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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24814 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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[modern academia] denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy

If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.

if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.

It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.

[modern academia] denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy

If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.

If you believe in logic, then no, that is not the case.

It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.

But it's not the only thing keeping Liberia at bay. In fact, it's doing the exact opposite.

If you believe in logic, then no, that is not the case.

1a. HBD posits that certain traits critical to functioning on an individual and civilizational level are substantially heritable. Further, it posits that these traits are most common/developed in Whites/Asians.

1b. White supremacy is belief in the superiority of White people over other races.

1c. Ergo, HBD substantially justifies White supremacy.

2a. HBD research uses scientific modes of inquiry, including logic and empirical evidence, to support its conclusions.

2b. HBD substantially justifies White supremacy.

2c. Ergo, logic and empirical evidence are tools of White supremacy.

But it's not the only thing keeping Liberia at bay. In fact, it's doing the exact opposite.

If Blacks and Whites are equal in their civilizational capacity, (insert the entire civil rights project here). If Blacks' civilizational capacity is substantially inferior to that of Whites, there is little reason to keep a large population of them in a White society; in fact, there is a strong incentive to kick them out of said society. Said Blacks would suffer greatly by being removed from the White society they inhabit, so they deny HBD and push their own counter-memes.

If Blacks and Whites are equal in their civilizational capacity, (insert the entire civil rights project here). If Blacks' civilizational capacity is substantially inferior to that of Whites, there is little reason to keep a large population of them in a White society; in fact, there is a strong incentive to kick them out of said society. Said Blacks would suffer greatly by being removed from the White society they inhabit, so they deny HBD and push their own counter-memes.

This requires a few jumps. Very few people are not willing to admit that stupid people exist and that they tend to have stupid children. And yet there isn't a mass movement to remove stupid people from society. It's a long way to go from HBD theories proven right to strip all Black Americans of citizenship and ship them to Africa. And when people widely believed in Black inferiority they didn't actually do that Liberia was a failed utopian experiment one of many for it's time.

And yet there isn't a mass movement to remove stupid people from society.

Yes, there was. It was called "Eugenics" and "sterilize all the stupid people" was the American version of the movement. THey're the reason you can occasionally stumble across historical lines like "Thousands of people in X state were sterilized for feeblemindedness and being unfit". This was a popular political project, considered settled science, with broad institutional support.

But then they spent a chunk of the 30's bragging about how great it was that Mr. Hitler was finally enacting their ideas at scale in Europe (the European variant of eugenics generally focused on promoting more children among "the right sort"), and Western intelligencia is still reeling from the psychic scars of that endorsement. All that remains is grandfathered institutions like Planned Parenthood.

1c. Ergo, HBD substantially justifies White supremacy.

White supremacy is almost never so watered down as "the bell curve of whites is centered around halfway between the bell curve of black and asians on a plotting of many desirable measures." It's a belief that whites as a class as superior to other races as a class which requires an additional very important racial consciousness layer that is not necessarily present. That I'm closer to the center of a bellcurve of my race than my equally qualified colleague Milton is a curious bit of trivia that need not concern either of us.

It's a belief that whites as a class as superior to other races as a class which requires an additional very important racial consciousness layer that is not necessarily present.

Civilizations can be considered as the cumulative efforts of a people/race "as a class".

That I'm closer to the center of a bellcurve of my race than my equally qualified colleague Milton is a curious bit of trivia that need not concern either of us.

It concerns your hypothetical colleague when women cross the street when they see him coming, when his kids stand out in the good schools he sends them too, when the criminals on the news always seem to look like him.

You'll note that I mentioned group dignity as a reason why non-whites/asians are understandably hostile towards HBD. I'm working on a post expounding on this at length, but for now I'll leave you with @hanikrummihundursvin's comment on a related thread:

[Humans] exist as biological entities. Genes expressed in an environment. We are a 'social animal'. We exist in groups. We interact with groups. You don't exist as an idea. You exist as a part of a greater whole. [...] I wish that the individual, reason driven, enlightened and fair minded people could understand and empathize with the emotion being displayed in the OP. Being part of a 'whole' that is in some ways lesser than another is a constant feeling of badness. The aforementioned minded, who want to rise above such silly emotions, or simply lack them, need to understand that they are a minority of a minority.

There is in principle no more reason to associate ourselves with a group or "whole" based on skin color than there is to do so based on eye or hair color and in fact more reason to associate based on shared culture, resident city or voluntary associations. I don't even share a language with most of my ancestors. My nation is America, my people are Americans.

1a. HBD posits that certain traits critical to functioning on an individual and civilizational level are substantially heritable. Further, it posits that these traits are most common/developed in Whites/Asians.

1a isn't accurate. Sure, some versions of HBD posits stuff ab out civilizational level stuff. That's not what I mean by HBD, and I don't intend to defend that at all, as I don't find it scientific and, as such, entirely inappropriate in academia. The version I meant was studying associations between genetics, race, and intelligence (and other traits, obviously, but also obviously intelligence is the big one that causes most of the controversy). In any case, the point of studying HBD in academia would be to discover if that's true WITHOUT pre-emptively biasing oneself to either side (to the best of one's ability to remove one's biases, anyway). The point would be to actually do what academia is supposed to be doing.

I have issues with 1b as well, but that's moot given 1a.

Furthermore, the chain of logic in 2 is a fully general argument about anyone using logic and empirical evidence to support anything, which seems to be based on a misunderstanding of my statement. The full sentence from my earlier comment is this:

And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth.

If you believe that the supposition being made here about "logic," "empirical evidence" and "White Supremacy" was that the former 2 are sometimes used as tools to justify the latter, then I apologize for not being clear in my sentence, though I admit I thought the meaning was fairly clear in context. I shall restate it as below, and I completely disavow entirely the notion that people never use logic and empirical evidence as tools in service of White Supremacy or Critical Race Theory or socialism or Nazism or egalitarianism or Creationism. I that's akin to what I stated, then I misstated and should have tried to clarify with you before defending my earlier statement:

And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as inventions of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth.

If Blacks and Whites are equal in their civilizational capacity, (insert the entire civil rights project here). If Blacks' civilizational capacity is substantially inferior to that of Whites, there is little reason to keep a large population of them in a White society; in fact, there is a strong incentive to kick them out of said society. Said Blacks would suffer greatly by being removed from the White society they inhabit, so they deny HBD and push their own counter-memes.

This kind of thinking seems to reflect a particular set of values that I don't think is anywhere near universal enough in modern Western society to make these logical jumps actually take place. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I don't think that's been proven to any reasonable extent.

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