Walter E. Williams: Idiot, Tool, Black Conservative

The latest Walter E. Williams article.

A truly insane article by a typical Black conservative nut. This kook points out the logical fact that is known to anyone: What do the Top 10 US cities with the highest crime rates have in common? Guess what? They are chock full of Black people! Duh.

One would draw certain logical conclusions from these obvious facts, but a Black conservative is too much of partisan monkey liar to ever do that. As bad as Black liberals can be (and they can be pretty bad), Black conservatives are by far the worst that the Black race has to offer.

According the Williams, the logical conclusion that we draw here is twofold:

1. These cities are full of Black folks.
2. They are all run by Democrats, for the most part liberal Democrats.

Conclusion: Liberal Democratic administrations cause unbelievable amounts of crime!

I kid you not. Black conservatives really are that stupid. As if Black people would act any better under a hard rightwing administration, not that they would ever elect one.

We have an actual experiment to see if this is true: the South. All Southern states are run by radical rightwing Republicans. Before that, they were run by radical rightwing Democrats. All of those states have been run by Black-hating racist White people for ever and ever. And how do Black people act down South? Perfectly horrible. They act as bad as Black people do anywhere. Why would Black folks suddenly act better if a rightwing Republican racist White massa was in charge, cracking the whip on those niggas? You think is going to stop making them act up? Come on.

The truth is that those cities are full of crime for the precise reason that they are full of Black people. Once you get a city full of Black people, you tend to get a city with lots and lots of crime. Those Black people created all that crime, and they will create about as much crime whether they are under a liberal Democratic administration as when they are under a Republican white racist massa administration.

Williams is truly crazy: a Libertarian Black. Black Libertarians are even more insane than Black conservatives. About 3% of Blacks are Black conservatives. We know this because ~3% of Black voted for Mitt Romney in the last election. However, if you looked at the US news media, you would think that 50% or more of Blacks are conservatives. Black conservatives may be as rare as four leaf clovers, but the “liberal” media loves them, and loves to over-represent them as demonstrative of the politics of US Blacks. If you are a US Black conservative, you are almost guaranteed of getting your own radio or TV show or your own newspaper column.

Does anyone on Earth think that Libertarianism will do anything for US Blacks?

Libertarianism is what exists in the 3rd world. In the 3rd World, the state is almost nonexistent, spends almost no money on the people on social programs, and what money it does have goes solely for police and military to enforce class rule over the lower classes and the workers. If the lower classes and workers get too out of hand, you just call out the cops and army and slaughter them.

Other than that, the government exists solely as an arm of the richest sectors of society and serves to protect their interests. The rich and business classes get to do everything and anything they want to. The state is starved for funds because the businesses and the wealthy pay no taxes, and the elites don’t believe in government spending anyway due to “the threat of a good example.” If the state spends money on pro-people programs, that is socialism, and we oppose socialism. Also the people might come to like this socialism and might want to have a more socialist country. This would interfere with the moneyed interests of the nation’s elites, so we can’t have that.

Libertarianism is what Blacks have in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and a few other places. Probably Haiti is the best example because it is the most Libertarian society ever attempted in a Black country. You can see how well that is working out!

Over in Africa, we can look at Kenya, Nigeria or Zaire as examples of nearly Libertarian Black countries in which elites steal 100% of the money in society leaving the masses with nothing but starvation and disease. As you can see, that is working out just fine!

Most other Black nations are socialist to some degree or another, so it hard to find a Black example of a radical rightwing country, but the above examples are pretty good.

Libertarianism won’t do anything good for Black people. All it will do is turn Black neighborhoods and cities like Detroit and Oakland into Haiti or Nigeria. If you think that is an improvement on the present state of affairs, you are wrong.

Massive Flynn Gains in Kenya

Occidental Ascent is a fascinating blogger, apparently part of the Alt Right and HBD scene, who nevertheless is not a race realist as far as IQ goes. He has written many posts showing huge IQ gains for Blacks, especially in the UK in recent times. I am not sure exactly where he is coming from at all. Looking at his blogroll, it looks like it was made up at American Renaissance, and yet he’s not a race realist.

A recent post quotes a post of mine discussing massive Flynn IQ gains in Kenya. He describes me as a liberal race realist blogger suffering a bout of race skepticism, which isn’t completely accurate, but oh well.

My post showed a 26 point IQ gain over a 14 year period from 1984-1998 in Kenya, raising their IQ’s from 68 to 89 and resulting in a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites. Gains were particularly massive in math and vocabulary. Researchers proposed that recent massive expansion of schooling in Kenya had been responsible for the gains.

A recent study confirms the previous one and shows that Flynn gains may be rising still.

A study by a Kenyan academic who is strongly opposed to race realism as far as IQ goes – she particularly takes issue with Rushton and Lynn arguing that the African IQ is ~70 – gave Raven’s tests to Kenyans of three social classes – slum dwellers, middle classes and the upper classes. Subjects were 17 year old high school students. The results were 89 for the slum kids, 93 for the middle classes and 106 for the upper classes. Averaging them together, we get an IQ of 96.

However, how many Kenyans are middle to upper class? Probably most Kenyans are very poor, akin to the slum dwellers. So the real Kenyan IQ is probably lower than 96, closer to 89. Further, how many Kenyan 17 year olds even make it to their senior year in high school? Most are probably long dropped out by then. These must be the brightest of the bunch.

Compared to US 17 year old Blacks, US Blacks at that age have an IQ of  ~90. It later drops to ~87 at age 24, at which point it levels off. But those 90 and 87 figures are controversial. Others say the real Black IQ is 87 at age 18 and 84-85 at age 24.

Anyway, things are looking good for the Kenyan IQ and for Flynn gains in general, which are still going like gangbusters in the 3rd World.

Early Homo Sapiens Sapiens in Africa

From the study of skulls we can learn what early humans in Africa looked like. By early humans, I mean modern man, not earlier types.

Very early skulls from Africa resemble either Khoisans or no living type. Some Khoisan type skulls (broadly defined) can be found going back as far as 90,000 years. Boskopoid skulls from 35-50,000 YBP seem to look like Khoisan (Mirazón Lahr,p. 282). Early Kenyan skulls look also look Khoisan.

Negroes appear in the fossil record in Congo, Mali, Niger and Chad from 6,000-12,000 YBP. They develop in the course of agriculture as Khoisan and Pygmy types gathered into agricultural villages in the regions above. In hunter-gatherer societies, women need men and marry early, hence there is little competition for females and every man gets a woman. In African agricultural societies, there was plenty of food, and women no longer needed a man to provide for them.

Since women no longer needed men, women got picky. Extreme competition for women developed among men, and one man or a small group of men tended to monopolize the women. This is the “chief” syndrome also seen in primitive agricultural societies in New Guinea.

Extreme competition led to the largest, strongest and most aggressive males dominating the group and preferentially passing on their genes. Hence, Negroes developed into big, strong, good athletes with high testosterone which drove high aggression. This is one theory for high Black crime rates.

In contrast, Pygmies are not aggressive at all, and tend to be rather meek and shy. Khoisan have low testosterone and have low levels of overt aggression.

Nilotics appear in Kenya 8-12,000 YBP. Originally, when these Nilotic skulls were first found, they were mistaken for Europeans. These are the classic “Horner” types of the Horn of Africa. It is amazing that Nilotics would be mistaken for Europeans, but they do have a more Caucasian look to them.

Recent Sub Saharan Africans have skulls that are more gracile than Europeans (ibid. p. 283), so it is a lie to say that Blacks have primitive or robust skulls.

The only really robust or primitive skulls nowadays in the study were found in Australians (65% are robust), Pantagonians, the Ainu and 1 Polynesian. This largely lines up with the Australoid racial group, which developed in a robust fashion for some reason.

The most gracile skulls were 13 E Asians, 13 SS Africans, 11 SE Asians, 7 Europeans, 1 Inuit, 1 S Asian and 1 Australian. So we can see that the most modern and gracile skulls are found in Blacks and Asians. Europeans are also modern and gracile, but not so much as the others. We also see that while Australians generally have the most robust skulls on Earth, some Aborigines have very gracile skulls. Australians are best seen as an extreme mixture.

Why did man leave Africa, and which route did he take? The reason for leaving was apparently a terrible drought in East Africa. For instance, between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago, East African droughts shrunk the water volume of  Lake Malawi by at least 95%, causing migration out of Africa.

Which route did they take? Researchers say their study of the tribes of Andaman and Nicobar islands using complete mitochondrial DNA sequences and its comparison those of world populations has led to the theory of a “southern coastal route” of migration from East Africa through India. They took the Indian Ocean coastal route.

References

Mirazón Lahr, Marta. 1996. The Evolution of Modern Human Diversity: A Study of Cranial Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Owen the Hippo and Tortoise Mr. Mom

Repost from the old site.

I bet you did not know that the horrible Tsunami that hit South and Southeast Asia a while back, killing 275,000 humans, also hit Kenya. It did. There are lots of critters still running around in Africa that the increasingly advanced Africans have not yet killed off.

There are hippopotamuses and giant tortoises. These tortoises are really giant, not like our desert tortoises here in California that are about as big as a football.

During the tsunami, the baby hippo, Owen, 350 pounds, and its hippo Mommy (name and weight unknown) got swept down the Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean. Though hippos can swim ok, they don’t like floods and tend to die in them. Owen’s Mom got killed, and Owen landed in the Indian Ocean. Then the tsunami waves swept him ashore with lots of other critters.

Somewhere in all this mess, Owen landed on top of a giant tortoise, male, age 100, name unknown. He probably landed on his shell and they both rode the tsunami waves onto the beach where they both kicked back and caught some rays of exhaustion until they were rescued.

Even though the tortoise is a dude, Owen either could not figure that out or didn’t care. He decided that Tortoise was his new Mom. They bonded well, and Tortoise, though being a guy and all, does not mind being Mr. Mom. They eat, swim and sleep together.

Owen follows Tortoise just like he followed his Mom, and he growls at anyone who tries to approach Tortoise. Hippos stay with Mom for four years, so Owen will probably live at home for another few years before moving out.

I thought it was interesting that Owen showed so many advanced emotions in these photos. He shows tenderness, love and kindness, and appears to be trying to kiss Tortoise, though I can’t see how any animal could kiss a tortoise. Tortoise either also has advanced emotions, or has undecipherable reptilian emotions, or I’m hallucinating. But some tortoises do mate for life, which is awfully advanced behavior for a mere reptile.

Photos at the link.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Al Qaeda Leader, Killed

On Friday, June 10, 2011, 38 year old Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the head of Al Qaeda in East Africa, has been killed at a roadblock in Mogadishu. His car failed to stop for a military roadblock, so soldiers fired on his vehicle, killing him. It was not the West who got him after all.

In 1992, as a very young man, he had participated in the Black Hawk Down firefight in Somalia that killed 18 US Marines. In 1995, he returned to the Comoro Islands, his birthplace. He settled in the capital of Moroni, married a local girl and worked as a fisherman. Formerly of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which he had joined as a very young man, Fazul was already working for Al Qaeda. He immediately set about planning Al Qaeda attacks.

One of the most famous photos of Fazul Abdullah Mohammad.

One year later, he hijacked Ethiopian Airways Flight 961 from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. The plane was forced down near the Comoros, but before it landed, the Al Qaeda force on board executed Leslie Shed, CIA station chief in Addis Ababa, five heads of Israel’s aviation industries, and a deputy commander of the Ukrainian Air Force. They were headed to a meeting in Jerusalem where they were going to discuss a deal whereby Ukraine would supply jets to Ethiopia which would be provided by Israel and would be paid for by the US.

To this day, all three nations have kept a tight lid on the case because they never figured out Fazul obtained the top secret information about who was traveling on the flight.

Soon after the plane landed, the hijackers took off in speedboats that were waiting for them. They sped off to the Comoros. They were never caught.

Two years later, Fazul masterminded the attack on the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 224 people, the biggest Al Qaeda attack to date.

The FBI figured out that Fazul was involved in the bombing and headed to Moroni. Too late, he was gone, tipped off that the FBI was after him. In 1998, he was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List with a $5 million price tag on his head.

Fazul Abdul Mohammad from the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist poster.

In 2002, Fazul pulled off another attack, this time in Kenya. He attacked Israeli targets, first attacking the Paradise Hotel in Mombassa, favored by Israeli tourists, with a suicide truck bomb. Next he chartered a plane and flew it near an Israeli Arkia passenger jet, firing a missile at the jet and just missing it. They flew the plane over the hotel they had just bombed, and dropped bombs on the hotel from their plane. Then they hightailed it to Somalia where they escaped.

In 2010, he attacked again, this time suicide bombing multiple cafes in Uganda that were filled with crowds watching the World Cup Final in South Africa. This attack was in retaliation for Uganda taking part in the peacekeeping mission in Somalia, where Fazul was leading the Al Qaeda allied Shabaab movement that was trying to topple the barely existing Somalian government.

Fazul was a master terrorist, one of Al Qaeda’s finest commanders and organizers. He hid successfully from the finest forces of the West for 15 years. A master of disguise and forgery, he spoke 5 different languages, used 18 different names and had three different birthplaces. At the time of his death, he had plans on him for attacks against targets in the West.

His death leaves Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa and East Africa high and dry, missing their terrorist leader and superb guerrilla fighter.

Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

Repost from the old site.

A recent post of mine noted that the Black IQ in the US has shown gains of about 5.5 points against Whites in both children and adults. At age 12, the Black IQ is now 90.5, as opposed to 85 30 years ago. Black adult IQ’s have risen from 79 to 84.5 during the same period.

At the same time, Blacks have shown major gains in achievement test results relative to Whites. They narrowed the achievement gap by about 30%, about the same degree to which they reduced the IQ gap. There is even some suggestive evidence that the Blacks who have experienced the most desegregation benefited most of all (Keita 2007). Integration seems to be good for the Black IQ .

Rising IQ’s over time are referred to as the Flynn Effect (FE).

In Britain, the results are even better. West Indian Blacks in the UK now have an IQ of about 93.5 at age 11. Scores for adult Caribbeans in the UK are not known. Studies from 1960′s-70′s showed an IQ of 85 for these same children, but now it has moved up by 8.5 points. Young Caribbean Blacks in the UK have closed the IQ gap by more than half.

Interestingly, this IQ increase has coincided with a spectacular increase in crime among these British-born Jamaicans. The first generation that came in the 1950′s and 60′s were mostly hard-working and law-abiding. But their offspring in many ways have been a disaster.

Here we see once again the phenomenon discussed on this blog before, that the male children of low-wage immigrants to the West are often criminals. This even held for the offspring of Irish, Italian and some Jewish Whites to the US over 100 years ago. With a rising IQ coinciding with a skyrocketing crime rate, again we see the disconnect between the simplistic game that White Nationalists play called “low IQ = high crime”.

Most Caribbean Blacks in the UK are Jamaicans. In Jamaica, the Black IQ is about 71.5.

A counterargument to these rising Jamaican IQ gains is that these Jamaicans are heavily intermarrying with Whites. In the first generation, up to 25% married Whites, and in the second generation, the figure is said to be up to 50%. These are just anecdotes, not hard figures. The claim is that all of the rise is due to White genes.

But let us look at the argument. If base Jamaican IQ is 71.5, then a 25% outmarriage rate in the first generation raises the IQ 3.5 points to 75. Instead, this generation had an IQ of ~85, 10 points higher than genes would have predicted. A 50% outmarriage rate in the 2nd generation should raise IQ by 6.25 points to 81.5. Instead, the figure is 93.5, 12 points higher than expected.

A good analysis of the UK Jamaican data is that, if assuming the benefit of increased White genes, the more complex modern environment in the UK is raising Jamaican IQ by 10-12 points.

In another study by Barbara Tizard (Tizard et al 1972), Jamaican children in the UK who were raised with Whites in an institutional setting had IQ’s of 108, mixed race children had IQ’s of 106 while White children had IQ’s of 103, at age 4-5. If anything, this study showed a slight advantage for the Black children.

Opponents say that these Jamaicans were selective immigrants – that is, they were the brightest of the bright. James Flynn argues in counterpoint that selective migration could not have raised IQ’s by more than a few points (Nisbett 1998). Figures for later ages were not available.

Black children in the US score 95 at age 4 and Blacks in Africa score 92 at that age, both scores in comparison to a White score of 100. The Black US score then declines to 85 (a 10 point drop) and the African Black score drops to 67 (an incredible 25 point drop).

Black scores decline as children age, and this recent post suggests that initial high followed by sharply declining scores are indicative of earlier maturation among Blacks. I do not know to what extent early Black maturation (Blacks do mature earlier, and this has a genetic basis) explains the strange phenomenon of high Black IQ’s in small children which rapidly decline into adulthood.

But it is interesting that Tizard’s group raised together in an institutional setting, the young Black kids had even higher IQ’s than the Whites.

In the Caribbean nation of Dominica, there has been a stunning rise in IQ over a 36 year period from 1965-2001. There was an 18 point rise during this period, which rose their IQ’s from 61 to 73 (the IQ’s did not rise by 18 points because other groups’ IQ’s were also rising during this period). This represents a gain against UK Whites of 12 IQ points.

The test used was Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is said to be the best available for measuring pure “g” intelligence.

 

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), if they do well on one test, do also do well on all other tests. The FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all.

Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects would seem to me to have quantifiable benefits in modern society, occupationally, academically and in other ways.

It also predicts success in life in various ways pretty well and is not culturally biased in any way. The researchers gave a vocabulary test to the group and found a similar rise of about 18 IQ points on that test.

Researchers tried to tease out which factors were most related to the IQ rise. The only factor that explained the rise fairly well was schooling, so it appeared that improved schooling was a major cause of the IQ rise. The IQ rise occurred at the time of a major expansion of the school system in Dominica.

Socioeconomic status of parents explained about 10% of the IQ gain. This shows that increasing incomes in the 3rd World may pay off in increased IQ’s in the children. Interestingly, researchers found no effect on family size, types of food consumed, head size or height. Mysteriously, researchers were unable to explain much of the IQ rise.

These findings are interesting for many reasons. This post suggests that most of the FE is due to increased caloric intake among children, resulting in earlier maturation. Improved nutrition has often been suggested as a reason for the FE, but did not seem to be a factor here.

Those who favor a genetic explanation for racial variations in IQ (nearly all of whom are White racists) disparage all societal interventions to increase IQ as worthless. In particular, they oppose spending any more money on educating “inferior” Blacks and Browns, as it is just throwing good money after bad. This study indicates that increased educational spending can indeed have IQ benefits for Blacks.

Some other findings in this study are of interest. One is that the rise is on the Raven’s test, which is the most heavily g -loaded test in existence. Critics of the FE claim that the rise is not on g, or general intelligence, and hence it is worthless. The Dominican rise was definitely on g.

In the West, while there have been major rises in tests of problem-solving, visual analysis, visual intelligence and verbal analysis, there have been little to no gains in general knowledge, vocabulary, arithmetic and mathematical analysis.

Some interpret this to mean that there has been no rise in general intelligence – only a rise in “factors subject to environmental bias”. Such an analysis is false – but it is interesting that in Dominica such huge gains are being seen in vocabulary, while in the West vocabulary gains have only been 4.4 points over 80 years.

A study out of Kenya in 2003 looking at 7 year old children found an incredible 26 point gain over 14 years from 1984-1998 in rural Kenya, leaving them with an IQ of 89 (Daley et al 2003). This apparently represented a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites from the previous IQ of 68.

The rise was correlated with schooling, family structure, nutrition and the health of the children. Schooling seemed to be the major factor and once again coincided with a major educational expansion by the government. The test used was the children’s version of Raven’s, the Children’s Progressive Matrices, once again a very g-loaded test, so the Kenyan rise was also on g.

The Kenyan, UK and Dominican studies are important because they show Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap by 10-21 points in a few decades. Hereditarians argue that the Black-White gap is permanent in all areas of the world, and that Blacks are a hopelessly stupid race – a drain on humanity. All money spent on raising Black IQ’s are wasted for this reason.

The three studies above show purely environmental factors causing major reductions in the Black-White IQ gap.

Another study found massive gains, that I have not been able to quantify, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, over a 72-74 year period. The gains were probably at least on the order of 20 points or so. Researchers suggested that increased cognitive stimulation in the form of a more complex world was responsible for the rise.

A common complaint of all of these studies showing rising Black IQ’s, both in tandem with Whites and closing the Black-White gap, is that the studies are done only on children. But most IQ tests are done on kids. Taking African studies as an example, we can see here that 69% of all tests in this series were done on kids.

In my opinion, testing kids is probably a better way to measure pure neurological efficiency without throwing in all sorts of potentially confounding extraneous variables.

Adults are much more likely than kids to have physical and mental diseases (schizophrenia and depression lower IQ), to be in jail, prison, or homeless, to abuse alcohol and drugs, or to have suffered serious head injuries. All of these factors throw a monkey wrench into tests that should be trying to show us real differences between races.

Just today, the White Nationalist blog Majority Rights posted a well-done article by Richard D. Fuerle, A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect. The article’s interesting premise is that the FE is due to increased caloric intake, and even increasing obesity, in our modern world. This increased food intake would result in earlier maturation and higher IQ’s among children, which would then level off in adulthood.

The author suggests that the FE is not really an IQ increase but an effect of this early maturation, and that people are getting less intelligent, not more so.

I believe this theory is wrong, though it has an interesting premise. James Flynn also disagrees with Fuerle’s article, saying that the author was led astray as he did not have good knowledge of the literature. Flynn also disagreed with the notion that the FE was only in children and that it leveled off in adulthood, saying that he had refuted this in an article his famous article published in JEM: The Journal of Educational Measurement, in 1984 (Flynn 2008).

Some of the comments following are also not correct.

First of all, IQ’s have been rising among all age groups, not just kids. It’s really a cohort effect. James Flynn agreed with me (Flynn 2007) that Black adults of today have the same IQ scores (100) as the Whites of 1957. Blacks of today have somewhat higher scores than the Whites of WW2.

This brings up a conundrum as one wonders if today’s US Blacks would have been able to beat the Japanese in WW2, since they can’t even seem to run Detroit (Taylor 2007). This long and rather involved post of mine deals with a lot of the arguments around the FE, including some of the misconceptions about it. My post theorizing that Blacks of today equal the Whites of 1957 is here.

Here, I show that Black children and adults have indeed made about a 5.5 IQ point gain on Whites over the past 30 years, coinciding with the liberation of Blacks via Civil Rights laws.

The notion that IQ has risen due to increased caloric intake is interesting, but probably invalid. Flynn himself says that after 1950, gains due to nutrition were minimal to nil in the West.

Furthermore, the gains should have been across the board, not just in the certain areas that the FE is in. As we see above, The FE is also occurring in 3rd World countries like Kenya and Dominica, where excess nutrition is certainly not an issue. In those countries, it is related to better education, if anything. Much of the FE remains mysterious.

The notion that gains are occurring only in certain areas that are “subject to environmental bias” is not correct. First of all, in Dominica, huge gains were seen in vocabulary, one of the areas that is not seeing much gain in the West.

Vocabulary, general knowledge, basic math, and mathematical analysis are all subject to environmental influence too, but Western society has not been promoting these areas so much.

The areas that the FE is occurring in – verbal analysis, analytical reasoning, visual analysis, visuospatial reasoning, on the spot problem solving for which no previous method was known, etc. – are areas that our increasingly sophisticated society has been promoting.

We have promoted this in terms of an increasingly complex society and the mass promotion of scientific thinking. The visuospatial aspect may be due to video games, cell phones, computers, and many things that need programming – boom boxes, car radios, microwaves, answering machines, thermostats, on and on.

My personal opinion is that TV has a lot to do with it. TV shows are increasingly complex, and kids sit in front of TVs with clickers clicking through 50 different channels one after the other. The camera usually only focuses on something for a short time, then moves on. Even jokes and dialog on TV come at a rapid pace. Movies seem to have gotten a lot more complex in recent decades too.

Lastly, the FE is only ending or reversing in Scandinavia. It is still going full blast in the US and in the 3rd world.

The notion that IQ is rising while “real intelligence” – general knowledge, math and vocabulary – is not cannot be supported. Those three things are no more “real intelligence” than the stuff that is going up in the FE.

Another argument advanced later in the discussion has to do with Malcolm Gladwell’s misreading of the FE. Gladwell says that the gains have been almost exclusively on a subtest of the WISC called Similarities. Although gains on Similarities reflect increased use of scientific thinking in our society, these gains are disparaged in the comments section as showing a phony effect of increased intelligence when there has been none.

First of all, the commenters are wrong in that gains on Similarities are a meaningless artifact. Similarities tests for the ability to solve problems on the spot without a previously learned method. Raven’s tests for the same thing – it is said to test for the “ability to make sense of the buzzing confusion of life”. Second, Gladwell is wrong. Major gains have occurred on many tests, not just Similarities:

Look at the gains:

Similarities         23.45
Picture Arrangement  21.5
Coding               18
Object Assembly      17.35
Block Design         15.9
Picture Completion   11.7
Comprehension        11
Vocabulary           4.4
Arithmetic           2.3
Information          2.1

A good summary of my current feelings about IQ and race are summed up here in this nice comment on Watson, Population Groups, Etc by Michael Blowhard on the nice 2Blowhards blog:

…”G” is just a correlation between a bunch of IQ test scores. IQ is about being a good abstract thinker, which (like all important skills) has a huge environmentally acquired component. It is taught from birth in our abstraction-saturated culture.

Even a cursory glance at history shows that the “achievement” levels of nations or civilizations change massively for purely cultural and situational reasons. Through much of the 20th century China was more of a hellhole than Africa is now, but I don’t think those guys are dumb.

Generally, people who make a huge deal about IQ are Mensa types without many achievements of their own to point to who like to feel superior to others. Such types are all over the net.

“If someone values modern-economy-type settings, and thinks only in terms of succeeding in such a thing, and orders all other people only according to how well they succeed in such a setting, this is OK of course.”

Maybe less OK if those who order others according to how well they succeed in a modern setting have a history of committing mass murder against those they consider to be among the lower orders.

Posted by: mq on November 10, 2007 4:42 PM

A nice photo of James Flynn, along with Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, from an obscure document reporting on a conference on intelligence in Amsterdam last year, is here. The link also features a short, interesting interview with Flynn along with some interesting abstracts on intelligence.

Some abstracts I found interesting were those showing that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to believe in God. Also, among believers, the more intelligent people were, the more liberal and less literal they were in their beliefs. These findings also applied at a national and ethnic level.

Other abstracts showed that the more intelligent people are, they longer they live and the healthier they are. A recent finding not in the document was that in the West, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a vegetarian.

References

Daley, Y. C., Whaley, S. E., Sigman, M. D., Espinosa, M. P., and Neuman, C. (2003). IQ On the Rise: The Flynn effect in Rural Kenyan Children. Psychological Science, 14, 215-219.

Flynn, James R. (November 2007). Personal Communication.

Flynn, James R. (January 2008). Personal Communication.

Keita, Lamin. (December 2007). Personal Communication.

Nisbett, R. E. (1998). Race, genetics, and IQ. In C. Jencks and M. Phillips (Eds.) Black-White Test Score Differences. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution.

Taylor, Jared. (December 2007). Personal Communication.

Tizard, B., Cooperman, O., Joseph A., & Tizard, J. (1972). Environmental Effects on Language Development: A Study of Young Children in Long-stay Residential Nurseries. Child Development, 43, 337-358.

The Real Reason for the Shining Path

Repost from the old site.

Rightwing anti-Communists (and for that matter, Centrist and liberal US anti-Communists also) have some very peculiar attitudes about Communism, shaped by the Cold War. Communism, it appears, is some strange, evil and insane system, a crazy, idiotic and totally failed economic and social system that brought nothing but misery, hunger, starvation and poverty to the world, while bringing nothing good.

The alternative was capitalism, which would at some point conquer hunger, poverty, starvation and all that. Capitalism is always supposed to conquer these things at some point in the future. Capitalist polemicists usually say, “Just give it some time…”

With the neoliberalism that has been pushed since 1980 and has brought nothing but misery and impoverishment to billions and caused many millions of deaths, we have always been told that it would start working pretty soon now…maybe next year…victory is right around the corner. The truth is that after 25 years of neoliberalism, the verdict is in and a long report has documented it quite well.

Nearly everywhere it has been tried, neoliberalism has benefited the top 20% of the population (often greatly) and screwed the bottom 80%.

Even in the US, from 1980-1992, the top 20% gained income (the top 1% had an incredible gain) while the bottom 80% (everyone with individual income of less than $56,000/yr) of the US population actually lost money. A similar scenario unfolded in Britain.

Neoliberalism, nearly everywhere, resulted in lowered economic growth rates, massive debt, plunging wages and living standards for the majority, reductions in access to health and eduction, and reductions in many health and education metrics like infant mortality, life expectancy and the percentage of children in school at various ages.

This is because neo-liberalism mandated massive cuts in all social services, especially education and health care. The outcome was foretold. The truth about neoliberalism is that it has always been a scam in which the West, especially Western banks, corporations and investors, ripped off the rest of the World blind and the people were always left holding the bag.

Nevertheless, the ripoff artists keep trying to sell their neoliberal snake oil around the world, but more and more nations are no longer buying. Most of the countries of Latin America have tired of the “checks in the mail” neoliberal snipe hunt, and collectively, they are trying, in their own often-limited ways, to dislodge themselves from the grip of the neoliberal plague.

Even mainstream economists admit that Latin America (macroeconomically) did not benefit from the neoliberal fad. Recently, Argentina paid off its foreign debt and said no more. In Venezuela, Chavez is trying to forge a completely new path that is, instead of the Communism his detractors libel him with, in truth nothing more than a reformation of capitalism.

President Lula in Brazil has been hampered by the death grip of both investor capital and the markets; he has not been able to do much at all. Uruguay has elected a strident Leftist, but it is not known what he can do given his restraints.

Chile, after the utter failure of Pinochet’s radical free market economics (something the free market crazies have never owned up to), has elected a socialist and a woman as President, Bachelet. It is not known what she can do in terms of progress, but Chile still has an education and health sector that is in pretty good shape and sports good metrics to show for it.

In Ecuador, Rafael Correa is President, and he has formed an alliance with Chavez. It remains to be seen what he can do in terms of progress, as his options, as usual, are limited.

In Bolivia, Evo Morales, an Indian, has won a very close election in a country where a small White elite has always run roughshod over the majority Indian population. His options are also limited, but Morales’ rhetoric has at least been almost as radical as Chavez’.

A major problem in Bolivia is the mestizos in the East of the country (Santa Cruz Province) who despise the Indians the West as inferior while they sit on top of Bolivia’s rich natural gas deposits. They are making noises about succession, but they will never try it.

In Mexico, AMLO (Lopez-Obrador), a Leftist, actually won the election, but due to the usual fraud, the PAN (a rightwing Catholic party that rose out of the religious hot war in Mexico in the 1920′s that left 70,000 dead) now holds the presidency. Felipe Calderon is the PAN President and he won’t do a damned thing to solve the problems that have caused an incredible 12% of Mexico’s population to move to the US.

As an example of such problems, the family of one man, Carlos Slim, the head of the private Mexican phone monopoly, controls 50% of the wealth in the entire country. That is why America is being overrun by illegal aliens.

There has been some resistance to this semi-feudal order.

A very radical movement has tried to overthrow the corrupt and brutal dictatorial government of Oaxaca state. The Zapatistas* are still alive, and recently a Leftist group, the EPL*, has started to blow stuff up again, after disappearing for three years.

In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega was re-elected, but he appears to have softened his rhetoric to the point where he cannot do much. Still, he has formed an alliance with Chavez. Nicaragua, now the second poorest country in Latin America, lies in corrupt ruins.

Support for the considerably neutered Sandinistas is higher than reported in the ruling class media – although Ortega had 35% support, his rival, a Sandinista attacking Ortega from the Left, had another 20% of the vote, so the whole Left vote was a 55% majority, not 35% as the corporate media would have you believe.

Under the Sandinistas, Nicaragua went from one of the worst to one of the best in Central America for literacy and health care figures. In 1990, Violeta Chamorro, adored by the whole US political spectrum, including the Cruise Missile liberals of the US Democratic Party, won the election.

Right away, she ended free education, requiring students to spend $35 a year on uniforms, a fee that immediately threw large numbers of kids out of school. Most have yet to return. She also got rid of free health care, so most of the population is without health care again. The health and education figures for the nation have shown the expected collapse.

It is interesting that Democratic Party liberals are apparently overjoyed about this situation, showing the bankruptcy of their ideology.

Most of the rest of the continent is collapsed in the usual ruins. 1 million people die every year from hunger in Latin America, and this has been going on for decades. How come this stuff never makes it to the “Worst Killers in Recent History” contests?

The anti-Communist line about Communism divorces it from its concrete realities in the sort of totally rotten social and economic systems that have spawned peasant revolutions for centuries before Karl Marx was even born.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990′s and the fall of the Warsaw Pact, rightwingers rejoiced. It was the “end of history”, said Francis Fukuyama. The era of peasant revolts was over. Never again would humanity have to worry about any Marxist, Leftist, worker, peasant, or even populist revolution.

Capitalism was here to say, in all of its forms, from most enlightened to most hideous, and no one could do a damn thing about it!

Well, that is nonsense. Anti-Communists say that revolutions happen for no reason at all, other than the insane desire of Communist madmen to seize power and impose their failed system on an unwilling population. They say that revolutions do not arise from horrible social and economic systems – they arise from sick Marxist pathology.

Get rid of Marxism, they say, and capitalism can run wild on humanity again. Perhaps we can even re-instate feudalism and slavery while we are at it. After all, they were both great for business.

Amidst the deafening racket of nonsense, a series of economic figures looms up at us like a ghost from the recent Peruvian past.

In back of those figures, 15 years later in 1980, like an Inca God rising up from the grave to slay the Spanish invaders 450 years after they waded ashore, is the frightening shadow of the Peruvian Shining Path*, another “totally insane” Marxist group that arose “for no reason whatsoever other than sheer evil”.

Yet the figures below show us why a revolution, even one as insane as Sendero Luminoso, was inevitable:

From the Peruvian National Planning Institute in Bejar, Peru, in 1965, we learn that the 24,000 families of the White ruling class in Lima had an income of $62,000/yr*.

The entire rest of the country had an average family income of $157.

The Indians of the Sierra, who even now have a life expectancy of only 45 years, had an average family income of only $10 a year.

*All figures in 1965 US dollars.

Most people agree that things have only gotten worse in Peru since then. Look at those figures above and tell that that is not kindling and kerosene for bloody revolution. The match was called Sendero, and someone was going to toss a match sooner or later.

There were centuries in Peru before 1965, four of them, and they build on our tale. From 1526 (when the Spaniards came to Peru) to 1630, the Indian population declined from 13 million to 600,000 – a loss of 95% of the population. It was a Holocaust, and I don’t care how many crazy Jews scream “anti-Semite” at me for stealing their pet word.

For the next three centuries, the Indians were tied to the land like serfs, bonded in debt peonage in a feudal estate society. This continued until well into the 1970′s. The jungle Indians were enslaved and killed for sport starting in the 1800′s and continuing until 50 years or so ago.

It is 1980. The bump and lurch of the dialectic, from Hegel to Marx to Mariategui to Guzman, has brought us here, to Sendero’s nightmare. The weight of 450 years of oppression, enslavement and genocide buckled the roof of the sick system and created the Sendero virus, which infected much of the country and nearly killed the host.

But given history, it could not have been any other way.

This is an example, from the city of Cherboksary, Russia, of the most failed economic system ever known to mankind – Communism. The fountains you see are inferior and worthless – totally failed fountains, if you will.

The buildings in the background as are complete failures as buildings, since they are dull and boring. Those buildings are called “socialist housing” and everyone in the West agrees that this type of housing does not work. What works much better are the capitalist slums in the pictures to follow.

The river is quite clean and this is another example of complete failure. Much better are the black rivers of capitalist slums, stinking with garbage, animal corpses and raw sewage. Why? Because diseases and smells are exciting! Who wants to be bored, anyway?

Even the bright greenery in the foreground in a total failure – it’s much better to have live amidst the mounds of garbage you see below. Capitalist slums, with their thrill a minute and constant search for food, are the only way to go.

A slum in Brazil. This is the successful system that works. Much better than that failed, dull socialist housing above, no? When are you moving in, reader?

Men pick through a garbage dump, probably in Nairobi. Slums in Nairobi make up 6% of the city yet house 60% of the population. In many parts of the capitalist third world, human beings actually live in these garbage dumps. They often suffer from continuous infections and sores.

Slums of Nairobi. This is the only viable system on Earth, capitalism. All of the alternatives, especially Communism, are failed and don’t work. As you can see, this system works great.

Communist housing fails because it is dull, boring and lifeless. It is much better to live in lively, exciting surroundings like this Nairobi slum, where I assure you there is never a dull movement. How dare those evil Commies try to move these people into “failed” Soviet-style high-rises!

An excellent example of capitalist education from Africa. Capitalism hates education, everywhere and at all times, because the capitalists can’t make any money off of it, and the capitalists all send their kids to fancy private schools, hence they resent paying for a system they do not even use. So capitalism, under neoliberalism, has predictably devastated education systems around the Third World.

Who needs to get educated anyway? The problem of the 3rd World is too many kids! Besides, Black people are so dumb that all attempts to educate them are a waste of time, or so The Bell Curve told me.

Slums of Brazil. The problem is these Brazilians have too damn many kids! Yet the evidence shows that Brazil’s birthrate is actually below replacement level. Never matter, in that case, the poor should quit having babies altogether!

Somehow, Westerners always find a way to blame the victim.

Of course, Brazil having the worst rich-poor gap on Earth could not have anything to do with this situation, now would it? By 2020, 40% of the world will live in these awesome slums. Cool! At least they won’t have to suffer from Communism or any of that failed stuff.

The charming slums of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is home to 12 million people – 4 million of them in 800 different favelas, or slums. All of these slums are run by gangs of drug dealers, who engage in continuous battles with each other and the police, that is, when they are not engaging in armed robberies, kidnappings and homicides. Recent articles in the Western press have hailed the dramatic improvements in these slums. As you can see here, they are so much better than they used to be!

Residents of a slum in Nairobi trudge through the garbage on their way home. Nairobi has an out of control crime rate, but of course that has nothing to do with the fact that these folks live in slums. It is because the criminals are evil and commit crimes for no reason at all. Furthermore, they are Black, and Black people are genetically natural born criminals. They’re just a race of Bad Seeds, and nothing can be done about them at all.

The wonderful slums of Mumbai again! This is the high tech economy that is taking the world by storm, the envy of the planet. Check out that high tech dishwasher this girl is using – I bet it was designed by those IT professionals down in Bangalore! Go, India go!

The truth about India is, of course, more tragic than Tom Friedman (see below) can figure out. By 1985, capitalism was killing between between 2.92 and 4 million every year in India, and 1.76 million were being killed in Bangladesh. That is 5.25 million people being killed by capitalism every year in just those two countries alone. But wait a minute! Capitalism doesn’t kill anyone. Stalin and Mao were the worst killers of the 20th century, dontcha know?

Since Communism doesn’t work, we have to go with the only alternative, the system that works, capitalism. This photo shows you just how great it works in Mumbai, India. Noam Chomsky reports that, comparing China and India, which had similar developmental figures in 1949, there have been 100 million excess deaths in Indian from 1947-1979.

This clearly shows the superiority of Chinese Communism, at least when it comes to saving lives. Note that China’s superior figures even include all of those killed by Maoism, which may number over 20 million people. But Maoism saved far more, and China set a world record with the fastest doubling of life expectancy by any country, going from 32 in 1949 to 65 in 1976, surpassing Joseph Stalin’s record set in 1956.

Now in China, gone heavily over to capitalism, millions are dying from lack of health care alone. Getting back to India, recent figures show that there are 4 million excess deaths in India every single year. Gideon Polya calculates that excess infant mortality alone, compared to a model of Sri Lanka, kills 2.7 million Indians per year.

Slums of Mumbai. 6 million people – 60% of the population – live on only 6% of the land. Pundits all across the West, especially Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, rave about India’s booming economy . India’s capitalism is praised all across the West. As you can see here, it really works great!

Working backwards and forwards from Chomsky’s figures above of 4 million deaths per year in India from capitalism, which he got from Indian economist Amratya Sen, we can guess that capitalism may have killed 170 million Indians since 1949 as compared to the Chinese model. But wait, aren’t Communists the worst killers of them all?

Don’t like the way I do figures? Try these instead then. Capitalism kills 14 million people every single year just by starvation, mostly in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan).

*This blog does not support the project of Sendero Luminoso, as they kill people who are completely innocent. It does support the Zapatistas and the EPL in Mexico.

The Place of Horners Among the Major Races

A commenter asks:

…I was wondering, is it true that Ethiopians, Somalis, Eritreans, Djiboutis, and some Kenyans (people from the Horn of Africa) are mixed Caucasoid-Negroid? What is “Hornoid”? I’ve seen it in a map on the origin of races. Are “Hornoids” different from Negroids? Are modern day Horn Africans descended from Hornoids and Caucasoids, and not Negroids or a combination of three? 

No one really knows what those Horners are. You can make a good case that they are a separate race entirely from Black Africans, sort of midway between Black Africans and Caucasians.

This excellent chart shows Ethiopids, or Horners, as a completely separate race from African Blacks and Caucasians

They seem to be a mix between some sort of ancient Caucasoid and some interesting form of Black African. On some gene charts, they plot midway between Africans and Caucasians.

This interesting map shows both Ethiopids and the San as separate races. I agree that the San are also probably a separate race from Black Africans.

Is Conservatism Always Bad?

Yes.

In my opinion, conservatism is always bad. Conservatism is always and everywhere at all times elite rule and only elite rule. Some support elite rule. I don’t. I support popular rule. I say elite rule is bad. Since elite rule is always bad, conservatism is always bad. Real simple.

In addition, conservatism is almost always dishonest. As an elite philosophy, you can either be honest about your goals and say you are working to better the elite and harm everyone else – say, the top 20% will benefit and the bottom 80% will be harmed, or you can lie and say you are out for everyone when you are not. It usually doesn’t work for conservatives to tell the truth, but now and then they do. Most people are not so stupid as to vote for an elite party when they are members of the non-elite group who will be harmed by the elite party. So conservatives, always and everywhere at all times, lie. They lie about their project. They have to, because often that’s the only way to get in.

But this continuous lying results in a destruction of Politics. There’s not much of a democracy left when almost the entire media is lying their fool heads off day and night. The population is bewildered at best or brainwashed at worst. This is the sort of “democracy” we have here in America. It’s hardly a democracy at all!

Erranter asks if we should not be bashing conservatives.

Doesn’t a conservative just mean someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo? There are places where the status quo is democracy and none of those above things. I don’t think it’s fair to attach “bad” to the very definition of conservative and “good” to progressive. That’s changing the definitions which people use to communicate and permanently attaching a moral judgment. It’s also unequivocal that conservatives are bad, because a part of this new definition is that they are bad.

Someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo – No, that is not what conservatism means.

Conservatism is elite rule. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. Some things never change. Elites hate democracy. The Republican Party hates democracy. Notice how they are always trying to repress voter turnout. Heavy turnout is always bad for the elite Republicans. Given half a chance, sane electorates generally vote for popular rule (the Left) and against elite rule (the Right). Why would any electorate voluntarily vote against popular rule and for elite rule? They would have to be out of their minds (like the US electorate).

It’s hard to vote in elite rule. People don’t like it too much. So conservatives usually need to rule by dictatorship in one form or another. Once Latin America got rid of the dictatorships, the first thing the people did was vote in the Left.

There are only a few places on Earth where US style hard rightwing conservatives are actually voted into power, and those elections are problematic because the popular, anti-elite candidates of the Left are typically murdered.

The US
Guatemala
El Salvador (though the Left is starting to win now)
Colombia
Chile
Turkey
The Philippines

That’s about it.

The conservatives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Turkey and the Philippines all rule by terror. They all run death squads and slaughter the Left.

In the Philippines, conservatives run as populists who will fight and get rid of poverty, so that’s not really US conservatism.

In Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador, conservatives usually run on a platform of “kill the Communists (the Left).”

Everywhere else on Earth, people generally vote in some sort of a liberal to socialist type government.

All of Africa has generally been run by popular Leftwing parties, with a few exceptions in Zaire and Kenya. They haven’t done a very good job of popular rule, but US style conservatism simply does not exist there.

In North Africa, most of the governments are socialist. Morocco was always the outlier, as it was ruled by a rightwing king, but he’s a dictator.

All of the Arab World is generally run by some type of socialist party or other. US style conservatism never takes power there.

All of the former Soviet Republics are now run by some type of socialist government or other.

All of Europe is being run by some type of socialist government or other, with the possible exception of Great Britain. The UK was always the outlier. US style conservatism ruled under Thatcher, but she was probably the most hated ruler in the 20th Century UK, and she couldn’t get much done.

Russia is run by a socialist regime under Putin.

The Iranian religious government has always been socialist in nature.

It’s hard to characterize the Karzai regime, but it is not US conservatism.

The Pakistani government is very hard to characterize, but it is not US style conservatism. The recently assassinated leader, Benazir Bhutto, was a socialist. The President, her widower, is also a socialist.

Since Independence, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have generally been run by socialist regimes of one type or another.

Myanmar is run by a regime that calls itself socialist.

Singapore has a social democracy.

SE Asia has been run by socialists since 1975. Thailand typically had rightwing military government. Recently, a progressive, Thaksin, was elected. He was extremely popular, but the conservative elite threw him out in a coup like they often do. At any rate, US style conservatism does not exist in Thailand.

China is run by a socialist party.

Mongolia is run by socialists.

Japan has been a social democracy since 1945.

True, South Korea was always a rightwing regime, but recently they elected a leftwinger.

Taiwan was always ruled by a rightwing dictatorship, but I am not sure who is in power since independence. They have had a social democracy for a while now.

Indonesia was always run by a rightwing dictatorship, but they recently went to democracy. The present leader has begun a number of socialist programs.

More Diverse English Dialects

We have already gone over some strange English dialects on this site in past posts. One tiresome canard that is oft-repeated is that US English speakers have a hard time understanding other US English speakers. This is usually said by Europeans. This is a misunderstanding of the dialectal nature of US English. The most divergent dialects of US English have long ago merged in something called dialect convergence. We already discussed New York English on the site.

As I noted, a young Italian man from Queens came to the Sierra Nevada in California recently and enrolled at a local college. For 3 months, people could hardly understand him. He finally learned to speak California dialect and make himself understood. Really, what he did was drop his outrageous New York English dialect.

What was interesting was that the guy could not seem to accomodate the listeners very well. People would ask him to repeat, speak slower, etc. but nothing seemed to work. And after 3 months of regularly listening to him, most listeners hardly understood him better than on Day One.

To me, these are strong suggestions that we are dealing with a separate language (albeit a very closely related one) and not simply a dialect. Speakers of a separate language have a hard time adjustting their speech to make it understood better, and listeners of a separate language usually don’t understand it much better with time than on the first day. With dialects, things are different. Dialect speakers can modify speech and be understood and listeners of dialects can start to pick it up a lot better in a short period of time.

An example of a dialect of English would be South African English. I recently met a fellow speaking a very thick S.A. English dialect. I could understand him all right, every word in fact, but it was one Hell of a thick accent! To show you how these things go, the woman behind the counter couldn’t really understand the guy, and I had to interpret for him.

AAVE (Ebonics) is quite different, and I think it’s a separate language in its hard form. I recently spent a few hours with two young Black women speaking AAVE. I didn’t understand them any better at the end of 3 hours than at the start. And they may as well have been speaking Greek. They couldn’t really adjust their AAVE to make it better understood (I think they don’t want to be understood, really) but they could drop the AAVE at a moment’s notice and speak perfect English.

There is actually some support among linguists for splitting off AAVE into a separate language. It’s probably not happening for political reasons. Could you imagine the howls from the rightwingers and the gales of laughter from the anti-Black racists if they did? I can see it now: “Niggers speak a foreign language! LOL! I always thought so myself!”

My Mom recently heard a fisherman from the coast of Newfoundland on the radio for several minutes and she said she couldn’t understand a word. There are some Newfoundland English dialects that are quite hard to hear.

There is a Youtube video about continuing slavery in the US. I’m not sure what it’s all about, but it looks like work in return for room and board in the deepest Mississippi Delta. There are Blacks on that video speaking a very deep Mississippi Delta Black dialect that can scarcely be understood.

Mulungeon English (especially Monacan Indians) and West Virginia Appalachian English (hard forms) can be quite hard to understand.

We can understand almost all Australian and New Zealand English. It’s often one Hell of an English accent (especially with the Australians), but they can definitely be understood. However, on the radio I recently heard a speaker of a Tasmanian Australian English dialect. She was from a rural forested area and was protesting logging in her area. I had a hard time understanding that dialect.

I would be all for making West African English (at least the hard forms of it) separate languages. On US TV, African English from Kenya and Liberia gets subtitles.

We’ve already discussed the Scots language on this site before. That Scots is now judged a separate language and not an English dialect drives many English speakers into wild conniptions. You can Google the controversy on the Net and watch the wild, raging debates unfold over many pages. I’m not sure why it pisses speakers of a major language so much when divergent dialects are split off into separate languages. Maybe it’s a primal thing.

There’s only been one scientific study done, but it found 42% intelligibility of Scots by a US English speaker. Sounds about right, but I’m surprised it’s that high. I can often barely make out much of anything of Scots, just words here and there.

At this point it ought to be quite clear that Scots is more than one language. In the heart of Scotland, you go 20 miles in any direction and the other Scots speakers won’t understand you. I wonder if there is some kind of “Standard Scots” that could be spoken that would be understood everywhere?

I would like to start the debate off by proposing that Shetlandic Scots and Orcadian Scots be split off from Scots proper. It’s uncontroversial that these are the most wildly divergent Scots dialect, and they have poor intelligibility to speakers of the rest of Scots. Orcadian Scots is spoken on the Orkney Islands and Shetlandic Scots is spoken on the Shetlandic Islands.

Shetlandic and Orcadian Scots have poor intelligibility with Standard Scots.

As far as the rest of British English, we can understand most of you Limey bastards, believe it or not. However, I have a very hard time with Midlands English. I definitely get less than 90% of it and I don’t get better with time either.

Two of the most infernal English dialects have to be Geordie and Scouse. They are also quite famous.

Geordie is spoken in the far northeast of England near the Scottish border in and around Newcastle. Other dialects around that region like Cumbrian and Northumbrian are similar. Geordie is famous for being one of the hardest English accents to understand. There is actually some support among linguists for splitting it off to a separate language.

Scouse is the notorious, but delightful, dialect of Liverpool. In mild forms, it’s what comes out of the Beatles’ mouths in interviews. In hard form, it’s extremely difficult to understand. There is a report on the Net of a US English speaker who spent 7-8 years in Liverpool and never learned to understand Scouse very well. He said that young working class women were the worst. I’d be in favor of splitting this infernal dialect off into a separate language, but it’ll probably never happen. Can you imagine the shrieks?