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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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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.

"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.

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.

Why do you put ‚scientific‘ in quotes if you (gun to the head) believe in HBD yourself?

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.

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.

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.

Let me rephrase: you reluctantly believe that HBD is true, but you really want to say/justify saying that HBD is false.

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).

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.

No, it's flatly false.

I hope getting that rant off your chest felt righteous and vindicating, but it was completely misdirected.

I do not want "the truth" hidden, I have not aligned myself with liars, and I do not (knowingly) repeat lies.

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.

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?

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?

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

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?

I'm not interested in banning or demonizing anything.

What's the proper way to refer to race-essentialist people who explicitly use HBD as a fully-general explanation for all behavior and outcomes? As an example, this post from a bit ago:

We know what the root cause is for classroom indiscipline, poor nutrition, bad (cultural?) traditions, bad (parental?) literacy, unstable home life and one-parent households.

If people are smart and capable, they won't find themselves in situations where they're having more children they can support with unhelpful partners, won't have a culture glorifying crime, won't be illiterate, won't disrupt classrooms, won't create or maintain food desserts or fail to provide nutritious food.

...So that's a claim of straight bio-determinism, isn't it? It seems to me that these sorts of posts are most of the HBD posts I see, mainly because the more rigorous conversations got mined out years ago. Now, maybe my impression is wrong, and I think that sort of post is more common than it actually is because it stands out to me in a way more rigorous HBD posts don't. But this low-quality and wrong posting is what I'm actually objecting to, and not the rigorous version that confines itself to the evidence.

How about "your average far right mottizen with more concepts than sense"?

Although I may be unfair to them. Given the disconnect between how suppressed HBD is, and how scientifically well-supported it is, it’s no wonder that people try to “put HBD on everything”, just for the novelty. What other puzzling questions can be easily answered with something like HBD when the lies are exposed and the censorship lifted?

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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.

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.

Consider the possibility that you have allowed your disgruntlement to force upon you an interpretation that isn't actually present if you read what I (and others) have actually said. Though I cannot speak for FC.

while you and FC, from what I can tell based on your behaviour, have adopted a ‚don‘t tell‘ policy.

My policy is not "don't tell" though certainly I don't go around in real life or blasting on Twitter the Good Word of HBD. I have never advocated that we should all politely pretend to believe pretty lies.

This manifests in a stream of arguments

Where do you see a "stream of arguments" ? The once or twice it's come up before? I respond to a post and it's "a stream of arguments," I might not respond to every single post and you accuse me of "refusing to answer." Come on, dude.

on why dissemination is impossible/undesirable

I don't think it's impossible - just difficult. Undesirable? Not really, I am always in favor of the truth being known. But I don't know how we get to a society that peacefully adjusts to a reality like that (if it is reality). Acknowledging a problem is not saying "Therefore we should ignore it and pretend." That is a projection on your part.

and attacks on the moral character of ‚HBD-ers‘, etc.

I only attack the moral character of the folks who use HBD as a justification for their racial animosity. I do think actual racial prejudice (not believing that HBD is true, but prejudging or mistreating an individual based on his race) is immoral. Be salty about that if you like.

Let‘s get the slapfighty parts out of the way first: I am neither „disgruntled“ nor „salty“, just disappointed. And ‚projection‘ is overused at the best of times, the ‚I know you are, but what am I‘ of the debating world, but your use here doesn‘t even make sense. What opinions do I hold, that I project onto you? An ambivalence towards the truth? Where? I do not think people are incapable of processing the truth.

Onto your ‚stream of arguments‘ where you, imo, „align yourself with liars‘:

  • presenting HBD as pseudo-scientific

  • questioning why anyone would wish to proclaim the truth, including their motives, preferred policies, associates and intellectual forefathers

  • defending HBD censorship (on the sub that one time)

  • claiming that there is ‚no easy way forward‘ and that expecting people to accept the truth is ‚unrealistic‘

Telling the truth is the easy way forward. You ostensibly can‘t go forward, you‘re stuck in place, refusing to answer or move. From a distance, you do move somewhat. Backwards.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.