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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.
My problem with HBD as it typically discussed in rationalist spaces and especially the Motte is that it is itself a massive Motte and Bailey.
The Motte is that broad differences between racial groups are real/exist.
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
You can spongebob meme at me about "dEmoCrAtSaReThErEaLRaCiStS uwu" and call me cringe, but if the truth is "cringe" then cringe i shall be.
As i touched upon below i am increasingly convinced that the reason HBD and other sweeping generalizations about race are so popular amongst priestly caste (academics, politicians, journalists, et al) and on certain parts of Twitter, is that it allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility for the negative consequences of thier policies and behavior. You can't blame me, it is genetics (or some structural "ism") that are the true culprits!
I think claims about general tendencies in this forum should at least be furnished with some examples of the beliefs you claim to be widespread, if you can't provide quantitative data. Otherwise, well, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
(Even the most expansive bailey I recall seeing around here, implicitly or explicitly, on this topic amounts to "always assume group differences in outcomes are fully innate, and refuse to acknowledge the possibility of racism in legislation, jurisprudence or social engineering programming", which is still a far cry from anything that amounts to using racial background as a means of organising society (like Apartheid South Africa, Israel or like Progressive America?).)
How many examples with how many upvotes would i have to provide to convince you that it's not a fluke? How explict do they have to be? Will you accept plain language at its meaning, or should i expect you to play the old "defund the police doesn't literally mean defunding the police" card?
2 or 3 from different users, explicit enough about what you claim to make up the "bailey" (including in particular language that is similar to your "scientifically correct means of organizing a society" quote), perhaps at +25 or more to back up your claim of being especially supported by this forum, with the responses and derisive responses to those posts you claim to exist below those posts.
Also, there should be at least something linking those posters to the "HBD" label, either explicitly or implicitly by way of some post where they display beliefs or preoccupations that are characteristic of that community (e.g. subpopulations of Nigeria). You can't just grab some old white supremacist off the metaphorical street and claim that he's actually representative of HBDers, as this would be pretty circular as a means to establish that your slander (that HBDers usually just amount to [garden-variety racial supremacists]; nobody is disputing that garden-variety racial supremacists exist) is not baseless.
Hard mode: No upper-caste Indian guys shopping around for frameworks to justify Indian caste society and their position in it.
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I mean, at least one, on this forum.
As one of the HBDers that you deride, my position is that HBD is a thing that we should take into account when looking at the world. It's not the only thing, but it is one of the main things. Pretending that all ethnic groups are identical blank slates is wrong and leads to bad outcomes.
But I've yet to see an HBDer in the wild who ignores everything else. He's a strawman for people like you who aren't willing to say 'all races and ethnic groups have identical IQ' but still force everyone to debate as if that were the case.
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