ending the unpleasant conversation. "

Yeah I am one of those. If I took it personally I would be offended and since I don't take it personally I find the IQ thing absurd.

Its designed by academic communist of learned fools who score high in their own environment. You transplant the said learned fools to jungle or war-zone and their IQ scores means absolutely nothing. IF anything it would get them killed.

You said: "The original intent was for individual counseling on career choices especially in the military. Not as a strict guide but as a tool to help people find a comfortable fit. "

Yes, I found the same when I try to investigate origins of The infamous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Created as a successor of similar manual used by the army to classify shell shock victims after WWII. So it was created by the beurocracy for the bureaucracy, that had no interest or time to treated individuals as individuals.

IQ tests are the same. Its a bureaucratic tool for corporate industry and for academics. It has nothing to do with fields out side of it since it would not be useful and it was designed in the image of people who started using it. I would rather trust a traveling chinchilla salesmen than IQ tests. Or... DSM.

@Krunoslav

I'm afraid I'm one of those "learned fools" I score pretty high. We can discuss it more if you like.

@wolfhnd My condolences. Jokes aside. Yes, sure lets talk. My problem is the lack of self correcting mechanizm and the bureaucratic nature of IQ testing. It is designed in the academia framework and like so many problems of academia, its a self congratulating culture. Hence there is rarely any self correcting mechanism built into the system.

On the bureaucratic side of things, it is similar to the Big Five Personality model. A complete hogwash, designed to help comb large number of people and place them in boxes for easier classification. And that is my problem with this approach. It is not really designed to treat people as individuals or outside the useful framework for those who design the tests.

IQ testing for example. There are many types of way in which people solve problems, and non of that is in IQ testing. Also IQ tests can be learned like any other similar test and pass with high score. So I'm not sure what they are supposed to be testing, good students or smart people?

Also there is no tests for how emotions impact the tests. In real life that is important. If you get a guy and you put a gun to his head and you starve him for five days before that and have him pass the IQ test, would he pass it with the same score as the same person under normal conditions? I very much doubt it. And in real world there are all kinds of situations for which you cannot test. Life is the ultimate test.

But if you are giant beurocracy and you are looking to expand and control the scores, than these tests are useful. But even if I accept that to a degree, for corporate or academic environment, the self correcting mechanize is still missing. And last thing I want is some Mensa egomaniac telling me how smart or stupid I am. I reject their authority. Simple as that.

For me its simple. Who designed the tests, with what end goal, and how they are implemented? Looking at those, I do not like what I see.

Criticisms against the IQ Test
[neuroscientia.com]

There are two kinds of fools. One says,
"This is old, and therefore good."
And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.

-- John Brunner

So what am I missing?

@Krunoslav

There are large bureaucracies that simply cannot be avoided.

It's easier to grasp if you start with a simpler society such as Sumer. Sumer has something interesting in common with the Aztecs. They turned what was an inhospitable environment into an agricultural miracle. In the case of the Aztecs we know they were pushed into that environment by stronger tribes and I suspect the same is true of Sumer. The agricultural miracle was a result of necessity or as they say necessity is the mother of invention. Becoming totally dependent on agriculture could by extension be seen as the mother of Civilization. When you are dependent on intense agriculture and complex irrigation structures competency takes on a different meaning. Especially when you have large high density populations. Everything within your society has to be organized around hierarchies of competence. Defense in particular has to be absolutely perfected because raiders can destroy not just your crops but the engineering required to produce them. In societies that are less organized or nomadic defense is mostly about staying alive.

I'm focusing on defense but a society dependent on intense agriculture needs hierarchies of competence to organize water projects, fortifications, sewers, roads, trade and distribution etc. All of which require the ability to manipulate abstractions.

The reason that I'm focusing on defense is that by time we reached the twentieth century defense was so complex and so dependent on logistics that people unable to manipulate abstractions were no longer useful in a military. Thus the IQ test was born to keep people that would be counterproductive out. You also had to sort people according to ability. For example the highest IQ people in the U.S. Army Air force were selected to be navigators. Navigation required math proficiency and the ability to use complicated scientific instruments. Artistic types regardless of IQ were generally unwelcome. Someone could be great at solving problems but if they didn't have the ability to do complex math they were useless as a navigator.

After the war it was clear that IQ tests would help society sort people so that educational resources that were in short supply were not wasted. Had we maintained those strict standards most of the problems with academia today could have been avoided as the woke tend to be unable or unwilling to meet strict standards.

@wolfhnd But your reply fails to address the inherent problem of those tests. They are limited by their own design. Furthermore, many people were great at navigation with no IQ tests, because they simply focused on the problem. People sailed and tracked and navigated with maps, no maps, and with the helps of stars, waves etc. They didn't need to past the IQ tests to do their job. And I would put any one of them against 10 of these military navigators with their tests.

" For example the highest IQ people in the U.S. Army Air force were selected to be navigators. Navigation required math proficiency and the ability to use complicated scientific instruments"

Funny how today, kids age six are playing complex aviation simulators with all the said instruments reading and no need for IQ tests.

"Artistic types regardless of IQ were generally unwelcome. Someone could be great at solving problems but if they didn't have the ability to do complex math they were useless as a navigator."

I very much doubt that. I think it was just beurocracy attempt to make their job easier. After all, when in the middle of combat I am pretty sure IQ tests are useless.

"After the war it was clear that IQ tests would help society sort people so that educational resources that were in short supply were not wasted. Had we maintained those strict standards most of the problems with academia today could have been avoided as the woke tend to be unable or unwilling to meet strict standards. "

Strick standards yes. IQ tests no. They are way to limited and easily abused. Besides the idea of an intelligence quotient was first suggested by German psychologist, William Stern, in 1912. I mean what could possible go wrong. God save the world from German thinkers.

@wolfhnd

History of Intelligence Testing

[iqtest.com]

Among the first to investigate individual differences in mental ability was a British scientist, Sir Francis Galton, who compared people based on their awards and accomplishments. This research convinced him that intelligence was inherited and led to further studies which involved evaluating individual differences in reaction time and range and specificity of the senses, which have since been shown to correlate with academic success.

A French psychologist, Alfred Binet, developed a test to accurately predict academic success when the French government asked him to help them determine which children in the public schools would have difficulty with formal education. He, and his colleague, Theodore Simon, found that tests of practical knowledge, memory, reasoning, vocabulary, and problem solving were better predictors of school success than the sensory tests used by Galton. Subjects were asked to perform simple commands and gestures, repeat spoken numbers, name objects in pictures, define common words, tell how two objects are different, and define abstract terms. Similar items are used in today`s intelligence tests.

Assuming that children all follow the same pattern of development but develop at different rates, Binet and Simon created the concept of mental age, whereby, for example, a child of any age who scored as well as an average twelve-year-old was said to have a mental age of twelve.

Binet’s test was not widely used in France, but Henry Goddard, director of a school for mentally challenged students, brought it to the United States, translated it into English, and used it to test people for mental retardation.

Lewis Terman, another American psychologist, adapted the test for use with adults, established new standards for average ability at each age, and called it the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, because of his affiliation with Stanford University.

Instead of giving a person’s performance on the Stanford-Binet as a mental age, Terman converted performance into a single score, which he called the intelligence quotient, or IQ. A quotient is the number that results from dividing one number by another. The idea of an intelligence quotient was first suggested by German psychologist, William Stern, in 1912. To compute IQ, Stern divided mental age by the actual, chronological age of the person taking the test and then multiplied by 100 to get rid of the decimal point. So, a child who was eight years old and answered the test questions as well as a twelve-year-old scored an intelligence quotient of 12/8 x 100, or 150. A twelve-year-old who answered the test questions as well as an average eight-year-old would have an IQ of 8/12 x 100, or 66.

This formula works well for comparing children, but since intelligence levels off in adulthood, it is not appropriate for adults. A thirty-year-old who answers questions as well as an average twenty-year-old would have an IQ of only 20/30 x 100, or 66.

So intelligence tests today no longer use the IQ formula. Instead, the score on a modern intelligence test compares a person’s performance with others his/her own age, while arbitrarily defining the average score as 100. By convention, most people still use the term IQ to refer to a score on an intelligence test.

.............................

Good old fashion bureaucracy. Inaccurate and easily abused. Even with best intentions it skews the academia and by extension civilization in one sided direction.

@Krunoslav

Any test you devise to screen people for aptitude will end up looking like and have similar results as the current IQ tests.

I could agree with you that they are biased but the alternative is to continue down the path of a decimated meritocracy. Keep in mind I'm not suggesting that IQ tests are a substitute for real world measures of productivity. I'm also actually on board with a certain amount of artificial diversity as well. What is important is that all standards are necessarily arbitrary. For example the age of consent, driving, military service, drug consumption, first year of school etc.

@wolfhnd "Any test you devise to screen people for aptitude will end up looking like and have similar results as the current IQ tests."

Perhaps. Which reveals another problem. He who invests and administers the tests, rules. Which is another dangerous incentive.

"What is important is that all standards are necessarily arbitrary. For example the age of consent, driving, military service, drug consumption, first year of school etc."

Yes, we have seen this as a problem as well. For example children are enrolled in the school system based on their year of manufacture. And if a child is not up to the standards of the meritocracy that represents the majority, it is usually left behind. Same is with children that are ahead of the class, they too are pressured to conform to the lower standards.

This served an industrialized nation and factory based society, but despite largely not living in such system in the West, many of the same systems remain. Furthermore, people have not evolved to be factory workers. If the nation needs only factory workers, I can see the argument that we should invests in the factory workers, but when so much potential can be encouraged in other ways, why do we still operate in the factory model of education? Well, for one thing, beurocracy. It protects status que long after que has lost its status.

Before the Wokkies took over the entire system , there was a pretty good talk by Ken Robinson.

RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms

@Krunoslav

I hope you haven't fallen into the post industrial economy delusion.

The reason that there are fewer factories is we have made a deal with the devil. The West has sold it's soul to export slave labor and pollution to China and other developing nations. It's every bit as immoral as any other slave trade. As with any slave system it has thoroughly corrupted those engaged in it and reduced the Western countries working class to near relative poverty. Instead of investing in meaningful labor and a middle-class work force the elites have looked the other way as an opioid pandemic has evolved and they have gotten richer.

While the benefits of the digital revolution are undeniable large portions of the national wealth has been siphoned off not only by China but the relatively unproductive. Slavery doesn't just harm the slave. The Roman slave economy played a role in it's demise. It opens up the possibility of great inequity in wealth distribution where the most unscrupulous elements of the economy can exploit a pacified population. In particular banister and other manipulators who produce no wealth. It also creates an environment where the upper middle-class can become obsessed with Luxus and ignore their social obligations. Just like Rome we have economies based on luxury not meaningful productivity. Entertainment has become an obsession making the unscrupulous artist class social icons. The best example of distorted values is Mark Zuckerberg. He the Richest man in California and he got that way by selling information that was supposed to be by contract private. In exchange society got the entertainment of a digital application hardly superior to MySpace that it replaced. The only thing innovative about Facebook is it's marketing strategy. An economy built on products like Facebook is no economy at all.

Building a Civilization is costly. It starts with industries such as agriculture. It requires extensive infrastructure. Once built it is the historical pattern for Luxus to destroy in. Bread and circus didn't save Rome and forms of entertainment like Facebook and extensive state welfare programs will not save ours. To rebuild our civilization we are no freer from the need for hierarchies of competence or meritocracy than any that have preceded it.

@wolfhnd "I hope you haven't fallen into the post industrial economy delusion. "

No, not post industrial, but also not only industrial. A nation that does not make room for art, literature, and many other non factory based industries is committing cultural suicide.

Yes you are right, deal with the devil. Consumer society at home and slave labor abroad. While the upper crust held together by a dough benefits.

But factories that are still in for example America are for weapons systems to feed the military industrial complex and forever wars.

No I'm not for post industrial society thinking its sustainable, but there must be more than factories in a nation if it was to be a healthy nation. Even more than that, it must not fall into dehumanizing culture. Weather its communism or raw industrialize with which both reduce humans to its economic output and nothing else. It is a form of slavery.

" An economy built on products like Facebook is no economy at all. "

I agree.

I suppose each civilization has its lifecycle. Than its replaced by another following its own life cycles. Greeks end, Alexander replaces, than come the Romans, republic than empire, than fall of western half, eastern survives for another 1000 years, we see the rise of Catholics in the West, unifies the barbarian kingdoms, becomes the Holy Roman Empire, splits into Catholics and protestants etc. Enlightenment, French Revolution, Napoleon, Another Monarchy, another Republic, WWI than WWII, etc.

Civilizations come and go. Some last longer than others, but on a long enough timeline everyone's surivial rate drops to zero.

Funny enough , despite falls of civilizations and much of it often ends up being destroyed in the process, what little survives helps the speed up the process for the next great civilization so they don't have to reinvent the wheel, just realign it.

@Krunoslav

Of course man does not live by bread alone. That said our society has elevated entertainers to demigod status. On an episode of 60 minutes I remember Mike Wallace saying that the English entertainers get knighted and we give our national treasures a cheap statue when talking about Meryl Streep. This is the woman who defended Roman Polanski after he seduced a minor. Great art and architecture needs to be celebrated but only when it is in line with our values.

@Krunoslav IQ tests are indeed controversial and have been criticized for various reasons, such as potential cultural bias, narrow scope, and misuse. However, they are also widely used and accepted as reliable and valid measures of cognitive ability by many psychologists, educators, and researchers. IQ tests are not meant to capture all aspects of intelligence, such as creativity, emotional intelligence, or social skills, but rather to assess specific cognitive skills, such as reasoning, memory, and processing speed. IQ tests can also have practical applications, such as helping individuals with learning difficulties, identifying giftedness, or predicting academic and occupational outcomes.

Of course, IQ tests are not perfect and should not be used as the sole indicator of a person's intelligence, potential, or worth. IQ tests are also not static and can change over time and with different environmental factors. Many IQ tests online like [iqtestonline.io] should be seen as one of many tools that can provide some insight into a person's cognitive abilities, but not the definitive or final answer.

Seems to me that this website is full of why and who. I have been posting on those topics myself for a long time as you probably have notice yourself.

But the questions I asked are interesting to me because as obvious as it might seem, the very nature of obvious is under attack by the identitarian fruitcakes, and in the war where language is so powerful, maybe its not a bad idea to re-examine the obvious. Just to make sure it remains the obvious.