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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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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. I don't disagree with them, but I still get mad

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!

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

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 "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 of most version of various humanist movements. Be happy with basic constitutional rights, everything else is free for all and there will be various casts, 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 current equality/equity obsessed society. Hence the vehement resistance to the whole concept of HBD.

all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect

Says who? This is a historically aberrant position.

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.

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.

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.

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