"U.S. society today is very nearly a pure meritocracy, perhaps the purest there has ever been."

gogls wrote:

asians should be put in concentration camps.

If all Asians in America were put in concentration camps, the US economy would essentially collapse.

The two fields that the USA is still the undisputed leader in is high tech and Biotech, both fields are dominated by Chinese, Indians and other Asians..

It is ironic that Much of America watches anxiously at the rise of China and India...yet it is the Chinese and the Indians in America that keep America ahead of China and India..

All humans share the same two ancestors from the Rift Valley in Kenya who existed some 60,000 years ago. IQ tests have thus been proven invalid and are used by certain elements for their own nefarious purposes.

Yes, and all humans share common ancestry with apes. Would you argue that differences in intelligence between humans and apes is to be disregarded?

Apes, cats, dogs, rats, tuna, dinosaurs are a different species. All humans have are one and the same species.

Some closer to the source than others. Aren't homo erectus and homo sapiens technically the same species?

Sagarin wrote:

Some closer to the source than others. Aren't homo erectus and homo sapiens technically the same species?

We're all the same "distance" from the source. A black person is going to be separated from the source by as many generations as a white person.

They aren't the same species. That's why they have different scientific names.

The human genome has 3 billion or so sequences, and only a few are about skin color. Most are not used, but several hundred million (as I recall) are. So a few DNA sequences do not define separate "races" or "species". Thus all human beings are one race, one species.

The U.S today suffers from acute problems with housing segregation, gender and sexual-orientation discrimination, Asian Exclusion in universities, lack of reproductive human rights, racist police and criminal justice system, etc. It doesn't look like the U.S. is anywhere close to being a mythical "pure meritocracy". Maybe another 300 years and it will be.

Affirmative Action does not condemn racism, it promotes it.

AA is inclusive, not exclusive. It seeks to include people from ALL races. Why should just the students with the highest GPA and test scores get into the top universities? Is there any evidence that they will contribute the most to our society and world? No. Look at the past, present and future Leaders of the Free World - did they have a 4.8 GPA and 1600 SAT score? No. Selfish high-scoring students who study all day to give themselves the best chances at college admissions are nothing to be impressed with. Their lives are all about themselves. What have they done for the world?

A lot of this article consists of unsubstantiated statemetns:

John Derbyshire wrote:

If you display any ability at all in your early years, you will be marked for induction into the overclass, especially if you belong to some designated victim group.

This is bullshit. Perhaps true some places but not true everywhere. For the past two years I've worked at a school in one of the poorest places in the U.S., a reservation in South Dakota. It was a place where there was no "overclass" for the able to join.

John Derbyshire wrote:

If you pluck a hundred rich men from their castles and put them in a room together, though, you will notice a high level of general intelligence. Contrariwise, a hundred poor men taken from their gates will, if put all in one place, convey a general impression of slow dullness. That’s the meritocracy. That’s where we’ve come to.

There's another one that struck me. Not only is this complete speculation, it's vague enough to be useless. What does a "high level of general intelligence" look like? What about "slow dullness"? How are we differentiating measurable intelligence from cultural bias?

Nefarious Myth wrote:

Apes, cats, dogs, rats, tuna, dinosaurs are a different species. All humans have are one and the same species.

True. Pit Bulls, Great Danes and Beagles are all the same species. Are you suggesting there are no real, predictable differences between Pits and Beagles? Or between the Japanese and Nigerians?

Nefarious Myth wrote:

All humans share the same two ancestors from the Rift Valley in Kenya who existed some 60,000 years ago. IQ tests have thus been proven invalid and are used by certain elements for their own nefarious purposes.

Wrong again:

true you might have been in one of the few places that are inconsistent with his findings. Yet still the genius or the gifted artist or the talented sports-person will move out of their social class and upwards. I'm sure you could find one example from your students.

It a generalisation and it points to the fact that there is observable trends. Would you aregue against the opposite assetion? That wealthy people on the whole are mentally dull whilst the poorest are on the whole the most intelligent?

blaaaze wrote:

true you might have been in one of the few places that are inconsistent with his findings. Yet still the genius or the gifted artist or the talented sports-person will move out of their social class and upwards. I'm sure you could find one example from your students.

There are a whole lot of other poor, rural places that are similar to where I was: the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, and the Rio Grande Valley to name a few. Knowing what I do about our education system, though, I'm not convinced that we are effectively moving all of our able students into better lives.

blaaaze wrote:

It a generalisation and it points to the fact that there is observable trends. Would you aregue against the opposite assetion? That wealthy people on the whole are mentally dull whilst the poorest are on the whole the most intelligent?

The point is that what we're observing with this trend might not really be intelligence. I would guess that the "rich men in their castles" have lived in different places and been exposed to different experiences than the "poor men at their gates." It's too easy to mistake cultural capital (and level of education) for intelligence.

Derbyshire quotes William Deresiewicz's article from "The American Scholar" where he finds himself unable to communicate with a plumber. Deresiewicz, reasonably, makes no assumptions about the plumber's intelligence. Derbyshire, though, assumes the communication breakdown is a result of a difference in IQs. Just because the plumber is "a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent," can we assume his "slow dullness"? Derbyshire seems to think so.

National Geographic Magazine and IBM say skin color race myths are all lies

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/

Wow. Thanks everyone. I didn't even realize that the article was about race.

I guess I forgot; on Letsrun, everything is about race.

reader of online magazines wrote:

Wow. Thanks everyone. I didn't even realize that the article was about race.

I guess I forgot; on Letsrun, everything is about race.

Any discussion of class that ignores its very clear correlation with race is going to be incomplete.

The problem with arguing that the U.S. is currently a "pure meritocracy" and that class is determined by intelligence is that you are saying that, by and large, minorities must be less intelligent than whites.

2nd Place wrote:

Israel is the most racist, the U.S. is a distant 2nd no doubt. I live in New York City, and all the blacks live over there, all the whites over there, all the hispanics over there. It's very Zionist here.

I take it you don't get out much. Go to Europe and get back to me with what you see over there.