Was Mahatma Gandhi a racist?

[Gandalf]

I am destroying the thread here, but seriously. Who watched TV in Noam Chomsky's day? Today people are watching reality TV, soaps and singing contests. And they cannot even find a partner who will stick around. No wonder kids are all over the place. "What's for dinner Mum" says little Sally with her Mum glued to the screen. "Stick something in the microwave. I'm busy" "Yes Mum". She is left alone with her homework and nobody tells her she is silly when she ends up taking on a sociology course at University with little more prospect than 40 grand of debt and a job in retail to try and pay it off. That's if she doesn't get pregnant at 16 first. It is a lottery and is awful. In the old days people read books and interacted. Sure, many young people play games too, but those tend to be the smarter kids, but what they are doing is stinting themselves socially instead. The Asperger's Crew tend to do pretty well on IQ tests of course.

[Gandalf]

And no I wasn't that stinted socially. I played for the cricket team and spent the weekends in the pub.

[TitoFan]

Miles, if you want to keep peddling that "IQ is attached to race" B.S. there's nothing I or anyone else can say that will keep you from doing it. Maybe you'll grow out of those beliefs... maybe you won't. We'll agree to disagree. Suffice it to say there's plenty of scientific evidence and papers out there backing up what I've said about IQ tests.

I'll also clear up a little something for you, since you seem to have me pegged wrong. When I referred to people who have trouble with tests, regardless of them being very intelligent, I was referring to people in many of the different places I've lived, including the U.S. I'm sorry if the idea of poor test takers is new to you... it's a well-known fact to many of us with college degrees. Some very highly intelligent people get nervous when taking tests and tend to do poorly. Yet others with less intelligence are adept at performing under pressure and thus tend to well in tests. I thought everyone knew this.... I guess I was wrong.

As long as you clutch to your beliefs of some races being superior and more intelligent than others, you'll be keeping this cloak on yourself which prevents you from actually getting to know people in depth. Wasn't it you who posted that trash YouTube from that Japanese fellow and tried to pawn it off as the truth? Only to find that there was a rebuke from a much more intelligent and mature Japanese young fellow who made the first guy look like a fool.

Differences in intelligence, athletic ability, hand-eye coordination, emotional intelligence, etc. are best studied on individual basis.... not broad-brushed like we like to do just about anything else in society.

You'll find brilliant, overachieving, successful professionals from all races, countries, ethnicities, and in general walks of life. But I suppose you'll write those off as exceptions to your "race rules".

Oh well..... c'est la vie.

[Gandalf]

You will find I reach the same conclusion as in your final paragraph except that I am not blind to the FACT that differentials in IQ between race exist. It's a topic I have looked into extensively and it is just the way it is right now. The average Japanese person has a higher IQ than the average Puerto Rican and that is just a fact. It is not racist. Of course you are going to meet Americans who struggle with tests of intelligence. People will anywhere, but how many will depend upon where they come from, the parenting, schooling, genetics, a variety of factors. At the end of the day if it is too hot in the kitchen and you cannot cook the dish on time then you are not cut out to be a chef.

I know full well what test anxiety is having been designing and administering tests for many years. In truth, you don't see as much of it as you would think. Written tests mostly show what you are capable of. Now oral tests are harder, but again, mostly reflect classroom performance levels. IQ is a different kind of test, but if you have anxiety then you need psychological help of some kind or else simply are not able to do the work. I doubt Americans have more test anxiety than any other groups anyway.

[TitoFan]

Here's a case that'll warm your heart, Miles. Controversy in a California high school over a science fair project that sets out to prove that "students of African American, Latino and South Asian descent didn’t have the intelligence to participate in the school’s Humanities and International Studies (HISP) college preparatory program". I would call that racist and inflammatory, but I suppose it's right up your alley. Blacks, Latinos, and South Asian all rolled up into the same disposable, low-IQ ball. Cute. A convenient way to further racist agendas, veiled and masquerading as a science project.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/ed...201449649.html


This is the type of useless drivel that keeps propagating the same racist beliefs from the old generations to the new generations. This inexplicable need to pigeon-hole people into tidy little groups.

[TitoFan]

I'm more of the technical, math and physics persuasion..... and human behavior is not my forte. So I like my studies "un-flawed", based on solid premises. When a study or test is subject to controversy and opposing facts, I tend to shy away from anything borne from those studies or tests. IMO, you seem too willing to embrace something which has long been deemed flawed and controversial. It's an old and unwinnable argument, I'm afraid. As long as there are people with agendas or axes to grind, there will be tests, measures, graphs, and "proof" to make their points. Sad, really.

[TitoFan]

I could bore you with personal facts and observations from a lifetime of experience that would shoot your IQ fantasies down, Miles. But in 13 years I've never made a habit out of putting my personal life on the forum. So you just keep on playing with your IQ-by-country blocks and using them for your grand observations on races and ethnicities, telling everyone who should have children and who shouldn't. I'm convinced you'll mature someday and look back on this with some amusement.

[Gandalf]

I think you are getting emotional now, Tito. Personal facts and observations are hardly going to shoot down statistical evidence which indeed suggests that there are IQ differentials between races. Believe me, I think it is a horrible thing and that is why I do make suggestions like making sure you have the material, emotional and dual parental capacity to give your child the best shot you can. In a multicultural melting pot like America IQ should all things considered be an average of around 100 points among each of the races, but that does not appear to be the case. This suggests a combination of genetic, environmental, developmental etc differences at work. That's what I was trying to say earlier, when I said I have done okay despite bad parenting, so in that sense environmental factors did not hinder me and that is where I do agree with your concluding paragraph. I would like it to be more of an environmental issue though. The lack of dual parenting, the lack of goal inspiring dual parenting, a lack of nutrition, bad cultural influences, whatever. I do not want it to be genetic. However, it does seemingly exist as a factor and this is how it is.

On the flip side of the negativity that you are talking about, I see it as more of a positive and that we need to kick certain groups up the arse and tell them to do better and to maybe not allow kids to be used as a tool to claim welfare. Clean up your own room before you have a child and at least in that sense the child might stand a chance. Don't get pregnant to some low IQ bloke who will go to prison and then you as a low IQ Mum are now also giving your child yet more obstacles? That is a messy, messy room. Like you yourself have pointed out. In Asia they tend to have tidier rooms. I would like that to be the difference, but it isn't clear that it is whence the IQ numbers within America itself. Is it racist to point out data? I don't think so. Some can use it in dark ways, I prefer to look at it as a positive means to improve things and it does not mean Communism.

[brocktonblockbust]

Why don't people from the Congo score as high as people from Korea? Why aren't there that many astrophysicists from Yemen as opposed to from Germany? Why are the top neurosurgeons in the world not from Venezuela or the Dominican Republic? Why didn't Cameroon or Laos go to the Moon? Why was Albert Einstein a German Jew? Why was Isaac Newton an Englishmen? Why was Copernicus a Pole? Why was Christian Huygens Scandinavian? Why was the human genome decoded by Japanese and German and Australian and American scientists, and not by Haitian and Indonesian and Nigerian and Mexican scientists?