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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21177 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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John Psmith reviewed "Leap of Faith," about the institutional failures or collective "non-decision" leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The review begins:

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So…they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy.” What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

By his description, everybody involved wanted to invade Iraq, but the dynamic that resulted in an invasion seemed to be that of the Abilene Paradox. He links it to CW issues, with discussion of "moralism" in American foreign policy and due to it being a major issue about which American government went against the overwhelming preference of the populace, and Trump being an outlier critic of the war being a big part of his early appeal. A handful of thoughts:

  • Coincidentally, I just listened to a long interview with an early American casualty in the "First Battle of Fallujah" - it's worth a listen

  • It's hard to square the Powell Doctrine with the description of Powell, which raises a lot of questions

  • I'm skeptical of the accuracy and/or probative value of the psychoanalyses of the people involved, more generally, and it's unclear if it's Psmith's own interpretation or him relaying that of the original author

  • One point raised is that the perceived easy success in Afghanistan was a major factor, which makes me wonder if military campaigns should be deliberately made to seem more difficult than they are

  • I don't remember any defenses of the war to contrast against Trump

  • While one can debate the merits of NATO Expansion, which Psmith criticizes at the end, I don't remember anyone advocating it on moralistic grounds (or the basis of specific alleged strategic threats) or think it's a good parallel, in general (you could say that it's an issue with a disconnect between government policy and the preferences of populace, but the disconnect would be in the general vein of the proverbial man on the street not following that area of foreign policy)

Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.

To put things in perspective, ousting the Soviets from Eastern Europe was largely successful. It was still highly taboo to talk about the problems in places like Zimbabwe and South Africa.

As a result it was impossible for anyone on the right to assemble an argument about how removing Saddam wouldn't result in a democratic revolution.

You'd sound too racist to be on TV.

Liberals from a more cosmopolitan background often have the attitude of "everybody knows X, it's just not polite to say it". But Republicans from small white towns frequently don't know it. They're going to go along with poor decisions if you don't let anyone tell them.

Edit:

I seem to be having some communications difficulties with this post. Back in 2009 or so HBD blogs were the only places having discussions about things like cousin marriage in Arab cultures leading to clannishness which caused problems when trying to impose individualist democracy on them.

I'm not even endorsing any particular theory. I'm just saying that the limits on public conversation made it difficult to fight a bad idea.

Really just said ~ "Only white people have a high enough IQ to form democracies".

I mean, I don't even find it useful to engage that assertion, but it is funny to contrast that with the take that I often see here that democracy in the west is now dysfunctional due to low IQ HBD dysgenics and only might concentrated in a single infallible strongman avatar can save us (Deus vult).

(+1 to aceventura's "History is longer than the last 70 years." which is approximately "read a book". I doubt the Greeks who invented democracy would've identified closely with your self identification on the HBD spectrum, you know, based on who they were geographically interacting with: southern Italy, Egypt, Anatolia, and Persia).

Really just said ~ "Only white people have a high enough IQ to form democracies".

This is somewhat tangential but it really bugs me that people seem to have decided that HBD is primarily about IQ. It's not. That just happens to be one of the easiest differences to measure.

HBD is also about:

  • Hygiene
  • Aggression
  • Sexual fidelity
  • Industriousness
  • Impulse control
  • Courtship behavior
  • Parental investment
  • Aesthetic perception
  • Tendency to addiction

And pretty much everything else. Personality, instincts, and so on are rooted in the genes. Consider tribalism/clannishness, propensity to corruption, likelihood of ignoring traffic regulations... it just goes on and on.

While I'm at it, I'll note that the founding fathers never intended a universal franchise like we have today. They understood that democracy can only function with a good electorate, which is why they restricted the franchise not just by ethnicity and sex, but also class. This too is HBD.

The IQ gaps have been investigated a lot more and the evidence regarding them is stronger. It is only natural to focus on them. The other things you mention are much more speculative, generally have a lot of room to plausibly be downstream of intelligence or culture, and are probably much less impactful than intelligence in any case. Sure we can acknowledge the possibility of genetic differences in other impactful traits, but that doesn't mean we can just assume that based on observing some difference between the population groups. In general I am wary about building castles of speculation on scant evidence, it might seem more sophisticated and cutting-edge but I think it's a much less likely to be true than something simple and well-tested.

As I suggested elsewhere in the thread, I think the burden of proof should be on the person who would argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.

The real question is how strong the proclivities are and how effectively culture can enhance or curb them. That's a great question and I wish anyone were looking into it.

Hygiene

Europeans don't exactly have a good reputation around the world when it comes to hygiene.

Did I argue otherwise?

Fair enough. My apologies.

FWIW I don't have a position on European genetic tendencies to hygiene, though I'd guess orderliness does come in when the subject expands to such things as keeping one's house clean. Who can say?

Don't recall where but I remember being flabbergasted by descriptions of pre-industrial European cities where all the roads, yards, etc. were just constantly covered in human and animal dung. Sometimes even indoors! The French in particular were noted for their penchant for pissing on staircases, also even indoors. Germans meanwhile were noted for fastidiously keeping interiors spotless. How much selection has taken place in the last couple hundred years, I cannot guess.

I feel like people take the wrong impression from those stories of historical roads covered in dung. Back then, all humans were a lot closer to nature so they were less grossed out by it. That dung was a sign of wealth. Animals were one of the most expensive things humans could owb, especially horses. In most societies, owning a horse made you a weslthy man. The manure was carefully collected and used for crop fertilizer.

It would have been mind blowing for most historical societies to see a European city with so many horses they cant even pick up all the dung. It would be like living in an oil field.

More comments

I think your idea here is plausible, but I have trouble seeing how you'd isolate nature from nurture here for these axes without some industrial-scale twin studies that seem implausible.

Well, I think the burden of proof is much higher for the person who wants to argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.

To your actual point though adoption studies seem useful.

A lot of HBD advocates in spaces like these do want it to just be about IQ, and a lot of people who call themselves pro-HBD will say it is just about IQ. It's one fracture on the DR regarding the Jewish Question, for example.

Arguing against specific highly spurious claims is very different to arguing that intelligence is the only feature of the mind that is inherited. In any case, you might add that the more anti-Jewish side of the DR is actually split between “Jewish IQ is a psy-op, see Unz, myth of American meritocracy, IQ stats from Brooklyn high schools in the 1930s don’t map to Israel” etc and “it’s real but it doesn’t matter because they’re also hereditary cheats, sex pests, clannish narcissists”.

Well, that perspective makes no sense and I've never seen it advocated; only implied by those who don't seem to know what they're talking about.

One sees it everywhere, even by those who otherwise denounce HBD.

The basic formula is: [My ingroup's positive attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to imitate; while [ingroup's negative attributes] are the random result of circumstance or interest or are entirely mythical. [My outgroup's positive attributes] are random results of circumstance or interest, or are entirely fake; but [outgroup's negative attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to improve or mitigate.

As I said, it doesn't make sense.

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