Thanks, it's good to know about market-dominant minorities.
I'm not sure what to do with this information...it seems to accurately describe the situation but is also very disturbing, for two reasons: First, it sounds like blaming the Jews, in that if they were a model (politically-weak) minority instead of a market-dominant minority they wouldn't have been scapegoated for Germany's economic problems, which is terrible (but I'm pretty sure you just are trying to describe the real world, with no value judgments whatsoever meant). Second, I am apparently one of the oppressors of today. Most Americans don't think much about the poor people who make the stuff they buy, or who get exploded by the weapons their military develops.
"Is" doesn't lead to "should", and there's no legal obligation to seek out opportunities to save lives, and I don't have enough power now to make a meaningful difference, but it's really hard to say "I don't care what other people think; I'm going to do what I want!", when every normal American day I burn enough money to support a few impoverished families. If I gave up some luxuries, I could save peoples' lives, but if I give in to that it means the end of my dreams, and would not necessarily do the most good. Most people choose not to think about these things.
Is it time to jump off the slippery slope? I falsely equate being selfish with being evil, because it feels like the cost of embracing selfishness is, to quote Steven Pressfield, to "wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to." But, being unselfish ends with my death with nothing meaningful changed, and refusing to choose, while easy, is a non-option. I need to not die, and to know the meaning of life, and I want to help others to the extent possible. Owning my place in the real world is painful but seeking oblivion through distracted and unhealthy living, because of my unwillingness to own my place as a subordinate fiend, is worse.
Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:
An intriguing opening. Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?
Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility. Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless. But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.
Later in the article came this:
This intrigued me for two reasons: First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction. And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?
A great deal has already been said about the Watson affair, and I suspect that in most respects I have little to contribute that has not been said before.
But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not? Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome? What difference does skin colour make? At all?
This is only half a rhetorical question. Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity. Some kind of different psychological processing is taking place around individually-unfair intelligence distributions, and group-unfair intelligence distributions.
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. What about lead-based paint? Does it not count, because parents theoretically could have prevented it but didn't? In the beginning no one knew that it was damaging. How is it just for such a tiny mistake to have such huge, irrevocable consequences? And regardless, would not a just God damn us for only our own choices? Kids don't choose to live in apartments with lead-based paint.
So much for God being "just", unless you count the people whom God has just screwed over. Maybe that's part of the fuel in the burning controversy - that people do realize, on some level, the implications for religion. They can rationalize away the implications of a child born with no legs, but not a child born with no possibility of ever understanding calculus. But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
And why is my own perspective, apparently, unusual? Perhaps because I also think that intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech. When truly huge horrors are believed unfixable, the mind's eye tends to just skip over the hideous unfairness - for much the same reason you don't deliberately rest your hand on a hot stoveburner; it hurts.