Stark wrote:I don't really understand their position (the whole 'deaf community' bullshit) but this is 'selecting' qualities without having to sterilise anyone.
I understand it - they have the usual human need to feel special, they've rationalised their disability into a reason why they're special, they've formed an insular community that makes them feel good about themselves and they don't want it to go away or the illusion to be revealed for what it is. But yes, it's bullshit when they start claiming that deafness isn't a disability or that fixing it in children is wrong.
While I'm on the subject, there are similar problems with acknowledging that yes, the brain is in fact coded for by genes, and genetic differences do dictate mental capabilities and strongly influence personality (albeit often in tortuous and nonobvious ways). On the one side you have racist fuckwits trying to pervert the science to justify hate and discrimination, while on the other side you have ultra-liberal social science intellectuals and genuine PC morons trying to push their tabula rasa crap and ignore any biology that proves even slightly awkward for their social philosophy. It's a complex and subtle issue that the general public isn't really equipped to understand - just look at the mess over the various and ongoing 'gay gene' theories. Take the question 'are there systematic mental differences between human ethnicities?'. In the 19th century, 'yes' was the foregone conclusion and many so-called scientists were essentially just trying to rationalise that. We got the whole 'black people have lower IQs' theory which various enlightened people in the 20th century realised was based on bullshit methodology. Unfortunately the less enlightened people ran with this until it became effectively liberal heresy on many campuses to suggest that their were systematic mental differences between populations.
If you approach this from a biological point of view, it's almost a no-brainer: genes code for behaviour and mental abilities as much as (though less directly than) they code for physical and biochemical characteristics. Again, systematic differences in behaviour between dog breeds are a good example of how it doesn't take that many generations to implement big changes, at least under artificial selection. For humans, behaviour almost certainly gets as much selection pressure as physical and biochemical traits, but there are two important differences: it won't be coupled to specific genes as directly because the expression mechanisms are more complex, and in a human community there will always be a range of 'behavioural niches' that prevent convergence to homogenity, unlike something simple like lactose tolerance/intolerance in communities that farm animals for milk. Looking at humans, we can see clear systematic differences in biochemical, immunological and physical traits between (formerly) regional populations, but they're small compared to some of the subspecies distinctions we see in other species. Simple traits like skin colour and lactose tolerance show overwhelming homgenity within a local population, more complicated ones (in expression and susceptibility to environmental factors) like height show a general trend but much more individual variation. Coming in from an apolitical perspective, a biologist's expectation that there would certainly be systematic mental differences, but they will be subtle, trivial compared to variation between families and individuals, and insignificant compared to the difference between humans and the next nearest species.
Just try saying 'there are almost certainly mild, but systematic differences in average mental capabilities and personality distribution between human ethnicities, though unfortunately it is very difficult to collect unbiased data on them' on a liberal forum though. A whole gaggle of tabula rasa PC nutcases will start screaming 'racist, racist', while any actual racist trolls hanging around will say something like 'see, the scientists are with us, the negros are inferior and we must cleanse the US'.
So anyway, the point is still just to be careful when critiquing. Claims like 'black people have lower IQs' (strange that no one claims the reverse despite it being equally likely from an indifferent prior...
) will generally be stupid for reasons like broken testing methodology, bad statistics, biased samples, cultural bias of IQ tests, the lack of sufficient post-split generations and selection pressure for a significant divergence, the general inadequacy of IQ as a measure of 'intelligence', the fact that even if correct this would have no meaningful bearing on public policy and/or just the simple folly of doing a study in an attempt to rationalise a pre-existing dogmatic belief. When arguing against these claims focus on these specific mistakes, don't fall into the PC trap of 'mental characteristics have a genetic basis == nasty racist scientists == crimethink! crimethink!'.
It doesn't really help the programme to label it deliberately something that evokes emotional responses.
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