site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24468 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What exactly would cosmic justice look like to you? More assumptions/"edifices" went into all the enslavement, oppression, discrimination and demeaning than what you gloss as HBD. They must have believed

  • in average lower intelligence of black people;
  • that average lower intelligence of a group conveys them a right to enslave any member of that group;
  • that skin colour is the right criterion by which to define groups for beliefs such as the preceding two;
  • that keeping slaves is economically advantageous for farmwork

and many other things including ones that are completely beyond dispute nowadays. You seem to single out the first entry in that list as the only one that cosmic justice absolutely requires them to have been wrong about.

Before the Civil War, the American South was economically thriving; wouldn't it have been equally cosmically more just if the fourth assumption turned out to be wrong, and their economy had collapsed long before it came to that? The third assumption is being enthusiastically perpetuated by many people left and right of the political spectrum nowadays, including you yourself in this post. Why does that not fill you with rage? The worldview of slavers would have been equally falsified if the God of Categories descended from above and decreed that actually the criterion on which you should categorise humanity (to then take averages that determine their collective rights) is the ratio of girth to length of their left pinky, rounded to the nearest 0.2. Most of the "pro-HBD" people are happy to conclude that the second entry in the list is the wrong one, and that settles the question of "were slavers right?" in the negative.

that average lower intelligence of a group conveys them a right to enslave any member of that group;

Most people believe this for legal minority/guardianship required. Most mentally disabled people have guardians, and I'm pretty sure legal minority for children is justified based on childrens' lower intelligence. The question is, is/was the black IQ low enough to meet this standard? Nowadays not at the median, but more generally in the past, less intelligent people received less rights because rights had to be won more and life was harder. For example, serfdom. Also non-genetic effects would have caused Africans to have really low apparent intelligences since they had no education or training available in Africa.

that skin colour is the right criterion by which to define groups for beliefs such as the preceding two;

Black people are definitely a race and it follows that in the historical US South skin color was in fact a perfect indicator of race. Now on a global scale it is not (someone with black skin might be Polynesian, Indian, or black African for example) but it was a perfect criterion in 1860 North Carolina.

that keeping slaves is economically advantageous for farmwork

It probably was otherwise it wouldn't have been demanded throughout history. Surely slaves are cheaper than W2 workers. For example slaves don't have to benefit from the Baumol effect. Nowadays the alternative is automation but I doubt we had that automation around in 1800 AD.

Guardianship exists, in theory, in the interest of the child/disabled person. Enslavement definitionally exists to benefit the slaveholder. This isn't to say that some system of slavery can't be worked out that also gives guardianship-like benefits to the slave - or that guardians don't often take advantage of their charges in some way - but let's just say that as much as guadianship isn't perfect, the historical record viz. slaveholders prioritizing their slaves' welfare and flourishing over their profit margins really isn't great.

that average lower intelligence of a group conveys them a right to enslave any member of that group;

Most people believe this for legal minority/guardianship required. Most mentally disabled people have guardians, and I'm pretty sure legal minority for children is justified based on childrens' lower intelligence.

Guardianship is different from enslaving, though. It's perhaps adjacent, but for mentally disabled people, it's based on the individual actually being mentally disabled rather than group-based identity (though obviously the subset of mentally disabled people do end up forming an identity group). For children, there's more than just lower intelligence, including relative inexperience, weakness, smaller size, and maturity (associated with intelligence, but arguably different), as well as the fact that it's definitionally a stage of life that literally everyone has to have passed through to become not-children (or baby or infant or etc.), so it's got a set per-individual expiration date.

If, by some miracle, the current state of scientific literature on IQ and intelligence and correlations between races and other genetic groups became common knowledge tomorrow, I'm skeptical that a movement to bring US race relations back to pre-Civil War times would be successful. We've gone several generations now since not just the Civil War, but also the Civil Rights movement. "Equality" as a virtue has become so engrained in this society that the most effective anti-equality forces right now are succeeding because they're pushing it under the spoken justification of equalizing old inequality. In that setting, this becoming common knowledge isn't going to somehow be the tipping point to a neo-Confederate takeover. In a way, it's cosmic justice for slavery that fear of bringing it back has so mind-killed so many people at so many places of power that it has gone to cause real harm in our ability to understand the world, which in turn has caused real harm to lots and lots of undeserving individuals.

Given the prevailing desire for equality (with a rather unhealthy dose of desire for equity) in America, I'd be more concerned about some mandatory reparations program justified not based on history but rather based on group IQ, where I, as an immigrant, no longer have an excuse to disqualify myself. And I'm pretty sure if we do go full Harrison Bergeron, whatever comes out in reality is guaranteed to be a thousand times stupider than what was in fiction. What would be interesting is if it compels some serious investment into genetic engineering and gene therapy research especially in relation to intelligence and race, in order to equalize the averages over generations, Bene Gesserit-style.

If AGI/ASI really does arrive and make our own human intelligence obsolete anyway, this would also complicate things somewhat, as financial status could become decoupled from intelligence. Or if not, everyone belonging to certain races could be given earrings with a free Claude subscription for life, in an effort to achieve equity between races which, depending on how things go, could be counterproductive or work too well or both.

But I can't express that belief because of how obviously irrational it is. It's a demand for cosmic justice, not a real intellectual rebuttal. Yet I can't help it

On this meta issue, I wonder if this harmful tendency of humans to attach moral weight to empirical facts is fixable and if so, how that would work. I feel like it should be standard in schools, starting from as soon as any sort of essays or argumentation is taught, to always use examples of correct arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers extremely evil or odious (i.e. fascism, racism, murder, rape, genocide, slavery) to always use examples of incorrect arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers good (i.e. democracy, equal rights, feeding babies). Hard to implement, even harder to enforce. I'd also think that, if I were a teacher, I'd try to make sure that the most popular high status kids are assigned to make arguments in favor of the most apparently evil things and the least popular low status kids are assigned the ones in favor of the most universally beloved and apparently good things. But that's even harder to implement and enforce. But if I ever became emperor of Earth, I'd probably edit the common core to include something along these lines.

I feel like it should be standard in schools, starting from as soon as any sort of essays or argumentation is taught, to always use examples of correct arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers extremely evil or odious (i.e. fascism, racism, murder, rape, genocide, slavery) to always use examples of incorrect arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers good (i.e. democracy, equal rights, feeding babies).

This would be a fascinating experiment. There would still be strong societal influences from outside of school that would shape the students, but in general I would expect that this would make some of the "extremely evil or odious" things much less taboo to them. For most people, the ability to even voice a "correct" argument in favor of something means that it is within the Overton Window. I say this as someone who used to be a much lower decoupler and can still somewhat model my past self.

if I were a teacher, I'd try to make sure that the most popular high status kids are assigned to make arguments in favor of the most apparently evil things and the least popular low status kids are assigned the ones in favor of the most universally beloved and apparently good things.

I'm imagining a Hitler Youth of Chads and Stacys running things by the time the experiment reaches high school...

Because HBDers don't want to eat the whole bullet. If being inferior on some axis is justification for unequal treatment then you might find your gander being sauced when it turns out that your own demographic isn't as high IQ as Jews or next generation chatbots, or as strong and capable as a younger demographic. Men are superior to women? Okay big man, the same thing goes for your own wife and daughter.

Let's look at why HBD is called Human Biological Diversity. The premise of the argument - borrowed from progressives - is that diversity is good, but that blending different cultures/races via mass immigration reduces diversity where they successfully mix and introduces conflict as a result of racial differences where they don't (remember: diversity depends on differences, meaning they can't retreat to colour blindness), and so to maintain the biological diversity of humanity the various genotypes should be kept apart. At it's base its anti-immigration/anti-integration rhetoric, not a racial supremacy theory.

The argument leans on and gestures at a blindspot or element of hypocrisy in the worldview of progressives who will happily support and defend diversity in every other context but clam up when faced with the diversity of human communities where the progressive's own politics are the only acceptable course. It's a convoluted gotcha - "You like diversity, don't you? Well ackshually you're harming the same diversity you claim to defend. Checkmate."

You can make an intellectual rebuttal to HBD by taking it seriously, analysing the means and ends of it, illustrating the implications of applying it consistently across all demographic axes, and contrasting that against the selective applications that HBD fans usually suggest and checking for inconsistencies. I'm not saying that's the perfect rebuttal, I'd hope that others can do better, but it's a start. Getting angry only leads to a "you rage you lose" forfeit.

This conspiracy theory about an "edifice of anti-blackness" is where you went wrong, IMO.

It never existed. There are always racist people, and there is always an ethnic angle to political conflict. Mostly this doesn't matter too much, because people are not and have never been any bigger on ethnic identity than any other. Racism is not an explanation, but a symptom.

The edifice of modern society based on international capitalism, division of labor and technological advancement is not and has never been anti-black. Black people who ran into it had a variety of outcomes, from slavery to slave trading empires. Every other group on earth did too. The native Americans died mostly of unknown and uncured diseases. The Mughals got overthrown by a beverage company. The Aztecs got overthrown by a local rebellion against their tyrannical rule spearheaded by a few Spaniards. The Aborigines were just....ignored mostly, so dysfunctional they were never an organized threat to anything.

Not every group of people was well selected for this new world. The long-civilized and long broken to the yoke of empire parts of the world tended to do better than more primitive cultures. This isn't a moral reflection on those people, but a recognition of their lesser ability to navigate the sort of complex systems and institutions necessary for a modern society. Civilization is partially genetic, as each society selects over time for those who can follow and prosper under its rules.

Take one aspect as an example. Literacy is one of those things that is not necessary or common in lower civilizations but becomes absolutely essential the more advanced a society is. People from largely illiterate societies by definition have not been genetically selected for whatever genes contribute to literacy. Over hundreds or thousands of years, once they develop a culture of literacy, they will become genetically better at it.

The reason Japan could resist colonization, and China could recover so quickly once they resolved the power struggle is civilizational, by which I mean a mental suitedness to complex society that has become partially genetic. Culture becomes genetic over time. This is why Ashkenazis have high average IQ, but Mizrahi don't.

We see that some cultures developed genetic templates that are superior under the current dispensation. These are not centrally "white" genetically, but tend to come from the heavily selected upper classes of several major genetic groups, all of which have a millennium or three of cultural literacy. Europe, China, Japan, India, the Semitic peoples, etc.

Some cultures developed genetic templates that are not well suited to the current dispensation. These are not centrally "black" although many (all?) black cultures are included. Tribal societies everywhere have struggled, from native Americans to Hmong immigrants post-Vietnam war. The Mongolians are not exactly tearing it up in international finance.

Much of the inequality everyone decries is just the mismatch of genetic templates from more primitive societies being exposed to the modern world. This has changed over time and will continue to change. HBD is a moving target. The future will be written by those cultural institutions that determine our current genetic selection.

People from largely illiterate societies by definition have not been genetically selected for whatever genes contribute to literacy.

They haven't been genetically selected for whatever genes contributed to literacy based on the results of that contribution to literacy, but if the beneficial alleles weren't heavily pleiotropic and selected for based on other effects then none of the rest of us would have them either. You can get something like "hang on to lactose digestion longer" from a single mutation, but "easily figure out how to turn abstract squiggles into concepts and vice versa" has got to be a side-effect of genes with other effects on the brain. It doesn't surprise us too much that an illiterate descended from ancestors with spotty "ideograms on birch bark" at best could eventually encounter "talking leaves" in other languages, then invent a syllabary for his own language, then spread literacy to half his contemporaries within a few years afterward.

It's possible that those genes then underwent greater selection later in societies with writing systems, but a priori it could be that they instead underwent less selection later. The worry that reading acts as a crutch and weakens our reliance on and our practice of memory and true understanding dates back as far as Plato, and its modern version is as near as that "students using AI do better on homework and worse on tests" study The Economist reported a few days ago.

A lot of these templates aren’t genetic- Confucianism is really good at learning and implementing superior organizational realities. Islam is definitely not(and Muslims are not majority Arab- this is a missionary religion).

Confucianism is a belief system which the Chinese have been using to select for their elites/mates for several thousand years. Do you really think that has had no genetic effect at the population level? At this point, I would say Confucianism has imprinted itself on the Han genetic code, just as Christianity has the European. A society run more or less under that framework has been executing rebels and criminals as defined by that system for four thousand years.

Islam is an interesting case. It has only ever been successful when married to a militarily dominant ethnic group. The arabs who originated it never had the assabiyya to maintain an empire, and thus it became the tame religion of one after the other of older ethnic groups and newer barbarian tribes (Shia for the Persians, Sunni for the Egyptians, and Turks). Due both to the organizational limitations and the genetic diversity of their adherents, the imprint of Islam is harder to distinguish, but still I think present in the older populations.

I propose an experiment- confucians create missionaries who travel to spread the word of improvement through education, respect for elders, hierarchy, etc to all the most savage primitives of the world. I predict that the sentinelese and new guineans will improve themselves.

Islam is, I agree, an interesting case, partly because it would be the textbook example of bad culture even where the ethnic group it affects is otherwise quite capable. But we don't need to look that far. Anthropologists- most of whom are progressives or marxists and don't like Christianity- have extensively studied the difference between primitives who have been converted by Christian missionaries and primitives who remain in the service of dumb idols. And, like, there isn't a space program from third world Christianity, but they generally compare favorably to their coethnics who continue to worship demons instead. You don't seem to see that with Islam, despite extensive Islamic missionary activities in Africa.

Hard to pin down exactly what it might be. My guess is that Islam provides a template for organizing clan-based societies under a religious superstructure that is too weak to hold sway without political power. I wonder if the explicit sanction of polygamy has a role.

Fukuyama talks about how both Christianity and the Chinese Imperial Bureaucracy were essential to breaking the power of the clans in their respective societies. Islam doesn't seem to do that at all, which is perhaps why their societies are unstable and unable to coalesce around nationalistic lines outside of discrete ethnic groups.

Whatever the causes are, something happened in the past that led to the existing population-level differences in intellectual achievement.

The question posed by the Civil Rights con is how much effort should be expanded to resolve these historical inequalities?

If there are $100 in education dollars, whether in school or library staff salaries or in compute, how many of these $100 should be taken away from your paycheck and given to little JD Vance or to little Jason Arday?

There are some things which are beyond politics and science - in particular, the domain of the tragic. If HBD, and genetic determinism more broadly, are true, they are part of the tragic nature of the human condition. Modernity tries to deny that nature, because it believes there can be nothing beyond politics and science (and modernity has ameliorated our condition - mass infant mortality is no longer one of our tragedies, for instance, and I recall Scott's old take on HBD being "let's not think too much about it but work really hard on gene editing to boost intelligence"). Historically, people have turned to faith and art, but we're not as good at that these days, either.

When people both here and elsewhere say that HBD is true but that society should still treat people as individuals or practice colorblindness, I get really mad.

Here is an analogy for you.

Certain populations enjoy a strong genetic advantage in long distance running. One might thus be tempted to simply select Ethiopian origin (or whatever) athletes to represent the US in international events. Except that this would be silly. Even within the genetically most favored group, there is still a lot of variance, so you want to select your athletes by track record rather than by ethnicity. And once you select by merit (which is the actual thing you care for), there is no reason not no let White or Asian athletes compete if they run fast enough.

Now, if you want for some reason to select for people whose kids will make great long distance runners, it might make some sense to take into ethnicity into account, because a +3 ethnic advantage to long distance running is likely not subject to regression to the mean in the same way environmental factors are. But even then, ethnicity would be just a crude proxy, and you would be better off looking at what actually interests you: alleles favoring long distance running.

By revealed preference, we do not care about the genetic markup of future generations on a societal level. The left believes in blank-slatism, so obviously it does not concern them. The right has simply other priorities. For example, access to abortion is a cheap way to prevent/slow/reverse IQ decline without any of the usual ethic dilemmas of coercive population control. In all likelihood, the 16yo's who had drunken unprotected PIV sex at a party will not become professors irrespective of the pregnancy. Nor would their kid (even if raised in an academic household, but in all likelihood it will be raised by a single mother, probably adding an environmental disadvantage to the likely genetic one). The rare IQ-140 girl who finds herself pregnant at 16 in Texas is much more likely to have plans about her future and the social network and agency to get an abortion out of state.

But the right has decided that they want unwanted pregnancies to disincline fornication. And thus they can not credibly pretend to care about the future genetic composition of society any more than a government which outlaws the use of water to combat forest fires can pretend to be seriously opposed to fires. Thus if I hear someone from MAGA claiming that one can not let in immigrants from certain countries because due to HBD this might lead to less stable societies, what I hear is "I really don't like more brown people here".

The analogy is neat and mostly besides the point. You are not selecting athletes for a race next month. HBD is about what follows when large, persistent group differences in traits that society actually rewards (IQ, crime, educational attainment) exist inside a single country, and when those differences are visible enough that ordinary people can pattern match on them. And in this case, he literally cannot switch teams. We know the Chinese and Japanese can build and maintain complex, high trust, developed societies of their own. Just look at their countries, then look at sub-Saharan Africa. This will shape perceptions and social status even if you're not allowed to say it out loud. An individual black man who is personally intelligent and did not choose to be his group's average will still be judged by his tribe's behaviour. And that shadow feels unfair to him, because if the patterns are real, then the old racists weren't entirely wrong about his people. What's grimmer still is that, perhaps, the average black person may be doomed to live in squalor many generations down the line, in America and in Africa. It's perfectly reasonable to want better outcomes for your tribe, and feel frustrated by the bleak likelihood that they may never be achieved.

The right has simply other priorities

'The right' is not a person (neither is 'the left' for that matter).

Religious conservatives who oppose abortion because they consider it infanticide and anti-immigration rightists who are willing to talk about HBD on twitter are mostly different people.

Alternatively, even if HBD is true, individuals should be treated colorblind. You don’t have to accept a premise to reason hypothetically.

Please try harder to step out of your point of view. If you truly believe that Black people are inferior, which you just said, this is because you have accepted a certain set of rules that means the qualities of Black people are inferior to the qualities of other groups of people.

A long time ago I had a boyfriend who was Black. He could barely count when he went to pay for things (this is not an exaggeration) and I'm not sure he could even type to text or if he used speech to text for everything he wrote. Yet still there were qualities he had that impressed me. He was so kind, had a great memory, so musically talented, so friendly, even when we were doing something so casually like going to a movie or dinner he made it feel like a special occasion. He passed away a few years ago but I still remember him fondly and think I became a better person and my world was improved by being with him even though it was for such a short time. He had various health issues he was saddled with from his birth he had no control over that eventually ended his life far too early. But despite all this I do not today or ever in the past see him as inferior to me in any way. I am not religious but I believe every person is equal and that we must treat each other as such. It offends me that people might have seen him as an inferior person to me. And I feel the same way about other boyfriends I've had in the past, regardless of their race, people in my family, who are all the same race as me, and every other person living or dead.

The broader point I want to make is that there is more than one measure of a man. If you belong to mainstream bourgeois western society today, there are certain skills and traits that are predominant and revered. I have Noticed that most of these traits align with the traits of White people especially and to a lesser extent East Asian people. These traits are portrayed as intelligence, time efficiency, cleverness, and so on. But intelligence brings with it an arrogance, time efficiency the specter of impatience, and cleverness a tendency to manipulate. These are not inherently superior traits, and often are perceived badly by people outside of the modern West.

In other words, if you buy into a worldview that places Black people as inferior to any other race, perhaps your worldview is wrong.

It's not so much that wealthy Western countries decided to lionize intelligence, time management, and cleverness, despite the possible vices at the extremes of the golden mean. Rather, being clever, intelligent, and punctual is conducive to creating a wealthy society. Because of these Western traits, a great many people have been pulled out of poverty. Being simply kind didn't do much to help feed everyone as much as developing the systems needed to produce 10x the food people could ever need, making food so cheap it is often given away without pain or sacrifice.

It's not fair, necessarily, and I have a lot of sympathy for people who are not the best at everything. But if we fail to acknowledge the outcomes of each society are downstream of the people and culture who produced them, we risk cutting off the legs on which we stand.

I don't disagree and I understand your point of view, but as someone who travels a ton, and who can see the good in the Mexicans and Thais and Jamaicans of the world as much as in the Swiss and the Japanese and the WASPs, I don't accept the given superiority of the latter group over the former in a cosmic sense, while at the same time, hoping that the latter people can have the conscientiousness to assert their values over more dysfunctional ones. HBD is actually the most effective and kind tools we have to do this. I don't believe in lying to anyone, I believe that even Black American people can accept HBD statistics if they are spoken to like mature and intelligent people. A huge percentage of them don't like a ridiculous dysfunctional leadership any more than the rest of us.

A long time ago I had a boyfriend who was Black. He could barely count when he went to pay for things (this is not an exaggeration) and I'm not sure he could even type to text or if he used speech to text for everything he wrote.

Are you sure that this is due to low intelligence rather than being simply undereducated? Inner city schools can be appallingly bad.

Now I don’t claim that they would be producing Nobel laureates very often with better instruction. But one of my uncle’s stepfather worked as a math teacher in juvie when he was younger and claims to have successfully taught math(I think pre-Algebra) to, by definition, some of the dumbest teen boys in west Texas. Mississippi with its population of poor black kids manages to teach fairly decently- actually better than all-white midwestern states with very high adult IQ scores.

No no no he was simply very low intelligence in terms of math and verbal intelligence and so on. A huge chunk of my family on one side are teachers or work in education and I don't buy the "blame the schools not the students" line at all. I grew up in a relatively affluent suburban school next to a northern migration city with a huge Black population, and the Black kids in my very same school were all in remedial education programs while all the Asians were in advanced programs. I don't know how everyone didn't notice this in first grade and then assume HBD was right from the start, it boggles my mind.

From what I understand teaching methods in Mississippi are closer to traditional education methods rather than the liberal "phonics isn't real" thing so I'm imagining that explains that

I am aware that some people are simply too stupid to learn. But there are real problems with many schools serving mostly blacks, with terrible instructional methods, unwillingness to make students learn, etc- an attitude that Scott(pbuh) describes as 'success through fraud and very low standards'. But I've met many black people and they aren't actual literal retards. They can count. They can read. They understand synonyms, they understand that they would be hungry if they didn't have breakfast.

'The average black will never learn differential calculus' is a different statement than the level of dysfunction you're describing, and poor pedagogy is a known thing that their community suffers from.

I am not religious but I believe every person is equal and that we must treat each other as such.

Humanism is functionally a religion, and this is functionally a religious belief. That does not invalidate it; far from it. But I think it's better to recognize what are statements of faith as such.

People have a hard time separating "moral worth" from... not exactly "economic worth," but something like that, that complicates their analysis of "equal in humanity" and "equal in literally everything that has value in modern society." I think liberal-progressives are especially bad at separating those and that's why they overcompensate so hard.

Your boyfriend, RIP, sounds like a lovely person, and as a carrier of the spark of humanity, the Imago Dei if you don't mind the religious terminology, has the same moral worth as anyone else. Trying to make him, say, a Cambridge professor or an astrophysicist would not have served anyone well.

But what does one do with that, at the population level? How does a multiethnic, multicultural society wrestle with "some groups are going to be overrepresented in some things, and underrepresented in others," and the downstream effects thereof? I don't know. I don't know of a good answer there, I just know the "hundreds of bonus points for college admissions and hiring decisions" answer is a bad one.

cleverness a tendency to manipulate. These are not inherently superior traits, and often are perceived badly by people outside of the modern West.

I would disagree with this last one, that cleverness meaning a tendency to manipulate is at its lowest in the modern West. Or was in the Golden Age/Cold War period, and ticked up substantially post-2000ish. Corruption and fraud are much higher basically everywhere else.

This isn't a hostile comment; I'm just curious. Your capitalization of "Black" suggests that you're in favour of leftist racial politics. But are you aware that they don't capitalize "White" the same way? Neither makes linguistic sense, since they're adjectives not based on a proper noun.

From what I can tell, modern journos decided to start capitalizing "Black" specifically because it's silly and wrong, as a way to signal tribal affiliation (like putting obvious pronouns in one's bio). So capitalizing "Black" will annoy people on the right, but capitalizing "White" will annoy people on the left. Is it your intention to do both?

modern journos decided to start capitalizing "Black" specifically because it's silly and wrong

No, I don't think this is a charitable interpretation. I think modern journalists started doing it to be respectful. I capitalize Black because I think it is silly and wrong and points to the hypocrisy of the left and the surrealism of our society as a whole. I do it because it is the "correct" way in the style guide newspeak of today. It is similar to how some American Indians prefer to be called Indians as it points to the idiocy of the explorers who believed they were in Asia and so on.

I think in the context of American race politics, both "Black" and "White" are normally used to refer to specific ethnic groups, and are therefore correctly capitalised. American Blacks are definitely an ethnic group - they have a distinct identity and their ancestors have been in America and mostly endogamous since 1808. American Whites' status as an ethnic group is less clear - their distinct identity (as White, rather than the various European nationalities their ancestors came from) comes from an artificial project designed to hold the Democrat's corrupt bargain between northern "white ethnics" and southern racists together, and they weren't meaningfully endogamous until the taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage weakened after WW2. But the Democrats' racist project was successful, and in the current year "White American" is an ethnic group and American White nationalists (and Black nationalists) are bad people, but intellectually coherent.

Applying the American ideas of Black and White to the rest of the world makes you stupid - outside American there are black people and white people (based on broad racial characteristics, and not capitalised because the words are purely descriptive like "short" and "big-nosed") but neither is an ethnic group. For a European to be a White nationalist is not even wrong - there is no White nation over here.

You are, if anything, understating thé taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage; before WWII different kinds of ethnic Catholics wouldn’t marry other ethnicities of Catholic. But it’s also more or less true that red tribe whites are functionally an ethnicity these days, and this is what ‘white’ as an ethnic group normally refers to(because it is the majority, and often a large majority, of the white population outside of New England).

HBD is not just about intelligence. And, no, I don't mean distance running or altitude breathing; I mean other mental traits.

Intelligence is easy mode, both because we have a test to measure it (IQ testing is the single most successful result in psychology) and because it is easy to say that someone should not be penalized just for being born dumb if they are morally praiseworthy in other areas; that the kind, hardworking janitor still deserves respect and a good life even if he still counts on his fingers. That is, indeed, a core socialist argument for why CEOs should not get paid much more than unskilled labor.

But, of course, HBD is also about conscientiousness (or executive function, or grit, or whatever the hell they are calling it now), and propensity to violence, and time preference, and so on. It's another thing entirely to say that a lazy, violent janitor deserves the same good life and social admiration as a CEO. But the shape of the argument is exactly the same. Therefore, proves too much.

Bur, of course, HBD is also about conscientiousness (or executive function, or grit, or whatever the hell they are calling it now), and propensity to violence, and time preference, and so on. It's another thing entirely to say that a lazy, violent janitor deserves the same good life and social admiration as a CEO. But the shape of the argument is exactly the same. Therefore, proves too much.

The beliefs (all of those traits are genetic to a degree) and (we should punish [broadly defined] some of them but not others) aren't contradictory. It all comes down to what you hope to achieve when you punish (or fail to reward) something. You can't punish someone for having low innate intelligence and expect them to get smarter. You can, however, punish someone for being violent and actually expect them to be less likely to choose violence.

Of course, the effect of high iq can be duplicated through other means, to a degree: A person who is dumber can often achieve the same things as someone who is smarter, but with more effort, so by paying some highly skilled profession X and paying some less skilled profession X-Y, you're increasing the likelihood that someone will either go into the skilled profession by using relatively much smarts and relatively less grit, or by using relatively much grit and relatively less smarts.

The moral worth of an individual doesn't dissolve the practical problem @Chi_Wara is lamenting over.

Even if every person has equal moral worth, human psychology will pattern-match group averages when those averages are large, persistent, and predictive. Crime rates, IQ, and other measurable outcomes are not evenly distributed across populations. When those patterns are visible to everyday joe's, even accomplished individuals will be judged according to their group's profile. And if these patterns are real and not simply explainable by environmental factors, then the social and status costs of sharing physiognomy with the lower performing groups become "justified" in some sense. Anti-racist HR policing can suppress HBD discussions, but it cannot rewrite human psychology and subconscious behaviours.

I do think there is a weirdly totalizing way that some people think about intelligence and moral worth in humans.

Like, come on, do people who fall prey to this kind of thinking really not have any dumb people who they respect for the virtues they do have?

Even in history, I look back and find less intelligent people I admire. One of my favorite Stoics is Cleanthes. He had a reputation for being a slow learner and a dullard, and he made his money fetching water, digging ditches and generally doing all the little odd jobs people would pay him for. And yet he was humble, loyal, hard-working, thick-skinned when insulted (by the Athenian public at large, or by his fellow Stoic pupils), and just seems to have been an all around good guy. I don't think it is an accident that he was made the second scholarch of the Stoics, even though Zeno had many worthy pupils who were much smarter than him. I also just admire a guy who managed to get into the history books by being virtuous and hard-working.

I also just admire a guy who managed to get into the history books by being virtuous and hard-working.

If you think about it, those are some of the few things that are completely within one's control. We cannot control our height, or our ability to grasp complex subjects instantly. We can control how hard we work and be good people.

A lot of people hate the so-called "Protestant work ethic", but at its core, there's something very egalitarian about it.

HBD does not imply hierarchy between races. The conceit of eugenicists is that they project their values onto nature.

They believe that what they consider good traits in humans is correlated or identified with genetic fitness. But there is no reason to believe these preferences are true, good, or invulnerable to human biases.

That they may be right in their analysis of the distribution of the traits does not imply that we should value what they value.

But this, in turn, is why they are heretics: because the underlying concept of all modernism is scientific government. The lie that we can extract good morals from reason and method alone.

And most of their fellow modernists are hypocrites who would rather taboo the truth than admit to the lie. Because then they would have to give up the edifice of moral legitimacy that gives them power.

Liars don't deserve cosmic justice. And we are all liars. Only once we repent may some more of the light of truth shine without burning us.

Because what I want to say in response is that that isn't good enough because your premise was supposed to wrong! The edifice that was used to justify anti-blackness for centuries was supposed to be completely discredited, put into the dustbin of history. You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right. That’s not fair!

I just think we're quick to forget. Abraham Lincoln was essentially in the group you criticize, he didn't think black people would turn out as capable as white people, but he didn't think they should be slaves.

Even if black people have an average IQ of 85, we would still predict there to be an IQ 145 black person in the United States who is not an outlier (he's perfectly on the bell curve.) Why should he be treated like a murderer, thief or criminal before he has actually committed a crime? Why should he not be allowed to live in a nice suburb if he can afford to live there? Why should he not have a colorblind chance of getting into a school based on his own hard work?

I really do think that a lot of the emotions people feel around 13/50 statistics are about as irrational as the women who would rather encounter a bear than a man when walking in the wilderness. Some men are rapists, but that doesn't mean that an average man is particularly likely to rape you. So too, some black people are violent criminals, but it doesn't mean that the average black person is particularly likely to commit a violet crime against you (especially when you're talking something like a college or professional environment which is more likely to be pulling from the upper end of the distribution of black people.)

Why should he not be allowed to live in a nice suburb if he can afford to live there? Why should he not have a colorblind chance of getting into a school based on his own hard work?

Because that requires also keeping around all the others of his race, who might be a burden on society as a whole.

I mean, in the United States, ADOS African Americans are here to stay, and there's not really a good alternative. We're not going to deport them all to Liberia or something, and if a president started doing that (or worse), I would consider that a cure worse than the disease.

Why isn't the de facto segregation of some people being able to live in expensive suburbs and some people being unable to live in expensive suburbs enough for you? It operates with the cold efficiency of capitalism, instead of requiring any actual interpersonal discrimination on anyone's parts. And the police actually do a good job policing suburbs, so it will be harder for any malefactor to step a toe out of line, white or black.

really do think that a lot of the emotions people feel around 13/50 statistics are about as irrational as the women who would rather encounter a bear than a man when walking in the wilderness. Some men are rapists, but that doesn't mean that an average man is particularly likely to rape you. So too, some black people are violent criminals, but it doesn't mean that the average black person is particularly likely to commit a violet crime against you (especially when you're talking something like a college or professional environment which is more likely to be pulling from the upper end of the distribution of black people.)

I wrote a comment about this a while back, but we do allow some discrimination on the social level based on this very fact. Uber has a feature that basically allows for women to select only women drivers, this is justified under the guise of womens safety. Whats stopping someone from making the same argument based on race if HDB is true?

Abraham Lincoln was essentially in the group you criticize, he didn't think black people would turn out as capable as white people, but he didn't think they should be slaves

Or, to hear it from the great man himself (slightly adjusted by Teddy Roosevelt):

I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal-equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all - constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.

@Chi_Wara - I'm putting this additional response here, but I'm really responding to a post you made 2 years ago, since it relates to this discussion.

I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

I don't think we can close the book on any of those things. There are definitely factors that make some of these things worse that can potentially be mitigated with the right social interventions. Drugs and alcohol really do make black communities worse, increasing violent crime and potentially reducing black IQ (in the case of certain drugs.) The War on Drugs might have been misguided, and harm reduction might have been misguided, but there is a world of social interventions we could try that might improve the situation and have more black people clean and off drugs, and gainfully and lawfully employed.

As far as poverty goes, a rising tide raises all boats. If groceries get cheaper in the US, they get cheaper for black people as well. If entertainment or consumer goods get cheaper in the US, they get cheaper for black people as well. Nothing about the situation suggests that black poverty is intransigent.

And as far as ignorance goes, I think we should be trying to achieve ultrahumanism: every human as capable and free as he or she reasonably can be in society, each person achieving their own individualized highest potential. The potentials might be different for a 115 IQ black man and an 85 IQ black man, but there's no reason to assume that we can't arrange society in a way that educates them both to the limits of their abilities, and successfully integrates them as valued members of the community, doing whatever job they are best suited for. And take heart, if the singularity ever happens, all humans will be basically obsolete anyways, whether smart or dumb, and the plight of an 85 IQ black man, and a 175 IQ Asian man will likely be one and the same.

Before mass migration we could functionally ignore HBD and be nice and get along because the country was 87% white. It was always just an easier way to govern America. When immigration increased and wide scale changing of US demographics became an issue then it was a no longer tenable position. I think for 1990’s America it probably was better to eliminate knowledge of racial differences from public view especially since everyone was still internally racists enough to do a meritocracy on crime enforcement.

You are aware that Lutherans, WASPs, and the different Catholic ethnicities Did Not Trust Each Other at the time?

Post 1980’s I guess we had a golden age.

Before mass migration we could functionally ignore HBD and be nice and get along because the country was 87% white

I'm not going to say you're fully wrong here, but history suggests that the 87% of what is currently considered "white" did not self-identify at the time as homogeneous. The largest single lynching in US history was of Italians (and why we celebrate Columbus Day). And they're hardly the only such group.

The perceived unity of the mid-twentieth century seems IMO more a product of the trauma-bonding of the wars, the looming Cold War threat to unite against, and mass-market broadcast culture. TV, radio, and print media all existed, but were restricted to scales that gate kept access and enforced some degree of "same screen".

Very much so. Shortly before Trump came down the escalator, America was at less risk of a race war than at any time since the Monroe administration, and possibly since the founding.

Why do I say this? There was a constant, very real, threat of political violence over slavery from the 1820 Missouri crisis forward, that would eventually break out into large-scale political violence in 1854 (Bleeding Kansas) and all-out civil war in 1861. After the war, there was a failed white insurgency in the South (the 1st Klan) followed by a successful one (Redemption), such that the South was not consistently peaceful until Jim Crow was secured around 1890.

There is then a period of relative racial peace (in the "absence of violence" sense, not the "presence of justice" sense) as Jim Crow is uncontested, but this requires occasional pogroms to maintain white dominance, and is a period in which a violent criminal racist organisation (the 2nd Klan) ran Indiana and was a big political player in several other states.

I don't think "the Civil rights era was full of threatened political violence and America getting through with as little bloodshed as they did was a great achievement" should be controversial.

And post-1970, the main forms of race-linked violence in America have been black-on-white crime, attempts by white vigilantes to stop it extra-legally, and attempts by Blue state and local governments to suppress white vigilantism. And crime in general, including black-on-white violent crime is dramatically lower than it was at the peak of the 1970s/80s crime wave.

So until MAGA and Woke started threatening political violence against each other, 2010s America had less race-linked criminal violence than at any time since the civil rights movement, and the post civil rights racial order featured no organised race-linked political violence and a lower threat level of potential political violence than previous racial orders.

Shortly before Trump came down the escalator, America was at less risk of a race war than at any time since the Monroe administration, and possibly since the founding.

The escalator (June 2015) was less than a year after the first Ferguson riots (which spanned several dates, the last of which was after the escalator). I would agree that race relations probably reached their best point during the early years of the Obama administration, but there was a demonstrable slope toward weaponizing it from as early as the White House Beer Summit (6 months into office). I think many people expected better improvements under Obama's leadership (I'm not going to say those expectations were, in hindsight, realistic), and more than a few voters soured on the idea in both directions.

I don't think "the Civil rights era was full of threatened political violence and America getting through with as little bloodshed as they did was a great achievement" should be controversial.

When I read about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, it’s interesting to do a compare/contrast of that with the US Civil Rights movement. If it was handled poorly, the US could’ve had a continent sized Troubles in the 60s and 70s. The US already had the days of rage in the late 60s and early 70s.

Good point. The Catholics protesting housing discrimination in Derry in the late 60's (and both sides agree that this is the flashpoint that escalated into the Troubles) explicitly modelled their movement on the US Civil Rights Movement. And Ian Paisley (who became the leader of the Protestant diehards) saw his role on the other side as part of the same spiritual project as the Southern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist/segregationist rearguard - he ended up on the board of Bob Jones University.

I think you could probably argue that the Days of Rage was the American troubles, just dramatically less troublesome.

This is why you should be a 'white supremacist' actually. If you care about the well-being of your own people, you should take to heart the '14 words':

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children

After all, Europeans are the only people that managed to stop the trade of African slaves within the territories they controlled. As soon as they relinquished control of African territories, the slavery returned.

Or perhaps you see equality as a foreign value pushed down by oppressive foreign people, and therefore the self-determining Africans should have a right to enslave each other, practice polygamy and cannibalism, and the rest of their precolonial culture.

Is DEI and affirmative action cosmic justice? Or just paternalistic handouts? How do you feel about Jason Arday? Victim of DEI-enablement or of an unfair witch hunt because black professors could not seriously be held to the same standards as say, the white woman of the 'Brad Pitt in hospital scam' fame?

After all, Europeans are the only people that managed to stop the trade of African slaves within the territories they controlled. As soon as they relinquished control of African territories, the slavery returned.

What do you mean by "Europeans"?

The British managed to stop the slave trade within the territories we controlled (which, by the second half of the 19th century, included the entire Atlantic) and so, belatedly, did the Yankees in the territory they controlled. The other Europeans didn't really bother until the Royal Navy made the trade dangerous and unprofitable.

Eh, France did, and most Latin American countries were white ruled at the time they ended slavery. The Arabs kept slavery for a very long time but Europeans didn't bother.

I suppose I should say Western Europeans, as it seems the Russians may have fewer qualms about slavery perhaps due to their Mongol/khanate history.

Either way, it appears to me that most African-descended people have historically enjoyed comparatively better living conditions under the rule of white / Europeans than under their own or that of non-Europeans.

Even under Jim Crow America, while there were restrictions, denial of access, inequalities etc in the services provided to African-Americans, they still enjoyed vastly superior access to white-made wonders such as running water, electricity, healthcare, education, the automobile, the railway, etc than in some current day sub saharian African countries.

You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right. That’s not fair!

Let us assume HBD is correct.

That does not make it acceptable to enslave, discriminate, oppress, or demean a race of people - all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect.

I'd also question the implicit assumption which seems to be built in that IQ is what makes someone superior/inferior. Is the 120 IQ person superior to the 119 IQ person? 110 IQ? 100 IQ?

Yes, I am aware on a population level, IQ is correlated with better outcomes, etc. but it is shocking to me that you have not come across lower IQ people who are wonderful, pro-social, and valuable members to society; or higher IQ people who are monsters. This is why judging people as individuals is incredibly important on the individual level. On the policy level where you do need to be concerned about population level issues, there would be better ways to account for HBD than using race as a proxy for something you could target more directly.

That does not make it acceptable to enslave, discriminate, oppress, or demean a race of people - all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect.

I wouldn't go that far. I think it is ok for my fellow citizens and for people with genes or cultural traits I find valuable, but why do so for the rest? With what the afghani coward that didn't put resistance to the Taliban takeover deserves dignity and respect for crossing my border illegally? The FGM supporter? The honor killing enabler? The "refugees" in Ceuta that started sexually assaulting the few women that actually crossed?

Do you think that Europe and UK would be a better or worse places now if we had sunk the boats?

I think there is a conflation that in order to have a baseline of dignity and respect you cannot punish crime or have to be a bleeding heart.

I am fine deporting people. I am fine with upholding the borders. I am fine locking people in prison for the rest of their life if their crime is severe enough. That doesn't mean everything is on the table though against people - I don't think it is justifiable to torture them, kill their entire family for their crimes, etc.

I think "baseline dignity and respect" is the level of respect you afford to people barring aggreviating or alleviating factors like mass rapes / achievements.

And even then when talking about criminal cases, we tend to believe in some "respect floor". Even death penalty enjoyers would balk at torturing criminals for entertainment, for exame.

Let us assume HBD is correct.

That does not make it acceptable to enslave, discriminate, oppress, or demean a race of people - all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect.

How do you measure oppression? On the face of it in terms of basic rights, this situation is solved. Universal suffrage and all that, the baseline of dignity achieved. Right? Except there is always more to that baseline and in that case the only measure of discrimination, oppression and the rest of it is outcomes. If outcomes are unequal, then oppression had to take place. For some times classical liberals talked about "equality of opportunity". Which is again an interesting concept - but how do you measure if access to opportunity is truly equal except of outcomes?

HBD means nuking tabula rasa, which is the basic dogma for most versions of humanist movements. Be happy with basic constitutional rights, everything else is free for all - so there will be various castes, classes and groups, some of them in hereditary worse situation when it comes to outcomes. This is a very, very hard pill to swallow in the current equality/equity obsessed society. Hence the vehement resistance to the whole concept of HBD.

How do you measure oppression? On the face of it in terms of basic rights, this situation is solved. Universal suffrage and all that, the baseline of dignity achieved. Right?

Yes, I agree with everything you said (as an aside this is why I try and use the term "baseline of opportunity" to short circuit the equity / equality of opportunity debate). I agree this is a hard pill to swallow for society which desperately wants to believe in tabula rasa, but that doesn't mean it becomes acceptable to treat individuals as their racial averages is their destiny.

I agree this is a hard pill to swallow for society which desperately wants to believe in tabula rasa, but that doesn't mean it becomes acceptable to treat individuals as their racial averages is their destiny.

I mean how could you not do that? You will always evaluate individuals based on some standard: you are a good student - for an inner city black man. You are an excellent basketball player - for 5'3'' Asian. The baseline of average is always there and tabula rasa nukes the universal baseline from orbit.

In a sense the DEI crowd is more honest here. They at least know that there are these huge disparities and they want to equalize them here and now with hope that power of representation and reeducation will erase them in the future. It is classical liberal position that is unattainable - even 150 years after emancipation the blacks are not doing well. Heck, it may take another 150 years of access to equal opportunity to fix it, nothing else to see here. That is why the liberal consensus was so easily hacked by Social Justice crowd - it plays on their hidden assumptions.

all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect

Says who? This is a historically aberrant position.

Well, I am religious, so God.

In the US, it is part of foundational documents.

I don't think being 'religious' cuts it; the Aztecs were plenty religious. But if you're a Christian, that's a relief.

Yes, Christian, sorry.

This is NOT true and a necessity for western civilization to exists is to govern in this way:

“ That does not make it acceptable to enslave, discriminate, oppress, or demean a race of people - all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect”

Pragmatically you have to do this. At an international level for instance you can’t give out tourist visas to a Somalian and a Norwegian at the same rate or demographic change would occur.

Pragmatically you have to do this. At an international level for instance you can’t give out tourist visas to a Somalian and a Norwegian at the same rate or demographic change would occur.

Colorblindness doesn't require that. You can take a standard for visas that captures what you care about without any reference to race. Only when your policy receives complaints about disparate impact you might need to do invoke HBD.

Ugh. In theory yes. In practice NOT within budget or American way of life. Yes you can IQ test everyone entering America and put ankle bracelets/police state to make sure people aren’t pregnant or overstay visas.

Or you could just give all whites people visas and just do zero mitigation. Mitigation is expensive.

Or you could just give visas to Norwegians freely but scrutinize Somalians, while agnostic to typical somalian skin color.

Use anything from wealth to culture to average IQ (again race agnostic) to previously observed behavior of tourists of the origin country to justify this.

This would be the racial discrimination you wanted to avoid. Scrutinizing Somalians but giving visas easily to Norwegians.

I’m not sure what cheap test you want to use that would separate the two groups other than explicit racism.

The big advantage of racism is it’s cheap and effective and doing the thing you want it to do.

No, its discrimination by nationality. And visas applications being treated differently by country of origin is not unreasonable.

It also catches economic and cultural factors, and is easier to administer than race.

That’s not exactly different than racism since most countries are a single race.

And then a country like Brazil you would also want to give a lot of visas to Europeans and not ADOS. And then a country like Ukraine with low gdp we probably still give a lot of visas too.

Nationality and race are very close to synonyms in a lot of situations. This just feels like wordcelling to me.

More comments

Tourist visas would not be a problem if the laws were enforced to ensure overstaying the visa would be inadvisable.

For immigration, again, you can better target what you want without having to use race (or nationality) as a proxy.

“If the laws were enforced”

Mitigation is not free. You either need to (1) something like ankle monitor every tourists or (2) punish severely anyone caught like go to gitmo for 3 years for overstaying a visa. Both are culturally wrong in the US and both would have significant dollar costs.

I am aware mitigation is not free. Though tourist money can sure help offset some of those costs - so there is a benefit and risk to tourism.

I'd rather not get into the nitty gritty of policies as there can be arguments regarding how to implement or how sufficient they would be. At the end of the day, changing the culture such that a non-insignificant portion of Americans want open borders and feel illegal immigrants have every right to be in the US is the most important thing, because then we can work on the law enforcement aspect and deterrence.

Saying mitigation is not free after arguing that you can just target better is just forgetting to mention the giant negative with your proposal.

Racism is cheap and effective and doesn’t cross any traditional American taboos on freedom.

Even the NYT implicitly understands the racism works, which is why when they want to run articles against Trump immigration policies they pick articles about an Argentinian or Russian being deported who cause no issues. Because having rules to mitigate negatives of global travel end up catching a few people breaking rules that are perfectly fine being here.

Saying mitigation is not free after arguing that you can just target better is just forgetting to mention the giant negative with your proposal.

Do we have evidence that a particular race has the lion's share of overstaying visas such that it would be more effective to deny all of that race from tourism in America vs another algorithm which doesn't use race as a proxy to determine who is more likely to overstay a tourist visa?

Tourist Visas themselves are mitigation to allow some tourism while not allowing just anyone to enter and be here.

Nobody cares if a white South African comes here like say Elon Musks and stays for 30 years. We do care if a Somalian just enters the country and stays.

Again tourist visas are a mitigating thing to manage unwanted immigration.

On the policy level where you do need to be concerned about population level issues, there would be better ways to account for HBD than using race as a proxy for something you could target more directly.

Insert the "turning people into dinosaurs" meme here. "But I don't want to address social issues directly, I want to be tribal and clannish."

Or, shit, just a person from a population with lower IQ than yours that nonetheless is clearly smarter than you. OP needs to go live some real life.

You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right.

The basis of human moral equality isn’t based on equal abilities or any physical trait or set of physical traits being equal; it’s based on the inherent dignity of humans. This can be justified by either secular ethics or religious ethics.

Most of the adherents of the Western Abolitionist Movement were literal White Supremacists; they thought the African Diaspora was incapable of civilization on an equal level to Europeans. Their argument against slavery was that it violated the natural rights of Africans. The capabilities of Africans wasn’t a question for them.

The same was true of the US civil rights movement: tons of US leaders, Nixon is a good example, believed in many claims that today are classified as HBD and that Jim Crow violated the rights of blacks. The population level IQ scores of whites and blacks just wasn’t relevant to why they found Jim Crow wrong.

In the end, HBD isn’t really how 99% of people organize their ingroup or outgroup anyways. “Never become so racist that you forget White Liberals are the worst people in the world.” is a meme for a reason.

I wonder how much of the sting of perceiving being viewed as “inferior” comes from a feeling of powerlessness. To give an example where the shoe was on the other foot: in Haiti, first after the abolition of slavery then after the defeat of the LeClerc expedition the Blacks and mixed race people ruled their half of the island. These are by and large the same people who were either slaves or (in the case of the mixed race) lived under basically French Jim Crow in 1788. In 1788, there was a large internalization of the view that the French were just better and they were powerless. By 1804, and even by 1794, that view was nonexistent. They had achieved self rule and clearly were not inevitable charges of the French.

It seems to me the issue isn’t this or that physical statistic, but more about the fear that “my community in perpetuity will be dominated by the outgroup.” As Haiti showed, albeit with every race massacring every other race, that feeling of agency is less about the base physical facts of the different groups and more about social position.

Every time you post, you repeat this lament. At this point, I am not sure you're not a troll.

But taking you at face value: what do you want? What are you asking here? What do you want people to say?

Either HBD is true or it's not. If it is true, then it doesn't matter whether it's "fair" in some cosmic sense. Of course it's not. No one is promised fairness. It's not fair some people are born into loving families in first world countries and other people are abandoned at birth in a slum. You are dealt the hand you're dealt. What other justice is there but "treat people as individuals"?

You can advocate for fair treatment. You can advocate for help to redress historical injustice. You can argue against the premise. But shaking your fist at reality because reality is unfair seems... really pointless.

What other justice is there but "treat people as individuals"?

"Treat people as individuals" is not a justice because it contradicts the ground truth that people are not individuals, by nature of their identities and indeed race they are members of one or more groups. "Treat people as individuals" is a strategy, and it's not a just strategy because it puts those that adopt that strategy at a huge political and cultural disadvantage to people who don't follow that strategy, to people who operate on the basis of their shared identity. They don't see their co-ethnics as "individuals" they see them as members of their ingroup, closer to an extended family than a random stranger sampled from a planet.

The reality is that strategy is only advocated for Whites and no other group, and everybody who advocates for that strategy is just fine with Whites adopting it while no other group does so. Maybe they will pay lip service to the notion they wish everyone else followed it, but they still advocate following a failed strategy with no rational basis.

It's not just to demand Whites treat everyone as individuals while everyone else organizes on the basis of their ethnic identity for political and cultural power. "Treat people as individuals" is only really justified by HBD denial in the first place, based on the assumption that it doesn't matter what genetic group or ethnic identity someone belongs to, which is false.

Of course everyone is a member of a group. Most people are not like you, acting as if their ethnic membership is their only relevant trait.

How Racial Groups Rate Each Other

And your takeway from that is that when you meet a black, white or Asian person or Jew, the way you treat them should not be based on how they behave, how they present themselves, how they treat you, but purely based on their ethnicity, because you believe everyone else is doing that to you?

What would your end goal be, assuming we all adopt this approach?

There is a significant current within Islam to oppose ethnonationalism, which drives civil conflicts all across the Islamic world. The Assad government in Syria, and more generally everything Baath-like with former Soviet backing in the Middle East, was a fragile coalition of ethnic tribalists primarily opposed by pan-Islamist groups. Dismantling Igbo and Yoruba ethnic consciousness in favour of the same pan-Islamism is among the core objectives of Boko Haram. China is not exactly at peace with people promoting their shared ethnic interests, either.

More generally, I think you are making a fundamental mistake in that you think that the criterion for tribalism to be widely opposed is "white" when actually it's much closer to a combination of "dominant", "nonconsensual" and simple political expediency. The simple truth is that nobody in the last ~100 years has managed to construct a "white" ethnic interest group that did not need to expend as much effort to force unwilling members to collaborate as it did to fight against competing ethnic groups. Israel, Japan, South Korea, Eritrea, or whatever other ethnostate you look at generally do not need to sanction their citizens for making facilities available to ethnic outgroups or diluting the bloodline; it is assumed that those who live in them will naturally favour their coethnics, and if not, well, it's their loss. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany, Jim Crow America, Apartheid Africa etc. were constantly foaming at the mouth chasing after whites who would aid fugitive slaves or fraternise with the outgroup. Further to the point, nobody bats an eye when pasty-white and highly tribal Estonia continues to refuse citizenship to the 20% or what it is Russians on its territory, or rejects the occasional gorillion Central Asians the same Russians try to dump on their border to troll; and on the other hand the Indian caste system, which is likewise built on significant inward-facing compulsion, is hardly appreciated by the SJW set, and neither is North Korea which actually does do racial purity laws (though of course they are hated for plenty of other things).

I can understand it. HBD has a few unfortunate implications and in many ways I'd wish it wasn't true, but as a white guy from an entirely white family in a predominantly white country, it's also true that for me, personally, it's not so bad. Whites are pretty middle-of-the-pack-to-upper-middle in most attributes, particularly IQ, so learning that these attributes are less socially changeable than one might want them to be kinda sucks conceptually, but "my people" are already in an OK place.

Now I imagine being a bright-eyed, above-average (whether IQ/conscientiousness/etc.) black guy, who learns the history of Africa, who may think that, well, they have still a long way to go, but fundamentally we just need to mirror the western approach and over time we will get to a comparable place. It's going to be hard, no question, but it's definitely doable, and basically just a question of time.

Then you learn HBD, get convinced, and suddenly all of this is an open question again. Sure mirroring the west to some degree is probably good, but it will not get them to the same place. It's unclear whether it's even doable at all. Possible solutions all sound awful, whether eugenics or de-facto non-black governance or just simply accepting that black-run countries will be consistently worse.

Personally, I think we just need to accept the bullet of genetic engineering, but I know a lot of people feel very squeamish about it, especially when applied to humans, and it's at least understandable to feel that way for historic reasons.

I agree that it would be a bitter pill to swallow. I don't blame the OP for being upset at this reality, if it is reality and if he has become convinced of it.

But I guess I just don't see the point of "Life is unfair!" posts. The Motte is mostly for discussing ideas and testing hypotheses. The OP doesn't really present anything to debate. Maybe he's hoping someone will talk him out of the HBD conclusion? (In this place, not likely.) Otherwise, a vent about existential angst is at best more appropriate for Wellness Wednesday or Small Scale Questions.

If you accept HBD but reject inidvidualism, you wind up where our enthusiastic ethnonationalists are. "Tribal and clannish" is just signaling you want war.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats