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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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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.