Tainari88 wrote:Blackjack, I am going to be very succinct with you about what I think you are about.
Succinct doesn't necessarily imply thoughtfulness. Blaise Pascal was reported to have once said, "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte," which is often attributed to Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain as, "If I had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter." Hasty generalizations can lead you astray.
Tainari88 wrote:You fundamentally believe in class systems and you think it is about performance and what the IQ or aptitude of an individual is about or his racial or ethnic composition...etc.
You've got the cart before the horse. I think political class systems evolve from nature. In my mother's family's maternal lineage, they have more or less always been working poor, but reasonably intelligent. Yet, in my father's family's paternal lineage, they have always been upper middle class to rich. I can trace my mother's lineage back about 200 years with maternal lineage, which is difficult to do. With paternal lineage, it's relatively easy to go back nearly a thousand years. In the British class system, the class system itself would explain why someone with my surname still sits in the house of lords, but that's become political now too and attenuating. That is to say, Salic Law, primogeniture, etc. explains how wealth and position is retained to the eldest son of the eldest son. A generation or two of educational advantage might explain why other than the eldest son does well. Marrying well for the daughters explains that in the first generation. However, once you get passed a few generations, class cannot reliably explain persistent advantage, because wealth evaporates and has to be regenerated. Even in a republic like the United States, enormous wealth like that held by the Vanderbilts evaporates over generations. The recently deceased Gloria Vanderbilt made a name for herself with designer jeans/fashion. Her gay son, Anderson Cooper, also made a name for himself as an anchor on CNN. Their success is much harder to attribute to a class system that favors them. Maybe her mother's famous name? Yet, she had no trust fund to propel her to success or sustain her. Anderson Cooper had a successful mother, but no well-known name. The fact is that the same lineages tend to rise to the top. My father's family doesn't seem to make the list of Kings. Why? We tend to be brutally honest, preferring that to dishonesty and treachery. That's a trait. Genetically, I have better than average episodic memory and high non-verbal IQ. At my age, I tend to amaze my long-term friends with details I can remember from our childhood that they have long forgotten. That's not white privilege. That's genetic. You can overthrow the government, but a new class system emerges and the same lineages tend to find themselves at or near the top. Barack Obama is related to Mitch McConnell and Dick Cheney, has slave owners in his past, etc. Most American presidents have distant ties to British nobility or even royalty. You think that those ties allow people to hold a position in a class structure. I think the lineage--and the selective breeding of the aristocracy--creates natural advantages. The class system evolves and changes, but as they say, the cream always rises to the top.
Tainari88 wrote:In the end, if you believe that is what human society should be based on and you take it to its ultimate consequences?
That is a
normative statement. I'm not saying that's how it
should be. I'm making a
positive statement. I'm saying that's how it
is.
Tainari88 wrote:What does one do with the ones with less than stellar IQ and aptitudes? Relegate them to what? Do with them what?
That is a very compelling question that Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein were raising with
The Bell Curve. They were not saying, "Hey folks, we did a bunch of studies and it turns out that whites and Asians are a lot smarter than blacks and Hispanics," but that did not stop supposed academics and their media apparatus from attacking them. Charles Murray wrote another book called
Coming Apart to reframe the issue within a single race so that people would look at the IQ issue squarely within the white population and the attendant class and cultural differences. They could not attack it as racist, so they ignored it.
Automation is coming and coming fast. So this question is going to be pressing politically and the old order/establishment will not be able to answer it. That's a big part of why I have decided I no longer support it.
Tainari88 wrote:I happen to believe that human beings of all backgrounds and abilities have innate human value.
I do to for the most part, but I am not an egalitarian. I would happily execute the guy that killed my childhood friend's daughter. Frankly, I don't think he's a credit to the human race or that he will ever turn it around to make a valuable contribution. I see no point in life in prison when the death penalty could rid us of people like that. Whereas, I think you'd nurse him in prison for the rest of his life, but be too afraid to let him out for fear of what he would likely do to others.
Tainari88 wrote:Those class systems are fundamentally used to justify the power of a small elite and rarely has to do with one group's natural intelligence superiority.
The class systems themselves? Perhaps. However, I think you can overthrow them and still arrive in a similar situation. Soviet Russia is a fine example. Post-Soviet Russia is also a fine example.
Tainari88 wrote:I don't see human society or human beings as useless, useful, good for this or good for that. I think human beings are all born, they grow, they age and they die off...like all living things do here. And all bring something with them for either helping out human society or not.
People have a pecking order just as chickens do. We do not see chickens reading Marx and disagreeing with the pecking order as a result. Americans more or less invented the cellular phone market; yet, the European market became more sophisticated until the iPhone and later Android broke the hold of the big carriers to determine what phones could be sold with what features. Now, it's the power of smart phone "apps," and that market power belongs to Apple and Google--and it must be broken now too. We live in a world where a few genius marketers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. take the technologies invented by other unknown geniuses--usually invented for other reasons; very often military reasons--and make massive commercial successes out of them. In doing so, they marshal many people with above average IQs. I'm one of them; one of many. I'm aware of it, but I don't get to feel super special, because everyone I work with is highly intelligent.
Yet, the very same society can let AT&T, Verizon and a few others keep feature phones out of the US market for a decade, and we US consumers have to look longingly at the "superior" Europeans for a time with their feature phones. That's the state and oligopoly seeking to maximize profits over free markets and technological advancement. That's another one of the reasons I left the Republican party. George W. Bush, who I voted for, donated money to and raised money for is responsible along with AT&T and a few others for allowing major telecom firms to dominate internet service and leave most of the US far behind in network speeds compared to countries like South Korea. Take that, McCain-Kennedy, and their constant acquiescence to left wing political correctness demands, and frankly I have no use for the Republicans either.
Tainari88 wrote:It is their choice Blackjack.
Not everybody can invent a smartphone or cobble together technologies invented by others to create superlative value. They don't necessarily have the mental equipment for high levels of abstraction. What Murray (and Herrnstein) was saying is that we cannot take the idiot, put him in college and arrive at a brain surgeon. What we do is we put the idiot in college, s/he fails out of college, and s/he's saddled with a debt s/he cannot repay. It's cruel and barbaric, and it is done by people who have a vested financial interest in continuing that activity. Meanwhile, we've cancelled out vocational schooling--hollowing out our industrial base and leaving lower skilled people unemployed, turning to alcohol and drugs, which leads to innumerable social problems, which the people who benefit from the system say is because the higher IQ people are "racist," when they know full well that isn't why the problem exists--more reason that I no longer see a reason to support the establishment.
Tainari88 wrote:I don't waste my time categorizing people in columns with labels about their being Native Indigenous people of the Americas, Asians from the Indian subcontinent, Africans from this part or that, or Europeans, etc.
Not much of an anthropologist then, are you?
Tainari88 wrote:They are all one homo sapien species for me Blackjack.
And you see no difference between Pit Bulls and Rottweilers on the one hand, and poodles and bichons on the other? They're just dogs? You can get a team of Alaskan huskies to pull you on a sled in the snow. How do you think that would work out with a team of poodles?
Tainari88 wrote:You either see them as worthy of respect or not.
I'm not suggesting you abuse or disregard the value of poodles. I just don't recommend trying to get a team of poodles to pull you on a sled through fields of snow in Alaska. Your ideas are a product of the great luxury of not having to fight for survival and basic dignity, coupled with the absence of greed for more and more. You are content. That will not provide employment for people with lower skills in the face of advancing automation.
Tainari88 wrote:Wasting them in wars and death without any sense of respect for how much work goes into raising a single human being and how many people got to expend their time and energies on that person and thinking people are discardable or not as good as the next guy is for a person with a different thought process than I have.
That sort of thought process changes with one's station, ambitions, etc. As I said, you are content in a physical sense and you aren't ambitious to acquire more physical wealth for yourself compared to many people in this world.
Tainari88 wrote:I don't like how you think about others that are not from your ethnic background. I don't like how you cope with humans in general.
I cope very well with people outside of my ethnic background. It's actually common among high IQ people, as you already know from your anthropology studies. As I've said repeatedly, my line of work involves many people from India and East Asia. Have you ever been to India? Seen the class system there? In my line of work, we need every able-minded person we can get. We cannot afford to discriminate. It would be economic suicide. We also cannot afford to delude ourselves that an idiot will make a good programmer. We even accommodate Islam, because there are many great programmers who are Muslim. Back when I used to drink coffee, I remember almost tripping over a Muslim colleague at a start-up, because he had setup his prayer rug just around a corner in a small office where we were working. When I was in Dubai about 6 weeks ago, I had to adjust to the regular use of religious language in the workplace. ʾIn shāʾa llāh If I said that in the United States in English, people would think I was off my rocker. "Q: How long will it take you to get this done? A: If God wills it, about 2 days." Simultaneously, we also accommodate transgender people. I have a male colleague, let's call him "Steve" who now wants to go by, let's say "Gloria". Personally, I find capitalist imperialist multicultural dogma overbearing and unnecessary. Yet, I work within it. Some work colleagues want to use non-traditional pronouns, some want to change from a man into a woman, and others think a woman's place is under a burqa and at home, not at work. Your effort to try to paint people like me as closed-minded is rather comical. I've also travelled far and wide and seen many things.
Tainari88 wrote:In strictly scientific terms Blackjack, I am not going to be a Eugenicist or culling the herd for the best of the breed and shit of that nature. I find that trying to control things too much.
That's a sweet disposition. Yet your stated profession arose with ethnology as a sibling, and it was husbanded by European empires in their effort to understand the peoples of the world they intended to rule over. Some used their positions to advocate (successfully) for the abolition of slavery, or gender equality and the right of women to vote. Others developed scientific theories that apply to all species, except humans; for example, Charles Darwin's work--with the Nazis and the Progressives being notable exceptions. The irony is that even though you are trained as an anthropologist--my studies are limited to the behavioral sciences required for a business degree--I'm better able than you to operate in societies where women have fewer rights or are expected to abide by different customs. For example, I can appreciate the cultural need for taxis for females in Dubai, where the drivers are also female, and find some amusement at the "pink taxis." When shopping in India, I allow a female colleague to hold my shopping bags so they don't feel uncomfortable, because in India--I'm told by my female colleagues--the women hold the bags. I do not say, "That's wrong. You shouldn't tolerate that. India needs to be more like the United States." It is a peculiar state of affairs that these days it is the conservatives who are fundamentally more tolerant than the liberals.
Tainari88 wrote:The son of a doctor. Upper middle class. Anglo. From the far right basically and with very little understanding or interest in the experiences of others who are not that.
Do you know many doctors? Do you really think my father taught me that it is perfectly alright to only treat people who can pay? That it's okay to conduct Tuskeegee experiments or Joseph Mengele experiments on black people or Jews? Do you really think my father taught me that it's okay to let non-Anglos suffer from diseases? My grandfather, my father's father, was a veterinarian. My grandfather ran this place for the State of Montana:
It's right on the grounds of the capitol building, as it was and is that important to the State of Montana; however, I do believe the building is used for other purposes now. The agriculture and livestock department is now in a different building.
Yes, they were estimable men. Virulent racists that hated all but Anglos? You must be watching way too much mainstream television. That is just what the establishment thinks is a workable "reverse psychology" that will teach us that "racism is bad," which has had the effect of making us think most of the establishment are hopelessly ignorant of the people of the society they purport to represent and that they could be easily replaced by people with virtually no political experience.
Did I tell you my grandfather was part of a US delegation to the
Baghdad Pact? That he met a very young Queen Elizabeth, Pope Pius XII and President Eisenhower? A religious man and ardently anti-communist. Some sort of Ku Klux Klansmen?
You've couldn't be further from the truth. Being anti-communist is so far from being a racist, sexist or homophobe, it's really just comical. I don't feel the need to even take that sort of thing seriously anymore.
See, I think David Duke has more personal integrity than Nancy Pelosi, because he states what he really believes and despite his shortcomings, that's really the best he can do. Nancy Pelosi knows better, but she still goes out and says things like "Trump wants to make America white again," and she knows perfectly well that's not the case. When I say I think David Duke has more personal integrity than Nancy Pelosi, that doesn't mean I agree with David Duke on anything. It just means that when David Duke says what he believes, I can take him at his word that he really believes what he's saying and doing. When Nancy Pelosi says that MS-13 murderers have a "spark of divinity," she's got something else up her sleeve. She's a snake, and I can't trust anything she says.
Tainari88 wrote:But to figure out why they are as human as I am but are so different and how that is beautiful and how that is natural and how I can learn something new from that difference.
Really? Do you find it fascinating that Hitler's economic blueprint for Germany became the economic footprint for France, the UK and to a lesser extent the US in the postwar era? A welfare state with unemployment benefits, a national health service, etc? Or do you recoil in horror that his regime set about to exterminate Jews, homosexuals, mentally and physically disabled people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political dissidents and his doctors performed medical experiments with a dearth of medical ethics, and his best scientists were employed to developing what became the future of weaponry--missiles, nuclear weapons on top of them, jet planes, etc.? You say that you are interested, but there are a lot of horrific people in this world too. Hitler was an asshole of monumental proportions, but he had enough integrity to say what he believed in Mein Kampf; and, he carried it out to the horror of millions. Is that beautiful and natural, and are you learning from that difference?
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden
?
) was pulling out of Vietnam until he ran into Alan Dulles' brain removal operation. LBJ , a Democrat, made the military industrial complex very happy by escalating the Vietnam war and over 58,000 mothers of dead American boys, and God only knows how many Vietnamese mothers, very unhappy. I hold LBJ, a Democrat, personally responsible for the death of 58,145 American soldiers (the death toll was 58,220, 75 of which took place prior to LBJ.)War is clearly a bipartisan pastime. Look at the dumb war that GW Bush, a Republican, started in Iraq. War has nothing to do with the political party in power and everything to do with profits to be made by the military industrial complex. Your boy Obese Donald is making the military industrial complex very happy by selling billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia to be used against it's neighbors for the usual reasons given to justify war for centuries.
Buenos Dias. 
- By skinster
- By Godstud