Please place all off-topic comments for the week here.

Some random thoughts:

Black national merit scholar G-man mentioned some claims by Jordan Peterson (why is everyone suddenly talking about him?) about the uselessness of people below 83 IQ (below 80 is what he means, since that’s about the 10th percentile below which you can’t qualify for the military).

The fact that the armed forces, despite its desperate need for recruits, would turn away the bottom 10% of the IQ distribution is a testament to the incredible validity of IQ.  If IQ were merely measuring social class, why would a low score make you completely useless during times of war?

The man interviewing Peterson suggests that with enough education and training, low IQ people could eventually become adaptable creative problem solvers, but Peterson is having none of it, saying the research is crystal clear.

I also saw this interesting discussion about slavery:

 

As a little kid I believed whites just walked into Africa and started catching blacks in traps, much like humans do to animals.  Believing blacks were dehumanized in this way, makes it easy for people to believe in HBD.

However as I got older I read that in most cases blacks were sold into slavery.  Many blacks deny this because it makes them culpable in their own victimization, however other blacks prefer to believe they were sold by their own people, than to believe their people were dominated by white people.  Because it’s such a sensitive issue, it’s hard to know who to believe.

It would be interesting to also look at the Arab slave trade.  J.P. Rushton constantly cited hyper-influential Bernard Lewis as the central authority on Arab-black relations in antiquity, however Lewis is very pro-Israel so I don’t know how objective he can be about Arabs, given how emotional both sides get.

I also saw this interesting video by Jesse Lee Peterson about Hillary’s recent visit to India. Not only did she make controversial comments there, but according to Peterson, she kept losing her physical balance.  I hope she’s okay.

It’s easy to say she should just retire and enjoy her grandkids, but when you’re entire identity (FOR DECADES) has been people claiming you’ll be the first woman president, and then to come so close to achieving that dream twice (only to have it snatched away both times) is traumatic.  The moral of the story is NEVER allow yourself to get too psychologically invested in events you can’t control.  It will ruin your life: