Some sucker dragged up The Bell Curver again and Eschaton has to deal with it:
Good researchers, liberal and otherwise, do plenty of work looking at racial differences in achievement. There’s plenty of work looking at the role of parental characteristics, as well as environmental factors, and the degree of their influence on various outcomes. Liberals don’t shy away from these subjects, they just shy away of people who play the little rhetorical game of focusing on intelligence, and the implied immutability, as well as people for whom The Bell Curve is a starting place for this discussion. There is intrinsic racism in both of these, so if liberals shy away from this conversation it’s simply because they’re shying away from bigots. Even some of their detractors fell for this rhetorical game, praising them for their ‘bravery’ for broaching these ‘sensitive issues.’ These issues aren’t sensitive, they’re needlessly and deliberately insensitive in the way that they’re being addressed, and the assumptions implicit in them.
(The premisse of The Bell Curve and similar works, that “intelligent people” are in danger of being swamped by the dull, moronic and stupid is one that has a great attraction to (techno) libertarians, to judge from personal experience. Being part of a subculture that highly praises intelligence and independence, often having experiences of being bullied by the dim and brutish in high school, is it any wonder that The Bell Curve appeals?)