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Then why do white Americans also suffer worse effects with out of wedlock births?
Could there be something different about that shared social environment in Iceland that impacts the outcomes of children?
Aha, but there are plenty of black people who don't behave in anti-social ways, so the same logic holds there, right?
They are, my understanding is that children in single-parent households do in fact suffer worse childhood outcomes, even in Iceland.
What gene controls freedom?
Even if you don't buy the Flynn effect, do you deny that African-Americans have a greater percentage of European ancestry than Africans? Do you deny that they perform better on IQ tests?
Oh, interesting. In what sense is the United States in the 1960s and 1970s or the 2020s a more permissive environment than Africa today? Is the law enforcement here less competent? Or is it that the United States has more legal freedoms and the people who you say have an antisocial disposition are careful Constitutional scholars who have figured out how to game the system? Or what?
For similar reasons AA's do, one could imagine. It's a practice that is more common among lower impulse lower IQ people in America. With the population size of the US you see the broad behavioral trends of lower quality people. But that's just us observing their behavior and expressions. Seeing they have bad outcomes and then erroneously assigning the blame to their actions is where we go wrong.
I mean, there are bad behaviors that have bad outcomes. Like gambling with slot machines. Your intelligence wont save you after you put your money into the machine. But there's a clear mechanism there. The RTP is 97%. There's no such mechanism in having children out of wedlock.
To that extent I can't possibly imagine what would influence the shared social environment of Icelanders except the Icelanders themselves. The country is primarily a cold inhospitable mossy wasteland. The population is largely atheist, is extremely sexually promiscuous, drinks a lot, does a lot of drugs, gambles a lot, has a lot of obesity. But they have a high IQ along with other positive traits and somehow manage to make one of the most peaceful places on earth. None of the classic American conservative boogeymen work when trying to explain this. Just like lefty theories fail to explain how the poorest country in the world, and a former colony, managed to become one of the most prosperous places on earth in less than a century.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, yeah, there are plenty of high impulse control high intelligence black people. Like Charles Murray infamously proposed, all the race gaps in America seem to vanish when you control for things like IQ.
Yes, but what portion of the blame rests with low quality people being more likely to make poor decisions that lead to single parenthood, and what portion of the poor outcomes of the child are simply a result of the child having inherited their parents low quality. Sure, it would be better for the child in the short term to have a better home environment. But the research on home environment and IQ, for instance, shows that there are no IQ gains into adulthood. So if the kid finds themselves in the wrong circumstance in adulthood, their inherited low quality traits are liable to make themselves known. Adoption studies also show this very clearly as well with regards to criminality.
I don't understand this.
AA's have greater percent European ancestry and have higher IQ's on average, as far as I can gleam, than many sub-Saharan populations. What's the relevance of Africans?
I'm not sure I understand this. Many sub-Saharan nations can't even qualify for a comparison.
In the same way poverty can prevent obesity, many less prosperous populations were guarded from their own self destructive tendencies. As an example, Pacific Islanders didn't have a problem with highly processed food products until they were presented with the option of buying them. Then it turns into an obesity epidemic. Aboriginal Australians didn't have a problem with huffing gas until they could, and so on. So the freedom to make a bad decision in a more prosperous society harms low quality people in a way that the constrictions of scarcity did not.
Interesting. What's the name for the shared social environment created by a group of people?
I don't believe this is correct, my understanding is that studies tend to show that home environmental impacts are modest, not nonexistent.
Then what's the point of HBD? If African-American violence is substantially different from people of similar ancestry, then why am I supposed to think that ancestry is important at all? If you can't compare two groups of related people simply because they are in different environments then it sounds like the environment is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
We started this conversation with you condemning what you termed the conservative explanation that "welfare state and ghetto culture" were responsible for high African American criminality. But now with just a little pressing, you're resorting to essentially the same explanation: that access to expanded resources and fewer constraints led to a dramatic rise in African-American crime. This is just a slightly rephrased version of a boomer American conservative rant about the welfare state and soft-on-crime prosecutors. You might object that your idea that "prosperity leads to crime" is mechanically different than "dependency via the welfare state leads to crime" theory our hypothetical pal would espouse, but you would also oppose giving them welfare, since that could increase their latitude of action.
Your criticism is that our boomer friend doesn't understand HBD. But you agree with him that welfare policies make the situation worse (and probably you agree with him on his criticisms of lax law enforcement, I would guess). And neither you nor our hypothetical boomer conservative can do anything about their ancestry. He might be able to do something about the welfare state and law enforcement policies: those are actual levers the American state has control over. So while you criticize his lack of understanding of The Bell Curve (which, I think, is actually something many, perhaps most intellectual conservatives are familiar with) he's actually trying to push policies that might make a difference on the ground in real life. And to the degree that those policies can make a difference one way or the other, it seems to me that you think his understanding of the problem is largely correct.
I don't know. Is calling it the shared environment created by a group of people not sufficient? Or are you looking for a specific word for an a-ha! moment? Id prefer if you got to the point.
Is it substantially different? It seems to me like black criminality is a thing in every western culture where a sizeable enough bloc of blacks live.
The problem with making a comparison between countries that I was alluding to is that they can be too different. Like, they don't accurately record crime at the same rate. The only crime one could hazard a guess on for comparison would be homicides, and SS-Africa is a world leader in that department.
Who controls these environments at this point? The people. The difference between the environments at this stage in history is the clearest demonstration of population differences one can imagine. The point of HBD is to help us recognize that these trends in behavior originate from the people. That their environments are not coincidental but a product of their expressions.
I don't believe that prosperity or welfare leads to crime. Otherwise Iceland would have a lot of crime. Low quality people lead to crime. Giving low quality people more opportunities to express themselves will give you more low quality expressions. And yes, I would argue that there is a very relevant difference between recognizing what the causal factor is in the equation and not recognizing it.
There are proportionally more low quality people in the AA's population than the white one. I don't want to live with groups of low quality people. I don't want to work with them. I don't want them working near me. I don't mind having a welfare state. I don't mind giving a proportionally small amount of low quality people money or financing some sort of livable environment for them that's not a prison cell, provided they behave and don't cause ugliness or suffering. I do mind them mindlessly procreating and growing their share of the population. I don't want to harm them but I also don't want to harm future generations and subject them to endless cycles of subsidizing wealth confiscations and violence against themselves and continuously growing the share of low quality folks that perpetuate the process.
I don't agree with our boomer friend that it's just welfare policies that make the situation worse. Desegregation and Civil Rights made things worse as well. But our boomer friend loves those things. Along with a host of other conservative sacred cows. So he will advocate for policies expecting results that will not occur, because he does not understand things, and then the lefties will pick up the slack provided by these poorly thought out policies and run the country further into the ground. And the boomer, just like every conservative that came before him, will accept his lashes and 20 years down the line his own children will pretend that conservatism is actually about conserving the progressive gains made against the sins of their own father.
You're right though, The most meaningful conservative policy is being tougher on crime. Principally because killing violent people is the most surefire way to prevent them from procreating. And Trump has said he wants to expand the death penalty to other crimes, which would be good. But to exemplify the point made above, being tougher on crime that's not punishable by death would functionally just be a different form of welfare. Except we are locking more people up for longer in abhorrent conditions that facilitate further ugliness and suffering. Without ever addressing where these low quality people come from. It's a very good example of how the conservative lack of understanding fuels their opposition. They create poor conditions that are easily propagandized against them. Which is also what would happen if they somehow managed to end welfare.
The word I would use is "culture" (although I don't think it's magical, and I don't object to other words).
Your source shows massive swings over time (e.g. surging from 21% of prisoners in the US in the 1920s to 50% in the 1990s) that can't be explained by merely noting skin color or ancestry. So your source shows that it is substantially different within the SAME population. (As an aside, thanks for finding those older numbers.) It also shows a massive gap between Latin America and the Caribbean (22.5) and Sub-Saharan Africa (9.5). If your article's suggestion that blacks are responsible for the high levels of murder in Latin America and the Caribbean, then yes it is substantially different on different continents as well!
Yes, and there is a much higher homicide rate in the American black community than in Sub-Saharan Africa; your source shows 9.5 which is considerably lower than African American homicide rate in the US (more than twice that, on a quick Google). So yes, substantially different.
This is also the point of a cultural analysis. The cultural analysis focuses, however, on the choices that people make, whereas an HBD analysis focuses on their ancestry. My specific objection here is to focusing on HBD to the exclusion of other factors. As your own sources show, other factors are tremendously important.
Boomer conservatives generally don't mind desegregation but they do not necessarily support everything that Civil Rights ended up entailing.
Interestingly in the United States penal servitude is legal.
Perhaps, but what's your superior solution? "Keep welfare, return segregation" is not a palatable political solution.
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