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[If following this link from the Twitter post on scientific literacy, please see here]
In his April Diary, the Derb brought up posts from the Inductivist (still relatively active here) and the Occidentalist concerning changes over time in the self-reported perceptions of why “on the average blacks have worse jobs, income, and housing than whites do”.
The response “less in-born ability to learn” has steadily declined from the 1970s through to the present, even as psychometric evidence and increasingly now genetic evidence for that explanation has accumulated over the same period of time.
Part of the change must be attributable to political correctness–“less in-born ability” makes normies squirm more than a value-neutral explanation like “genetic differences” would–but exactly how much is conjecture.
Reminiscing on my fellow GSS data miners, I took a look at the variable I don’t recall having analyzed much in the past.
The racial differences in responses are noteworthy. Because the question has been asked in every iteration of the survey, sample sizes are large. For contemporary relevance, then, all responses are from 2006 onward. The percentages of those who attribute greater success in life outcomes for whites than for blacks to the latter having “less in-born ability to learn”, by race and a few other select demographic characteristics (n = 9,341):
One of Thomas Sowell’s major insights in Black Rednecks and White Liberals–that on many things black opinions and behaviors are closer to those of white conservatives than of white liberals–is relevant here.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jews–all Jews, not just liberal Jews–are even more prone to blank slate thinking than white liberals are.
GSS variables used: RACDIF2, YEAR(2006-2016), RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), POLVIEWS(1-2)(6-7), RELIG(3)
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
A.E.
That graph says a great deal about the membership make up of academia.
This one graph explains so much, and so succinctly.
"On the other end of the spectrum, Jews–all Jews, not just liberal Jews–are even more prone to blank slate thinking than white liberals are."
Do they actually believe it or is it just for the consumption of the goyim?
Totally baffling on the Jewish end. We're talking about a people who literally still use eugenics, and generally don't have a problem with it, yet somehow believe that all other races are a blank slate. I believe the term for this is "chutzpah".
We're talking about a people who literally still use eugenics
Indeed.
I'm too lazy to track it down, but I recall some thread on here about Asians/Hispanics being more un-PC than others in America.
As far as I can figure, there's at least two things at work here. First, Asians and Hispanics are not as heavily assimilated to the modern American way of being a two-faced pansy when it comes to racial issues. Second, there appears to be a correlation between cultural elitism and being full of BS.
On Steve's three C benchmark (competence, creativity, and charisma), the highest scoring groups (Jews and whites) are big cucks on racial issues. High black ratings on creativity and charisma allow them to be well-represented among celebrities. Corporate/cultural elites seem to say "why not highly promote black figureheads as reparations on behalf of blacks since people find them entertaining anyway". But most blacks still remain at a pretty low level, power-wise, so they aren't as PC.
Asians are highly competent but lack either the temperament or perhaps verbal skills to climb to elite status in many sectors of America. Then again, as we see with college admissions, white/Jewish elites may find Asians to be both a status threat as well as still not fully American enough to be worthy of the sympathy extended to blacks and Indians. So there could be some merit to the idea that just as white elites seem to lift certain groups up, they may also be pushing others down. Culturally, whites/Jews/blacks eligible for elite status are expected to be as interested in liberal agitation as they are in anything else. Asians are more resistant to that, preferring instead to be stolid laborers focused on career and family rather than being distracted by getting too worked up over social/political issues. There's also the fact that competent Asians to some degree can disdain Left-wing paternalism, while mediocre NAMs embrace excuses and hand-outs.
Hispanics score the worst collective three C score, though overall they are less toxic to society than sociopathic blacks. Nobody really believes they enrich anything, even with gregarious blacks people can fool themselves into hoping that blacks "get over" awful ghetto culture so we can have the best of both worlds: entertaining blacks, and a vast reduction in crime, disorder, and welfare use.
A greater Asian population has it's drawbacks, and the black population as yet hasn't really declined. Though we've seen some gentrified areas (which just caused blacks to move to another city anyway, not really hurting their overall numbers), and Hispanic gangbangers pushing blacks out of some areas out West, it's hard to really foresee a time when blacks lose enough turf to diminish their numbers and thus their effects. Which is a shame because they do so much damage.
Perhaps, as whites lose status among the Dems due to Gen X/Millennial non-whites displacing white Boomers, we're really then going to see war break out between the Dems. As much talks as there is about the Dems uniting via hatred of whites, the irony is that it is precisely the homogeneity of the current and recent past Dem leadership (Silent and Boomer whites and blacks) that's allowed them to have any semblance of camaraderie and consensus. Black and white Dems born before '65 mostly agree on most issues. The much greater cultural and ethnic diversity seen among X-ers and Millennials, raised on MTV, video games, and YouTube as opposed to the sweeping group oriented generational social movements and straightforward culture of older generations, is going to bear some bitter fruit for liberals. They're going to find out that the hedonistic and multi-cultural approach they've favored for 50 years produces quarreling and sometimes petty/cynical factions. Such as demanding that True Dems don't oppose abortion.
Obviously, Boomers frequently bicker with each other, in addition to picking fights with other generations. Be that as it may, I think that what Boomers disagree on is the exact way in which they go about things. They don't disagree as much on the overall goal of CHANGE.
Boomers felt that older generations were boring, lame, irresponsible, callous, etc. So they felt obligated to push for some kind of change to society, even if they didn't necessarily agree on what the change should be.
Surveys show that Boomers feel much more of a generational solidarity than younger generations. They had a mission. What mission do we have? X-ers and Millennial would rather focus on their careers, or hell, the escape of "junk" culture (music videos, video games, self-deprecating and self-made online celebrities of their generation) that throughout life has often been more appealing than the Boomer dominated outside world that those under 50 grew up in. X-ers and Millennials have a worse voting turnout record than elder gens, which speaks to the powerless mood we feel because one generation (for good or for ill) hogged the spotlight for 50 years, with the encouragement of the generation above them (Silents). Recall Roger Ebert denying the artistic merit of video games; since they're not associated with the formative identity of Silents/Boomers, they don't count. Hell, even a lot X-ers still seem to live in the 60's and 70's, even though they either weren't alive or were too young to appreciate the things that were going on. We seem to almost have as much disdain for our culture of the 80's/90's/2000's as older people do.
Feryl,
Here.
I wonder if we're to the point where a shared sense of popular culture–in the particulars, not in the general worldview–is no longer possible at a scale in the millions. My parents were at least familiar with the pop culture movies, tv shows, music, etc that I was enmeshed in during my coming of age. I know less about those contemporary things today than my parents did. More than that, I'm not sure my son will be plugged into the same pop culture universe that the neighbor kid across the street will be.
Stuff from periods before the internet are there forever. But who, in 2030, is going to pull up a song or tv show from 2007 on a whim? Almost no one, I think.
Worth pondering is why people think that the downfall of the mid- to later 1900s' Hollywood/Fifth Avenue popular culture/mass audiences is anything to worry about.
The vacuum would allow for reclaiming or creating other affiliational patterns…even as the centralized/authoritarian-type institutional controllers of culture wet their pants to be losing the control they spent trillions on building in the 20th century.
Why this is a bad thing, I cannot see.
Speaking as an old '70s punk, I never felt a "shared sense of popular culture" such as Feryl notes. In my view now as then, "The Sixties" was an invention of slick merchants and their pet minstrels.
And what people commonly use as generational tags? Those are market research slices created in order to shove people into consumerist forced choices.
The 1960s as I saw them lived in childhood, for us, was about the destruction of our jobs through offshoring and globalist/internationalist speculation, race wars/riots, mass destruction of our local ecosystems/species webs, and more and more gold stars in the windows of tiny houses that ceased opening their curtains, and eventually front doors.
So from a latter-day deplorable racial realist perspective, fragmentation of the 20th century mass-marketing/mass-behavior-engineering/hive-mind scheme would be the best thing that could happen for a return to affiliation based on deep kinship.
IME in a 70% black city my first 30 years, Epigone's data are correct: blacks of my acquaintance were the biggest racial realists I ever met outside of Greeks and Sicilians. When Jews started getting blacks to buy into Jews' retconning of history (slavery, exodus, Egypt, kangz/prophets, Chosen People marked by suffering), it gave Jews power over whites…but has done nothing whatever for blacks.
The smartest blacks I know, know this. In the Seattle area, they are surprised to find there are white people who know it as well.
Olorin
," I never felt a "shared sense of popular culture" such as Feryl notes. "
That's not my exact phrase, it's AE's. Still, there was much greater ethnic and cultural homogeneity among older generations. Fittingly, the '65 immigration act was passed, then begin to have a serious impact in subsequent years, after the Boom ended. You Boomers like to think of yourselves as being individually important and unique, never settling for doing what "the man" wants or expects. G.I.s and Silents were more likely to believe in conformity and don't take offense to suggestions that they represent their generational team or the system. Neil Howe, among others (David Brooks included), have written a lot about Boomers explaining away the dissonance of their youthful (and sometimes contemporary) rhetoric and the substance of their behavior.
All the same, Boomers do in fact still play for a generational team, and, for what it's worth, it's the last generational team to have any semblance of harmony and unity. X-ers and Millennials are more scattered, more individually idiosyncratic, less inclined to be proud of their generation, than previous generations. Younger generations have grown up with profound differences between regions, classes, and ethnicities. More immigrants, more religions, etc. In the 50's and 60's, the majority of houses that were built were modest things for modest people. Blacks sounded more like whites back then, too.
Since Boomers have been in firm power for the last 20-30 years, with plenty of influence even before then. They've really got to own what's theirs. G.I. and Silent culture wasn't perfect, but in hindsight wouldn't the majority of us just as soon as turn back most post-1970 changes? This isn't to deny accountability of younger folks, either. Previous generations had their turn, made their mark. What's taking us so long?
"The Sixties" was an invention of slick merchants and their pet minstrels."
Per Steve Sailer, the Sixties last from about 1964-1975, and were a period of political/social unrest considerable drug use, promiscuity, crime (for the first time in documented Western history, hundreds of serial killers were know to be operating at the same time), and relative affluence for many. These aren't contrived or corporate things. Neither was the Roaring Twenties. Society periodically goes through different phases. Every cultural decade is unique and memorable in some respects. I don't see much point in denying it, even if some feel these things being over-rated or exploited.
For example:
– the Fifties, 1946-1963 (peace, prosperity, progress)
– the Sixties, as noted above
-the Seventies, 1976-1981 (Bicentennial, the Carter admin disaster, cynicism)
– the Eighties, 1982-1991 (Just Say No, AIDS, Soviets crumble)
– the Nineties, 1992-2001 (End of History, grunge/gangsta rap, greater push for neo-liberalism and PC/mutli-culturalism)
Olorin,
I just wonder what comes next, but the pop culture collapse seems to me like a good thing. Even sports–the last holdout, largely on account of needing to be consumed as they happen to be viewed as valuable–aren't immune. The NFL was throttled last season.
Audacious, could you please check what about people who have 2 children of same sex .vs. those who have 2 children of different sexes?
I suspect that those with same-sex children will be more likely to think 'we are raising them identically but getting very different outcomes, therefore must be due to genetic difference' whereas with 1son+1dat may attribute differences to sex.
Alliumnsk,
Unfortunately the GSS only asked about the sex of respondents' children in a single year, 1994, so we'd be working with a small sample from over two decades ago.
Aren't there also: sonnum, daunum: in 1986?
Also I think about how much info can be retrieves from
'Relationship of 1st person to household head' and the likes.
Hm… I think instead of raw 'racdif2' we should somehow use normalized, e.g. divided by sum off all other racdif**
This question seems little vague. [Majority] of blacks are incapable to learn anything*
I think more and more elaborated and well-explained question and maybe we will see different answers.