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Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites. That doesn't imply at all that bringing in foreigners, even pretty ok ones would be a net increase in the average quality of the humans in the country. So the motivation for closed borders is not at all inconsistent with HBD ideology. And trade protectionism, while largely supported by the same coalition that supports HBD, is not the same as keeping foreigners out.
Wanting to support the weakest and most vulnerable inside the country is also not really a component of HBD. That's just being a good person.
This post reminds me of this meme just replace christian with HBD beliver
Yes
Absolutely not. Job losses and wage depression are a harm in themselves. But few people are arguing that it's the cause of fent zombies. And the vast majority of people affected by illegals and free trade do not become fent zombies.
In fact the mainstream right wing opinion has little sympathy for fent zombies. They would be happy to have the zombies rounded up and disappeared, while also advocating for secure borders and trade protection.
Yes
Can't even begin to respond to how hateful this message is.
And it's near the lowest ever
You have zero evidence of that.
Interesting that all the things rightists propose help (or affect, if you think they're bad) all Americans equally, but you're the one over here projecting your racism on others.
Ethnonationalists are (often) also HBD believers, and they say that the important aspect of a person is their race, full stop. You could point to higher intelligence, longer life, better health, or lower criminality among other ethnic groups, but that still wouldn't convince them that someone from another race is better in the ways that matter because that's not what they're judging people on.
But they aren't saying that race is the most important part of a person because of HBD, but in spite of it. All white supremacists believe in white supremacy but only a subset of them believe in HBD.
I've also seen arguments that a particular distribution of values for IQ, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, etc (including many factors that psychologists don't measure) is the best for a nation, and the only way to get spread is to select based on race.
Even though the "good" numbers might be higher on other people, naive number-maxxing would lead to a failure mode of some kind. It's often unspecified, but the ones I can remember involve out-of-touch highly [good trait] people making norms that are legible and achievable to them, but disastrous to everyone else. Liberalization of sex and drugs are the main culprits.
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I have seen it argued on multiple occasions right here on the Motte that racial background is the "most dispositive" factor in determining human behavior. That is to say that a person's race will tell you more about how they are likely to behave than whether they are male or female, young or old, married or single, rich or poor, urban or rural, republican or democrat, etc...
By extension wether a man is black or white must matter more than whether they are an aged Supreme Court Judge or a Twenty-something meth head. You may claim that the Motte is not representative of the HBD movement or that when users here say things like "most dispositive" or "predictive" they don't actually mean it literally, but it's not a strawman.
Certainly this can be argued for certain aspects of behavior. For example, educated professional blacks are more likely to commit violent crime than the most impoverished White trash in Appalachia. It all depends on exactly what you're trying to disposit. This can be extended to argue that such White trash is somehow "superior" to more economically advantaged individuals of other races, though I would not personally agree with this conclusion. Anyways this still only applies to groups and even the most hardcore HBD believers would also accept the existence of individual freak exceptions to the rule.
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Maybe. I saw some stats on the Trump 2016 election, and the survey showed that being Black was a better predictor of presidential vote than beinga Republican .
The correlation is weak at best and even if it was strong, the same source in 2024 tells a different story.
In the meantime, being in a heterosexual marriage appears a more reliable predictor of voting preference than either racial or party affiliation.
Where are you finding that?
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If you read more carefully, you'd realize I was mocking the message and saying it was wrong.
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