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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   22301 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Just before Covid, a gun store was robbed in my town. I worked in a different gun store, so we got some of the inside scoop. Proprietor of the robbed store used to work on my computer whenever I fucked it up too badly. The shop was the shittiest one in the county, lodged in a former meat market. The robbers just pulled part of the roof off the building to get into the secure room.

Turned out to be the local high school football team. They stole around fifty guns, fifteen of which have been recovered some seven years later. The recovered guns have been used in at least three homicides so far. One was just recovered at a traffic stop this year, one killed a high school senior just after prom not two weeks ago. Perp there hasn't been identified or caught.

The kids who robbed the place were caught within days. It remains unclear exactly how many people were involved, at least two unnamed juveniles were processed, but shield laws prevent the public knowing anything. Three of the older kids were charged for the robbery, one got no time, other two got three and ten months respectively, despite not cooperating with police in the recovery of the firearms or identification of other perpetrators. Everyone involved was put into a youth criminal diversion program that released them without a criminal record.

The ringleader and one who got the most time, one Travontis (Drink!) Miller, was given the ten month sentence, but due to the protective nature of the diversion program, it will never be public knowledge that he plead guilty to multiple firearm felonies or how long he actually served of that jail term. What we do know is that he was out prior to December of 2021, because that's when he was arrested for a series of other crimes we're not entirely sure what happened.

He was charged with assault and battery (strangulation), robbery and domestic violence, but once again was given protected youth status despite being in his twenties by this point (the program runs until age 24). He also picked up charges of resisting arrest and being in possession of one of the stolen firearms from the original gun store case. These charges too were concealed under the diversion program.

So when people tell me that what we really need to cut down on gun violence in this country is to ensure that every state has a different magazine limit, or force used gun sales into stores, or ban AR-15s, or not allow gun companies to advertise, it makes me irrationally angry. This dude, when he hits 25, will have no criminal record and will be able to pass a background check to buy a firearm legally. At least until his next felony, which I don't expect to take long.

Below are two quote sets for those who didn't read the articles, first the prosecution in the original case:

At the June sentencing, Stevenson objected to Borrello’s indication that he would grant the defendants HYTA status.

“In this case, the defendants stole 50 guns from Showtime Guns,” Stevenson said. “Fifty guns. Only 14 of those firearms have been recovered as of April 8 of this year. And no surprise, Judge, all of them have been found in the hands of convicted felons. In fact, one of those firearms was used in a homicide in December in which an 87-year-old grandmother was shot in the face and killed.”

The judge wasn't interested, and had The Science on his side.

"It’s very clear science, evidence-based conclusions that the brain isn’t fully developed in young men until roughly around the age of the mid 20s,” Borrello said. “These gentlemen allegedly committed these crimes when they were teenagers, not even adults. If I learned one thing in handling juvenile lifers, it’s that we have to look at these things a little bit differently than we look at adults making the same poor decisions that these gentlemen may have made.”

But sure, the problem with gun violence in the US is that Billy Bob put a giggle trigger on his PSA.

Edit: added/fixed links

Edit: Added a CDC study of gun violence by ethnicity for support, as requested by mod. Honestly I've never looked it up until now, the below was just based on my personal lived experience.

Guns and blacks just don't mix well if you don't want a society with high gun violence.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7242a4.htm

If you have significant amount of blacks in your society then you must ban guns entirely and make possession a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined black youth will eventually get their hands on guns through legal means or the black (pun intended?) market. It's unfortunate for the responsible gun users but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else. Of course, this would require a constitutional amendment in the US so it's basically impossible.

You could also toughen up juvenile sentencing to reduce the age of adult criminal responsibility to like, 10 or something. If guns are still legal in this scenario then blacks will still have high gun violence, but at least their genetic pool will slowly improve over time. You might have to wait a few thousand years to get any benefit of lowered aggression through genetic selection though, much faster to ban guns.

If you have significant amount of blacks in your society then you must ban guns entirely and make possession a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined black youth will eventually get their hands on guns through legal means or the black (pun intended?) market. It's unfortunate for the responsible gun users but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else. Of course, this would require a constitutional amendment in the US so it's basically impossible.

If you have significant amounts of men in your society then you must ban penetrative sex entirely and make not wearing male chastity belts a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined men will eventually get their penises into unwilling vaginas. It's unfortunate for the responsible or homosexual men but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else.

Your argument if I have it correct is that some men are rapists, so we should ban penetrative sex to prevent rape.

First, your proposed solution wouldn't work. Men would just dismantle or break the chasity belt before raping a woman.

Second, it's a violation of men's bodily autonomy. While we don't want men to rape others, we shouldn't attempt to violate the basic human rights of men to have their sexual organs freely accessible. All men are born with a penis, no man is born with a Glock 19.

I consider myself sympathetic to dissident rightist views and yet I find arguments such as this somewhat baffling. Endemic black gun violence wasn’t much of a social issue in the US until 1970 or 1980, was it? So American society was clearly finding entirely mundane ways of curbing it before that.

Endemic black gun violence wasn’t much of a social issue in the US until 1970 or 1980, was it?

A little earlier; the uptick in homicide starting after 1963. The limited data I can find suggests the homicides were of similar racial mix as today (and got more white as you get into the 1980s). It is tempting for the wrongthinker to draw a straight line between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and this fact, but I don't know of any direct evidence for that.

Redlining, or de facto segregation through discriminatory housing practices was one method of keeping black gun violence from spreading to white neighborhoods. Additionally, crack cocaine started being a problem around the 1980s, disintegrating the social fabric for black communities that previously held back violence in general.

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

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

Is crack as a cause statistically proven or did it just correlate? Crack still exists today (Hunter Biden) and it’s easy to get cocaine but no one blames crack today for murder rates. Chicago I am more familiar with and most murder is over stupid shit. Like someone posted a video on YouTube calling you bad names.

Great Migration was over the prior few decades. Plus Civil Rights. So perhaps the first generation moving to big cities had some selection effects for behavior, but the kids did not who would have come of age in the ‘80’s. Honestly just spitballing a theory because crack caused murders to go boom makes less sense today since crack still exists and no one blames crack today.

Crack ruined the preexisting social order in black communities that kept gun violence down from previous decades. Afterwards, gun violence and gang wars became embedded and normalized in parts of black culture. So even without the crack, the gun violence continued because it had been normalized for an entire generation. Additionally, there were advancements in drug production chemistry know-how and increased world trade that led to increasing popularity of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. Now, we have Mexican drug cartels importing opioid precursors from China, and those drugs make their way into black communities.

So, my thesis is that black murder rates are high without crack for two reasons - gun violence normalization and alternative drugs supplanting crack in the drug economy ecosystem. Fentanyl doesn't lead blacks into gun violence directly, but I'm sure the dealers and distributors use violence to protect their business.

I guess corners mattered a lot more back then. Today they don’t. So maybe it did just cause a cultural thing. I know anytime I go thru Chicago murders it’s over very dumb stuff and rarely appears drug dealing related. Cartels I think have also cut down on drug murders. But someone from the southwest would know more. It’s bad for business so they keep the violent part of the drug trade in Mexico.

If you're advocating for racially-based denial of rights, you might as well instead advocate for just expelling blacks from the country. We don't care to enforce our civilization on them in their native lands, why bother doing it here?

Not advocating at all for racially based denial of rights, as in gun ownership. Easier and non-discriminatory to ban gun ownership for everyone.

Same problem, why deny fundamental rights to a people who are capable of handling them for the sake of peoples who cannot? Even if you care about uplifting them (an idea I am sympathetic towards, if pessimistic of the chances of it ever happening), it’d be much easier to do once your own societal capacity is improved in their absence, like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

I'm not too keen on expelling people who've been in the US since the British colonial days. Blacks were exploited as slaves, so even if blacks have problematic violence as a group it's a 'we broke it, we bought it' kind of issue in my opinion.

There's many problems with expelling blacks even if we were willing to do it:

Where are we expelling them to? Does any country in Africa have the capacity and/or willingness to absorb a massive foreign population? I don't think multiple African countries could do it sharing the population influx.

For blacks unwilling to leave voluntarily, are we using military divisions to drag them out of their homes and into a container ship? Seems like a genocide in the making.

Blacks were exploited as slaves, so even if blacks have problematic violence as a group it's a 'we broke it, we bought it' kind of issue in my opinion.

They've been "broken" since far before you involved yourself with them, and you can plausibly claim that the moral debt of slavery has been long since repaid by decades of wealth transfers in their favor.

Where are we expelling them to? Does any country in Africa have the capacity and/or willingness to absorb a massive foreign population? [...] For blacks unwilling to leave voluntarily, are we using military divisions to drag them out of their homes and into a container ship?

Quick plan I came up with in 5 minutes: seize some rural chunk of land on the West African coast (or anywhere really, in fact it might be better optics if it's not in Africa), create a settler colony there, then reintroduce transportation as a punishment for felonies following the Australian model. Considering that IIRC about 1/3 of black men will be charged with a felony in their lifetime, you could relocate millions of blacks while encouraging their friends and families to follow them in tow, all with plausible deniability for your ultimate motive. If push comes to shove, you can in fact just enforce your will on people, as has been the state of affairs for 4000 years and counting. It wouldn't be trivial, but if there's anyone who can pull it off, it's the white man.

All of this is coup-complete, of course, but so is ~every tenable solution to the problem.

Well, I agree that your proposal to expel black felons would improve the genetic pool quickly and reduce gun violence without banning firearms entirely. We may as well go further and simply expel all felons regardless of color, it would improve everyone's genetics and could be argued as a non-discriminatory policy. Also, for children over 10 who commit crimes that would result in a felony for an adult, we'd expel the child and both parents/guardians too. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to avoid 'underage' criminals as shown by @JTarrou and they would have more time to spread their genetics.

Instead of annexing land, the US might as well annex an entire country if the status quo is being discarded anyway. A non-nuclear power with poor international standing. I suggest Venezuela. Or Iran if we're willing to make the ground troops commitment anyway, may as well get rid of a long term foe.

You can slice statistics any way you want, it just depends on what factors you actually care about. The black vs. white disparity is about the same as the male vs. female disparity, but I doubt you'd recommend the alternative scenario where we say that guns and men don't mix well.

  1. You are correct on ratios and just looking at ratios the male female gap is the same.
  2. Absolute levels matter too. 46/1000k black men die by murder per year. Over a roughly 80 year life (simplified) that’s like 3250 black men out of 100k die by murder. 3.25%. Perhaps that is a rate society can deal with. If you do another similar jump in murder rate it would be close to 50% of a group dying by murder. Probably can’t do civilization then.
  3. America wouldn’t exists without white men having guns. America would exists if black men didn’t have gun. The backbone of the US military has always been white men. The backbone of global security is white men.

Though for (3) with infantry not being important anymore I guess in the modern area it would be fine to argue you can have white men in fighting wars and they don’t need gun culture.

FWIW I have no interests ever owning a gun.

The backbone of the US military has always been white men.

Southern white men, actually, in fact, if I'm not mistaken.

True. I did try to hedge on that point since the future of the military seems to be nerds playing video games controlling drones. The future of the military is probably not a redneck with a gun. The past has been a redneck who likes guns.

Depends on what exactly you mean by "southern", but to a degree. Texas is wildly overrepresented, rural appalachia etc., though that includes West Virginia, Tennessee, parts of Pennsylvania etc. Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, Florida etc? Not so much. Don't know if I ever met a Louisiana boy in the infantry. OTOH, Virginia is the backbone of the Navy.

OTOH, Virginia is the backbone of the Navy.

I don't think that has a damn to do with southernness beyond Tidewater simply being where the biggest/most important shipyards/naval bases are. That's a feature of geography, not the Mason-Dixon line. I mean, maybe there's an alternate history where Fore River or New York shipbuilding gets politicked to be more prominent than Newport News post-WWII, but I doubt it.

You can slice statistics any way you want, it just depends on what factors you actually care about. The black vs. white disparity is about the same as the male vs. female disparity, but I doubt you'd recommend the alternative scenario where we say that guns and men don't mix well.

I think it's interesting to note that there are plenty of neighborhoods in the US where the population is 50% male which feel (and are) very safe. There are very few neighborhoods in the US where the population is 50% black which feel (and are) very safe. So assuming that the male/female and black/non-black crime discrepancies are roughly the same, it seems like these numbers aren't telling the whole story.

Perhaps part of what's going on is that society is comfortable with incarcerating violent offenders even though this greatly disproportionately affects men. If the authorities arrest, prosecute, and imprison 100 people, and 95 of the people are men, there isn't serious outcry over the system being biased.

Actually, I would say that guns and men don't mix well either. FBI says 89% of gun violence offenders are male, where the gender is known.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide

If there was a way to restrict civilian gunownership to all females only, then that would also probably lower black gun violence simultaneously. But we'd probably just have women acting as gun buyers and gun mules for young black men and nothing would change.

I don't know about gun crime specifically, but I've seen analysis that concludes that, according to the FBI, black women commit violent crimes at a rate greater than white men. Which is certainly counterintuitive to me but also doesn't seem completely absurd.

Black women have higher levels of testosterone compared to other women, so it may partly explain the increased violent crime rate. That and the fact that black women are in closer social and familiar proximity to black men may explain the rest.

You’re making some pretty dramatic claims there. Proactively provide evidence rather than just asserting that “you must” do something. Why do you think that? How have you ruled out other explanations, models? These are the questions people are going to ask you. Preempting them helps to keep things…civil.

Evidence has been provided for decades. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring. And it's biased that you guard this specific topic with the provide evidence rule much more than other topics.

Yes. Paying the evidence tax is what turns it from an argument into a debate. The more controversial a topic, the more important it is to explain your reasoning.

@sleepyegg added an example. This is an improvement. Now people who disagree have something to address rather than going straight to “nuh-uh.”

It doesn’t even have to be statistics, though. Citing his own experience would have been fine. The important thing is that there is a chain of reasoning which lets people engage without making up a position for him. It’s also why we discourage sarcasm and weakmanning.

  1. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time?

It might be a good idea. It just takes a link (which @sleepyegg actually has in his post, maybe he added it after @netstack's comment). If posters assume familiarity with such things, newcomers might be bewildered and turned off. FBI crime statistics aren't like "the sun rises in the morning", which you can assume everyone other than insane people acknowledges. Vast numbers of people, including many intelligent ones, have absolutely no idea about the FBI crime statistics you are talking about. It's not that they've even been exposed to the information and rejected it. It's that they have absolutely no idea the information exists. It might not be good for the site to turn (even more) into an insular group of users who assume familiarity with controversial and relatively obscure information.

  1. Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again?

Arguing against HBD doesn't make someone a gaslighter.

Arguing against HBD doesn't make someone a gaslighter.

I've come to accept Hanlon's razor as true:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Is HBD denial adequately explained by stupidity? Not basic denial, no. Trailer-park dwellers intuit the crime statistics. They do not intuit many other controversial ideas. I think the fact that HBD is more controversial in academia than it is among normies is suitable reason to reject the razor in this case. The reverse pattern holds for many other taboo topics, so the razor holds for them.

Even the FBI crime statistics, by themselves, aren't enough to support the original claim. The claim was that (paraphrasing a bit) you can have guns, black people, or a society without much violence, pick two. For that to be true, you need more than statistics which show "look, most crimes are committed by black people", because it does not follow from such statistics that most black people are committing crimes. You need evidence to bridge that gap, the crime statistics themselves can't get there.

You don't need to show that most black people are committing crimes. You can alternately show that you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so, which seems to be empirically correct.

You can alternately show that you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so

Except you haven't shown that. As @FCfromSSC observes we, as society, know how to create better outcomes. The problem is that the required actions are not seen as politically acceptable because there are a lot of bigots and grifters who's egos and livelihoods depend on problems not getting solved.

I can't help but notice that the same people who say "you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so" are the same people who also lionize George Floyd, defend DeCarlos Brown as "a victim of circumstance", and make excuses for liberal AGs releasing violent schizophrenics back onto the street for the umpteenth time.

We can stop the trolly at any time but doing so would require the liberal striver class to admit that they fucked up.

The problem is that the required actions are not seen as politically acceptable because there are a lot of bigots and grifters who's egos and livelihoods depend on problems not getting solved.

The actions are not politically acceptable, and that is why we cannot implement them. It does not matter if there are ways of stopping black criminals if we cannot implement them. We've seen what happens if we try -- the pushback gets stronger until we stop doing it, people who notice the issue are ostracized, it becomes illegal to use data to demonstrate things, and if the data stubbornly keep showing the wrong things, they just stop publishing or collecting it.

We can stop the trolly at any time but doing so would require the liberal striver class to admit that they fucked up.

Then we can't stop it.

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Evidence has been provided for decades. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time?

Yeah, the claim that generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups is very obvious and very well supported.

In my view, the inflammatory claim is the opposite. People who claim that blacks behave more or less the same as every other group are the ones who should be proactively providing evidence. Because, in effect, they are claiming that people who observe and comment on black dysfunction (and its intractability) are either delusional or are liars.

Obviously a society where (1) guns are freely available to adults; and (2) there are a lot of black people, is a society where there will be a lot of shootings.

Yeah, the claim that generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups is very obvious and very well supported.

It most certainly is not. If you want to make that claim, you best bring receipts if you want people to take it seriously (or if you want the mods to not ding you for making inflammatory claims without evidence).

It most certainly is not.

Just so we are clear, are you highly skeptical of the following claims:

(1) In the United States, black people commit crime at rates which are significantly disproportionate;

(2) In the United States, black people become parents out-of-wedlock at rates which are significantly disproportionate;

(3) In the United States, black people save money and accumulate wealth at rates which are significantly under-proportionate;

None of those is the claim you originally made, so I'm not going to get dragged to a debate on any of those points. What you said was "generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups". For that to be true, it would require most black people to behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner (because that is what "generally speaking, (group) behaves" means). To show that a group has higher rates of such behavior does not suffice for proving that most members of the group have that behavior.

None of those is the claim you originally made,

The claim I made was that "generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups"

A reasonable way to evaluate this claim would be to look at crime; out-of-wedlock births; and financial behavior. But let me put the question to you: What sort of evidence would it take to convince you of the claim?

For that to be true, it would require most black people to behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner (because that is what "generally speaking, (group) behaves" means)

No, because I said "compared to members of other groups." So for example, if 5% of blacks behave in an antisocial and/or irresponsible manner, while only 2% of other groups do so, my claim would be correct. (And to be clear, I'm not going to get in a debate over what I meant. I know what I meant and that's what I meant. It was reasonably clear, but even if it wasn't, it's clear now.)

Here on this forum it is often stated outright or implied that those problems are strongly intractable, i.e. that there is no sociocultural intervention (cutting race-based leniency, welfare reforms, penitentiary reforms, less glorification of crime in pop media, etc.) that would, if not completely erase the gap between racial groups, at least make them decent enough neighbors. I do not find that immediately obvious or well supported.

I do not find that immediately obvious or well supported.

You've tried for 60 years, isn't it obvious now?

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"we can't fix this at all"
vs
"everything we've tried to fix this has failed"
vs
"actually, we have a way to fix this, but solutions are being blocked by specific actors for specific reasons".

The difference between these three positions really matters.

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It is not that there is no sociocultural intervention that would reduce the gap. It is that there is no politically acceptable intervention, because all of them will look like they are disproportionately punitive to black people.

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Here on this forum it is often stated outright or implied that those problems are strongly intractable, i.e. that there is no sociocultural intervention (cutting race-based leniency, welfare reforms, penitentiary reforms, less glorification of crime in pop media, etc.) that would, if not completely erase the gap between racial groups, at least make them decent enough neighbors. I do not find that immediately obvious or well supported.

I disagree, but in any event, but the claim -- charitably interpreted -- is that if guns are freely available to adults in the population; and there are a lot of blacks in the population; one can reasonably expect a lot of shootings by black people. My position is that this is so clear and obvious that pro-active evidence is not necessary. I take it you disagree?

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It is not actually obvious at all to the average intelligent person who might make a good Motte commenter but comes from a sheltered liberal or moderate-conservative background. The vast majority even of intelligent, generally well-informed people have never looked at the relevant statistics, and many of them have also been exposed enough to the "the racist law enforcement system is the reason for such statistics" theory that the bare statistics wouldn't even be enough by themselves.

It is not actually obvious at all to the average intelligent person who might make a good Motte commenter but comes from a sheltered liberal or moderate-conservative background. The vast majority even of intelligent, generally well-informed people have never looked at the relevant statistics, and many of them have also been exposed enough to the "the racist law enforcement system is the reason for such statistics" theory that the bare statistics wouldn't even be enough by themselves.

For such a person, what evidence could be provided to substantiate the claim that "generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups"

I imagine the same evidence that convinced you would be a good place to start.

I imagine the same evidence that convinced you would be a good place to start.

Well, that would be (1) general, informal observations; and (2) publicly available statistics.

Apparently, this hypothetical intelligent person does not accept publicly available statistics. And it doesn't seem likely that an anonymous interpret poster's summary of his general informal observations will carry much weight.

Yes. We had a 20 year campaign to deny the truth. So a lot of people have never been exposed to it. And it’s honestly clustered in upper middle class people since they often live in a highly filtered environments and wouldn’t see results on the ground. Even athletes are extremely filtered for intelligence. Antonio Brown is the exception that proves the rule. You need to be highly disciplined and usually more intelligent to make it to the nfl

I mean Antonio Brown's hardly the only nutjob in the NFL he's just had a combination of 'did a bunch of funny nutjobbery and only lapsed into criminality later in his career', 'good enough to stick around even with the character issues' and 'got spotlighted'. Modern sports are pretty good at filtering, but there's always going to be a subpopulation of those who are just so freakishly naturally gifted that they get away with being a moron otherwise.

He’s the leading brand. But I do think most professional athletes are on the more intelligent side. Analytics are probably pushing it farther as the schemes and techniques continue to become more complicated. Body-maxxing is also far more complex. Even with professional experts telling you what to do it takes a lot of discipline to follow the diets and exercise routines. It’s year round training now.

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What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring.

One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.

At the very least, you could link to a past discussion on the Motte or somewhere else that you think did a good job rigorously interrogating the evidence and policy choices, while arriving in the neighborhood of /u/sleepyegg's assertions, so that those of us who are interested in high effort discussions and a free search for truth can have something to sink our teeth into.

One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.

It „used to be that way” and is not that way now, because the Motte did not reward effort posting enough. In my mind the reward for effort posting should be no more „evidence please” for the same dry topic; just go browse the AAQCs or some canonical blog posts, maybe from some of those effort posters who you chased away. If the mod feels the need to chime in, maybe they should chime in with links to some of those instead of demanding another poster do it. There's no point to having a debate if you can never make any progress.

Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier. It's not a particular failure of the Motte to fail to make progress on this topic. If anything, the Motte is better than most places when it comes to it. But what is more interesting to me than rehashing it again is looking at the meta question of, is one side operating in bad faith? I think so, probably. Which deflates my motivation to engage in the object-level debate with high effort.

If the mod feels the need to chime in, maybe they should chime in with links to some of those instead of demanding another poster do it.

We will demand posters follow the rules.

Alternatively, DM me to discuss rates since apparently you are dissatisfied with the level of effort being made by volunteers.

Maybe you haven't been exposed to any decent anti-HBD arguments. Personally, I think there probably is a genetic component to racial differences in criminality. However, I think that pro-HBD people often overstate their case.

@2rafa's recent post about Irish Travelers is interesting when it comes to the explanatory power of HBD.

There are also many examples in history of savage, unintellectual people later becoming great intellectuals without, perhaps, the genetic stock changing much. If one used a time machine to observe the founding Indo-European-speaking stock circa 2000 BC, one would probably find it hard to imagine that 1500 years later they would have descendants like Thucydides and Euclid. If one observed the Germanic people around 0 AD, one would find it hard to imagine that their descendants would include many of the world's foremost scientists and mathematicians.

There are also many examples in history of savage, unintellectual people later becoming great intellectuals without, perhaps, the genetic stock changing much.

You should look up some medieval descriptions of Vikings for fun reading on this. Or German writings about Swedes from around 1630 for that matter. That same genetic stock rather famously produced Alfred Nobel.

If one observed the Germanic people around 0 AD, one would find it hard to imagine that their descendants would include many of the world's foremost scientists and mathematicians.

1500+ years later. Which is about 75 generations. At just +0.01 SD per generation, that can add up to 0.75 SDs in that time. Which is 11.25 IQ points. Which is a rise from a mean of 88.75 to 100. This can be produced by having an average r=0.02 correlation between fertility and IQ during that time by the way. We're experiencing 5x that selection pressure in the opposite direction right now.

Why should the rate be .01 SD/generation? Why should it even be linear?

If the one sample set we’ve got today is a somewhat stronger negative correlation, I would expect that to extend backwards. I know that was the case in 1800s America.

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Any HBDer would readily agree melatonin level does not cause low IQ. With the right selection pressure with a certain amount of time African Americans would begin dominating science and engineering.

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Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier.

Look, I'm fully open to the idea that I'm totally wrong-headed on these topics, and I always try to keep the idea that I might be biased and believing what I want to believe in view as a possibility. But I genuinely think there are a lot of questions that a lot of HBD people I've interacted with seem ill-equipped to deal with.

For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.

Like, I'm fully aware of the "13% of the population commits 50% of the murders" argument, but surely if we were just genuinely tough on crime and caught the bad eggs, there would be no reason for segregation, since the vast majority of African Americans are not murderers? Like, if you just look at averages and standard deviations, then the smartest non-outlier African American in the United States has an IQ of 145. I don't understand why we need a system that segregates that IQ 145 person away from everyone else, just because 1% of his same race cohort are murderers or whatever.

I kind of just don't see why the Steven Pinker-style of HBD-aware liberalism isn't still possible, even if HBD turns out to be 100% true? Do you really assert that we've known since 1995 that such a system was and is impossible with any realistic social arrangement?

Segregation has some issues because very clearly you have some Africans perhaps even well over 50% that do not cause any issues and are perfectly fine mixing with the rest of society.

The best evidence for segregation is America spends an insane amount of money to do segregation without doing segregation. This is essentially all housing regulations in America. Minimum lot sizes, building restrictions, etc that are all designed to make sure poorer people can not get into your neighborhood. It’s car culture. If you look at relatively homogenous populations - pre-19th century Europe, Tokyo, Buenos Aires they all build a lot of dense urban housing. All the cities built after the Great Migration in America are essentially suburbs connected to each other. With local coordination to keep low income folks out of their communities. Sure you can disagree with this argument. You can say it’s just the car and people like backyards. That I guess is viable. Tokyo largely developed posts-car and is dense.

Completely changing how people live (cities to restricted suburbs) is a huge amount of gdp and utility. It’s big enough to justify explicit segregation.

You can honestly just change any argument wokes made for racism caused bad things and instead attribute it to lower class black people bad behavior and then add up all the mitigating costs the rest of the society does to avoid mixing.

I think it’s fairly obvious the US spends trillions per year to achieve segregation without explicit doing segregation. Private schools would barely exists if segregation was legal.

They don't want poor white people in those neighborhoods either, you know. Far less than they want wealthy blacks.

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For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.

Sleepyegg didn't argue for Jim Crow, and you pled for him to include basic race-differences fact links in his post.

For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.

We can't have this discussion properly when you aren't actually willing to grant the basic race facts. You don't just grant for the sake of the argument here; you must grant for the sake of reality. Then we can talk about policy. The way it works, though, is that when we try to establish the facts, we get shouted down. So there is no point and there can be no discussion. The facts remain the facts, and the fact remains that the facts remain denied.

Like, I'm fully aware of the "13% of the population commits 50% of the murders" argument, but surely if we were just genuinely tough on crime and caught the bad eggs, there would be no reason for segregation, since the vast majority of African Americans are not murderers?

That means someone has to die before we act, and we also have to be tough on crime, which is ugly and anti-liberty.

I kind of just don't see why the Steven Pinker-style of HBD-aware liberalism isn't still possible, even if HBD turns out to be 100% true? Do you really assert that we've known since 1995 that such a system was and is impossible with any realistic social arrangement?

No, we have known that the facts about race differences are as sleepyegg stated. We also know race blind liberalism is possible, since the United States lives under it (and to some extent Europe). Do you like the system?

Also, I personally don't argue for Jim Crow and don't know any serious HBD people who do. I would prefer a holistic class based system where race differences are accepted, and races assort into classes in proportions which accord to their talents. Blacks would not be bared from the nobility, but would probably only be a small percent of it, and that is expected based on their racial averages. This is anything but a normal HBD belief, though. It's more like Moldbug multiplied by HBD; most HBD people are slightly racist liberals who just want to be a little more tough on crime and restrict immigration. I would like a society which is run by and for its nobility, which competes against contemporary peasant states by attracting a lower class willing to accept explicit subordination based on superior economics. Its values would be truth, beauty, human flourishing, and biologically improving the human species.

We also know race blind liberalism is possible, since the United States lives under it (and to some extent Europe). Do you like the system?

I mean, isn't the complaint that it isn't actually race-blind? Either because we're too lenient on black defendants, or because of affirmative action and DEI?

My preference as a heterodox libertarian would be for a race blind system that actually punished people where appropriate. If that means a higher percentage of black people end up in prison, so be it. So yes, I like the theoretical idea of race-blind liberalism, more or less.

We can't have this discussion properly when you aren't actually willing to grant the basic race facts. You don't just grant for the sake of the argument here; you must grant for the sake of reality. Then we can talk about policy. The way it works, though, is that when we try to establish the facts, we get shouted down. So there is no point and there can be no discussion. The facts remain the facts, and the fact remains that the facts remain denied.

I don't think I've ever shouted anyone down for anything here on the Motte.

Don't get me wrong. I've been working my way through books recommended here and elsewhere. But it is slow going, and I'm not yet fully on board with HBD in its most common form here.

My biggest hang up has always remained that I just don't think that establishing the facts of HBD should have much effect on public policy besides immigration. We have the people inside of the country that we have. We can do some amount of voluntary eugenics under a libertarian/liberal regime, but even changing my view to agree with the common HBD consensus wouldn't really change anything about how I think society should be organized. I had already priced in that some people are naturally going to be more violent, or stupid, and I still think we should treat them as individuals and let them rise or fall on the basis of their own merits.

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