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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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I think you are slightly but not significantly confused.

  1. On HBD, you seem to attribute state success to National IQ: "Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great." Were you to look at most of these Asian Nations in the early 20th century, you would have seen extreme poverty, floundering industry (lots of rice farmers paying taxes in-kind), and lower IQs than the West [1]. Given that the Flynn effect was much higher for these countries during their period of industrialized, urbanized, and instituted public education[1], one must wonder what it would look like if the same policies were successfully carried out in some of your less desirable countries.

Note that this doesn't conflict with the larger point about immigration: the Flynn effect works over generational time, and I will not dispute that emmigrants from war torn states where blood feuds over cows have been evolved into law[2] are less likely to contribute to the success of recieving nation than emmigrants from industrial states who are leaving their homes because starting engineers in the US make 2~3x (PPP)[3], and I do find it plausible that Western nations will be more successful if they focus on importing engineers rather than carving out asylum categories for people who are fleeing blood feuds [4].

  1. On global competition, the Jews will be important, but I think that the differential success of the West is less about their Jewishness, and more about how their home countries showed intellectual elites the door. I have heard WWII summarized as "our Germans were better than their Germans", and a history of the Cold War would not be complete without a history of the soviet diaspora to Israel. It seems likely the West will pull the same gambit in the 21st century, and "our Chinese" will be "better than their Chinese". Accepting refugees turned out well for the West when the principal victims of our geopolitical enemies were the elite and well-educated with high-class values. It will continue to work well for the West as long as totalitarian societies continue to alienate their intellectual elites (i.e. China enforcing capital controls) ... but it might also reverse if, say, European online speech controls become implemented across the West.

[1] The Flynn effect in Korea: large gains. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.022 [2] The Evolution of Blood-Money for Homicide in Somalia, by Paolo Contini. Journal of African Law, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1971), pp. 77-84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/744600. See also https://www.academia.edu/25376232/EARLY_LEGAL_SYSTEMS_IN_SOMALIA. [3] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-level/locations/korea-south [4] https://www.euaa.europa.eu/coi/somalia/2025/country-focus/1-profiles/15-individuals-involved-blood-feudsclan-disputes-and-other-clan-issues

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