1/ *71-IQ Syrian migrant held fully criminally culpable** In a remarkable development, a German forensic psychiatrist declared that the Syrian migrant who stabbed 13 people, killing 3, at a "festival of diversity" in Solingen last year was "fully criminally culpable".
2/ I call this development "remarkable" because it's common for foreign criminals who commit violent attacks in Germany to be held less than fully responsible for their crimes because of real or claimed psychological problems. https://www.br.de/nachrichten/...
3/ Court-appointed shrinks often seem to proceed on the assumption that someone who begins yelling and screaming and stabbing people at random probably isn't right in the head, and the task of the shrink is only to find out exactly *how* they're not right in the head.
4/ Which is understandable from a human perspective, but bad news for German society, since it means unstable violent men will be held in psychiatric institutions and subjected to ineffectual "treatment" for a few years before being released. But in this case, Issa H.
5/ will go to prison. Issa's best claim for reduced culpability was his IQ of 71, which is exactly on the border of intellectual disability in Western Europe, where the average IQ is about 100 and 70 is 2 standard deviations below the mean.
6/ However, the psychiatrist noted, an IQ of 71 is in the "low normal range" for Syria. It's amazing that the psychiatrist invoked these findings -- there is a *ferocious* taboo on discussions of IQ in Germany based on the fact that one of the many categories of people
7/ singled out for murder under the Nazi T4 program was people with severe mental retardation. The phenomenon of "taboo creep" then took hold: Because the National Socialists had used criterion X to single people out for persecution, no decent person may ever use
8/ criterion X to make *any* sort of judgment about *anyone*. That also goes for cultures: Because the National Socialists considered German culture superior to other cultures and then used that judgment to justify war and persecution, it is impermissible for a right-
9/ thinking German to draw any unflattering distinctions about any other culture, no matter how obviously backward or violent. This practice of reality denial established itself in the German bureaucratic and professional classes in the 1970s and persists to this day.
10/ It was the key driving factor behind Germany's decision to open its borders in 2015. At that time, it was not permissible to hazard a guess at the ability levels of the scruffy young males streaming into Germany or to argue that the culture of the countries they
11/ came from was backward and not a good fit for an advanced high-trust nation such as Germany. The mantra everyone was forced to recite to remain respectable is that immigrants are interchangeable, fungible units: an illiterate 65-IQ migrant from a Syrian backwater was no
12/ less likely to contribute to German society than a microbiology Ph.D. from Canada, and it was racist to even suggest such a thing. But now, 10 years of experience have eroded the taboos on IQ and cultural difference, although discourse matrons are still striving to keep them
13/ standing. 10 years ago, the idea that a forensic psychiatrist would even *mention* national IQ studies in a high-profile case would have provoked considerable outrage, perhaps even protests. By now, however, Germany has gained much bitter experience. https://www.astralcodexten.com...