You know what’s really weird? From what I can tell (having read descriptions/reviews and some scattered bits of the book itself), the parts of The Bell Curve that aren’t about race are dedicated to making a completely standard disability-rights type argument that could be almost effortlessly rephrased using terms like “ableism,” “accommodations,” “cognitive privilege,” etc.

Basically Charles Murray thinks the social structures around us have been designed by people with high IQs on the assumption that everyone can do the things they can do, and just as easily as they can do them, and so the world is lacking in figurative “wheelchair ramps” for people who don’t have relatively high cognitive ability. His policy proposals at the end are stuff like “more accommodations” and “better social safety net.”

I know next to nothing about Murray, but have to I imagine that when he hears “IQ research is bad because it was used to justify eugenics,” it sounds to him like “some people wanted to sterilize people who couldn’t walk, and that involved identifying who could walk and who couldn’t, so let’s just pretend everyone can walk. What could go wrong?”

This isn’t some horseshoe theory joke or any other kind of “own,” or like, anything, it’s honestly unsetting how leftist this stuff sounds and how easy it is to imagine it being a standard leftist concern. And hell, if this critique of society is true, well, most people are never going to know that, because it’s written in The Horrible Book, by Voldemort, and not really (m)any other places that I know of

What if Charles Murray is right about why people suffer and there are people suffering who will go on suffering because instead of spreading the idea in a pragmatic way, he chose to put it in something that would predictably become The Horrible Book by Voldemort and make very very sure no one would go near the radioactive idea for decades, what if, what if. These are the kind of things that bother me, like, constantly, as ever-present background noise whenever I think about Serious matters, and, argh,