Intelligence, Nation, Whiteness and Other Stupid Ideas (Nation and Team rant, part 1 of 3)

The speaker discusses their thoughts on intelligence, arguing that it is not a helpful concept and was designed by Europeans. They believe that the idea of whiteness is a relatively new concept and that diversity is not accurately represented in places like Amsterdam. They also touch on the history of European cultures defining intelligence and the negative impact on non-European cultures. The speaker also expresses their views on IQ tests and their limitations, as well as the mistreatment of Native American tribes in the past. They emphasize the importance of acknowledging and learning from this history. I kind of want to say my piece about intelligence. It's not like a high priority issue for me, but it has intersections with high priority issues for me. And, yeah, I just, I don't think it's a helpful concept to focus on, to talk about, to describe about oneself or others. It was designed by Europeans. They got to define what intelligence means. They designed the test to test for their definition of intelligence. And then they pat themselves on the back for scoring more highly on their own tests than most other cultures. Not all, some other non-white cultures or whatever. I don't believe in whiteness. And Europeans didn't either. It's a relatively new concept. They were always just like, it was more about nation, right? Still is over there. They think diversity really is. I mean, like Amsterdam, for example, is listed as one of the most diverse countries on the planet. I've been to Amsterdam. It's wall-to-wall white people. I mean, yeah, you see some African, I don't mean Africans, people of African descent, like Sub-Saharan Africa, like darker skinned people, or South Asian, or East Asian, or all kinds of people. You do see a little bit of everything there. Yes. But the vast frickin majority is white. You're seeing a lot of white people there. Now, if you walk down downtown San Francisco, Berkeley, New York, you're going to see a lot more like colors and variations of skin tone. That's all I'm saying. It's going to look more and feel more diverse than Amsterdam, which is listed, last time I checked, like higher than those other cities in terms of how diverse they are, because they count diversity as anyone from any other country, including any other European country. So we just invented this idea of whiteness, right? And we just sort of like, took an amalgamation of like, all European cultures, I guess. It wasn't even that at first, it was only some European cultures. And then it kind of eventually came, you know, grew to include all of them. But yeah, remember, there were, there was a few that we weren't really kind of on board with, as being white, Irish, Polish, and Italians, I guess, and Southern Europeans, whatever. That was a long time ago. I don't remember that. But there was a time, I have read and have been told by numerous people, and numerous sources, that, yeah. I mean, it tracks with basically Hitler's kind of stupid idea of Aryanism, like the Germanic and Nordic tribes being like the master race, right? And then like, it's really stupid. And all the like, blonde hair, blue eye bullshit. Yeah, but we're still dealing with that, like in a huge way. That idea is not dead. It didn't die with Hitler in a bunker. Okay. There's a lot of people in the world that go around describing or, you know, sort of valuing and evaluating themselves by a single number, as like, their, you know, brain power, like their, you know, which almost equates to usefulness in today's society, right? If you're not very intelligent, and you can't do very much. No, you're just, yeah, you're a mere waste. You can't have this job. You're not smart enough for this. I mean, and there's clearly cases where people don't have the right kind of intelligence for certain professions. Yeah. And, yeah. That's why we have schools and, you know, in the process of just basic education, meaning prior to, like, college, it should become clear-ish, kind of where a person's strengths are. I mean, it was kind of, for me, clear by the end of high school, like, some areas that I was probably better at than others. I knew I wasn't going to be a math guy. I could tell that right off the bat. I struggled algebra at first. I mean, I get it now. But that was, yeah, I really, there's still some components to algebra that I'm not, like, totally on board with. But I actually found, like, pre-calculus a little easier. And, like, very early calculus in college to be, yeah, those, yeah, when it tracks with velocity and acceleration and other physical processes, it just makes sense. I can sort of see it. But when it doesn't, when it breaks away from anything, like, to do with reality, or if it goes into, like, economics or other areas, it gets hard for me to picture. And I don't do as well. But, yeah, I could picture the, like, electron models. And, you know, it turns out they're not really true. But still, I mean, they were, they're helpful, like, learning tools, I guess, like kind of the Bohr model of an electron. Or not of an electron, of an atom, of an atom. I'm talking about atoms, atomic structure, which includes electrons, right? But yeah, anyway, it turns out they exist in quantum states. And it's a little bit more complicated than just, like, you know, orbiting around. They're probably not doing that. They just have kind of, yeah, these different possible states that they exist in at any given time, at a certain percentage of the time. And it's either, they're kind of like an average of them, I guess. I don't know. It's quantum mechanics. I don't fully understand quantum mechanics. I don't think anyone understands quantum mechanics. That's, that's what I keep hearing people say, anyway. People who have PhDs in it don't even get it. Einstein certainly didn't. And no one did. But, I mean, the people who proposed it didn't even fully get it. It's freaking weird. It's very weird. But it does appear to be true. Well, I mean, it matches the data better than any other theory we have. Or, it's not really a theory, but it's a set of, like, equations to describe observations at a given, like, level. Like, very, very small, very, very, very, very small levels. Like, the smallest levels we can detect and measure certain things, certain parameters. Yeah, it matches that data. And it looks nothing like data of any other kind. I mean, it looks nothing like Newtonian data. It's not predictable in any way. There's total uncertainty. I mean, you just don't, there's not a way to know. You can never make a prediction with it. You would never really need to, because why does it, doesn't really help you to know, like, where a given electron is. Right? I mean, how does that ever help you know anything? But yeah, intelligence. I know what it is, intelligence. I got a bone to pick with intelligence and IQ. Really, what I mean is IQ, because they're almost synonymous in our culture. And that's what I want to, I want to break that, that idea. I want to snap it in half and break its spine and kick it down a cliff. Because it's just not correct. The time that IQ was invented, the most powerful powers, world powers, were in Europe. They got to define what intelligence means. They got to design the intelligence test. What if we, and yeah, there are certain, as a result, the further away from Europe you go, generally, in terms of like cultural differences, so not necessarily by distance, but like, the more different your culture is from European, then the lower you're probably going to score on an IQ test. And that should not be shocking. And that should not, there should be no conclusions drawn from that. It just means, yeah, you don't have the same, your culture didn't have the same sort of foci of things to learn and pass on that European cultures did. Duh. I mean, why would they? If we let the aborigines of Australia, I don't know if that's a correct thing to say. We still, I don't know, the natives to Australia, if we let them design their own test for the rest of the world to take, right, and let them define what intelligence is, how do you think Americans would do on that test? Probably pretty fucking awful. I mean, except maybe not Native Americans, the Native Americans would probably do okay. But even they probably wouldn't do that great because, you know, the environments are very different. And also because they have, you know, their way of life has been forever dramatically changed. We pretty much destroyed their culture, the Native American culture, not completely. But yeah, I mean, there's only threads of it hanging on in these different reservations. And a lot of them have completely lost touch with their roots. And they don't have any way to know. So because yeah, we just did so much. I mean, it wasn't all active genocide, but there was active genocide. And yeah, and then disease. Just kept pushing them back and pushing them back and pushing them back and pushing back and trail of tears. It's fucked up. Manifest Destiny was not like, it was a dark chapter of our past that we like to just pretend didn't happen. But it happened. All we have to do is just acknowledge it. It happened. Okay, it happened. None of us, there's no one alive today that was involved. Okay, so no one needs to say sorry. However, we all need to acknowledge that it happened. And we should try to not be dicks. When it comes to any member of a given tribe. It will meet that tribe standards to be called a member of that tribe, or whatever. I don't know. We shouldn't be dicks to them. Right? Because then then it does involve us like, like people who are alive today, right? It wasn't that long ago that the whole ghost dance thing. When was that? I don't know. And then there was that Alcatraz thing. And yeah, the real kicker is Mount Rushmore. I mean, come on, when you learn about the actual history of that. It's just, it's embarrassing how mean that was. It's just mean. I mean, it was like a secret mountain to them. I think the Blackfeet were, I mean, don't quote me on that. I don't know what tribe was living there before we kicked them out, and then let them back. Because we gave it to them as a reservation. And then we discovered resources there that we wanted. So we took it back and kicked them out again, or at least push them to a side or whatever. They're still there, whatever. But we kicked them out of a big chunk of it, including their sacred mountain, which had I guess is what had the resources or was whatever. And we knew it was a sacred mountain to them. That's why we gave it to them as part of their reservation. We were, for a moment, trying to be respectful. But it's often until we discovered that it had a lot of value, or resource value. And then we're just like, Oh, yeah, no, actually, you know, that's sacred mountain you guys got. Yeah, we're gonna take that back. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, it's ours now. Bye. So they had to go. And then what did we do? We didn't just take the sacred mountain back, we actually carved four faces of our most revered leaders, arguably our most revered leaders, the size of their sacred mountain. I mean, how much, it's a massive middle finger to them. How could you not read it that way? If you remember of that tribe? How could you not read that as anything other than just the biggest possible middle finger you could possibly point at another group, from one group to another. Oh, is this your sacred mountain? Oh, is it sacred to you? Really? Really? Oh, look at it now. Look, it's got our presence on it. I mean, what the fuck? I mean, it's just like, it's like, it reminds me of stories my dad used to tell about like, growing up when he was like, at dinner time when there was like, a piece of chicken left over and there's competition for it because he had a lot of siblings. And his elder brother, his next oldest brother, Peter, I guess he used to spit on it. He would just be like, oh, you want this chicken? Huh? Oh, you like this chicken? Spit on it and then basically yeah, ruin it for my dad. That's basically what we did. Instead of spitting on it, we like carved permanent spit on it and permanently destroyed it for them. So yeah. Oh, well, I'm not sure that that was, that's like the entire, I don't know. I don't know all the details of that story. I did at one point, I heard the whole story and it's bad. Just, I remember that much. It's really bad. It's embarrassingly bad. And we frankly should just give it back to them. We should have done so a long time ago. It's not that cool anyway. You go there, you see some faces. It's like, oh, neat, huh? Okay, what am I doing here? South Dakota, wherever it is. What? There's no utility of it. And people died to make it too, by the way. It was kind of a crazy thing to do. And for no reason. Why? To like, revere our president? What? They're not kings. They were kings. We don't do that here. I thought, I thought we were supposed to be a nation of equals. We believe these truths to be self-evident through the enlightenment, which was not enlightenment. Okay. It was barely a fucking, it's like we barely opened one eye and just like peered around and looked around and was just like, oh, wait a minute. Things look a little bit different than we thought. Huh? That's weird. And then we just closed our eye again. But now, then, you know, now we have a slightly better impression of the way things look around us. But we didn't wake up. We didn't, we're not enlightened. We're still like fucking half asleep, maybe 90% asleep. It was a step in the right direction. And then we just stopped, didn't we? We just took a step and then we went, and halted. And then we, ever since then, we've been making just insanely slow progress. Just insanely slow. I mean, yeah, I mean, it really wasn't that long ago that we were so, like, there was so slimmer here. I mean, that in relative terms, that wasn't that long ago, 150 or 70 years ago, whatever it is now, but it's not that long, especially the scales of, like, most other countries' lifespans. 170 years in England is like, what? It's like a blink of an eye. It's like two or three months, or four, depending. The last one was pretty long. And then the one before that was also pretty long. Well, I guess there was two there, wasn't there? I don't know. I don't remember. I don't know the freaking kings and queens of Europe that well. But anyway, yeah, we're not making a lot of progress lately. And actually, we're making, we're slipping back instead of moving forward in a lot of very important ways. We may be moving forward in some social ways. Gay marriage, transgender rights are at least being talked about. Do they have them? Not exactly. That's going to be a fight. That's going to be a long one before people kind of accept that one. I don't know. It's just, it is important. But it's not really related to the fiscal stuff so much. And I wish we could decouple them. Because there's some very important changes that need to happen on the fiscal side as well. And they don't have to, they can happen concurrently, but they don't have to be the same teams. You know, we really, by having political parties, we've really shot ourselves in the feet. In fact, by having nations, we've really shot ourselves in the heads, basically. There's a whole idea of nation is very much antiquated. And it's really holding us back. Think of how much war has been caused by that idea alone. Now religion, nation, is the idea of nations. Okay, so if people like to say how much war and death and strife religion has caused, yeah, okay. It's also done some good things for us universities. We wouldn't have those. They don't know what I can think of off the top of my head. But I mean, they provide community centers and ways for people to, you know, exchange information. And there's still though, they still provide a community center for people to engage with their neighborhood. And it's not a bad thing, at its core. There's nothing wrong with that. It just gets, when people get a little bit too zealous about the dogma, and get a little too, yeah, they start trying to apply it to their political beliefs and to their worldview. And then, you know, pushing that on others, and it becomes kind of a problem. But yeah, it's a mixed bag is what I'm saying, religion. It's not all negative, it's not all positive. But nation, what positives are associated with the idea of nation? Can you name one? What good has the idea of nation done for humanity, for the world? For other species on the planet? I can't think of anything. It's divided us. In some cases, nations formed by unification of smaller sovereign states, in a way that could be seen as a positive. Like Germany formed, Germany and Italy formed out of sort of the ashes of the early Roman Empire. I mean, Northern Italy was part of that. Southern Italy was not. But yeah, so there's less separate sovereign states in Europe now, than there would have been, because of this idea of nation. That's great. But did that really help us at all? No. Germany and Italy forming actually really freaked the fuck out of France and England and Russia, and everyone else, the Netherlands and Belgium. And yeah, that's a big part of how World War One started. I mean, it was just simply just the formation of Germany alone, was kind of like kicked off the cascade of events that led to World War One. I mean, in a lot of ways, it couldn't have happened without them forming first. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying that them forming caused it, but it wouldn't have happened if they didn't form. So yeah, that's so helpful there. And Second World War, also, not so great, right? I mean, what were, what were, so what are the positives? Like locally, certain nations have benefited at the expense of other nations. So it might seem to people living in the nation known as America, or the United States of America, that it's a very positive thing, since they're a very wealthy nation, right? Especially back when we were, I live in America, I say we, because I'm, I guess I'm an American later. I'm on Team Earth, okay? That's what my point is. I'm on Team Earth. You are on my team, whether you like it or not. End of story. Anyway, yeah. America really blew up after the Second World War. And I mean, he nailed it right on the head, warned us, and it happened. And now look at us, 12 super carriers, more fucking nuclear missiles than, yeah, could wipe out all life on the planet, I think a couple times over. Why did we do that? Why did we build all those nukes? What idea, what single idea, if you had to think of one, would be the most responsible idea for the buildup of all those nukes? I would say nation, right? If the Soviet Union, which was a union of nations, supposedly, I mean, it was a nation that had a bunch of protectorate nations under it, kind of. I mean, it was a whatever. But the point is that, yeah, it's teams, really. It's not so much nation. It's just this team idea. And it's also, it applies to political parties as well. That's kind of how I got, both of those concepts are about being on a team, and just sort of, you know, being loyal to the team, no matter what, even if your team is going batshit crazy, doesn't matter, you're still on that team. And screw the other team, and let's win. It's not about actual progress or issues, or whatever. People are just believing whatever they're supposed to believe according to what their team's telling them to believe, more often than they're believing what they have thought about, and learned about, and come to understand over time, and have a, you know, non-reactionary response to. And that doesn't happen so much. The other thing happens, they just join a team, and then they just, they take on the position of whatever team they're on. I think, you know, it would help to have a more educated populace, yes, and we should make school free. I think that's a no-brainer. I think that should involve the relief of student debt. No-brainer. If you happen to pay for school while you went to school, sorry, if it was within the last, like, 10 years, maybe you can get some kind of rebate. But, you know, you probably paid a hell of a lot less than they're paying now, because it is freaking tripled in my own lifetime, tuition, and rent, to a large degree in most places. I mean, landlords are acting like, they're taking advantage of the situation around universities, because given that they're going to have tenants, they can charge them anything they want, and they'll always be full. Their units will always be filled. They're paying with loans. That's one reason why students are leaving college with more and more debt. It's not a great way to start out in life, being like, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt. And even if it's not the same as credit card debt, it's like there's some protections. Not everyone knows that, first of all. It seems like it's a cost-prohibited amount of money, just to say. And it probably does ward off a crap ton of people from even trying to go. Yeah. So there's a whole lot of different issues that we need to face as a species. And in America, I think in particular, we really need to get over this idea of, we're very fiercely nationalistic. So we are one nation of a handful that are particularly problematic when it comes to the idea of nation. Russia is another one. I think we all know who are the most problematic actors are. But yeah, we're one of them lately. Okay, we have not been acting like so great on the geopolitical stage for some time. And the world is kind of both annoyed and terrified of us. I mean, a lot of it is. Some of it is, you know, is in love with us. But that's getting to be a smaller and smaller fraction. Yeah. So we're losing our soft power. And eventually, we're not going to be the most powerful country or nation, whatever, on the planet. And yeah. And everyone just assumes that because once China gets like a military that's capable to match ours, we're going to go to war. Why? Why is everyone making that assumption? Why do we have to be ideologically opposed? Just because they're more collective in their thinking than us? Or more authoritarian? I mean, I wouldn't want to structure a society to look exactly like theirs. I would make some changes. But same with ours. I would try to make, I would try to take the best of both and make it a hybrid hybrid. Because theirs already is kind of a hybrid. But it's not like a perfect hybrid. Because why would it be? Anyway, if we, it would take a united planet to really do it right. Because then we wouldn't have to be spending all this freaking money on military. We had to make, we can just maintain a very limited one. You know, here and there, kind of kind of Coast Guard-ish, you know, in nature, with maybe like a few special forces type groups here and there, but not like armies, and not like, you know, tanks and nuclear weapons. We wouldn't need any nuclear weapons anymore. We could just completely dismantle them. And that's something that has to happen. It has to happen at some point. Or we will use them. We will either use them, or they will be dismantled. Or they will just not work. I mean, they probably have a shelf life of some kind, I'm sure. And after a given period of time, I'm sure it just won't work anymore. And nothing lasts forever, right? There's got to be some components inside of those things that will, yeah, degrade with time, and no longer function. And they'll be just duds, or a large percentage of them will be. But I think I would prefer it if we just disarmed them, you know, before that point, because I think that could be a long time from now. And I don't like playing Russian roulette every year. You just, well, let's just hope this is the year that, you know, this is not the year that, you know, the statistically inevitable thing is going to happen. Which is, you know, we're gonna blow ourselves up. We're gonna find some freaking reason to blow ourselves up. There's people that are looking for excuses to do so. There's people that think that, you know, they're hoping for Armageddon. There's people that think that they're going to be raptured and shit. And a lot of them are in positions of leadership in our country. So yeah, it's a little scary. You know, I won't. Yeah. Yeah. I really don't like this trend we're on towards the right. It really needs to come to an end. I think we need to flip the script somehow, you know, we need to come, we need a more united and cohesive left to confront the right. The middle won't do it. The middle will only do it symbolically. I mean, they will fight the right to win an election. Yes, they fight tooth and nail to win elections. But once won, they don't do much that different. They act much more the same than they do different. And I mean, the only real difference is the social issues. Which, yeah, because of political parties, they've gotten coupled with fiscal issues. We're still doing supply side economics. It's still like the orthodox view. That was like a crazy view for a long time. It had existed as a theory for a while, back in like Nixon and even pre-Nixon days. But it was seen as just crazy. They were nutjobs. And all of a sudden, it just flipped. I don't know what happened. But I mean, it was Margaret Thatcher and Reagan, I guess, whichever one of them came first with the idea, stepping forward with that, you know, the supply side trickling out of bullshit idea that Milton Friedman was espousing. University of Chicago, I guess, sort of the source of that. But now it's everywhere. It's just everywhere. And it's almost like people have forgotten. Yeah. I mean, modern monetary theory sounds to me a lot like kind of a return to Keynesian. I mean, in terms of it actually doesn't make any policy suggestions. It just states things in a way that probably Keynesian capitalists would have also stated things. But yeah, ever since then, we've been stating it, like the reverse way. You know, money comes from the private sector, and then goes up to the government. And then that's used to fund our military and all our... No, the money is made by the government. And then it goes to the private sector, when they need stuff like military and whatever. Yeah, it's not, the private sector does not produce money. Okay, they produce stuff. We don't produce that much stuff here anymore. We have a lot of jobs here that are all about just playing games with numbers, using, you know, Glass-Steagall was repealed, and all kinds of tricks that companies can pull to just make money from nothing. It's just like a magic trick they're doing. And it's hurting everybody. In a big way, that's what 2008 was about, essentially. And it's kind of happened again. So yeah, this capitalism always falls apart. Like, it's just not a stable system. Listen to Richard Wolff. And yeah, or don't, and just look at our history. Yeah, there's routine, like collapses or recessions, occasional depressions, and what have you. They're going to start happening much more often. They have been since the repeal of Glass-Steagall, if you think about it. The dot-com bust, 2008, I mean, they were like, that's like 10 years apart. And yeah, I mean, COVID complicated things. So I mean, it's arguable whether or not we were heading into another one. And well, we did. And it's hard to say how much of that was COVID, and how much of that would have happened anyway. I mean, a lot of it was COVID, for sure. So, but anyway, it's just, it's got, it's becoming less and less stable, and importantly, more and more inequitable. The level of inequity is just rising and rising. It's almost at like, Rockefeller levels. Do we want that? Do we have like a de facto aristocracy? Everything that we've been talking about, freedom and, you know, equality and whatever, all of the fucking things that the Enlightenment valued, they're going away. With that regulatory capture, our government can't seem to do a thing, because they're, yeah, they've been captured by the private sector. Enough of them have been to be useless. So, I was really trying to talk about intelligence. I think I made my point about intelligence. It's just not a good idea. Gay birth, eugenics, I mean, it's a big part of what sort of fueled the eugenics movement, stupid IQ bullshit. And it's just not helpful today. I mean, my fiance's no longer with us. I don't know. I don't know if she took it or what, but I think she did. And she wasn't like, she was like above average, for sure. But she really thought she was kind of dumb. And that makes me think that maybe she didn't score as highly as she had hoped. And that's just a shitty thing to fucking carry around. In the chat room that she moderated in, I would very frequently see discussions of intelligence, and IQ specifically. It's not a meaningful number. No one cares about it, in terms of medical fields. No one uses it. If you ever have a psychiatrist or psyD or whatever, that's all about IQ and wants to measure your IQ, I would say they're a bad fucking whatever they are. I would say you'd get a different one. Definitely. Anyway, I mean, just look into it for yourself, if you don't believe me, about its history and everything. And keep in mind, yeah, just imagine what maybe an IQ test developed by the aboriginals of Australia would look like, and how Europeans would do on that test. Probably not so great.