Your reaction to Loury reads like "oh, he's one of those", which is not a good sign.
I mean, you made a reference to him being a professor at Brown as if that somehow made him apolitical, and that his words should be heeded more than most other black intellectuals.
Though, for record, I don't think anyone is (or can be) apolitical, but let's not simply brush away the idea that Harris referenced someone who just coincidentally happened to align with his own views on race.
Why does there have to be the sort of stink that exists for talking to Murray? This racist, eugenics stuff is nonsense.
No, it's not. Just listen to some of his quotes that Ezra mentioned in the discussion, where he talks about Black women and immigrants, and his hilarious conclusion in that other book where he measured black people's contributions to civilization by the number of entries they had in Encyclopedia Britannica. We're talking about a guy who didn't seem to know that cross burning was associated with the KKK.
And it doesn't change the fact that the information is there. This is why Harris brings up the neandrathal point. We'll find out things over time. We need to be able to handle them.
This is a very dumb strawman that both you and Harris have brought up. Nobody on the Left (as far as I know) is arguing that we shouldn't study certain things cause the "truth" may be uncomfortable or whatever. That part is fine, and there are people who study this stuff (like the people Ezra had to write that initial article), who nobody finds as controversial as Murray. Hell, the recent meltdown Harris had was because he tweeted an article from the NY Times about race and IQ to Ezra, who he was sure would raise hell, but in fact had very little issue with it.
But (once again), the issue is that such data collected needs to be examined carefully, with context, and not just mindless acceptance (this is another amusing thing about Harris, one of the founders of the Skeptic community, that seems to feel zero need of being skeptical for things like IQ).
When Ezra says his fear is Murray's impact on policy, he's really crying out that he's threatening a pet democratic voter base of the eternally dependent.
Tell us more about these "eternally dependent" demographics.
Which is why Harris bringing in the SPLC is relevant, because the SPLC is basically a political tool that uses the same scare tactics to shakedown wealthy, sheltered east coast white liberals for donations. And it really doesn't care who it runs over with slander in order to do so.
Yup, all the major democratic donors bow at the feet of the might SPLC. That's exactly how it works.
Also, you need to better understand how IQ works than Ezra does to have the conversation Ezra does. I recall that he tries to use Flynn to say that IQ could be explained entirely through environmental factors or at least the gap could be. The probability of that is very low yet not absolutely zero. That is what Flynn is saying because that's how something like this works. For "oppression" to account for this entirely you have to throw out the biological. For biology to account for it all then you have to throw out environment. You don't do that either.
It's just not reasonable to cry out at Sam for not invoking enough of the history of oppression when Sam is looking at ti scientifically. Oppression is a universal human experience, especially once you go evolutionary and extend what you're looking at over hundreds to thousands of years. Slavery and Jim Crow are just too small a piece of history to blame it all upon. You have to throw out the distribution whole, because you would have to explain how the highest ends of that population escape the problem. You'll notice how Ezra completely avoids discussing how Asian groups score higher than others or how Jews score higher. Both of those groups have gone through great periods of oppression.
It's best dealt with by looking at the individual, which Ezra does not do. The scientists he drags in are dishonest about the subject. They are cherry picked to defend the attack. When you're dealing with such a highly controversial topic then you are going to have people who abuse the political climate to prop themselves up as defending the moral good rather than be honest about the topic.
1) How are the scientists that Ezra chose "dishonest" about the subject?
2) Why the hell should we accept Murray's work and conclusions on the subject considering he himself has no formal background or education in biology or genetics? (He has a history degree and a poli sci degree for crying out loud)
3) Why didn't Sam accept Ezra's offer to have him debate the topic with one of the scientists he chose?
And the end result isn't anything of value is done, but that the topic is left to the shadows of science or in the hands of the ethnic supremacists. My view is that Klein and Vox are just puppets for higher ups who don't want Blacks to look at social programs as possibly not working for them.
So the bleeding heart libs aren't bleeding heart libs at all?
The same as immigration, its largely a fucking war over vote outcomes rather than any real moral battle. Because the moral battle would realize its handing the topic over to the white supremacists and that's dangerous. The alt-right will know the science and warp it to their aims. If the public doesn't know that's happening then you're handing over the entire topic to the worst people.
You know, this kind of sounds like a similar argument made by the same people who are against the idea of tearing down Confederate monuments because that means nobody will know how to argue that the Confederacy and slavery was bad.
But to reiterate yet again, just like the monument argument, people are fine discussing the topic, but with proper context.
