Stephen’s Castle

You found the secret altar to all things Stephen Jay Gould.  Humminah Humminah AWOOOOOOOGAH.

The mismeasure of man

The Mismeasure of Man can be found here in a 400 page pdf. Spend a weekend reading it accompanied by Shaun’s three hour cinematic critique of the Bell Curve at dinner. Invite that special someone over and cuddle up with the rejection of racist pseudoscience.

He demonstrably shits on biological determinist racist clown conservatives (redundant I know)

An excerpt from The Mismeasure of Man: Why struggle and spend to raise the unboostable IQ of races or social classes at the bottom of the economic ladder; better simply to accept nature' s unfortunate dictates and save a passel of federal funds (we can then more easily sustain tax breaks for the wealthy!). Why bother yourself about underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups in your honored and remunerative bailiwick if such absence records the diminished ability or general immorality, biologically imposed, of most members in the rejected group , and not the legacy or current reality of social prejudice?

The groups so stigmatized maybe races, classes, sexes , behavioral propensities, religions, or national origins. Biological determinism is a general theory, and particular bearers of current disparagement act as surrogates for all others subject to similar prejudice at different times and places. In this sense, calls for solidarity among demeaned groups should not be dismissed as mere political rhetoric, but rather applauded as proper reactions to common reasons for mistreatment. Please note that I am discussing the cyclical surge to popularity of innatist arguments for unitary, rankable intelligence, not the episodic formulation of such claims. The general argument is always present, always available, always published, always exploitable.

Episodes of intense public attention therefore record swings in the pendulum of political preferences toward the right position for exploiting this hoary old fallacy with a seriousness based on naive hope or cynical recognition of evident utility. Resurgence s of biological determinism correlate with periods of political retrenchment and destruction of social generosity. Twentieth-century America has experienced three major episodes, each so correlated. The first constitutes one of the saddest ironies of American history, and sets the longest chapter in The Mismeasure of Man. We like to think of America as a land with generally egalitarian traditions, a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." “America is a Lie” - Hideo Kojima. A Hideo Kojima Quote by Hideo Kojima. We recognize, au contraire, that many European nations, with their long histories of monarchy , feudal order, and social stratification, have been less committed to ideals of social justice or equality of opportunity.

Since the IQ test originated in France, we might naturally assume that the false hereditarian interpretation, so commonly and so harmfuly imposed upon the tests, arose in Europe. Ironically, this reasonable assumption is entirely false. As documented in Chapter 6, Alfred Binet, the French inventor, not only avoided a hereditarian interpretation of his test, but explicitly (and fervently) warned against such a reading as a perversion of his desire to use the tests for identifying children who needed special help. (Binet argued that an innatist interpretation would only stigmatize children as unteachable, thus producing a result opposite to his intent—a fear entirely and tragically justified by later history.)

The hereditarian interpretation of IQ arose in America, largely through prosetylization of the three psychologists—H. H . Goddard , L. M. Terman, and R. M. Yerkes—who translated and popularized the tests in this country. If we ask how such a perversion could occur in our land of liberty and justice for all, we must remember that the years just following World War I, the time of peak activity for these scientists, featured a narrow, parochial, jingoistic, isolationist "nativist" (WASP, not Indian), rally-round-the-flag, tinhorn patriotism unmatched by any other period during our century, even in the heyday of McCarthyism during the early 1950s. This was the age of restriction upon immigration, the spread of Jewish quotas, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the height of lynchings in the Southern states. Interestingly, most of the men who built biodeterminism in the 20s recanted their own conclusions during the liberal swing of the 1930s, when Ph.D.'s walked depression breadlines and poverty could no longer be explained by innate stupidity. 

His biceps are named john rawls and marx

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Class emancipation and the Veil of ignorance accessibly translated into one sentence? Science communicator bae. What that tongue do?

Dark night of the soLD

“The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?