Sargon of Akkad if anything is closer to SJW than 'Alt-Right,' a term usually used by leftists as a label for anyone on the political right who isn't some variety of Neoconservative (and in that sense, I personally identify with it). However Sargon's one time arch-nemesis, Libertarian Realist, is a bona fide alt-righter - the issue over which they clashed was racial differences in cognitive ability.
I don't have the time to follow these things between the garden-variety of SJWs and alt-righters on places like reddit etc but I have been following the academic-scientific version of the debate since I was a teenager, and I will use that favourite topic of Libertarian Realist's to illustrate why alt-righters can't have serious discussions in the real world about these things.
All of this goes back to the late 19th century but I will begin with the 1960s case of William Shockley, the physics Nobel Laureate who co-invented the transistor (and therefore, arguably, the age of electronics and computers we enjoy today).
In his midlife Shockley started studying the psychometric literature on IQ and discovered two things he remained convinced for the rest of his life were the most important social problems of the modern world: that populations statistically differed in their average genetic intelligence - just as they do for athletic ability -, and that more generally the correlation between fertility and intelligence was negative. The later problem is known as 'dysgenics' - the film Idiocracy is a comic play on it. This is the opposite of 'eugenics' which although has come to be a synonym for the holocaust originally simply meant the artificial selection of humans for traits like health and intelligence (this goes back all the way to Plato's Republic in western culture).
Shockley went public with his concerns which turned out to be a fatal mistake:
[video=youtube;sAszZr3SkEs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAszZr3SkEs[/video]
Consequently, he was lynched by the media and the left-leaning sectors of academia (which is most of it). In fact his persistence with those issues ultimately even lost him most of his family and friends.
William Shockley, one of the men responsible for the digital age, because of his extreme political incorrectness, died an estranged man whose children only learned of his death via the media.
More recently (2007) another Nobel Laureate and the co-discoverer of DNA, James Watson, was given the Shockley treatment. Watson made the mistake of blurting out in an interview the suggestion that the universal assumption of all individuals and races being identical in all meaningful traits like intelligence might not be true - a media uproar followed and he shortly after lost his position at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. By 2014 Watson's income had diminished to the point where he ended up selling his Nobel Prize medal for various funds.
During the era of Shockley two other eminent scientists also suffered similar fates, Arthur Jensen - the greatest psychometrician since Charles Spearman - and to a lesser extent Hans Eysenck the father of personality psychology.
And this is all the tip of the iceberg as men like Shockley, Watson, Jensen and Eysenck were so far up at the top of their fields that even their most vicious enemies acknowledged their first-class contributions to their respective scientific fields. Yet that did not stop them from being victimized by the leftist thought-crime apparatus in western society.
Countless less accomplished folk who have ventured into those minefields were destroyed with much less noise, for example the 2013 media lynching of Jason Richwine for his report suggesting that cognitive ability should be a relevant factor in immigration policy.
A comprehensive treatment of the technical aspects of this debate is beyond the scope of a post on Narutobase but allow me to give you a small dose of what that looks like by describing a few of Arthur Jensen's achievements.
To this day whenever this topic is broached in western media, time and time again, I see assertions like "IQ tests only measure ability on IQ tests" and "IQ tests are culturally biased against Blacks," though Jensen long ago crushed these arguments.
Refer to Jensen's masterpiece "The g factor: The Science of Mental Ability" for the details of my brief descriptions that follow:
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Although almost everyone has an idea about what IQ tests are about, very few people - especially leftists - have any clue as to what they precisely are designed to measure.
The 'thing' IQ tests are supposed to measure is what Jensen's book is named after, namely 'the g factor,' and this is basically the result of quantifying the multiple positive correlations (aka the positive manifold) between scores on different tasks that require some mental ability (via factor analysis), e.g. mathematical reasoning, spatial rotation, reading comprehension etc etc.
More mathematically the g-factor can be defined as the limit of the average score on N different mental tests as N tends to infinity - in other words, the perfect IQ test would be an infinite number of mental tests and your IQ would be the average score of those infinite number of tests.
A perfect IQ test (the average of an infinite number of tests) would correlate with the g-factor perfectly at 1.0 though most real world IQ tests used by psychologists only imperfectly correlate with g - a good IQ test such as the WAIS will have a 'g loading,' as they call it, of around 0.9.
Aptitude tests such as the SAT, GRE and law-school aptitude tests like the LSAT and medical school aptitude tests like the MCAT, UKCAT, GAMSAT etc tend to have g-loadings of around 0.8 - in other words, all these tests are imperfect measures of IQ.
High-school grades in specific subjects tend to have lower still g-loadings (for maths/science it tends to be around 0.6) so even high-school grades are an imperfect measure of IQ.
Here's an even more arcane set of fact to leftists: the neurobiology of the g-factor (chapter 6 of Jensen's book).
Head size has a modest correlation with IQ and this correlation increases as the measure becomes more accurately a measure of brain size - estimates of brain size determined from MRI brain scans are more highly correlated with IQ than crude estimates based on head size.
Now the races all differ in this regard - for a century it's been established that North-East Asians (Japanese etc) have, on average, slightly larger brains than Europeans who in turn have significantly larger brains than Blacks, after you correct for body mass.
Jensen reports older studies of nerve conduction velocity (related to how fast your brain cells can transmit signals) that show modest correlations with IQ - more recent techniques that more accurately measure this physiological variable have reported even greater correlations. I am not aware of studies investigating how this variable differs among races but I suspect the results will follow the brain-size reports which is why even the mention of this sort of thing terrifies leftists.
And last but not least - Jensen's greatest scientific work on this topic: his method of ferreting out the genetic underpinnings of the correlations long before recent genomics based analyses confirmed his conclusions.
As it turns out, both height (in males) and myopia (short-sightedness) are positively correlated with IQ but the question remains as to the genetic origin of that correlation because it can be mediated two-fold:
1. The correlation is extrinsic, i.e., although there is a correlation in the population, the genes for the two traits are independent of each other and have simply come to be grouped together because of assortative mating.
2. The correlation is intrinsic, that is, the two traits are pleiotropic which means that both traits are influenced by some of the same genes.
Jensen figured out an ingenious way to distinguish these two possibilities without knowing anything about the genes involved: look at correlations within families between siblings and compare it to the correlations between unrelated individuals in the general population. If the former is significantly greater than the later, it follows that the correlation is intrinsic. You can find detailed mathematical motivations and derivations of this line of thought in any modern population genetics textbook.
Thus Jensen found that the correlation between height and IQ in males is extrinsic while the correlation between IQ and myopia is intrinsic because intellectually gifted children are not, on average, taller than their mediocre siblings but do have higher incidences of myopia. This means that the reason height and IQ are correlated in males is simply that females tended to mate with taller and more intelligent males - what evolutionary biologists call sexual selection - whereas some of the same genes responsible for myopia also have the effect of boosting IQ.
Not only have Jensen's belief that IQ and myopia are pleiotropic been supported by recent genomic studies but it turns out that the relationship is mainly between non-verbal (as opposed to verbal) IQ and myopia, ruling out the idea that the relationship is mediated by environmental factors like time spent reading books.
And (surprise surprise!) the races differ in their population rates of myopia with the usual order: NE Asians having the most myopia, Europeans less and Blacks having the least rates of myopia.
Jensen destroys the idea that cognitive ability tests are culturally biased - somehow the fact that East Asians do better on IQ tests created and designed by Europeans never enters the discussion - with the demonstration that racial differences are greatest for the most g-loaded items on the tests. See, the racial gap between Whites and Blacks is largest for the most abstract questions of IQ tests and those questions on the tests that demand specific cultural knowledge show the smallest racial gap between Whites and Blacks. And that is just the opposite of the prediction we would have made with the hypothesis that IQ tests are culturally biased against Blacks.
Now finally let us turn to very recent developments enabled by the genomics revolution of the past few years.
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GWAS (genome wide association studies) of IQ have shown that cognitive ability, like height, is a highly polygenic trait - as in thousands of genes each raising or lowering IQ by a fraction of an IQ point are involved, and only in the past several years have found some of those genetic variants associated with IQ.
Only in 2015 did researchers start comparing the frequencies of these genetic variants in the different racial populations, and of the 9 genetic variants examined the results are:
1. The positive variants, i.e. variants that raise IQ, are, on average, most common among NE East Asians and least common among Blacks, with Europeans having slightly less of them than East Asians.
2. The negative variants that lower IQ are, on average, highest among Blacks (the relation is less clear between Whites and Asians though on the two negative variants examined).
3. When these variants are taken together to give an average polygenic score (the higher the score, the higher the genotypic IQ) it turns out that NE Asians have the highest polygenic scores and Blacks have the lowest polygenic scores with Whites in the middle again (closer to East Asians).
Tell me Pumpkin Ninja - have you ever heard of this issue being discussed as I have done it in the media or mainstream western culture in general for that matter? Of course not, why do you think that is? As you can see from what happens to even Nobel prize winning scientists who even so much as whisper about the topic, the alt-right is limited to the internet if its successful adherents wish to keep their livelihoods, that is.
Anyways let me moderate all of this by saying that my identification with the alt-right and my personal acceptance of the evidence on the issue of race differences in intelligence does inform but does not determine my moral views.
No, I am not a Nazi and I do not want to exterminate anyone or any group and, unlike Shockley, I do not even care about incentive based sterilization of the dull - although I do wish to reform the welfare system so as to discourage a fertility rate greater than the replacement rate among the welfare using population (especially Muslims) but I think that is a very sensible and modest view.
