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Race Realism

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On 3/30/2018 at 5:45 AM, Sameak said:

the 3 main racial groups are Asian, European, and African

How does that make sense? The Americas were separated from the rest of the world 15,000 years ago. The people who lived there don't get a separate race, but Europeans do?

Why? Do you know how much mingling there's been between Asia and Europe in the past 17,000 years? There are languages in Europe (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian) that arrived from Asia only 1,000 years ago. And, of course, countless large scale migrations before (Huns, Slavs, just to name some recent ones.

The most ancient European ethnicity is the Basques, and not even they can be traced back to Europe for longer than 7,000 years. That's half the time we know for a fact pre Columbus Americans have had the place all to themselves.

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On 3/27/2018 at 12:09 AM, 2046 said:

But what's the point of your argument? Let's put aside the data, because none of us are going to agree with the validity of it, there has been enough scholarly criticisms of your viewpoint no one is going to agree with whatever links you're posting.

Suppose there are two people, A and B. A tests a IQ of 120, B tests an IQ of 119. Ergo what? What inferences, in terms of political philosophy, follow from this?

Just so.  And it wouldn't matter if the numbers were 90 and 160.  Or whether we're talking musical ability, running ability, or any other non-essential characteristic.  If an entity possesses the attributes of a human being, he is a human being for moral and political -- and therefore for Objectivism's -- purposes, regardless of what race (however defined) he might be. 

 

 

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NY times had a surprisingly good op-ed by Harvard geneticist David Reich, researcher on "ancient DNA" wherein he makes several points that sound downright Rand-tastic. Some snippets:

  • institutional discrimination also has a negative impact on I.Q. of populations, which when those factors are controlled (education, economic upbringing, even being adopted and raised by parents who are of a different race), leads to even less substantial difference in even the average I.Q. of populations.

    Differences in individuals vary far more widely than populations. Especially with intelligence. 

  • The key point is that whatever science finds should not affect the way we behave toward one another. Whatever small average differences across groups might exist (and genetic studies have already made it clear that average differences across populations are much less than those between individuals), we are members of a single species, all of whom must be given every opportunity to flourish in every realm.

  •  “Race” is fundamentally a social category — not a biological one — as anthropologists have shown.

  • As a society, we are already committed to giving everyone a full opportunity for self-realization — regardless of the particular hand each person is dealt from the deck of life.


https://nyti.ms/2GmRY2n

Of course the mainstream right and left want to "provide opportunity" by coercive legislation, and the postmodern leftists want to provide it by tearing everything down, but ah, we can't have everything can we.
Edited by 2046
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