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There's a profound epistemic benefit to learning about HBD as a scientifically sound framework. It gives a man grounds for confidence about two very important matters, namely that a) despite disagreeing with the apparent common sense about some observable facts, he is not insane or evil, and b) a near-totality of respected and publicly visible people, in a highly transparent, individualist and relatively very democratic society, can be gaslit or intimidated into perpetuating a regime of blatant lies; even though those lies were not so long ago known to many to be just that.
This is quite sufficient to justify informing people of it.
I have an extremely strong revulsion for gaslighting. I viscerally experience it as intrusion into the brain, and into that which brain exists for; tentacles, spider legs, ovipositors, horsehair worms, larvae with mechanically clicking jaws, the assertive writhing mass of wiry, greedy, fecund alien appendages trying to violate soft tissues of my mental organism and remake it into a host for its own designs, into a consumable devoid of inherent worth. I dimly guess that's how many victims understand rape.
I think lying to people, with a serious intent to mislead them, is wrong, though this definition covers too much to use heavy words. To mislead them about themselves is, generally, an evil act. But, worst of all, to make them stop believing in a significant real facet of their goodness and ability to appreciate good and true within and without themselves – this amounts to an act of gratuitous violence; an attempt at mutilation worse than crippling the body. I feel that Christians get it right when they identify the principal source of evil and misery and distortion in the world as The Father of Lies, and exactly for this reason.
I've rewritten this section several times now; I seriously don't know how to express my attitude, except simply: when I notice a person trying to knowingly gaslight me (or even someone else) about anything not utterly trivial, I start thinking of a suitable pretext to kill that creature. I give up always, but not because I believe that impulse is wrong.
Alas, you and Hlynka (and to an extent Amadan) are now, it seems, erecting your own regime of gaslighting here, what with these «political HBDers» (rather, regular White Supremacists) advocating for racial discrimination all over the place; so pervasive that simply gesturing at the subreddit name suffices to make the argument.
But I don't see you keeping that same energy when posters here start talking about christianity as if it were true.
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How ... good is this kind of poetry in practical writing? Loose analogies to visceral, easily understood ideas. Most very good writers do it, at every level - you, moldbug does it, scott does it... But does it really communicate anything? "Mechanically clicking jaws" are 'bad', and HBD-denial and shame-transmitted memeplexes are bad, but there's not really a deeper relationship between then than 'bad'. (there's ofc something to 'parasitic organism ~ parasitic memeplex' but is 'ovipositor' really characterizing it?) And to the extent those analogies persuade, are they persuading on incorrect grounds, sowing the seeds for mistakes in the future even when the original conclusion is true?
(I'm not actually sure what the answer is)
I know that Jungian typology(and MBTI by extension) is not exactly well-respected scientifically, but these sorts of things are very obvious when you learn it- it's because these people are intuitive types (or engaging in intuition, at least), and such analogies naturally come to them, while they might suppress judgement in the form of thinking more than needed. However, some elements are easily translated to OCEAN, and being very intuitive always means being very imaginative, as a faucet of openness to experience. So you say there is no deeper relationship, and that's true from a thinking point of view, but not from an intuitive point of view.
The easy counterargument is what you refer to as 'the intuitive point of view' is mostly factually wrong and misleading. Both 'being misled' and 'botfly' are unpleasant. And unpleasantness is intuitive. So they're both similar in that way. When I say deeper I mean anything that isn't already covered by "both are bad and both try to hide from you"
Well, it can still be factually wrong, but like with everything else, it depends on how the person says something. In this case, it's not claiming any fact, just drawing an association which in itself is true.
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I find that analogy extremely convincing because it mirrors my experience of being gaslighted, and is the reason why I even found this forum in the first place.
Convincing, sure. But what were you convinced ... of? Being 'gaslighted', over who did the laundry last or over black crime, sucks, but do invertebrates help anyone realize that? Is the abusive boyfriend or SJW trying to "violate your soft tissues"? How does that tell us anything beyond "being tricked"? If there's any sense of 'aha, this is true!' you get from the insect paragraph that you wouldn't from a description of gaslighting itself ... what did you just start believing that you didn't before?
Strong emotions can be deceptive, but they aren't always. Sometimes they're being triggered for a good reason, and sometimes it's worth noting when and how the instinct and the truth align.
Definitely, but that's not what I'm arguing - it's specifically about the way the insect metaphor is used. If you already know gaslighting is bad, and have some sense of why it's bad, thinking there's some disgustingness to it beyond the actual harms it has, in a way that's related to insects, doesn't seem important. 'assertive writhing mass'?
I think there's something to my objection. It's not specifically to ilforte's comment or themotte, it's a very broad and common thing, present in most fiction, poetry, etc
hmm. can you elaborate? Is it something specifically about insects, or more generally about visceral imagery?
It's about very broadly poetic analogies. When you're moved by an aesthetic or piece of writing or find it appealing, that corresponds to learning, believing something new. If I read a particularly nice passage about everyone living in harmony in a socialist utopia, or about the glory of a noble battle, that's not just some aesthetic pleasure that's disconnected from anything, that's a specific claim about the kinds of things worth doing and their effects.* If I read 'being gaslighted is like botflies erupting from the liar's foaming mouth and corkscrew-drilling through your eardrums into your neural tissue' and am like 'wow ... so compelling ...', what am I convinced of? I'm worried it's a general sense that 'gaslighting is bad' that isn't informative. Maybe if you read a few paragraphs that characterizes particular aspects of progressive gaslighting, even via analogy - it might enable you to understand better how it's bad - but when you read 'gaslighting is like a roiling mass of hairworms' ... what? Okay, I believe that now, I believe there's something to the way hairworms are viscerally disgusting that also applies to progressive gaslighting. But I don't think it does? Hairworms are viscerally disgusting because once they burrow their way into your skin, they hurt you, and absent modern antibiotics there's not much you can do to stop them. Progressive ideas, by contrast, are virtually everywhere, and the only real way to beat them is to understand why they're bad.
not sure i explained that well.
*Modern fiction still invokes this, but the way it's so disconnected from day-to-day life both hides that and, imo, causes people to come to believe, and act on, various half-baked, incoherent ideas
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Well gosh, dude, I'm sorry that I inspire in you an impulse to kill and I'll try not to take it personally.
I literally don't understand what you're saying here. I feel like there is some sort of disconnect here, between you and I and @aqouta and several other folks, and I am self-aware enough to consider that if several people are misreading me, the problem may be me and not them. Still, I really don't know how you got from "Amadan thinks HBD is probably real but we shouldn't racially discriminate, and a lot of HBDers do want to do that" to "Amadan wants to gaslight us about the reality of HBD."
So there are at least three parties at play here.
people like me, and I think some of the other individuals named, who recognize that HBD is unfortunately accurate and oppose racial identitarianism.
Racial identitarians who may or more not believe in HBD. A.K.A. The dissident right
People who do not believe in HBD and oppose racial identitarianism.
People who do believe in HBD and believe in racial identitarianism. A.K.A. Progressives
I can see why people might want to collapse 2 and 4 into one category based on their belief in identitarianism but when you call the HBDers or some other term that implies HBD is the actual core and their belief follows naturally from it you're throwing us, your potential allied against the identitarians under the bus for no discernable reason. You're ceding grounds on our behalf to our common enemy.
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Do they?
The disconnect, if that's how you want to put it, is a very simple matter, I think. I'll ping people to let them refute me if I'm wrong.
Me, @The_Nybbler, @aqouta, @fuckduck9000, @curious_straight_ca and perhaps others who are pressed to identify as «HBDers» variously accuse you of or are questioning reasons behind you lot's (@HlynkaCG, @FCfromSSC, and you too) misrepresenting the distribution of opinion around these parts, in a way that amounts to slander. Denying that slander when directly asked, but then repeating it as a generality, is a very irritating pattern.
We believe that what you present as a non-central, relatively unimportant case and specify with the qualifier «factual», i.e. an HBD-recognizing belief system that does not advocate for racial discrimination against any group (please let's not get off track with some inane "is canceling affirmative action not discrimination" debate, this clearly isn't what you mean) is the central case here, to the point it needs no qualifiers. It's a coherent position, in many/most cases motivated not so much by object-level theory of human trait variability, nor by normative ethnocentrism (I don't even identify as «White» and look down on you hajnalbots), but by opposition to systematic deceit, anti-white racism, unjustified redistributionism and leftist ideology writ large.
Notably, «political HBDers» that exist are a somewhat separate club. They are few and they include people like @parrhesia (and I suspect Matthew Yglesias) who, in effect, call to proactively brain-drain the world and put genotypic IQ above any other merit of a citizen. On this account they, too, are invulnerable to Hlynka's gotchas, even though they are, in a meaningful sense, progressives.
Back to the main issue, in these spats you do not point to a sizable constituency of what you inappropriately call «political HBDers» i.e. generic White Supremacists who don't much care who scores what. Instead, you speculate about them hiding behind the veneer of the merely factual opinion, just-asking-questions to support a preconceived bigoted ideology with an arbitrary self-serving table of ranks for different groups.
Hlynka:
FC:
You:
You refuse to say «$username, I call you out on actually, secretly adhering to this ideology». But you always bring it up when arguing with any of us.
And crucially, the very act of creating those boxes, identifying people as «HBDers» of any sort serves to distance yourself from the toxic belief and the whole cluster of associations that it evokes. You, Amadan, do not think of yourself as a «factual HBDer» or some other variant species – you just happen to think HBD is a fact, because you are capable of generic reasoning about facts, but it does not define you like it ostensibly defines us. With these classifications and distinctions you put us on the spectrum from I-Fucking-Love-Science race realists to 1488 genocide enjoyers, but you do not inspect your position on that spectrum, you look at it from a comfortable vantage point of «reasonable opinion»; you condescend to «factual HBDers» with platitudes to the effect that, facts being what they are, racial discrimination is still wrong – instead of admitting that there is no difference in opinion between you and us. This is what drives @fuckduck9000 mad here, and what I perceive as gaslighting.
Because if there is a difference in opinion, what do you think it is exactly? And why does it apparently call for these incessant remarks about «Dreaded Jim» and deporting all blacks and other shit, and rhetorical questions like «sooo, what do you think follows from these oh-so-important Facts, Mr. HBD»?
Do you think you deserve that treatment for believing the same things?
Speaking personally, neither you or any of the people you listed were who I've had in mind. I'll humbly decline to ping people at a third party's demand, but feel free to do so yourself if you find it warranted. I was referring to posts like this, this, or this. It seems to me comments like this are frequent, and having had them pointed out to me, I notice them quite a bit now. It also seems to me that they used to be a whole lot more frequent in the old days, and I consider the decline in frequency to be an unequivocally good thing and would like to maintain it.
If you like, I'll start collecting them when I come across them; it's entirely possible that their prominence is an example of whatever bias it is that makes you notice things you've previously noticed. On the other hand, there's also the bias where people pay more attention to things they disagree with strongly, and less attention to things they disagree with less strongly, which I've noticed cashes out here in the sharpest hunting for holes in arguments coming from people on the opposite side, and the laxest treatment coming from people, roughly speaking, on the same side.
In any case, this thread has convinced me that labeling the pattern of using HBD as a fully-general explanation for any and all behavior "HBD" is a bad idea, for what it's worth. It clearly rings up people I had no intention of ringing.
Thank you for explaining your perspective concretely, this clears things up.
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I refuse to say it because I don't think any of you are secretly adhering to an ideology you are not stating.
I do think most of you harbor a lot of racial ill-will, and you use HBD to justify it.
I will repeat to you what I've said to @The_Nybbler and @fuckduck9000 and several others, that I don't think you can actually describe my position with any accuracy, even though I do not think I have ever been ambiguous or evasive about what I think. I mean, not long ago you were claiming I was "anti-HBD," despite my years of commentary on the subject, and after I flatly told you you were wrong, you've shifted to another set of ill-fitting sentiments you are trying to force onto me. It is particularly absurd to me that you are trying to put me, @HlynkaCG, and @FCfromSSC into the same box. If there are three people on the Motte who represent three widely separated compass points, it's us.
In a nutshell, resentment and animosity, or lack thereof.
What "treatment" has anyone received from me, other than disagreement and (for the overt racialists) scorn?
I'm quite aware that most leftists would not see any difference between me, the HBD skeptic (that's in the literal sense) who accepts some of the claims, and the white supremacist who wants to ship 'em back to Africa, or anyone in between. What of it?
I just want to chime in to register myself as a HBDer with no "racial ill-will" I'm aware of - unless it axiomatically counts as racial ill-will if I tell a hypothetical poor and stupid $american_protected_group person something to the effect of "you are probably poor and stupid because your ancestors were", even if I would tell the same to a poor and stupid Caucasian-American - who finds this repeated attempt to associate us with white supremacists to be slanderous. The case that white supremacists are no true HBDers is very easy to make: the core blogs that defined HBD as a "movement" were generally obsessed with ethnic groups that outperform American whites, no doubt in a conscious effort to distance themselves from white supremacists, and I doubt you could a more unexpected cluster of people with detailed knowledge on the differences between the ethnic groups of Nigeria. The actual white supremacists on the Motte are easy to spot, because even if they borrow some HBD vocabulary for spice, they will always argue, as it says on the label, for the superiority of "white" ethnicities, making up fuzzy metrics like "creativity" or "morality", as happened in those anti-Chinese posts we kept getting for a while, to justify it on the fly. There is a good case to regard theories of group differences that seem optimised to flatter the speaker's group with skepticism, but for most speakers, HBD is not one of those.
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Thanks, this is sufficiently clear. It could only be better if you named names, instead of spreading this accusation thin on a group of people many of whom, I believe, do not materially differ from you in either opinion or feeling about race.
Mealy-mouthed but persistent gaslighting about the nature of one's feelings and motivations with regard to the subject.
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