Assimilation?

The fact that he is attacking real people

The Quran never says to kill innocent people

The Truth:
Yes, the Quran never says to kill innocent people. Unfortunately, it does say that people who don't follow Allah's Law are not innocent - even if they are outwardly Muslim... and it does say to kill them.

This is explained in this article: Myth - It is Against Islam to Kill Innocent People

So, if a Muslim apologist asks where the Quran says to kill "innocent people," ask where the Quran states that non-believers are innocent - and, if so, why they are sent to Hell.

However, such a discussion typically results in proof that I am correct.

What I have seen in these discussions is that you end up believing that you were proven correct... and so does the other person. I have been in lots of discussions with you here. I have never seen anyone who started out disagreeing with you and ended up accepting that you were correct all along.

And I have never seen you convinced by someone else's facts.

Pretty much you and everyone else ends up with "proof" that you were correct all along. So what does that prove?

I have seen no evidence that your facts are superior (i.e. more factual) than anyone else's.

You seem to have a lot of them though.

Can anyone find the original news story, from "Fox 9 News"

Ultimately, race science depends on a third claim: that different IQ averages between population groups have a genetic basis. If this case falls, the whole edifice -- from Ashkenazi exceptionalism to the supposed inevitability of black poverty -- collapses with it.

Before we can properly assess these claims, it is worth looking at the history of IQ testing. The public perception of IQ tests is that they provide a measure of unchanging intelligence, but when we look deeper, a very different picture emerges. Alfred Binet, the modest Frenchman who invented IQ testing in 1904, knew that intelligence was too complex to be expressed in a single number. "Intellectual qualities ... cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured," he insisted, adding that giving IQ too much significance "may give place to illusions."

But Binet's tests were embraced by Americans who assumed IQ was innate, and used it to inform immigration, segregationist and eugenic policies. Early IQ tests were packed with culturally loaded questions. ("The number of a Kaffir's legs is: 2, 4, 6, 8?" was one of the questions in IQ tests given to US soldiers during the first world war.) Over time, the tests became less skewed and began to prove useful in measuring some forms of mental aptitude. But this tells us nothing about whether scores are mainly the product of genes or of environment. Further information is needed.

One way to test this hypothesis would be to see if you can increase IQ by learning. If so, this would show that education levels, which are purely environmental, affect the scores. It is now well-known that if you practise IQ tests your score will rise, but other forms of study can also help. In 2008, Swiss researchers recruited 70 students and had half of them practise a memory-based computer game. All 35 of these students saw their IQs increase, and those who practised daily, for the full 19 weeks of the trial, showed the most improvement.

Another way to establish the extent to which IQ is determined by nature rather than nurture would be to find identical twins separated at birth and subsequently raised in very different circumstances. But such cases are unusual, and some of the most influential research -- such as the work of the 20th-century English psychologist Cyril Burt, who claimed to have shown that IQ was innate -- has been dubious. (After Burt's death, it was revealed that he had falsified much of his data.)

A genuine twin study was launched by the Minneapolis-based psychologist Thomas Bouchard in 1979, and although he was generously backed by the overtly racist Pioneer Fund, his results make interesting reading. He studied identical twins, who have the same genes, but who were separated close to birth. This allowed him to consider the different contributions that environment and biology played in their development. His idea was that if the twins emerged with the same traits despite being raised in different environments, the main explanation would be genetic.

The problem was that most of his identical twins were adopted into the same kinds of middle-class families. So it was hardly surprising that they ended up with similar IQs. In the relatively few cases where twins were adopted into families of different social classes and education levels, there ended up being huge disparities in IQ -- in one case a 20-point gap; in another, 29 points, or the difference between "dullness" and "superior intelligence" in the parlance of some IQ classifications. In other words, where the environments differed substantially, nurture seems to have been a far more powerful influence than nature on IQ.

But what happens when you move from individuals to whole populations? Could nature still have a role in influencing IQ averages? Perhaps the most significant IQ researcher of the last half century is the New Zealander Jim Flynn. IQ tests are calibrated so that the average IQ of all test subjects at any particular time is 100. In the 1990s, Flynn discovered that each generation of IQ tests had to be more challenging if this average was to be maintained. Projecting back 100 years, he found that average IQ scores measured by current standards would be about 70.

Yet people have not changed genetically since then. Instead, Flynn noted, they have become more exposed to abstract logic, which is the sliver of intelligence that IQ tests measure. Some populations are more exposed to abstraction than others, which is why their average IQ scores differ. Flynn found that the different averages between populations were therefore entirely environmental.

This finding has been reinforced by the changes in average IQ scores observed in some populations. The most rapid has been among Kenyan children -- a rise of 26.3 points in the 14 years between 1984 and 1998, according to one study. The reason has nothing to do with genes. Instead, researchers found that, in the course of half a generation, nutrition, health and parental literacy had improved.

So, what about the Ashkenazis? Since the 2005 University of Utah paper was published, DNA research by other scientists has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are far less genetically isolated than the paper argued. On the claims that Ashkenazi diseases were caused by rapid natural selection, further research has shown that they were caused by a random mutation. And there is no evidence that those carrying the gene variants for these diseases are any more or less intelligent than the rest of the community.

But it was on IQ that the paper's case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: "Our figures ... would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent". And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average.

A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn't just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.

No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University's human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: "It's bad science -- not because it's provocative, but because it's bad genetics and bad epidemiology."

It's happened five times over the years. Each time, I was wrong only on a side issue and not my main point.

There is a significant difference between "me being correct and knowing it" and "a delusional person believing themselves to be correct when they are not".

This difference is only in your own mind.

This always happens. Two people on the internet both are sure they are correct (and "know it"), and they both think the other person is delusional.

At least fifty percent of the time that someone on the internet is "correct and knows it", they are wrong (and since it is possible that they are both wrong, it is likely more than 50%). And yet, somehow no one is ever wrong on the internet.

Everyone on the internet is correct and knows it. And, everyone thinks that everyone else is delusional.

Wrong. The difference between "people who are correct" and "people who are delusional" exists in reality.

How is what you are saying different than what a delusional person would say?

I think you are saying that you are right 100% of the time (except on side issues) and that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong. That is silly (if not delusional).

Humans are fallible. We are correct sometimes and wrong sometimes. Even when we are completely sure we are right, sometimes we are still wrong. Are you a human?

Sorry to break this to you. But you are probably not any more correct than anyone else on the internet.

You are being silly, Oralloy.

You have your 100% track record of always being proven correct because you are judging yourself.

Is there anyone else who can vouch for your exceptional brilliance?

This idle boasting about how incredibly intelligent you are so you are never wrong is a little much, don't you think?

It takes intelligence, and maturity, to be able to accept your own fallibility. The truly intelligent people I have met do just that.

There is the small matter of me not being delusional and actually being correct.