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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.

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.