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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

This is a real uncharitable interpretation. I have never seen an HBD person ever advocate such a thing, not counting white nationalist subs or 4chan.

On the other hand, opposition to skilled immigration seems super common amongst HBD people here. While not as egregious, that's pretty close, especially because the definition of "skilled" can easily include things like English ability or other markers of ability to assimilate.

This is the main reason I don't really trust the stated motivations of the average HBD person. Race is at the very best only a super loose proxy for the things that actually matter and you can always easily measure and filter on much better proxies instead. Not noticing this and asking to filter on race is super suspicious.

big difference between "X should not come in" vs. "kick X out"

If HBD/average human capital concerns are that important for you, there isn't really that much difference. Furthermore, shouldn't it be a much lower bar to let people in vs. kicking them out? Unless you're some kind of extreme Malthusian, there are far fewer bad moral side effects to increasing skilled immigration than to forced deportations---like this big difference makes opposition to skilled immigration even more bizarre.

Anyway, I hope you noticed the convenient demonstration of the extreme vitriol bringing up this argument always seems to produce in this community---it's like a pattern match to the storybook reaction to cognitive dissonance. It's also the one topic where the moderation team is ok with constant personal attacks being made instead of arguments.

Interactions here have made it quite hard not to conclude that a very large fraction of HBD-talk here is really motivated by exactly what @HlynkaCG was pointing out in his comment---it's simply a convenient argument for an ultimate goal of a world where people are judged by what they were assigned at birth instead of what they control.

it's simply a convenient argument for an ultimate goal of a world where people are judged by what they were assigned at birth instead of what they control.

You know, this really is something of a blue-and-orange universe. Are you sure you can comprehend Western morality enough to imitate its outward expressions?

Are you sure you can?

The dark irony is that the Nazi-types are directionally correct about Jewish thought-leaders undermining and corrupting the West. Most of the leading figures in early socialism including Marx himself where secular jews after all. Where they're wrong is about who the actual carriers of the disease are because it's not society that's succumbed to corruption but themselves. It is their belief in collective guilt and collective virtue. It is their desire to judge based on nebulous groupings rather than individual worthiness or behavior that marks the true departure from "western morality".