I have no love for Barry Bonds. I don’t like cheaters, but let’s not pretend he’s the first, last, or only person to cheat in professional sports. The Mitchell report shows that to be true in baseball. The Mitchell report ALSO shows that taking steroids doesn’t automatically give you the homerun title. Some of these guys are very mediocre MLB players. There is a demand from much of the public to put an asterisk next to EVERY single record any of the players on the Mitchell report. Keep in mind steroids became illegal in the MLB in 2002, but not really until 2005; what you tolerate you encourage. Critics of this argument say, the MLB didn’t outlaw murder either, so the federal law against it should have been enough. I would tend to agree with that as well. Im not supporting steroid users, Im simply analyzing it from the outside.
You can look at in a much simpler way. People CONSTANTLY foul each other in basketball; offensive linemen hold. Do we go back and look at Superbowl video and determine how many penalties weren’t called on the winning team to determine if they should remain the winner? The winner of these games were “cheating” weren’t they? Their win is “tainted” just like Bonds homerun record.
As I said, I have no love for Barry Bonds. All I question is the objective consistency of the asterisk wielders. His homeruns went up surprisingly in 2000; this is also in conjunction with the Giants new ballpark… which has a very short porch in right field, perfect for a lefty like Bonds.
An interesting analysis of Barry Bonds post-1999 career concludes that 85 homeruns should be taken away based on subtracting 9-18 feet from each home run, causing those 85 to hit the warning track instead of going over.
** Image from dailywaste.com
“Racism has many definitions, the most common and widely accepted being the belief that members of one race are intrinsically superior or inferior to members of other races.” (Wikipedia)
The notion that racism has MANY definitions is nonsense; its simply a manifestation of the exploitation of the concept to silence controversial thought. There was a time in America when if you showed a picture of a white person next to a black person, and asked Jim Bob who was smarter, he and many Americans would have immediately answered that the white person was smarter. That kind of response is extremely ignorant and racist. Just as it is to interchange any race, color, or religion into that scenario in place of white or black. There have been and are today many great minds of impressively high intelligence representing all races, and other identifying features that I will ignore for the remainder of the article to remain focused.
Why does society accept studies that illustrate height differences between races as completely possible, but rejects the possibility that there could be intelligence differences? If one can accept the concept of survival of the fittest, then it follows that taller animals might have a better chance of surviving, simply because taller often means bigger and stronger. More muscle, more weight, better ability to defend itself and survive. Extending that one step toward our conclusion, certain areas of the Earth might have more or less predators. In the areas with less predators, the tall animals survive, but the smaller animals also do. The area with more predators might weed out a HIGHER percentage of the smaller animals. Over hundreds or thousands of years, the population’s average makeup in the two different areas would be different. This illustration can be applied to so many other aspects of a species development: longer tongues on anteater’s, longer necks on giraffes, etc. Why would intelligence be immune to these natural influences?
An intermediate understanding of probability and statistics is all that is necessary to understand why Dr. Watson’s comments were NOT racist. Critics of Dr Watson’s comments have painted him as Jim Bob of the scenario above, which is an ugly mischaracterization. It’s VERY possible Dr. James Watson is a raging racist, but that cannot be determined by the comment he recently made. Dr Watson is referring to the findings of other scientists that indicate the AVERAGE IQ of Africans is lower than “our intelligence” on average (I assume “our” means Americans since he is American, but lets assume he means Caucasians to entertain the critics). It is quite true that scientists have found that there is a difference in the mean IQ of different races. For what its worth, I have no stake in which race wins, in fact, my race is not the winner. The misunderstanding that occurs when discussing this subject is the concept of a probability distribution. The 10 smartest people on earth could all be from the race with the lowest average, and this fact would not substantially affect the average. The average or mean is the sum of all the IQs of the subjects in the sample taken, divided by the number of subjects. The sample of subjects in all the races is made up of really stupid, average, and really smart people. Just because your race’s average isn’t the winner has nothing to do with your intelligence.
An ignorance of statistics combined with knee-jerk, irrational political correctness has condemned an amazingly important man of modern science. Just because his statements were blunt and insensitive does not dispute the veracity of the statements. As I said before, I have no stake in whether his statements and the studies they were based on are true or not. All I know is they have not been disputed by contrary studies. Im sorry that people of African descent are offended by these statements, but the fact that white people’s feelings might be hurt by the statement “White men can’t jump” doesn’t change the fact west africans have more fast twich muscle fibers than European whites. Regardless of who wins, is it so hard to believe that people of different races have different numbers of “fast twitch” brain “muscles”?
What Dr Watson said…
“In an interview with his former protege Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really.”
