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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Agreed - dumb people are dumb, and one characteristic of dumb people is an inability to accept cause and effect, that actions have consequences, to take responsibility, etc. As well as suffering from Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. (I've known a few dumb people who knew they were less than bright and more or less accepted it, but most... don't.) Obviously this is equally true of dumb white people and dumb black people.

As for how they cope with it, ideally, that would be on them. Alas...

Yeah, that is the crux of it. My argument is not that IQ tests imply unfortunate things so we should not believe them, or that we should pretend things that aren't true because it makes dumb people feel bad. My argument is a purely practical one: given that dumb people demonstrably can't accept this, then if it's true that blacks and Latinos are dumb at much higher rates, why would you think they should just "cope" and be happy? That's not a reasonable expectation of human behavior.

What is the solution? I don't know.

Some things don't need to be solved, the solution, if we must have one, is what the French did. Stop. Pointing. It. Out. Do not collect racial data. Do not write opinion pieces about racial differences. Attempt as much as possible to pretend that race is like hair color. We did this for a while and things were getting better. I believe, perhaps in futility, that we can return to that place. But can we at least acknowledge that it was a clear miss step? That the racial grievance departments have done real and incredible damage to society?

Well, I agree. I don't think we're going back to "color-blindness", though. Even if we all collectively agreed to stop collecting data and pretend we live in a colorblind meritocracy, it will be impossible not to notice persistent disparities, and the real and lasting damage has been done - a disparity is prima facie evidence of racism.

why would you think they should just "cope" and be happy? That's not a reasonable expectation of human behavior.

These are two separate issues. Obviously, they should accept it because accepting reality leads to better outcomes for the entire nation – and I posit that even dumb people are able to understand patriotism; and if they aren't willing to put the nation above their race, then @Hoffmeister25's plan for separation promises higher odds of success than the status quo.

It is also generally personally adaptive. You can extract concessions via unfair complaints, but can you use them well if you don't even realize the unfairness? This doesn't seem to work for blacks. Meanwhile a low-IQ black person who acts in full knowledge of what his IQ implies will (if properly educated) abstain from hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes and crime, work honestly in sustainable ways, and not support destructive (first of all to the black community itself) movements. In short, behave like a member of a lower-IQ Asian minority such as the Hmong, who are not thriving economically, but also are not nearly as troubled as the black community – my earlier argument about self-esteem aside, and speaking only of objective outcomes like credit scores, family structure, crime&incarceration, disease; misfortunes which are, in the case of blacks, attributed by various tribes to «systemic racism», black culture, or HBD.

As for whether they would – well, obviously they haven't yet, and they never will if everybody of consequence only affirms their suspicion that whitey has tricked them and appropriated what's theirs by right.

But it is not clear to me that dumb people cannot comprehend meritocracy.

Or is there some lower bound for this idea? Everyone here seems on board with the theory that more intelligent people naturally tend to become more competent, thus contribute more and are entitled to earn more benefits. It's not because everyone here is sure of being near-maximally intelligent or feels entitled. It's because we believe merit-based economy is better than spoils system, for the whole society. I realize this would be harder to accept if most users here were dirt poor, but probably not very much harder. The principle holds.