Those of 9,999 in 10,000. But what do they matter?

The sunrise plains are a tender haze
And the sunset seas are gray,
But I stand here, where the bright skies blaze
Over me and the big today.
What good to me is a vague “maybe”
Or a mournful “might have been,”
For the sun wheels swift from morn to morn
And the world began when I was born
And the world is mine to win.

Thank you for having precisely the right words at the right moment.

Aren’t Spaniards and Italians known for being passionate and emotional? and are not Scandinavians known for being just the opposite?

Do you really think that someone could arrive at the conclusion that these are genetic rather than environmental? Oh, those crazy Spaniards and their overactive limbic systems!!

Now, I am personally sure that environment is responsible for a lot of that, perhaps all of it, but perhaps Rothbard wasn’t so sure. He did not say “blacks are inherently inferior”.

Negro, please. He make this supposedly value neutral assessment of their intelligence in the process of characterizing them as a stupid and destructive underclass of welfare dependents acting in the capacity of barbarians at the gate.

I’d be curious to know what kind of standard of “moral worth” considers a person’s mind to be beside the point.

If his belief was based on the arguments made by Herrnstein & Murray in The Bell Curve, then by definition it isn’t self-evident at all. Perhaps he started out with this self-evident belief and was pleased to find arguments supporting it.

As for the IQs of black children raised in white families: this does not eliminate environmental variation at all. As Ned Block points out in his demolition of The Bell Curve, How Heritability Misleads About Race:

if you place a pair of Black one-egg twins in different environments “at random,” you automatically fail to randomize environments. The Black twins will bring part of their environment with them; they are both Black and will be treated as Black.

He may mean that it is in the nature of certain ethnic groups or races to value intelligence more than in others, and so that’s the result. All he said in the first part was “differ amongst themselves”.

The second part says “…intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.”

Aren’t Spaniards and Italians known for being passionate and emotional? and are not Scandinavians known for being just the opposite?

Now, I am personally sure that environment is responsible for a lot of that, perhaps all of it, but perhaps Rothbard wasn’t so sure. He did not say “blacks are inherently inferior”.

He did mention the Charles Murray book “The Bell Curve”, which had come out recently, and that book does contain the inflammatory conclusion that blacks are a hell of a lot dumber than everyone else. But Murray’s book also contains IQ tests from black youths who grew up in white middle-class households and so should have been as smart as the white middle-class youths, and were not — according to Murray’s tests anyway. So perhaps Rothbard was merely provoked by that data.

I think it’s the fact that he believes this is self-evident that suggests racism, not just the belief itself.

He just brushes aside the obvious possibility that apparent differences in intelligence might be due to environmental variation, and finds it self-evident that these differences are genetic.

I wonder what might have inclined Rothbard to jump to a conclusion, with the false justification of its supposed self-evidence, that lines up so well with traditional racist thought on the inferiority of blacks?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFJ2q73FpAw&feature=related

You make it easy, my friends. Some day I shall care more about how I hold a phone than how I say what I believe. Time begins to slow, details of everything grow softer and larger. There is nothing else.

And their world cares.

I think the charge of racism applies not solely to the content of such theories but also to the reasons for accepting them. I say more about this here.

It is another to say “whites are inherently superior to blacks.” — the latter being a truly racist statement. Rothbard’s view in the first piece you linked to is merely controversial biological determinism. Such a belief should not be held against him. Whether he’s right or wrong is above the pay grades of everyone except God.

Note: I disagree with ROthbard’s conclusions but it seems to me that he’s only attempting to bash the taboo of saying that we are not all equal and this inequality comes from genes. He’s not promoting hate towards other races, etc.