h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a forgery. That would seem to be the crime here: asserting that some book has a certain authority. The writing itself is not the crime.

"The Bell Curve" (as I understand from a brief look at http://www.sfu.ca/~wwwpsyb/issues/1996/winter/keenan.htm ) makes the mistake of deriving moral directives from statistics: a procedure well countered by rational argument( e.g. Steven Pinker in "The Blank Slate"). A crude equivalent would be to find a suspect guilty because he's male, justifying your judgemnt by the fact that most criminals are male.

I confess I had difficult following Sea's argument. I am *not* a libertarian by the way. Libertarians tend to be exclusively right wing people, and I'm not one of those.

The main argument I have against the Bell Curve is that it is hung up on this idea of genes and intelligence. I am a very intelligent person, but I have no truck with the likes of Mensa and people who bang on about how important it is to have a high IQ. Likewise for scientists who seem to be out to prove a link between genes and IQ. I'd be amazed if it there wasn't but it really *isn't* a very interesting problem, scientifically. You get a whole load of genes cooperating to produce a physical characteristic, so you end up with a broad distribution. End of story.

So my main argument with Murray, apart from that major detraction, is that having set out to establish a link between genes and intelligence he then tries to extrapolate it to racial trends, and then broad brush social policies based on such. The first is a non-sequitur: there is far more genetic variation between individuals of a race than there are genetic traits in common. Moreover, the genetic differences between a male Caucasian with a bit of Spanish blood in, like me, and somebody from Burkino Faso are mostly due to the normal variation between individuals. We are all mongrels deep down, especially in our DNA.

If one was to set up a society which rewarded people purely on their IQ (and God forbid that ever happens - as I've said the world has a far greater deficiency of fellow feeling than brains at the moment) then we would therefore have to do so by assesing individuals as such, not memebers of a race first and foremost. The attraction of Murray for the right-wing is that it gets *them* off the hook: if people fail then it's purely the fault of the individual. And we know it's never that simple.

I'm with you there Felonious, but I don't understand "Caucasian with a bit of Spanish blood". Are Spaniards not Caucasian?

I didn't say the two were exclusive, did I? I'm such a mongrel it's impossible to work out exactly where I originate from, but some old boy in our family years ago said he'd managed to trace us back to some bucklesquasher on the the Spanish main.

No . . . you didn't

Well, the only reason I pointed that out was because that probably the only bloodline I have that hasn't become knotted and tangled together with God knows what else.

The Spanish bloodline is particularly interesting. At last the Spanish are beginning to acknowledge their Jewish and Arabic factors; from the 15th century on they had to pretend to be squeaky-clean-christian-since-the-year-dot or the Inquisition came and got them, they couldn't get married or get a job, total denial ruled. Until just recently, apparently.

Have I ranted this rant before?

I condensed this paragraph of yours :

I kind of feel that anybody who has the discipline to sit down and read a book from cover to cover (especially something as woefully boring as Mein Kampf, which I have read and which did not result in me feeling any sympathy for the Third Reich btw) and to take in all of the contents, probably also has the intelligence to weigh up the arguments contained within it and come to their own conclusions.

Into the phrase "intelligent, book reading".

The Protocols were written with the express purpose of antirevolutionary rhetoric in Tsarist Russia. it's disingenuous to separate the writing of it with the interpretation of it; it is written in such a way that it comments on itself and it intends that you interpret it exactly in the evil way that it's (copiers from the French piece that targetted the Jesuits) intended.

In the United States, libertarians propose ideas that are not coincident in any reliable way with the left or the right. They are against taxes (a rightist position, or at least it was until Bush the Second's fascists seized power and spent us into oblivion), but they are also against criminalizing drugs or prostitution.



I wasn't talking about any particular book (say the Bell Curve) so much as I see both you and Frenchbean on interesting sides of the argument of whether any particular book could possibly be evil, one which supposes an automatically superior bullshit detector for all readers. IQ is not the be all and end all, but some people are smarter than others. (I am certain both of you are much smarter than me, for instance) And, some people have more time for ratiocination and revolution than others. Not everyone has the time to investigate. Sometimes it's wealth, sometimes it's having slaves, sometimes it's having an excellent job or an exceptionally fast thinking process, and sometimes it's just using yer brain to bake your own bread and grow stuff in the harsh Scottish soil.



The Protocols, and they are quite seductive on the surface, unless you KNOW that it's bogus, therefore, it is evil. The Communist Manifesto is totally open, you can tell where the logical hole in it is by reading it, so one doesn't need to know any history or research it, so to me, it's not evil.

"it's disingenuous to separate the writing of it with the interpretation of it" -- fair comment. But the damnable intention there was to create a forgery, to pass it off as something it wasn't.

Interestingly, you can argue that More's "Utopia" was equally obviously intended to deceive its less alert readers, since he tied the narrative seamlessly into a piece of true reporting on a visit he (More) had made to Holland.

Indeed. I'm not a great fan of this Derridaist claptrap which maintains that the meaning of a book is somehow divorced from the intentions of the writer. It's one bloody big sophistry if you ask me. To give another example: If you read the Daily Mail in the UK it will publish a lot of 'news' about the Labour Government purporting to give exposes of its incompetence, venality, double standards whatever. Of course, the Daily Mail's agenda has and always will be that ntohing but a Conservative Government will do, and that any tactics are acceptable on this war upon the left. This is what led to the writing and publishing of the Zinoviev letter. the dmanable intent is there for all to see.

Coming back to an earlier point of mine, I remember watching an Equinox program on the link between genes and intelligence. The scientist had done research on the link between a gene called IGF-2R and its prevalence in super-bright kids who went to Harvard three years earlier than expected. It transpired he had written his conclusions up before he'd fully analysed his results, and was very disappointed when it seemed that they contradicted his conclusions. However, he found he'd made a mistake and was very pleased when the results were shown to support them.

Now, talking about damnable intent, what was this guy setting out to prove, and why? How many journalists, scientists, politicians out there have deeply ingrained and fixed views about the way that the world should be run, and choose their findings accordingly? And why do most of them seem to be on the Right/

BTW: if anyone wants to know, as a kid I had an IQ of 190+. It's now about 140-145, mainly due to a very bad head injury I suffered when I was 12. And I *still* don't support the idea of a meritocracy based upon IQ. Why should people who are more intelligent get rewarded purely on that basis? I've seen many very average people do far more for themselves and society with their quota of wits than countless Mensa members.

As for guns, like many inventions they can be used for both good and bad. you can also do serious damage with a bow and arrow, but no one decided to limit their use.

Many books can be, and are dangerous in their content, fiction and non-fiction, as all can be missleading in one way or another. Does this mean that a) propaganda, despite 'freedom of speech' should be banned, b)People should automatically believe everything they read, and/or c) that newspapers, non-fiction books and information on the net should be censored, or rated PG, 18 etc just because some people find it hard to determine facts from opinions?

Most extremely useful things are dangerous: scalpels, chainsaws, cars . . .

The most dangerous books of all are the bibles.

I don't believe any books should be banned, but that's a separate argument from my orginal point, which is that the choice of the books by this panel of conservatives said a lot more about them than it did about the books themselves. They deride The Kinsey Report, Democracy and Education, The Feminine Mystique, On Liberty, The Origin of Species and even Silent Spring for chrissakes.

Wow. I just had a look at that site that started this discussion: http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591

It seems to be dedicated to ridiculing Hillary Clinton.

it has always been the same! the 'powers that be' always find some way to destroy peoples ideas. what ever happened to freedom of speech? how sane can the world be when a) the roman catholic church denied for years that the earth is round, despite evidence, b)lady chaterley's lover is banned *gosh how rude* incase people hardly 'exposed' to it(?) and c) despite popular belief, it does not mention anything about Jonah being swallowed by a whale!

Curious. Did the church ever deny the earth was round?

Not that I'm aware: I don't see how a flat Earth could be incompatible with Christian doctrine, and the ancient Greeks knew it wasn't flat well before they came along.

Though it is true to say that Jonah was not swallowed by a whale in the bible story; it was "a great fish".