October 7, 2003
IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ENTERTAINMENT:
Rush Was Right, Of Course. But Why? (Steve Sailer, October 05, 2003, V-Dare)
[H]aving written countless articles denouncing the NFL's black quarterback lack as being the result of irrational racism, Big Media now has a vested interest in hyping the new generation of black quarterbacks to prove they were right all along.I'd add that there's another reason the media has overrated McNabb: McNabb has been a bit more exciting than he has been effective.
He's certainly been quite adequate. But you could easily get the impression from the TV sports wrap-up shows that he's the second coming of Joe Montana.
That's because, as with many black quarterbacks, McNabb's best plays, the ones that are shown over and over again, are so much more spectacular than his average plays. [...]
As fun as it is to watch, running is a secondary talent for an NFL quarterback.Unfortunately, the current black quarterbacks generally have less than spectacular passing accuracy, perhaps because they get so banged up carrying the ball. McNabb, for example, has never achieved either of the standard season benchmarks: completing 60 percent of his passes, or averaging seven yards' gain per passing attempt.
Why do black quarterbacks tend to be better runners than white quarterbacks?
For the same reasons that blacks tend to be better runners than whites in all sports. Perhaps the single most self-evident fact about American spectator sports is that blacks, on average, are faster than whites. No human being not of West African descent ever ran 100 meters in less than 10 seconds until this spring, when Patrick Johnson, finally broke that barrier, 35 years after the first Sub-Saharan African. And Johnson is an interesting combination of Australian Aborigine and Irish.
No manifestation of political correctness is more bizarre than that the same folks who believe with Darwin that environmental factors have sorted the biosphere into innumerable different species then turn around and insist that every human ethnic group, from whatever environmental background, must be identical, that race is simply an intellectual construct. You get a mental image of these people trying to drive a dogsled pulled by poodles in order to prove there's no genuine variation among dogs either.
Meanwhile, here's an interesting, if dubious, test that the authors claim mat reveal something about one's racial attitudes, Mind Reading: A simple test uncovers hidden attitudes (Eric Haseltine, Discover)
The polygraph, or lie detector, which measures heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and skin conductance, remains a controversial instrument because it does not directly measure truthfulness but rather physiological arousal, which may or may not signify deception. However, psychologists studying attitudes may have developed a simpler technique that gives more accurate insights into what's going on inside someone's head.Posted by Orrin Judd at October 7, 2003 9:35 AMThis technique, developed by Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, is called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) because it can bring to the surface attitudes and beliefs that people may not even know they have.
Let's see what this test might reveal about you.
Perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule, but I would like to point out that Steve McNair is doing quite well in every benchmark imaginable.
And I've always felt that the 7.0 yards per is a bit useless; it relies on too many factors other than the QB.
Posted by: Chris at October 7, 2003 10:28 AMFootball stats are limited in terms of explanatory power, it seems to me. The only QB stats that seem meaningful are pct. Completions, Interceptions, Passing TD's, Won/Loss. The most important: How many championships? Listen to the offensive linemen describe the best they've played for and it becomes obvious that statistics in football do not tell the tale.
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford,Ct. at October 7, 2003 10:50 AMTom:
Yes, technical skills are rather less important than we'd like to think in many endeavors.
Posted by: oj at October 7, 2003 10:54 AMLook at the purest atletic competitions...
a) Sprinting - dominated by one ethnic group (west African)
b) Distance - dominated by another (east African)
c) strong-man/power lifting - yet another (eastern
and northern European)
More well-rounded athletic endeavors are of course
harder to pigeon hole because they require a
variety of phyiscal traits.
Interestingly if white QB's really do throw better
passes does that mean that they would actually
be better at throwing spears?
JH:
It seems so:
http://www2.iaaf.org/TheSport/sport/jt/MenLandmarks.html
Posted by: oj at October 7, 2003 11:12 AMFor me what makes baseball a fascinating sport
is that it seems to reward a whole variety of
physical attributes preferably wrapped up in
a single package. Of all of the major sports
(aside from hockey which is regional)
it is the everyman's game.
From an Iditarod website:
"Chugiak musher John Suter had tried to mush poodles in the race -- one was filmed by TV crews frozen to the ice in McGrath in 1989 (the dog wasfreed unharmed), another died of hypothermia in a 1991 blizzard. After Iditarod board members passed a rule limiting the race to "northernbreeds" and rebuffed Suter's efforts to get them to reconsider, he attacked the race, fueling a nationwide letter-writing campaign and boycotts byanimal rights groups."
I think that the test is biased to detect racism. It's harder to do the second phase because you have to "unlearn" your reactions to the first phase (perhaps that's different for people who don't play first person shooters). There's also the fact that the time to move the mouse is non-trivial). Also, if you click twice it records the wrong reaction time.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at October 7, 2003 1:23 PMAOG said what I was going to; I kept associating Good with Left for the first couple of clicks. The difference in times was identical to the delay in the first two responses.
Posted by: Chris at October 7, 2003 1:55 PMAnonymous:
That's awesome, thanks. Of course if Rush had dismissed the shushing skills of poodles, PETA would firebomb his house.
Posted by: oj at October 7, 2003 2:30 PMThat was me.
Of course the northern breeds only rule would have excluded Buck from The Call of the Wild from running.
I seem to remember him as a Saint Bernard or Newfoundland, not a northern breed like Malamutes, Huskies, or Spitz.
Posted by: Jason Johnson at October 7, 2003 3:52 PMFor what it's worth, my reaction time was longer on the first test than on the second test, and I'm pretty sure I didn't make any double-click errors. I guess, by their criteria, I'm a non-racist. Yay for me.
Posted by: Joe at October 7, 2003 6:05 PMSuter's poodles were standard poodles, though, which are quite a bit larger than what most people think of as "poodles" -- roughly the size of small Labs or Goldens, with males averaging 50-60 lbs. Also, the modern standard poodle was originally bred in Germany and Russia as a duck retriever, so they operate fairly well in cold-weather environments.
Toy poodles are, of course, another matter, but as far as I know, nobody's ever tried to use them as sled dogs.
Posted by: Atlee Breland at October 7, 2003 7:55 PMI had no idea when I woke up this morning that we'd end up discussing the finer points of poodle Iditarod.
Posted by: oj at October 7, 2003 8:25 PMI was nearly ten percent faster on the second than the first.
There is so much learning curve skew in this test as to render the results worthless.
Plus what AOG said.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at October 7, 2003 8:49 PM