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Look, people can privately fantasize over their weird racial utopia or idealistic society whatever have you, but it’s not going to happen without a radical (and radically violent) civilizational upheaval of modern day civil society. And nobody wants that. I hate living in a radically progressive society, but I recognize to some extent that’s the cost paid for all the other benefits that get provided to me. Society isn’t going back to some purified white ethnostate out in the American northwest somewhere. It’s just not going to happen. I could go back and live with distant relatives I still have some connection to in Scandinavia but I wouldn’t because it’s too foreign to me, even though I’m genetically indistinguishable from them. I actually ‘feel’ much more connected to my friends who are Hispanic, white, black and Asian than I would with other whites who can’t speak English or speak it with an unintelligible accent.
What are people like Nick supposed to say on this “racial biology” point? “Race” is a biologically fuzzy concept. Even population geneticists behind closed doors have admitted that you can talk about biology at the level of the gene itself without commitment to now outdated and pseudoscientific categories like comparing Nordics and Teutons and Alpines and Slavs, etc. Most genetic traits today are polygenic (i.e. single genes don’t code directly for most traits, multiple different genes contribute some proportion) and some are in fact omnigenic (at the genetic periphery, and genes only contribute very small, indirect effect sizes to a trait). What is this racial significance supposedly sitting there in the corner that nobody is talking about?
None of that has anything to do with my point. Even if HBD is objectively untrue and completely useless, it is the one inviolable taboo of 'Wokeism', far moreso than anything to do with trans people, and the supposed "death of woke" has done absolutely nothing to change that.
My point is that woke isn't dead, it's just a little dormant at the moment, and is about to come back with a screaming vengeance. Progressives acting like it hasn't gone anywhere are acting rationally. Conservatives parading about and doing victory laps without actually doing anything to change the institutional and demographic factors at play are the ones behaving irrationally.
“[It] isn't dead, it's just a little dormant at the moment, and is about to come back with a screaming vengeance.”
Common words uttered by a man to a woman after a long night of partying.
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You can take an MRI or CT scan of someone, feed it into a neural network, and it can classify their race to a very high degree of consonance with their self-identification. It can even do this if you remove the low-spatial-frequency or high-spacial-frequency information. Everything in biology is fuzzy to some degree, even such concepts as "alive" and "dead". But race is reasonably solid.
Sure, they can speak in coded language to avoid being canceled or just losing research funds. That doesn't make the reality go away.
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Race being fuzzy doesn't mean DEI doesn't work. It doesn't prevent people worrying about the right representation of race in the military, in academia, in politics, in media, in jail. When I apply for a job, I am asked about my race. They don't do that for no reason. Indeed, HR will admit to discriminating against white men: https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/
Race is no more fuzzy than bullets are fuzzy. What is a bullet? Can it be made of copper, lead, ceramics? How about glass or wood? Can it be spherical or pointy or a dart-shaped flechette? Maybe it has explosives in it, maybe not. Huge diversity here!
But the key essence of a bullet is that you fire it out of a gun to hurt something. A really fine definition of bullet isn't needed to fire a gun. We don't need to nail down the exact nature of all the polygenic traits affecting a racial group to use it politically for X, Y or Z. Recognizing race is an extremely basic skill that children learn early on. Farmers made use of heredity in their animals centuries before anyone knew what genetics was.
There are no Black STEM Nobel winners, no Black Fields medallists, no impressive technical or civilizational achievements, much evidence of dysfunction wherever they go (the murdery parts of Detroit, the murdery parts of Washington DC, the murdery North of Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, South Africa, even Sudanese gangs in Melbourne). Yet there's a powerful lobby for capitalizing 'Black' and decapitalizing white, for giving blacks more privileges and status in society, which really complicates the situation when you observe that Nigeria alone has more births than Europe (Russia included).
So if we stick with the status quo of valorizing blacks while propagating stories of white racism and wrongful, evil discrimination against blacks, it seems highly likely that the Western world will be overrun with blacks who are incapable of running it but world-class in wrecking things, while also motivating them to do so by creating and incentivizing this animus. What idiot would want to live in Nigeria when they can move to Britain, Australia or America instead and get guilty white people to give them free stuff and special privileges? And only a racist is going to have the guts to actually block them, for they don't care if it's against 'international law', 'human rights', 'historical debts' and other such things.
This is in addition to the huge deadweight costs of existing DEI and black-valorization policies. So the racial significance ranges from 'gross misallocation of resources in the present and injustice' to 'looming demographic disaster'.
Demonic pigskin talking about bringing back slavery. Fuck the "norms" you deserve to killed fuck you cracker bitch
This sort of post is obviously against the rules here, as you appear to be aware. You have no mod history, positive or negative. This is not a great way to start things off. You don't have to agree with people, or even like them. You may even believe that they are enemies who should be fought to the death. But here we do not fight over words, but meet the arguments of others with arguments of our own.
Normally we start with a warning, but again, you seem to understand the rules and are choosing to egregiously ignore them. Banned for three days, and if you continue to communicate in this way, the bans will escalate rapidly.
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I don’t know if I’m being asked to defend DEI policies here or what, because I most emphatically do not, and I’m all for dismantling them. Nor do I see the relevance of your comparison to bullets. What’s in there that’s supposed to be significant about race somehow? Do people identify with phenotypic familiarity? Obviously. The science of Genetic Similarity Theory (GST) has received substantial support since its development. Does that mean there’s some ‘gene’ out there that predisposes one group to create civilizations that other groups lack? Highly doubt it except in only the most extreme and fringe examples.
We don't even need to know what genes are for race to be politically, economically and socially significant. The DEI people don't even think race has anything to do with genes, which is silly beyond a narrow word-games sense. Despite that, they can use race politically. No knowledge of genes is needed, only observation of outcomes and trends.
The ancients didn't need to know why arsenic was poisonous, only that it was. That's the key information.
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You just described Rhodesia and South Africa. Theres a fun discrepancy playing out here too: Rhodesia under a strongman shit the bed hard, South Africa seems to have collapsed into incompetent grifters stopping grift purely to spite other grifters.
No matter how much progressives cheer on blacks destroying hated wypipo institutions run by Those Other Whites, blacks will turn on each other at the power consolidation stage and often before that. Farrakhan and MLK, Zuma vs Ramaphosa, Tutsi vs Ibo, etc etc etc.
Looming demographic disaster is quite possible in aggregate, but survival can exist next to the chaos. Scott Alexander and his coterie of Aella rationalist adjacents can thrive in San Francisco isolated from the decay in Tenderloin and even if the rot spreads they just become islands floating in swamps. I visited a friend in Mumbai where his place was more opulent than estates of Indonesian tycoons, but all the windows had to be closed because it was surrounded by literal filth. Not that he would care because he would be rich eternally, probably off the backs of the peasants drowning in the filth out the back.
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Everyone is dancing around the two issues that are verboten to explicate, especially in the USA: that a common overculture conflicting with libertarian sensibilities is a good thing for cost effective social organization, and that implementing said overculture onto culturally disparate populations inevitably requires sacrificing some forms of cultural identification which is impossible when cultural identification carries local power. 1950s postwar USA had a common commie enemy, a distinct life path that was socially sanctioned and available to most, and rising quality of life that could be enjoyed guiltlessly because envy was itself more transgressive than "greed".
Race is shorthand for culture, and much easier for progressives focus on race because it externalizes white blame onto immutable characteristics that therefore must be protected. Igbo and Yoruba are physically identical to outsiders but if I say that in Lagos I'd be lynched. Minnesota just had an election where the white winner Jacob Frey won by preaching unity across somali tribes and the somali contender lost because his tribes opponents refused to vote for him. Culture is what matters more, and even though race is the obvious proxy, it is imperfect enough to distract from tangible effects.
Obama was the genius that played both sides of the race angle: raised ENTIRELY white (his black father left him), dons a fro in college for black points and speaks legible jive for white curios and black hoodrats to feel equally comfortable with him. The significance of race died with him... until Michael Brown. I think Ben Shapiro is a dolt whose claim of right wing racial resurgence is only due to Obamas claim that "Brown looked like he could have been my son" is thin, but it did reflect an implicit race war rearmanent: shifting from grudging complaining to rahowa (directionally). The racialization of US politics (and all western politics are downstream of US politics like the fucking BLM shit in goddamn Berlin or Defund The Police in UK) is objectively a bad thing and any restarting of it is a fucking horrible outcome, yet the progressives insist on restarting it whenever they muster the brain cells to agree on an action befitting the progressive stack.
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