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User ID: 442
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3mo ago
Sorry, I won't do that again.
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4mo ago
The right thinks systemically when it comes to HBD, the left thinks individually. The left thinks systemically about privilege, the right thinks individually about privilege. If you define "the right" as people who think individually, you are drawing a line that excludes a lot of people who both self-define as "right wing" and would be identified as such by a vast majority of people.
HBD is such a niche concept that I would hazard a guess that fewer than 1/100 self-identified right wing people would even know what the initialization means.
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1yr ago
Petition: We are all special snowflakes and we deserve special characters in our user names.
¿Can we please have special characters in our names? I think it would add cool customization to usernames and it ought to (naively) be a simple change to the website.
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6mo ago
Yeah that doesn’t sound like very appealing accommodation, what are you looking to do in the country? Anything I can help with?
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6mo ago
Good luck, which city are you moving to?
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7mo ago
That's cool, I live in Auckland so if you need any information I'll be happy to help.
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7mo ago
Which city are you intending to reside in?
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3mo ago
Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.
I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.
The simple way to settle this would be to:
A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.
Has anyone actually done this?
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3mo ago
See:
“data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world” (subsequently amended to “about as different”). Similarly, educational material distributed by the Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world.”
Here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
In a nutshell, if you take a White or Asian person, they are about as different or as similar as say two White people are.
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3mo ago
This is obviously false. Consider someone living in brazil, 7000 years ago. Their only real chance of spreading genes outside the americas came in the 1500s. That's certainly not enough time. Secondly, it's irrelevant—that everyone at some point shared ancestry doesn't mean everyone is the same along any particular trait. This is really obvious when you consider that this would apply just as much to visual racial markers.
Even historically isolated populations have had significant selection pressure and intermixture with Eurasian peoples. The average age of the most common past ancestor has been put at between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, so in biodiversity terms human beings are closer to Cheetahs than they are to Chimpanzees. There isn't a significant amount of 'diversity' within the population to start with.
Okay? Two different responses to that. (1) If race is just something we made up, that doesn't stop us from doing statistics on it, and that doesn't mean that the stats can't tell us averages of the people who happen to be in whatever made-up categories we throw them into. This is especially relevant when people are already drawing up racial stats on representation or whatever—there should be no problem with using the same categories, to show that it's actually not all discrimination! (2) Race isn't perfect, but it does act as a proxy for genetically closer clusters of people.
It also acts as a proxy for environmental and sociocultural factors as well. Melanin levels as far as I am aware have little to know direct impact on brain development, but it still has a clear and measurable effect on social and cultural factors.
I'm not familiar with how the Gaussian-by-construction biases things; I do find this a plausible concern but don't know enough stats to figure out what things like that would do. But that doesn't void it as a measure entirely, that just means that you can't really compare gaps very well. One standard deviation might mean different things at different places along the scale, but that doesn't mean that the order is invalid.
I.Q. tests are designed for instance to give men and women the same I.Qs on average -- 100. Recent 'gains' by women that raised their relative I.Q. compared to men, IIRC 100 vs 104, would that indicate that women as a group are smarter than men on average, or does in indicate that the factors that lowered women's I.Q. in the past were removed and the test's adjustment hasn't taken that into account yet?
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3mo ago
But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence.
I'm bringing it up because genes do matter, but there simply isn't nearly as much diversity within the human population which means the overall effect of genetics cannot be large on a population level. It tempers the overall impact of any kind of diversity, the fact that we humans are so similar. I simply do not believe that HBD as seemingly commonly held in this forum is nearly strong enough as a concept to use it as a battering ram to dismiss or deflect the mainstream or the left wing's position on this matter.
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3mo ago
Relevant traits such as height, weight, intelligence etc? Compare Europe with Japan, they are very similar and yet separated by thousands of kilometers.
I see this HBD talk here constantly, yet it seems everyone assumes that it is true without bringing evidence, where is the proof for such a bold claim?
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4mo ago
One of the most significant differences between men and women is that women appear to able to be significantly more content and happy outside of relationships and are better able to have fulfilling platonic relationships; whereas men are both less happier and purposeful, and suffer far greater loneliness and isolation from being single. Men as a whole have not evolved culturally to the new playing field, and women are often preferring to be in no relationship than be in a bad relationship -- bad sex, more chores and less freedom. We can argue absolutely that society as a whole has left boys behind in so many ways; but the solutions proposed by the online right are more like willful regression than a genuine means to fix things.
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6mo ago
It's ironic on so many levels. Two groups of socialists, both alike in 'dignity', trying to promote an ideology created by and associated with Jewish people to an anti-Semitic Islamic audience.
Israel itself is a pan-Arabic failure and a symbol of the collective helplessness of the Arab world. We own their leaders and their leaders use this issue to own and control them. We prop up dictators because they are cheap and easy to pay off, and they use whatever tactics are required to ensure we get what we want in return. The reason why they get a pass with the 'Professional/Management class' (PMC) is that it is assumed that we are on an 'auto-win' trajectory. Either they become secularised, educated (westernised) and tolerant; or their entire civilization will collapse into the sand that it emerged from and the remaining muslims will be 'managed' until they are no longer problematic. Unironically I see the way the Left as a coalition treats Islam as irrelevant is more shameful than the rightwing outright hate and mistrust.
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6mo ago
That’s a vile thing to write. It’s a vile thing to contemplate. And that’s the difference between the spirit of ‘68 and the spirit of ‘16. The latter is born of a willingness to confront the ugliness and the foul consequences of the spirit of ‘68. That’s why it trades principally in “hate facts.” The spirit of ‘16 knows that black IQ is on average one standard deviation lower than white. It knows that despite making up just 13% of the population blacks commit 60% of homicides. It knows the average gay man has over 100 different sexual partners in his life, and the outliers may have thousands, and that what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass; It knows that 100% of homosexual adoption is child sexual exploitation. The spirit of ‘16 knows that gender confirmation surgery is adult genital mutilation. It knows that a trans woman is a man who gets off on the idea of himself as a woman, so he has a surgeon cut a bloody gash between his legs, which smells like a septic tank for the rest of his life. The spirit of ‘16 knows that the vast majority of homosexuals, male and female, were sexually abused as children, because homosexuals are vampires who “reproduce” through sexual molestation. This is only the tip of the iceberg, (or the icestein, or the icenthal, if you prefer.)
And the rest isn't actually that much better... Accusing the opposition side of pedophilia, like somehow Chicago Black Panthers are somehow aligned with French intellectuals on child age of consent laws. It's got more than factual error problems, it's basically a shameless bash of the other side and doing so by making some terrible arguments at that.
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1yr ago
This started as a post reply, but I decided to make a top level post instead. It's an opinion piece to sum up my own personal reflection on what used to be 'my side' of the culture war. I believe that by the very definition of racism itself if we used the 'privilege + power' definition a lot of Western institutions and cultural beliefs can easily be classified as racist and as a system of power and hegemony they may actually represent a cultural memeplex that blinds people to the true nature of their beliefs and creates a systemic myopia to what I would define as 'cultural white supremacy'. I'm kind of trying to get back into writing more, but unfortunately in many ways this is kind of a poor attempt and ought to be revised and revisited, and I kind of just wanted to get something out there.
There has been significant trade and cross-pollination of cultural ideas between East and West for a significant length of time. So much of what we would consider to be purely European or American cultural, political and economic ideas have been adopted wholesale or in large part by Eastern nations to the point where I would argue that the argument itself that 'white people' have no culture is in effect a product of the tacit white supremacy of progressive and left leaning intellectuals. It is pure narcissism in the way that they often assume the only cultures with agency are major Western powers and this by extension can deny that same agency to those whom are intended to be helped. The phrase "white people have no culture" can cause annoyance, or worse, to the people on the right; but, considering it as something that essentially camouflages a hegemonic belief system amongst powerful NGOs, governments and businesses that directly interface with a significant proportion of the global population I find it particularly chilling. Focusing attention on a few blow-hards and random easily provoked 'losers' isolated from real institutional power is a giant red herring against the very real and extremely powerful institutional power ideas on the left have.
Cultures can export much more than just music and consumer goods; there is a whole spectrum of significant cultural adoption and adaption to new technologies, economics, geopolitical realities and social/societal relations. Europeans sold much more than guns for instance, they also shared the military culture and tactics that stemmed from it as well. One of the biggest factors is the adoption of Western style education, and especially the university system that represents nearly a 1000 years of European tradition, to the point where higher education is used as an indicator of 'immigrant fitness' in most countries that use a 'merit' based criterion for selecting immigrants. The greater the level of education the better the fit seems to be between the immigrant and the host society when considering net immigration to the West from other areas of the globe. An uneducated illiterate laborer is likely a terrible fit for instance, but as years of education increases the average compatibility improves. One major push for instance is the spreading of education to the masses, which is truly in my opinion an honorable goal, has the added effect of spreading and increasing the cultural hegemony of the West. My imagination of this is basically Abe Lincoln sitting bored at his computer endlessly hitting 'ENTER' to win a culture victory on Civilization.
If we consider for instance the perspective of 'seeing like a state' in the context of understanding foreign governments the mass adoption of Western norms of government has made the whole world 'legible' both in an imperialistic as well as real-politic diplomatic sense of global relations. Non-government organizations also have a similar 'ease' in dealing with foreign countries and local peoples as they can interface with both an international system as well as peoples that have already been exposed to significant Western ideas and concepts through everything from entertainment to education and the way their governments have agreed or been coerced to adopt significant foundational beliefs of the West. Our governments and institutions are staffed with the products of our University systems so the beliefs they adopt from these institutions have significantly greater power than a few uppity 'right wing' billionaires. Robber barons eventually sleep, but it's those who are doing it 'for your own good' are tireless for their crusade is a righteous and moral one. Random billionaires have not got the economic or political firepower to completely upturn a society; however, there are major institutions and governments that do. We should therefore be much more critical of the nature of the beliefs of those who wield actual power over the stupid overexposed wailing of the relatively powerless.
I believe that if we judge the institutions from the frame-work of the left then PMC (professional management class) leftists who are true to their core beliefs would be compelled by their own 'scripture' in essence to tear them down. The culture wars against religion helped to unseat the WASP (white anglo saxon protestant) somewhat from political power and increased the power of social organizations such as universities and government agencies. The issue with the education system is that beliefs that have as much actual 'proof' as scripture in essence can borrow the prestige and credibility of the hard sciences. These cultural beliefs are being presented with the same credibility often as actual hard sciences through the error or myopia of the media. At the end of the day it is the beliefs of the most powerful people in the world that has the greatest impact of human beings, so we should and must question the institutions that exercise power over us. Are we ruled by people with no concept that their shit stinks with nobody to tell them their questionable clothes choices are leaving them looking rather naked? Using the Bible to prove the existence of God is just as circular an argument in essence as using educational credentials as credibility when those credentials are based not on fact but belief. The people who form the parts of the education system working to 'smash the patriarchy' for instance could be viewed from a certain perspective as the actual white supremacists themselves due to their power and the hegemonic nature of their beliefs that are based on culture as clearly as religious beliefs are too formed through culture. From Nietzsche's perspective God is dead; but, from a post-modernist perspective God is very much alive and that could be even more scary.
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8mo ago
I think it's because culture war issues are cheap issues, it's politicised tribalism where it costs almost no time or effort for politicians . It means that they can free significant political capital to spend on their own personal in-group interests and the interests of their key supporters. If all you have to do is take any reactionary/annoying/grumpy talking point and amplify it, and say 'other side bad', then you have a quick and dirty means to bolster cheap support. I think we need to look deeper than the specific talking points of the culture war to the underlying structure of the game that is being played underneath. The culture war excites our limbic system, but I feel that it acts as a distraction as its straight up buying the kayfabe and talking about the game under the assumption that it's being played straight.
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5mo ago
It's an interesting tidbit, but at the same time it doesn't really tell us much more than pointing to the idea that many of our assumptions about crime and income may be incorrect in an area where the social safety net eliminates most cases of extreme material deprivation.
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6mo ago
The last book I read was: The Dictator's Handbook -- https://www.amazon.com.au/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845
It was a really interesting take and an entirely different mental map of power than I am used to. The unfortunate side effect of this book is that if it's 'true' then it engenders a heck of a lot of cynicism in the reader about political power and government in general. The TLDR video by CGB Grey effectively covers 80% of the content in the book -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=3s&ab_channel=CGPGrey
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1yr ago
Good point:)
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3mo ago
If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
In my opinion, and the 'mainstream' tracks this as well, the current hormone mix is good enough for many transwomen to be indistinguishable from ciswomen. They may not all be 'pretty'; but the majority of them will have the hormonal and physical appearance of women as far as their secondary sex characteristics are concerned. The whole 'transwomen are women' and all that...
In general this debate is quite well settled at least from the perspective of the establishment and mainstream professional opinion. People may have issues with it, but I don't see this being overturned and I would predict that trans-rights will be even more embedded over time as the phenom becomes more normalised.
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3mo ago
Simple answer: People driving bigger trucks and giving even fewer fucks.
Longer answer:
Pedestrian deaths are up by thousands and:
In 2016, cars hit and killed nearly 6,000 pedestrians. That’s a serious spike from the historic low—below 4,000—in 2009.
See: read://https_www.wired.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fpedestrian-death-rates-climb%2F
Also statistically,
Key findings from 2019 to 2020:
• Fatalities increased and injured people decreased in most categories. • Speeding-related, alcohol-impaired-driving, and seat belt non-use fatalities increased. • Urban fatalities increased by 8.5 percent; rural fatalities increased by 2.3 percent. • Older drivers 65 and older involved in fatal crashes decreased by 9.8 percent; drivers under 65 involved increased. • There were fewer fatalities among people 9 and younger and people 65 and older from 2019 to 2020. Most fatality increases were people 10 to 64, with the 25-34 age group having the largest increase of 1,117 additional fatalities. • Male fatalities increased by 8.6 percent, and female fatalities increased by 1.9 percent. • Nighttime (6 p.m. to 5:59 a.m.) fatalities increased by 12 percent; daytime (6 a.m. to 5:59 p.m.) traffic fatalities increased by 1.4 percent. • Forty-two States and the District of Columbia had increases in the number of fatalities.
Caused by:
38,824 people died on U.S. roads in 2020. Fatalities compared to 2019: ↑6.8% overall ↑21% rate per 100 million VMT ↑14% in alcohol-impaired-driving crashes ↑17% in speeding-related crashes ↑11% motorcyclists ↑3.9% pedestrians ↑14% unrestrained passenger vehicle occupants ↑21% ejected passenger vehicle occupants
↑9.4% in single-vehicle crashes ↑8.5% in urban areas ↑12% during nighttime ↑9.5% during weekend
See: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813266
Basically, people driving faster, more impaired and fewer people wearing seat belts.
Questionmark
4mo ago
I watched that or something similar quite a while ago, and the major difference between the attempted execution that didn't go to plan and the one proposed is to use a chamber with the atmosphere replaced rather than the mask that failed to achieve the purpose it was meant to.
The election fraud issue is vapid because taking a deep dive into what amounts to propaganda is an exercise in frustration. The claims serve the purpose of riling up his base support, and to shore up his power; given the vast number of them they act as a shotgun approach for his supporters to find one particular claim compelling.
Your motte: All claims are at best specious and at worst groundless. Your bailey: Insufficient evidence exists that has survived testing by the court system and all attempts have failed, there is simply insufficient evidence to make the claim that the election was stolen -- I'm not so sure on your fall back position to be honest as the motte here is so strong that it would be hard to imagine ever having to fall back to the bailey.
I thought about this issue while I was at the gym, and the most plausible take that fits the evidence or lack-thereof would be internal government agencies such as the CIA. I'm looking at this issue through the lens of The Dictator's Handbook, which you can get 90% understanding through watching this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&ab_channel=CGPGrey
If the Democratic party had a concrete means to steal elections, or an 'auto win' button, then I cannot see them not pressing it every single time as they have already worked themselves up into a rhetorical fervor that their opposition is evil and cannot be allowed control of the government. On the other hand, the only institution with the knowledge, wherewithal and motivation to steal an election would be the CIA as they already have considerable experience in doing this exact thing in overseas countries, the list of governments overthrown or rumoured to have been overthrown by the CIA is quite frankly staggering. The CIA has literally had one main job over the past 75 years that it has been around, dunk on the Russians, and it would be hard for them to let that go -- especially given the alleged ties between Trump and Russia. The sheer amount of useless chatter can be explained away by one of two possible scenarios: either propaganda, as I suspect, or a successful intelligence operation flooding the information space with useless junk.
Joe Biden has had considerable ties to the CIA through his long career in office, and during this term he has increased the funding and elevated the status of the agency within the United States government by for instance elevating the director of the CIA to his cabinet. See: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/politics/bill-burns-cia-director-cabinet-level/index.html . Biden would have the necessary ties to coordinate the effort with the CIA and I believe the CIA could have been motivated to help him, especially given accusations publicly for instance that Trump compromised several agents with his intelligence leaks, along with a number of other OPSec issues as well. One the other hand, Biden has given greater 'treasure' and power to the agency over the past few years; whereas the Republican party has developed a spottier relationship with the agency ever since the second gulf war; finally, the 'drain the swamp' rhetoric is a direct challenge to the institutional members of the government.
Unfortunately, there is no real evidence and at best it is 'evidence of absence'. I am picking on the CIA as a potential conspirator simply because they are the only agency that could pull this kind of mission off and then get away clean. They have a potential motive to act due to their seemingly poor relationship with Trump; the means to act because of their close relationship with Biden as well as their institutional know-how in the spheres of dis/misinformation and election tampering, and finally they have recieved rewards from the Biden administration with considerable additional funding going their way. This is heading down the road of 'conspiracy theory', but the agency deemed responsible to prevent foreign interference in the election is likely the best placed agency to tamper with the election themselves. The necessary number of potential guilty parties is quite small and well contained given only a few top level people need to know the full extent of a 'possible conspiracy', and the rest of the agency has little motivation to offer help to Trump who has shown disdain for them and has actively hurt their operations.
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