Last year I published Race, IQ, and Wealth, presenting the overwhelming evidence that group IQs were far more malleable and shaped by social influences than is widely acknowledged in many quarters. The result was a lengthy and ferocious Internet debate, including an overwhelmingly negative and even hostile response to my suggestions, mostly by bloggers who had long specialized in that forbidden topic.

As the dozen or so rounds of the debate played out, some of my critics, including the most scholarly, began to acknowledge that my arguments actually had quite a bit of merit, and these “second thoughts” continued after the controversy had died down.

For example, late last year an erstwhile blogger-critic informed me that he had discovered the precise details of the huge but hotly-disputed 1972 IQ study in Ireland that I had repeatedly cited, and the methodology seemed exceptionally well-designed and sound. Therefore, I think it can not longer be seriously disputed that just forty years the population of Ireland did indeed have a mean IQ of only 87.

The recent defenestration of the unfortunate Dr. Jason Richwine has brought these issues once again back to the fore, and apparently sparked renewed interest. During the previous debate, one of my earliest and strongest quantitative critics had been someone styling himself “The Occidentalist” and running a blog of a similar name. But a few days ago, he published an extremely detailed 5,000 word article entitled “The Argument Ron Should Have Made” in which he now grudgingly acknowledges that many of my central arguments seem to have been correct after all.  This is a welcome change from his original response last year, which had characterized me as “egregiously dishonest” and my views as “laughable commentary.”

As I’ve noted before, it’s a bit ironic to me that virtually all the significant debate on this important topic takes place without the substantive participation of the huge population of “anti-racist” intellectuals, who apparently confine their activities mostly to keeping their fingers firmly jammed in their ears while occasionally organizing employment blacklists of a few Richwines here and there.

Indeed, Steve Sailer, founder and leading figure in the racialist blogging community, yesterday posted an interesting item. Apparently a “leading academic” had contacted him and said he planned to introduce Sailer’s ideologically heretical material in his college course, but was wondering if there existed any remotely plausible arguments on the other side, anywhere on the Internet.

Sailer replied that as far as he knew, no one had ever significantly rebutted his own genetic-determinist theories on IQ or other matters, and that all the prominent intellectual figures who had once tried had long since abandoned their efforts as futile, recognizing that Sailer was entirely correct. To this posting, one of Sailer’s regular commenters replied “LOLOLLLOLOLOLOL!”.