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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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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

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.