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posted by on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the freedom-to,-not-freedom-from dept.

Charles Murray, controversial author of The Bell Curve, which promoted links between intelligence and race, was shouted down by protesters at Middlebury College last Thursday. PBS reports:

Murray had been invited by Middlebury's student group affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank at which Murray is a scholar. [...] Prior to the point when Murray was introduced, several Middlebury officials reminded students that they were allowed to protest but not to disrupt the talk. The students ignored those reminders and faced no visible consequences for doing so. [...]

After the students chanted for about 20 minutes, college officials announced that the lecture would not take place but that Murray would go to another location, which the college didn't name, and have a discussion with a Middlebury faculty member — livestreamed back to the original lecture site.

According to Middlebury officials, after Murray and the professor who interviewed him for the livestream attempted to leave the location in a car, some protesters surrounded the car, jumped on it, pounded on it and tried to prevent the car from leaving campus.

Other sources note that political science professor Allison Stanger, who agreed to moderate the discussion, was attacked while accompanying Murray to the car, ultimately requiring treatment at a hospital for neck injuries caused by protesters pushing her and pulling her hair.

Murray himself later gave an account of his experience on the AEI blog. He emphasized that Middlebury's administration and staff displayed in exemplary ways their encouragement of free speech:

Middlebury's stance has been exemplary. The administration agreed to host the event. President Patton did not cancel it even after a major protest became inevitable. She appeared at the event, further signaling Middlebury's commitment to academic freedom. The administration arranged an ingenious Plan B that enabled me to present my ideas and discuss them with Professor Stanger even though the crowd had prevented me from speaking in the lecture hall. I wish that every college in the country had the backbone and determination that Middlebury exhibited.

But Murray notes that the outcome was very different from his previous controversial appearances:

Until last Thursday, all of the ones involving me have been as carefully scripted as kabuki: The college administration meets with the organizers of the protest and ground rules are agreed upon. The protesters have so many minutes to do such and such. It is agreed that after the allotted time, they will leave or desist. These negotiated agreements have always worked. At least a couple of dozen times, I have been able to give my lecture to an attentive (or at least quiet) audience despite an organized protest.

Middlebury tried to negotiate such an agreement with the protesters, but, for the first time in my experience, the protesters would not accept any time limits. [...] In the mid-1990s, I could count on students who had wanted to listen to start yelling at the protesters after a certain point, "Sit down and shut up, we want to hear what he has to say." That kind of pushback had an effect. It reminded the protesters that they were a minority. I am assured by people at Middlebury that their protesters are a minority as well. But they are a minority that has intimidated the majority. The people in the audience who wanted to hear me speak were completely cowed.

The form of the protest has been widely condemned even by those who vehemently disagree with Murray, as in the piece by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic that claims "something has gone badly wrong on the campus left." He argues strongly that "Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent."

Meanwhile, student protesters have responded with their own account, disclaiming the hair-pulling incident as unintentional and "irresponsible" but condemning the Middlebury administration for their "support of a platform for white nationalist speech." They further claimed "peaceful protest was met with escalating levels of violence by the administration and Public Safety, who continually asserted their support of a dangerous racist over the well-being of students."

Personal note: My take on all of this is that the actual subject of Murray's Middlebury talk has been lost in the media coverage, namely his 2012 book Coming Apart, which (ironically) is a detailed discussion of the problems created by a division of the intellectual elite from the white working class. He explicitly dilutes his previous connections of social problems with a black underclass by noting that many of the same issues plague poor white communities. While his argument is still based on problematic assertions about intelligence and IQ, the topic of his book seems very relevant given recent political events and issues of class division. There's some sort of profound irony in a bunch of students at an elite school refusing to allow a debate on the causes and results of division between elite intellectuals and the (white) working class. I personally may think Murray's scholarship is shoddy and his use of statistics frequently misleading (or downright wrong), but I don't see how that justifies the kind of threats and intimidation tactics shown at this protest.


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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:31PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:31PM (#476611)

    Here we see the so called "tolerant" progressives true side, violently attacking and assaulting people who do not subscribe to their own political doctrine. It also shows how progressives despite how they portray themselves as rational and scientific, are anything but, ignoring the scientific evidence that contradicts their political agenda.

    Few doubt that environment is a factor in IQ. The debate is mainly between whether IQ is entirely controlled by environment or whether there is a combination of genetics and environment, in relation to the race differences in IQ. I find the environment-genetic explanation more convincing. If IQ is a hybrid environment-genetic influences value, then each racial group would probably have its own upper and lower bound of variability and the bell curve would be centered lower or higher on the IQ spectrum. What this means is that each racial group would have its own pre-literate average IQ average and post-literate IQ average, and that the Flynn effect would move the IQs within a different range for each racial group. This fits with real world data where the average IQ in subsaharan African countries is 70, while African American IQs, where schooling is more universal, average at 85. In white countries, the pre-literate IQ is approximately 85 and reaches 105 IQ with universal schooling.

    You have to ask yourself, where are all of the technologically advanced African countries? Is there any black majority countries that are not either 1) entirely dependent on tourism services or offshore banking 2) a poverty filled crime ridden basket case.

    JP Rushton did research in favor of the hybrid heredity-environment model for IQ. This included advanced MRI studies where he found that Europeans and Asians have larger brain cavities.

    There are separate lines of evidence for a genetic cause for differences in IQ such as the persistent SAT score gap in US schools which has not responded to billions of dollars of federal funding thrown at it and has not moved significantly over a period of over 40 years. It is also telling that the IQ levels are lower for black populations at all socioeconomic levels, for instance, a black child in an upper middle income bracket tends to have a lower IQ than a white children in the same upper income bracket.

    The IQ differences would show up most clearly on processing and analytic intensive tasks such as advanced mathematics an that is exactly what we see in the data. Blacks perform much more poorly than whites and it doesnt depend that much at all on socioeconomic background. The socioeconomic situation is a result of the lower IQ rather than vice versa especially in the USA. There are of course blacks which are good at mathematics and science, this is also consistent with the bell curve and the heredity-environment model, the bell curve would predict that there are black people who have IQ 105 or above, there are just fewer of them than in the white population. This is exactly what we see in the real world. The IQ differences explain why there are so few black computer programmers and why the profession is dominated more strongly with Whites and Asians. It also explains why some blacks are extremely successful but why poverty and thus crime is far higher in the black community generally. The blacks with a above 105 IQ are a much smaller percentage of the black population than in the white and asian populations.

    The Irish in the USA were once at the bottom rung in the US economically, did not recieve advanced educations and worked often in the most undesirable jobs. The same for the Chinese and Japanese in the USA. However the fact is that the Chinese, Japanese and Irish today are not today living in slums with very high rates of crime and poverty, very high levels of high school drop out. The Japanese are a small ethnic minority in the USA. If being an ethnic minority was the cause of poverty and low IQ, it would not be that generally Japanese and Chinese actually have higher incomes and better academic outcomes than the white population in the USA?

    Given that employment and academic discrimination has largely vanished from the USA, the blacks should have thrived just the same as the chinese and the japanese if the IQs were equal.

    There are mountains of data to backup the hereditary-environment model. The main problem is it does not support the political goals of the progressive left.

    There is also a sound evolutionary theory for higher IQs for whites and asians and lower IQs for tropical races. The cold weather climates of the temperate zones with cold winters were far more difficult to survive than the tropical climate where you could run around naked all year and fruit grows on the trees all year long. In the temperate zone you have to store food and a much higher level of tool and clothing industry is needed to be able to survive the winter and not freeze to death. This strongly selected for higher IQ genetics that would give people better problem solving skills to develop the technology to survive cold winters. This explains why the Koreans and the Europeans have higher IQs due to having to deal with cold winters.

    In his writings JP Rushton, who upheld the reality of racial differences in IQ, advised people for purposes of hiring should be treated as individuals and opposed any kind of racial discrimination and that hiring should be merit based rather than based on race. This could very well mean that blacks will on average work in different kinds of jobs than white or asian people and that fewer are cut out for computer programming and other STEM jobs but this is entirely due to merit rather than based on race. Improvement of the condition of humanity thrives on inequality and that equality of outcome is utterly destructive to improvement of the human condition. The Einsteins and Von Brauns of the world have to be able to out-do others in order to make the discoveries that will improve conditions for everyone. Different races should also have their own majority countries, blacks have a place in the world and the fact that there are differences in IQ does not mean one race is less valuable than another. These races should be able to exist as sovereign people and run their own affairs as sovereign people in their own sovereign nations. The progressive mentality that no one can be more successful, smarter or intelligent than anyone else is totally destructive to civilization and human progress since advancement requires some nations, races and individual exceed and surpass others in intellect, achievement, and accomplishment. People are different and races are different, Different races such as asians, blacks and whites should exist on this planet each in their own majority countries so that each can run and manage their own affairs as soveriegn and independant people. A black country will likely be different than an Asian one but there is nothing wrong with that. We have to respect and support the diversity of nations on this planet and the sovereignty within them. This is what best respects all races on this planet and the diversity of nations and the uniqueness of the people within them. A progressive is totally intolerant of any kind of diversity because they are unable to cope with the fact that one race of people may be different, think differently, look differently, may have different IQ levels. They are unable to cope with this. Rushton and I, both advocate that we have to allow Blacks to run their own nations and cultures as with each race, including whites. We have to respect the sovereignty of peoples and races on this planet we have to accept the differences between them and the right to exist on this planet as sovereign people. It is the progressives who are unable to tolerate the fact that races are different and who have a hatred of human racial differences and of the diversity of nations and peoples on this planet. Many progressives take this to a genocidal extreme, that they so hate racial groups that are different from one another and nations that are different from others that they want to genocidally destroy with mass immigration and so on those differences. Mass immigration would eventually destroy human diversity and the wonderful racial diversity on this planet and it is progressives who want that. Progressives cannot stand that races have different average IQ levels, they cannot tolerate this, so they are driven to genocidal hatred of the races themselves and want to genocide these races in any way that they can whether it be by dilution., This is the true intolerance and hatred today. The acceptance of the IQ differences between races is necessary for us to respect and preserve the existance of the many unique races on this planet from the progressive genocidalists that want to destroy them by dilution and the destruction of nations, borders and the destruction of racial diversity itself because of their intolerant hatred of racial diversity on this planet.

    Mass immigration threatens human diversity on this planet. Would dumping millions of Pakistanis into Japan enhance diversity? No, it threatens it. If we dumped millions of pakistanis into Japan, Japan would end up looking less and less like Japan, racially and culturally. Is this something that someone who loved the Japanese would do? If we were so destroying Japan in such a way, can we really honestly call ourselves then respectful of diversity? Certainly not. The pakistanis already have their own country, so moving them into japan would threaten diversity by destroying the uniqueness of Japan., eventually mass immigration would make one country look no different than the next and so would destroy racial and cultural diversity on the planet and the diversity of nations, causing one nation to look no different from the next. This does not promote and is not tolerant of diversity, it is intolerant and destructive to diversity.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:57PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:57PM (#476644)

    If anyone ever doubted just how motivational racial animus is ... that post should remove all doubt.
    Whoever that anonymous cuck is, that fact that he spent the time to write that huge post all from scratch and post it here where hardly anyonebody will even bother to read it just goes to show how worked up racism can make a person.

    Only someone living off welfare has enough free time in the middle of the day to do that.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @07:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @07:55PM (#476677)

      In my experience, a good number of conservatives live off social security disability and other welfare programs.

      I really hope they get their way some day and welfare is completely defunded. ;)