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The I have a black friend argument.
I do too. I’ve had a few. One went to Northwestern, they all pretty much have corporate jobs doing normal blue tribe stuff.
The thing in the whole debate is nobody doing the debate had George Floyd type black friends. It does go too far too call black people in general animals. We all know many who function quite well in western civilization. However, there is an underclass that seems to need a huge amount of intervention in terms of policy and financial aid to develop communities looking anything like the rest of western civilization. They are not self-sustaining without aid from other parts of society.
There is a counterargument to this which is that there are many white people who are also the dregs of society. Objectively there isn't much difference between a George Floyd and a Kensington zombie. That the problem is more acute in the black community is obviously true; that it is something inherent to being black is something HBDers assume to be true.
"I have a black friend" is of course a trite cliche, but it's also something I cannot overlook every time people bring up HBD and argue, essentially, that we should just accept that blacks are lesser, or even go further and argue for full segregation (the premise being that the only alternative is race war). I do have black friends. Educated, professional black friends. Now of course in an actual race war, everything can go sideways and your black friends won't count for much, but it seems like a lot of people arguing, essentially, that blacks are animals are either making some kind of "But I don't mean you" exception for their black friends, or they really believe that black people who are intelligent and socialized are like unicorns.
For some of us it's more like we just give up. As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it. It never gets better, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to.
It's not that we're all ideologically dedicated to the idea of HBD, necessarily, so much as it's the fact that the alternative is a hodgepodge of unfalsifiable just-so excuses that in aggregate strain credulity beyond the breaking point. I just don't really buy that they're equally capable but have coincidentally been kneecapped by one historical mishap or another, everywhere, a hundred percent of the time, forever.
I don't really buy that we just need to eradicate the latest iteration of structural systemic invisible racism and suddenly their homicide rate will plummet by 90%, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. It looks exactly like an ethnic group with lower IQ ending up exactly where you would expect it to while people make up other reasons for it. The idea that they're collectively capable of advanced civilization on their own is, let's say, unevidenced, and it doesn't look like that evidence is ever going to come.
Most advanced civilization was invented by the British and Americans, some by a few other Western Europeans. That didn’t stop plenty of other countries borrowing the technology to start their own industrial and technological revolutions. China didn’t need to invent the car, or the computer, or laundry detergent to use those things. “On their own” isn’t a standard we apply to other modern civilizations.
Sure, African countries are less functional and developed than the West, but many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity. It seems ridiculous pessimistic to think things will never improve. Most African countries are far from being Haiti.
Man I want to believe this but I just don't. It happens every once in a while but as far as I can tell it's only ever cyclical. The country getting out of a low-trust hole can only do it for 10-15 years before the next coup based on tribal lines.
You can't even read the Africa section of the economist regularly without losing your mind. There's such a constant background simmering of rape, mass murder, and corruption going on at some level on that continent it's just impossible to fathom.
I'm not convinced that that has anything to do with HBD, actually. First of all, Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well, and not much tradition of nationalism outside ethnic boundaries. Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power. There's also the familiar poverty trap where you have to help your family members rather than save for yourself, which also leads to "you have to be corrupt because your family members will require that you use your position to their benefit".
You could have said this about Europe as well. What did the Welsh have to do with the Scottish or English? People in Provence, Brittany, and Isle-de-France didn't even speak the same languages. Italian only coalesced as a basically-uniform and mutually-intelligible language in the last couple hundred years, and at the time of the discovery of the New World there was no "Spain", but instead "the Spains" because they were a bunch of fiercely-independent kingdoms with their own privileges and rivalries, bound together through fragile personal unions. Prussians, Brunswickers, Saxons, Badeners, and Bavarians didn't have much in common. Russia is a giant, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire, and even today eastern/south-eastern europe don't match ethnic and national borders well - they certainly didn't back in the bad old days of the great Habsburg empires.
Up until the late 19th century, just about every significant country in Europe was some type of monarchy (i.e. dictatorship), mediated by local elites (as is the case in Africa as well). How did they escape this seemingly-impossible corruption trap?
Dictatorship and corruption aren't synonymous. There's some trivial sense in which a dictatorship is "corrupt" because the dictator can violate laws for his own benefit, but it isn't necessarily corruption in the sense of there being whole classes of corrupt people and cultural expectations that push the government towards being corrupt.
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Even more recently there's been a bunch of ex-dictatorships emerging into strong market economies without much outside influence. Most of the Asian Tigers would be closer to facist than anything else. Spain, etc.
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