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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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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.

  1. The "heritage American" label reminds me of this. Like white people are Ford model-Ts, outmoded machines that nevertheless have aesthetic and historical significance.
  • -29

Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.

It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.

One week ban.

Eh, I understand why you had to do it. But man I wish we had more liberals/libertarians posting here. Mister Turok is pretty salty but still. A boy can dream.

I'm suddenly struggling to find a proper term to describe posters like Turok - I understand that, presumably, there's a plethora of posters on the Motte that would identify as left-leaning that don't act in the way Turok and others like him do, but I can't quite find a good way to describe them.

Anyways, the point I'm trying to make - in my experience, posters like him tend to flame out badly when they interact with forums that are neutral and/or lightly-conservative-leaning. It's far from a Motte-only problem.

I would have preferred to keep him to make the whole "Elite Human Capital" thing ridiculous by his presence, but at this point it's something of a dead horse.

I never quite got that. What is "Elite Human Capital" about?

In short terms (based on my experience), I'd say something like "Blue Tribers who like the movie Idiocracy for being 'so true,'" or "racist Progressives who've figured out they hate Red Tribe 'fellow whites' more than they do blacks or browns."

The first time I ever encountered the term, it was in a Substack essay by a "former white nationalist" who pretty much fit that second description — the moment he got out of his diverse, coastal, urban, Blue Tribe bubble into the >90% white "flyover country" and met his "fellow whites" of the Red Tribe, suddenly he wasn't a "white nationalist" anymore. The essay also went on about how "progressive" his politics were, how they were solidly in the tradition of past progressives like Galton and Sanger, and how eugenics are really the most progressive thing (I'd say he's not wrong about that), and that his "project" to "fix" our politics is about reclaiming "solidly Anglo" progressive eugenics from it's "unfair" association with Nazi Germany. (Meanwhile, I noted that his list of past pro-eugenics "Anglo" progressives that started with Galton included the rather non-Anglo Wernher von Braun.)

Basically, this is one of the places where I agreed with Hlynka, that there's a lot of these sorts who are supposedly on the "far-right." (My primary disagreement with him was always that he held being a "principled loser" as the essence of "the Right," and thus pronounced all atheists — and anyone else who disbelieves in "a future state of rewards and punishments" after death — as automatically and inherently Leftists, and thus The Enemy.)

It seems to be code for ‘the aesthetics of 2000’s democrats’.

Some people are better than others. Elite Human Capital is just the stock at the top of the hierarchy.

That seems to be the face-value meaning of the term, but I have a feeling that there's a meme on the Motte that goes by the "Elite Human Capital" name.

It gets thrown around by goblinoids like Richard Hanania to explain why they viscerally hate regular people and instead offer unlimited, unjustified consideration for people with proper credentials, in spite of their decades of total incompetence and failure. It's a sad effort by the untalented to ingratiate themselves into the popular kids table, even as the popular kids are having their lives fall apart.

Exampli gratia and exemplar.

The basic idea is that you need intelligent high-agency people to win / get anything done, and so movements should try to appeal to such people rather than alienate them.

I don't even think the basic idea is wrong per-se, but the people putting it forward tend to insist, in a childish Joffrey Baratheoneque way, that they are the Elite Human Capital that needs to be appealed to, and so you must do their bidding, They also seem unaware that even if they were accepted as such, it would come with it's share of duties and responsibilities to their followers. I'd also quibble about the appeal / alienate thing, because the EHCs are very anxious about their status, and can be arm-twisted to do your movement's bidding.

This is it right here. If you have to tell people that you're "elite human capital," you ain't elite human capital.

But man I wish we had more liberals/libertarians posting here.

Sure, but most of us aren't filtering that through 7000 levels of irony and then getting butthurt about it being perceived as pointlessly-hostile nonsense.

The problem is that [too much acknowledgement of] HBD is just as destructive to classical liberalism as it is to progressivism for reasons that should be obvious- once you start treating HBD as prescriptive rather than descriptive then there's no reason to be anything but a hardcore turbo-trad. If your political philosophy suggests society should maximize its "gain" from realizing HBD is true and immediately go full Apartheid, then you prevent those with [the characteristic that predicts poor performance] but perform well anyway from properly developing[1].
This is OK for traditionalist societies in which one Knows Their Place(tm)[2], but there's only one way to compromise such that differences are sanded down over time, and that's by giving them more freedom then their characteristics suggest in the chance that, when members of that group beat the average, we enable both a eugenic effect and more effective suggestion that the HBD-disadvantaged group better assimilates. (Whether those things have worked is an exercise for the reader- I assert that they have, that what is left at the bottom probably can't be fixed, and that it is unfortunate that they look that way but our ruthless market system will pay them what they're worth backstopped by our infinite greed above all other moral principles.)

Since the entire conceit of liberalism is that good performers who are worthy of unrestricted freedom shouldn't be held back by bad performers who are not[3] (and those negative consequences of excess freedom correctly fall on the virtueless, which is the fundamental problem trads and progs have with liberalism since charity for those people isn't mandated), we can understand it, but we can't really do anything about it other than offer our velvet glove before we give 'em the iron fist.

That does mean HBD predicts those most likely to get the iron fist are going to be [characteristic predicting poor performance], which means we can have the potential blind spot of confusing [characteristic predicting poor performance] with [poor performance], and the fact we know that means we're vulnerable to the bad-faith rent-seeking my outgroup defines itself by having the right to do because Muh Oppression or whatever.

[1] And now you know why otherwise high-potential modern teenagers and early twentysomethings are so fucked up- arresting development like this has serious group-level long-term consequences, but we pretend it's OK because "at least it's not HBD".

[2] Knowing One's Place is not unique to Traditionalists; after all, Progressives have the same stack vocabulary, they just put themselves on top of it axiomatically, where with the Traditionalists they at least have the notion (albeit as unenforceable as the liberal claim that charity will fix the problems) that those on top are to perform like they're at the top.

[3] And note that liberalism doesn't inherently conflict with HBD categories from being imposed; you can still have a liberal slave-owning society, or one with limited franchise for certain groups, and nearly every place with a tradition of liberalism has been this way at some point. This is another weakness liberals have to progressives, since progressives will argue using liberal aesthetic but will destroy all protections for high performers in the process if left unchecked.

Since the entire conceit of liberalism is that good performers who are worthy of unrestricted freedom shouldn't be held back by bad performers who are not[3] (and those negative consequences of excess freedom correctly fall on the virtueless, which is the fundamental problem trads and progs have with liberalism since charity for those people isn't mandated), we can understand it, but we can't really do anything about it other than offer our velvet glove before we give 'em the iron fist.

Yeah I must admit this is a pretty scathing indictment of the whole 'liberal' project. Alas.

Well, you can have that, or you have the traditionalist/progressive projects which are just unironic rewrites of Harrison Bergeron (the only difference between the two is the hair color and name of the antagonist).

(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)

Nah, there's a middle ground. "Trad with liberal characteristics" or whatever, where you acknowledge that some people are gonna do what they want and have it mostly work out for them, and encourage them to do it in isolated enclaves like SF, while still discouraging it in the general case.

What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population. This helps those individuals, by hamstringing their competition, but it is virulently anti-social.

What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population.

Indeed; and while invoking Cain and Abel may flatter my personal biases, there's another one right next to it that very certainly does not: you can perhaps view [those humans given to be] traditionalists as Adam, progressives as Eve, and liberals as the Snake (and the sexes in that story are that way for good reason).

The liberals lie to the progressives so they'd take accept something that was too advanced for them and [that the liberal knew] the only reason they [progressive] wanted it was to be turbo-selfish with it.
The progressives in turn lie to the traditionalists, saying the thing was perfectly fine and good for everyone, don't think about it, just enjoy it.

And now everything's fucked up because beings that weren't supposed to have to deal with knowing [thing] now just have to deal with the consequences of knowing you can do [thing].
That, combined with the separation from God that comes from not being perfect with it, is how the knowledge from the fruit kills you!

Actually, both the Garden of Eden and Cain vs. Abel contrapose when read this way, but then the difference between the snake and Abel was that Abel acted faithfully and the snake faithlessly (and the siren call of the liberal t'was ever thus: did God truly say?)

It's strange that I've never heard anyone explain this in this way. Or maybe not, considering it's quite embarrassing, and especially to those "closer" to the fault (though there is ultimately no degree of "closer" in sin, and the traditionalists are too busy abusing it to shit-talk the progressives anyway in the "hurr Eve ate it first that means I'm better" sense anyway).

And maybe it's wrong, maybe I'm reading too hard into these... but if you're trying to explain how human nature and sin works to a prehistoric people then I'd say it describes the major players/impulses/excuses of the classes of humankind very well.

Of course, it doesn't say what each should do in response; the fact people can be bucketed this way is [and quite importantly] not part of the curse, but "the people more ready to accept 'did God truly say?'-type questions when they're posed in faith will instead desire and be ruled over by that class of people who are not so willing, and they will not be willing because they're cursed with having to work for a living until they die" sure is!

(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)

To give the traditionalists their due, Cain WAS the bad guy in that story.

Liberalism (meaning, not socialism and not hard right) is the dominant position here, and pretty much everywhere else too. Libertarianism is also popular here.

You were probably looking for a term like “progressive” or “woke” instead of “liberal”.

Interesting. Maybe? Idk I don't know that liberalism is the default view around here. Perhaps 'liberalism if they agree that Christian values are the correct values for their individual flourishing.'

"Liberalism in the way it was meant 200 years ago" is pretty common here, and yes Christian values are part of that because they're significant rootstock of the project.

"Liberalism as used by David French to describe Ketanji Brown Jackson" is not, and is unrelated to the first definition, despite being more common in the common discourse.

Alas! Language evolves.

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