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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Progressives have this insane tendency to assume that if it really is true that blacks aren’t as smart as whites on average, then the only logical thing to do would be to murder all of our fellow black citizens in Treblinka-style death camps. Why? Because, they apparently reason, only Nazis, as they’ve so often said, think blacks have lower mean IQs, so if it turns out that the IQ Nazis are right, well, that means Hitler should be our role model.

Or something. You can never quite get liberals to articulate why they are convinced it would be the end of the world if there are racial differences in intelligence, other than that’s the ditch they’ve decided to die in and it would be embarrassing for them to turn out to be wrong.

An awful lot of people believe that low intelligence logically implies moral inferiority. That if you are unintelligent, you are a bad person. It is a moral failing to not be smarter.

Progressives seem to believe this more strongly than conservatives, and use it as one of their primary attacks against the right. If you take "stupid = bad" as an axiom, then HBD forces you to conclude that less intelligent races are bad, and progressives who don't even question the "stupid = bad" axiom automatically equate HBD with "some races are inferior". But because the "stupid = bad" axiom is unstated, and probably not consciously endorsed, they can't quite articulate this chain of reasoning. The embarrassment that would come if it were incontrovertibly proven that some races were inferior on a genetic level is that it would be revealed that they are bigots. They have always been bigots against unintelligent people, but by restricting their bigotry to unintelligent white people, manage to convince themselves that that doesn't count. But if colored people are even less intelligent, and it wasn't society's fault it was inherent to the individuals themselves and their genes, then the progressives would either have to admit to being racist, or change their worldview to account for good but unintelligent people. Who, in my opinion, exist in multitudes. I've met quite a few. But a lot of people aren't ready to admit that.

I think the best world for how it is would be an ignorance is bliss world. HBD isn’t taught but the elites have read Charles Murray. MSNBC doesn’t say the word white supremacists constantly. They accept differences in outcomes isn’t proof of racism. It’s probably not good if every kid is taught in high school that blacks are you on average much less intelligent. It would be very discouraging. I still had an inkling as a 5 year old that most of the sports players didn’t look like me especially at run fast positions.

But that’s also a conservative view. Some systems just work better probably because they get to a workable rational equilibrium that agrees with human nature and not a pure robotic rationalist.

Oddly, the only ways you can keep the smarter kids from figuring out black kids are on average less intelligent basically amount to segregation. If black kids are in other schools, the kids get no basis for comparison. If the student bodies are carefully curated so some schools have only the smart black kids, they get a false one -- but you can't apply that one too widely for lack of appropriate population.

I remember a study or book years ago showing that nerdy black kids in all black schools got hassled less because they couldn't be so easily compared to Asians or whites.

(Of course who were they getting hassled by?...)