Race and IQ -- Desperate rearguard action at "The Guardian"

Leftists will of course always believe what they want to believe. Their simplistic conceptions of the world matter far more to them than the facts. But even for Leftists, the truth about race and IQ is getting increasingly hard to ignore. And a recent article in "the Guardian" by Marek Kohn is testimony to that. He admits that the old Leftist shibboleths like "race does not exist" just sound hysterical these days and refers to sources that set out at length the evidence that race not only exists but that it is important. In particular, he refers to two publications by Charles Murray that set out at massive length the scientific evidence for group differences, racial differences in IQ included.

So what is a Leftist to do who knows as much about the facts as Kohn does? He bleats. But as well as bleating, he deliberately misleads. He says that Murray only "suggested" that there are differences in average IQ between the races. The difference in average black/white IQ would however have to be the most massively proven finding in the whole of psychology. It has emerged ad nauseam in study after study stretching back nearly 100 years. What does it take to turn a "suggestion" into a fact? I guess Kohn must be one of those post-modernists for whom there are no such things as facts. If you cut his salary, I think you would find that he would have no hesitation in regarding that as a fact, however -- a fact to be howled loudly about.

In the end, however, Kohn does not challenge the research findings. All he does is bleat about their explanation. Because he cannot see how racial differences in IQ have arisen, he seems to think that this means that they do not exist. I might as well argue that because I cannot understand how someone as stupid as Marek Kohn could exist then he does not exist either. A Freudian would call that strategy a "denial" defence mechanism. It is of course true that our explanations of how racial differences in IQ have arisen are speculative but most explanations in astrophysics are speculative too. Does that mean that the stars and the planets do not exist? I would like to suggest that in the great scheme of things it does not really matter much whether Marek Kohn understands something or not. But the facts matter.

His conclusion is however perfectly sensible, even if he cannot resist a pun: "We have gone beyond the stage where the question of racial science could be seen as a straightforward contest between decent values and sinister pseudoscience. It's no longer black and white".

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