***Official H&F LC Thread***

@melkerson

If you put poor infant African Americans into the same environment as middle class whites in terms of education/parenting/etc, they would not magically have the exact same IQ as middle class whites as they mature into adulthood. That's ridiculous cope that just flies in the face of evolution. However, if they were put in the same environment (and culture) as middle class whites with all the same selective pressures, they'd have the same IQ as whites within a few generations. So in this way saying "it's environmental bro" isn't wrong at all. But "lol he only has high iq becuase he went to a bad school and grew up poor and racism lol" just middle school commie reasoning backed by fake-ass science.

Melk,

I'm going to assume that "substantial/significant" is bigger than small. I also don't understand you inability to quantify the effect size since IQ is already quantified and you are simply saying how much bigger one number is than another. But you were able to quantify your certainty and that may be the best we're gonna get. The point of this little derail is that any view you would hold based on someone being a Trump supporter absent other information would also need to be held for someone with dark skin, except moreso. You know... absent being a racist.

There is a lot of weird insanity in your ramblings of late but I'll touch on a few points of inconsistency.

1) The continual gaslighting that you "answered" the question while then rambling about not reading things is p weird. You can't even decide whether you responded (you didn't anyone can check the quotes and repeated avoidance) or ignored it.
2) You claim to lack expertise on this subject, which more aptly should be skin color and intelligence rather than race, since race is a nonsense social construct that lumps a whole variety of dark skins ethnic groups together including the most diverse genetic pool, Africans. But you made a very basic scientific error with your summary of the research on the subject where you conclude absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Laughable, but in line with your racist views.
2a) To put this more simply, even authors who favor extreme environmentalism views conclude they can't warp the data to sufficiently explain the full gap. So while there is "growing evidence" that environment is the largest shaping factor, we still don't know. But this delves into epigenetics which I will touch on in response to Guy.

Guy,

What you are touching on, and I'm sure the video gives a kinda weird ass explanation of, is epigenetic factors. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics) We know these are heritable, and while they are not actual genetic differences, they are differences in expression which can take several generations to shake out. So even if we teleported the magic black man in your example into your white family. Assuming there were no actual genetic causes for lower IQ (dubious), it could still take generations before they reach equivalency even assuming the cause was 100% environmental. I personally think this is an interesting field of study and would help rejoin some of the high heritability of IQ and skin color along with the lack of a "dark skin = dumb" gene.

But as we know geneticists in this field aren't really looking real hard to find any answers. It'd be a real question on whether looking for gay genes or dumb black genes would be more detrimental to your career. But luckily we have a bunch of sociologists make dubious thought problems and just paint anyone even asking "should we look?" as a neo-Nazi.

But again, what should we do with this information.

I read your posts in relatively real time and was very slightly rustled even as I knew what you were doing, so consider it a success! To the extent I felt the urge to reply (you are right that I've had a fair bit to do the last few days), I just didn't want to needlessly derail what has alternated between a reasonably high concept, informative discussion and a car crash of disingenuous skewed posting.

Merry Christmas S&F!

Thx bro, we're doing our best to inject some straight up schizo energy into lc thread because kamala vs trump is just that ***** boring.

Merry Xmas to you too, homie. Maybe I'll make an old school New Year's LC thread post like back when we had monthly threads.

Yes, Thremp. This was obvious. And as you can see there is no inconsistency in my views. Well done!

I did respond. I probably would have expanded further or pointed out exactly where I made the response if I were reading every post and saw how rustled you were, which I admittedly was not doing. Like I've said, I easily may have missed things that you posted, and if there is anything relevant that I missed, just let me know.

Sure, no argument there.

It's not my summary. It's the summary posted in Wikipedia and the claim has several citations to support it. You got any evidence to support your claim or are you gonna do the Rich Muny thing where you just claim a bunch of stuff, but supporting it with evidence is just a bridge too far? All I saw as was study you posted whose first author willingly does speeches for White supremacist groups. Even Muny might be reluctant to pass that off as unbiased evidence.

As an aside, you might want to look up what racist means. While your reading comprehension problems are numerous, that one might be the most pressing. Again, dictionary or any reasonable source you want to use is fine. I'm quite liberal about such things.

It's fine to say that we don't know, but the best evidence that we have is that it's mostly environment (which I think is the case in both Trump voters also).

Anyway, since I promised Guy, I'd try to hurry this along, lets skip ahead to your loltastic reading comprehension on my views on sunscreen. It's looks like this is the best I'm going to get from you for the moment:

Bolded is basically my exact view on sunscreen, but since your reading comprehension is at Rich Muny levels, I guess that was too difficult for you to understand.

Here's my version again, so you don't have to scroll back:

Clearly I am saying that it makes sense to have different recs for darker skinned folks (and I looked it up and this is actually what they do!). And yes, it is problematic because people are idiots or just have poor language comprehension skills (this is something I know you can identify it). It is unfortunate that is a problem and I was curious how schools might be dealing with the idiotic concerns of those people, which was the reason for my question to feel wrath.

So I was waiting for you to come up with your glorious explanation of how "When Thremp says it, it is fine, but when Melk says the same thing it is racist". That would have been great. I hope I didn't miss it somewhere. If I did please let me know.

I am grunching the overall conversation and responding to this post, so I may be missing some context; but there are plenty of places in the world where women are certainly not elevated with extremely little single motherhood the I wouldn't consider exactly thriving. Afghanistan is a piece of low hanging fruit that comes to mind.

Even in a Western context, in Western Europe there are large communities of migrant populations with low single motherhood and that dont elevate females that dont seem to be doing so hot.

So again, it does not appear that in itself trad family units and gender roles unlock some master key to elevate the hoi polloi to some unrealized potential.

Also, I wouldn't say progressives are particularly interested in actually elevating women. If they were they would be more empathetic towards how their ideology isn't really working for women. I would say progressivism mainly serves to make progressives feel self righteous and morally superior**; and everything else is downstream of that.

**This is speaking more to the un-self aware majority progressive herd. At its philosophical core, the aim of progressivism is to deconstruct rationality and enlightenment ideals; so basically to destroy Western civilization.

Why didn't you just give it a try and see how bad the nausea was for you? There is a range of severity when it comes to how these side-effects are experienced. If it causes too much nausea you stop, if not, then you found a good drug. I guess if you are really worried about the week that it might set you back, that kind of makes sense, but it seems like a small price to pay to find out for sure.

Guy,

I meant moreso as individuals and not policy experts. Good luck ever manageing to try and push heritability research and epigenetics tho. Our society is so deeply racist that we are unwilling to even entertain the possibility of an uncomfortable truth (these cultures are fundamentally flawed and pass on traits that continue to disadvantage them), even if this would be the most expedient way of helping these people.

I agree with the single mom thing, but that is likely due to mom bias where women who would be objectively worse parents end up with kids for a variety of reasons. In the black community this is more so due deadbeat dad than in white communities, but you basically end up with a default scenario where single moms end up with kids so hard to really know atm. Obviously we could try to slowly skew the balance and find an equilibrium (maybe women are better parents naturally), but this again, a complex and fraught subject.

Melk,

I'm not reading that. If it was good, good for you. If it was bad, I'm sorry.

Dun,

I think he was speaking primarily from a US-centric POV. I would be interested in whatever evidence supports trad families doing worse off in the West than single parent households. Obviously I support whatever new age polycule, but I can't claim to have any idea this would affect child rearing.

Monte,

Amazing self-restraint, Merry Christmas.

Well, I doubt any evidence supports single parent households working out better for anyone. I think we can say his point is very self evidently correct, but also very context dependent.

Merry Christmas, man. I've enjoyed (most) of this conversation in between cooking four different proteins over two days (full turkey and ham for Christmas Eve; prime rib and salmon for Christmas), along with all the fixings yesterday. I always forget how much work it is, but I had zero booze yesterday and it was "incredible" how good I felt this morning.

To you as well!

Dun,

As they say the devil is in the details. I have mixed feelings on the "village raises a child" type stuff, which is to say I have some very low confidence views about whether the nuclear family is better in extenuating circumstances, which is why I support the weird polycule stuff. In normie life, two parents who are actively involved in child rearing is obviously vastly superior. But you raise some excellent points, but I was just curious how far out of the bounds you were pushing this vaguely described idea. To use a similar argument to my prior point, we have no idea how good what sex would be as single parents (obv bad) and how coparenting affects this (something not really broached). My general view is that (and I'm not an expert on the literature in this by any means... as opposed to say something like "crops grown for livestock", in which I'm pretty unimpeachable) two parents households are vastly superior mostly due to expert coordination (needless to say that being married to/living with someone and caring for anklebiters to halflings and into adulthood requires vastly more coordination than dropping someone off every other weekend, or even date swapping into a 50/50 arrangement) whereas single parent households even after adjusting for economic status and a variety of other factors suffer.

Mostly I was just curious on what you were actually claiming, and it seems you were more focused on the "waman first" aspect rather than the two parent portion. Obviously the joy and horror of message boards is the fact that unless everyone wants to read a 5 minute treatise and compare it to prior posts on the issue we can end up with what we've had for the last 100-500 posts (not gonna look). Equally obvious is that I'm part of the problem, but I can't help bait someone into a good corner regarding Newspeak v newspeak. (I'm not sure newspeak ever actually occurs in the novel. But hey, where would the fun be without someone obviously incorrect flipping their shit over repeated attempts to correct them in roundabout and very insulting ways.)

But back to your prior point, if you are discussing context specific degrees of success/failure, sure. I think, which you rightly point out, this is heavily dependent on the niche these people occupy in society, whereas the overarching point that was originally made was entirely accurate. This is much the same argument used for foster/adopted children who are generally in shitsville. They get molested, abused, etc at absurdly high rates. But when you take them from an abusive situation, and they are almost always problematic, what can you really expect? We can't fix mummy and daddy dying on the way home from a date because they were too busy canoodling to pay attention to driving. But we can, perhaps, provide better oversight for more rudimentary and regular signs of abuse. (There is a good COVID rant here.)

I would assume you've lost interest long before now. But I find your posts have gotten a lot less ornery and more cogent over the years. Perhaps I have done the same. Maybe not. No way to really know. Maybe someone will go back and backtest our different usernames over the years with the help of AI and feed them in for agreeability. The Guy can explain that this is due to our rising estrogen levels and lack of T. And so the world turns.

This is some real sociopath shit right here. Ham (assuming you weren't really "cooking" but reheating) is pretty simple as is salmon. But to layer two fairly simple meats on top of two reasonably difficult meat items is whew. And the fixings is just an exercise in project management. I assume you are not the farmhouse wife with 2-3 ovens and a six burner stove, which makes the entire exercise tedious at best. That being said, if you have a 8 burner, 3 stove setup, plus a french top, this becomes a trivial exercise that is slightly more difficult than just doing the stuff and requires no planning. Sadly even my kitchen plan does not include a french top, which means I'll need to plan how to keep some things warm that aren't oven suitable. Holidays are a nightmare. (Personal aside: Blood sausage is extremely common here. I do not like blown out sausage. No one else sees any problem with this. I could save myself a decent amount of time just blasting the shit out a sausage and being done with it. But my pride does not let me even entertain the idea. And so I sit and make time sheets, evaluate different cooking times and temps, and develop plans. Luckily I'm old and have done this dozens of times so I can do this all mentally. But man... mailing it in would be ezpz.)

However, I am very happy that we're almost all at the point in our lives where these our biggest struggles. We've even formally lost Emoken now. (RIP) There is something to be said for playing out the string. Then again this assume we're a top tier SEC team (choose your preference and time period), playing an early season FCS team. Even the half-assing we do nowadays is grossly better than the really hard work we did a decade earlier.

It is definitely more project management; I have two ovens and five burners, but neither dinner occurred at my house, so some added difficulty involving transportation and keeping stuff warm. Most of the Christmas Day cooking (outside of what I'd prepped earlier) occurred at my brother-in-law's place, which simplified that part of it.

The turkey is actually much easier than you're thinking; the new hotness on foodie YouTubes is to break the turkey down completely the day before cooking and use the carcass to make stock for the gravy. The dark meat quarters take about 60-70 minutes and the breasts (now boneless) take about 40 minutes (obviously sear off the skin for a few minutes before roasting). This is my third year doing it this way, and it's a big hit every time; I recommend it highly.

The prime rib is also easy; I've been doing it for the last 16 years, after I came for Christmas with my wife's family for the first time and asked her to politely offer my services for cooking it after the atrocity I was forced to eat. It's just the bog standard serious eats reverse sear, so it's almost impossible to **** up if you own a thermometer. Dry brining both the turkey and the prime rib with homemade herb salt the day before cooking is an easy way to level up.

The sides were roasted and dressed beats, horseradish mashed potatoes, roasted carrots, sauteed green beans, spinach stuffing,Yorkshire pudding, horseradish cream sauce for the beef, and tzatziki for the fish; I did as much as I could ahead of time, and had some help with a few of the sides, so it wasn't terrible. The hardest part was doing it sober, since I had a run scheduled this morning.

I can't say I have much experience with authentic blood sausage; I've ordered it a few times, but I generally pussy out and stick to the kinds more familiar to my ugly American palate when I'm abroad. I respect the autism about cooking it optimally if it enters your orbit, though.

Amen to that.

Monte,

So my assumptions were based on normie 4 burners and 1 oven assumptions. The prime rib is a fucking gong show to manage without multiple ovens simply because it takes hours and hours at low temp and then you need to heat your oven up to near max (or max) and that is inherently problematic since you need to manage to either sear and serve, after heating all your other items that need oven time, or leave oven door open, wait for it to cool, throw something else in, and pray.

With 2 or more ovens, much of this becomes fairly trivial tbh.

I genuinely dislike turkey making. I've done it a variety of ways (not the way you described however), but I feel like turkey is easily worse than chicken and substantially worse than "good roasts" and probably equal to just a lazy ass pork joint when I do all the fancy shit. My personal view is that a duck, goose or other waterfowl (who knows what weird shit you can get now), roasted over vege would be a superior experience esp when coupled with leftover options. However, one of the new things I noticed where that breasts are now easily purchasable. Bone on breast roasts seem to be the easiest thing for folks who demand a roasted turkey breast. Then again this depends on your bird, your generic stuff contains basically no subcutaneous fat, whereas many of the weird "organic" birds I've seen in Europe have substantial amount (my only experience with fancy turkey). Granted this could meaningfully change my view, but once we start to inch up the price scale from a .99c frozen Butterball, couldn't I just get a leg of lamb, or a prime rib? If we're paying $4 a lbs for turkey... could I end up with an amazing pork belly roulade for less money? Again, this is entirely personal preference. I don't think anyone on this forum is really worrying about $2 for their Christmas main per serving, but I'm also not a fan of just pissing it away.

Roasted carrots are a very underrated side and one I did not make this year. While most of that isn't on my menu (Mac and cheese, green bean casserole, roast potato, corn bread, pepper gravy, assorted pickled items, blood sausage and a skin on pork butt) I don't see anything wrong with those choices and I am somewhat intrigued esp by the horseradish taters. (Have functionally infinite access to fresh horseradish.)

On the blood sausage, my issue is the exact same as every other sausage. Do not burst them. If you wanna slit and fry a cased meat, sure. But don't do it randomly with too high heat. But these are people who almost all (younger kids excepted) engaged in subsistence farming, so if they wanna fry the shit out of a sausage and "like" it that way, when they make dinner, they can go nuts. But I sure as shit will have all my encased meats with the casing on the outside and the meat part on the inside.

Well, generally I would say I have undergone a revelation that liberalism is directionally correct; but needs to be protected from its own excesses. My previous self would just rant about what was wrong, without really thinking of what the alternative was.

When I first starting skimming this thread again after a very long hiatus I was a little amused that so many of you guys became Trump supporters (or at least felt he was the lesser evil). I am the last person to defend progressivism, as I have essentially been railing against it for 20 years; but I am equally skeptical that the right wing cult of personality/populism that Trump represents is going to result in better outcomes.

I dont know if you go on X platform, or if you do what kind of discussions the algorithm pushes you into. But there is an interesting thing going on where Musk made some comments about modifying the visa system to allow more skilled workers in, and he got a monstrous right wing populist backlash from it; which should really surprise no one if you have been paying attention.

Trump for his part hasn't waded into that stream yet; as he seems preoccupied with threatening a hostile takeover with various neighboring countries at the moment. Which again, isn't too surprising; as Trump is definitely in what Bill Simmons calls "The Tyson Zone," meaning he is so erratic and unpredictable there is pretty much nothing he would do or say that would be a giant shock at this point.

I am not loving the new look forum

just stick forumserver. in front and you're back in business on the old one

Nice one. It switched when I clicked on the obvious spam post, and I failed to find the trick to go back.