Re: Is my CS instructor nuts?


Gerry Quinn wrote:
In article <1150907326.721207.85780@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx says...
Gerry Quinn wrote:

As an argument for the existence of an "innate" black, grey works. And,
absolute blacks and whites are rare in nature.

You mean non-existence. And grey is no argument against the existence
of an innate black. Grey paper may consist of a white background with
small black dots, and nothing is said about the nature of the blackness
of these dots.

It can certainly be agreed that people exist for whom it is difficult
to identify their lineage. Usually these will be people of
considerably mixed lineage. One might make an analogy with a bar at
which there are numerous beer, some pure or almost so, and some which
are mixed in varying proportions. A pint of Guinness will easily be
identified as a stout, and many will be able to tell what brand it is.
A pint of cider, likewise, is easily identified as such. But if a
pint-glass contains a mixture of various types of beer, it may be
difficult to identify just what has gone into it.

The exzistence of this pint in no way invalidates the concept of
Guinness.

The fallacy here is that people aren't (yet) made for their exchange
value as a commodity as is Guinness.

No, the fallacy is your assertion that because people are not pints of
Guinness, they can share no properties with, nor be subject to, any of
the same laws of nature and mathematics as pints of Guinness.

Actually, people are subject to different "laws of nature" than pints
of stout. And, they can reflect upon those "laws" when those "laws"
attain sociological status. And, they can CHANGE the law at that level.

No, they manufacture by having wild and pretty random sex (and again,
this may Bug you at some level). Sometimes, after a pint of Guiness.

Guinness' makers, G-d love them, strive every day for six-sigma purity
and quality in their beer.

Whereas the whiteman in de woodpile or his inverse, de black man yo be
done lubbin', cannot be eradicated

Which means that racial purity is sub-biological and exo-biological; a
matter to be discussed (in the interest, in fact, of free discussion)
and then dismissed in Biology for Boneheads 101. In the noble words of
the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, THE HUMAN RACE IS ONE
SPECIES.

In which "pure" specimens of any one racial subgroup are sports,
deviants, inbred and too damned isolated for their own good, not some
ideal (which, I'll admit, you do not consciously make them to be).

Whatever your views on the matter (which amount to racism as defined by
you) the facts of the case are not altered.

That's just sloppy thinking, like calling a person who talks about sex
a sexist because...he talks about sex.

Racism is wrong because, like Creationism, it is unscientific. Your
modal theorising that it might be right in some possible world does
need to be discussed, as does Zionism in a Religion class or Fortran in
a computer science class, but then dismissed, like Zionism or Fortran.

Racism and science are orthogonal - as I stated, racism is based on a
moral or aesthethic framework. It is neither scientific nor
unscientific. As in the case of most issues that involve real or
purported facts about the physical world, its proponents and opponents
attempt to enlist science in the service of their cause, often in a
dishonest fashion. (A typical symptom of such dishonesty is a
disinclination to consider facts and figures on their own merit.)

Bull***. Modern science at the level of biology refutes racism, which
is the reason for covert Bush support of Creationism, in order to
undermine biology.


Education has a normative task, in other words.

So it does, and science does not. That's one reason why education and
science are sometimes at cross purposes.

There is no prohibition on analysing the causes of phenomena as well as
their nature. By the nature of things, the latter comes first. [You
propose, on the other hand, to make confident assertions about the
nature of things before permitting anyone to investigate whether they
exist.]

No, as a matter of fact, we do this. There is no other way.

Only at a very basic metaphysical level, relating to the existence of
entities such as rocks. You take complex views on how a human society
ought to conduct itself, and attempt to impose them on the measurement
of phenomena. Science doesn't work that way.

Observation of human beings, anthropology has long known, simply
doesn't reduce to "measurement of phenomena". In fact, it entails
dialogue, not some silent jerk like you measuring brain sizes, or
typing in IQ scores into a spread***.


So you admit you have been lying all along in denying the existence of
racial variation? As for the tendentious argument above, how could one
argue a purported need for 'redress' without *first* recognising racial
variation?

Easy. You allow people to identify themselves as members of the victim
class. If you must confirm their claim you look for evidence of
victimization, which is easy enough to find in Amerikkka. For example,
if someone says he is black, and he was permitted to rot in the Super
Dome and did not have a car to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina, then
he's "black" in the sense of social construction.

That seems an excellent way of increasing the number of 'victims' in
society, should we for some perverse political reason wish to do so.

No, just recognizing them as victims, something American society is
loth to do.

(And unfortunately, left-wing politics in general provides exactly such
a reason. If people were not poor, abused and helpless, or cannot be
convinced that they are, who will vote for the Left?)

Oh, so the people that had JACK *** on August 29th of last year, and
NO CAR, and NO POLICE PROTECTION, and were left to fucking ROT on their
rooftops were not "poor, abused, and helpless".

I wish as I type that you had had the gonads to walk up to people in
the Superdome and tell them this.


But to get back to the point at issue - your logic fails, as according
to it anyone can declare himself 'black' and thus deserving of
'redress', irrespect of his genetic and social heritage.

As I said, he would have to point to a low or negative net worth.

This discussion is being conducted by you from a white bread fantasy
land. FYI, I traveled by bus from Chicago to Seattle for the Microsoft
author's conference in 2001 and I saw with my own eyes what you cannot
see. Furthermore, I am willing to admit the evidence of my eyes. You
sit in your car and spin fantasies.


Drivel. The word 'genome' in a species context includes variations.
In many cases, there are more than two common versions of a particular
gene, and in such cases NO individual shares the species genome in its
entirety.

But white people have the best? Pseudo science.

When have I ever suggested that? White people probably have the best
genome for survival in less sunny climes, but it has disadvantages when
there's lots of UV about. On the subject of the general intelligence
factor thought to be measured, however imperfectly, by IQ tests,
research indicates that those of Asian descent come out tops on
average. Last Saturday, the Irish rugby team had cause to reflect on
the size and muscularity which seem to be frequently expressed among
those of Polynesian ancestry; runners who compete against Ethiopians
will empathise. And so on...

I think those happy Irishmen would do better to get stuck into a pint
of Guiness and your claim is dubious because, you see, outside of the
US, rugby is on hold: it's the World Cup we're watching out here, mate
kamerad boyo tovarish citoyen sowar.

Since the rugby tour is taking place in the Antipodes, the times do not
clash.

As to Ethiop domination of the marathon, it has nothing to do with
race. It has instead to do with the brutalization of Ethiopia and the
fact that culturally, Ethiopians have learned that there is money and
fame to be had doing something they love. This is strictly a phenomenon
which you'd better get used to: culturally, not racially, a society
builds expectations and an infrastructure for writing software you
can't code or running your *** off, and they make money from the USA.

Long legs are nothing to do with running prowess?

I have long legs, and I've completed two marathons. If I were thirty
years younger, I'd have a shot at beating the Ethiops because the
"racial differences" you mention are a mere statistical artifact and a
product of the Ethiop's desparation.

If I had short legs, all I would have to do is change my running
strategy.

A cat cannot learn to bark like a dog, but these subspecies barriers
which you so prize because of your racial and sexual anxieties are
crossed all the time...at fearful resistance from the wealthy and the
powerful who USE them to divide the working class.


And they can't. Even if the report by these professors was false or
misleading, it does not prove that every statement in it was false.

What bull***. A single lie makes everything a lie in the pragmatic
sense that IF the authors of the Wall Street journal had such contempt
for the ability of their readers to add a single point, no part of what
they say may be credited. From a single lie, anything can be derived in
the logical sense.

You don't have to credit it on account of it being in the Wall Street
Journal. If the pagination of the WSJ asserts by implication that one
is followed by two, are we obliged to deny arithmetic?

Incredibly poor logic. Just pitiful. Some of the content is true but
enormous falsehoods are allowed to stand.

My logic is impeccable; it is yours that is at fault.

The US patent office does so every day. It refuses applications to
patent a *perpetuum mobile".

Tripe. The patent offioce no more legislates the second law of
thermodynamics than building regulations legislate the constant of
gravity. [In fact the patent office normally ignores scientific views
on the workability of inventions, but makes an exception for perpetual
motion devices simply because so many cranks attempt to patent them.]

Very few cranks except perhaps your friends in the trailer park, yet
the rule, the guideline, the legislation remains.

The number may not be all that large, and the objection to perpetual
motion in particular may be part of the scientific mindset that finds
objections to iconic laws such as the second law of thermodynamics
outrageous; the same mindset that leads to hysteria about creationism.
But the point stands: the patent office do not legislate the second
law; they acknowledge it as true.

Quibbling.

If the patent office won't let your next door neighbor patent perpetual
motion, this is precisely the sort of "government control" which has
got your pantyhose in a tangle.

They will let him patent it; they place a slightly higher barrier by
requiring a working model of such a device:

"The views of the Patent Office are in accord with those scientists who
have investigated the subject and are to the effect that such devices
are physical impossibilities. The position of the Office can only be
rebutted by a working model."

As you see, the Patent Office clearly specifies that the matter is as I
stated.

And that is "government", dat mean old "government", doing the SAME
thing when a public university controls hate speech, or a textbook
authority selects a biology 101 text because it addresses racism,
perhaps in a sidebar.


And, you really don't understand "the second law of thermodynamics".
It's in a strong sense true for all time.

I agree; it is an unusual law of science because it is so fundamentally
connected with the nature of our existence as conscious observers.
Memory is a form of entropy, and thought can be considered as the time
derivative of memory. Thus the Patent Office are on stronger ground
than they would be if they made similar demands on the inventors of
anti-gravity devices (always with the rotating disc!), or
electrochemical devices that are supposed to initiate nuclear fusion.

If S is the expression of this law, and an observation occurs that
implies !S, then a THEORY has to be created that implies the TRUTH of
ALL previous verifications of S in the circumstances where S was valid,
and the new protocol-observation statement, !S, in its environment.

That's simply not the case in any strong way. It is no more than
saying that Newton's law of gravity is approximately valid in the
appropriate domain (slowly-moving massive objects).

The result, where T is the new theory, PS are the preconditions of S,
and PPS the preconditions of !S,

T -> (PS -> S) & (PPS -> !S)

Note that S still stands and is TRUE.

This is why "creationism" is so pernicious and why people like you
oughta be locked up: you permit a "discussion" of theories without a
chance of verification which upset the entire web of science!

As Popper pointed out, science works on the basis of falsification
rather than verification. Now I think of it, your arguments seem to be
based on a misapprehension of this fact. Insofar as a theory is
falsifiable, it can be considered by the methods of science.
Creationism, in fact, isn't particularly bad in this regard - it can be
argued that string theory has worse problems.

Popper is a disaster who was scarred by the pseudoscientific, as
opposed to the transcendant humanistic, interpretation of Communism.
OK, a scientific law is in a sense immortal and never falsifiable, only
relegated to special conditions.

Copernicus accounted for the phenomena but was falsified, therefore is
no longer a scientific law. Newton was an evolutionary step and won't
be falsified, only subsumed. And that's because of observations that
were not, to take a Marxist turn, possible given productive forces
prior to Newton.


For example, if there were uncontrovertible evidence that the Earth had
only been inhabitable for the last hundred thousand years, scientists
would argue that living things were placed here by the action of some
intelligent agency, and those who believed that life had evolved here
would rightly be derided as crackpots.

Yeah, but it's already been discovered by observation that that's
false, right? To imagine that the observational data by change, be
altered, was deceptive, is pre-Cartesian. You cannot get there from
here.


If creationism is true, then you lose all biology.

Why? Somewhere in the universe, there is a planet whose inhabitants'
ancestors were constructed by aliens, who subsequently left. Can't
they study biology? Is it somehow 'unscientific' for them to
objectively analyse their origins?

Without evolution, a theory, biology becomes taxidermy, pal. You'd like
that: pure observations that can be used to support any bull*** you
want.


If your bs about "innate" differences, based as it is only on
questionable studies that refuse to account for colonial oppression, is
true, then biologists were wrong in saying "there are homo sapiens and
they are a species, like cats are a species", so wrong, indeed, that
there entire conceptual apparatus has to be replaced...by
pseudo-scientific bull***, written by white men with deep racial and
sexual anxieties, which only claims that the differences exist based on
testing a laughably small subset of people now existing.

Human beings are a species, like cats are a species. Both species
exhibit noticeable racial variation, and it is not necessary to test
all humans or cats in order to make that assertion.

There are no "races" of cats: the construction isn't grammatical. There
are BREEDS which were created by BREEDERS (humans).

Left to themselves, cats would be all mutts. This is what we need to do
with human beings, because otherwise they construct false barriers (and
6 million have to die).



And ALL science is based on small subsets. What proportion of the
gravitating mass of the universe did Newton observe?

A small part, which is why THEORY is needed. The same laws operate
everywhere.

Muy il se muevo. We can consistently measure them, and demonstrate
that they are inherited via the germ line. All the political
declarations in the world cannot alter that.

Yes, but sex between a black man and a white woman can, and this bugs
you, doesn't it?

How would we demonstrate the inheritence via the germ line of which I
have spoken without considering precisely such cases? And what makes
you think I am 'bugged' by the concept? I believe I spoke earlier of
the concept of 'hybrid vigour', which might be expected to work to the
benefit of the children of such a relationship.

"Hybrid vigour" is itself racist because people aren't beasts to be
spoken of in eugenic terms in the first place.

Have you a better term? Should we refuse to talk of somebody "falling
down the stairs" because it implies that the gravitational properties
of people are in some ways similar to those of rocks?

False analogy, because "vigour" is evaluative and "falling" not, or
negatively evaluative. "Vigour" is good: to fall is bad, generally. The
mischief is in giving pseudoscientific ground to evaluative language.

No, you don't have the courage to make an assertion, only to sow doubt
so that people can be beat up by your thug friends in the name of
"innate" differences.

If I thought mankind was on the cusp of speciation I would say so. I
don't, and I have said that. If I am sowing doubt, it is in the
interests of inoculating readers against the misuse of science - I
would hope that my arguments would be as destructive to 'racist
science' as to 'anti-racist science', both of which seem to embrace
some very odd beliefs about evolution. I would not welcome the
friendship of anyone who beats people up on racist grounds.

No, but you'll cower behind the computer when the beatings occur.
You'll vote Bush or sit out the election because of the last-minute
Swift boating of any opponent. You'll take refuge in pompous
pseudotheorizing and "we can't be sure".

Racist beatings, sadly, have probably occurred for as long as there
have been races.

Americans like to say this, but it isn't true. America's race problem
is unique, and other countries don't have it ... until American
attitudes are imported.

I don't get to vote in US presidential elections, but
if I did, race would not be high on my agenda of reasons for choosing.
(Nor would the last-minute attempts to derail an opponent's candidacy
which all parties have used.) Bush has placed blacks in positions of
high office, and has been liberal on the subject of Mexican immigration
- these might well be considered more positive actions on the race
issue than attempts to foster an endless culture of special treatment
and dependency.

- Gerry Quinn

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