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With and Against Yarvin on Cults, Racism, Gaza, and the Danger of Being Wrong
TLDR: Cults and related extremist groups arise when the Commanding Heights of culture and intellect are wildly and obviously wrong about something, opening space for less respectable and reputable groups to be obviously correct. In a healthy example, the Antithesis is quickly synthesized into the mainstream; in an unhealthy example the Thesis stands rigid and refuses to budge, and a as a result the antithesis grows in power and control. Seeing that the Antithesis is correct about one thing, people buy into the whole program, and pretty soon: there’s the Flavor-Aid.
My wife and I have been on a big kick of cults lately. She’s been watching a done of documentaries on cults, running from Heaven’s Gate and Synanon through NXVIM* and Gwen Shamblin. I, meanwhile, have been listening to Daryl Cooper’s extensive podcast on Jim Jones and The People’s Temple. Cooper does a great job of contextualizing Jones within the broader left* and the culture of the time. Cooper gives us the loony fringe left of the time, and how People’s Temple fit into that cultural movement. The insane things the Black Panthers would say, and the credibility they were given. The Weathermen taking over SDS, and actually going out to start a revolution. How insane everyone was, that Angela Davis would endorse People’s Temple, and call Jonestown in some of its last days to talk to Jones and encourage his people to hold the line against capitalism/racism/etc.
But what Cooper also does a great job of is showing the racism that the Panthers and the People’s Temple and their supporters active and passive were all reacting against. He starts the work quoting extensively from Isabella Wilkerson on lynchings in the South, the resulting Great Migration to the North, and the racism faced by blacks in Northern cities like Chicago. The violence in Cicero against a college educated father trying to move his family into a better neighborhood, where he could pay lower rent and have room for the piano they bought for their daughter.** He movingly talks about MLK and Selma, and the violence that lead to the rise of SDS and the Black Panthers.
I never realized how much of People’s Temple’s work was devoted to race issues, and how much of the congregation was black. Which, in light of recent conversations, has me thinking about how People’s Temple and similarly insane groups were enabled by American racism. They were handed a public issue, in which the mainstream was quite obviously morally wrong by its own standards and factually wrong in its claims. This enabled a malignant narcissist like Jim Jones to be correct about one thing, which caused a lot of people to listen to him about other things. I think people don’t appreciate this, on either left or right, because they don’t remember that…
Racists Really Did Believe in Racism
Curtis Yarvin in a recent podcast appearance talked about recent studies published in Nature indicating significant genetic contribution in sub-Saharan African genomes from an unknown hominid species, theorized to have diverged from modern humans before Neanderthals. Yarvin strongly implies, though he does not outright state, that this contribution indicates that sub-Saharan African populations are other than or less than other humans, and then moves on from the point quickly. Yarvin jokes that:
This was the outright expression of something I’ve been thinking about for a while. A pretty frequent argument seen in right wing or putatively trad spaces: our ancestors knew these things, their superstitions were suppressed by a movement of the evil or the idiotic who forced us to pretend that things that aren’t true are, that the emperor had clothes, but we who can notice can look at the facts and the science and realize that they were true all along. But this ends up, inevitably, being an act of sane washing of the opinions of racists of the past. The modern HBDer like Yarvin takes a defensible compromise Motte, then declares Uncle Roy’s Bailey to be fully under control!
Much as atheist materialists try to rewrite history by assuming that all examples of religion are really cynical efforts to achieve material benefit, both racists and anti-racists of today sometimes do the same with racism. They soft-pedal the racist beliefs of American whites circa 1776-last week. HBDers sanewash their predecessors, talking about bell curves and averages and standard deviations. Wokes paint the racists of the past as purely evil, bent only on preserving their own selfish social and economic privileges through a devious and cynical set of schemes to keep the obviously equal (or brilliant) black man down. A certain breed of online dissident rightist will even buy into the woke framing, and try to sell racial segregation as a neutral social technology, that reducing diversity is necessary to conjure up social trust or something.
When the reality was, racists of the past were genuinely racist, they really did believe that the blacks and Jews etc. were inferior. And not just inferior on average within overlapping bell curves, or in specific metrics, or as a result of cultural conditioning. White racists often believed that every black was inferior in every way to essentially every white American. Consider, for a moment, the dialogue on sports pre-Jackie Robinson. The color line in sports is generally presented today as something done specifically to be cruel, to keep superior black athletes**** from getting their proper respect, to keep social lines intact. For the most part, if you ask those who created and upheld these lines, they genuinely thought that blacks couldn’t compete. The goal wasn’t to keep blacks from beating whites, it was to give blacks a League of their Own where they could compete without getting blown out by superior whites.
Before Jack Johnson, the assumption was that the greatest fighter in the world must be a white man. After all, the white man had outfought every other race, had the world in subjugation in 1900, how could it be otherwise than that he would win in the ring? Among the first great African American sportsmen, Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion of the world. He is celebrated for managing to break the color barrier, after pursuing the white champion across countries and borders trying to force him to fight, but few remember that beforehand most white experts doubted he could do it at all. Harper’s Weekly in 1910 argued that “The superiority of the brain of the white man … is undisputed by all authorities… [A] white man fighting with a negro … ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.” The same logic lead the Washington Post to argue about a hypothetical meeting between black champion Jack Johnson and white hope Jeffries “If Jeffries ever meets Johnson and is in his old trim, experts believe that ‘Texas Jack’ will not last more than ten rounds.” Jeffries and Johnson did meet, after years of intrepid effort by Johnson to bring him to the ring, and Johnson won despite a ruleset that allowed for up to forty rounds to be fought. The Grey Lady must have been worried sick after, the editors at the New York Times had openly speculated before the fight that "If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors.” The editors had set the stakes, and Johnson had delivered. Uncle Roys across the country wept, gnashed their teeth, and searched for a Great White Hope (the origin of the phrase) who would set things right by winning the heavyweight belt. They would mostly be disappointed until the millennium, outside of Sylvester Stallone movies.
Baseball, America’s pastime, was next. I’ve written before about how important Jackie Robinson was as a civil rights figure. Today he is mostly remembered as a social hero, but much more than that he was a baseball player, a true talent hall of famer with the WAR and the .400 OBP to show for it. He was great and his greatness proved the doubters wrong. Fred Lieb felt that Black ballplayers lacked the stamina to hold up to a 154 game schedule, or the refinement to handle the professional game at the highest level. Grantland Rice said the negro couldn’t handle the mental aspect of Major League ball, while Hugh Fullerton and Cap Anson often stated they lacked the discipline to stand the strain of the big leagues. Joe Williams in the New York World Telegram argued bluntly that: “Black players have been kept out of big league ball because they are, as a race, very poor ball players[,]” and would go on to say that "The demands of the Negro often bulk larger than his capabilities.” In the Sporting News J. G. Taylor Spink said of Jackie Robinson when he was in the Dodgers minor league system that “at 26… were he white and a polite college player, [he] would be eligible for a trial with one of the Brooklyn B farm organizations[,]” while Dan Daniel said “[Robinson] wasn’t of International [minor] League caliber.” Jackie Robinson would go on to put up a purely statistical Hall of Fame career and finally lead the Dodgers to the World Series. Robinson’s performance disproved
Despite the rise of the black athlete in mid century America, one spot where whites held out until recently was at quarterback in football. Bear Bryant, arguably the greatest college coach of all time, said that “The quarterback has to be a leader, and I don’t think a colored boy can do the things we need done at quarterback;” while Fran Curci of Kentucky told the NYT that “They’re great runners, but when it comes to reading defenses and passing, I don’t think the coloreds can handle it; and an anonymous NFL coach as late as 1978 felt comfortable telling Sports Illustrated that “The quarterback position requires more thinking than running, and that’s why you don’t see many blacks there. They’re not thinkers.” There wouldn’t be any black QBs in the pro game until the 80s, and they would remain a curiosity until the 2010s. Only in recent years have we seen black QBs break out of the running QB mold (and arguably seen teams overrate black QBs perceived as Athletic over white QBs perceived as statuesque pocket passers).
I’m sticking with sports because they’re easy, and the results are statistically obvious on the field. I hope I won’t be accused of consensus building when I say that we could dig up innumerable Uncle Roys saying Thurgood Marshall could never make it as a lawyer or judge, that there would never be a great black novelist or musician, that no black man would ever reach the rank of general in the US Army, or perform heart surgery. But that would be exhausting and boring. The sporting examples are enough to prove the point: our racist Uncle Roys, or perhaps Uncle Roy’s racist great uncle Roger, weren’t of the opinion that there were mostly-overlapping-bell-curves with different averages, they were of the opinion that blacks couldn’t compete with whites in any field.
Turn again to the same topic with regards to women. I’ve often seen it said on here that until the rise of Feminism and then of TRANS, everyone intuitively and obviously knew that women were about 35-40% weaker than men, that they would never come within 20% of men’s performance in sporting events. This is, again, sane washing history. When Bobbi Gibb tried to run the Boston Marathon in 1966 (when, for context, my father was in college), race director Will Cloney rejected her on the grounds that women were “physiologically incapable” of running 26 miles. Other observers theorized that her uterus might fall clean out. This year, the difference between the men’s and women’s winners in Boston was less than fifteen minutes in a total time of just over two hours. This is not what Uncle Roy predicted, and to pretend that fifteen minutes is closer to “her uterus falls out” than it is to equality strikes me as odd.***** The famed tennis Battle of the Sexes is often derided today, don’t you know that he was out of shape and old, that Serena and Venus in their primes couldn’t take some minor league nobody in tennis, etc. What this ignores is that the Uncle Roys of the world really believed that Billy Jean King didn’t stand a chance, that any professional male would slaughter her. The result was genuinely shocking to a great many people at the time.
This brings us back to the man himself, Curtis Yarvin. When imagining a coup-complete solution to the problems of the modern United States, Moldbug pictured the key tool to destroy his nemesis The Cathedral as an alternative truth telling service he labeled the “Antiversity.”
His core idea is that the Antiversity would present all facts, including the ones that are inconvenient for the NYT or for Harvard, the Antiversity will be correct in its statements and predictions while The Cathedral will be wrong, and that as people recognize this they will notice what is going on around them and this will bring down The Cathedral and bring in a more sane regime. I’ve always found this a compelling argument, as I find many things Moldbug said. The conflict lies between Yarvin’s prior Moldbug arguments, and his current championing of your racist Uncle Roy, in that Uncle Roy and his arguments lost his credibility by more or less exactly this process. Uncle Roy predicted that Jack Johnson would lose, that Jackie Robinson lacked the discipline to play in the majors, that women couldn’t run 26 miles, that no woman could beat any man in competitive tennis. He was wrong every time, lost his credibility, and was dismissed as a crank, his views ignored or reengineered into imaginary social boundary keeping or capitalist exploitation.
But in the process, a lot of people became extremists or joined cults. The People’s Temple, Synanon, The Weathermen, the Panthers, the Red Army Faction, SDS. Their best recruiting tool was the purported racism of the establishment, this issue on which the establishment was obviously incorrect, being proven incorrect regularly. Cult leaders like Jim Jones used the racism of society as a recruiting tool, as his most powerful recruiting tool. Jim Jones used the obviously incorrect stances of millions of Uncle Roys to convince his followers that they should look for alternate sources of truth, sources like Jim Jones. That they should trust Jim Jones in all things, and even when Uncle Roy points out all the weird shit going on with Jim Jones he lacks credibility because he was wrong so many times, and Uncle Roy isn’t even around to ask what’s in the Flavor Aid.
The cults were the flower of this phenomenon, but the fruit is our modern world, where people genuinely think that men and women are physically equal if women only tried harder, and citing simple statistics and repeatable studies is verboten, for fear of sounding like Uncle Roy. The modern absurdities are born of overreaction to the absurdities of yesteryear. We must be careful not to overstate our cases and produce yet more absurdities, circling a Hegelian drain.
Which brings us to the other great recruiting tool of the 60s-era cults: Vietnam. Vietnam was a botched abortion of a colonial war, born in deceit and confusing esoteric doctrine, carried on in lies and half measures, brought to an embarrassing defeat after extended flailing and extensive murder of innocents. The establishment was always wrong on Vietnam, and always obviously wrong, and it destroyed the credibility of the establishment when Nixon’s conversations with Kissinger made clear that the establishment itself knew that they were wrong. Nixon knew the war was lost when he reached office, and continued it out of a strategy of achieving a “decent interval” before surrender, or occasionally bombed Laos or Camdodia in a half-hearted attempt to turn the tide.
Today’s absurdity is Gaza. A carnival of cruelty, with no obvious exit strategy. Israel has never had a real theory of victory, no one has yet offered a real plan for Gaza going forward, a few Israeli cranks on the right wing will at least attempt to forward real plans for genocide or ethnic cleansing, but mostly everyone still talks about a two-state solution that will obviously never come to be. Israel will not allow any group that could govern Gaza to govern Gaza, will neither absorb Gaza nor let it go, will neither integrate the Palestinians nor murder them in numbers significant enough to achieve population reduction. Gaza is kept in desperate famine, but not exterminated; it is kept miserable but not destroyed. And the vast majority of US politicians stand with Israel, and are more concerned with campus no-no words than with ongoing physical cruelty to no obvious end.
But what the lessons of Uncle Roy and Jim Jones should teach us is that being wrong for a long time in public is dangerous. It can destroy your credibility, it can overthrow regimes, it can lead to a reaction much worse than the problem ever was to begin with. The dynamic of truth-telling as revolutionary act that Yarvin purports to espouse, is most dangerous when the regime chooses to be obviously wrong.
We need solutions in Gaza, however brutal they may be they must be logical. We need to stick to facts, to stick to truth, to stick to principles. To do otherwise creates openings for things that are worse than we can imagine.
Footnotes
*While Cooper spends a lot of time denigrating groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, people who try to deride Cooper as a simple racist clearly haven’t consumed much of his content, where he’ll quote pages of Isabella Wilkerson or James Baldwin at you. That said, I warned my wife before recommending the work to her, the one thing Cooper did that was in poor taste: he should not have tried to do various blaccents when reading primary sources, it sounds ridiculous and embarrassing.
**Places like Cicero would provide some of the inspiration to the play A Raisin in the Sun which I saw performed locally a few months ago. The play was extremely well acted, the plot orients around a similar black family who put a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, only to be approached by the Clyburne Park Improvement Association with an offer to buy them out of the contract at a higher price than they had paid originally. The conflict over whether to take the money or not results in a moving soliloquy from the male lead, in which he imagines his conversation with the whites who want to keep them out:
MAMA Baby, how you going to feel on the inside? WALTER Fine! … Going to feel fine … a man … MAMA You won’t have nothing left then, Walter Lee. WALTER (Coming to her) I’m going to feel fine, Mama. I’m going to look that son-of-a-bitch in the eyes and say— (He falters)—and say, “All right, Mr. Lindner—(He falters even more)—that’s your neighborhood out there! You got the right to keep it like you want! You got the right to have it like you want! Just write the check and—the house is yours.” And—and I am going to say—(His voice almost breaks) “And you—you people just put the money in my hand and you won’t have to live next to this bunch of stinking niggers! …” (He straightens up and moves away from his mother, walking around the room) And maybe—maybe I’ll just get down on my black knees … (He does so; RUTH and BENNIE and MAMA watch him in frozen horror) “Captain, Mistuh, Bossman— (Groveling and grinning and wringing his hands in profoundly anguished imitation of the slowwitted movie stereotype) A-hee-hee-hee! Oh, yassuh boss! Yasssssuh! Great white—(Voice breaking, he forces himself to go on)—Father, just gi’ ussen de money, fo’ God’s sake, and we’s—we’s ain’t gwine come out deh and dirty up yo’ white folks neighborhood …” (He breaks down completely) And I’ll feel fine! Fine! FINE! (He gets up and goes into the bedroom)
This was a small theater, a black box set up with maybe a hundred people, so I was only a dozen feet from him as he did this. Excellent actor. But, and this actually did make me reflect on white privilege as a concept, I couldn’t help but reimagine the play as a comedy. In the script, they tell the whites to go stuff it and they move in anyway, with the consequences good and bad obvious to the audience. But in my mind, if I put money down on a house, and someone came asking to buy me out for more, I’d do nothing but ask for more money, there’s some price at which I’d absolutely take the money. Obviously if I got a really good deal to start, they’d have to really pay me out, but I’d absolutely sell to them at some price. And I’d be trying to convince them that I didn’t want to sell, and that they really really didn’t want me to live there, to pump up the price.
And this is where it ought to be a comedy, Walter Lee imagines himself getting on his knees before the White Man, degrading himself, calling himself nigger, begging; he imagines this is how he will be able to take more from the white man. When that’s the opposite of what he ought to do to get more money out of the Clyburne Park Improvement Association! When the CPIA shows up, they should be blaring the most obnoxious Negro music they can find in 1959. Walter Lee should be telling them that while he appreciates the offer, he is really looking forward to having the house in Clyburne park so he can have all his friends over for barbecues, and that he just couldn’t accept their number. Meanwhile, Walter Lee ought to be inviting all his blackest friends over to jump in and out of the apartment at random to “talk business” while the CPIA is there, hinting darkly at how the house in Clyburne Park will be perfect for their “business” and how all the customers will be able to find the house easy and park all over the neighborhood. Beneatha and Ruth should dress like whores, hell have the grandmother wander in half dressed and drunk. Beneatha’s African boyfriend Asagai*** should show up in a loin cloth with a spear yelling unintelligibly in gibberish, while Beneatha’s rich respectable colored boyfriend George will bring over a car load of his black fraternity brothers, all drunk on malt liquor, and start a fight with Asagai. In the midst of all this negro ruckus, the respectable suburbanites of the CPIA, terrified of this kind of family moving into their neighborhood, double their offer to Walter Lee, who sighs and accepts it. The CPIA YTs scurry out, and the blacks collectively break character and laugh together at how they hoodwinked the Man.
The fact that this is the obvious way the story should end, says something about my relationship with racial pride as a white person.
***I imagined Asagai in all his appearances as Barack Obama’s dad. Chicago university in 1959 is about when he would have been around. It added spice to the dialogue if you thought about Asagai later marrying a white bitch and leaving town, ditching her with the baby Barack. This isn’t strictly accurate, but Asagai as an archetype is literally Obama pere.
****Black American superiority in athletics is also rapidly being revealed as a myth. The various race scientists proclaiming it are too numerous to discuss here in my fourth footnote to an already overly verbose comment, but Jimmy the Greek has turned out to be wrong in addition to being rude. Black athletic dominance was a fact of life in the late 90s, but it peaked around the early 2000s and has been in decline ever since, across all major American sports (other than Hockey, which never had any black players). When I was a kid, it was basically understood that there would never be another white heavyweight champ outside of Rocky movies, never be a star white halfback in the NFL, never be a dominant white NBA MVP. As with the ascent of the black athlete, the decline started in boxing, moved to baseball, and has since started to show up in football and basketball. Russian/Ukrainian fighters have mostly dominated the heavyweight championship since the fall of the USSR, with the odd Irish traveler or Mexican thrown in. The percentage of black (African American) players in Major League Baseball peaked in the 80s at around 20%, and now sits at 6-7%. The percentage of black NFL players peaked in the early 2000s at 70%, and now sits just over 55%, with notable recent white stars at traditionally black skill positions like RB, WR, and CB popping up literally for the first time in decades. The NBA, of course, remains predominantly American black by numbers, but the rise of slavs like Jokic and Doncic has punctured myths, and the Serbian team took the US olympic team to the brink without a single black player. Racist myths are being punctured, here. Were I Ibram X Kendi, I would be trying to get Cooper Dejean and Christian McCaffrey on a podcast. We desperately want athletic success to be ethnic in nature, genetic in nature, but we’ve gotten it wrong every time. Basketball was once thought to be a great sport for Jews because it offered so many opportunities for trickery and deceit. But, of course, the Jews among HBD believers argue that Uncle Roy was right about the blacks, but wrong about the Jews.
*****Though this may be just be a case of appropriate username. I’m pretty sure my uterus would have fallen out if I had one.
If we are looking at athletic differences in general, marathon is probably the endeavor most favorable to women. The male advantage in lower body is less than upper body; the advantage in endurance is less than in raw power. A marathon is not comparing each sex carrying a similar load, like a pack of 50 pounds of military ammo and equipment. And a marathon is only measuring a single dimension of ability. So a 4SD outlier for a woman in running, will be better than almost all men. But in most athletic endeavors require multiple dimensions of skill -- endurance and power and dexeterity and accuracy. It is very likely that a 4SD outlier in one areas is an outlier in a second or third unrelated characteristic. SO when you have a more well-rounded athletic activity it will be the case that the 99th percentile woman will be worse than the majority of men. When the Canadian gold-medal winning Olympic woman's team has done training in the past, they have played in a men's high school league, and been middle of the pack. Thus the best women in the world are basically slightly above average high schoolers. And this was with checking banned. Thus I think most people still substantially understimate how big the sex differences are in athletic activity.
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This is just basic party-line establishment liberal/progressive history that I got in high school and college 101 courses. The entire point of Moldbug was saying, "this is the history you have been taught, but here, read these actual sources from closer to the time, many from liberals or black people presenting evidence against interest, and you can see the mainstream narrative about racism in the 1950s and 1960s was just as crazy wrong as the BLM/NY Times narrative about race is crazy wrong in 2010" And myself and many other read the sources he recommended and was convinced he was right.
For an overview, you can try these classic blog posts:
https://devinhelton.com/why-urban-decay
https://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/black-history-i/
https://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/the-truth-about-lynching/
Or you can undergo the full treatment and actually read the books Moldbug recommends here, and then give us a book report: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/07/olxiv-rules-for-reactionaries/
The reality is that black people had something like 5X to 100X higher rates of predatory crime, and that there were many cases of white people doing the "right" thing and welcoming black people into their neighborhoods with gifts and open arms -- and often the result was that in a few years the white kids were getting beat up at the bus stop and elderly people were getting assaulted and the girls were getting their asses grabbed in the schools and overall the situation was intolerable. Given that, I do not blame white people not wanting a black family to move in. Maybe they are upstanding and won't create any problems ... but maybe not. And in a time before credit checks and internet searches there wasn't a good way to tell. Furthermore, maybe they have relatives who will be a problem, or their daughter is going to bring home a boyfriend and he and his friends are going to be a problem. Or maybe if you let in one family, then another will come, then another, and the entire neighborhood will flip and then your life will suck. That said, some neighborhoods did seem to have success with a "black a block" strategy where they allowed in just one or two high-quality black families to move in. But such a strategy was something required more sophistication to pull-off, your ordinary working class whites are not going to be able to do it.
The other thing people forget is that in a time before video surveillance and computerized criminal databases, phenotype-based discrimination ("you don't look like you are from around here, what is your business? who do you know?" was the only way to keep a neighborhood safe. All neighborhoods were heavily segregated, polish neighborhoods, Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc, and people from a different ethnic group could not just freely walk into another neighborhood. If you allow strangers to walk unmolested through your neighborhood, it was trivially easy for that stranger to commit a crime, slip away, and never be found again. There are tons of stories of Irish youth wailing on Italian youth or vice versa over territory, and blacks wailing on whites, yet mainstream history will only tell about whites wailing on blacks, making whites looking uniquely evil.
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Lynchings were a response to violent crime. Something like a third of those lynched were White. Africans were lynched more because they commit more violent crime, and also because their crimes were seen an attack on the community from a foreign community. Generally, it worked as follows: if you were to rape a girl, the community would strangulate you to death, and they would make a whole spectacle about this so as to deter future crime and to reaffirm that the community is protected. Lynchings are bad because justice is better, as a small percent of the lynching victims were innocent, though jury trials also pose their own problems. But we see in recent events eg Rotherham that lynching can produce better justice than subverted judicial processes even into the 21st century. Had the men of Rotherham lynched the rapists immediately, they would have prevented many thousands of rapes, which is clearly better than no justice at all over decades. Following from this, one problem in the south was that Blacks were allowed to be on juries, and we now know from studies that Blacks on average cannot judge defendants impartially. Blacks, but not Whites, are more likely to let someone of their own race go free yet convict someone of another race. Possibly because Blacks, but not Whites, have a high in-group preference.
You write
This depends on your values, really. If you believe that all groups should share in each others’ resources, despite having different behavioral tendencies, levels of intelligence, cultures, and histories, then the mainstream was wrong. But if you believe that White people are genetically and historically different, and consequently deserve to be raped less, and murdered less, and deserve to enjoy the justice system they created which requires honor and trust, in accordance to their ability, then the mainstream was obviously correct.
Yes, you are supposed to make generalizations based on observable evidence and trusted testimony when you lack superior evidence. This is the intelligent thing to do. This is the moral thing to do. It was their best option because they didn’t have an entire science of intelligence, and even if this did exist in some obscure intelligence journal, the average man did not have easy access it. So they say, “wow, this golden retriever is gentle and kind”, or “wow, this pitbull is aggressive and dangerous”, based on a collection of experiences. When Americans were debating the Chinese exclusion act, the argument was not that the Chinese were stupid or lazy. Even proponents of exclusion knew that the Han were industrious and intelligent. Is it really racism if human intuition is just that good at generalizing?
I don’t think there’s evidence for this.
These QBs are usually more than half-white, with light eyes (this has its own interesting genetic reasons), and there’s also been political pressure to introduce more black QBs. A lot of what you’ve written is just “some Whites underestimated Black athleticism”. We’re not talking about chess or strategy games here, we’re talking about a very base form of human leisure activity. Your opinion seems to be that we should shame Uncle Roy because, well, while his intuition may have been correct about the most important things in the world, it was wrong about…. sports. Something that doesn’t matter. Something done for leisure. Something that is more fun to do the worse you are at it. You didn’t attempt to prove an equality between the races for anything that actually matters (development, virtue, productivity, etc). Surely the best hominid heavyweight lifter is actually a gorilla, but does this matter? Has anyone checked if Terence Tao can dunk?
Cults
I don’t find the overriding argument compelling. NXIVM didn’t draw on the mainstream being wrong, and neither did Osho’s cult or the nascent Mormon cult. ISIS is probably the worst cult of the modern era, and they are wrong on virtually every issue. To understand cults it’s easier just to understand that humans have certain vulnerabilities which evil people can take advantage of. One of these vulnerabilities is our innate desire for equality and fraternity, which evolved to aid the tribe, which is why racism has been a powerful rallying cry since the 60s.
The other thing about lynchings, is that even if you believe that every one was actual murder, the total number of white-on-black lynchings for all of American history since the civil war, is far less than the excess number of black-on-white murders over the past fifty years. So if we are to focus on problems based on the size of the problem, the history textbook section on the problems of black crime should be many times larger than the section on lynching.
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True, but they were both Kenyan, who are so far removed from the average in long-distance running it hardly seems like a fair comparison. I would love to see the average difference in finishing times between male and female competitors.
To the best of my knowledge, Billie Jean King is the only case of a female tennis player defeating a male: going through the examples in the Wikipedia article, I can't find any other examples in which a man played a match of three sets or more against a woman and lost, and these include many examples in which the man played with significant handicaps. Even in the single outlier of King v. Riggs, there's a credible theory that Riggs deliberately threw the match in order to get out of a gambling debt.
As to whether people believed that no woman could beat any man - I'm sure people in the 1970s would have conceded that a female tennis player could beat a man who was a literal invalid. Even if Riggs didn't throw the match, he was twenty-six years older than King. I ask you whether "several decades past his prime" is closer to the "able-bodied woman vs. male invalid" end of the spectrum than to the "evenly matched competitors" end.
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This post follows the "ideas I don't like are Cults and the ones I do like are Rational" signaling, but the fact is it's cults all the way down. Cult, after all, is the root of the word culture. It's not about a struggle of cults against rationalism it's about a struggle of cults among cults. And the dominant cults of the time may appear invincible and their ideas unassailable but that's never the case.
The Rational perspective is not to oppose cults, it's to foster the cults that have the greatest n-order effects for some objective; like the flourishing of civilization. The racial consciousness of yore that you denounce was a cult, sure, but so is the emotional scandal you feel today when you consider that set of beliefs- anti-racists really do believe in antiracism. Which set of beliefs is more functional? That's the more important question than just denouncing one or the other as a cult.
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Interesting post. I checked and (to my surprise at least) there are world-class black fencers too. But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?
War is not merely physically demanding but the most intellectually demanding test there is. It requires large-scale, long-range coordination of thousands, tens of thousands even millions of men (their food and supplies), it requires marksmanship, codemaking and codebreaking, optics and stabilizers, barrelforging, chemical industry, metallurgy, tactics and strategy, endless sophistication.
And war is dominated by whites and east Asians. Only once did a black army inflict a major campaign-ending defeat on a white army: the Italians vs Abyssinia in 1896. The Abyssinians had a 5:1 advantage in numbers and French/Russian rifles and smashed the fairly small Italian force. I chock Haiti up to disease, most of the whites who went off to fight there died of tropical illness rather than black military capacity (disease was sub-Saharan Africa's greatest shield against imperialism).
In 1935 the Italians came back and smashed Abyssinia (who were ironically getting a little aid from Nazi Germany, at that point they were unhappy with Italy over objecting to their desired annexation of Austria). The Abyssinians were using Mauser rifles, Hotchkiss machineguns, European weapons imported from whites, they had no major military industry and still don't today.
All other African states were conquered by a relatively modest white effort. There is no black equivalent to Japan thrashing the British Empire in Singapore, actually attacking and conquering a white-held region rather than merely defending their independence. They were using Japanese weapons, aircraft and warships. They produce their own aircraft today. There are no black fighter jets, not even license-built aircraft.
Today a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy. Wagner is not the A-team of white military power, they're at least two tiers below Ukraine, who is at least two tiers below a big power like the US or China. Colonialism was, is and will remain fairly easy against blacks, it's only that colonialism has gone out of fashion.
The colonial wars fought by white powers like Portugal that ended with Portuguese defeat were primarily political defeats, not military ones. Now a political defeat is still a defeat (war is about politics first and foremost). But the military capacity is there to force surrender. If you just go in and massacre the other side, eventually the population will submit. Mongol tactics work provided you retain military superiority. Chemical weapons are almost perfectly suited to fight guerrillas. Only the international community will likely impose sanctions and there'll be domestic political problems with massacring, so this isn't an option. Political constraints with regard to democracy, nationalism and freedom make it very hard to fight a war, motivate soldiers and implement a coherent, effective strategy. Thus overwhelmingly superior military Coalition forces lost in Afghanistan. Thus superior Israeli forces are making no headway in Gaza as you point out.
Back to my main point, war is like STEM Nobels and heavy industry, chess, esports, founding unicorn companies, invention generally... it requires large investment over a long term, patient maintenance, specialized skills and deep thought. Whites and East Asians are the best at it and much better than blacks. On a micro level, there's Sailer's law. When violence is inflicted ineptly (many shot but few killed) it's usually black but when there is a big body count, it's usually white.
This warfare gap is a key fact where the antiracists are consistently wrong, rather like how I was wrong about fencing (which after all is mostly about the body no matter how much we romanticize and intellectualize it) and ye olde racist was wrong about sport. The Cold War powers assumed that Africa was quickly going to become prosperous and powerful, it would be wise to curry favour with them. Thus 'strategic' ploys all around Africa by various sides. But sub-Saharan Africa remains weak and poor today, albeit with ballooning populations. They usually find some way to squander their resource endowments, Botswana excepted. And even Botswana is mostly HIV-ridden subsistence farmers with diamond mines - a Sub-Saharan success story up until synthetic diamonds become more popular. Raw resources and key waterways remain the most important things in Africa, in strategic terms. Trying to curry favour with weak, poor states that routinely collapse is not really effective. You can just muscle in and take the gold or oil, it's not that hard.
At the end of the day, basketball does not matter. Athletics does not matter. Fencing does not matter. Boxing does not matter. Whether you can reach the rank of general in the US Army does not matter (it's more to do with politics than performance), whether you can be a CEO does not matter. There are lots of crap CEOs, judges and generals. What does matter is warfare and all that stands behind warfare (like wealth and technology). Warfare is the difference between an Israeli living more or less securely and a Palestinian who got their land taken, children starving to death and leg blown off by a bomb.
Warfare is derived from the whole population base, from the engineers and factory workers, scientists, officer corps, general staff, pilots and riflemen. There's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary. Ye olde racist might be wrong 9/10 times but is right where it matters, regarding key civilizational abilities of which warfare is the most important. The leftist might be right 9/10 times about things that don't matter but still have a much more flawed understanding. Consider Detroit, school bussing, affirmative action and trillions in foreign aid to Africa...
Abyssinians are white. As white as the Jews, the Arabs and the Nubians.
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To interrupt your thesis, Shaka Zulu was clearly a military reformer whose innovations of 'having reserves' and 'enveloping the flanks to crush the middle' were superior enough in his local enviroment to cause the Great Bantu Migration. I'd also point to Paul Kagame as a leader of the RPF in fighting guerilla war against a numerically superior opponent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Kitona is basically what the VDF tried to do in Ukraine but failed miserably at, again the Rwandans.
OK but Shaka Zulu was using iron-age tactics in the 19th century. When the British showed up, it was over for the Zulus.
The Rwandans are quite good at fighting... by African standards. If they were in Ukraine, they'd be slaughtered with contemptuous ease by either side. Ukraine had integrated air defences, S-300s, Buks, Strelas, Tunguskas... they were coordinated and capable, loyal response forces would show up to counter a breakthrough. You can't just fly into a Ukrainian airbase with civilian aircraft, land and storm it. That's not how it works.
4 civilian aircraft continued to fly back and forth? They just bribed the Congolese army to join their cause? They grabbed some crap tanks from the 1950s and 1960s? That's African warfare, whites are on another level entirely.
All military is relative to the competency of the belligerents. You wouldn't say that Hannibal was a incompetent loser if he was bushwhacked by a time-travelling Marine Corp Expeditionary regiment. To bring up the Ukrainians and the Russians, either side would be completely annihilated by a modern western combined-arms military in a war of maneuver, but we wouldn't say that Slavs are incompetent at war.
So who counts as 'white'?
Can non-white countries adapt 'white' ways of war?
Doubtful in its own terms, and irrelevant when Khinzal or Oreshnik or Sarmat with thermonuclear warheads show up. Again, African militaries don't have that kind of firepower.
If Hannibal tried to do his thing today with Numidian horsemen and iron age weapons, I'd call him very weak, only capable of beating very weak forces in exceptional circumstances, with no hope of longterm success.
Anglo-Saxons, Swedes, Poles, Frenchmen, Germans and others... It's really not a relevant or interesting question. Normal people can give a good approximation of 'who is white' with some uncertainty in the case of Southern Italy/Balkans/Greece-Turkey.
Sure can, to differing degrees. East Asians are the best at it, co-equal IMO.
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Not very well thought out thought at the moment but I think my counters to this are:
OK but part of this is that most of the white-black wars never even make it into history since it's so quick and one-sided. If you're well-educated, you might know about the Italians losing in Abyssinia, Isandlwana and Haiti's war of independence. They're the interesting exceptions. Usually whites showed up with Maxim guns and dominated so effectively that there wasn't even a war. Thus all of Africa was colonized between about 1850 and 1936.
Consider the two biggest wars in this period. The most stubborn resistance was put up by the Boers (white but outnumbered 5:1), fighting for three years against the British Empire. Whereas the Italians (in their full-scale invasion in 1935) mauled Ethiopia in seven months, despite the latter having rough numerical parity. The British suffered much higher casualties than Italy did too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Italo-Ethiopian_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War
After decolonization, no black African state ever became a major technological/military power like India, South Korea, Japan or China. Or even a middle power like Saudi Arabia or Iran. The strongest black African state is South Africa, which is also the only black state with a significant white population. There's been noticeable deterioration in quality of infrastructure, medical excellence (the country went from pioneering heart surgery to HIV denialism) and crime under black rule.
And we see the same pattern in so much else: STEM Nobels and heavy industry, chess, esports, founding unicorn companies, invention generally, like I mentioned. Not a single STEM Nobel has ever been awarded to a black person.
If you look at the leading companies in the world of high technology, it's disproportionately whites and East Asians that run them.
These are of course legitimate objections, it is indeed hard to define racial groups and thoroughly test such a broad-spanning topic. But the trend is both important and large in magnitude. A simple, imperfect model with some limitations is still an advance on pure blankslatism or question-begging 'oh sub-Saharan Africa is struggling due to lacking the necessary infrastructure'. Why don't they build the infrastructure? They lack the capital? Well why don't they acquire the capital? Bad institutions? Well why are the institutions bad? Other countries manage these issues too.
It all requires a root cause, which is either colonialism (dubious, many countries were colonized, brutalized and exploited for much longer periods of time: Poland, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Greece, whereas Ethiopia was occupied for only a few years, Liberia never colonized at all) or fundamental inequality of ability, which would explain a lot more.
Uh, Liberia was a settler colony.
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Thé Japanese won one war against a white power- the Russo-Japanese war. They kicked the Chinese’s teeth in regularly, they managed to beat the Dutch at the end of their supply line but lost to the Anglosphere. China then fought the mostly white UN forces to a draw in Korea, but they never withdrew. Vietnam was a political defeat from US taxpayers not wanting to keep bailing out a corrupt, unstable dictatorship.
It looks like whites retain an edge over East Asians at war.
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Shades of the Judge. I agree almost entirely, but I'm compelled to point out that Isandlwana was essentially campaign-ending, in that the British had to completely withdraw from Zululand and plan a second, more competent invasion. Bad planning, sure, but it was also a perfect storm scenario for an African force to defeat European riflemen - a large part of the area the Zulus charged over was dead ground from the perspective of the British lines, and the British were undersupplied and had little space to fall back into. A Roman legion would have whipped the British there.
Good point, I forgot about Isandlwana. I said campaign-ending when I was really thinking 'war-ending' or at least something more decisive, like how the Singapore attack was a decisive blow against Britain in the Far East but not sufficient to knock them out of the war...
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And in the 1990's Executive Outcomes could quickly win wars in sub-Saharan Africa until the US/UN told them to stop.
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This part seems shoehorned into your post without you really making the connection. I don't think it accurately portrays the situation in Gaza, which is part of the reason it simply does not fit the pattern. Gaza, simply put, may be a carnival of cruelty, but it is self imposed. The people of Gaza prefer being poor and hungry to being non-violent and cooperative neighbors. They have expressed this again and again. And part of the problem with that is you assertion that a "vast majority" of US politicians stand with Israel is false. Most will mouth words in that direction from time to time, but particularly Democrats, are quick to criticize any effective military or law enforcement action by Israel. Because of this, the US imposes significant restraints on Israeli action (preventing the ethnic cleansing/genocide or even just a real blockade, for example) which means Hamas always has the whip hand in Gaza. Gazans largely like Hamas, it appears, but those who don't fear Hamas much more than they fear Israel. For as bad as some actions have been on a small scale, Netanyahu is never going to condone raping the wives of Hamas militants while their babies burn to death in an over. And I don't think Israel needs to go THAT far to win this war. But from Vietnam to Afghanistan, we have consistently learned that occupations with a soft touch are doomed to failure.
ISTM the most clear and least cruel path forward is a worldwide Israeli green light to level any building, whether it be a school, hospital, or bunker, where there is reasonable suspicion a Hamas person or article is present. Realistically, this is most of Gaza. Following a WWII Tokyo like bombing campaign over the majority of the territory, perhaps the people of Gaza will elect new leadership and come to an armistice. That could, theoretically be followed by one of a few scenarios:
I would expect under #1, both would quickly become very well off states provided they don't go back into the terrorism game. Trump often spouts BS, but he is absolutely correct that they are both excellent locations for a prosperous state, given the right leadership and populace. I expect, for example, if you put a bunch of Iowans in Gaza and Nebraskans in West Bank, both would swiftly approach or exceed Israel in GDP/Capita.
Why? What makes you think they'll exceed Israel?
Do you think the ultra Orthodox are dragging the gang down?
There is that, but also I just think Iowans and Nebraskans are generally pretty good at self-governance, and they'd have none of the built up bureaucracy that Israel has from its early years that were much more socialist in origin. It is still a fairly dysfunctional government as we've seen with the Supreme Court's battles with Bibi.
Generally busting a bunch of Americans out of the complicated regulatory environment that exists in America would usually result in explosive growth.
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This is Whig history. Even your positions contradict themselves.
It was the establishment that pushed trans in sports and female equality and now as the tide turns it is the establishment that seems to be coming around to opposing it. What then should we learn from your proposed righteous arc of history? Which establishment can we assume at the Walters? This is an acid that dissolves itself.
I think this is addressed in the OP. The absurd beliefs of today (there is no difference in peak athletic performance between males and females, and all observable differences are the product of socialisation) are an overcorrection to the absurd beliefs of yesterday (men are physically superior to women on every axis, and women are so physically weak that they cannot even safely compete in long-distance running events). We're now belatedly arriving at a Hegelian synthesis, in which we acknowledge that men are stronger and faster than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation, while still recognising that women can be plenty strong and fast on their own terms. While "the establishment" was once pushing the "men and women are the same" angle and are now pushing the Hegelian synthesis, the use of the collective noun disguises what a hard-fought battle it was to get them to sit up and take notice. Gender-critical activists spent innumerable thankless years trying to draw attention to the higher rate of injury when male athletes were permitted to compete in female sporting events, and were rewarded for it by being harassed, doxxed and called bigoted and even racist (?). It's only very recently that the Hegelian synthesis has undergone a respectability cascade and the establishment is starting to recognise just how absurd the "men and women are the same" framework is. It'd be curious to see what the catalyst was - I think Lia Thomas started to make a lot of people sit up and take notice, but "swimming speed" is too abstract a metric for a lot of people to care about. Imane Khelif, however, seemed to have really redpilled a lot of people. The sight of an obviously male person punching a female person and being rewarded for doing so triggers an intense emotional reaction which probably has a long standing evolutionary basis.
I think you and the OP are making pretty different claims. Maybe the OP, in their TLDR uses dialectic terms, but the problem is you can make a just so dialectical story about anything as they do. If you see the HBDers as wrong so the Yarvinites aren't on the synthesis edge but instead the regressive edge. If you see HBD as right then they're a synthesis of the older pure racism with modern science. This structure can't actually do anything but affirm your priors. You could take this structure and decide that women really are physically the equals of men. And the application to Gaza? What is that even supposed to mean? What is the Thesis and Antithesis of Gaza? It a quagmire, a lose lose situation, not some kind of dialectical question.
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Nah, way before that there was Fallon Fox, an actual transgender, rather than male with DSD like Khalif, literally cracking an opponents skull.
You're not going to find a neat explanation, why this incident and not another. They just ran out of mana.
True. I suspect it's because MMA is a comparatively niche sport compared to the Olympics, female MMA even more so. A cursory Google suggests that as many as 5 billion people watched at least some of the 2024 Olympics: if even 1% of those watched the Khelif vs. Carini match, that's 50 million people around the world watching a presumably male person punching a female. I'd surprised if as many as 10 million people watched the Fox vs. Brents match.
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If you read progressive histories, there is a lot of cherry-picking/nut-picking of the dumbest or vilest things conservatives said, and making that the representative of the whole argument. And as /u/sodiummuffin points out, some of that nut-picking is just straight up fabricated.
Meanwhile sometimes you read the best of the old racists and what they say is remarkably sophisticated, nuanced and time proven its accuracy. For instance, Francis Galton was down on blacks ever achieving a high level of development, but pointed out that the Chinese were actually smart and industrious but held back by bad government/environment. This analysis was remarkable predictive.
The other thing that happens is that we often underestimate how old political correctness is. Even in the 1920 and 1930s a certain set of elite liberals would exaggerate the achievements of women and blacks, and it was becoming politically incorrect in elite circles to talk about blacks being less smart. In such a climate, it is often easier to make an argument of the stor, "Integration would be bad for black people" than "integration would be bad because it hurts the interest of white people." Today this is the trope of "Democrats are the real racists" and conservatives making arguments along the line of "affirmative action is bad because it is bad for black people because it creates mismatch." Or Bush's argument that blacks were hurt by "the soft bigotry of low expectations." So moderate conservatives make a bad argument out of political correctness, and then that argument ends up proved wrong, thus discrediting the conservative, thus giving the liberals another chance with the ball.
Also, conservatives have been the populist party for the past 90+ years, they don't have institutions that do a good job at filtering for the truth, and so often the most famous conservative spokespeople and Uncle Roy say a lot of dumb things, even if they are more directionally correct than the liberals.
The point of the antiversity, thus, is to have a much, much more truthful version of rightism than what Uncle Roy can produce. The point is to create an actual credible, good alternative to the progressive institutions so we don't have to rely on Joe Rogan and right-wing twitter. So the Antiversity is supposed to be much, much better than Uncle Roy, and Uncle Roy, despite is flaws, is closer to the truth than modern progressives.
?? Conservatives in the thirties may have been many other things, but 'populist' is a strange description.
Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh America First, Nazi's filling Madison Garden.... I should have just said "rightists" instead of "conservatives". It's a tricky period because an older right (the Coolidge right) was being defeated and destroyed and new forms of rightism were splintering from the New Deal and trying to coalesce.
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There could be some irony here.
Despite progressive hopium that improved Environmental Factors would close achievement gaps between black and white Americans, if instead the quickly diminishing returns to Environmental Factors (such as childhood disease and nutrition) and improving Environmental Factors across the world led to black Americans losing ground to unpopular population groups such as the Chinese and Eastern Europeans—whether globally or with respect to first generation immigrants from those regions, in domains ranging from academics, income, and even "black" sports.
For such groups have perhaps increased in height and cognitive ability in the past few years/decades by emerging from relative deprivation, while black Americans have long-hit the diminishing-returns plateau from getting subsidized by and riding the Environmental coat-tails of the rest of the US. Young black Americans are basically the same height on average as their grandparents were; young Chinese and young Chinese Americans tend to tower over their grandparents’ peak height.
Both Serbia and Slovenia's men's basketball teams have been formidable in recent years, to say the least. Serbia took Team USA to the brink in the last Olympics and Slovenia made a deep-run in the Olympics before that. A Yugoslavia team would include both Jokic and Doncic in the starting five; a game played between Yugoslavia vs. the US today, last year, two years ago, etc. would likely have the best 2 of 10 starting players on Team Yugoslavia (having the best 5 of 10 starting players would be the maximum).
There was a time not long ago when the USA was expected to not just win the Olympic tournament, but would have been favored against a combined rest of world team. Now the USA would be iffy against Yugoslavia, and in the last Olympics relied on a starting C who, really, shouldn't be on the USA basketball team.
There's layers of irony. Sailer type HBDers have long offered the NBA as the thin wedge to argue that we accept ethnic differences in some fields, and "evolution doesn't stop at the neck," so we should be willing to accept the reality of differences elsewhere. And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
Who’s this “we”?
It’s not that complicated at all and broad racial categories work well, especially for the topic of black American (lack of) average achievement. Despite decades of goodthinkers muddying the waters, making excuses, and performing interventions on behalf of black Americans, the standardized test score gap remains substantial between black and white Americans, and even moreso between black and Asian Americans.
Furthermore, "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatism.
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Maybe more complicated than you thought it was, but Sailer and the HBDers have talking about these nuances and for a long time. IIRC correctly, it was from the Sailersphere that I learned about interesting racial differences even among the broad racial categories, such as the height advantage and athletic prowess of the peoples of the Dinaric Alps. Furthermore, it was actually sprinting and marathoning that Sailer used as the clearest example of racial differences. Sailer has always said nurture matters as well as nature for most things. But sprinting has far less room for nurture playing a role than does a high-skill and complex game like basketball. I also learned about the differences between East Africans and West Africans and Khosis, and then even among West African tribes, etc. There is a running joke that if a man knows what an Igbo is, he is probably a super racist.
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Childhood nutrition can have strong affects on adult height.
In the 19th century blacks were on average about an inch shorter in height than whites. It's not a thing these days since anti-poverty programs basically closed the gap for the 1930 birth cohort.
But in the 1950s a 40 year old American grew up with smaller black people. They didn't realize that it was nutritional instead of genetic.
It was also an issue for peasants in Europe, not sure on the exact years. European aristocrats visiting the US were shocked to discover that the average man was the same height they were.
21st century American blacks are on average over an inch shorter than non-hispanic American whites
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Blacks are still slightly shorter than whites.
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I'm currently listening to George Patton's war memoirs on audible, so far he's gone through North Africa and Siciliy and each place he goes he judges the peasants to be even worse than the last bunch. After judging the Sicilians to be even worse and more ignorant than the Moroccans, he travels to Egypt and says:
The context you're offering is very much accurate, but it goes to the general problem: we always assume that traits displayed today are genetic or inherent, but we've turned out to be wrong about which traits inhere to which groups in which quantities nearly endlessly as contexts and conditions change.
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Did anyone actually say this? Trying to find the origin finds lots of people repeating it as what those idiot sexists believed, particularly in association with Katherine Switzer (not Bobbi Gibb), but not evidence of anyone actually saying it. This seems like the likely origin:
The Myth of the Falling Uterus
Which becomes "uterus would fall out" because of the marathon (not basketball) in other accounts by the same person:
You’ve Come 26.2 Miles, Baby : Roberta Gibb and K. Switzer Made Boston Marathon a Coed Course
I think judging the mainstream beliefs of the past by the most publicized claims of its ideological opposition is a terrible way to actually understand it. It's bad enough when you try to understand an ideology from Twitter dunks by the opposing side cherry-picking who to quote-tweet, how much worse is it when it was 60 years ago and the dunkers have spent decades writing the articles and history books?
Uterine prolapses are hardly unheard of, but they're almost certainly happening in middle-aged women with weakened pelvic floors (post childbirth) instead of young athletic women. You'd have to try very hard to get that to work.
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Are you going to lavish this attention on disproving the load-bearing quotes? Do you also think that I'm misquoting Bear Bryant and Cap Anson and the NYT editorial board? Or was it just the fun little joke that caught your ire?
In all my years on themotte, the most valuable lesson I've learned is that checking your interlocutor's sources is a superpower. Nobody else will do it, and there's a fair chance he hasn't.
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Before getting into the comment proper I think I should add this to the top: I am feeling some suspicion that you are quoting LLM hallucinations because your Bear Bryant quote doesn't seem to exist on the internet and your Harper's Weekly quote is actually from Current Literature. This seems unlikely given your comment history but it's unclear how it ended up happening otherwise. Could you dispel such concerns by explaining where you got those quotes from?
Lets start with the full NYT article in question:
Pugilists as Race Champions (The New York Times, 1910)
This seems...straightforwardly correct. The fight demonstrated nothing besides the abilities of the two combatants and to a much lesser degree a bit of evidence regarding the physical capabilities of their two races. However some people were treating them as champions of their races that would "prove" the superiority of the winning race, transmuting sport rivalries into racial rivalries. Sports riots are bad enough without bringing race into it. No matter who won they predicted it would inflame racial conflict, and indeed the aftermath of the fight saw nationwide race riots.
There is also a certain irony that, in a post about how "racist Uncle Roys" "weren’t of the opinion that there were mostly-overlapping-bell-curves with different averages, they were of the opinion that blacks couldn’t compete with whites in any field", one of the "load-bearing quotes" had no problems printing and agreeing with a letter from the president of a black college. Based on the fact that you think the NYT cared a lot about the result when the point of the article was that either outcome would be bad, I'm guessing you just grabbed the cherrypicked quote from somewhere like Wikipedia without reading the article. This has the consequence of flattening and distorting their view to fit into a modern narrative. This sort of thing is why I recommended against trying to understand historical beliefs this way.
Searching for this quote has one result: this thread. Chopping it up into subquotes does no better. Searching finds discussions about whether he was racist that would have reason to bring up such a quote, but they don't. At this point I start to wonder if your comment is "LLM assisted" garbage filled it with hallucinations that I'm wasting my time by responding to, but I already wrote the NYT part and you otherwise seem to be a legitimate poster so I guess I'll keep going. Even if it was real it's not really a terribly strong statement, people in sports make dubious assertions like that all the time and nobody finds it significant if they're wrong when they don't involve politically-relevant identity categories.
This is too vague to look up whether the actual quote is real and searching keywords like "cap anson black discipline" doesn't find anything.
That quote isn't from Harper's Weekly, it's from the article "The Psychology of the Prize Fight" from "Current Literature". Also, while I wasn't able to get the full original article, this has a fuller quote and already indicates you left out some context. They also said "Expert opinion has inclined to the theory that the negro is the strongest man physically" and your quote clipped the relevant middle of the sentence from "[A] white man fighting with a negro to whom he is not physically inferior ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.", so they don't seem as confident in the outcome as portrayed. Look, there are countless modern sports articles invoking scientific findings to make highly dubious claims about sports. This is not something that particularly reflects on either the ideas they invoke or even the general beliefs of the public. It reflects that there is demand for both sports coverage and for a subset of that coverage to contextualize it in terms of science.
Fundamentally, despite the fake or misleading quotes, I'm sure you can indeed find plenty of historical quotes that were both straightforwardly racist and incorrect. I just don't think that means very much, because "a lot of people who believe in X say things about it that are wrong or grossly exaggerated" is true for pretty much any X. And then of course it's easy to get your impression of historical views and events from people who have hammered them into the ill-fitting mold of their own ideological convenience.
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You posted a wall of text that amounted to "Suck it, HBDers, your forbears were wrong in the past and consequently you're wrong now". You didn't indicate which quotes were load-bearing and which weren't, so it seems to me they're all fair game. Anyway, I can't find any of the quotes except in secondary sources written by their opponents much later.
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While the mechanism is…. Wrong, isn’t a relatively-frequent side effect in women of marathon-level physical fitness infertility?
Amenorrhea isn't unheard of in professional-level runners (and other very lean athletes), but these days it's considered to be part of RED-S, previously the "female athlete triad" , indicative --- along with bone density issues --- of under fueling and eating disorders. It's not a healthy state of being. RED-S occurs, if more difficult to observe, in male athletes too.
I don't know that I've heard of long-term issues of fertility, but they might be more common than the background population.
The fact that it's literally called the 'female athlete triad' indicates that health concerns are not unfounded. This paper(https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7768504/) indicates preliminarily that more-conventional eating disorders can be recovered from, fertility-wise, in a relatively short timeframe. Anecdata tells me that this is still a reduction from maximal fertility but most people aren't aiming at that.
It's highly likely. Young wrestlers who cut weight too aggressively suppress testosterone levels in season, and former high school wrestlers have reported permanently fried endocrine systems (though this may be complicated by seeking medical treatment in the form of TRT).
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This post feels like it could be summarised as 'essentialism was more common in the past'. Plus a degree of weakmanning. How many men really believed that marathon running would cause a woman's uterus to fall out?
The uterus falling out is ridiculous, but issues with women and long distance running are real.
Australia lowered training standards for the military (slower runs, softer surfaces) due to pelvic stress fractures in female recruits.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10332180/
The uterus falling out thing sounds like maybe this was among the last diagnoses for 'hysteria' which was an old-timey garbagebag diagnosis for women's health issues with no understood mechanism. Aristotle thought that it was caused by the womb moving out of place(hence 'hysteria' from the same root as 'hysterectomy'), but the diagnosis was used well after this theory fell out of favor.
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A majority of those running athletic institutions at the time believed that it would be physiologically dangerous for a woman to run a marathon. They were literally banned from events for that reason. It's not weakmanning to point to the institutional position of the time, it's rather odd to pretend that "everyone" knew women could run marathons except all the people involved in marathon running.
It is physiologically dangerous for a woman to run a marathon, because it is for anyone, and, more importantly, it's more physiologically dangerous for a woman than for a man, for whatever it means when we make sweeping general statements comparing women and men, due to how the physical act of running a marathon is influenced by and influences one's physiology. I have no information by which to determine if this "uterus might fall out" characterization is weakmanning or just accurate, but certainly there's a large gap between "women ought to be banned because their uteri might fall out" and "women ought to be banned because the threshold we have for acceptable risk is crossed by females trying to run a marathon, even though it isn't crossed by males." Even if the latter is also pretty ridiculous by most standards that modern people find reasonable.
That statement is even more true of senior athletes, but we generally don't have ethical qualms in allowing them to race. The oldest Boston finisher this year was 84.
That's because we don't care about some 84 old man. If he dies, he dies
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Long distance running really is hard on women’s health though. Not in ways present society cares about, but in ways the fifties did.
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The fall of African descent athletes is actually pretty interesting. I think there's a good chance it's downstream of the increased professionalism (in both player development and optimization of tactics) of sports and the scouting pathways starting younger and younger.
I've read articles suggesting that American Big 4 athletes are also coming from consistently more affluent backgrounds, since those are the ones that can afford the travel leagues, the gymwork etcetera you need to get up the ranks. Even the NBA pivoting to be less centric on height and physicality plus having truly global scouting these days. Black American athletic performance was naturally gonna dwindle as the talent pool for most major sports expanded.
Even the UFC which is still pretty chaotic in terms of development pathways and truly global doesn't have any black champions at present.
I’ve argued before that a big part or AADOS athletic over performance is just selection effects from sports starting to cut- or otherwise ruthlessly ability sort- at the ages when black’s physical advantages from early puberty are at peak. If everyone played on the same no-cut teams until college the NFL would be a lot whiter.
I don't think this is true because the population isn't evenly distributed as far as teams are concerned. Here in Western PA, if you're black and good at football you're likely playing on teams that are majority black all the way through high school, the same being true of white students. And at the high school level, the racial composition of teams isn't a factor in how competitive they are. If you're white and good at football you're not getting cut in middle school in favor of precocious black kid for the simple reason that there probably aren't enough black kids to make a difference.
Even if you're not getting cut, you're still playing against them. I've heard kids on my son's all-white middle school basketball team make comments asking how they're supposed to deal with a "casual 6'3" dreadhead" that every team from certain towns seems to have. Or in football where there's always that one kid from the predominantly black down who looks like he's 4-5 grades ahead of everyone else. My son's class doesn't have a lot of size; he tends to get put wherever the disparity is worst. I've literally heard coaches tell him his position is "wherever their biggest kid is". When he was 9 years old, he came out of a playoff game in tears, because the black kid he was supposed to be handling was taller than the refs and just absolutely trucked him every play.
Maybe they just lie about ages for a few kids to cheat the system - I know for a fact that some of those towns train outside league rules. But that sort of thing absolutely drives kids towards lacrosse or hockey. (And funny note, my son just discovered a few weeks ago that the couple of enormous black kids in his 12-15 hockey league are only a year older than him. From the first game we saw them, two years ago, I assumed they were 15. Luckily they've been on his team often enough over the last few years for him to become friendly with them.)
But the Sailer sort of argument, as I've seen it, isn't that kids are being cut, but that Eastern Europe is putting up white guys in basketball at the NBA level because in that environment, they get to compete against age-appropriate athleticism all the way up, until things are evened out in late high school or college, so a lot fewer kids get discouraged and quit or go to other sports.
I can see it either way. On the one hand, my son has massively improved his hockey skills by comparing and sharpening himself against enormous (and talented) black kids. On the other hand, he occasionally brings up quitting football and basketball to focus on year-round travel lacrosse.
Lying about ages always seemed like a second tier thing- lying about residency is the usual scam for Friday night lights to cheat on eligibility.
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Nonchalant*
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I will point out that the Euro countries which are producing the most NBA stars are also some of the countries with the highest average male heights on Earth. (The Balkan countries, Lithuania and Latvia, Finland, and Germany.) Not saying the other factors people have brought up aren’t real, but it’s worth pointing out that men from these countries do have at least one very important physical attribute working in their favor, relative to the world at large.
Statistically, maybe. I grumble.
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I've heard similar things about Polynesian players in Rugby where the long-term lock-in effects of early selection are used.
Personally I don't think it's outlandish that certain ethnicities are a bit more explosive or whatever, but ultimately the professionalism of modern sports means that consistent structured play matters more. Especially with modern strength and conditioning meaning everybody's largely 'strong enough'
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I agree, it shakes a lot of deeply held Uncle Roy assumptions I was raised with! There's a tendency to always see whatever obstacles have already been done away with as resulting in a "final product" of a society, and it keeps turning out we're wrong. The same assumption is made about class in every society: the current upper class tells myths of a prior class system that was unfair and stupid that put them at the bottom, but the current system that puts them at the top is justified and logical. It's hard to critically examine assumptions about the world.
My guess is that we're also seeing assimilation, with black teens acting more like white teens. I've seen it argued that much of the purported drop in teen sexual intercourse in America disappears if looking purely at whites; the white rate has remained the same while the black rate has converged with the white rate. Life paths are probably converging in other ways as well.
Notably we're writing about five minutes after Jon Jones retired, but it's actually notable that the UFC is pretty dominated by a really tiny global minority of central Asian athletes. I'm sure there are people who assume it is genetic, as they previously did with every other ethnic minority that has dominated a sport.
Jon Jones has been effectively retired for years now. I'd argue the central Asian thing is more that it's the only region where truly top class athletes will go into combat sports as a first option and then don't make enough money doing those so the UFC seems palatable.
I mean, that's exactly my point. It's all downstream of cultural or economic questions, of interest and the availability of a strong culture of training, you need the right economic mix of availability of training with desperation to succeed. This is obviously visible in sports, but there's no reason to think that it's less true of other human endeavors.
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