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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Sure, push back against those specific takes all you want. I have a problem with you saying things like ‘nothing good can come from [discussing HBD]’, not you taking apart flawed arguments. You'd immediately recognize your statements as indicating a wish to hide the truth if a progressive said it about one of your hobby horses.

I’m not going to condemn all hypergamy, cathedral, or anti-enlightenment talk (for example) because some take it too far (despite those concepts being a lot more dubious than HBD). We don’t even draw the line at things that are clearly false, so why here?

I have a problem with you saying things like ‘nothing good can come from [discussing HBD]’, not you taking apart flawed arguments.

...and part of the problem is that there's two different arguments getting conflated.

"Put HBD in everything" arguments are generally poorly argued, and often motivated reasoning. I don't like seeing arguments of this sort, because they're low-effort, unsupported and inflammatory, without actually providing anything of value.

"HBD is useful" is coming from the common assumption that HBD in the narrow sense is pretty clearly true, and then asking what we do about it. This seems like an entirely legitimate argument to me, but I hold that, practically speaking, there is nothing particularly useful you can do with HBD. Spreading it isn't going to resolve our racial problems, because they're already too far gone. I could be wrong about this, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to debate. Part of the problem, though, is that spreading "HBD is useful" seems to also spread "Put HBD in everything", both here and in the general population.

You'd immediately recognize your statements as indicating a wish to hide the truth if a progressive said it about one of your hobby horses.

I have a hard time imagining a symmetrical argument on my side that would fit the particulars, so this is hard to assess. I don't think it's true, though, because I don't see how anything I'm saying is properly understood as an argument to hide the truth.

This seems like an entirely legitimate argument to me, but I hold that, practically speaking, there is nothing particularly useful you can do with HBD

Why is HBD held to this impossibly high standard? A large majority, at least, of all political theories are false, what's useful about those?

Spreading it isn't going to resolve our racial problems, because they're already too far gone.

No offense, but this is your usual excessive pessimism. If nothing can be done, your way is just as pointless. From the POV of a guy who hasn't abandoned all hope, there's a good chance that publicizing HBD lowers the 'it's racist discrimination' pressure considerably. The truth is usually helpful in navigating the world.

'put HBD on everything' is to HBD as 100% environmental explanations are to well-supported environmental explanations. You're saying environmental explanations generally 'lack all usefulness' because you are annoyed by the blank state types, and legitimate environmental explanations 'help spread' crazy blank statism.