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The origin of the American federal welfare state traces its way back to the Freedman's Bureau, established during the Civil War. As you might guess from the name, blacks were "drawn to it" because the Bureau was specifically established for them.
A sociological theory that hangs it all on "IQ" and doesn't account for the facts of the historical case is less fixing the problems with lefty sociological theories and more embracing them, just swapping out "IQ" for "racism" as the Great Monocausal Foe.
I think some people assume that accomplishing this swap will lead to closing the welfare state tap off, perhaps unaware or forgetting that the tap was turned on at a time when (functionally) that very belief was widespread.
To take your narrative seriously one would have to imagine that a post-war government program that lasted 9 years in the 1860's which gave resources and education to a group of people was always going to lead to that people being welfare dependent. If that's not the argument, then we're just finding historical a-ha! moments that might feel satisfying to our brains but are of no real consequence or value beyond that.
Both the left and the conservatives assert that the gaps exist because of historical circumstance and/or oppression. They both assert historical just so stories without ever applying them seriously as sociological theories about the nature of man. Instead treating it like a verbal game, not a look at reality. They walk through the steps of history and pontificate on each as a cause for behavior, but not a consequence of it.
The 'monocausal' foe is the nature of human beings, the differences between them, the widely divergent population groups humanity is composed of and the wide variety of circumstance they find themselves in.
If history was causal in the way you describe and not consequential, one would see a vast difference between ancestrally similar population groups that had divergent historical paths. We have this case.
Iceland was the poorest country in Europe for centuries. Yet with the Marshall Aid program post-WW2, they went from being the poorest to being one of the most prosperous nations on the planet in the span of 50 years. The lesson is simple. Give high quality people technology and resources and they will prosper. Being colonized doesn't matter. Being poor doesn't matter.
Becoming a criminal or welfare dependent is not a consequence of history. It's the path of least resistance for a certain type of person. Most people find it easier to learn how to read than to have 5 children with 5 different men, collect child support, become obese and claim medical benefits on top of that. Most people find it easier to go to work rather than rob a liquor store and sell drugs. Most. But not all. The difference is the people.
The circumstance that make those anti-social actions possible are a consequence of the kind of people that would take advantage of those circumstances existing. On top of that, welfare programs existing doesn't cause, for example, Norwegians in Norway to abuse the programs at nearly the same rates as other groups do. In short, these history specific explanations fail to explain anything in a broader context. They're not applicable to the real world. These things happen in different context and the obvious determining factor is the humans, not their historical circumstance.
In the conservative narrative you are trying to identify (not necessarily my narrative), the Freeman's Bureau would just be the start of a much more persistent and long-running government-led effort specifically designed to target black Americans (and other minority groups) with various types of benefits.
If you hung out around conservative Americans long enough you would hear some of them say something along these lines, perhaps with fewer five dollar words.
In the United States, African-American out-of-wedlock births have increased dramatically since World War Two. This is despite the fact that measured African-American IQ scores have also increased over the same period of time. Why?
Yeah, that's generally how those narratives go. A string of just so stories and a-ha! moments that don't hold water when we have to explain the same pattern existing elsewhere.
Paleo-cons got kicked out of the mainstream a long time ago. Peter Brimelow did a nice interview on the topic on Tucker Carlson's show recently. Which was a nice, albeit a bit late, surprise.
Why indeed. Are either of these things relevant or related? Out of wedlock births in Iceland are the norm and happen at almost the exact same rate as out of wedlock births for AA's. Yet they have none of their problems. You are going to have to clarify what the point is here.
Lots of people who probably don't know what a paleo-con is still vote R and can express similar sentiment.
Yes, out of wedlock births are an anti-social behavior that correlates with bad childhood outcomes (at least in the US of A).
In Iceland, though, this only translates to about a quarter of children being raised in single-parent homes - quite possibly, the parents being married in all-but-name, you're right that it doesn't cause significant problems. It's something like twice the rate among African-Americans - which, relevantly to my point, has risen since the 1960s. Why has this negative behavior among African Americans risen with their IQ score?
And we can ask the same question about violent crime: what's the HBD explanation for why African-American crime rose massively in the 1960s even as they grew more prosperous (in the 1940s, when African-Americans were poorer, crime was much lower)?
Random people who vote R don't make the conservative narrative. It's made and expressed in mainstream conservative media.
Yet the mechanism does not hold the same effect when looking at a different population. So it's not a cause but a consequence.
There are plenty of single mothers who successfully raise their children alone. So single parent homes are not a cause but a consequence. There are different reasons for why some people find themselves in the circumstance that correlates with negative outcomes. It's those reasons that matter, not the circumstance. A low intelligence low impulse control person was always going to have problems when given the freedom to express themselves, and their offspring would always face similar challenges if they carry those same traits.
The notion that civility and success needs to be drilled and beaten into every child through a mother and father isn't true. It's true for some of them, and I do personally believe two parents households are better. But the high quality children generally just make success and civility happen because it's not that much effort for them. Sitting still, figuring out the solution to the problem and getting a reward for their good behavior comes naturally and effortlessly. You can sabotage them, sure. And some otherwise high quality kids might have specific peculiar needs that will hamper them if not met, but the point is that there's a difference between what a sufficient environment is for a 'high quality' kid populations and 'low quality' ones.
As for AA's IQ gains, they seem largely driven by test score inflation. Or are, at the least, not indicative of an improvement in intelligence. Look for the 'Hollow Gains' chapter.
Why would more freedom and prosperity being handed to a population that has a lot of low impulse control low IQ people make them less criminal?
A more constrictive environment prevented the expression of bad behaviors. A more permissive environment allowed for it.
To contrast this with the point made earlier, a more permissive environment in Iceland allowed for more expressions of good behaviors. Because the population there had more good behaviors to express. The controlling factor is the population.
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.
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