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Notes -
Far Right HBD Civil War
Bronze Age Pervert recently xeeted on what he believes in the current infeasibility of HBD politically:
This was controversial with numerous pundits amongst the different spheres of the Right: with Woods, Winegard, and Fuentes having opposing views.
I think the question of politically feasibility of HBD is a point of discussion, in addition to—perhaps more interestingly—the timing of the xeet by Bronze Age Pervert—wat means? Is HBD the path forward? In the chaos of the Isreal-Hamas war and the current anti-woke backlash, is the vitalist Right looking to make themselves more palatable?
BAP's point is that some people on the right imagine that "if HBD awareness goes 'mainstream', racial spoils systems will end", when in reality racial spoils and denial of HBD are only tangentially connected.
It would be quite easy to have both widespread awareness of HBD and racial spoils systems like affirmative action, because the primary point of these systems is to distribute resources (like well-paid sinecures, social status, political influence) between groups. It's actually a very classically liberal viewpoint to believe that meritocracy must be absolute and that everything should be distributed based solely on talent.
EDIT: As @Ioper says below, this misunderstands the central progressive impulse, which is the drive toward equality. "From each according to ability, to each according to need" is a direct rejection of the idea that talent should be rewarded with a superior quality of life.
And the global viewpoint suggests this, because many nations far beyond the WEIRD bubble practice affirmative action widely even though DEI politics isn't dominant there. Hindu nationalists practice it, the CCP practices it, the Brazilians and Nigerians practice it. Sure, global homogenization is a thing, but in many cases these policies exist for much more mundane reasons than high-minded progressive equality politics, like reducing the chance of explosive civil conflicts.
There's a delusional fantasy among some rightists that if only the (white) public "knew" about HBD, the wool would fall from their eyes and they'd instantly adopt conservative positions on a wide range of policies. In reality, leftist ideas are much more resilient than that. They can justify affirmative action, reparations and so on in countless other ways, and in some cases already have.
What I notice is that this delusional fantasy is shared by many, possibly most, leftists as well, which is what many of them say justifies the immense amount of censorship efforts to prevent HBD from being an acceptable thought. But as you say, leftist ideas are resilient, and it always struck me as both as naive and as counterproductive. Naive because it it takes the most simplistic idea of something like "if people realized people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior], then of course that would lead to more bigotry and racial hatred and dehumanizing of people of [race]" without actually doing the sociological research required to justify such a belief. And counterproductive, because it creates the false notion that the correctness of leftist ideas are contingent on some empirical reality about genetics, leaving those ideas open to appear to be falsified by facts about genetics coming out. And for what gain? None as far as I can tell, since leftist ideas actually aren't contingent upon HBD being false.
Is sociological research really needed, beyond the examples of history? I'm reminded of a piece from "crunchy con" religious right-winger Rod Dreher where he first acknowledged that HBD — he specifically singled out Steve Sailer — is probably correct, scientifically; but then argued that we, as a society, must pretend it is not, actively censor it, and maintain instead a "noble lie" (Dreher explicitly called it that) of egalitarian blank-slatism, because it's "proven" that human beings simply 'can't handle the truth.' The proof being the Jim Crow South and, of course, 1930's Germany.
I seem to remember ame_damnee back at the old place once making a similar argument in response to someone asking whatever happened to 'the pursuit of excellence.' To draw attention to "excellence" would also draw attention to it's lack, and that, it was argued, automatically and inevitably leads to people donning jackboots and building death camps. Again, "the Mid-Century Germans," as some like to euphemize, are all the proof necessary to show what happens when the egalitarian veil receives the slightest puncture.
(Meanwhile, this ignores that the bulk of settled societies throughout human history were quite inegalitarian and believed in hereditary differences, without descending into coercive or genocidal projects of eugenic "improvement." For example, it's hard to find a philosophy more hierarchical and inegalitarian than Confucianism, but AIUI when eugenics came to China, the (greatly weakened) Confucians were pretty much in opposition. And in the West, the now-deleted third verse of "All Things Bright and Beautiful" persisted enough in cultural memory that I remember once hearing it performed in a Bob Hope movie. So there's something more needed beyond just "people are born different" to get to "therefore we must exterminate the lower orders.")
As Neema Parvini said in his New Years stream, the core of the dominant ideology of the present day is that we're still fighting Hitler, if only 'the little Hitler inside each of us.' Letting people "realize people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior]" led to Nazi's once, and we all swore "never again." So what more social science is needed beyond that?
This is my core objection, that this isn't what led to Nazis. I don't believe the Nazis' rise to power in Germany was due to scientists dispassionately admitting to a populace that has only ever lived in a Western society of egalitarianism that they are forced to conclude something that they didn't expect or at least know to be true before they did the research, that there are different distributions in important traits such as intelligence when analyzing different groups of people, grouped by what we refer to as "race." I think it was closer to telling people that the Sciencetm proves that those people you already despise really are despicable. Which is far more similar to modern idpol than to HBD, which is one of the main reasons I reject idpol so much, though even then I wouldn't go as far as to censor them.
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