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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.

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.

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