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HBDers are ideological descendants of the Eugenics movement, which was as progressive as it gets. The Jim Crow South did not invent racism against Africans, and it did not have a monopoly on it in its own time. That being said, I am pretty sure the Jim Crow South did have a fair amount of ideological cross-pollination with the racialist end of the Progressive movement.
I don't think this is true.
The "scientific" theories behind HBD are certainly descended from the eugenics movement. But early eugenicists were, as you say, progressive and thought their ideas would improve the human race. They thought this would be good for everyone, including blacks. They weren't trying to breed black people out of existence or marginalize them or just consign them to their miserable plight as hopeless inferiors.
Modern HBDers, by contrast, are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of non-whites. Their approach is not one of trying to improve race relations or the human race. They're tribalists, and HBD offers a convenient narrative why Our Tribe is superior and Their Tribe is awful.
Please explain how this is not textbook uncharitable boo outgrouping
Modern BLMers, by contrast, are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of whites. Their approach is not one of trying to improve race relations or the human race. They're tribalists, and BLM offers a convenient narrative why Our Tribe is superior and Their Tribe is awful.
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Your interpretation of past progressives' motives is far more rose-colored than mine.
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"Modern HBDers" are anything but white supremacists, modern HBDers are IQ supremacists and their "tribe", if any, are all people who can pass the IQ tests.
You will not see a shred of sympathy for poor whites of Appalachia, Latin America, Balkans, post-Soviet countries etc. in this sphere. It is similar attitude that eugenicists 100 years ago had, only even more crass.
See, for example, Anatoly Karlin's attitude to ordinary "sovok" Russians, remember how he cheered when they died of COVID or alcohol poisoning, remember his open boasts he is not going to serve in Russian army, because heroic death for the motherland is for dumb cannon meat only.
edit: spelling mistakes fixed, so I can continue to pretend to be part of high IQ elite and avoid the fate that awaits the losers ;-)
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Why do you put ‚scientific‘ in quotes if you (gun to the head) believe in HBD yourself? The idea that psychometry/HBD is ‚pseudo-science‘ is a giant gift to white supremacists. Center-left elites who reject HBD on ‚moral grounds‘ have aligned themselves with falsehood, and from then on the Truth shall be their enemy.
Entire discussion‘s bulverism. I shouldn‘t have to prove that I love everyone, my motives are pure, my ideological predecessors‘ moral status is beyond reproach, and my future policies will be beneficial to all, before society deigns to proclaim HBD true or false.
Sorry but I don't buy it. While there may be a hand-full of principled libertarians amongst all the witches, the vast majority modern HBDers including the users who post about HBD here are race-essentialist identitarians who are trying to wrap their preexisting biases in a veneer of "i fucking love science".
This is plainly true on twitter (for every libertarian HBDer there are a thousand pro-white activists), but afaict it's not true here? Posts explicitly about how blacks or asians or jews should be kicked out aren't well received here.
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Because I think there is a certain amount of "I Fucking Love Science"-level understanding in the HBD crowd, where they say they are just being race realists, but while the science might support "black IQ scores are lower on average," it does not support Dread Jim-style racial hot takes.
If I started talking about ‚The so-called 'scientific' theory of evolution‘, what does that imply about the truth of the theory?
‚I just mean some kooks misuse it.‘
Charitably, I could buy that.
However, you, @FCfromSSC and the ‚don‘t tell‘ crowd are so uncomfortable with the truth that you defend white lies/lies by omission on this subject. You do not want the truth known, you have aligned yourself with liars, so when you repeat their lies, I find the charitable explanation lacking. When people tell you they might lie, believe them.
Let me rephrase: you reluctantly believe that HBD is true, but you really want to say/justify saying that HBD is false. So when you say something that looks a lot like ‚HBD is false‘ , I suspect a gap between your words and your beliefs. That is not unreasonably uncharitable on my part. Whoever excuses lies, voids their right to charity.
Whether HBD is true or not(although I believe it is obviously true), whatever Jim said, what if anything is to be done about HBD, those things don‘t concern me nearly as much as lies.
You are projecting many sentiments onto me that I have not expressed or defended. I do not want "the truth" hidden, I have not aligned myself with liars, and I do not (knowingly) repeat lies. Apparently you have assumed that I support the "Noble Lie" ("we all know HBD is true but we should pretend it isn't because it would be bad for society"), and that is not what I advocate.
Incorrect. At most, you could say that I wish HBD were false, but have reluctantly concluded that it is true (but the extent to which it is true is still unknown).
No, it's flatly false.
I hope getting that rant off your chest felt righteous and vindicating, but it was completely misdirected.
Ok but what do you think the end result of your current insistence of linguistically erasing the non-identitarian HBD crowd by collapsing the term "HBDer" into just the identarian HBD crowd results in? This may not be outright hostility to the truth but it's certainty acting in a way that makes it more difficult for the truth to be spread.
I haven't insisted on anything. I use "HBD" here because that's what most people here use. Since we're discussing the different ways it manifests, I distinguished between "identitarian" HBDers and "scientific" HBDers because someone else brought up that distinction. You seem to be mistaking my attempts at description for prescription.
If you object to the terms I used, what terms do you prefer?
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Come on, I disagree with all my friends.
Nybbler, Dase and I have asked you in other threads what your position is: lie, self-delusion, silence, or truth, but you refuse to answer. Going off heuristics, you have a propensity to attack the motives, associates and preferred policies (or lack of policies) of one side (which you believe to have the truth on its side) while defending the other. You just lament what you know to be true and the negative consequences that would result if this truth became more widely known. Honestly, what does your position look like to you?
Okay, just for calibration purposes, here is an example of an HBD comment from this thread. Do you think this is a good example of an argument well-founded on facts, solid evidence and intellectual rigor?
[EDIT] ...This thread turned into a bit of a free for all, but this comment and this one might be relevent.
It is an example of poorer quality of argument, but also I need to say I saw this argument repeated by anti-HBD people before. E.g. Vladimir Fridman claimed that slave owners selected for 'buffon-like' behavior in slave
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The comment is of low quality, and wrong. But that is no more a discredit to HBD than it is to right-wing ideology as a whole. Should that be banned and demonized?
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What the hell are you talking about? I've answered all your questions - if there's anything I'm guilty of, it's probably being too willing to keep responding to people when I should just walk away.
Even in that thread you linked to, my statement was that I didn't think people would accept that some races are genetically disadvantaged, that realistically, even if it's true, it's never going to be accepted as factual, and that I don't know what the solution to that problem is. I did not say we should lie about it or cover it up.
I think HBD is probably true. Specifically: I think it is likely that there are racial differences in intelligence, and more specifically, that black people have lower IQs on average. I think it is also possible that some behavior (e.g., propensity to violence, short-term thinking, etc.) is also biological, though this is less clear.
What I do not know is how strong this effect is, or what the actual variance is. I think some "strong HBD" proponents take it to the extreme of believing, essentially, that blacks are incapable of functioning in a modern civilization, and that we should segregate for the greater good. This I believe is wrong both factually and morally.
I also think individuals should be treated as individuals and allowed to prove themselves on their own merits. I think some people are irrationally prejudiced against other races, and this is bad.
So what is it you think I have not stated or been honest about? Or are you just complaining because I haven't "accepted the truth", taken the blackpill, and become a "race realist"?
We all agree (you, FC, dase, nybbler and I) that HBD is true. ( @HlynkaCG has chosen delusion, special category).
We disagree on what to do with this knowledge. The latter group support disseminating it/telling the truth, while you and FC, from what I can tell based on your behaviour, have adopted a ‚don‘t tell‘ policy. This manifests in a stream of arguments on why dissemination is impossible/undesirable and attacks on the moral character of ‚HBD-ers‘, etc.
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Whats a "Dread Jim-style" racial hot take? I've familiar with Dreaded Jim's takes on women, but not so much his racial stuff. I doubt he's gone so far as
“Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street.”
but maybe. He makes weird claims like blacks not being fully interfertile with whites, and calls blacks inferior, but I don't find much about HBD per se. Anyway, Dreaded Jim is a weak man. He's called Dreaded Jim by those who are outside the mainstream on the same side he is, because he's so far out there.
I don't follow his blog - not my thing - and I can't find the links (in fact, unsurprisingly, Google won't even find his new blog for me), but I'm pretty sure I've read a few posts by him along the lines of why "Why we should ship them all back to Africa and exterminate the ones who won't go willingly."
Anyway, regardless of whether that's actually Jim's position, we have seen a few folks here who are both unabashed HBD enthusiasts and at least low-key race war enthusiasts and/or segregationists, arguing that blacks are literally incapable of higher-level civilizational functions and the only peaceful solution is to put them in Bantustans.
(Most "HBD" talk is really about blacks, of course, but this does extend to folks with hot takes about Jews and Hispanics, or the most recent iteration of our old friend with his manifestos about how Chinese people are Zergs. None of which I find persuasively "scientific.")
Dreaded Jim is at blog.reaction.la, if you want to go wading in the sewer. It's indexed by Google, even. But the question is not whether we have HBD-believing race-war enthusiasts; we do. It's whether "Modern HBDers" or "the HBD crowd" as a group are largely pseudoscientic race-war enthusiasts.
I literally can't remember the last time I saw you discussing HBD in any detail, but my subjective impression is that every time there's a discussion impinging on race, we have people (and almost always either non-regulars or the WN-adjacent regulars) dropping absurdly-reasoned biodeterminist hot-takes backed by a naïve appeal to the general HBD consensus. I think it's pretty clear that there's a cluster of people who are firmly persuaded of the HBD hypothesis by the overwhelming evidence, and then a quite distinctly separate cluster of people who are very excited about HBD because it gives them an excuse for what appears to be straightforward racism. I can see that painting the later as "the HBD crowd" confuses them with the former, but "the HBD crowd" seems like an obvious label for the people consistently driving a large majority of the discussion of HBD.
I'm open to the idea that my impression of the relative frequency of these groups is wrong or biased or whatever. I don't think the people using HBD evidence as a springboard into unsupported biodeterminist speculation discredits the evidence itself, but I do think using it as a springboard is wrong, there's a pattern of it, and I'd strongly prefer to see less of it. Assuming I'm not wrong about the frequency, wat do? Does using a different label solve the problem?
This cluster of people (if there are indeed more than one) is annoying, but calling them "the HBD crowd" seems to me to be a conscious effort to smear those of us who are both firmly persuaded of the HBD hypothesis and who believe it has real-world implications. Especially coming from long-timers who know better. Aside from discussions caused by those people we don't talk about HBD here very much any more, and I've given my reasons for it elsewhere, but that doesn't mean the reference HBD-believer is indeed the annoying identitiarian.
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I didn't say they are. But a subset of them are, and I was asked why I am skeptical of some "scientific" HBD conclusions.
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Indifference is not tribalism. And there are modern HBDers who take the tack of wanting to improve the plight of blacks (because it ain't "non-whites" in general, nobody's worried about Asians. Probably American Indians and Australian Aborigines where appropriate. Maybe Hispanics, maybe not); it tends to be tinged with paternalism/condescension because how could it not be under the circumstances?
As for improving race relations, an argument I often hear is that it's not reasonable for blacks to be willing to accept that they'll do worse, therefore HBD is wrong. That's trying to move from an "ought" to an "is" and I'm afraid biology is just not going to co-operate.
No, but "racism isn't real, all bad outcomes are attributable to genetics, therefore fuck you and stop trying to improve their lot" is.
Okay, but even if HBD is true, in the "biology says blacks are going to be at a disadvantage no matter what we do" sense, what should we do about it? The answers vary from "Some bad outcomes are still the result of racism and historical inequities and we should redress those" to "Fuck 'em, nature's a bitch, shouldn't be our problem." Naturally, the latter position leads more easily to even more repugnant conclusions. If you're blackpilling that hard, you don't really care about facts, you're just grasping for justifications for tribal animosity.
No, it really isn't. Responding to the proposition "Let's take from white people to give to black people" (which is tribalism) with "how about no?" is not tribalism.
"Fuck 'em, nature's a bitch, shouldn't be our problem" is not tribal animosity. Not taking on the burden of saving or uplifting the world is not tribal animosity.
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Do you appreciate that at the very least it says what we SHOULDN'T do about it? Namely, we shouldn't do that which is mainstream now – gaslight white people with the assumption of their collective, systemic complicity in underperformance of black people; their unmerited privilege; their bumbling idiocy that precludes them noticing literally brain-damaging harms incurred on blacks by the very phenomenon of their white living.
This is not a trivial proposition, for it drastically changes the moral arithmetic of any possible positive action to close performance gaps: from "redressing past wrongs at last" to "voluntarily helping the less fortunate", say; and it changes the whole landscape of authority to have opinions on the subject, which matters arguably even more. It makes your condescension even for more radical HBDers less morally impressive, too.
Derogatory rhetorical flourishes aside, where do you get the idea that I am in favor of this?
I don't care about impressing people, but I will continue to condescend to racists (in the old school, literal sense) because I think racism is morally repugnant and intellectually bankrupt. Yes, that includes the "new" racism of hating on white people.
I am not saying you are in favor. I am saying that implications of HBD can inform constructive enough plans to make rhetorical questions like
– suspect, and your attitude both unreasonable and morally wrong in a way. Knowing what TOTALLY NOT to do because it doesn't help and indeed makes the situation, taken as a whole, worse along neglected dimensions is valuable, productive knowledge. «To begin with, stop fucking digging» is very often good advice. In an ideal world, HBDers could be perfectly content with autistically pointing out Facts About Race that absolve whites of collective guilt/responsibility and predict/explain low RoI of many popular strategies (which are intellectually predicated on HBD being mostly wrong and "systemic white supremacy" being true), while not proposing any positive action themselves. They wouldn't have to be dragged over the coals with this sort of character analysis:
What did you do about race relations? Wrung hands that HBDers (or, here, specifically @The_Nybbler) aren't exceedingly generous, and don't talk nicely enough when being subject and objecting to unironic racism against their people (which you yourself recognize as repugnant)?
But I won't hold you to task for not meaningfully contributing to «improvement of race relations» (not that I care much about that specifically). This is an unreasonable standard, not just on this platform. My point is: being correct, honest and calling out counterproductive bullshit is plenty enough to merit some charity.
Really, that is your impression, that I wring my hands and get upset when people aren't talking nicely enough? I mean, that's usually a criticism of mods coming from a certain belligerent type of poster, but not something I'm used to being accused of personally. You seem to be complaining as you would if I had inappropriately modded someone, when I have done no modding.
But thank you kindly for not holding me to task for not meaningfully contributing to improvement of race relations, since I never claimed I am doing that. We are randos on a message board. I was asked what my beef with HBDers is even though I accept some of their claims. My beef is that I think racial animosity and discrimination is bad. It's not complicated.
Personally I asked:
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Can you define exactly what you believe the term "HBDer" includes and excludes?
There has been some discussion already about the different between "fact-based" HBD and "political" HBD. I would generally fall into the former category: I believe there probably are evolutionary differences in behavior and intelligence among human population groups. I am mostly referring to the "political" HBDers who use this as justification for arguing that we should "recognize" these differences (the degree and manner to which they want to "recognize" them varies) in our social and political policies.
This is just ceding yet another rung on the euphemism treadmill. The group you're describing as "political" HBD will latch onto any phrase that describes the observation. We can't just always give them the control over it or the only two stable positions anyone will be able to refer to will be occupied by people who are wrong.
Well, HBD is a euphemism too, though it's probably more accurate and less charged than "race realist."
Anyway, I am basically disagreeing with @FCfromSSC and @HlynkaCG that HBDers are direct descendants of old-school progressive eugenicists.
Yes, HBDers are less optimistic than classic progressive eugenicists.
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HBD is more descriptive than prescriptive, but it has applications for education reform. It does not fall along predictable ideological lines. It spans the spectrum. Andrew Sullivan for example believes in HBD and praised The Bell Curve...the same guy who pioneered gay marriage.
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