Somebody’s Gotta Say It

     The title of this piece is shamelessly stolen from Neal Boortz’s book of that name. I found that particular book unimpressive, mainly a compendium of soft libertarianisms. There was little original thought in it. It was still of some value; the freedom philosophy can always use another popular voice. My theft pertains to the sort of thing I’ve been writing lately, particularly on the ever-hazardous topic of race.

     We’ve been experiencing race riots. They’ve been massively destructive. They’ve inflicted injuries on both rioters, police, and the uninvolved. They’ve thrown the afflicted locales into social, economic, and political chaos, at least for a time. Yet despite the undiluted racial category of the rioters, the media have resolutely refrained from calling them race riots.

     One or two other low-gauge Internet commentators have noted the correlations and have dared to speak them aloud. Here’s one:

     Then there’s the other narrative, the one no one dares say for fear of being labeled a monster. On the television you see young black males mugging for the cameras as they commit pointless acts of mayhem. You see blacks running from burning stores with arms full of goods. Of course, the liquor store is robbed and you see blacks carrying away the liquor and beer. These scenes are narrated by the same old voices saying the same old things. To spice it up, they interview a local, who mumbles through the interview, confirming everything you see on TV.

     This, of course, is the simple reality of places like Baltimore, Detroit, East St. Louis and so on. When the government banned private discrimination in in the 1960’s, whites fled the cities to avoid having to send their kids to school with blacks. Responsible and intelligent blacks tried to keep it together, but they threw in the towel in the 80’s and 90’s when crack turned American cities into war zones. They headed for the suburbs to live with the whites. What’s left in these urban reservations are low-IQ violent nitwits.

     Of course, no one is allowed to say any of this in public. Racial solidarity requires blacks, who know better, to defend their dimwitted brothers rioting in the streets. Liberal whites think there’s profit in the riots so they cast about for a black hat on whom to pin the blame. Crime thinkers like John Derbyshire believe that the truth of things will eventually will out. I think John is right that reality will always win eventually, but I know I’ll never live to see it. Everyone alive today is too deeply invested in the myth that if we just turn the right knobs and push the right buttons, biology will be overcome. Fantasy is powerful stuff.

     Z Man is probably wiser than I in his decision to go by an anonymizing Internet moniker. It’s not my style and never has been; besides, I want my readers, whoever and wherever they may be, to know that I stand behind my words. If I’m proved wrong, I’ll admit it. This is a subject on which I’d like to be proved wrong. I just don’t think there’s much likelihood of it.

     The reason for my skepticism is the normal distribution.

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     Here is a visual depiction of the normal distribution, perhaps better known as the “bell curve:”

     And here is an excellent survey of its properties for the intelligent layman. For the more mathematically inclined, the curve follows the following equation:

     ...where σ (the lower-case Greek letter sigma) is the usual symbol for the distribution’s standard deviation. The standard deviation is a reliable predictor of what percentage of the distribution will fall within a particular band around the horizontal axis of symmetry of the curve, which passes through the arithmetic mean. The mean indicates what it always does: 50% of the points under the curve lie to the left of that axis, and 50% lie to the right of it. (In the first graphic above, the mean has been arbitrarily taken to be 0, though this is merely for simplicity in the depiction of the curve.)

     As for the use of the standard deviation:

• 68% of the points under the curve lie within 1 standard deviation of the axis;
• 95% of the points under the curve lie within 2 standard deviations of the axis;
• 99.7% of the points under the curve lie within 3 standard deviations of the axis.

     Further than that from the axis lies very little indeed.

     The important point about the normal distribution is its normality. Virtually every human characteristic is distributed among humans according to this formula -- not because we want it that way, but because the laws of probability have decreed that it shall be so. Among those characteristics are:

• height;
• weight;
• intelligence;
• strength;
• speed;
• agility;
• propensity for aggression and lawlessness.

     More, there are some notable correlations among those factors, and between each of those factors and the three anthropologically agreed-upon races of Mankind.

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     For as long as general intelligence – i.e., the ability to reason from abstract propositions when presented with specific cases in a relevant context -- has been measured, the scores of the races have fallen into a particular relation:

• All three curves have been normal distributions;
• The Caucasian race has exhibited a mean of 100.
• The Mongolian race has exhibited a mean of 107.
• The Negro race has exhibited a mean of 88.

     The standard deviation of those three normal distributions / bell curves is 15 points.

     Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray dared to discuss this openly, despite the enormous pressure put upon them by other researchers in the cognitive sciences to keep their conclusions to themselves. Those two unusually accomplished, bright, and candid men published anyway, expecting that controversy, dissension, and vilification would follow...and they got it in spades. But what none of their critics were able to do was to refute their conclusions.

     Those conclusions led immediately to a statement that John Derbyshire was roundly castigated for making:

     The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

     Poor John Derbyshire, an eloquent conservative and a mathematically able man inclined toward stating a conclusion when it stares him in the face, has been so viciously vilified for noting the above that he’s become anathema in conservative circles. He failed to comply with Heinlein’s Law:

Being Right Too Soon
Is Socially Unacceptable.

     Yet his numbers are accurate and his conclusions flow from them.

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     There is another correlation with race that our media refuse to allow us to draw, mainly by suppressing the data that would lead us to it: the correlation between race and propensity for lawlessness.

     You will not see American Mongolians as rioters. You’ll see very few American Caucasians destroying property or looting stores. You will see an overwhelming preponderance of American Negroes at such an event. Some will even allow themselves to be filmed doing it.

     Are all American Negroes willing lawbreakers? Of course not. But the bell curve seems to have put a greater fraction of them reasonably close to the mean that when given a rationale, that fraction will riot, burn, and loot. There will be some inclined to help the police to restore order. However, as The Z Man notes in his above-cited essay:

     Responsible and intelligent blacks tried to keep it together, but they threw in the towel in the 80’s and 90’s when crack turned American cities into war zones. They headed for the suburbs to live with the whites. What’s left in these urban reservations are low-IQ violent nitwits.

     In other words, they did what sensible, adequately perceptive people do when confronted with a dangerous situation they’ve decided is beyond their control: they fled those environs. The ones that remained there are the lawless – the “low-IQ nitwits” – who have so narrow a reasoning horizon that they cannot or will not see that their actions will leave them worse off than before.

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     For the purposes of this tirade, please take a collectivity to be a group of persons who share some observable characteristic and who exhibit behavioral cohesion. Following from that, the social acceptability of any collectivity will depend upon its discipline in adhering to social norms. Such discipline can only come from two places:

• From within the collectivity itself;
• From outside it.

     In the former case, there will be minimal tension between that collectivity and the larger society. In the latter, the collectivity will be deemed “unruly,” in need of “restraint,” perhaps requiring it to be “civilized.” If the measures put to that end are sufficient, the collectivity might eventually shed its unruly ways and thereafter be accepted equally in the larger society. If not, there are only two possible outcomes:

• Separation of the collectivity from the larger society;
• Warfare, possibly ending in the extermination of the collectivity.

     The American Negro collectivity has exhibited cohesion in several ways, but most important for the purposes of this tirade is its observable disinclination to discipline its unruly sub-cohort. The American Left, which dominates the educational system, the communications and entertainment media, and the political elite of both parties, has stood firmly against the external application of effective restraining or civilizing measures to that collectivity.

     Draw your own conclusions. I stand by mine.

     To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance – Victor Hugo