As lots of Anerican commentators have pointed out, the people keenest on using IQ to protect criminals from punishment are those most opposed to using IQ testing in education and employment.
Another supporting point for my view that biorealism would not necessarily be the magic bullet against left-liberalism.
The likes of Freddie DeBoer for example believe that it is unjust that many should be excluded from opportunity for immutable characteristics of intelligence. Hence he believes in greater social justice measures to uplift them.
You say the likes of Freddie DeBoer, but he seems completely unique in his attitude. I don't think anyone else on the left has his view on IQ or Education.
Just came here in case no one had yet pointed out that labour want to lower the franchise to an age they don’t think you can be held responsible for murder
A state loses authority not when it falls, but when the population stops believing that it can act. We are well into the collapse of authority in the west. Legitimacy devolves when demographic and cultural fractures deepen due to mass migration, ethnic diversification, and value pluralism.
I love Ed's writing, but it is almost too sad to keep reading how the UK is slowly swirling down the drain by various means. On a more upbeat note, here in America, a teenager, probably with low impulse control, was just convicted of murder for stabbing another teen to death. The jury only deliberated for 3 hours and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. All this despite the media trying to make it "racially charged". Apparently the jury was having none of it.
How can you suggest that prisoners have an average IQ of 87 when Netflix and Nordic Noir clearly show that most murderers are debonair masterminds? Indeed, Agatha Christie has demonstrated that half of them live in posh country houses. So there!
presumably the ones who get away with it have a much higher IQ!
Theodore Dalrymple used to say that whenever he struck up a cultured conversation with an inmate he could always guess what he was in for - noncing. But presumably even they are dimmer than average.
This probably doesn’t apply to low category prisons and white collar criminals.
In my city there is a small prison for p*dophiles. Someone who worked in the Prison Service once told me that, because the inmates were unlikely to be violent or rowdy, working there was considered a comparatively "easy gig" by prison guards.
Unwisely, I mentioned this to some acquaintances and must have phrased it clumsily, because I got looks of baffled horror. "Oh my God, you think that would be a *nice* place to work??" I thought it prudent to stop digging and change the subject.
Yes. There was a young man in my county, mid-twenties, who had been jailed for sexual crimes against minors including the rape of an 11 year old girl.
He appeared on television talking about what he'd done and at the end he said that he was due to be released soon, having served his sentence, and he virtually pleaded to be chemically castrated because he feared that he would do it again if given the chance.
I ended up feeling quite sorry for him, despite what he'd done; he had a rough problem that he didn't know how to handle.
Bit disappointed that nobody is picking up on the murder of 55 year old grandfather Mark Carroll by 19 year old illegal immigrant Rasheed Rahman in Camden in 2024 , tried and convicted last week.
No sentence as yet.
I came upon it as I was trying to tease out what makes an unprovoked lethal attack “racist” .
I look forward to someone elucidating it for me.
Funny thing - it happened in April 2024 and garnered effectively nil publicity but at the end of last week the Met decided that a review into its handling of the case needed a review.
Talking about teenage Killers, Graham Young comes to mind. After poisoning several members of his family (one fatally) and a schoolfriend in the early 1960s, he spent nearly nine years in Broadmoor and, having been assessed as having been cured, was released at the age of 23 only to embark on another poisoning spree (and again people died).
The problem as I see it is that it's very difficult to lock up a fourteen year old for life, even one as severely psychopathic as he was; all the optics are against it, and yet we don't really know what to do with such people.
Maybe a liberal society can't deal with them effectively. It's similar in some ways to the Midwich Cuckoos John Wyndham wrote about in his book of the same name; people who by their very nature pose an intolerable threat to the society of which they are a part, and force it to take extreme and uncharacteristic measures in order to protect itself.
I suppose you could justify a lesser sentence for someone who could read by arguing they were more useful to society than someone who couldn't - kind of like the German physicists given new lives in the USA and Russia after WWII. Yet quite how you justify giving lesser sentences to people who are of zero use to society and represent a grave danger to the general public is just one more example of the mad world of runaway progressivism.
We had a horribly lenient juvenile court judge in Baltimore who gave out slaps on the wrist to minors even for truly heinous crimes. His retirement and the forced resignation of the corrupt and incompetent main prosecutor may well be a factor in the steep fall of the city's crime rate.
I am leery about linking low IQ to poor impulse control. Animals like horses and dogs are decidedly less intelligent than us, but can still be trained to behave themselves.
Judges reap only benefits from their progressive ideological positions. This would change overnight with a rule that any judge deviating from the set maximum sentence for a crime will be debarred should the early released criminal go on to commit any crime that otherwise would not have been committed had the maximum sentence been applied. Also, it would be easy enough to legislate for higher maximum sentences. Some things are hugely frustrating because so easily fixed.
IDK, I think there is much to be said for leniency towards the under-21s. Their brains have not matured, and they have little autonomy - what they get up to is largely a reflection of how dutiful their parents are.
Not too long ago, all these low-intelligence low-lifes would have been treated as living arguments for mercy killing....i.e. the death sentence or at least a lifetime stay in a mental ward without parole.
Policy making on crime is so odd it rejects both technocratic considerations and populism, it just ends up being unpopular and ineffective with ministers not taking any responsibility.
It is harder than you would expect, if competently administered, because there are some questions that everyone can get right, so to produce a valid low test you have to work out the right ones to still pass.
Yes. Jamie Kelso (who went on to become an administrator on Stormfront under the pen name Charles A Lindbergh) once wrote about his experiences in trying to dodge the draft (for Vietnam) by failing the entrance test.
He said that the first time he took it, he got all the questions wrong, and the Navy (I think) recruiter told him to try again because no one ever does that badly. He did so, and scored a hundred which he said was the first they had ever seen.
"An offender with low impulse control . . . more likely to reoffend.'
I can't help thinking that in medieval times with rather little by way of law-enforcement, such matters were likely to be dealt with by means of what we may call community punishments. A young scallywag about his nefarious business one dark night would find himself terminally admonished into a nearby ditch. I can imagine that there were established customs in such matters; for which little evidence would be found in the local manorial records.
So long as things did not get out of hand, labour services performed and order maintained, the local gentry, I imagine, would have no reason to intervene. Trickier, I suppose, if the rapscallion were one of their own; off to the Crusades with him, perhaps.
Asylum systems in Europe work in a similar way too. The dumber you are, the less immigration services are allowed to 'expect' from a person's statements in terms of coherence/consistency, etc. So there is a benefit to playing dumb
As lots of Anerican commentators have pointed out, the people keenest on using IQ to protect criminals from punishment are those most opposed to using IQ testing in education and employment.
Another supporting point for my view that biorealism would not necessarily be the magic bullet against left-liberalism.
The likes of Freddie DeBoer for example believe that it is unjust that many should be excluded from opportunity for immutable characteristics of intelligence. Hence he believes in greater social justice measures to uplift them.
You say the likes of Freddie DeBoer, but he seems completely unique in his attitude. I don't think anyone else on the left has his view on IQ or Education.
Not at the present at least.
Just came here in case no one had yet pointed out that labour want to lower the franchise to an age they don’t think you can be held responsible for murder
Well done, great piece.
A state loses authority not when it falls, but when the population stops believing that it can act. We are well into the collapse of authority in the west. Legitimacy devolves when demographic and cultural fractures deepen due to mass migration, ethnic diversification, and value pluralism.
We are coming close to a tipping point.
I love Ed's writing, but it is almost too sad to keep reading how the UK is slowly swirling down the drain by various means. On a more upbeat note, here in America, a teenager, probably with low impulse control, was just convicted of murder for stabbing another teen to death. The jury only deliberated for 3 hours and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. All this despite the media trying to make it "racially charged". Apparently the jury was having none of it.
35 still to low for that miscreant.
How can you suggest that prisoners have an average IQ of 87 when Netflix and Nordic Noir clearly show that most murderers are debonair masterminds? Indeed, Agatha Christie has demonstrated that half of them live in posh country houses. So there!
presumably the ones who get away with it have a much higher IQ!
Theodore Dalrymple used to say that whenever he struck up a cultured conversation with an inmate he could always guess what he was in for - noncing. But presumably even they are dimmer than average.
This probably doesn’t apply to low category prisons and white collar criminals.
In my city there is a small prison for p*dophiles. Someone who worked in the Prison Service once told me that, because the inmates were unlikely to be violent or rowdy, working there was considered a comparatively "easy gig" by prison guards.
Unwisely, I mentioned this to some acquaintances and must have phrased it clumsily, because I got looks of baffled horror. "Oh my God, you think that would be a *nice* place to work??" I thought it prudent to stop digging and change the subject.
Yeah me too. It’s an affliction
Yes. There was a young man in my county, mid-twenties, who had been jailed for sexual crimes against minors including the rape of an 11 year old girl.
He appeared on television talking about what he'd done and at the end he said that he was due to be released soon, having served his sentence, and he virtually pleaded to be chemically castrated because he feared that he would do it again if given the chance.
I ended up feeling quite sorry for him, despite what he'd done; he had a rough problem that he didn't know how to handle.
Bit disappointed that nobody is picking up on the murder of 55 year old grandfather Mark Carroll by 19 year old illegal immigrant Rasheed Rahman in Camden in 2024 , tried and convicted last week.
No sentence as yet.
I came upon it as I was trying to tease out what makes an unprovoked lethal attack “racist” .
I look forward to someone elucidating it for me.
Funny thing - it happened in April 2024 and garnered effectively nil publicity but at the end of last week the Met decided that a review into its handling of the case needed a review.
Headscratcher or what?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rasheed-rahman-murder-mental-health-police-b2985286.html
yeah it's horrific - I tweeted about it, and waiting to find out more about why it was allowed to happen. am asking around
👍
Got a definition of racist murder yet ?
Not holding my breath.
Don’t care. Just don’t want to be murdered by anyone of any race. Don’t care if they hate me either
Talking about teenage Killers, Graham Young comes to mind. After poisoning several members of his family (one fatally) and a schoolfriend in the early 1960s, he spent nearly nine years in Broadmoor and, having been assessed as having been cured, was released at the age of 23 only to embark on another poisoning spree (and again people died).
The problem as I see it is that it's very difficult to lock up a fourteen year old for life, even one as severely psychopathic as he was; all the optics are against it, and yet we don't really know what to do with such people.
Maybe a liberal society can't deal with them effectively. It's similar in some ways to the Midwich Cuckoos John Wyndham wrote about in his book of the same name; people who by their very nature pose an intolerable threat to the society of which they are a part, and force it to take extreme and uncharacteristic measures in order to protect itself.
I suppose you could justify a lesser sentence for someone who could read by arguing they were more useful to society than someone who couldn't - kind of like the German physicists given new lives in the USA and Russia after WWII. Yet quite how you justify giving lesser sentences to people who are of zero use to society and represent a grave danger to the general public is just one more example of the mad world of runaway progressivism.
We had a horribly lenient juvenile court judge in Baltimore who gave out slaps on the wrist to minors even for truly heinous crimes. His retirement and the forced resignation of the corrupt and incompetent main prosecutor may well be a factor in the steep fall of the city's crime rate.
I am leery about linking low IQ to poor impulse control. Animals like horses and dogs are decidedly less intelligent than us, but can still be trained to behave themselves.
Judges reap only benefits from their progressive ideological positions. This would change overnight with a rule that any judge deviating from the set maximum sentence for a crime will be debarred should the early released criminal go on to commit any crime that otherwise would not have been committed had the maximum sentence been applied. Also, it would be easy enough to legislate for higher maximum sentences. Some things are hugely frustrating because so easily fixed.
IDK, I think there is much to be said for leniency towards the under-21s. Their brains have not matured, and they have little autonomy - what they get up to is largely a reflection of how dutiful their parents are.
Not too long ago, all these low-intelligence low-lifes would have been treated as living arguments for mercy killing....i.e. the death sentence or at least a lifetime stay in a mental ward without parole.
Policy making on crime is so odd it rejects both technocratic considerations and populism, it just ends up being unpopular and ineffective with ministers not taking any responsibility.
If low IQ is a reason to get a lower sentence - can't people deliberately fail IQ tests?
It is harder than you would expect, if competently administered, because there are some questions that everyone can get right, so to produce a valid low test you have to work out the right ones to still pass.
Yes. Jamie Kelso (who went on to become an administrator on Stormfront under the pen name Charles A Lindbergh) once wrote about his experiences in trying to dodge the draft (for Vietnam) by failing the entrance test.
He said that the first time he took it, he got all the questions wrong, and the Navy (I think) recruiter told him to try again because no one ever does that badly. He did so, and scored a hundred which he said was the first they had ever seen.
"An offender with low impulse control . . . more likely to reoffend.'
I can't help thinking that in medieval times with rather little by way of law-enforcement, such matters were likely to be dealt with by means of what we may call community punishments. A young scallywag about his nefarious business one dark night would find himself terminally admonished into a nearby ditch. I can imagine that there were established customs in such matters; for which little evidence would be found in the local manorial records.
So long as things did not get out of hand, labour services performed and order maintained, the local gentry, I imagine, would have no reason to intervene. Trickier, I suppose, if the rapscallion were one of their own; off to the Crusades with him, perhaps.
Protection of the (innocent) Public should be the greatest motivator. I am a proponent of long sentences and three strikes laws.
Asylum systems in Europe work in a similar way too. The dumber you are, the less immigration services are allowed to 'expect' from a person's statements in terms of coherence/consistency, etc. So there is a benefit to playing dumb