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Abominable as it is, my views are not just based on the Bell Curve's race-IQ discussion. * In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be res
by damnyou 6y ago
Abominable as it is, my views are not just based on the Bell Curve's race-IQ discussion.
* In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be restricted because Black people are having too many kids. His book had a great deal of influence on the "welfare reform" instituted in the mid-1990s in the US.
* In In Our Hands, Murray proposes replacing all government assistance with "an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older". Not only is this eugenics because everyone, abled or not, with medical needs or not, must be able to survive on $10,000 a year; but note the absence of a UBI for kids: the proposal would punish poorer people--who are disproportionately Black for historical reasons rooted in racist institutions like slavery, redlining and the War on Drugs--for having too many kids.
All of this is pretty textbook social Darwinist white supremacism--all of these views are regularly espoused at Stormfront and other such places.
Charles Murray is quite clearly a white supremacist, and the race-IQ stuff is only a small part of the case for it.
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Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: I didn't know about Nathan Cofnas so I googled him and he appears to be standard-issue IDW: writes for Quillette, defends bigots like Kathleen Stock, etc. Any blowback they got is well-deserved.
From https://quillette.com/2021/01/14/philosophers-smear-one-of-their-own-for-gender-heresy/ https://quillette.com/2021/01/14/philosophers-smear-one-of-t...:
> Stock argues that, for example, it is okay for cis women to object to a lesbian with a penis—what in ye olden days of 2014 was known as a heterosexual man
This is of course a complete lie: trans people have been recognized and understood across many cultures for thousands of years, sometimes as a third gender but usually not as the gender they were assigned at birth. This is both ignorant and hateful. Cofnas deserves to be "cancelled", as does anyone else who writes for Quillette to be frank (for the same guilt-by-association reason, which remains just as valid for Quillette as it is for Murray).
- laretluval 6y agoUBI (your second point) is a common idea advocated by many people other than Bill Murray. This is the first time I've heard it described as white supremacy and eugenics although I'm sure it won't be the last.
- damnyou 6y agoI like and support UBI (for complex reasons some of which are related to the arguments in Seeing Like a State). However, some implementations of UBI are white supremacist and eugenicist, and Murray's version is one such implementation. This does not mean that UBI is inherently eugenicist or white supremacist. A UBI which did not replace literally all government assistance, which took into account the fact that some people will always need and should get more assistance than others, and which started from birth rather than adulthood, would not be eugenicist.
- ctvo 6y agoRace-IQ stuff as you call it is still a debated issue. The recent blowback over Nathan Cofnas’s work [1], for example, show there’s a culture where anyone not in line with the view there’s no connection is a target for cancellation. I don’t agree with the science from my layman reading of it, but I have much bigger issues with this attempt at silencing people by associating them with white supremacy. 1 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2019.1697803 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2019.1...
- swebs 6y agoIn The Bell Curve, they report that Asian Americans have a higher mean IQ than European Americans, who have a higher mean IQ then African Americans. Wouldn't that make him an Asian supremacist, if anything?
- damnyou 6y agoWhite supremacists are happy to co-opt East Asian (not Asian in general, only East Asian) populations for their purposes when convenient. Your response doesn't engage with the rest of my post either, which I think is the primary evidence that he's a white supremacist. I'm not going to rehash race-IQ arguments because I find them tiring and not very consequential.
- ALittleLight 6y agoIt seems your response doesn't really engage with any part of that comment. What is the meaning of "co-opt East Asian populations"? You claim Murray is a white supremacist because he thinks whites have higher IQs than blacks, but when dealing with the point that Murray thinks Asians have higher IQs than whites, you dismiss it with this language about "co-opting"?
- damnyou 6y agoI'm claiming that Murray is a white supremacist primarily because his welfare reform and UBI proposals are white supremacist.
- damnyou 6y agoThe reaction to my posts is rather remarkable. I've lost 30 karma so far just for stating a bunch of facts and opinions that challenge the hegemonic narrative on "Hacker News". Oh no, I'm being cancelled. I should go write about it on Quillette. /s
- the_only_law 6y agoHN is more about intellectual posturing than it is about having discussions on anything.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI think you're getting downvoted because you are stating highly disputed things as if they were facts. When people question you, you refuse to engage with their arguments. You're also slandering a person (calling Charles Murray a white supremacist) on the basis that he supports welfare reform and you disagree with him on some edge cases of UBI. Downvotes are well deserved in my opinion.
- damnyou 6y ago"Supports welfare reform" and "edge cases of UBI" are doing a lot of work there. I, too, support modernizing our governmental assistance programs, but not in a way that's white supremacist and eugenicist. There are welfare reform ideas I disagree with that I don't think are white supremacist either. Murray's ideas and policies, however, are beyond the pale.
- ALittleLight 6y agoSee: here is an interesting case where you think I'm summarizing you unfairly or incorrectly. Do you think Charles Murray would feel you were summarizing and characterizing his arguments fairly?
- damnyou 6y agoNo, I don't, because I'm sure he's constructed post hoc rationalizations in his head about how he's not actually as bad as it seems. I evaluate him like I do any other public figure: based on his writing and the impact he's had on public policy debates. His internal state of mind does not matter at all.