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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The problem for the dissident right types is that the dissident right only really exists as a subset of the woke. In my experience the average HBD is even more of an ardent true believer in the correctness of progressive talking points than the average democrat. For all the talk of combatting wokeness it's clear at a glance that these people don't want to see wokeness defeated, they just want to reorder the intersectional stack so that thier favored groups are on top. This is why HBDers are always framing their policies in terms of race instead of the problem they claim to be fighting. Some HBDer will make some comment about how we could reduce criminality if we deported all the blacks, and I'll comeback with "What if we just deported all the convicted felons instead" only for them to stammer something about group differences in IQ, the 14 words, etc...

Simply put so long as identity politics and internal vs. external loci of control remain the core points of disagreement between the mainstream right and left, the only place the dissident right has any hope of gaining any traction is amongst their fellow leftists.

Edited to be less inflammatory

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.

HBDers are ideological descendants of the Eugenics movement, which was as progressive as it gets.

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.

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.

Indifference is not tribalism.

No, but "racism isn't real, all bad outcomes are attributable to genetics, therefore fuck you and stop trying to improve their lot" is.

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.

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, but "racism isn't real, all bad outcomes are attributable to genetics, therefore fuck you and stop trying to improve their lot" is.

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.

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.

"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.

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?

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.

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.

Derogatory rhetorical flourishes aside, where do you get the idea that I am in favor of this?

It makes your condescension even for more radical HBDers less morally impressive, too.

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.

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