OOM confirms this when he says he first understood the term a decade or so ago by Trotskyites in Paris.

Notice that neither OOM nor wikipedia can cite a written instance of its use.

The belief in liberals as “useful idiots” (i.e., dupes of a totalitarian conspiracy) and in “white supremacy” and “the races of mankind” are all useful myths in the support of a agenda that has lost sight of its goals while redoubling its fanaticism. I am speaking of the paid, professional cultural cold warriors (undercover and not) who went after liberal and New Dealers from the early fifties on, and their various Neocon offspring and hangers on and who until 9/11 found themselves threatened with unemployment.

Incidentally, someone speculated that this issue of “racial” inferiority of the darker races is being raised now in an attempt to sabotage Obama’s campaign.

Good point. No region that had o.o.m. travelling “extensively” around it could possibly be considered a paradise.

And since when is “sexual restraint” a sign of intelligence?

Huh. I remember learning in college that the Irish were the only group known to have limited their population growth by means of abstinence.

If Mr Saletan continues to stick his nose in this trough, he’ll be sure to come across something unflattering:

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/its_whats_happening_now_baby/

abb1, good one.

lemuel pitkin: I am not.

Moff, having to live with such a rotten temperament is all the punishment you need.

By using the word “amusing,” yes. The straw man is very distressed.

Your writing is a witness to your inferiority.
.

This is very different from looking at how different sets of factors that contribute in some way to intelligence affect and are affected by environment, heredity, development, and so on. I’m reminded of discussions about measuring inflation, actually. The various measures all have at least some arbitrariness in them, based on which costs they choose to include the index. What the racists are doing with g is like someone taking a particular set of goods to measure, declaring that it’s the only real measure of inflation, that this set is fundamentally all one and can’t be usefully divided, and that no other set measures a real thing in the way that their Real Inflation Number does.

Koffler, on the other hand, makes some very good points. The Flynn effect, in particular, is a significant consideration.

His point about “g” is not so relevant, unless I’m missing something. Why does it matter whether what we think of as intelligence corresponds to an aggregate of independent specialized intelligences in different domains rather than a generalized intelligence? I don’t see why it should matter.