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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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I constantly wonder what it is about the dumb people looking alike that makes it politically salient. Just our inbuilt tribalism I suppose.

I just keep thinking back to my time in school. I don't recall encountering a single minority until highschool. We still had dumb kids. Nobody gave a fuck. There will always be dumb kids and smart kids. They turn into dumb adults and smart adults. Sometimes even the smart kids turn into dumb adults. When everybody looked the same, it simply was not a political matter. It was a fact of life.

I simply do not understand what The Plan is these days. The average IQ of African Americans, near as I can tell, is incontrovertibly lower than the rest of America. You can argue over causes all day. Whether it's cultural, environmental or genetic. Even if we had that answer to all our mutual satisfaction, it changes nothing about the population we have, and need to live with, today.

All that said, I simply don't understand how you convince a population that believes "We wuz kangs", and successfully convince them that they are probably ending up at about the correct station in life given their individual IQs. That there will never be as many blacks in the most intellectually rigorous fields as other races. There will be some, because every population has a distribution. But don't be shocked when all your asian classmates (if they haven't fled the community) are getting accepted to colleges while you are joining the army. If they'll even have you.

Frankly the only workable solution I see any longer is Scott Adam's sage advice.

All that said, I simply don't understand how you convince a population that believes "We wuz kangs", and successfully convince them that they are probably ending up at about the correct station in life given their individual IQs.

This is one of the arguments against HBD, though, that black people won't accept underrepresentation (and you're a bad person for wanting them to). But lots of white parents have to break it to their kids that, no, you probably won't get to be an astronaut, so why should black people be any different?

Lots is underselling it. The overwhelming majority, like 90%+, "have to tell their kids" that they're not going to be able to go to any remotely prestigious college and that the upper middleclass is almost certainly out of reach, nevermind things like being an astronaut.

There are a lot of things relatively dumb people can do and make decent livings.

But being a plumber in Tulsa is low status, and while dads can get away with telling their sons that ‘aren’t good at tests’ to consider it, school systems categorically refuse to even try whether the kids in question are black, white, oriental, native or Malay.

Now you’re asking them to open themselves up to a disparate impact lawsuit to do something they don’t want to do anyways?

Look, I’ll buy that blacks should be as functional as 85 IQ whites. But it’s kinda hard to get them there, because the social institutions that make 85 IQ whites more functional than 85 IQ blacks are not things that can be imposed from the top down(you’ll notice that a big chunk of modern bro country is dedicated to glorifying being a plumber in the suburbs of a third rate metro in flyover while functionally no rap music is, for example), and even discussing the cultural differences that feed into it is taboo.

Regardless of social status, plumbing is not a low IQ gig (for the well paying positions at least).

This site shows plumbers with IQ’s starting in the lower-mid eighties, which is what I would call ‘low’. And there’s almost always a legal definition of ‘plumber’ which excludes people who, say, come along to paint the pipe plumbers have put in place, and which keeps wages high.

https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx

Neat! Thanks for the info.

That’s surprising

you’ll notice that a big chunk of modern bro country is dedicated to glorifying being a plumber in the suburbs of a third rate metro in flyover

This raises my respect for country music, since a lot of the happiest men I know fit that approximate description.

The distinguishing feature between country and pop these days is the former reflecting things the blue collar laboring class thinks are important.

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Absolutely, a decent living starts far below that.