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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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