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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. 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

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.

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).