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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration? Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them? Arabs?

HBD is not really my area of expertise - it's questionable if it's anyone's, given the extreme political distortion of the field for at least the past two centuries - but:

I'm very sceptical of claims of recent large evolutionary changes. There's one that has definitively met the high bar, which is the terrible disease resistance of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals due to not having plagues until colonisation (of course, this isnt a change in them; rather, Old Worlders were massively selected for better disease resistance than the prehistoric norm).

I'm more open to claims of difference based on long timescales - the divergence of Homo sapiens sapiens within Africa (note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia), and the hybridisation with other human subspecies (all non-Africans have about 3% Neanderthal admixture; the Austronesians of Maritime South-East Asia and Oceania have very large Denisovan admixture, sometimes over 10%; there may be some admixture from another subspecies in sub-Saharan Africans).

So from where I sit, this basically leaves only two groups with major question marks over them due to long separation and/or different subspecies makeup from most of humanity - the sub-Saharan Africans (including differences among them), and the Austronesians including Aboriginal Australians. These areas have been notoriously-far behind for most of history, so my best guess is that both of these question marks are probably negative in terms of cognition. My wild guess, if I have to give a number, would be 3-5 IQ points on average; not enough to swamp individual variation, but noticeable on population scales. As noted, though, probably some variation within Africa, and of course there are massive effects from nutrition.

Indians aren't far from being white with dark skin; the gene flow through Persia was always pretty significant. East Asians are more different, but are still basically Eurasian (there's detectable Denisovan admixture, but it's orders of magnitude smaller in China/Korea/Japan). Arabs are white except to the degree they've had recent sub-Saharan African admixture, which is usually minimal AIUI. "Hispanics" are heterogeneous; usually they're some mixture of white, Native American and sub-Saharan African, although the proportions vary drastically and many are outright missing one or two of those components. Native Americans can be treated as North Asians with shitty immune systems and don't have the question mark. Those with substantial sub-Saharan African ancestry have some portion of it (proportionally; do note, of course, that one-drop classification is a pile of shit, as generally everybody has a tiny bit of everything - the human race has never been fully sundered, and the most recent common ancestor may have lived within the span of history).

Obligatory disclaimer: I don't think slight statistical differences in cognition merit massacre or explicit discrimination in everyday life. They're still human beings, and the bell curves have massive overlap! About the only policy choice where I think my opinions are significantly influenced by this is the native birth rate vs. immigration question in First-World countries, but I should note that there are other, non-racist, reasons to prefer native-borns (native-borns get put through a better education system, and there are also cultural-continuity issues with massive importation from Third-World countries that are not secular, liberal, stable democracies, particularly with salad-bowlers around sabotaging assimilation - and in the case of the PRC, there's an outright security risk from those who've been through its education system and/or have family in Mainland China as potential hostages).

I'm not a HBD absolutist (Culture matters.), but I'll bite. I spent a few years at a stem-oriented boarding school for allegedly smart kids, so I wound up spending a fair amount of time with the kids of educated immigrants. Note, outside of that my experience is limited by having spent all my time in a not especially diverse part of the South. Also note, the smartest and dumbest kids I met there were of domestic extraction. The usual white problem was having mistaken being weird/nerdy for being smart (Those kids usually couldn't put down the video games long enough to study and weren't smart enough to get away with that, so they failed out quickly.) and the usual black problem was that "smart by the standards of the school back home" didn't mean that smart (though there were a few who were that smart).

Indians are among the most heavily filtered demographics in America (See also: Africans), so yeah, by and large they're at least midwits. In my experience the Indian kids weren't shockingly brilliant, but they were at least above average and the studious ones are doing well in life. An unfortunate set I met were a professor's sons. I have no idea what happened to one of them (He was something of a druggie burnout in college.) and the other is one whose level of education badly exceeds his intelligence combined with a nasty case of arrogance (and obesity) to boot, basically an Indian neckbeard and one of the universally reviled people I've known. It's hard to describe, but we're talking about a guy who had an MS in economics but couldn't really hack delivering pizza because he sucked at reading a map and using it find things.

The Asians tended to be FOBs or close to it with lousy English skills (same at the SEC school I attended) and/or terminal cases of introversion, but excellent at math (and WoW at the boarding school). The more Americanized ones have fared very well. I can't comment further because they tended to stick to their own clique.

The most oddly overrepresented demographic at the school were Russians/Ukrainians whose parents came here after the fall of the USSR/the bad 90s, about half Jewish and half gentile (Hilariously, it never occurred to me as a teenager that my friend who is the weediest, most obviously Jewish Russian Jew to ever walk the Earth is Jewish. White Southerners don't have Jewdar by default. Sadly, he suffers from neuroticism to a life-crippling degree and I see plenty of posts on Facebook about his struggles with CPTSD due to a less than ideal childhood.). The Russian from St. Petersburg is one of the most intelligent and driven people I've met, also among the most intransigent and outspoken, for better or worse. His inability to hide his sympathies for the Z invasion in '22 led to an epic crashout and loss of (mixed Russian and Ukrainian) friend group. He's now relocated to China with a wife, kid, and a job as a university professor. The Ukrainian was kind of an asshole (We ran in different cliques.) but definitely smart and is doing well here as an engineer. Memorably, he came up to me after someone else got the history ribbon during senior awards for DEI reasons and told me that it was bullshit that I didn't get it, high praise from an enemy (The history teachers wound up concocting a different award to give me that amounted to "teacher's pet".).

Exiting the classroom, I can't say much about Arabs because the only ones I've interacted with run gas stations, vape shops, or restaurants. They're not common where I've lived.

Hispanics are a broad category. The white Spanish ones are, well, white people, and the castizos aren't far off. One of my dear friends falls into that category and when she gets too deep into ranting about her experiences as a brown woman I like to fuck with her by pointing out that she's whiter than I am (If I have anything like a decent tan going on.). The mestizo Mexicans (and, they're all Mexican, or at least were; todays illegals are from further south), once assimilated (The kids of the W. era illegals have grown up now.) strike me as not much different from working-class white people (Note: I said working class and not white trash. The Mexicans strike me as less trashy, for now at least.). Hispanics don't really have the same problems that black Americans do. Hell, they live longer than white Americans in spite of being fatter and more diabetic.

For fun, I'll pick on my own kind, as someone who also had a chain smoking Mamaw named Bonnie who got married at 13. JD Vance might've done better to pick up a copy of Understanding the Borderline Mother (It would not surprise me if Scots-Irish women were found to suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder at rates above the white American baseline.) than to try to find a political explanation for his family's dysfunction (and to be clear, one of the themes of the book wasn't frustration over being poor, because his family wasn't, but over being dragged down from an otherwise middle class life by bad behavior). Hillbilly Elegy was a mediocre political polemic (and is badly dated; it was written pre-Trump when Vance was still angling for the Romney-Ryan wing of Republican politics) but his story was a sufficiently compelling trip down memory lane that I really don't want to read it again and refuse to watch the movie.

To twist the knife a bit more, his telling of the story comes across as claiming the sort of unconditional victimhood that can only be the luxury of the younger sibling. That, and while I deeply sympathize with his reactionary streak there’s an air of self-righteousness that’s a touch off putting in someone I’d otherwise want to like. I describe my mother as something of a cartoon villain but it’s hard to square “honor culture”/”honor” as I grew up to understand it with “writing a book outing Mom as a dysfunctional fuckup/bad person for all the world to read”. It never occurred to me to play the “write about my crappy childhood in a college admissions essay” card, but my little sister sure did.

I feel like there's a certain element where people in Western 'salary-driven' economies don't really understand that people in more developing economies tend to have far larger reliance on entrepreneurship to get rich enough to be in the West and especially to be affluent in the West. Whilst it's likely valuable to have intelligence to succeed as an entrepreneur, the great sort of Western civilization means that if you're living in an UMC bastion the locals likely have parents who are your doctors, engineers etcetera (which correlate more strictly with raw intellectual horsepower) whilst foreigners are more likely to have made their money through business ownership.

This IMO makes trying to proxy raw intellect via income weaker than you'd expect. An entrepreneur is testing for luck, social skills, connections et al in ways that white collar professionals aren't experiencing the same way. This also factors strongly into some groups being able to swing way above their intellectual horsepower due to having cultural setups that are better at enabling them to run businesses and find their way into more-softskill driven sinecuresque parts of the established economy through their mastery of networking and the art of the job application. This can be a double-edged sword in that said groups can be good at entrepreneurial (yay, more small business) and sinecure obtainment (boo, those jobs really should either not exist or be earmarked for sons of the soil and you'd have to be monumentally stupid to give these to foreigners) whilst the difference doesn't show on a spreadsheet to politicos who simply say 'X minority has a higher gdp per capita'.

Small quibble, but you probably meant Indians (South Asia). Never heard of anyone placing India in East Asia.

Indians aren't really an ethnic group. The caste system means that, in spite of living together for thousands of years, the different ethnicities in India are vastly different, genetically and phenotypically. The high-performing Indians you know are mostly from the upper castes.

Arab countries have pretty low IQs, although they could probably do better if they stopped marrying their cousins. Incest causes mental retardation. Christian Arabs are higher-IQ due to hundreds of years of selective pressure (the jizya meant that low-IQ Christians converted to Islam).

'Hispanic' isn't a particularly useful term. It can range from people who are 100% Spanish genetically, to Amerindians with no European ancestry whatsoever, to full-blooded Africans. Probably you're thinking of Mexican mestizos, who have lower IQs than Europeans, but not that much lower.

Of course, the people you're interacting with are massively confounded by selective migration. (Legal) migration to the US is very hard, so it selects for high-IQ people.

For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration?

There are high-performing (IQ-wise and economically) subgroups of all these populations e.g. Tamil Brahmins for Indians, Maronite Christians for Arabs, and the white elites of any Latin American country for Hispanics, so you'll have to be more specific. Typically, immigrants who do not have access to a land border to hop or refugee status to apply for are disproportionately from these sorts of high-performing groups and subject to additional selection effects as well. People disagree on the magnitude of each of these effects, but that they exist there should be no doubt.

Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them?

If by similar problems you mean crime, then at least as far as Mexico is concerned it seems to me that interpersonal violence correlates with Spanish conquistador ancestry. Areas that remain majority indigenous, such as the Yucatan peninsula, have low homicide rates, and travelers tend to remark that the locals are quite docile compared to their mestizo neighbors. There is a confounding factor, in that the whiter states in the north are close to the American border, a major catalyst for crime, but seeing as the Spainards who came to the New World were from areas like Extremadura that were at the front lines of the Reconquista for centuries (cf. the Scotch-Irish, who came from the bloody no-man's land between England and Scotland) it makes sense to me.

Perhaps just selection effects from immigration?

That can be, and is an important part of why immigration, especially the highest skill immigration is so important to keeping the US rich and powerful.

Let's say that white people will have a polymath SuperGenius in one out of a million people. In the US, that leaves us with roughly 210 white polymath SuperGenius. (in this scenario, we are Bovino pilled and have no non whites left)

Meanwhile let's be really racist and say that the ethnic Chinese only have a SuperGenius with one in three million. China, even despite this handicap, has roughly 450 or so super geniuses.

China has more one in a million SuperGenius than the US despite a significant disadvantage we applied to them. Do the same with 1 in 500k or 1 in 100k or whatever and you get the same results. China has more.

If the US does not either grow numbers significantly or recruit more SuperGenius, subSuperGenius, Genius, etc from elsewhere in the world, we will lose the top of intelligence war. Maybe we can cope with that, maybe we have better healthier systems from our higher average intelligence or something. But we will lose it anyway, China will have more just by pure numbers. Now consider that China is probably not 3x dumber than us at making SuperGenius.

Now apply this to the whole world. The US is only about 4.3% of the world population. Way more geniuses and talent of all sorts is born outside the country than in it. The best thing you can do is be immigrant friendly, and bring in the geniuses who do things like make up almost a third of your country's nobel prizes and make you richer and stronger. The worst thing you can do is to expel your geniuses so they all work for the immigrant friendly country willing to accept them.

You need the elite human capital. And of course, the more willing you are to take in anyone who is above average, your chances of Geniuses grows.

Many will say it’s good to let in the world’s geniuses, but that we don’t need people who are simply slightly above average. Of course, there’s no reliable way for government to decide who the geniuses are beforehand. Under such a system, Elon Musk wouldn’t have gotten in, and neither would Jensen Huang’s parents. The point is that if you accept large amounts of people who are slightly above average, some percentage of them and their children will turn out to make absolutely massive contributions to society.

Personally I've always said that we should extend immediate citizenship invites to winners of the math Olympiad and other such contests.

If you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.

The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible. Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture, make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages), bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people). Not to mention that things like IQ =/= social trust, "western" morality, etc.

People have pointed out that Asians are importing things like Childhood-destroying striverism (see the whole Vivek thing), Caste-like dynamics, etc.

I am not nearly as reactionary as a lot of posters here but I do not believe in the fungibility of people. I think the US was smart to consider demographics in immigration policy, not just due to economic reasons, but much more because of cultural cohesion. Just like places like Singapore or the UAE (to a lesser extent) do. That doesn’t mean "no Asians" but maybe being very discerning about to whom you grant permanent residency to is not a bad idea. And it's not like you could just move to India or China either.

you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.

People are not fungible. Jensen Huang alone has created far more value than the extremely large majority of other Americans regardless of race. You can not replace what he has created (5.4 trillion dollar valuation of Nvidia!) with your average Joe, it is not possible. You take a random white guy off the street and compare their value, and you can't even see the stranger on the chart. That is how dwarfed he is by Huang.

The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible.

Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.

Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture,

Yes, and part of that cultural change is a culture that values being smarter and harder working than what we currently have. A culture of grinders and geniuses.

make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages)

Again, Jensen Huang alone is so massively valuable that even hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of net negative parasites would be cancelled out. Alone. And we are not even close to that number of immigrants who are purely net negative.

bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people).

I think Hanania addressed this with an excellent point that realistically, the same people pushing nativism the hardest now have been sabotaging themselves with the things they claimed immigrants would do.

I’m old enough to remember when nativists complained that immigration would make the country more socialist, yet as the Republican Party has become more nativist and anti-market at the same time, they have shown themselves to be accommodating towards or even enthusiastic about economic statism as long as it’s the type preferred by Americans who share their distaste for foreigners.

Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants. Meanwhile go up in the Appalachians or something and you get a bunch of drug addict white trash statists who would rather bitch about how unfair things are.

Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.

It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world -- the last, best hope of man on Earth.

They are the people who embrace being American far more than some white chick reposting marx memes on her phone between college classes, or some white trash honey boo boo family, or the endless other complainers and whiners who when given the greatest and most opportunities filled country in the world, in history, for free with native citizenship, flounder like the losers they are and complain instead.

Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.

Plenty of places manage this without meaningful abilities to tap into the social security net. Dubai, Singapore etcetera are welcoming but you're going to struggle immensely to ever get a passport for a lot of immigrants. I do also broadly agree that the 'O1'/'genius' level of immigration should be encouraged (albeit one must acknowledge you're absolutely fucking the developing world by taking their best and brightest), but the current playing field has gone far far far far beyond that where now the H1B layer is taking fairly interchangeable mid-level career jobs and being used as a bludgeon on the native stock to keep wages down.

Without even going down to the Deliveroo layer that's now plowing into Europe where '30 years ago when we were ultra-selective people from these countries used to excel now let's take anybody who can get on a plane' is absolutely botched policy.

First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.

Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.

Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.

Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.

Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants.

If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.

Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.

Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.

Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.

Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.

Western countries didn't exactly vote against mass immigration either, until well into the 2010s. There is a very noisy anti-immigration movement going back to Enoch Powell in the UK and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and it has real mass working class support, but it doesn't actually move votes.

Even now, anti-immigration populist parties seem to face a hard cap of 25-30% support and centre-right parties who go into coalitions with them are punished - in other words about 70% of the voters are opposed to anti-immigration populism. (Trump wins because the US system allows you to capture the Presidency with 26% of the vote by winning a close primary and then a close general - in a jungle primary he would get 25-30%).

The British far right and populist right are an electoral irrelevance until UKIP get 16% of the vote in a low-turnout European election in 2004, and the first time a party running to the right of the Tories gets a significant vote share in a general election is 2015 when UKIP get 12.6%. The Tories run an anti-immigration campaign in 2005 (with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" and it goes down like a lead balloon. David Cameron includes a pledge to cut immigration to the tens of thousands in the 2010 and 2015 manifestos, but the voters (correctly) don't believe him, he wins anyway, and doesn't cut immigration. Boris gets a landslide in 2019 despite having published policies that imply he will do a Boriswave.

The lack of ballot-box support for an anti-immigration insurgent party is unlikely to be purely because FPTP suppresses it - other third parties get mass support during this period, with the SDP-Liberal Alliance peaking at 25.4% in 1983 and the Greens getting 15% in the 1989 European elections.

So the big picture in the UK is that the Tories don't need an anti-immigration message to win, which is good because they can't effectively use one. And there is no meaningful opposition to their right until Farage, and even Farage doesn't have enough votes to matter until 2024 - his impact on British politics between 2010 and 2024 is driven by the impact of Farage panic on the internal politics of the Conservative Party.

In France, you have a serious anti-immigration party opposing the Gaullists from the right going back to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in the 1980's, but it's stuck on about 15% of the vote (with very little chance of winning anything under the French electoral system, because the other 85% will hold their noses and vote for anyone-but-FN in the runoff) until Marine Le Pen's 2017 breakthrough.

In the US, socially conservative insurgents (who, among other things, oppose immigration) consistently get about 20% in Republican primaries until Trump. The GOP grassroots are obviously more anti-immigrant than this suggests, but when they get into the polling booth they pull the lever for a GOPe tax cutter.

What does all this mean - the simplest interpretation is that immigration is low salience for normies until well into the 2010s. Talking about the issue (in either direction) is a vote loser even among anti-immigration conservative voters because it implies you don't care enough about the bread-and-butter issues voters care about. The other point is that effective anti-immigration politics is very visibly tied to the failure of traditional centre-left and centre-right parties to offer a positive programme voters could vote for. The best example here is the French Presidential election in 2017, where the traditional two big parties came third and fifth, but you see the same thing happening in the UK (where Boris can only win in 2019 by running against his own party's record in government) and the US (where neither the GOPe nor the Democrats can manage run a replacement-level candidate against Trump).

So the interesting question is the direction of causation. Do centre-left and centre-right parties decline because the public finally means it when they say they are fed up with mass immigration, or does anti-immigration politics exploit a vacuum left by the decline of centre-left and centre-right parties for other reasons? Those other reasons are obvious - some combination of social media-driven negativity and very real policy failures including the 2008 financial crisis and Iraq, with the relative impact depending on how sympathetic you find the old-school politicians.

Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.

I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.

To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.

Yeah I'm not a particular Elon Musk fan and I think he's probably better example of somebody who's harder to replace in that he has the right combination of luck, willingness to keep diversifying into new speculative fields and raw tenacity to actually engender meaningful change as an individual. IMO somebody like Huang would have likely emerged regardless since it's not like he invented Unobtanium that completely unlocked the path of GPU development.

You can not replace what he has created (5.4 trillion dollar valuation of Nvidia!) with your average Joe, it is not possible.

Again, Jensen Huang alone is so massively valuable that even hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of net negative parasites would be cancelled out.

Not really. It's true no amount of average Joe's can replace a Jensen Huang, but the truth is he depends on them as much as they depend on him. This is trivially observable by the fact that none of these people are able to "cancel out" impoverished populations of other countries, and have to go to the US for their success.

It's also telling you measure his contribution by the valuation of his company, which is an absurd thing to do. In the mind of a valuation appreciator, all you have to do is subtract government expenditures going to the net negative parasites from the company valuation, and as long as the bottom line is in the black,you're good! The reality is that just like no amount of average Joes can compensate for Jensen Huang, even if you get enough of them that their total contributions exceed $5.4 trillion, no amount of Jensen Huangs, and no amount of money transferred by the government, can compensate for the social erosion caused by mass immigration from incompatible cultures.

Yes, and part of that cultural change is a culture that values being smarter and harder working than what we currently have. A culture of grinders and geniuses.

That's not the cultural change that's happening anywhere in the west. We are constantly being pushed to erode our standards, and a significant justification for that is the push for greater "diversity" necessitated by mass migration.

Neither Indians (caste system) nor Hispanics (white, black, Amerindian) fit into one group. Hispanic is like saying someone is American. It’s not an ethnicity.

Intresting, so what are the actually "races" genetically speaking? Is it just, black people, whites, than asians? How is it classified?

The 19th century scientific racists worked this out, and it has been confirmed by modern DNA testing. There are three major surviving racial groups, separated by the Sahara, the Great Steppe and the Himalayas:

  • Caucasians, including North Africans, Turks etc. who are white, but also Indians, who are closer to whites than either is to East Asians
  • East Asians
  • Black Africans.

There are then the various groups that didn't develop agriculture and got mostly-genocided when they came into contact with people who did. The pygmies and Khoisan in Africa are genetically distinct races and would be on the list alongside the big three if there were enough of them left. Native Americans (whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait relatively recently) and Polynesians are subgroups of East Asians. Australian Aborigines have been genetically isolated for long enough that they are de facto a separate race too.

From the point of view of HBD-driven policy, this is complicated by the fact that endogamous sub-populations can be subject to relatively rapid selection for IQ or other pro-social traits (definitely over a timescale of centuries, possibly faster), leading to a hierarchy of desirability that doesn't track the big-picture genetics.

From the point of view of normie ethno-nationalism, none of this is relevant because "white" as an identity group that one can be a nationalist of is a political category and not a genetic one. The ethnogenesis of "whites" happened in America (and South Africa with the need to unite Anglos and Afrikaaners) and largely didn't in other places, and the boundaries of who can assimilate to American political whiteness are roughly "culturally Christian with no visible sub-Saharan African ancestry". The nearest equivalent to political whiteness in the UK is "non-Muslim", with Jews and Hindu Indians being politically whiter-than-white. Vivek winning the Ohio gubernatorial primary suggests something similar could happen in the US, with anyone who is neither Black nor Muslim ending up tarred with political whiteness by the far left and welcome in the politically white coalition on the right.

You can cluster populations into clearly distinct genetic groups using various unsupervised algorithms (i.e. without prior labels about who belongs to which group). If you did this in the United States, those clusters would be highly predictive of which race we label the individuals in that cluster. Mixed race individuals would typically fall between those clusters. You'd also find a kind of substructure inside them: the Indian cluster would contain subclusters, corresponding to different castes and geographies. It, however, would still be in a distinctly Indian cluster. Hispanics would be the messiest group: black Hispanics would fall nearest the USA black cluster, white Hispanics nearest USA whites, and pure Amerindians would be their own thing, closest to Asians but more distant cousins.

Historically, there were gentler genetic gradients between different populations, along lines of historical migration. If you lined up every human in history, you'd see no sharp breaks at all: everyone is predictably a mix of their parents, with a couple mutations. Many of those lineages have died out, though, as they're outcompeted by other lineages; this creates a sharper gradient between adjacent successful lineages.

Races are made up tribes based on people who have more similar genetics and skin coloring. It somewhat works for quickly understanding a few broad groups of people but has trouble with categorizing various shades of brown and brown-adjacent people. Unless brown is a race?

In your question about Indians, Arabs, and Hispanics you reveal the problem with a white/black/asian lens of race - it can't categorize most of the world with just a few categories. If you wanna go into HBD you need to read the research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatu_Vanhanen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn

2002, IQ and the Wealth of Nations - this can be your starting point. It's old, and there is much newer stuff but you can get to that later.

Same for arabs (especially since I'd expect the OP using it as a shorthand for 'Middle Eastern' more so than 'explicitly arabic descent')

One thought experiment I’ve had is I think it would be very interesting if upper caste Indians found an island or maybe somewhere in S America and did like the Jews in creating Israel. HBD studies seem to show a large part of Indian population is very low IQ. I think it’s tough to manage a country like that. What could they create if like 20 million of the better caste Indians moved to Uruguay which has enough land and low population. What would they create in 50 years?

Kinda played out a bunch of times. Trinidad's largest group is Indian descent afaik plus they're economically dominant. I don't think any has been able to necessarily filter for 'top 10% intellectually' but there's a bunch of countries with strong Indian diaspora presences.

One thought experiment I’ve had is I think it would be very interesting if upper caste Indians found an island or maybe somewhere

The British Empire already ran this experiment to a lesser extent, recruiting Indians to work in other British colonies. It gave rise to groups like the Ugandan Asians. Indians are economically dominant minorities in all the African (Caribbean included) countries they inhabit.

Indians are MDMs in Africa just like Lebanese and Palestinians are MDMs in Central America (and parts of West Africa, too). But that doesn’t say much about overall performance, just about potential differences with majority populations in those lands. ‘In the land of the blind’…, as that line goes.

I am not necessarily a "believer" in the strong sense, but I guess I believe in a weaker sense that genetic differences can cause some group differences in intelligence. The extent and magnitude of that is debatable. I guess I simply don't believe group differences can be ruled out a priori and I also don't see why they should be especially unlikely. They are definitely not the sole explanatory variable but they seem to be a pretty good one for some cases.

I think for Indians the party line among strong proponents is that India is genetically very diverse and most immigrants are from higher-functioning sub populations. Hispanics are a mix, between blacks and whites and Arabs I don’t know what the party line is.