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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Low effort but CW so it goes here. Its the end of the week anyways.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/115vdud/looking_for_recommendations_on_sources_for_why/

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified. Of all those comments only 1 mention (hint) of group average IQ on why sub saharan Africa is poor??

Then theres the "woah how did you get here, you dont belong here" as a response to the guy who hinted at IQ. Does that guy even know whose blog he is in the subreddit of.

All I am saying is for those of you who still say /r/ssc is "smart", update your priors, this post is not an isolated case.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

Me and some others tried to speak up. The jannies censored our comments.

Those three deleted top comments are really low effort. A drive by punchy one line comment is bound for deletion.

Other comments more thoughtfully discuss IQ and have not been deleted.

If you dislike this, consider organizing a pipeline from there to here, privately or publicly. Bakkot says:

As a reminder, culture war topics are forbidden. That includes "maybe these people are genetically predisposed to be lower IQ or otherwise less suited to build modern economies". I've removed a few subthreads to that effect. Please don't make any more of them. If you'd like to have a discussion about that particular hypothesis you'll need to go elsewhere.

This pissy attitude openly vilifying the very clear and well-argued line of thought in the corpus of writing of the guy he owes the community to is deserving of some pushback. I'm permabanned there (for mocking Kevin Bird's beliefs), but if I were not, I'd have written something like «and if you'd like to discuss whatever hypothesis seems best supported by evidence, you can check out this offshoot of the community». What's he going to do? There are no normie reddit rules against promoting other places, far as I know. Will he remove it as culture warring unto itself?

and if you'd like to discuss whatever hypothesis seems best supported by evidence, you can check out this offshoot of the community

Sounds good probably won't work. "Best supported by the evidence" translates to "The evidence I agree the most with (but is just as shitty, but in the opposite direction)" in the overwhelming majority of cases, anyone who hasn't defaulted to making that translation is less cynical than I. This is assuming you are trying to invite the HBD skeptics along aswell.

A superior advertisement (imo) would be "The theories discussed here are some of the theories but not all of them, visit this offshoot community to read what you read here, and more". This has the advantage of implying that you won't only see a set complement of arguments but a superset of them. However there is a failure mode that any invitation to an alternative discussion can be translated to "come join us at the flat earth society we have alternative theories!".

I honestly can't think of a perfect advertisement for someone who is (rightfully) skeptical and not on the fence already.

Yeah, could be phrased better. I referred not to the evidential superiority of my own opinion, but to the possibility to entertain any opinion you deem better-supported – not just the most plausible thing still allowed by Bakkot. They are explicitly prohibited from discussing HBD to any serious extent, beyond a snarky hint or a perfunctory denunciation. Sure, some of that is community sentiment. Consider such brilliant rationalist logic as:

Jumping straight to an IQ answer is antagonistic and uncharitable to a whole group of people, and more importantly, a thought-ending cliché that's likely making you stop looking for actual answers.

But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.

As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.

But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.

This got me thinking if a place is sufficiently woke (not sure if it generalizes to all ideological conformity), then most of the modded/removed content won't be by people breaking non-political rules but by people who say something unwoke.

Thus writing a bot that scrapes the usernames off the red comments from unddit.com and sending them an automated message along the lines of

"We saw that your comment was removed from {woke sub}, there is a high probability you didn't break the discourse rules but instead said something unwoke, consider joining us at this { same community but not woke}, {summary of community}"

Might work as an excellent recruiting tool.

As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.

Lack of self-awareness is a hell of a drug. So is confusing aesthetics and morality.

Exactly my point.

Well, @ZorbaTHut, how's that for a recruiting pipeline? I gather you still haven't decided what to do. I foresee your objections along the lines of diversity, but people who still hang around captured subs might well be the closest thing to a leftie you can get.

Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V

Right now recruiting is not the biggest issue I see. Honestly, this thread itself is kind of a bigger problem; note that it's already been mod-warned, but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem". The thing I'm most concerned about right now is . . .

. . . okay right now it's dealing with the employment tangle I'm dealing with. But after that, the thing I'm most concerned about is tweaking moderation and figuring out a better way to gently-but-firmly shove the tone around, and that's what the volunteer-janitor stuff is for.

Once I've handled that, I plan to go back to recruiting efforts. However, right now the traffic honestly isn't bad - it's lower than it used to be but nowhere near lower enough that I think it's an immediate existential threat.

And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting. Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.

Well this went poorly. You look like you are going hard into your bonsai-trimming power trip. Do you plan to monetize this place of what?

but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem"

Well, what else could we say – that it was a mistake to commit a stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast? I believe such regrets are expressed as silent evaporation.

Are you impressed with the intellectual culture Bakkot et al. have built? Get a load of those mod notes. Be honest. It is objectively a normie culture, a culture of shaming and shooing and unquestionable sanctified priors instead of rational discussion. When the choice is between scholarly epicycles in the manner of Marxist theory and a possibly more parsimonious explanation, they are being told to praise the amazing complexity of the former or shut up and «go elsewhere». Elsewhere where if not here?

I realize that «normie» is just a psychologically healthy normal Hajnali human, and as one of those you too might have a hard time distinguishing between very consistent «shame on you, cringe, do better, imagine your mom reading that, we do not need this, removed» etc. signals and a reason to value one's opinion less. But those are still different things and the former is still poison for any serious rationalist-ish place, and is still far less desirable than «dogpiling» in the form of tonally correct objections. At least that's how I see our value function.

if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting

Really? You would prefer people who «read the room» over people who can't – as in, who believe that «no culture war» should apply fairly and not privilege a side in it? The mods implicitly precommit to a culture war position that requires righteous combat, under the justification of «no culture war». This is a deceptive signal, and a profanation of all that the sub stood for. Are you saying you endorse that? If even we pick people who are adept in reading the room over autistics irritated with inconsistencies and double standards, where are people who are bad at that supposed to go – straight to nazi imageboards?

right now the traffic honestly isn't bad

It's not so much the traffic problem as diversity problem. And I do not mean political compass distribution but even just topic distribution. More people means less banding. For example, nobody has mentioned Turkish earthquake (okay, here) – a NATO state has suffered a major disaster, tens of thousands dead, possibly immense geopolitical ramifications, partially because Erdogan has appointed his fellow right-wing theologian grifters throughout the system. I might do a writeup as a community service and as the resident Turk, but more people could help with such stuff.

Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.

Have you not understood my argument? People uncomfortable with /r/slatestarcodex modding are leftier than the median user here, and realistically as far left as you will get now, barring a complete reinvention of this place. You will never again get the «diversity» we had on Reddit by virtue of dipping into Scott's captive leftwing audience, unless you ruin TheMotte in the manner not much different from Bakkot's – and then, you'll probably just chase everyone away, like you've repeatedly threatened to do.

It is inevitable that the discussion evolves and some opinions disappear, while others emerge. This is what it means to have a honest non-compelled discussion. If you fetishize access to the frozen equivalent of Scott's captive audience from 2010's, with their particular distribution of opinion, over the value of this community where genuinely all hypotheses can be discussed and the worst that could happen is «dogpiling» – then you, like many people, are a rigid old fart fixed on the object level, unable to recognize the worth of your creation, and should stop wasting our time, much less soliciting our help and money. Pull the plug ASAP.

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Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V

I'm sure the approach is bad for a thousand reasons but if applied very judiciously to very specific places (NOT /r/politics and other stupid places) I don't see how it would run afoul of your concern. E.g users from that ssc thread.

And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting.

The Motte is not on Reddit because they couldn't read the room. Don't you think that ship has sailed?

I respect your vision and desire to attract "diverse-opinions", but that has never happened. It's not ever going to happen for various reasons.

Not until you fix (not saying you should);

"diverse opinion" haver joins Motte -> expresses opinion -> gets dogpiled -> leaves (after flaming out and letting us know that we are nazi shitlords)

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I just assume no HBD allowed on reddit, full stop.

As @DaseindustriesLtd said, the appearance of incompetence of the opposing side the intended outcome of censorship

There’s clearly more going on in Africa than just low IQ. Europe has had waves of migrants. At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling. And often these migrations were at knife point. For most of history people from places with civilization did not decide to move to Africa.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

Fair I said this too strongly. And was more referencing the ancient regimes and movement of people.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

It's about over 2400 miles from northern France to Nova Scotia. The only sane way get to Nigeria would be by sea, which is nearly 5000 miles, which about the same as the distance to New York.

When you arrive in Nigeria, you are facing a land full of unfamiliar diseases, before vaccines. You are competing with many established civilisations. When you arrive in Nova Scotia, you arrive in lands that have already been considerably emptied by European diseases, and with diseases that have not been enhanced by urbanisation, and the nearest civilisations are thousands of miles to the south.

To put some numbers on that, estimates I could find put the African population at a lower figure of 50 million in 1500 (mostly Sub-Saharan, I think) whereas the North American population was 1 or 2 million.

Except the places that were settled quickly in the Americas were farther away and had higher populations like the Caribbean’s, Aztec/Mayan empires. 50 million for all of Africa is about the same estimates for the Americas.

There were special political factors in the case of the Aztecs that made colonisation easier. That's a long story, which you probably already know.

It's actually a very similar distance (by sea, of course) from Europe to the Caribbean vs. Europe to Nigeria. In terms of places where Europeans ultimately settled (South Africa, Zimbabwe) it is much further to Africa.

You’re probably overstating the attractiveness of South Africa to settler colonists. The boers were settled more to allow Dutch trading ships to the East Indies a convenient source of resupply than because holland had vast numbers of people clamoring to move to Africa.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

The parts that weren't that hazardous like e.g. the fortuitously depopulated highlands in Kenya, or South Africa were settled.

By the time the tropical lowlands stopped being hazardous to health (1950s+), the population pressure in Europe had abated, and elite opinion was changed against colonisation.

Gotta love Wikipedia. After several paragraphs casting shade on the British for their dastardly deeds in stealing the highlands

Today, the region is at the heart of Kenya's economy. It is the country's best served region by road and rail and has many flourishing cities such as Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kitale, Thika, Kericho and Nyeri.[6] Although covering only five percent of Kenya's total land area, it produces most of Kenya's agricultural exports, particularly tea, coffee, sisal and pyrethrum.[6]

Just a coincidence I'm sure.

And that in some form is basically true everywhere. The wealthiest and most culturally influential black group today is where they were slaves. Of course many groups do not notice these correlations when reading these articles.

Specifically, the tsetse fly made it difficult to maintain the herds of livestock euros relied on for agriculture, which meant Islam couldn’t expand southwards either even with lots of subsaharan African blood that granted some resistance to malaria.

Most places in sub-Saharan Africa were death sentences for European settlers due to various diseases that there were no good ways of avoiding before the late 19th century.

And "death sentence" often in a very literal sense: some European countries would exile troublesome individuals to their African trading posts / islands as a means of killing them without having to execute them.

It's funny, I literally just made a post to this effect in last week's Friday fun thread. As I said then, the dumbing down of the space is inevitable given the growth of the subreddit and the number of good posters who have simply moved to other spaces like here or DSL. I'm surprised people are only just noticing though, I'd say the decline has been obvious for 2+ years

If you're going to argue something outside the mainstream, you're going to have to do the work in explaining yourself. None of the "It's IQ" comments are doing that, even the ones that were removed. They're simply attributing the entire reason to IQ and leaving it at that, as if you can reduce all of SSA's failure to develop strictly on their national IQs.

Even if that were the case, you'd have to do a great deal more to explain that position. The comment about institutions cited multiple published books by respected researchers to illustrate its case.

Is this outside the mainstream? It’s not something acceptable to talk about but my gut is most people believe it is a primary contributor. Just the whole getting branded racists and talking about differences is a taboo. I put this ideas is the taboo but everyone basically believes them camp.

IQ is generally not in the Western mainstream. I've seen people express genuine shock at the idea that IQ is even heritable.

I strongly suspect that this is a "blue tribe midwit" phenomenon. I would also bet that most of those people think IQ is a fake statistic made up by racists in general, and that most of them would cite the "regatta" example as proof. That idea is much rarer among the people who don't even pretend they read the NYT. "Parents pass down traits like brawn and brains" is the sort of folk wisdom that everyone has... except for the people who've had that scooped out and replaced with something else.

The American working class mostly does not think IQ is particularly closely correlated with g, and is fairly likely to deny the influence of IQ on success in education.

That is completely antithetical to my experience. They think IQ is the measure of how smart someone is, so they think it obviously factors into success in education... even if that's not necessarily the be-all-end-all of general life success (book smarts versus practical smarts). They have never heard of g, and have also never heard of progressive cope lines around the topic.

The "American working class" has never even heard of Spearman's g.

In a freshman class in college many years ago we were basically fed anti-IQ propaganda. Including impuning people as racists. Good educated middling progressives have been inoculated against honestly considering the facts of heritability. That well has been thoroughly poisoned.

Is this outside the mainstream?

Yes. Whatever you want to attribute it to, the prevailing sentiments are like this one:

“Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person?” David S. Jones, a Harvard historian and medical ethicist, told Vox. “I can’t think of how that could actually be true. And the assumption that it is true just sounds like white supremacist racism to me. We need to subject any claims like this to really strict scrutiny.”

Not just, "well, that's one explanation" or "I doubt it, that's improbable", but "I can't think of how that could actually be true". Stating that you can't even think of how it could be true that people of different ancestries differ in average cognitive ability is Harvard medical ethicist thinking. Whether he's stating that cynically or honestly, that's where we're at. Do you want to be subject to really strict scrutiny on whether you're a white supremacist?

How many Black friends do you have? Close friends, say minimum "pick you up at the airport" level of friendship on the Seinfeld scale

Two that meet that standard, but I probably wouldn't actually call them, "close friends". Close enough to be part of group get togethers at holidays and such though.

You actually hit on why I’m questioning whether HBD is mainstream accepted. Vox is a blue tribe probably aimed at around the 10-20% Iq area. Harvard is a 1% elitists spot. So people here would call it not mainstream because the people in their intellectual space don’t follow it. If I asked a 50 year old welder his views he would probably admit he thinks there are differences. It’s just that people in your social space don’t adhere to hbd.

The big logic for HBD being important is based on Garrett Jones arguments. A quick simplification is he thinks a nations average IQ is important and not as much being smart yourself. You have a better chance being well off being less intelligent in a high average IQ country than you would be super smart in a low average IQ country. Basically governance improves a lot if you have higher average IQ. All government need to get a consent of the governed to effectively function. Democracy especially is hard to do if the voters can’t understand policy. So that ends up making dictatorship better. But you still need a degree of the populace understanding what your doing to encourage good policy choices. And when things go wrong poorly informed citizens are more likely to turn to their in group leader and having a coup and hopefully sending more of their spoils to their own tribe.

Democracy especially is hard to do if the voters can’t understand policy

Countries with low IQs tend to do poorly no matter what system they adopt. The UAE is a possible exception because it pivoted to tourism and westernism in every other respect but government and religion. The quality of people tells you the quality of country. Liberal democracy seems to work best when you have a small, highly productive, high trust population, which pretty much excludes much of the world and even much of the US.

Most of the UAE's revenue is oil and its derivatives (You are confusing Dubai and UAE). The Arab Gulf states are National avg IQ vs GDPPc PPP, outliers. Simar to ex-communist states who are outliers in the opposite direction. Credit where credit is due, it's not like natural resource wealth can't be squandered (or not realized at all), the ruling elite of the UAE is the real deal.

The native modest IQ stock of the UAE is a minority at ~20% of the population. The entire rest of the population is much higher functioning imported expats who do all the serious work (and construction workers).

A 50 year old welder may not have a positive view of black people, but it’s the rare blue collar worker who thinks of IQ as the determining factor.

Blue collar workers who think there’s something wrong, genetically, with blacks are usually going to point to laziness, not IQ, being the differing hereditary factor.

I don’t know that ‘people with differing ancestries have different IQ’s’ is the sentiment objected to so much as ‘it just doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility that entire countries are made up mostly of actually literally retarded people’ is the objection.

Sigh. A Harvard medical ethicist of all people ought to know the nosological difference between «actually literally retarded» and «very low IQ», because those are, in fact, different conditions.

Then again, maybe it's the opposite and his job is to not know the difference – who am I to tell, not being Harvard material myself? Like the Chinese say,

“We need to teach machines not only how to speak, but also how not to speak.”

And more is expected of experts.

more is expected of experts

By who? I certainly don’t expect experts to speak truth to power, and I don’t expect the general public to be able to catch them lying or confusing terms to mislead or shutting down debate or whatever.

If some people have cognitive impairment and low IQ and some have just low IQ and can function in society, I don't see why the cognitive impairment shouldn't be considered to be part of IQ in the first place. A meaningful measure of IQ would consider the person with cognitive impairment to have a lower IQ, because he has cognitive impairment.

You can also look at it from another angle: "Can learn the skills needed to function in society" should be most of IQ. If a 60 IQ person can function as well as an 80 IQ person but doesn't understand analogies, he should, by definition, have a 80 IQ, especially if the 80 IQ person barely understands analogies either. "Understands analogies slightly worse, but neither of them understands analogies well enough to use them" is not a large IQ gap under any useful definition of IQ.

(I'm not convinced that the whole distinction is even real. Are there studies that show that it's possible to have 60-IQ-with-impairment and 60-IQ-without-impairment for people who are otherwise under similar cultures and circumstances?)

That would defeat the premise of what an IQ score is, a metric trying to capture the latent g factor.

Why not just have a "societal functioning quotient"? The SFQ so to speak. It might even gain popularity over IQ and become the de facto "intelligence" metric (because that will be gameable unlike IQ). Be warned, it's not that easy to make what you are proposing, not to speak on will it be even useful for research or as a signal. There is a reason Academia gave so much weight to the SAT and GRE up until the recent past (It was a useful signal), Half the job openings for ETS (the company that makes the GRE) is for Psychometrics and Psychology PhDs.. I wonder why they need so many psychologists for a primarily Math and English test.

FWIW I made it to my late 20s working in philosophy and cognitive science before I encountered HBD. Most people, especially educated ones, will simply believe some combination of (i) IQ is a discredited old measure of intelligence, (ii) race is a social construct, and maybe (iii) insofar as we give IQ any weight at all, we should recognise it as highly mutable as demonstrated by stuff like the Flynn Effect.

This started to unravel for me when I began poking around and found that (i) was false. But most educated people won’t get to that point.

This feels like something where education makes you forgot something that was plainly obvious to children or lower educated people.

I knew the points you make were false when I was 8 year olds and saw a lot more people with more melanin playing the sports I liked to play professionally. Just seemed obvious races were not identical. Everyone I grew up knew that blacks people ran faster and jumped higher.

Well, what I don’t understand is that there are obviously some people who are smarter compared to other people. Just like there are people who are more attractive or more athletic or more consistently drunk. And shockingly these things seem to run in families.

That and we see that in animals we can breed certain outcomes.

Blank slatism just seems so difficult to believe given the above. The simpler solution is that genetics impact life outcomes. Not saying it is 100% but important. Once you accept that, then it seems once you have population A and population B separated by an obvious genetic difference it is perfectly within the realm of possibility to see a difference in group IQ.

Of course, I do think the problem is people oversimplify. There are African sub populations that are reasonably high IQ. Moreover, there is great variability within black populations. And white populations. And Asian populations. We need not abandon colorblindness as principle given HBD. But it can be a refutation of the claim that group differences re a result of oppression.

Well, what I don’t understand is that there are obviously some people who are smarter compared to other people. Just like there are people who are more attractive or more athletic or more consistently drunk. And shockingly these things seem to run in families.

People do not seem to follow up on observations about genetics, if they are even making them in the first place. That is, people will accept that you look like your parents, but don't consider if you can be smarter or dumber based on the genes your parents give you.

That and we see that in animals we can breed certain outcomes.

"Humans are different", "evolution stops before it reaches the brain", etc.

It is very easy not to see something when your viability within the system depends on not seeing it.

Not mainstream in... Scott Alexanders blogs subreddit?

It was maybe mainstream in the past. Definitely not now.

Isn't, this, rather, an argument that Haiti is «HBD played straight»? This is how a democratic, or perhaps ochlocratic, nation with an average IQ of 67 functions: it doesn't.

It's those other nations which are deviations from the natural path, thanks to introgression of some elite material and its ability to withstand the pressure of the demos, which is not a given when eldritch powers side with the latter. And accordingly, African nations which have succeeded in humbling their elite castes – be those local Africans of another tribe, like with Tutsis, or Indians, or Arabs, or colonial remnants – are nations where the genetic factor is playing out in its purest form.

Uh, isn’t Rwanda improving rapidly while the rest of the Great Lakes region is perhaps not improving rapidly but still gradually getting better? S Africa is getting worse, true, but Botswana is getting much better.

Rwanda is ruled by Tutsis,no?

I doubt the concept of the Tutsis, like the Igbo, being outliers is Sub - Saharian Africa is common knowledge much less commonly accepted.

I was under the impression is was a lot less Tutsi dominated than it used to be, but admit that I’m not totally up on my Central African politics.

The opposite is true - although Tutsis were generally richer than Hutus and more important politically, the RPF (Tutsi exiles) takeover of Rwanda during the genocide has led to the creation of an authoritarian government friendly to Tutsis, so overall their position is likely more secure.

Could you explain the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu?

Previously I vaguely remembered colonial authorities basically made them up. So I looked into it a bit. Wiki e.g.:

They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical features of a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and being over six feet tall, all of which are common descriptions associated with the Tutsi.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

Both the Tutsi and Hutu had been the traditional governing elite, but both colonial powers allowed only the Tutsi to be educated and to participate in the colonial government.

🤷‍♀️

Is it the case where a few disparate groups were sublimated into either Tutsi or Hutu? Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group? Are "official" takes as distorted as e.g. HBD? I'm more familiar with Central Asia, where Kazakhs, Uzbeks and such were basically invented in the 1920s, almost whole cloth.

Yeah, that's the standard excuse - Belgians did it because they elevated only one group. There was no trouble till whites came.

I don't really believe it in the slightest.

Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group?

They're probably largely descended from a coherent group that originated outside Rwanda.

E.g. from wikipedia:

The ability to digest lactose among African adults is widespread only among desert-dwelling nomadic groups that have depended upon milk for millennia. Three quarters of the adult Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi have a high ability to digest lactose, while only 5% of the adults of the neighboring Shi people of eastern Congo can. Among Hutu, one in three adults has a high capacity for lactose digestion, a surprisingly high number for an agrarian people, which Mamdani suggests may be the result of centuries of intermarriage with Tutsi.[2]

EDIT:

Imo, the clearest reason why Rwanda went bugshit was, that even though it is an unusually fertile region, the population density was extremely high, resulting in privation:

Rwanda's population soared from 1,887,000 people in 1948 to more than 7,500,000 in 1992, making it the most densely populated country in Africa. Poor farmers were forced onto marginal land, where cultivation resulted in severe erosion. Reliance on firewood as a source of energy caused massive deforestation, and farmers were then forced to use straw and other crop residues for fuel, thereby damaging soil fertility. These factors led to a disastrous shortfall in food production, with two-thirds of the population unable to meet even the minimum food energy requirement of 2,100 calories per person per day.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

From my understanding the categories are remarkably genetically coherent since they measured different cultural groups/ways of life, but it wouldn't shock me if there was also an element of 'everybody doing 8/10 or better at life is now a Tutsi' at the fringes.

There's been a bunch of revisionism on the topic that's very much of the 'ethnic strife didn't exist prior to colonialism whatsoever' brand of hilarity.

The Tutsis are mostly descended from East African Cushitic pastoralists. They have significant Bantu admixture, though. Hutus are almost all generic Bantus genetically. There has been no formal studies on this as the Rwandan government doesn’t allow it, but Razib Khan privately analyzed some samples he got from Rwanda years ago on his blog.

Huh I had no idea. I always bought into the party line of “Belgians invented them” I should’ve known better

I guess It's how Brits supposedly invented Brahmins to delegate them power over the oppressed proletarian masses. Turns out, made them genetically more Aryan too. And of course language families are spread by emancipated women who love traveling and acquainting themselves with fascinating diverse cultures – not with the edge of the battle axe.

Once you notice that those 20th century historians and anthropologists started from a very particular, very self-absorbed theoretical lens, you develop a certain... prior for every time you hear about some clearly hereditary group being a social construct.

That said, @veqq is correct that Soviets, who took that lens as both an explanatory framework for things that work and, logically enough, an instruction manual, did invent a bunch of peoples, or at the very least redefined their distinctions and populations –Tatars and Bashkirs are the most glaring example.

The obvious question for me as a libertarian republican is, how was free-market capitalism treated in the school lessons learned by the children who grew up into the gangsters now dividing up the island? Were they taught to respect others’ property? Were they taught to deny a single one of their emotionally-driven urges to have and thus to take?

I’m “friends” with an autistic woman with an IQ of less than 100. She was raised by a WEIRD progressive mother in a highly permissive home. She was thoroughly educated about her rights as a human, a citizen, and a person with disabilities, but not her responsibilities as an economic unit. She is now a want-monster who argues until she gets her way, because she believes the world owes her, and money is just an excuse for people to reject her. She treats her help-staff as garbage and complains when they quit.

Why would you be friends with such a person?

Before I learned about codependency, I thought I could be the friend people needed. That got me four bad friends in a row who could not reciprocate in any meaningful way. They drained me and I suffered immeasurably. She’s the only one I’m still in contact with because she’s the only one with my phone number.

Not OP but, I am friends with a lot of basketcases. Most of them got "grandfathered in" as friends from middle school and my childhood neighborhood.

They are not bad people, if you can dispense your desire to have "deep" conversations with literally everyone you know ( I have other people to do that with), then they are perfectly fine to associate with and do (limited) things with such as play sports, video games, goof about, hold a cookout with, etc.

Also, "bad" people are not always universally bad to everyone. In certain cultures, the more of an asshole one is to "outsiders" the more loyal he is to his "family". My grandfather was one such example, An absolute menace to service workers of all stripes, but a gentleman of the nth order with his family.

I feel like "Haiti's problems are caused by the masses preventing the mulatto elite from holding power" elides an important detail, which is that the instability and massacres weren't a bottom-up noir-peasant rebellion, they were driven by the mulatto elite themselves - generally by one faction (often financed by the Germans) hiring mercenaries to take out one leader and install their favored candidate instead. President's Sam massacre against leading mulatto families, however and barbaric and unjustified, wasn't due to racial animosity but to credible fears that this would happen again (as it had happened numerous times before) due to another incipient caco revolt fomenting around the opposition leader. From Max Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace":

Of 22 rulers between 1843 and 1915, only one served out his term of office. During those years there were at least 102 civil wars, coups d'etat, revolts, and other political disorders. The period between 1908 and 1915 was particularly chaotic. Seven presidents were overthrown during those seven years.

Most of these coups followed a familiar pattern. They were orchestrated by the mulatto elite that ran the black republic . . . A cabal of mulatre (mulatto) plotters in port-au-Prince, the capital, would become unhappy with the incumbent. They would select an alternative candidate - usually a noir (black) - and line up financing for him from the German merchant community, which expected to make a tidy profit on the investment out of public funds once the usurper came to power. The would-be president would journey to the wild, mountainous north of Haiti, where he would recruit to his cause tatterdemalion soldiers of fortune and part-time bandits known as cacos (after a local bird of prey) with promises of loot. The cacos would march south toward Port-au-Prince, plundering coastal towns as they went. Since the Haitian army was corrupt and ineffectual, there was little to slow their progress. Upon the cacos' arrival at the outskirts of the capital, the incumbent president would go quickly and quietly into foreign exile, taking a portion of the treasury with him. His successor would be elected by the National Assembly at gunpoint. The cacos would be paid off from the public treasury and happily return home, until a fresh revolutionary leader invited them to march again. It was, boasted one Haitian in 1915, "an efficient revolutionary system . . . the most intricate and elaborate system in the world"

If the elites were so elite, why did they lose, time and time again? You'd think that an elite class would catch on.

Haha, it's been that way for ages. Last year there were people saying that there was no crime increase in 2020, the 30% increase was just random statistical noise and Scott was making it all up https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vn40ma/what_caused_the_2020_homicide_spike/ie5ct2u/

And of course ranting about the fucking pigs deserved their bricks which somehow never triggered the new mods' culture war detectors.

It's been a long time coming, and was preventable at every step if the obvious subversives had been purged instead of being handed the keys. Don't make that mistake again.

Currently, both of those comments are downvoted to -3, while the responses are upvoted. So what are we supposed to conclude about the subreddit as a whole from them?

That the mods are responsible for selectively enforcing the "no violence, waging, or even discussing the culture war" rules to bring /r/communism_memes users into the sub.

Quoting naraburns:

HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.

It's the standard reddit power-jannie entryist story.

It's generally understood that /r/ slatestarcodex is to the left of themotte, hence the fork a few years ago.

Second, we talking reddit here. Not exactly friendly to HBD overall. Posting 'red pills' about HBD incurs a non-trivial likelihood of being banned, either the individual or the sub.

The thing is, it's not just left: It's oblivious left. They demonstrate absolutely no awareness of then existence of obvious counterarguments to the ridiculous things they say. After the split, /r/SlateStarCodex didn't just move left. It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.

In terms of IQ, I would say themotte is 1/2 of a sd above /r/SlateStarCodex , surveys be damned. A lot of the smart people left.

It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.

Yes, look at this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/116a0hi/the_crowd_gasps_audibly_and_outgoing_governor/j96s71h/

ever hear of google? Embarrassing...

It's censored left. There are HBD posts, most are already deleted is all.

I would like someone to poke Bakkot with a stick on whether it's «Culture War» to mention HBD in a discussion of African dysfunction, if only to see him squirm.

/r/SSC has been bleeding quality contributiors for years.

The vast majority of the really high quality blog posts were made between like 2012-2014, then there were a few years with much lower output but still the occasional high quality post and then almost nothing.

It's almost a decade since 2014, multiple community splits and a general ban on discussion on the topics that made both the forum and the blog popular.

Endlessly fascinating to me how hard the internet has accelerated the life cycle for nostalgia, I've noticed myself pining for the good ol' days of the internet with newgrounds, YTMND, SA, 4chan or even what YouTube used to be. These things disappeared or underwent fundamental changes to them not so long ago (a similar timeframe to paying off a car loan or meeting, courting and marrying a stranger) and yet everybody who remembers the internet before Facebook (at least those I've spoken with) all seem to share a similar sentiment. My favorite quote that encapsulates this was from a post from 2014 on one of 4chan's now-defunct text boards saying "2012 was so long ago, was i even alive back then. who knows."

Further viewing for anyone who cares about the phenomenal acceleration of nostalgia as much as I do. ALERT! YouTube link! (also contains what can be considered a very annoying pop song)

Go ahead and read the comments below; from what I can tell these are actual children, or at the very least young adults, waxing poetic on the halcyon days of their youth. This, to me, is just incredible. Literally! Imagine if you had told just about anyone across history that the unblooded youth of society would reminisce over their shared childhood, before they had even stepped into adult society proper. Maybe my priors on this are skewed by my neophyte-tier Cynicism and a knee-jerk tribal desire for RETVRN, but I can't help but wonder if this is something very, very new.

A fascinating topic to me, and one I don't have the requisite familiarity or ability to trawl through academic literature on this subject, or even know if there's been anything published that would cover this.

I don't know that the older generations aren't guilty of this also. Happy Days was from the 70's, That 70's Show was from the 90's.

But then, I am part of that generation that this video is probably targeting (millennials), and people of my generation have almost certainly done some time in adult society by now. Maybe the timeframes are shrinking, I do find myself longing for the days before social media was all-consuming (one such post here), but maybe we're all just reaching back to the last real big inflection point.

There's certainly a market for nostalgia, I won't deny that - I will say you've perhaps glanced at the decade and not the precise date. Happy Days is for sure a bit of a prick to my balloon, but That 70's Show aired originally in 98, nearly thirty years after the 70's began. Even drawing the time frame in as close as possible, you're comparing a show ostensibly set 18 years and some change before its air date, to a condensed nostalgia trip featuring a song that came out 12 years ago (peaked in popularity around 7-10 years ago) paired with clips from kids shows that aired up until three years ago. My more pressing point is about the audience's self declared ages (found in the comment section, a hoary place where few tread). There are easily dozens of remarks from individuals providing identifying information on their ages. A highly updooted comment explicitly states that nostalgia for this song, these clips means you experienced the best Gen Z had to offer.

While television programs and Online Content™ are admittedly apples and oranges, it's more the turnaround that has me impressed. Your last point is well taken too, part of my fascination with this video (not necessarily this one though I love it for its QED power, a cursory search for similarly themed videos will turn up comparable results, courtesy of the wackily overtuned algo) is the response it evoked in me. It almost grabbed me for a moment before my brain caught up with my reaction, started placing each reference next to the metaphorical calendar and immediately noticed that things weren't adding up.

Anything that tries to catch me on that sort of level without my permission is met with automatic suspicion so I'm not certain this isn't me reading signals from the noise, or if maybe this means they grew up on recycled content from the previous generation. Either way it seems off to me, to canonize your own past before you've even found yourself properly settled in the present.

Generally we'd prefer people didn't remove posts unless they really regret posting something.

I don't think this is consensus-building, but it is kind of failing to leave the rest of the Internet at the door. "Look at how stupid SSC has become" isn't exactly a genre of post we want to encourage.

Most people who got to know about HBD didn't look for it, myself included. I stumbled upon it. It did change my view on a lot of things, but I still think liberals have the correct take on a large number of issues. Plus I suppose it's just a matter of socialisation. As a lot of "intellectual heretics" have either departed or been banned off reddit, there is less pushback than ever there. I suppose the same can be said about this place. Ultimately, we're all worse off for it, because intellectual diversity keeps everyone on their toes rather than fragmenting into echo chambers.

Reddit ban is fairly easy to get now. You have to be quite careful-

I forgot myself for a while and caught a ban on reddit just like that, for mentioning the 30x difference in homicidality in the US between Asians and blacks.

Same here, only learned about HBD thanks to the long (long) discussions about it back on the old place. Hasn't changed my mind, since I think there's a heck of a lot of bad data floating around there (and Richard Lynn should be put in the pillory for spreading it around), a lot of environmental influences, and a certain degree of racism to be cleared out of the way before we can get onto "do some populations have lower/higher IQs?"

I think it's possible, indeed. Can we increase IQ by interventions? Once we get things like pollution, malnutrition, lack of access to education, etc. out of the way, if there still is a gap, then we need to think about genetics and how alterable (or not) they are. But the big problem remains a moral one - some people will indeed use HBD as an excuse to be persecutors, to keep people down, because "it's inalterable genetics, they're just inferior by nature, they have to be treated like sub-humans, I don't make the rules".

a lot of environmental influences, and a certain degree of racism to be cleared out of the way

How will we know when it's cleared out of the way?

we can get onto "do some populations have lower/higher IQs?

This is something you do actually have to ask yourself though if you want to reason about these things. If you choose to discard you still have made a choice.

How will we know when it's cleared out of the way?

Probably when we've got to the point of worrying about the Oompa-Loompas.

Who is 'we' to because it seems like we got to that point years ago.

For context, OP (Matt Lakeman) is an old ex-regular who has an amazing blog dedicated mostly to international travel, reading on historical stuff and self-experiments. He's been to the Dominican Republic, among other places. He was not impressed. As one can expect, there's a section on the Haiti, with passages like:

Haiti was my first destination choice for this trip. But when I Googled “Haiti,” the top news story was about 17 American and Canadian missionaries being kidnapped by a Haitian gang and held for $17 million ransom. So I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to Haiti at the moment.

I don’t know why the two countries have diverged so dramatically. Noah Smith says no one knows the cause of the split, but it’s probably some combination of Haiti starting its independence with enormous national debt (as part of a settlement with former colonial master France), terrible land management policies, the ongoing toll of the U.S. occupation for twenty years (the Dominican Republic was invaded too, but only for eight years), constant regime change, and generally abysmal macroeconomic policy. One Dominican I talked to attributed the country’s success to mid-century dictator Rafel Truillo, who was authoritarian and oppressive (and renamed the capital after himself), but allegedly brought enough order to the country to attract foreign investment and jump start the modern tourist economy. Also, for geographic/climate reasons, Haiti gets hit far more and far harder by natural disasters than the Dominican Republic.

By chance, I spent some time with two European aid workers stationed in Haiti. Their strong consensus was that Haiti was even worse than I had imagined. Worse than anyone imagines. And it has no viable recovery plan. A few interesting things they told me:

[...]

Law and order is non-existent in the cities. There is no point in reporting crimes. The cities are essentially in a state of anarchy.

The lawlessness has gotten worse over the last few years. The two used to be able to go to restaurants and jazz clubs, but now they don’t leave their homes at night.

Taxes are not paid in Haiti (duh). But if for some reason someone wants to pay taxes in Haiti, they first have to bribe the security guards at the doors of the tax offices.

When the Haitian people get pissed off at the government, their only viable means of protest is to block roads. So they’ll cut down trees or light tires on fire and cut off major highways. There is literally no process in place for the Haitian government to clear these blockages.

The Haitian people are consumed by “fake news.” Rival political factions run radio stations and Whatsapp groups, and spread fake news to vilify the opposition and/or foreigners. The fake news is so rampant that the average Haitian seems to have a completely deluded view of politics and the world at large.

It's a mystery indeed!

By the way, Scott's trip to Haiti was what opened his eyes to biodeterminism. (this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative). Maybe Matt should've gone after all and written something in his usual manner.

...But also.

IQ is not a mechanistic explanation. All the politically correct stuff he asks about – governments, [inability to make use of] climate, culture – are in the end products of IQ but can be studied separately. IQ only tells us why it's so inescapably and consistently bad. But then an informed person would ask: why is Russia or Ukraine or Belarus like that? Why is China like that? Why is Iran like that? Sure it's not Sub-Saharan Africa, but aren't these people clearly smart enough to at least do better than what they show? And why are they worse than, like, Portugal? So IQ can't be the full story; and so long as this is the case, one has enough wiggle room to not notice the elephant.

As I've just argued, tabooing HBD destroys a great deal more than understanding of stuff that pertains directly to HBD. It lowers the effective IQ of the group, and much faster than dysgenics. Regarding the normiefication of the sub, you're obviously correct, but barely-challenged mentions of Jared Diamond, who is an utter fraud and a just-so storyteller, are even more telling. AskHistorians link is okay. Here's a good discussion of his GGS by that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective, if anyone is interested, I can... proofread Deepl/ChatGPT translation.

(this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative).

Here it is. CW for, uh, emotional honesty if you follow the link.

that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective,

Except that Tolkien wasn't thinking about Russia at all, in the slightest. If they really do think that the Orcs are a depiction of what the West thinks of Russia, they're barking up the wrong tree. If they then say "Okay, let's be Orcs! To hell with the West!", they're idiots (not to put a tooth in it): they'd rather cut their nose off to spite their face, and they still don't understand how irrelevant they are to most Western thought historically.

Do you believe we care that much about Tolkien's intentions in particular? Enough to engage in some post-mortem polemic, even? Our ressentiment is more interesting than your escapism, our literature is deeper than your fairy tales. Be flattered when they are used as a starting point, in the way Yudkowsky used Rowling's.

Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and Venezuela are like that while Indonesia and Botswana and Costa Rica are not like that because the former set of countries are run by elites with Marxist assumptions that lead to retarded economic policies and general dysfunction, while the latter are run by elites who are normal and where dysfunctional are dysfunctional in predictable self interested ways. Botswana and Indonesia in particular benefit from keeping much of their colonial institutions from very functional countries instead of asking corrupt and ideologically driven marxists to design new ones.

A somewhat fanciful tangent, but that reminds me of the debate over Elon Musk commandeering Twitter on free speech fairness grounds only to end up promoting his own tweets.

I think a social media CEO tilting things in their individual favor is less terrible than abstract ideological shenanigans stacking the decks against rival or suspiciously off-the-grid political notions.

According to Wikipedia, which cites the IMF, Haiti's per capita GDP, in purchasing power parity, is $3,188. Jamaica's is $11,802, and Barbados's is $17,407. Something other than HBD is going on.

And, btw, describing Guns, Germs and Steel as a just-so story seems very odd. The book repeatedly discusses alternative theories, potential weaknesses in its evidence, and avenues for additional research which might confirm or refute his argument, none of which is the norm, especially in books designed for a popular audience. That doesn't mean he is correct, but it certainly isn't a just-so story.

The book is a very good just-so story with an honest author who more or less admits that's what he's telling.

It's particularly visible towards the end when it attempts to explain European dominance as opposed to Chinese, Arab or Indian dominance, but then admits that had one guy made a different choice (the emperor of China and the treasure fleets) then European dominance likely would not have happened.

You've got that backwards: He starts by saying that internal politics led to decisions which meant that China did not end up conquering the world,and then argues that that decision would have had less effect had China been divided into several regional states, and then presents a hypothesis of what role geography might have played in China's high level of political unity. But, regardless, that is basically irrelevant: It is 3 pages tacked on at the end on the subject of potential future avenues of research

There looks like there's now a comment there from a mod saying that those topics were removed.

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified.

It's Eternal September everywhere, and the SSC modteam barely exists on reddit anymore. Baj hasn't posted on reddit in five months, Cheeze occasionally moderates but was pretty low-participation already by the time I became a moderator, Zorba is busy with this place when he's not busy with life, Scott himself is a token mod to satisfy Bakkot's aesthetic, and Bakkot seems to be one of those people who refuses to ever give up control of anything even when he no longer contributes to its well-being nor even especially pays attention to it. HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.

The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse." Obviously you can't have the CW thread without that spirit, but I am increasingly persuaded that you can't have the spirit of open discourse with topic bans. You can't have Free Speech with an asterisk; the asterisk strangles the life out of the conversation, quickly or slowly. The whole enterprise withers on the vine; if anything does remain, it's mostly just virtue signalling.

It's frankly frustrating, because damned if I'm not tempted to slap some of the more annoying people around here with topic bans, sometimes! And there are still occasionally some good threads that crop up on the SSC sub from time to time, and in other places in the diaspora. But even Astral Codex Ten is a shadow of Scott circa 2015, because he's muzzled himself (or allowed himself to be muzzled) in spite of his increased freedom and wealth (or perhaps because of it--he now has something substantial to lose!). Respectability and stultification seem repeatedly to arrive hand-in-hand.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

You specified that it "seems to me" and you didn't say "everyone knows," so I think you're good.

I would very happily take recommendations for new mods, for what it's worth. It's tricky because we've gotten burned a few times by giving good contributors the mod bit and then having them immediately stop participating, possibly because dealing with the worst posts is sometimes dispiriting (though really it's the edge cases which are more draining to deal with), so we don't want to simply offer the position to any good contributor - that's evidently a good way to get less participation from good contributors, which is the opposite of what we want. And while I'm sure there's lurkers out there who would be a good fit, there's no good way to find and vet them.

I would really like to be responsible for less of the moderating, but there would need to be other, more active mods for that to work.

In the previous two months which are all the mod log shows, I've taken about 600 actions, HarryPotter5777 has taken about 70, and other mods about 6. ("Anti-Evil Operations" has taken 3.) Keep in mind that most of these actions are approving comments which were reported but not quite over the bar of warranting action, removing spam, or otherwise invisible. (I've been unusually busy the last few months, which is reflected in my reduced use of reddit; I think the ratio was even more skewed before that.)

While I'm popping my head in, I should say that I'm not actually the one who added Scott (that was one of the very first other mods, since departed). He uses his mod bit exclusively to sticky and unsticky new threads for posts from the blog when he gets there before I do, so it's correct not to call him a mod in any real sense, though, yes.

I've taken about 600 actions, HarryPotter5777 has taken about 70, and other mods about 6. ("Anti-Evil Operations" has taken 3.)

Thanks for sharing--I apologize for drawing conclusions from limited evidence (your public posting histories; HP5777 has recent mod-hat comments and you do not) but of course I don't have access to anything else.

It's tricky because we've gotten burned a few times by giving good contributors the mod bit and then having them immediately stop participating

Yeah, that's been true of the Motte as well, and I daresay many other places besides.

The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse."

I'm inclining more and more to the notion that what is needed is some of us stickle-backed old dinosaurs with right-wing and conservative views. The Schism was set up to accommodate those who felt they were being dog-piled by the righties, and to be more sympathetic to the left-wingers who were leaving, and it has settled down to being rather flat, in my opinion. Comment threads there don't get to the length as on here. Everyone pretty much murmurs "yes, how true" to the original post. SSC, from the rare times I dip back in, has gone the same way. The Culture War was purged, now it's comfortably leftie-progressive in its views. And stagnating, I regret to say.

(All opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and are not to be taken as representative of The Motte).

Now, before anyone wants to remind me, I am very well aware of the danger of getting our own little right-wing echo chamber going here, and certainly there are opinions expressed that I do vehemently disagree with. But I think that is the benefit here - for whatever reason, be it that we're accustomed to seeing right-wing/conservative views decried as the most evil of evil, or whatever, I do think that (a) there is a spectrum, not a monolith, of conservative views and (b) right-wingers are a bit more thick-skinned when it comes to debate/argument. So where someone on the left of the centre might flounce off because "you are personally attacking me, this is hate speech and violence", I think someone to right of centre is more inclined to stick around and fight it out. I mean, I know I have views that would get me hanged as a bigot and a transphobe and a racist and I can't remember the entire list of badness, on other places on the Internet where any divergence from the current orthodoxy is pure evil (see Jesse Singal's travails, and he's more liberal than I am).

There is also the benefit that as an off-shoot of the original SSC, Scott's rules about niceness and charity are still being followed. This keeps things from degenerating to the level of just shouting insults at each other. If I want to express my full-flowing bosom about the likes of Felker-Martin, I'll head over to CultureWarRoundup (a very useful safety valve to vent). I'll try and keep on the civil side on here.

Everyone pretty much murmurs "yes, how true" to the original post.

This is not at all true, there have been substantive debates where people have made it clear they disagree with a top-level post for a variety of reasons.

Now, before anyone wants to remind me, I am very well aware of the danger of getting our own little right-wing echo chamber going here

It's not "get going here", that echo chamber is already happening. Almost every comment in this whole chain of comments, starting from the very top with OP, is people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology. We're not getting an echo chamber here, we're literally sitting in one right now.

Almost every comment in this whole chain of comments, starting from the very top with OP, is people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology. We're not getting an echo chamber here, we're literally sitting in one right now.

If the ground shakes, a lot of people will say "Whoa, an earthquake". That doesn't indicate an echo chamber.

If you want to use that analogy, we have people here who hear T-Rex thumps like Jurassic Park 1 and assume it's always an earthquake, and everyone around them agrees.

Anyone who disagrees with those posts can reply with either evidence to the contrary or just their personal opinion. And unlike on reddit it will not lead to <deleted posts> and the mods locking the entire thread because "y'all can't behave. It's basic human decency. Do better"

Anyone who disagrees with those posts can reply with either evidence to the contrary or just their personal opinion.

Sure, that could happen. But you don't see that happen. The amount of pushback against those positions is dwarfed by the amount that agree with those positions.

I think we are slightly more right here. The Schism was for those liberal/lefties who felt they were being persecuted, DSL ended up as the haven of the very right-wing, ACX is a mix of what the old SSC was like, and on here are the more centrist(?) righties. With the mass migration, I think it did shake out that those who remained on SSC behind after the Culture War thread split off on its own were more inclined to be on the left, and the various dispersions since then have only increased that effect.

It's like the sediment jar test, we've all settled into our various layers, though there is still an admixture.

This is a strange notion of an echo chamber. By this standard, any group that has reached effective consensus on a partisan issue is an echo chamber; in reality this is a necessary (arguably: in my view, 4chan/pol/ is an echochamber despite it being filled with contradictory bullshit of the same genre), but not a sufficient condition.

The only thing keeping those leftists out of here is generic moderation against uncouth tone (and their own disinterest, of course); the thing keeping us out of there is an explicit prohibition on discussing a not particularly fringe scientific hypothesis that's germane to the topic. We see their arguments. They don't see ours and are lost in their own echos.

The only thing keeping those leftists out of here is generic moderation against uncouth tone (and their own disinterest, of course); the thing keeping us out of there is an explicit prohibition on discussing a not particularly fringe scientific hypothesis that's germane to the topic. We see their arguments. They don't see ours and are lost in their own echos.

You're ignoring a pretty important point - the inevitable dogpiling when someone disagrees with this place's mainstream opinions. That has a tendency to drive people out as well, and it began all the way back when it was just a thread in the ssc subreddit.

I am not a total relativist. What is the difference between dogpiling and fair criticism of intransigence? This depends on merits of the case, and a proper rationalist should at least entertain the possibility that he's egregiously wrong about a subject he has not studied, thus take an apparent dogpiling – or «mansplaining» or any other sin from the list of progressive anti-cognitive memes – in stride.

I don't know about dogpiling. I've always felt that that was an intentional effect, a campaign: everyone is co-ordinated to drive off the heretic. I know I don't think like that when I'm responding to something that seems very egregious, even if there are already several other responses as well. I agree that it can be a problem when someone says X and gets ten replies all saying no, it's Y - but that is different to having a set-up where there is deliberate action to drive someone off. I don't think we have that here.

I agree. But the effect is roughly the same because it's a largely a question of character, not perception, whether you bear repeated criticism. I don't blame any particular person because it's a collective action issue.

I don't know about dogpiling. I've always felt that that was an intentional effect, a campaign: everyone is co-ordinated to drive off the heretic.

When the Motte was still on Reddit, someone (my google-fu is abandoning me) came up with the idea of a distributed Gish Gallop, which I found rather insightful. Also, prospiracies are a thing, IMO.

The effect of a coordinated attack against the heretic, and just members of the majority opinion saying their opinion towards the minority, are identical if you're at the receiving end. And this seems to me the central problem, on /r/SCC and here, just with opposite polarities.

Distributed Gish Gallop

Earliest mention I see via camas.unddit.com is here back on the mothersub by @TracingWoodgrains; the original comment by /u/saladatmilliways is unavailable (Culture War Roundup for the week of June 25, 2018). Maybe there's some way to find a copy but a quick look didn't help.

Checking out that thread was interesting, and of course nostalgic. Much was lost.

This is not at all true, there have been substantive debates where people have made it clear they disagree with a top-level post for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes, I agree, that happens. But comment threads don't seem to get going over there and while that may be a function of "not many people were interested in transferring over" and so a smaller commentariat, it does seem to me, the times I drop in to see if anything interesting is going on, that they peter out because of the "yes, that is so" effect.

people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology

It's been a while since I did wander over to the original (what remains of it) SSC - I hung around The Motte back on Reddit and on here, I dipped in and out of DSL but moved away from there, and I waited for Scott's new place to get up and running, but mostly left with the rest of the diaspora after "we don't want no Culture War no mo" event. I've been very surprised by what it's like now, I have to say. But again, new blood came in after we moved out so it's their house now.

Sometimes, I agree, that happens. But comment threads don't seem to get going over there and while that may be a function of "not many people were interested in transferring over" and so a smaller commentariat, it does seem to me, the times I drop in to see if anything interesting is going on, that they peter out because of the "yes, that is so" effect.

I think you're leaving out the biggest factor - the sheer volume of top-level posts where people come to bring out their axes to grind. Anger drives posting in a way that's difficult for other emotions to do.

I just intuited an observation on that. The Triessences of What, How, and Why occur in that order, and are the spirits of Republican, Libertarian, and Democratic discourse, respectively.

If you start with What, you can follow up with discussion on How and Why, but if you start with Why, you’ve already assumed the What and How.

I’ll add an expansion on these thoughts on political discourse dynamics in my Triessentialism thread sometime before Monday ends.

Left wingers are in power; there's no particular need for them to argue with right wingers. They can just boot them out of any place they want to have a 'conversation', except for a few witch's dens which have no outside influence. (And maybe Twitter, for now).

In Scott's last linkfest he hinted that he was no longer living in San Francisco. Not that that would help him much with an ability to return to his 2015 self, but I'm curious if he really is no longer in the area.

I also "didn't live in San Francisco" for years. I still lived in the Bay Area, like I believe Scott does.

I lived in Oakland for 10 years but would still see the condition of San Francisco, homeless or otherwise, due to sheer proximity.

I'm in San Francisco proper now, long after I've passed the age where it feels necessary to be here. Would have killed for this at 30 lol.

TLDR: THERE THERE THERE

Sociopathy is a mostly learned behaviour complex. If you are raised in a desperate or violent enviroment and/or without a strong positive parental involvement, you are much more likely to develope sociopathic tendencies. This is known.

Demographically black folk are more likely to belong to an honor culture with no institutions in America. Because the institutions of the dignity culture that subculture exists within historically did not serve them and actively subverted the creation of their own institutions. Honor cultures can exist with relative "lawfullness" if there are cultural or governmental institutions. For example the South operated on an honor culture pre-civil war, not a dignity culture. But they had total institutional control, including the institutions of the black slave's family and the black slave's church.

"Family" counts as an institution and so does church. So black churches and family should be supported by the prevailing dignity culture as a partial solution to the issue at hand. Institutional capture should play a role as well. The obvious goal should be to bring those black folk trappped in an institutionaless honor culture into the fold of a dignity culture supported by strong institutions.

Another observation. Black folk in America have very strong in-group bias compared to white folk in America at the popultion level. Though certain white demographics might buck this trend. So yes, it's racism agianst white folk. Not surprising at all. This is one of the reasons CRT is damaging to progress on racial relations. We must acknowledge black on white racism as racism begets racism.

There are other observations (such as Eastside urban pollution, war on drugs/over policing, racism etc effect on black family structures) that can help account for the increase in sociopathic behaviour in certain black communities. But I feel like I am beating a dead horse.

But to understand why white folk might be disproportionately targeted by black folk's criminality in-group bias should be the starting point. I would add to that white folk make better targets (more money, not part of the community). In regards to rape black men in America grow up inundated by images of beautiful white women. We all know there is some issues in some black communities between the sexes over this. Black women in America grow up feeling bad about themselves because beauty and whiteness are seem synonymous in a majority white culture. (I am a white man married to a black women for a quater of century so I can attest that 1st: this really fucks up black women's self esteem and 2nd: black women are the most beautiful creatures to ever grace this earth ;)

So to end my meanderings I am not even sure I am responding to valid statistics. Perhaps there is no there there in OP's article. I can't be bothered to read it. My entire point is that if there is some there there there is more than enough known, supported thereness in the "left-wing" position to dismiss any HBD arguement or whatever the point of posting this link was. I would find it trivial if it is true that black rapist disproportionately target white women. Lord knows if I was a rapist I too would avoid black women. They'd kick my ass.

Lord knows if I was a rapist I too would avoid black women. They'd kick my ass.

If we're taking this terse top-level post seriously at all, this is an element I think could be explored.

A significant amount of the differences in interracial crime is as you say - due to in-group bias (and, in parallel, out-group bias/racism).

How much of it is the perception that whites are ineffectual and weak? My personal belief is that white folks are softer targets on average. If anything, the past few years of the culture war have made this more pronounced, though the folks who train with firearms and carry at one end of the bell curve exist too.

It may be important for conservatives to talk openly about it because it pits “systemic rape” against “systemic racism”

Who actually talks about “systemic rape”? Maybe I’ve seen it in the context of genocide. I don’t think it has nearly the mindshare of systemic racism, probably because there are fewer sympathetic cases getting labeled “rape.”

"Rape culture" is probably the term he was groping for. Though come to think of it, I haven't heard much of that one in quite some time.

Conservatives don’t talk about systemic anything and don’t want to.

In any case the explanation for this is almost certainly that white women are much more attractive than black women.

The conservative take is that the whole "systemic" framing is a sham.

This is not what we are looking for in a top level post. And is boo outgroupish. One day ban.

Edit after the fact (14 hours later):

I have seen a pattern happen before where a single troll posts a dumb question. We don't moderate it very quickly and the top level posts following the troll post also become low quality. There could be many reasons for that. Maybe the troll is setting the tone, maybe people think 'well if thats allowable, then surely my post is fine too', or maybe they are trying to be helpful and just knock the troll post from the top of the discussion list.

I wanted to short-circuit that whole downward spiral, but I was also about to leave for a few hours, and then would probably need to go to bed afterwards. I saw my options as: act quickly and stop the downward spiral with little explanation. Or leave it until morning and potentially have a lot more cleanup to deal with. Bad posts sometimes create good discussion, but they just as often create bad discussion (I've already had to go back and ban someone else for one of the sub-conversations that popped up from this).

I am always willing to offer explanations of my moderator actions, but because things tend to spiral so fast here, I can't promise I will always offer those explanations in the exact moment of moderation. Expect it within 24 hours if someone asks for it. If I know I don't have the time or energy to explain myself later I just add my report to the pile, rather than moderating the comment.

This top level post had something like 8 reports. I thought it was obvious that it was a bad top level post. It pattern matches a low effort trolling attempt. I am surprised that people were surprised by this moderation.

What the actual fuck

@cjet79's reason was good enough (it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith), but in addition, @bigtittygothgf is a ban evader, so the ban has been made permanent.

No, the reasoning wasn't good enough. If you want people to respond to moderation, you need to give specific feedback. "This is not what we're looking for." is not remotely specific.

Also, since it's perfectly obvious, can you tell us exactly how you were sure that this was a trollish shit-stirrer and not a terse poster asking a question in good faith? Since it's obvious, it should be no trouble, to both cjet79 or you, to say what exactly was obvious about it and how apparently-similar posts that aren't by trollish shit-stirrers are clearly so instead.

Look, you're the mods. You make judgement calls, and our continued presence on this site is evidence that we respect those judgement calls at least enough not to throw our hands up and storm off collectively. But please recognize when you are making those judgement calls and don't just fall back on heavy implications of "It's obvious, and if it's not obvious to you, then clearly you're also a trollish shit-stirrer and probably a ban-evader, so stop asking questions or you might be next." If multiple members of the community are not reacting the way you are to the post and, well, obviously do not find it obvious what is going on, then perhaps it is not actually obvious.

and don't just fall back on heavy implications of "It's obvious, and if it's not obvious to you, then clearly you're also a trollish shit-stirrer and probably a ban-evader, so stop asking questions or you might be next"

This has never been implied. You have been around plenty long enough, and lobbed enough brickbats at the mods yourself, to know better than accuse us of threatening to ban people for questioning or disagreeing with a mod decision.

If multiple members of the community are not reacting the way you are to the post

Quite often a low-effort shit-stirring comment will nonetheless start a decent discussion. That doesn't validate the comment after the fact.

Doesn’t it “validate” it after the fact? It seemingly proves that the comment was useful from an instrumental perspective. I take your use of the word “decent” to suggest quality not quantity.

Doesn’t it “validate” it after the fact?

No.

I take your use of the word “decent” to suggest quality not quantity.

Yes.

Can you explain? Basically, I imagine we want moderation to improve themotte (ie increase quality conversation and decrease non-quality conversation). If a statement increases quality conversations, why are we trying to remove?

I guess one could imagine where it directly increases quality conversation by X and indirectly decreases quality conversation by X+N but that seems like a rather big leap.

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I can only speak for myself, but maybe votes will show that others concur.

I appreciate that the comment fell egregiously short of our standards, both codified in rules and informal but clear in the culture of the place (very low effort and low volume together with provocative phrasing, mainly), and personally don't like having that user around, due to history of what seems to me to be bad faith (and almost invariably low-effort) comments.

I believe that the crux of the problem is one of attitude, that mods do not justify their decisions. You don't need to litigate every call but it'd be less jarring if you cited the specific grievance, like «Too low-effort for a top level, bad track record, 1 day ban» instead of the imperious «not what we are looking for». Rapidly escalating to permaban on a unverifiable accusation of ban evasion (despite the semi-consistent policy, one you have explicitly professed too, of tolerating ban evaders unless they jump on their previous hobby horses) was also a bit much to me.

it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith

You don't have to imitate Hlynka either.

My original comment has been edited to add explanation

I believe that the crux of the problem is one of attitude, that mods do not justify their decisions.

Usually I do. But sometimes we don't have a lot of time to write a long explanation of a fairly straightforward decision, we're just doing some jannying, and when we come back to people angrily demanding why we modded someone expressing tribal CW bait that made them clap, we are not going to satisfy them with any explanation and usually aren't inclined to try.

I also am not going to step in and speak for @cjet79.

Rapidly escalating to permaban on a unverifiable accusation of ban evasion

You are just going to have to accept our judgment on ban evaders, because for reasons that should be obvious, we aren't going to tell you everything that informs our decisions in that regard.

despite the semi-consistent policy, one you have explicitly professed too, of tolerating ban evaders unless they jump on their previous hobby horses

I am not sure where you got that idea. We are not tracking people who were banned on the old sub. If you get banned here and come back with an alt, you're definitely getting banned again.

You don't have to imitate Hlynka either.

Your pattern-matching is broken.

IMO we need something like the BLR back so people can drop interesting things without the expectation they write a whole essay about it to clarify their basic reaction of "I think this is bad.", "I think this is ridiculous.", "I think this is a good thing.", etc. or get the banhammer for booing the outgroup or whatever. I get the ideally that goal of this community is to solicit the essays but I would rather have a place that highlights 70% of recently interesting things with only 75% of them having extended commentary on them versus a place that highlights only 30% of recently interesting things with 95% of them having extended commentary on them, especially since multiple people in the comments will often pick up the extended commentary duty.

Personally, I'd rather hear about interesting new information concerning interracial rape rates (and, yes, not just because I'm racist against blacks, as I'd want to hear about it if it were in the opposite direction too) even if I'm not going to get the fair and balanced perspective on top about how it can be interpreted in some manner that is neutral for the raping demographic, larping as some future historian totally disconnected from present issues. Sure, I wouldn't want every post to be "Science CONFIRMS that BLACKS = RAPE" or it would just turn into heterodox /r/science or /r/politics but I think there needs to be some more intelligent way to balance this out (like multiple different feeds accomplishes).

And yes moderation communication here is also often terrible. But all productive suggestions in that area have been ignored from day one so oh well.

Though it's not nearly as bad as it was at times on Reddit, some mods here are definitely starting to get a bit too active and trigger-happy again (with modding this post probably not necessarily being the worst or even a bad example of it, but still). It seems to me when this place migrated from Reddit, they were very hands-off in its initial phase (which seems to me to be an implicit admission that the capricious and heavily-involved moderation they engaged in at times on Reddit would have strangled the baby in the cradle, which you might think would also make them rethink it in general but maybe not) and things were better than ever. Now they seem to be starting to believe that they have enough of a captive audience that they can begin to return to their old ways though. It's disappointing.

I get that not every post here is great but for the most part some random red-named post popping in occasionally going "No bad little boy don't do that!" (which is only a mildly satirically exaggerated version of how the mods here often chastise people) or throwing out random bans is about as effective as TSA security at the airport. It may occasionally find a knife, but it also misses a lot of knives, throws out a lot of non-knives or things that are maybe knife-shaped but probably not actually that dangerous, and in general annoys people and causes more contention than its benefits can justify. (Of course, this is describing the active behavior. The implicit background threat of moderation is certainly necessary, but that can be achieved while rarely if ever using it.)

But all productive suggestions in that area have been ignored from day one

False. We just don't take up the suggestions that people who want to wage unrestrained culture war would like us to implement.

Now they seem to be starting to believe that they have enough of a captive audience that they can begin to return to their old ways though.

It's fascinating that this is how you model our thinking. Though I'm not sure I believe you sincerely believe this.

throwing out random bans is about as effective as TSA security at the airport

We don't ban randomly, and banning bad actors is quite effective.

I should have saved you guys openly saying that the light hand was there to encourage engagement until you thought you had enough of an audience to keep the place going. How else are people supposed to read that other than adding the obvious "then we can crack down and shape the contributors however we want"?

Alas, dissolving the people and electing another is not a realistic option here

False. We just don't take up the suggestions that people who want to wage unrestrained culture war would like us to implement.

That you immediately imply that any possible suggestion that might have not been taken seriously enough by the mods here would only come from "people who want to wage unrestrained culture war" (the type of veiled insult pretty much all mods here almost always throw out in response to any suggestion that they may not be as open to suggestions as they claim, which I guess you don't seem to realize kind of proves the point), as if there is no possibility that the mods here could have ever dismissed a valid suggestion (I guess you're perfect oracles of what's a good suggestion or not, no mistakes ever?), is a great example of the terrible mod communication I was talking about. Thanks for proving my point with your arrogant and dismissive tone.

Anyway though I'm not going down this rabbit hole since I've seen where it leads: frustration and zero results for those who try to take the whole "moderation here is driven by user sentiment" stuff seriously (as you've proven by starting off the conversation with nothing but passive aggressive sneering).

It's fascinating that this is how you model our thinking. Though I'm not sure I believe you sincerely believe this.

I do sincerely believe it. The difference in moderation immediately going from Reddit to the new site was obvious. Maybe it's not something you implemented consciously but it sure happened.

Just keep in mind that with this new site you still need us more than we need you. An independent enterprise is always on shakier ground.

That you immediately imply that any possible suggestion that might have not been taken seriously enough by the mods here would only come from "people who want to wage unrestrained culture war"

No. I was talking about you and your suggestions. Some people have made valid suggestions, some of which have, in fact, been implemented, some of which were acknowledged as good suggestions but were not implemented for various pragmatic reasons.

Just keep in mind that with this new site you still need us more than we need you.

Nobody needs anything here. This isn't a business, and we're not your employees. We do want to attract and keep members because we all believe in the purpose of the Motte, but that doesn't mean that every individual member gets what they want or that all demands are legitimate.

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Something like the BLR, but maybe 'must give two-sentence summary' + 'mods can, and are expected to, delete bad posts if they have a vibe that they're bad posts even if they technically comply with the rules'?

Sure with the second part applied very rarely if at all. If you're going to have a lower-effort queue, let it be lower-effort.

It depends on the content, though. If the second part was rarely applied, we'd just get the same old BLR, which I mostly found annoying and the mods decided to nuke.

I specifically remember /u/greyuniwave, now suspended, posting a ton of shit in the BLR, usually about covid or conspiracy stuff. Quite a few of his posts were heavily upvoted despite me calling them shit, so my opinion is a minority - but BLR posts often were, and despite that the mods considered it low quality enough generally to be removed, so eh.

Picking a specific BLR thread ... the content just seems uninspiring? Half is awful, whether it's grayuniwave's 10 posts or others (this did get warned, but 45 points?)

[–]cantbeproductive 45 points 1 year ago [link] This is the fifth church burning in Canada since the internationalist and atheistic Canadian press decided to blood libel Catholics with implied claims of mass child murder without real evidence.

But even most of the 'good posts' read like the second page of the NYT. "Matthew Yglesias Responds to Ross Douthat on CRT, the 1619 Project and Public School Curricula."? "On May 24, 2021 the United States State Department imposed a “Level 4: Do not travel” advisory on Japan, the highest level used to advise US travelers against traveling—in effect, a quarantine."? "French lesbians and single women to get IVF rights"? Who cares? (clearly, readers did).

Compare this to an ACX monthly linkspost, or the better parts of HN or /r/ssc, or our toplevel posts, which are just more interesting.

The toplevel effortpost restriction seems to serve as a content restriction preventing the worst of 'random news item that could be replaced with gpt-3 output' or 'JUST IN: corporate racist democrats hate christians.', even when the posters/readers still find the former interesting, and absent explicit content discrimination to balance out the lack of implicit discrimination, the BLR would just suck again.

A BLR without mods removing lots of stuff would still be fine, and I'd still speedskim it, but reluctantly.

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The ruling was fair and righteous but the exection was performed with a dull axe.

But executed nonetheless, and thus fair and just.

Everyone here should be capable of looking at that post and seeing the pattern of "drop steaming statistical turd, ask 'what do you think guys?' while offering no opinions of their own" and targeting the non-existent left membership.

Consensus building! Ban he!

In all seriousness, yeah. The post was probably bad faith, the user ought to be punished for it, and we can still have a decent discussion in the comments. That’s before any ban evasion which may not be obvious.

My original comment has been edited to add explanation

The top-level post was terrible, that's the exact kind of post that drives discussion and newcomers away from this place. It's not like it's insightful at all either.

Mate, we make an effort to ban people for that kind of behavior. If you choose to leave anyways you only contribute to the evaporative cooling effect; we're doing what we can to prevent it.

Is it truly this difficult for you to collapse bad top level posts?

If OP had a few paragraphs summarizing the article and comparing it to the views of the "left-leaning people", it probably wouldn't have been banned. Toplevel posts aren't supposed to be three sentences!

It's obviously a low effort post that doesn't meet the standards for what we're looking for in a top level post.

I agree that mods could do a better job of elaborating on that though, in cases where they do feel the need to intervene.

Same thing “we” have always done.

Rape is still awful. I don’t really care who’s doing it to whom. Kirke does, because he’s running off a very different sort of tribalism.

What’re the actual rates he comes up with? In a perfectly race-blind America, I’d expect 8-9x difference purely due to population sizes. But the error bars are going to be enormous.

Edit: as @benmmurphy observes, naive population numbers aren’t the right figures. In the race-blind, perfectly random hypothetical, we’d expect any category to match the demographics. White people would be 58% of victims and perpetrators alike. Then

12% Bp 58% Wp
12% Bv 1.4% 7.0%
58% Wv 7.0% 34%

In reality, we see something more like

10% Bp <1% Wp
18% Bv 1.8% 4.2%
82% Wv 13% <1%

(Both tables are missing columns, so the percentages are going to be weird.)

The ratio of black-on-white vs. white-on-black rapes is still a poor way to investigate this, though.

i guess it depends on what you mean by rates. if you compare the ratio ([W rapes W] / [W rapes B]) against ([B rapes B] / [B rapes W]) then you would expect the ratios to be out of whack. but if you compare (W rapes B) against (B rapes W) then these should be the same numerically because it takes 2 to tango so the ratios in the final equations are the same but just ordered differently. but i guess if you doing something like dividing (W rapes B) and (B rapes W) by population numbers of the offender (or victim) then you are going to get ratios that are out of whack because the numerators should be the same but will have different denominators. but i'm not sure what the justification for doing this division would be...

A worked example:

Using this population ratio:

A: 3/4

B: 1/4

Where the population is made of of 50% rapists who rape from the population randomly:

A_r: 3/8

B_r: 1/8




A_r_A: 3/8 * 3/4 = 9/32

A_r_B: 3/8 * 1/4 = 3/32


B_r_A: 1/8 * 3/4 = 3/32

B_r_B: 1/8 * 1/4 = 1/32

BrA is 3x more likely than BrB

whereas

ArB is 3x less likely than ArA

but A_r_B == B_r_A

Doesn’t that estimate totals instead of rates?

Take a random victim, ignoring race. Selecting a perpetrator at random, there’s 12% for a black rapist or 58% for white. If the OP is suggesting black men are unusually likely to rape white women, then that’s the figure he’d be comparing against.

God help me, I’ll check the article.

P(BrW) = 23.5/181 = 13%

P(WrB) = 1.65/39 = 4.2%

So the first number is right around what I’d expect from the hypothetical, and the second is really low. This gives his mismatched ratio.

I think you’re right that my 8-9x number was the wrong stat.

yeah. obv there is something not normal between the rate of rapes between the two races but i think a lot of articles from the 'pro-white' perspective exaggerate the discrepancy because if you have a model of perpetrators selecting random victims then blacks are going to naturally commit more rapes against whites per population. however, in the article emil does make the case that victim selection is not random and perpetrators tend to target victims that they have access to and there is a lot of racial segregation so its a lot more complicated. this 'random' model might not be appropriate.

there seems to be two things

  1. blacks are committing more rapes than whites per population and this seems to be undeniable

  2. blacks are targeting whites more than some kind of 'normal' model of rape would predict. this seems much harder to prove mostly because wtf is this normal model of rape. it seems like some random model of rape is inappropriate due to neighbourhood distribution. so how do you come up with some 'normal' model of rape.

  1. I am not sure that this is exactly news.

  2. Some of the discrepancy is because white women make up a greater pct of possible victims. Eg: If a city of 1000 people is 80% white and 20% black, and blacks are twice as likely to commit a crime as whites (say, 10% of whites commit a crime each year, versus 20% of blacks), and victims are chosen at random, then whites will rape 64 white women and 16 black women per year, while blacks will rape 32 whites and 8 blacks per year. Of course, most rapes are intra-racial, but OTOH, if you look at page 4 here, the average white person lives in a neighborhood that is about 10% black, while the average black person lives in a neighborhood that is about 30% white. And, I am pretty sure that the average black person is far more likely to work in a heavily white area than the average white person is to work in a heavily black area. So, while the article says that "For Blacks to attack Whites, they would have to go out of their way to some White (or Asian etc.) area," that seems actually to be more true for whites.

  3. I don't see a source for the data in the linked article, but some of the data looks very odd. For example, the number of white victims of robbery went from 195,000 in 2004 to 267,000 in 2005, while the number of black victims of robbery dropped? Then, from 2006-2007, the number of white robbery victims dropped more than 25%, while the number of black victims rose 10%? There are similarly strange numbers for rape from 2001-2002 and 2005-2006

Edit: I would also note that the linked article cites evidence that "White men particularly don't find Black women attractive" as a partial explanation for the disparity.

I am not sure that this is exactly news.

I think it's an interesting item to have people look at and then see what their response is. The one thing that usually stands out to me is that a lot of the responses don't couch this as an issue to be solved, unlike many other items of a similar nature with differing races. Gun control, for instance, only exists as a solution when you look at shootings as a problem to be solved. But that's not the response these items ever get. It's always in the vein of 'why is this here' or 'the author is racist'. The item itself is seen as a problem to be solved. Not the actual reality that it represents.

2.

I don't understand the point being made. Some of the discrepancy is because of X. OK. How much? And what about the rest of it? Obviously blacks rape a lot. So here we can either do HBD or roundabout justifications for why the white folk are just reaping what they sowed. Or is there a third position?

I don't understand the point being made. Some of the discrepancy is because of X. OK. How much? And what about the rest of it? Obviously blacks rape a lot. So here we can either do HBD or roundabout justifications for why the white folk are just reaping what they sowed. Or is there a third position?

The third position is that neither of those is relevant. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he didn't say "because of my genes" nor "because the banks are reaping what they sow," but rather, "because that's where the money is."

White women are where the pussy be, in this case? That doesn't make sense for explaining the difference in rates.

Please review the section of my comment to which the other commenter was responding.

I mean the obvious explanation is that rapists are at least partly motivated by lust and white women are more attractive than black women to a statistically significant average.

Both of those things seem obvious to me.

Your disposition towards the topic seems very similar to what I described in my earlier post.

I don’t understand what that means.

You could also have the culturalist explanation that a lot of mainstream conservatives still hold to- black culture is just dysfunctional, produces very high rates of criminality and other bad outcomes, and that if black kids were raised by, say, chinamen they'd turn out to be much like chinamen.

That's true in a sense. Though I always found culture explanations to just be environmentalism with its roots cut off. Existing more in the realm of 'how do we solve this immediate problem' rather than being a theory on why the problem exists in the first place.

OT - here’s an African Development blog seems rather new but there’s a few interesting posts. I was struck by this article asking why there are so few African mining billionaires. It does seem like one of the easier businesses to get rich in - establish some amount of political control/monopoly on violence and dig things out of the ground sometimes with foreigners help. The two richest are South African. One white and one black (SA has had a law a mining license needs 26% black ownership maybe that helped)

Another article had me thinking about why Africa was so sparsely populated until recently.

For the most part it uses a traditional development economic arguments. Reading these articles had me thinking a lot about Garrett Jones arguments.

https://kenopalo.substack.com/p/natural-resources-and-economic-underdevelopment

It does seem like one of the easier businesses to get rich in - establish some amount of political control/monopoly on violence and dig things out of the ground sometimes with foreigners help

The 'digging things out of the ground' part is highly technically complex. You also need to purchase and maintain all the expensive equipment.

It's really quite daunting.

Economically speaking you can hire people for that. It’s not like inventing a new thing. The Saudis when they went from Western taking the money still used western for a while to do the drilling.

It depends on why the discrepancy exists. If it’s genetic, then you can only contain the damage by limiting opportunities to rape (I don’t buy this as the best theory). If it’s poverty, fix the poverty. If it’s culture, change the culture.

My suspicion is that we’re looking at a cultural difference in which white men are taught to seek long term mutual supportive relationships with women. The goal is at least a companion if not a marriage. The goal for black men seems to be bedding a woman, or preferably multiple with no intention of forming a long term relationship at all. If this is the cause, the solution it to change the culture to being more like the white men in seeking out long term mutual relationships, rather than simply notching the bed-posts. You can do this (at least in a thought experiment) by forbidding arts and media from celebrating easy sex, among other cultural bad habits. You can also purposefully inject more useful memes into the culture to promote marriage, sobriety, and industriousness. I think the Christian sect that Kanye is in is a sort of answer. Promote the idea of keeping the law as a practice, which naturally includes not raping people, working hard, being a family man, being sober, and so on.

Love your username.

Information about racial disparities in crime is only useful if you're trying to combat the claim that racial disparities in incarceration is due to systemic racism. For that purpose, this information isn't useless, but it doesn't do anything that the broader "13/52" stat doesn't already do.

I'm pretty far left, but the author doesn't really give much of a reason to think much of anything. He opens with a weakman, demolishes it, and then proceeds to loosely related speculation. In particular, he doesn't do anything to establish that rape behaves differently than other violent interpersonal crimes. Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board, a fact that is much more reliably established using better reported, less heterogeneous types of crime.

No, normie lefties seem to legitimately believe that whites victimize blacks at much higher rates than vice versa and that normie blacks live in fear of being victimized by whites.

That this belief is stupid and obviously wrong doesn't stop them from holding it.

Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board

I don't think this is true. Try talking to some normie lefties. They'll tell you that crime stats are biased and you're racist for even considering blacks might be more violent.

I don't think this is true. Try talking to some normie lefties. They'll tell you that crime stats are biased and you're racist for even considering blacks might be more violent.

This, I think, is where the trail veers into the weeds of expressed belief vs reasonable knowledge vs patterns of action and so forth. I think I've encountered the view you reference, as a genuine belief in every sense, in the wild, but AFAICT it's uncommon in my neck of the woods. I have yet to see the extreme version @hydroacetylene (isn't that just ethane?) claims, but presumably it occurs. More often people will express that point for signalling purposes when advantageous, only when they are not in the business of making factual predictions about the world.

In reality it's hard to know for sure, though. If you start spouting racial crime stats at people then you look like a racist weirdo. People will fight you even when they know you're right.

Can't find it on mobile, but 2020 was the first year that white liberals started claiming that blacks are less violent than whites on surveys. It was a sharp, sudden drop when the command went out.

Discussions are increasingly impossible due to leak-proof echo chambers destroying any common factual common ground.

In the followup tweet showing laziness stereotypes, you can literally see the 2013 great awokening dive starting.

It was a sharp, sudden drop when the command went out.

If you are going to make a claim as partisan and inflammatory as "white liberals all simultaneously began believing a counterfactual thing on command," you are going to need to do better than "I saw it somewhere but can't find it on mobile."

https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1565810798236155904

I can never remember if Zach is berg, ing, stein, or if I'm entirely mixing his last name up with my accountant.

Setting aside any problems with study design…I was kind of expecting more for a “sharp, sudden drop.” Is the 1990-95 gap also an example of the “command” going out?

A 4 year drop almost as great as the one that previously took 24 years is an example of "going woke slowly, then all at once," yes.

Ah, I mixed it up with the 1990-2020 intelligence chart further down.

More comments

Is that the same Emil Kirkegaard as this Emil Kirkegaard?

Who is safe from Pakistani groomer gangs?

Me! I’m pretty sure I’m safe from Pakistanis, groomers, and gangs. Even all at once.

The question is, what do we do with this information?

i dunno/trick someone who you hate to post it on social media so they get banned

What do we do? We marvel at the fact that Emil's up on Twitter and his website is not given the Kiwifarms treatment.

Interracial rape is understandably a great cause for flame war in the US, and also not something I care about. My model is mainly that black people are all-around more impulsive, more criminal, more violent and more tribal; the specific distribution of the impact of those differences is downstream of contingent factors like relative population densities, laws, housing, policing etc.

That said, @Gdanning's analysis (Kirkegaard's sources discuss the question too) reminds me of another politically incorrect and statistically literate author, La Griffe du Lion, whose website is even more of a marvelous fossil. He has developed a model of ghettoization/white flight based on selective victimization of non-blacks by blacks. It seems to comport with anecdotal reports like that man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas and with the graph in Emil's piece.

Anyway, Crime in the Hood, November 1999:

… However, as a neighborhood turns black, this factor could increase black-on-white violence at most by a factor of 3, and then only when a neighborhood is virtually all black. The observed level of white victimization is much too high to blame on general tendencies of blacks to be violent. A more important reason is simply that blacks prefer white victims.

The best and most complete evidence comes from the Justice Department. Its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) canvasses a representative sample of about 80,000 Americans, from roughly 43,000 households. From this survey, a picture of crime is painted by its victims. The last full report of the NCVS was issued in 1994. From it we learn that blacks committed 1,600,951 violent crimes against whites. In the same year, whites committed 165,345 such offenses against blacks. Despite being only 13 percent of the population, blacks committed more than 90 percent of the violent interracial crime. Less than 15 percent of these had robbery as a motive. The rest were assaults and rapes.

The asymmetry of interracial crime goes still deeper. More than half the violence committed by blacks is directed against whites, 57 percent in 1994. Less than 3 percent of the violence committed by whites is directed against blacks. Population and NCVS statistics reveal that in 1994 a black was 64 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. In the city, the races live mostly apart from one another, so that the most convenient victims of thugs are others of the same race. Only a hunter's mentality could account for the data. Given a choice, a black thug will select a white victim. Ironically, so will a white thug.

[…]    Equation (4) gives the probability that John will be victimized by a white in a given year. It shows that to a high degree of approximation, the risk John faces from whites is not only independent of neighborhood size, but also neighborhood composition. The probability that John is attacked by whites in a given year is the same no matter where he lives. It is simply equal to the per capita number of violent incidents perpetrated by whites in a year. We tested this approximation, setting N = 1000 and pW = 0.0279, the value obtained from the NCVS. Over most of the range of racial composition, the approximation, Φ_W_ = pW = 0.0279 agrees within 2 figures with the accurate expression (3) as seen in the table below.

[…] We have modeled violent victimization of whites in a racially mixed neighborhood. Our model is based on data collected by the Justice Department and reported in the NCVS. It paints a bleak picture for whites. As a neighborhood turns black, violent victimization of its white residents begins immediately. At first the risk is small, not much different from its previous all-white level. However, by the time the neighborhood reaches the half-black point, every white family of four has better than a one in three chance of being victimized within a year. Two factors account for black-on-white violence. 1) Blacks are 3 times more likely to commit violent crime than whites, and 2) black thugs prefer white victims, selecting them 64 times more than white thugs choose black victims. Most of the risk faced by whites, results from the predilection of black thugs to prey upon whites. As a neighborhood becomes overwhelmingly black, the risk curve for whites rises to ominous heights. In the last stages of transformation, the likelihood of a white being victimized within a year becomes a virtual certainty.

The measure of «systemic» power that progressives like to talk about – systemic racism, patriarchy, etc. – is an ability to make outcomes that hurt your outgroup look like they follow from natural, inevitable processes, long in motion through no living person's fault. Some things are genuinely this way; others are only made to assume this form. For example, by making unwarranted promises of miracle solutions, and suppressing public awareness of and interest in more feasible alternative routes for so long that they become technically obsolete or politically unfeasible.

As you can note, this article is over 23 years old. People not yet born then have formed strong political opinions. We haven't progressed even on talking points. So I don't think there's much to «do» about it all. Like Yevgeny Ponasenkov said 8 years ago: «If you couldn't do it in a 1000 years, what are 20 more to you? Look, Russia can develop normally and it's not about 20 or a 1000 years, a lot can be done in a single year, if there's a honest admission that we were making mistakes here and there, and now will follow another path. Okay? Only – not «our special path», in the ditch, with empty shops and towards 1937. There exists the history of Civilization, everything there has been tried, conclusions proven, we are buying everything from there now – cars, phones, clothing, food… and all mistakes are also on display there, you only have to not replicate them. That's all. So we need to admit: yes, we were mistaken, no, we will no longer search for our special path that doesn't exist, we're going forward, in the correct, Western, so to speak, direction». You know what Western direction we took.

None of this was exactly unanticipated before La Griffe either. Black impulsivity, criminality and tribalism are factors that have been known for centuries; the intuitive solution is: high priors for black proclivity for antisocial behavior, therefore unequal treatment, either by segregation (cheap, only protects whites) or in the manner of policing (medium, somewhat protects blacks) and state-mandated upbringing (very hard, actually helps them).

But after a few generations grow up on a steady diet of mocking the very premise of the problem, it doesn't matter what facts you show them: their thought trajectories cannot exit the basin where this problem can be divorced from white people problems and where solutions which do not amount to doubling down on total society-spanning surveillance exist. «All rape should be investigated and the culprit found», indeed. We have a discount on CCTV systems with integrated gait recognition!

I read this twice. I have pretty good reading comprehension skills. You have tested those skills. Can you summerize your comment in plain and non-flowery language what you feel about about the artical OP posted? I'm sure if you summed it up in a few sentences it would help us all avoid a misunderstanding.

My point, if you will, is that the intellectual core of the left-wing political project, such as there is, has been well aware of the evidence for extreme black criminality (both in general and in this specific white-targeting sense) for many generations, probably 2+ centuries, and abundantly well aware in the last few decades. That making unwarrantable promises about possible rectification of the issue, moving from desegregation to stigmatising white flight to forced integration, suppressing evidence of the futility of attempts to rectify the issue, censoring and harassing people who propose workable solutions, encouraging and valorizing antisocial blacks, and other leftist stratagems have been at least partially rational. (Partially, because I assume that the overwhelming majority of rank and file have been sincerely deceived people, emotionally manipulated useful idiots and just conformists).

That the outcome of this approach is a society where neither workable solutions nor even crude measures like a return to segregation are politically possible, because the doctrine of equal treatment has been burned into people's minds, but the problem exists and prompts people to support genuine policy preferences of that intellectual core that have been unchanged at least since H.G. Wells and Stalin sympathizers, namely: increase of the power of the centralized state, more political propaganda in state-mandated education, prohibition of guns, blanket surveillance, and other steps towards disempowering laymen in favor of a political priesthood that determines the angle of propaganda and otherwise guides state efforts.

Likewise for other aspects of the racial issue and superficial leftist egalitarianism.

Is that plain enough?

And yet, throughout those years, the black homicide offending rate (used here as a proxy for extreme criminality - rape rates are notoriously hard to define since they depend not only on how often the crime is committed but also on how often it is reported, since it is so dependent on actually being reported) has gone down, indeed gone down considerably.

Clearly something must have happened, whether that is a result of left-wing policies, right-wing policies (but if it's the result of successful right-wing policies, it would be evidence that leftist hegemony in society is not quite as firm as claimed), or things like potential offenders just staying inside to smoke weed and play violent computer games (but even then the legality of weed and comparative lack of regulation for violent games have been policy issues in themselves). The issue is being partially rectified, and that's what counts, no? It still is rather more important whether people are actually getting murdered or not than what the actual ethnic ratios of the murderers are.

I thought murders have gone down across the board until recently? I thought decreased exposure to lead leads to decreases in putting lead in a 3P.

right-wing policies (but if it's the result of successful right-wing policies, it would be evidence that leftist hegemony in society is not quite as firm as claimed), or

"Imprisoned criminals are less likely to murder, than if they were allowed to be free." is a possible explanation, which requires policies (prisons still existing) supported, until recently, by all but the most radical leftists. It certainly doesn't required non-leftists to hold any significant power, as long as centre-left still believes in at least temporarily separating rapists, murderers, and thieves from normal people.

Sure, almost everyone supports imprisoning criminals, but there's still a sliding scale as to how readily a society will imprison people, how long the sentences are etc. and those are generally left-right issues.

or things like potential offenders just staying inside to smoke weed and play violent computer games

You know that part of the reason is them staying, but not exactly home. Sailer likes to return to this point. His other favorite example of things that work – in the exact period in question –is the tough-on-crime New York city policing. And yes, sure: this goes to show that liberal hegemony is not total.

On the other hand, such «triumphs» of forcefully managed diversity only reinforce the impression which I claim is the goal: that only an overbearing police state can solve the problem of black crime. NYPD is an army unto itself. What was that Madison's quote about standing armies?

It still is rather more important whether people are actually getting murdered or not than what the actual ethnic ratios of the murderers are.

Not sure. Technically people are always getting murdered so you mean «less often», but sure, lower murder rate is desirable. On the other hand, murder (and other sorts of violent crime such as rape) is, while terminally bad, already a very unlikely risk in the lives of most people (except black men of prime age, I guess), far below suicide and health problems. So I'd say it's up for debate whether the racially motivated gaslighting of the overwhelming majority is rather less important than the exact size of the very small minority that does get murdered. People fear death and violence, fear appearing to support murderism, and can be blackmailed into approving any absurdity, tolerating any indignity if it seems to mean less death and violence. There should be some resistance to this exploit.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd rather live in a place with 4-5ish murders per 100k but fewer cops and CCTVs than in London or Moscow or Chennai or NYC. And less gaslighting, please.

I imagine many black people would, if educated to think about this seriously, prefer a different point on the Pareto frontier – either an even laxer one, or one radically less liberal. I think both me and them should be free to explore those options, but not at the expense of others who don't subscribe to our philosophies.

Wait, that spike in the white homicide graph in 2001... It can't be that they threw 9/11 under "homicides by whites," surely?

Rates are now back up to 90s levels, although not yet quite as bad as the peak of the "crack wars" that saw the highest murder rates in US history. Wikipedia for some reason hasn't chosen to update its graphs for 6 years to show this.

It seems like an issue can go from "partially rectified" to "spiralling out of control" in a matter of months, raising the concern that whatever policies caused the drop were just papering over an unsolved problem.

Probably not. Though I guess the order of magnitude is about right for such a trick.

Wait, that spike in the white homicide graph in 2001... It can't be that they threw 9/11 under "homicides by whites," surely?

Why wouldn't they? It was, indeed, homicide, and it was, as a matter of fact, performed by people whom the official government racial classification scheme classifies as whites. Sure, this is a huge outlier, but I don't see why should this require us to treat it specially.

Si

Not to disparage your comprehension skills, but the points he's making are fairly simple:

Even if the research is spot on, what can be done?

This is not new, here's a study from 1994 that has similarly ugly conclusions, but there is no will to do anything about it.

The conclusions of the research were not unanticipated. In fact the motives behind the results have been understood for centuries.

Power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that hurt people you don't like look like they occur naturally.

To solve the problem people need to admit they were wrong. They would rather keep searching for a solution that doesn't exist, rather than admit that the research shows what they think is unfavorable (in this case, black criminals prey on whites, and this has a direct correlation with white flight).

You can come up with all the facts you want, but there is no way around the problem that people understand the will to power.

You missed the point of my comment. I was well aware of what they were saying. I wanted them to say it plainly so they couldn't hide what they really felt behind flowery, obtuse pseudo intellectual languge.

Then say that?

Not to disparage your reading comprehension but that should have been obvious by the words I used. I was just being diplomatic and charitable as peer the forum's culture and rules.

  • -13

My mistake. I assumed you were making a request in good faith. I won't make that mistake again.

One of the rules here is to speak in plain language. OP was using obtuse languge to say something they were afraid to say in plain language. In plain language I asked them to clarify. My motivations for doing that are irrelevant. It is the socratic method. Something promoted on this forum all the time. It is part of civil discourse and completely inline with this forum's culture. You might as well criticize me for asking a question that you have no good answer to...which is exactly what you are doing.

This is hilarious; the entire apparent point of your comment chain was to get someone else to speak plainly. But for you it's okay to be arch and clever and whatever.

To wit: they have now responded. If I were to be uncharitable thier more plain language version sounds more like mien kamph than rationalist. Peel back another layer and we might get there. But I am being charitable. They are right that "straw folk" ...i mean "woke folk" ignore statistics and don't seem to have anwers. But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order. That's what I wanted them to more articulately express so no one can misunderstand.

  • -12

This subthread was a shitshow, and you racked up an impressive number of reports.

You need to speak plainly, and avoid making inflammatory accusations with little evidence.

5 day ban

Thanks for providing an example. Since you have been molded by those efforts I describe, your conclusion is to pattern-match me to Hitler while handwaving away the mendacity of egalitarians like mere good-natured statistical ignorance and chortling about strawmen – rather than pattern-match their conspicuous denial of harm their policies cause to a hostile conspiracy, and dismiss alarms going off at me.

It's funny that you contrast the «white nationalist» reading to a «rationalist» one. Rationalists deal in hypotheses and adjustment of priors. Do you think you are being a better rationalist?

People's beliefs are determined by attractors built over years of indoctrination, so the word vomit they spew is largely post hoc rationalization for what they already can't not believe. Like I say:

But after a few generations grow up on a steady diet of mocking the very premise of the problem, it doesn't matter what facts you show them: their thought trajectories cannot exit the basin where this problem can be divorced from white people problems …

Like you say:

They are right that "straw folk" ...i mean "woke folk" ignore statistics and don't seem to have anwers. But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order.

Oooh, you caught me. It's right there. We can't have that, can we? I mean, repelling Section 8 or, G-d forbid, legalizing nonviolent race-exclusionary communities that you don't have to be rich or nonwhite to get into would be the worst, right right? Tearing that down in South Africa is a great success story, correct? Some fucking whiteys are still resisting, but it's clearly not acceptable and will be made unsustainable.

Peel back another layer and we might get there.

I appreciate the self-confidence.

But I am being charitable.

That too, but you know, I can take a bit more beating. Be my guest.

Oh this is fun! I've been banned from reddit so many times I finally gave up three years ago. Everytime for calling out the "woke left". Do you even know what they are? I can educate you as a "leftwinger" and we can circle jerk about what cucks they are and that sounds hot. But I am suspecious that you might think I am gay.

My self confidence about your trajectory is confirmed by this very comment. Socratic method works!

I really don't need to say anything. You have said what I wanted you to say.

  • -18

I think you misunderstand the «Socratic method», but you're welcome to keep going. (BTW, is the typo in your flair intentional?)

OP was using obtuse languge to say something they were afraid to say in plain language. In plain language I asked them to clarify.

Your success at this would be logically inconsistent with the premise of my being afraid to speak plainly. Now, how about you speak plainly, without bald assertions in the style of

sounds more like mien kamph than rationalist

But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order. That's what I wanted them to more articulately express so no one can misunderstand.

and self-congratulatory vague bullshit like

My self confidence about your trajectory is confirmed by this very comment.

I really don't need to say anything. You have said what I wanted you to say.

I was well aware of what they were saying. I wanted them to say it plainly so they couldn't hide what they really felt behind flowery, obtuse pseudo intellectual languge.

You appeal to forum rules and culture. There's a norm here against darkly hinting and insinuating, and also against building consensus. If you believe your conclusions are so self-evident that none could misunderstand, you clearly can afford to spell them out while you're at it. Running victory laps high on your own supply is pretty cringe.

Lol. I'm 8 deep. All I keep saying is that you can keep talking. I encourage you to keep talking. My goal is to hear you talk. I like talking to you. I want to hear you. You are seen and heard. This is me speaking plainly. I want to hear you. But you are not so good at being heard.

What do you think are my motives? Do you believe I have an agenda? By what mechanism are black folk different from white folk such that the only solution is segregation or some such?

You are loved.

  • -14
More comments

in the manner of policing (medium, somewhat protects blacks) and state-mandated upbringing (very hard, actually helps them).

Also

increase of the power of the centralized state, more political propaganda in state-mandated education, prohibition of guns, blanket surveillance, and other steps towards disempowering laymen in favor of a political priesthood that determines the angle of propaganda and otherwise guides state efforts.

theyarethesamepicture.jpeg

You are against the latter because it's attacking the civil liberties of the White majority in the name of curtailing the threat posed by the Black minority. How is it different from attacking the civil liberties of the non-criminal majority of Blacks in the name of curtailing the thread posed by the criminal minority?

First, I reject the symmetry. Whites have built that country; whites and non-blacks overwhelmingly maintain it. Whites as living heirs to this culture do have a priority in deciding its rules, and are entitled to demand assimilation from those who want equal treatment; you do not get to demand equal liberty if you want to belong to an assabiyah which does not value that liberty and does not contribute to its preservation. Oranians have found that few are interested to join on those terms

Prospective residents are vetted and must have no criminal record.

"It's like going into a marriage," said Strydom, a 28-year-old born in the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal.

Would-be residents must "share the values and subscribe" to the town's goals, he said, insisting Orania was not "racist" or a "desperate grasp back to apartheid".

Boshoff said there was nothing stopping any non-white Afrikaners from applying -- only no-one ever did.

"We haven't found anybody," he said.

(This reminds me: in Stephenson's Diamond Age, a white thug contemplated joining a Boer neo-tribe but decided against it).

Second, they are indeed the same picture, in that something always restricts our liberties and modifies our behavior. Questions are: who, whom, how much and to what end. Right now, the behavior of both whites and blacks is being modified by disparately acting stimuli like this one, which encourage guilt, self-hatred and undue tolerance in whites and unmerited indignation and racial pride in blacks. The broader structure does little to buck those trends. This begets problems, which call for solutions of the type that I would like to have abandoned.

If instead blacks were vigorously (I cannot know the optimal degree of that) pressed into church-going and other easy forms of prosocial networking, provided with schools that focus on rote learning and unambiguous discipline, systemically shamed for dysfunctional family structures and criminality, dissuaded from what our friend calls «honor culture», denied opportunities to build antisocial status hierarchies and endow them with externally validated prestige and capital, etc., or even just not encouraged to be delusional, there would be less of a problem. I believe that a separate Black America would have had a decent chance to independently arrive at this strategy and eventually become more successful (assuming continued economic interaction with the US) than the current black population of the US. This would entail some sacrifice on part of those prosocial blacks who want to have it all, white standards of living and black culture and no police state. Such is life: something has to give, in this case the «black culture» has to develop adaptations to co-existence with non-blacks, at the very least being willing to meet them halfway.

It is hard or utterly impossible to implement within the same non-segregated society, especially a society that does not recognize the root of the problem.

anecdotal reports like that man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas

What possesses a man to do this? What drives a clean-cut, techno-optimist, science-tinkering Mormon with three kids to deal with arsonists (and arsonists). To be held at gunpoint. To interact continuously with thieves (and thieves, and intruders, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and…I could go on), derelicts (and, and, and, …). To be assaulted by a zoning bureaucrat. To drive around a recently-purchased 220k square foot abandoned warehouse late at night. To livestream council sessions passionately deriding slow-moving approvals to apathetic council members, and to do it again, and yet to have no ready, coherent answer to the objection of building and zoning laws. To live in a house with contaminated water. And yet, despite all of this, to continue to persevere.

What possesses a man to do this?

Mental illness. We don't call it possession anymore. We often don't call it a mental illness either these days. Neurodivergence.

What kind of left-wing person do you think comes here and would argue something other than "all rape should be investigated and the culprit found"?

It's a question about sanewashing, I guess. You see a lot of that here from people explaining away extremist positions from people on their side.

99% of any sanewashing going on is going to be for the right in this forum. The natural demographics skew that way.

The natural demographics may work that way, but the ground-level issues being discussed work overwhelmingly the other way. Progressive ideology generates most of the controversies we discuss here, and often does so in ways that are quite challenging to effectively defend. Sanewashing is one of the more effective techniques for defending the indefensible, so if one side's positions are generally less defensible, you'll see more sanewashing from them.

I think you are missing the flow of argumentation that drives lefties into anti-white corners.

Why do blacks rape a lot? Because of poverty. Why are blacks poor? Because whitey made them that way.

It's not that anyone goes out there and says 'whitey gets raped and that's good'. Or at least not any notable person since George Jackson, though there are probably a lot who share his black activist sentiments chirping on twitter right now. It's more that this is an ugly truth derived as a consequence of lefty priors.

It's very similar to 2nd Amendment arguments that flare up when the topic of mass shootings pops up. I don't think any gun control advocate would rest their case against a 2nd Amendment advocate who says that 'all mass shootings should be investigated and the culprit found'. That's not really a relevant answer. The relevant answer would be to a question of why people should settle for this as a status quo. How many mass shootings do we need before we do something about guns? How many white victims of black crime to do we need before we do something about blacks?

How many white victims of black crime to do we need before we do something about blacks?

I reject the framing. The focus on race can be useful when talking about why people commit crime, and perhaps even where you do your policing, but the fundamental goal is to go after all criminals. The demographics of crime should not alter the goal. I think this is somewhat of the foundation for how a leftist would respond, but I acknowledge that they're fully aware of the politics surrounding talking about disparity in black-on-white vs. white-on-black crime.

What kind of left-wing person do you think comes here

TBF you could leave the question there.

Curious, open-minded, and confident?

What are you driving at? Do you want to imply most left-wingers aren't this way?

see how the conversation would go towards "actually maybe we shouldn't investigate too much".

But the fact that we don't see that suggests that leftists aren't interested in that. The argument about disparate impact of lower standards in Title 9 has penetrated discourse for a while now, I even saw it years ago in a left-wing dominated place.

I mean, there IS a strain of leftist who advocates for a form of 'racial justice' that allows oppressed groups more leniency for criminal acts, particularly when it is only damage to property involved.

There's also a much more common strain that blames criminality on poverty and inter-generational trauma and thus advocates for an approach that addresses socioeconomic inequality rather than harshly punishing offenders.

I think the question is would the leftist acknowledge the racial disparity, what would they attribute it to, and how would they suggest is should be addressed? Because investigating all rapes would, after all, end up with a racially disparate outcome in incarceration.

What would this discussion achieve? I dunno.

There's also a much more common strain that blames criminality on poverty and inter-generational trauma and thus advocates for an approach that addresses socioeconomic inequality rather than harshly punishing offenders.

Is there any way to know how common this strain is?

To within some degree of uncertainty.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/

I wouldn't expect to see it here, but advocacy for black men raping white women is not a completely foreign concept in the left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Cleaver

Soul on Ice (1968)

"In the most controversial part of the book, Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto "for practice" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired, motivated by a genuine conviction that the rape of white women was "an insurrectionary act".[4] When he began writing Soul on Ice, he unequivocally renounced rape and all his previous reasoning about it.[1][2]"

And before we dismiss this as the ravings of a criminal psychopath (which Clever most assuredly was), "Soul on Ice" was on the bookshelf of my not-particularly-radical Midwestern parents. You can find lesson plans online for teaching it, presumably to high school kids.

Except your own excerpt says he renounced rape entirely. If I trust your excerpt, it actually sounds like okay - the author is explaining his own beliefs at the time, not continuing to believe those going forward. I would be leery about a child having to read it, but it's not literal advocacy for rape any more than an ex-fascist's description of why they believed in fascism once is advocacy for fascism.

Could a white supremacist who was a serial rapist of black women be rehabilitated in the public eye? Would his books be studied in school? No, of course not. Why not? Because the left, which controls the educational apparatus, believes that black on white crime is less serious than the converse.

But this has no bearing on whether reasonable people could come together and agree upon the book's inclusion in school plans.

Remove the object-level details, and you're left with the question "If a criminal publishes media that explains why they thought their crime was acceptable at the time, but currently does not avow that reasoning, is there something wrong with teaching kids the media?" I suspect the answer is not a unanimous "yes", and questions of the left and right wouldn't even enter the discussion.

"Could a white supremacist who was a serial rapist of black women be rehabilitated in the public eye"

I'm pretty sure that despite the best efforts of my fellow wokists, we still cover Thomas Jefferson in school fairly positively.

There's a conundrum with that one on the left, I believe.

Is MLK still left-coded at this point? I suppose it's a conflict between the MLK kinds and the newer versions.

Things like civil rights laws are based on the Constitution, and the idea of 'democracy'. They still call themselves 'Democrats'.

It would be somewhat awkward to acknowledge that all of the Founding fathers that wrote the Constitution -that all of the current corpus of laws used to bash right-wingers with are based on- were white supremacists.

The United States of America were founded on an explicit, European and Christian nationalist basis.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103, enacted March 26, 1790) was a law of the United States Congress that set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization. The law limited naturalization to "free White person(s) ... of good character", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, enslaved people, free black people, and later Asians, although free black people were allowed citizenship at the state level in many states. The courts also associated whiteness with Christianity and thus excluded Muslim immigrants from citizenship until the decision Ex Parte Mohriez recognized citizenship for a Saudi Muslim man in 1944.

I'm sure the left will finally cut that umbilical cord at some point, but it's still somewhat awkward for now.

Why should anybody even bother tolerating all of these other people that the left want us to tolerate, if we do away with the historic mythical essence of the country, which is already pretty hollowed out? The 2nd Amendment doesn't need to be written on a piece of paper to have a value, after all

You specifically presented this as "advocacy for black men raping white women", though, when it is - within context - the exact opposite of that.

Yes, you are right. It's more nuanced. It's more like

"Criminal rapes white women for leftist reasons".

"Criminal admits he was wrong"

"Criminal is celebrated by other leftists for his amazing personal journey".

Clearly, mainstream leftists were not advocating for rape here. But they are also clearly apologizing for it if the demographics fit the right profile. Overall, second most disturbing book I found on my parent's bookshelf after "Naked Lunch".

The only thing I ever "did" with the information from interracial crime statistics was have the ratios for rape and murder permanently seared into my brain. They're pretty effective blockers against taking BLM slogans as anything other than pathetic mockeries of reality.

If reciting 13/52 didn't have whatever effect you're shooting for, going for something that's harder to prove with a smaller disparity certainly isn't going to, particularly when Kirkegaard is the guy doing the legwork for it.

Technically this is a different argument than 13/52, given that the vast majority of the 52 is other 13s. This is a much older argument - that black men are disproportionately aggressive towards non-blacks, and thus that non-blacks should stereotypically fear blacks more than other races just because of their skin tone (perhaps in conjunction with other class markers).

I would expect that this argument would be significantly less likely to gain traction among leftists than 13/52, because it pattern-matches more directly to cartoon-evil-stereotype KKK racism, and thus is more-easily cut-off as beyond the pale, regardless of whatever evidence may be deployed in service of it.


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