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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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What is the value of HBD being true?

I was talking to my psychiatrist about this. He seemed amenable to HBD, he has heterodox opinions, but he was curious as to why I was curious.

I think that most people at the motte generally accept that IQ scores aren't evenly distributed among groups, but what is the counter argument to: "Why does it matter?" and "in the past, when we've focused on differences, it ends badly".

Scott thinks it matters because he believes that our resistance to using IQ tests is based on the fact that favored classes do poorly. I think he's right; we have our (heavily discredited, but still used) hypothesis of multiple intelligences. And the Nazis developed their own hypothesis of multiple intelligences, "practical" and "theoretical", because they realized that their favored class "aryans" performed more poorly than their hated class "jews".

What do you think of the idea that multiculturalism needs a "great lie" in order to function? Subconsciously, progressive whites know that black people broadly aren't as intelligent; they downshift their speech around black people more than conservatives do. I don't think this is because conservatives are less "racist", but because they aren't willing to make themselves less competent to cater to black people. But what if it goes mainstream, and from subconscious to conscious? My most honest thought is, I don't know what comes next. Because I don't know, it could be worse. I have to admit that's a possibility. But I don't think we'll ever get a satisfying conclusion by lying. But I would like to harvest some thoughts here. Are we setting up for another holocaust if we push this mainstream, or is that just more nonsense?

I think that recognizing that IQ differences are a thing would open the door to separating classes by aptitude. I think the primary resistance to this is that you'd see the wrong concentrations in the high aptitude and low aptitude groups. Currently, in CA, the new (old) thrust is that talent isn't real, aptitude isn't real. I think that a denialist approach will probably do damage by not challenging each type of student appropriately. And we have a tendency to be willing to disadvantage higher performing students, like cutting AP math classes because of "white" (asian) supremacy. We know that students learn best when around other students who are their peers in terms of academic ability. I don't think this would be persuasive to a hardened woke, though. I think that even if they knew IQ differences were real, and genetic, they would resist this because they would see it as harmful to low aptitude students.

Group differences in IQ being genetic could be a strong pro-welfare position. But that also makes me uncomfortable. Should we really make it even easier for the low IQ to further outbreed high IQ people? But I'm just rediscovering eugenics. Should that be a bad word? In the past, strong selection (cultural, and biological) probably led to Britain escaping the malthusian trap (see "Farewell to Alms" for more details). What could we accomplish if we again constrained reproduction to push for the kinds of traits that get shit done? Where I'm sitting, it looks like we're caught in a sort of trap. What problems could we solve if we tried to create better people? Maybe intelligent species die in their planetary crib because once they reach a level of sophistication supported by their biology, they engineer ways to decouple reproduction from the stuff that matters, and as a result, they fail to achieve anything more. They maybe succeed in creating a comfortable way of life, but not an innovative one. So, a society like ours, that favors Nick Cannons over Von Neumanns. Still working through this line of thinking, any thoughts?

White and Asian kids are being raised, from my view, to be sacrificial lambs. I see it as a modern, woke retelling of the White Man's Burden. If Black kids weren't raised to blame White kids, and to turn their feelings of inferiority into weapons, I think that would be good for them. And it would certainly be good for White kids to not grow up internalizing that any disparity is their fault. Same with Asians, they aren't even White but they get hit with this shit the most. But again, this isn't going to be convincing to a woke. Can this be framed in a way that they will understand? Or is that structurally impossible? My view of things is that the White guilt narrative allows White elites to outmaneuver other Whites by allying with non-Whites. If this is true, being completely correct means nothing as long as this alliance is paying dividends.

More generally, a principle I believe in is: it's much harder to solve a problem when you're deliberately ignorant to the cause. We didn't solve anything in the '60s, I think we put off the problem, and we'll have to pay, with interest, but I'm not totally sure the form this will take.

I am as racist and White supremacist as any can be, and I don't want any of the terrible things people think racist White supremacists want. I don't want to lynch them. I don't want to fly them to Africa. I don't want to put them in camps.

I just want society to stop catering to its lowest element. I want us to stop burning wealth and social capital on trying to uplift the black race out of a hole they dug themselves in. I want to shatter the mass cultural delusion that White people are responsible for black underperformance, that it's us keeping them down instead of them holding us back -- I just want them to fuck off and do their own thing, and I don't care if that thing succeeds or fails, so long as I don't have to pay for it or live in it.

There is no fix. The White race are not messiahs or babysitters. It's up to them to fix their problems, and the best thing we can do is go completely hands-off while they do it.

I don't care if that thing succeeds or fails, so long as I don't have to pay for it or live in it.

Is that you, Antidem?

https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/dear-black-people/

One aspect of the establishment left’s recent push for gay rights is that they are quietly but visibly dumping blacks as their most favored oppressed minority in favor of gays. This is largely a simple matter of political practicality. When nice white ladies of the sort who often vote for Democrats turn on the TV and see large groups of feral blacks burning down Baltimore, it makes an impression

Boy that one aged like a little match girl. I guess he never imagined getting white ladies cheering for mass arson. Absolutely astonishing to remember 2015 from 2022.

Boy that one aged like a little match girl.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give....

I don't want to fly them to Africa.

Why not? Kerosene too expensive?

Consider that it would be the ethical thing to do.

If you look at the Black American experience from an objective, detached point of view, for some their current situation can be considered to be worse than slavery.

Slavery meant regular exercise, food and healthcare included, and relatively stable lives. They potentially grew up with family or at least some kind of role models around them.

Some of them even graduated to lording over other slaves.

When slavery was officially abolished in Brazil, they just ended up without a job, so the landowners who had just freed them asked them 'so you're looking for a job? How about you come work on my plantation for less than what I was spending on your food, shelter and healthcare?' That's how favelas were created, they all piled up in poor conditions which remain over a century later.

Now they get in huge amounts of debt for college degrees that they may not even be able to complete, they get scammed by banks and car dealerships due to the white flight brought about by their freedom of movement, they murder their own children in unprecedented amount...

Despite all of that, if they still somehow end up being part of the small group that is hard-working, motivated, religious, behaving morally etc, still, they are at a huge disadvantage. They have to compete in the work place with people that are on average a lot smarter, even if they literally come from the 3rd world like Indians and top 0.01% African immigrants.

And on top of that they have to deal with the stereotype of the 13%, despite themselves being part of the 10%(?) 'good ones', they will never make other people comfortable, they will never have a waiter (even black themselves) enthusiastically take their table, etc.

The ethical thing to do is to send them back, for their own good.

Why not? Kerosene too expensive?

As much as I wish history went differently, they are legal US citizens, and have been widely recognized as such for a long time. I'm unwilling to support the government having the power to arbitrarily mass deport its own citizens.

I'd happily support a program to help deport minorities who voluntarily signed up and revoked citizenship, however.

Blacks were steadily improving from the end of WWII until about 1975. It was the import of mostly white originated social experiments in replacing the traditional family structure with welfare and single motherhood that ruined it, so whites have a duty to fix what they've made.

Of course the way of going about this is simply dumb and won't work and should be opposed for those reasons, but there is a real white man's burden to spread white civilization to african americans because on a deep and fundamental level, we broke it.

Those policies were put in place by the Democrats who win 90% of the black vote.

Who is "we" precisely?

I took "we" to mean "white people."

Blacks were steadily improving from the end of WWII until about 1975. It was the import of mostly white originated social experiments in replacing the traditional family structure with welfare and single motherhood that ruined it, so whites have a duty to fix what they've made.

I am comfortable accepting the notion of racial guilt and the need to address the mistakes of the past, provided we start at the early 1600s, not the 1970s.

provided we start at the early 1600s

What is the implication here?

1619 is widely considered the start of serious African enslavement in North America, at Jamestown, though there was a slave presence beforehand. If I accept Whites have a responsibility to correct their mistakes, as @hydroacetylene asserts, then I must accept that first mistake being bringing blacks to the country to begin with.

That ship has sailed. Culturally modern day African-Americans have nothing in common with Igbos or Shonas or whatever. They have slightly more genetically in common, but they're still mostly mulattoes who wouldn't be reckoned as black in Africa, and anyways we're talking about a broken culture.

African Americans as they actually exist today are an ethnic group characterized by broken family norms, elevated rates of crime, poverty, etc. And the latter two come in part from the former, which was broken by white people in pursuit of "liberation" in the 60's and 70's- before all that, blacks were taking strides towards closing the gap.

That sounds like a problem for them, not me.

If you're advocating for race politics, the answer to that is- your fellow whites shouldn't have broken those family norms for ideological reasons.

More comments

Why?

Why do you think the primary determination of group membership should be race? “Catering to its lowest element,” as you put it, applies to welfare claimed by whites, to special-needs programs, to any infrastructure sullied by the huddled masses. Throwing out black people will not change that.

Racial segregation is stupid and wasteful. If all you really care about is raising average intelligence, then you’d be better off advocating general selection coupled with race blindness. But then you wouldn’t get to draw a clean dividing line, and you wouldn’t get to cash in on the easy tribalism.

This, of course, is assuming that intelligence is all we should care about! The founding principles of human success include the ability to extend charity to those less fortunate. You are careless to discard that skill, and foolish to do so on the basis of race.

I also object to the claim that hundreds of years of chattel slavery, followed by 100+ of abuse in a time of relatively limited mobility, counts as “digging themselves in” a hole. But I suppose that’s a moot point if you don’t actually care about culpability. As LBJ put it,

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

I also object to the claim that hundreds of years of chattel slavery, followed by 100+ of abuse in a time of relatively limited mobility, counts as “digging themselves in” a hole. But I suppose that’s a moot point if you don’t actually care about culpability.

Consider that hundreds of years of chattel slavery is actually still ongoing right now in the continent they escaped from. If you look at a family, the ones that stayed behind are more likely to be enslaved or in horrible conditions right now than the ones whose ancestors were transported to North-America.

North-American Africans actually have way higher living standards than their cousins from back home.

Living standards do not sum up the entirety of the human conditions, but there is a case to be made about simply stopping to teach racial history to African-Americans.

The recollection of the racial violence seems to be just as bad if not worse than the actual effects of the racial violence. After all, the African-Americans alive today are objectively better-off materially than if their ancestors (not them) had not been enslaved.

They admit it themselves:

When her son wanted to leave America and give up his passport, she recalls telling him: “You will not give up the passport because it is the key to the candy shop” — meaning access to all the economic opportunities America provides. “It would be rewarding people who did what they did to my ancestors to give the key to the candy shop,” she told me. “I will stay here and throw the Constitution up in their face. I am going to be here. They would be so happy if we all got on a boat and left. And I do not want to make them happy.”

Why?

Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it. In that light, racial differences, racial in-group biases, and racial spoils are unambiguously real. I didn't make the game, but I'm willing to play by its rules.

“Catering to its lowest element,” as you put it, applies to welfare claimed by whites, to special-needs programs, to any infrastructure sullied by the huddled masses. Throwing out black people will not change that.

Time, money, status, and effort are all zero-sum. The more of anything we waste on blacks, the less we necessarily have for others.

Racial segregation is stupid and wasteful. If all you really care about is raising average intelligence, then you’d be better off advocating general selection coupled with race blindness. But then you wouldn’t get to draw a clean dividing line, and you wouldn’t get to cash in on the easy tribalism.

I don't care at all about average intelligence. If blacks were dumb but harmless I'd covet their multiplication.

This, of course, is assuming that intelligence is all we should care about! The founding principles of human success include the ability to extend charity to those less fortunate. You are careless to discard that skill, and foolish to do so on the basis of race.

I'm very charitable toward my people. I have no need to extend charity to outgroups.

I also object to the claim that hundreds of years of chattel slavery, followed by 100+ of abuse in a time of relatively limited mobility, counts as “digging themselves in” a hole. But I suppose that’s a moot point if you don’t actually care about culpability. As LBJ put it,

History is full of genocide, slavery, persecution. We threw the Chinamen in concentration camps after breaking their backs on the railroads. The western world has collectively tried to wipe the Jews out for centuries. Worse, even blacks in their own countries do poorly.

I reject your attempt to render agency the sole domain of the White race, as flattering as it is.

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