Cold winters is just speculation and at least partially wrong. There are some Arab populations that "evolved" in cold climate yet still do badly on tests.

No serious scholar still doubts the heritability of IQ within populations. Problems start when genetic causation is asserted for IQ differences between populations and for that the evidence thus far is also less compelling.

"I don't really see the issue with the "cold winters" mention that Ritchie brings up. They note that it's a hypothesis by some "prior scholars." They haven't made any definitive statement that living in snowyland makes people smarter."

This is a miscaracterization of the argument.

Evolving in cold weather isnt enough. The scientific argument is that a harah envirionment selects for higer IQ because survival requires more long term thinking and planning.

In tropical climates the primary factor in survival is disease resistance. Harsh northern climates required sophisticated hunting and farming techniques and a large cooperative social structure.
That said, there seems to be a big gap on average between those with Neanderthal/Denisovan ancestry, and those without.

A high average IQ in a population group is much more important than individual IQ. Populations evolve. Individuals do not.

Everyone who criticizes heritability of IQ is denying reality. "I don't want it to be true, so it isn't. So there!"

But you know what? In the end, it doesn't matter why blacks have a lower IQ in the US, and African blacks have a catastrophically lower IQ. Whatever the cause, these differences exist. In order to do anything about the respective situations of these people, we must deal with facts, and not with wishes.

There's a reason that Africa remains basically uncivilized, and it's the IQ. Africans are incapable of maintaining the infrastructure that the West is accustomed to. By infrastructure I mean everything from safe water supplies to a functioning government.

Now, suppose that we manage to find a way to help them establish an infrastructure that they can maintain, that raises the living standards of the population to something approaching Western standards. If the IQ gap is environmental, it will disappear - that's great! If the IQ gap is hereditary, well, we will still have solved the problems of poverty and disease.

However, as long as people refuse to face reality - that a population of IQ 75 cannot do the same things as a population of IQ 100 - Africa will remain a disaster.

The same for American inner cities. Blacks with IQs of 85 are seriously disadvantaged compared to white. Pretending otherwise, setting affirmative action quotas, and all the rest - stupid and counterproductive. Deal with reality.

Blacks with IQs of 85 are seriously disadvantaged compared to white. Pretending otherwise, setting affirmative action quotas, and all the rest - stupid and counterproductive. Deal with reality.
——————————————————————————————————————
a_random_guy at June 6, 2017 4:50 AM




"Random."

... it doesn't matter why blacks have a lower IQ in the US, and African blacks have a catastrophically lower IQ. ~ a_random_guy at June 6, 2017 4:50 AM

Yet it seems when you read about a high-achieving black person in the US, he/she is an immigrant or the child of immigrants with parents who emphasized education.

Myron Rolle's parents moved to the US from the Bahamas so their children could pursue opportunities. Myron took full advantage of this; he played football for Florida State University, was drafted into the NFL, put off his football career for a year to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and was recently awarded a Harvard medical residency in neurosurgery. His heroes were Deion Sanders and Ben Carson.

Colin Powell's parents emigrated from Jamaica. He rose to four-star general in the US Army, served as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, and as Secretary of State under George W. Bush.

Ben Carson is an exception to this general rule. Both of his parents came from large families in rural Georgia. His mother, working several jobs as a maid, insisted he and his brother read books and write book reports when their education was not up to that of their fellow students.

I mean, all those things could be said of the Trump voters in Appalachia and Wisconsin, as well.

You guys are very much of our moment in America.

Proud, right? Intelligence quotient.

"But you know what?," we are asked.

By infrastructure I mean everything from safe water supplies to a functioning government.

Is that you, Flint, Michigan? oh, right an example of neither.

It seems to me that when a statement is described as racist, this often (but not always)means the statement is true but embarrassing. For example,if someone claims that young black women go to libraries and tear pages out of books, the reaction is that statement is not true and is stupid. If someone claims young black women often have children with multiple men without marriage, that statement is racist. So the subtext I'm hearing when charges of racism are issued is often "You're right but I don't like it."

That has a weird context when joined with the common claim that all white people are racist, Blue Kayak.

"Yet it seems when you read about a high-achieving black person in the US, he/she is an immigrant or the child of immigrants with parents who emphasized education."

That is part of the problem with the genetic inheritability of intelligence model. While you can have one off mutations you see relatively few with regards to IQ. And immigrants with high IQ have children and grandchildren that revert back to the mean fairly quickly. Usually after four generations there is little evidence of a high IQ ancestor.

On the flip side there are many clear genetic markers for low IQ. It is finding ones for high IQ that seems to be the problem.

"It seems to me that when a statement is described as racist, this often (but not always)means the statement is true but embarrassing."

Which I think is the crux of the problem: everyone is afraid of what the answer might turn out to be. Suppose it was conclusively demonstrated that European-background whites are on average smarter than blacks, and that Far East Asians are on average smarter than whites, and that the basis for this has a genetic component. What would that mean in terms of society, mores, politics, etc.? Here's the thing: demographic statistics tell you a lot about the average behavior of large groups. But they tell you very little about the behavior of an individual. It would make no sense, for example, for a college to say, "From now on, we're only admitting Asians, because they're the smartest ethnic group." No, what they want to do is pick out the smartest people from their applicant pool, of whatever race they happen to be. Not every Asian is smarter than the white average, and not every white is smarter than the black average.

But, because the Left discounts the validity of the individual, they can only look at people as units within ethnic groups. Thus their hysterical reaction whenever someone does this type of research. Because if it is proven that there is a race component to intelligence, then certain groups will have IQ-shame foist upon them, and every individual in those groups will be shamed, even the extremely intelligent ones. No one wants to bear a group shame, and especially when they do not bear the characteristic that is being shamed. But within the context of Leftism, it cannot work any other way.

"Yet it seems when you read about a high-achieving black person in the US, he/she is an immigrant or the child of immigrants with parents who emphasized education."

Everyone likes reading stories about people who overcame an economically disadvantaged background to become successful. But these are, in a sense, a self-selected audience and not very representative of the average outcome. The fact remains that most people from dysfunctional backgrounds become dysfunctional adults. The opposite thing happens too: I can point out any number of children whose parents emphasized education, sent them to the best schools, etc, and they still turned out to be slackers and drug addicts and petty criminals.

BTW: "Murray Hill"... I see what you did there.

Go objective: look at brain size.

You're not arguing about Intel's i7 vs the i3 in absolute processor terms because the advantages of the i7 are obvious: more transistors = more processing power.

You can make an i3 very effective and cripple an i7 by putting them in different environments, motherboards or operating systems in this case, but it remains that there ARE physical differences. In animals, we would call this hereditary. In IT, we do call processors by generation.
In animal husbandry and information technology, we adjust the environment to produce the best result.
In people, we will hide everything we can, some of us pretending as loudly as possible that everyone is the same while "diversity" makes us different.

Fred Reed has a category on intelligence that is at least entertaining...

...if it isn't alarming.

Good links Radwaste!

@Radwaste,

Unless you are comparing laptop processors, an i7 chip is significantly much bigger and more complex than an i3 one.

I think a better comparison would be between the X, T, E, and U variants within the same processor models. On the surface they all look the same (That's racist!), but if you take a closer look you'll notice that there are differences and some variants perform better than others (That's racist too!)

I was giving a leadership breakfast to a group of black civic leaders, talking about character and getting ahead. Someone asked about the disadvantages of black people --ie they are starting off behind. I replied that this is certainly true, but that getting pregnant out of wedlock and going to jail only make it worse, that there are things within one's control that can make it better--not magically, but step by step. They were very happy with that answer. Of course this was 20 yrs ago. Now I would have been lynched.

There's a reason that Africa remains basically uncivilized, and it's the IQ. Africans are incapable of maintaining the infrastructure that the West is accustomed to. By infrastructure I mean everything from safe water supplies to a functioning government.

The kindest thing the west could do for Africa is get out, stop messing with them. Stop the aid drives, stop the emergency shipments of this and that. Tell the blue helmets to stay home. Let them reorganize their countries so they make sense to them. We try to force our complicated alien ways on them, and they just don't fit. Then we make fun of them because they can't *shakes dice to pick something* run an airport.

Let them organize their own means of production. If this means they use a hundred times more people per unit of whatever, so what? If they actively *want* democracy or capitalism or something, let them work for it, build it from the ground up. Then they'll have something that they can run that works for them.

If they want something we have, the west has roughly a two thousand year collection of knowledge, and we will share it with them if they are interested. Enough with this business of shoving it down their throats.

The confidence you guys have in your beliefs about these matters is dumbfounding.

• That intelligence can be reduced to a useful 2-or-3 digit number
• That intelligence is the highest measure of a man or a culture
• That sorting these numerical values in a sorted list presents a worthwhile judgment for political and other purposes
• That such a project is of particular utility for places like Africa rather than, say, Fort Wayne
• That the people of Africa should be concerned with such measures

• That you personally could have nothing to fear from such a 'measurement,' nor should your family, friends, or anyone else you care about.

I think you guys are crackers. Animal Crackers.

Couple of points> When I studied psychology fifty years ago, we were exhaustively instructed as to why the results of the intelligence tests didn't mean what it looked like they meant. Point is, the data have been around for a long time, even before Charles Murray started looking at it.
Look up "spatial orientation" wrt Inuit, Ashkenazi, and Australian aboriginal people. Lot of work on that, and wrt the Ozzies, some anxiety to show it's cultural even if the folks had not been living in the Outback for a couple of generations. Because if that is heritable, so might be the results of conventional intelligence tests. Can't have that.
Bill Bryson, in his book on Australia, refers to the traditional peoples who...almost operate on a different plane and are ignored. Very sad and interesting.
The history of the Ashkenazis is of a savage culling over less than fifteen hundred years.

At one point, Murray suggested the thing to do is let people get as far as luck, talent, and other character traits will take them without regard to group identification. That would cost a lot of hustlers their jobs.
Disparate impact is currently actionable.

☑

(Though I'm not certain what "Disparate impact is currently actionable" means.)

I'm with Crid and Richard.

I think this is one of those things averagely successful white guys love because they think everyone who doesn't admit to the superiority of these silly IQ measurements is just being purposefully obtuse for social justice reasons. If only everyone else was as rational as they then surely they would see the high heritability of success. It's only because we don't like hurting peoples feelings that we deny the truth.

To their credit they'll freely admit Asians and Jews do better on these tests than whites. Ya know to show it's not about the superiority of the group they just happen to belong to but
to remind us rubes its really about accepting rational scientific evidence.

Great minds like Sapolsky think IQ is....well fucking trash and I agree with him.

He's a Jew, lived with various types of Africans while studying primates over the course of decades. It's way more complex than heritability or environment.

In fact I personally think IQ is a very useless question as to what drives human behavior. I don't care for it, or about it.

By the way for all you twats obsessed with the IQ of black people, theres good evidence its catching up with that of whites.

That's why IQ is such a shitty measurement, every study we have is pretty crap because asking if it's heritable and important for the average person isn't the right question.

"I think this is one of those things averagely successful white guys love because..."

Nonsense. Those same "successful white guys" - who have brought you every modern technology - will show you the emergence of northern Asians as innovators and technologists.

"That's why IQ is such a shitty measurement, every study we have is pretty crap because asking if it's heritable and important for the average person isn't the right question."

First - "every study we have"? I had no idea your research was so comprehensive, so well-controlled against bias, etc...

And that's why I noted processor capacity - brain size.

The cold hard fact is this: if you don't have the capacity, you can't hold what you're exposed to, and no amount of good intentions, talk about equality or anything else will change that.

There is immediate offense in this question, also asked by Fred Reed: "If genetic differences in intelligence can exist between subspecies of dogs, why may they not between subspecies of humans?"
The offense is expressed by subsequent behavior: "If I said that Jews were smart, and adduced all manner of achievements over the centuries, no one would deny it. Similarly for the Chinese. If I said however that Australian aborigines were inferior in IQ, I would be told as follows: Intelligence does not exist; it is a social construct; it is culturally determined; it can’t be measured; it has no genetic basis; the tests are biased; lack of achievement is caused by discrimination, or institutional racism running through Australian society, or geographic considerations. Whereas if I said that Italians were of low intelligence the response would be to produce counter evidence, in the case of the aborigines it would be to give all manner of reasons why there was no counter evidence."

He's hit all the objections here.

Crid.
Here you go, one of many.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano

It is not necessary that any racist issue be found in the test/requirement.

Physical requirements for cops, firefighters and combat arms have a disparate impact against women, so we have gender-normed physcial requirements. So far, the Supremes have not opined on the laws of physics.

Brain size and IQ? You do realize our brains have been shrinking yet our IQs have gotten better, for everyone.

"Indeed, skeletal evidence from every inhabited continent suggests that our brains have become smaller in the past 10,000 to 20,000 years. How can we account for this seemingly scary statistic?"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-have-our-brains-started-to-shrink/

As a side note I have to say the neurocentrism in brain sciences is rather worrying. Take a human neuron and a rat neuron and you can't tell the difference without a protein test. Put human neurons in a rat and you still have a rat. No significant change. But the brain isn't only made up of neurons. In fact they are only 10% of the brain. Transfer some of those horribly named glial cells and you see significant changes in behavior.

But at the end of the day there is no money in glial cell research. Neurons are sexy. Glials are not. And hence fashion holds us back.

There's a reason that Africa remains basically uncivilized, and it's the IQ. Africans are incapable of maintaining the infrastructure that the West is accustomed to. By infrastructure I mean everything from safe water supplies to a functioning government.

It's not intelligence, it's culture. Many culture view menial work as unworthy. Farming was, for most aboriginal tribes, women's work. Men hunted, they didn't farm. That kind of prejudice made its way to the modern world, for them, as men looking down on factory work and other menial jobs. Arabs import Chinese and Indian laborers to do the repetitive jobs Arab men feel are beneath them, including maintenance on their infrastructure.

The West developed what we now call the "Protestant Work Ethic," thanks to Protestant philosophers like John Calvin, who taught "that hard work, discipline, and frugality are a result of a person's subscription to the values espoused by the Protestant faith, particularly Calvinism." This allowed one to take pride in doing even a menial job. It gave the US the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches mythology, the log cabin presidents of our past.

"There was a time, in these United States, when a candidate for public office could qualify with the electorate only by fixing his birthplace in or near the 'log cabin.' He may have acquired a competence, or even a fortune, since then, but it was in the tradition that he must have been born of poor parents and made his way up the ladder by sheer ability, self-reliance, and perseverance in the face of hardship. In short, he had to be 'self made.' The so-called Protestant Ethic then prevalent held that man was a sturdy and responsible individual, responsible to himself, his society, and his God. Anybody who could not measure up to that standard could not qualify for public office or even popular respect. One who was born 'with a silver spoon in his mouth' might be envied, but he could not aspire to public acclaim; he had to live out his life in the seclusion of his own class" ~ Frank Chodorov

It's also why people like George HW Bush, George W. Bush, or even Donald Trump, born with the proverbial silver spoons in their mouths, went out to try and earn their own fortunes instead of resting on the ones they inherited. It was expected; to stay home and live on their inherited fortunes would have been looked down upon, even (or especially) by their own class.

The Roman Catholic tradition upset by the Protestants valued prayer, attendance at Mass, and involvement in the rites of the Church. Islam follows a similar tradition. One shows one's faith in the tenets of one's religion by major acts, not simply going to work and adhering to a budget, thus providing for one's family. Hard work, both in Islam and many of the cultures it overlays, is not its own reward.

"Indeed, skeletal evidence from every inhabited continent suggests that our brains have become smaller in the past 10,000 to 20,000 years. How can we account for this seemingly scary statistic?"

Because bulk brain size doesn't matter much. What matters is the number of neuron interconnections. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to determine that for prehistoric humans.

"By the way for all you twats obsessed with the IQ of black people, theres good evidence its catching up with that of whites."

Couple of points. First, IQ testing is well recognized as being a crude tool, and its limitations are well recognized. Until we can develop a more direct means of measuring neural activity, it's the only tool we have. Second, if IQ is meaningful, then the improvements that blacks have made in recent years is something to be celebrated; it means that we as a society are doing something right. On the other hand, if IQ is meaningless, than the improvements made by blacks are also meaningless. It can't be both.

"There was a time, in these United States, when a candidate for public office could qualify with the electorate only by fixing his birthplace in or near the 'log cabin.'"

And it was with the Kennedys that that changed. I've always found it ironic that the Left, which supposedly regards wealth as inherently immoral, tied its political fortunes to one of the wealthiest trust-fund babies in America.

> it's the only tool we have

Only tool for what task?

Our world is crawling with tools, and I don't just the in-the-hand-of-The-Man kind.

"our brains" refers to H. Sap. Smaller in the past 10k to 20k years.
So we're looking at the skulls of pre 20k years folks. How many of them are there? Sufficient to draw such a conclusion?
H. Nean had a bigger brain. So....
It's about connections and...whatever. Neurologists don't know.

"Brain size and IQ? You do realize our brains have been shrinking yet our IQs have gotten better, for everyone."

Sigh. Missing the point. "Our" brains are not all the same, today.

Everyone in the Politically Correct universe uses the skin-color test for diversity and claims that everyone is different but has the exact same abilities.

Nope. It's testable, six ways from Sunday and then some. We don't have the same abilities, individually or by ethnic group. I don't, and I am manifestly NOT scared by that.

"If genetic differences in intelligence can exist between subspecies of dogs, why may they not between subspecies of humans?"

"However, the variation between dog breeds is much greater than the variation between human populations (27.5% versus 5.4%)"

http://genome.cshlp.org/content/15/12/1706.long

"It's testable, six ways from Sunday and then some."

And you're missing my point. This isn't a settled matter because the tests themselves aren't considered very good. That's why neurologists can't agree on what IQ actually means. It has nothing to do with being "politically correct" and everything to do with the fact that as of now we can't measure what it means to be a human being very well. Yes this includes intelligence.

The only true genetic diversity exists in sub saharan africans, and that's from each other. Everyone else is pretty much the same. That's why I think people place too much stock in such silly measurements when neurologists themselves don't agree that it matters or that we have a good way of measuring intelligence.

Ffs a study came out that first borns are smarter than everyone else.

I mean, all those things could be said of the Trump voters in Appalachia and Wisconsin, as well.

Crid at June 6, 2017 5:35 AM

Exactly. Not to mention, that if one is going to compare entire nations (the following is from 2006):

"According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12 percent of Americans believe that life on earth has evolved through a natural process, without the interference of a deity. Thirty-one percent believe that evolution has been 'guided by God.' If our worldview were put to a vote, notions of 'intelligent' design would defeat the science of biology by nearly three to one. This is troubling, as nature offers no compelling evidence for an intelligent designer and countless examples of unintelligent design. But the current controversy over 'intelligent design' should not blind us to the true scope of our religious bewilderment at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists. This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect our presidents and congressmen–and many who themselves get elected–believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah’s ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the earth, and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, but the hand of an invisible God.

"Among developed nations, America stands alone in these convictions. Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant. Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying, even to one’s friends.

"Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen–the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves–socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."

-Sam Harris.

Intelligence is whatever the intelligence test measures. So we have to figure out what we think is "smart" and design a test for it.
Among other things, success in society which requires cognition is going to be considered "smart" and we'll have a test testing that kind of cognition.
That kind of cognition is less useful to an Australian aborigine who spends hours trotting over a featureless outback trying to follow a game trail and not get too far from water.
Or an Eskimo who, after wrapping himself in a polar bear hide to wait out a storm finds the terrain features aren't what they were when he hunkered down.
Problem is, people who are, by natural selection or by culture, fitted for one kind of life don't do as well as we would like in another kind of life with different pressures.
But see Sowell on culture. Its pervasiveness is astonishing.
Example: In the early eighteenth century, a number of Germans emigrated to Russia. In the 1910 census, Russians descended from that migration constituted two percent of European Russians and...forty percent of the Czar's officer corps.

"Sigh.", says Raddy, tiring of his own excellence.

The IQ test was invented to sort military recruits, many of which were not fluent in the English language.

It was later extended and used fairly sucessfually as a tool to sort people into the proper academic tracks for their abilities.

It was a less than pefect tool but better than a coin toss, for individuals who had no formal schooling, or very little of it.

Instead of taking pride in your IQ scores, or belonging to a group with an average high IQ, (just another form of credentialism) wouldn't it be better if we took pride in our accomplishments as Individuals?

I dont want to go to a dumb doctor who afirmative actioned his or her way into medical school but neither do I want to go to a *smart* doctor, who either doesnt have a handle on my medical issues or has been so brain washed by the Lancet that he thinks having guns in my house is a huge threat to my health.

We are coming to an age where the only area where an actual human doctor is going to be able to compete with a computer is by being able to think outside the box.
That is going to be true of a lot of occupations for *smart people*

"Instead of taking pride in your IQ scores, or belonging to a group with an average high IQ, (just another form of credentialism) wouldn't it be better if we took pride in our accomplishments as Individuals?"

This. Intellectual ability (no matter how you measure it) is only one component of success. And how important it is varies a lot depending on what you're doing.

Disparate impact theory of racism

Definition: A thing is judged racist not on its merits but its effect on minority populations.

Statement one: Tracking IQ to find a root cause might lead to ways to increase it for all

Statement two: Years of research already shows a difference in IQ between the 'races'

Statement three: Liberals want to block any further study

Statement four: Preventing such study ensures nothing can change

Conclusion: Liberals, happy with the status quo, endeavor to prevent any research that might lead to altering the status quo. As this has a disparate impact on minority groups within first world countries, liberals are by definition racists

lujlp

Wish I'd thought of that.

Isab Says,

"A high average IQ in a population group is much more important than individual IQ. Populations evolve. Individuals do not."

This quote is only partially true.

While it is true that biologically speaking populations evolve and individuals do not, when we are discussing the advancement of our own species we cannot ignore individual contributions.

The reason for this is that while biological evolution is Darwinian in the sense of passing down genes associated with intelligence and cognitive ability... our societal progress/evolution is very much Lamarckian in character.

Brilliant individuals have a disproportionate impact upon our overall progress that isn't lost even if the average intelligence of the species happens to drop.

Issac Newton for example never had any children... yet his contributions to calculus and physics set us on a path that has more or less defined the modern age.

Newton's IQ was surely far above average and he has contributed nothing to the modern gene pool... yet his ideas and discoveries shaped pretty much every facet of our 21st century world.

His contemporaries who were not as intelligent and who may not have comprehended a single thing he was doing passing on their comparatively dull witted genes to the future and all of those descendants still managed to reap benefit from that 1 brilliant and yet childless individual.

So no... for a social technological species such as our own where knowledge is transmitted across many generations it isn't quite so simple or accurate to say that "A high average IQ in a population group is much more important than individual IQ."

That kind of statement applies more toward a species that is incapable of documenting and passing down accumulated knowledge.

Thanks for that, Artemis.

And, since Isab said:

"Instead of taking pride in your IQ scores, or belonging to a group with an average high IQ, (just another form of credentialism) wouldn't it be better if we took pride in our accomplishments as Individuals?"

- I would say that Fred Reed's piece on pride (posted by Radwaste at June 6, 2017 9:41 AM) is at least somewhat misleading. It's a slippery slope to be proud of something that OTHER individuals accomplished, just because one might belong to the same "group." While no college student should have to put up with another individual's face-to-face rudeness or unjustified anger (as Reed describes), "pride" is dangerous. Gay composer Ned Rorem (now in his 90s) said it well:

"Black Pride and Gay Pride are dangerous slogans, like White Pride or Straight Pride. Gay and Black are not achievements but accidents of birth. One must not be ashamed, but that's not the same thing as being proud. Pride should lie only in what one does with one's blackness or gayness."

Not to mention that now that Indians are finally being ALLOWED a place on the world stage and often have rock star status in the computer world, there may well come a time when they will eclipse MOST of what white people accomplished before them in that field. Had they not been discriminated against previously, who's to say they wouldn't have done the same thing a century earlier?

""Sigh.", says Raddy, tiring of his own excellence."

You left off the part where I already addressed the objections raised in subsequent posts.