This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Sleepyegg didn't argue for Jim Crow, and you pled for him to include basic race-differences fact links in his post.
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.
That means someone has to die before we act, and we also have to be tough on crime, which is ugly and anti-liberty.
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.
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.
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.
This is my preference as well as a leftist liberal. One major problem is that anyone who has this opinion of "so be it" is deemed to be ideologically indistinguishable from Nathan Bedford Forrest by mainstream liberals who disproportionately influence public conversation about this, if not actual public policy. I haven't been able to figure out a way to fix this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link