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Notes -
Academia vs. racist memes
A new paper in Evolutionary Human Sciences has been making rounds.
Memeing Scientific Racism: The Digital Reframing of Racialist Ideologies – “examines how racialised memes circulating on X revive scientific racism”.
The most intriguing feature of the paper is the way its subject of study is presented. Though the aim is to dissect bigoted memes online with Science, the author deemed it inappropriate to grant her readers direct access to the offending material. The four case-study memes are “presented exclusively through schematic reconstructions created using standard image-editing tools, including limited AI-assisted transformations”, bringing to mind some SCP Foundation containment protocol for high-caliber memetic hazards.
I’m certain that the author believes she is doing genuine research investigating a pressing problem, so that’s the angle I'll consider it from. As far as its scientific value goes, my feelings are mixed. Though the author clearly did a lot of legwork collecting nearly 70 memes, and namedrops things from the Dark Enlightenment and human biodiversity to effective altruism, and genuinely attempts to figure out what makes memes compelling and facilitates their spread, the analysis of the memes seems incomplete.
One of the case studies, a meme that was circulating since 2018, originally features a crude outline of a man drawn in soyjack tradition saying:
The rhetorical thrust, as I see it, is to contrast some of the more shallow sounding supposed benefits of mass migration with its most lurid observed effects.
(In February this year a big account, owned by an actual left winger with real-life clout and bearing a striking resemblance to the meme character made this post:
Which is an interesting case of prophetic hyperstition)
" Ethically modified" version of the meme in the paper turns the man into a simpler, more friendly looking figure changing the text to:
And here's what the author has to say about it:
Though this goes in the right direction, nothing reflects comprehension of the joke, of what the meme tries to convey.
Refraining from including the original memes is a serious self-imposed limitation. She could talk about how the slovenly scribbled caricature serves to dehumanize open border supporters, and a grotesque crime is juxtaposed to a relatively marginal example of benefits of mass migration (which are, of course, countless) as a tool of propaganda.
Though the image of the author frowning and making notes as she browses racist jokes on Twitter brings me joy, this paper appears methodologically limited, and more research into the threat of racist memes online is likely required.
The progressive would never admit to being a scientific racists. But this is scientific racism: “ “The migration policies of Reform and Restore Britain would destroy football throughout the UK”
I don’t think it’s a big leap to go from “some population groups run faster” to “some population groups do management/science better”.
Twitter went off yesterday about how all the African countries suck at football despite having far more genetic stock of football talent. France is the lead country in producing World Cup players (around 100 players). African teams have a lot of African players born in Europe. But they can’t develop players in their own country. A lot like the resource curse which only applies to certain countries.
Like everything else, cognitive science is subject to The Movement and its ends: to the extent that it serves the purpose at hand, IQ is as rock-solid science as universal gravitation; to the extent that it doesn't, it's lies that must be quelled and suppressed.
I tend to be a Cofnasian about wokeness (remove the "equality thesis" and it collapses) but stuff like this does make me wonder.
I suppose you can say that saying IQs are low is fine. Saying groups have lower IQ is very much not fine.
That's where the left often find themselves in trouble intellectually. They'll spend plenty of time examining, reposting, and commenting on the IQ differences of Republican voters vs. Democrat voters. Once you examine group IQ differences along racial lines the conversations end and the silencing begins.
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