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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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The progressive would never admit to being a scientific racists.

Like everything else, cognitive science is subject to The Movement and its ends: to the extent that it serves the purpose at hand, IQ is as rock-solid science as universal gravitation; to the extent that it doesn't, it's lies that must be quelled and suppressed.

As Nick Land put it:

The notion that retardation is a mitigating rather than aggravating factor in regards to criminal culpability is sufficient on its own to condemn an entire legal philosophy.

... "Congenitally incapable of avoiding criminality even if he wanted to, so innocent I guess."

-- This is the kind of argument the technical term 'shitlib' was coined for.

Yeah, at least for violent aggression, I think it's a ridiculous case to make. Many Down's syndrome people are severely retarded, to the point that they indeed cannot be held fully accountable for things like theft. Even if they sorta understand money, it's more in the 4-year-old sense of "handing over some random green papers and coins is a ritual you do before you walk out of the store with stuff", rather than any understanding of monetary value and transaction. The level of understanding common in Congress, basically. Yet even among downies and Congresspeople, it is well-understood that you can't just maul random people on the street and walk off with their stuff. Even most animals that grow up around humans don't have trouble with this.

I have to wonder what percentage of people with Down's Syndrome would be worried that putting too much stuff on an island would tip it over?

Edit: rephrased.

It's an argument by a lawyer. They're not expected to be intellectually honest, or consistent across cases.

I tend to be a Cofnasian about wokeness (remove the "equality thesis" and it collapses) but stuff like this does make me wonder.

I suppose you can say that saying IQs are low is fine. Saying groups have lower IQ is very much not fine.

Nah, if someone put out a study showing J6'ers had below-average IQ, it would be enshrined in liturgical canon immediately.

The media was all over J6'ers about being broke idiots. Literally.

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.

So, a population of 125 comes up as perhaps one standard deviation above expected random sampling.

This is selection bias at a cartoonish level. But it's dressed up with enough circumstantial relevance and high-minded sounding statistical framing that the self-assured PMC'er reading it can go, "Oh, of course, those crazy MAGA folks are aggrieved because they haven't the sense to manage their money properly. Harumph. I, on the other hand, am always wise in my investments. Why, just look at what we did for young Junior - $300,000 for a degree from Am'erst (not Am-herst ... the "h" is for the peasants)."

Hat tip as ever to Scott's idea that the media doesn't lie in a factual sense, but just frames and reports selectively to, nonetheless, alter the perception.

Yes but that's not a group based on an immutable characteristic. That's the red rag.

Whenever a study is pushed that attempts to tie conservatism with low IQ it'll generally get thousands of updoots on the science subreddits

That's where the left often find themselves in trouble intellectually. They'll spend plenty of time examining, reposting, and commenting on the IQ differences of Republican voters vs. Democrat voters. Once you examine group IQ differences along racial lines the conversations end and the silencing begins.

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