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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I think your take is terrible and that if you don't understand a topic you shouldn't opine authoritatively upon it, but something you said piqued my interest.

I admidettly only scan over this material but the best examples are Askhenazi Jews are inherently smart, in it's worst guise Black people are inherently stupid.

I'm really, REALLY curious to hear a bit of elaboration on your thought process here. Why is "Ashkenazi jews are inherently smart" the best example, and "black people are inherently stupid" the bad example? What is the precise differentiating point between those two positions that makes one the best and one the worst?

It's a potentially narrow, fairly homogeneous grouping at least for some of history. It's more tractable for study. 'Black people', which at that level, not so much-it would include a plethora of overlapping lineages.

This is not a useful objection, as "black people" can be usefully narrowed to "black American descendants of slaves" (ADOS) -- which informally is often what is being talked about anyway. It is an interesting question about whether sub-Saharan Africans (who do form a useful if large cluster) or e.g. Nigerians (or Igbo or Yoruba) or Congolese are also different, but in the US it's ADOS which are normally most relevant.

Certainly it's an ugly idea that an identifiable group might be on the average significantly less intelligent than the whole population average, but just because it is ugly does not mean it is not true.