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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

You keep making this argument and it keeps making no sense because you conflate HBD types with the white-identity types. The white identity types obviously want to reorder the stack the way you say. I'm pretty sure the majority of the HBD believers would be fine to let the chips fall where they may, and believe that doing so will likely result in black people being worse off and Asian people being better off (statistically) and that's acceptable. An ordinary HBD type might be happy to deport all the convicted felons rather than all the blacks, but get pissed off if you insist that the racial distribution of deportees must match the racial distribution of the population.

You keep making this argument and it keeps making no sense because you conflate HBD types with the white-identity types.

What if it's not a conflation? What if you and @aqouta are two out of the three principled libertarians in a coven of a zillion witches and my reply is "Find me 10 righteous men in Sodom".

That you might have been caught in the blast radius doesn't mean that HBDers on theMotte don't deserve to be bombed.

Non-identitarian HBDers on the Motte used to talk about this stuff all the time. Several things happened. One, the moderators in the previous place (and you were one at the time) became hostile to it. Two, some of the people who used to talk about it left, partially as a result of the moderators being hostile. Three, there really isn't much left to talk about. The numbers are what they are (especially in the US), they stubbornly remain despite all interventions based on !HBD, and no amount of moral suasion or coercion is going to actually change the facts. You and Amadanb want to call me a monster because I follow the facts where they go and don't try to soften them with leftist platitudes or use them to support some sort of transfer system, fine. Eppur si muove. Kenyans are tops at marathons and Asians are tops at the SAT, and that's not going to change because of your smears. So the only people who even bother nowadays are the identitarians -- and usually identitarian trolls, at that. Doesn't mean the rest don't exist.

I wonder sometimes if your recollection is really this faulty or if you just aren't capable of framing things in a way that fits actual events and not your internal narrative.

One, the moderators in the previous place (and you were one at the time) became hostile to it.

I wasn't a mod at the time, yet I still remember this. What happened was that HBD was sucking up all the oxygen and the mods got sick of HBD dominating every single thread all the time, and the heat and lack of light it generated, so they put a temporary moratorium on it. To this day, you and a few others have carped "The mods banned HBD discussions because they were afraid of The Truth!" to death.

Two, some of the people who used to talk about it left, partially as a result of the moderators being hostile.

Partially. But mostly because they were pure heat culture warriors who did nothing but post their pet theories about untermenschen and were insulting and condescending to anyone who disagreed with them. They could not follow the rules (unlike our still sizeable retinue of HBD enthusiasts and Holocaust deniers who are still around despite this supposed hostility from the mods) and didn't want to follow the rules because they thought the place was a soapbox for them to proselytize their racial obsessions and not to challenge and be challenged.

Your take is as accurate as saying "marxbro left because the mods were hostile to communism." Which is his take to this day. But anyone familiar with actual events knows that is not an accurate description of what happened at all.

You and Amadanb want to call me a monster because I follow the facts where they go and don't try to soften them with leftist platitudes or use them to support some sort of transfer system, fine.

I've never called you a monster or implied you are a monster. I don't think you're a monster or anything like a monster.

I don't think you're even capable of honestly and accurately describing what I believe about any given topic, let alone what HlynkaCg believes.

@The_Nybbler too, for good measure.

I wasn't a mod at the time, yet I still remember this. What happened was that HBD was sucking up all the oxygen and the mods got sick of HBD dominating every single thread all the time, and the heat and lack of light it generated, so they put a temporary moratorium on it. To this day, you and a few others have carped "The mods banned HBD discussions because they were afraid of The Truth!" to death.

When you say "sucking up all the oxygen", I think people who were not there might be left with the impression that non-stop debates about whether or not Blacks had lower average IQ at the population level were cluttering up the thread. This would lend credence to the idea that The Truth Was Being Suppressed. The problem for me is that I was there as well, and my memory is that this would be a false impression.

What I recall is that HBD was increasingly being used as a fully-general explanation to any question pertaining to differing outcomes of any sort. The initial arguments over whether Blacks had lower IQ were left far, far behind in a spiral of increasingly absurd extrapolations. The picture that emerged, for me, was a belief that higher IQ was the determining variable in all outcomes, period, end of story. A lot of people appeared to believe IQ was the only variable that could ever conceivably matter, in any situation, ever. It became routine to see completely unsupported just-so stories about how some phenomenon obviously was caused by HBD, complete with speculations about the mechanism involved, without a shred of supporting evidence and to a level of granularity that was frankly absurd. Then there'd be a big debate, often between different "HBD" enthusiasts arguing different but equally ungrounded theories for the purported mechanism, without a shred of actual evidence or even logical rigor visible. And when people grumbled about how absurd this all was, the response was "you're suppressing the science!"

A concrete example from this thread might help: take this comment as an example of the form. The chain of logic seems to be that people who get enslaved have lower IQ, slaves who get sold abroad have lower IQ than slaves retained locally, and that any genetic contributions to ADOS from whites can be safely ignored. The first claim is plausible but unproven, with Greek slaves in Rome being an obvious counterexample. The second claim appears completely unsupported, and the third claim is implicit in the logic but likewise unsupported. None of this meshes at all with the frequently-cited statistics about native africans having sub-70(?) average IQs, to point out only one obvious complication.

Comments like that are neither rigorous, nor evidence based. The fact that American Blacks have lower IQ than American whites is, I think, well-established. The fact that Africans generally have lower IQ is a whole lot less well-established, since Africa hasn't had the thorough population-level scrutiny the US has, but I'd grant it as a reasonable hypothesis based on what evidence has been gathered, and partly on the continent's general dysfunction. "Slaves can be safely assumed to have lower IQ because they got enslaved" is not supported at all, and counter-examples spring readily to mind: the many Greek slaves taken by Rome, for example. "Slaves sold overseas can be safely assumed to have lower IQ" is likewise not supported at all. These are just-so stories.

My memory is that just-so stories like this used to be absolutely rampant, and that this rampancy was what the topic ban aimed to suppress. I think it worked reasonably well, though not without considerable cost. Maybe it have been better to just spot the pattern, trace its outlines, and then point it out whenever it showed; that's the pattern that eventually worked on a number of other emergent or engineered problems in the forum. I contend simply that it was a serious problem, and it deserved to be addressed because it was notably degrading the perceived quality of the forum for a lot of users.

Maybe my memory is wrong, and I'd be open to contrary evidence. I waffled on turning this into a top-level post next week, but eh.

Maybe my memory is wrong, and I'd be open to contrary evidence. I waffled on turning this into a top-level post next week, but eh.

No, I think that's a fair summary, but I'd add that I do recall that there were a lot of posters who just seemed to want to turn every thread into yet another polemic about how all problems in the American culture war go back to blacks and their low IQs.