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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28357 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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British RAF describes applicants as "useless white male pilots" in leaked emails.

In a bid to increase its diversity, an organized and systematic discrimination of white men was implemented. Leaked emails from RAF staff include vehemently racist and sexist remarks, reports have revealed.

Under a subject line entitled: "BOARDING PROFILE", a squadron leader wrote:

"I noted that the boards have recently been predominantly white male heavy, if we don't have enough BAME and female to board then we need to make the decision to pause boarding and seek more BAME and female from the RF. I don't really need to see loads of useless white male pilots, lets get a focussed as possible, I am more than happy to reduce boarding if needed to have a balanced BAME/female/Male board."

The emails date back to 2020. But even before then there had been a focused anti-white anti-male effort to discriminate against white men in a bid to get women and browns into service. The full article linked above gives further account to the full extent of the conspiracy that kept multiple white men applicants out of service and further discriminated against those that managed to enter. In contrast with women and browns who were fast tracked through the process.

As is noted in the article, the conspiracy was temporarily halted as Group Captain Elizabeth Nicholl resigned from her post in protest to what she thought were unlawful hiring practices back in 2022. Voicing disagreement with Air Vice-Marshal Maria Byford, the RAF's head of recruitment. The row led the RAF to claim that no discrimination was taking place, as a Ministry of Defense inquiry was launched into the nature of Nicholl's resignation.

"The Royal Air Force will not shy away from the challenges we face building a Service that attracts and recruits talent from every part of the UK workforce. We will continue doing everything we can to increase our recruiting intake from under-represented groups within the provisions of the law."

And at the time the evidence for 'strict' discrimination was lacking. As then leaked emails only noted anti-white sentiment in propaganda creation:

'Gents, do any of you have a "pilot who is preferably not a white male" who would like to be the "RAF" face at a press event for the release of Top Gun 2? Shy guys get no cakes so shout quick as offer has also gone out to other units.'

Nicholl's replacement, Group Captain Dole, saw no issue with furthering the conspiracy of active anti-white discrimination and went on to be awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Years Honours List. As the RAF proudly met its target of 20% women, 10% browns. Thankfully a part of the racist and discriminatory process by which the goal was reached is now out in the open.

Contrasting this anti-white conspiracy with last years report that China was "luring" UK pilots to train its pilots, what exactly does a white person owe a state that actively discriminates against them?

Contrasting this anti-white conspiracy with last years report that China was "luring" UK pilots to train its pilots, what exactly does a white person owe a state that actively discriminates against them?

This is completely pathetic. A pilot feels, perhaps not unreasonably, disadvantaged by this one policy, so that's grounds on which to throw your toys out of the pram and work for a state which, for most RAF pilots one imagines, behaves in a manner completely antithetical to your values?

  • -23

So what's the State that has values that are antithetical to the pilot values in this scenario exactly? It's not the one that's racially oppressing them? I'm not sure I understand.

has values that are antithetical to the pilot values

China. Most Britons and doubtless RAF pilots would and do abhor their form of government.

I agree the Chinese government is abhorrent but what makes them so much worse compared to the UK government? That is, sure China is worse but the UK government also sucks.

Surely whatever you think about the UK, any plausible faults are on a completely different plane to those of the Chinese state, especially if the complaints you're levying are the aforementioned ones about affirmative action or whatever. Most importantly of all of course is the total absence of any genuine democracy or appreciable freedom of the press in China. Certainly to the extent that assisting China militarily because you were hacked off at a diversity initiative is indefensible.

First, I don’t really value democracy qua democracy. Second, the point isn’t just affirmative action (which is wrong) but actual dislike and disgust toward whites and specifically white males. That hatred will eventually lead to big problems for white males.

So while China sucks, strategical strengthening an enemy may in fact be beneficial. Granted, I wouldn’t strengthen since it believes in Han superiority. But the basic concept of strengthening the enemy of a regime that despises you isn’t a crazy idea.

but actual dislike and disgust toward whites and specifically white males

This is so terminally online. Are you British? I have literally no idea where you have picked this idea up.

  • -22

Reading the relevant emails posted in the first link.

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This is so terminally online. Are you British? I have literally no idea where you have picked this idea up.

Did you read the OP in this thread? Declaring shocked ignorance isn't the great argument you think it is.

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Here's a counterargument. China does despise white people, they are just better at hiding it due to East Asian cultural norms.

Meanwhile in the West, while its true that white males face serious dejure discrimination, we are still on the top of the social hierarchy in some ways. For example, white men have an easier time finding dates with women. This "revealed preference" of women shows their true beliefs. Even if they might claim to view all races equally, they prefer white men.

So I think you are overestimating hate for white men in the West and underestimating it in China.

China seems to have a hierarchy of Han->honkees->everyone else. Which puts the white people above the bottom, anyway, unlike in more enlightened countries.

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Men do not face de jure discrimination, they face de facto discrimination. It is still technically illegal to discriminate against white men.

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Oh I noted that China believes in Han superiority. I don’t doubt the PRC loathe whites. And I wouldn’t buddy up with the PRC. My point is that buddying up with the enemy of the UK may not be a bad idea.

So while China sucks, strategical strengthening an enemy may in fact be beneficial. Granted, I wouldn’t strengthen since it believes in Han superiority. But the basic concept of strengthening the enemy of a regime that despises you isn’t a crazy idea.

Strengthening foreign enemies of the regime is almost by definition strengthening people who believe in their own superiority over you. If not China, then whom? Russia? ISIS? No outsider is going to help native Britons out of the goodness of their own hearts, and I daresay most of the world still despises them more than their own government does.

Yup. In UK they arrest you for misgendering and in China about mentioning Tianamen

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arrested-children-calling-transgender-woman-man.html

Before I respond with anything else is your genuine belief that the Chinese state does not restrict freedom of speech to any considerably greater degree than the British state?

In which country are you more likely to actually be arrested (or at least have the police show up) for posting in contradiction of state mandated beliefs? I actually don't know the answer. I do hear about it more often from the UK but that doesn't prove much for multiple reasons.

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In the same order of magnitude. Just different things you cant say. British libel laws are notorious. And the police is quite active in anti bigorty and hate speech online.

China cares about things people say that towards the state, UK - what people say to each other. Since I am quite fond of China retaking Taiwan, suppressing Tibet and don't give a fuck about Tiananmen - I don't think I can get in trouble with my speech in China ...

There is no freedom of the press or genuine democracy in the UK.

The PM is a party man the public did not vote for and people are routinely arrested for disagreeing with government ideology.

The PM is a party man the public did not vote for

Welcome to the Westminster system. The public did not vote for him, but they voted in the MPs that chose him as leader. A slight degree of removal but every action he wants to take (at least in the realm of primary legislation) must be voted upon by the people's elected representatives and those representatives could remove him and his government at any time should they wish to.

people are routinely arrested for disagreeing with government ideology.

Like with @Lizzardspawn before I respond to this I'll ask you a question; is it your genuine belief that the Chinese state does not restrict freedom of speech to any considerably greater degree than the British state?

I'll just try to answer here instead of having two threads for the same points.

I believe that using constitutional means of removing elected representatives in favor of bureaucrats approved by the real power structure is accurately characterized as a coup.

I believe that the current regime in place in the United Kingdom is no less totalitarian than the one in China. I believe it has similarly declared totalitarian designs, when challenged it has made similar exceptions to individual freedoms, and it has no ideological mechanism to stop it from growing more oppressive to those it sees as it's ennemies.

I can name ennemies that have suffered similar repression and harassment. I can name truths that are not allowed to be said. I can name people killed without trial. I can name ethnicities whose property has been seized. I can name statutes that allow the government to break the law. And now I can even name ethnic cleansing initiatives.

I don't like that things are the way they are. But I don't think it's in any way rational to consider the UK a free state. And I would like the case to say it is one still is to be explicitly stated and solid enough it doesn't sound word for word like Chinese propaganda.

I'm glad to be wrong. But why is the UK in any sense of the word freeer than China?

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And yet, no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.

Now how exactly is the Chinese form of government different from the UK in practical terms right now? What is it that you would be defending that is practically different?

And before you make any invocation of the natural freedoms of Englishmen or to democracy, remember this is the UK right now we're talking about. A regime led by a bureaucrat that owes his seat to a coup where people are routinely harassed by the police for speech the government disapproves of.

A regime led by a bureaucrat that owes his seat to a coup

Probably not much continuing here now thar these points have come up in your other comment but this is absurd. This is just how the Westminster system functions and even this party-orientated system has been the norm for coming up on a century. It's called the 1922 Committee for a reason.

When you are on your third PM since the last election there is a real question of democratic legitimacy for their current administration.

With that said, I think there are a lot more complaints about the British system compared to the above (eg lack of freedom of speech).

When you are on your third PM since the last election there is a real question of democratic legitimacy for their current administration.

How so? He has the support of the MPs we all elected on the understanding that they could if they wished replace the PM with another.

Because generally speaking when people voted Tory they were voting for Boris. At a certain point, the ruling regime is so far from what people voted for it would be appropriate to call for a new election.

The only reason Tory’s don’t is because they’d lose.

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Under that logic you would never need another election. After all, you already elected the MPs once.

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Now how exactly is the Chinese form of government different from the UK in practical terms right now? What is it that you would be defending that is practically different?

The UK government did not literally weld people into their apartment buildings to enforce covid lockdowns. It has not within living memory shot protesters en masse in the streets or run them over with tanks. It does not throw its citizens into internment camps for believing in the wrong religion. It has not within the last century so thoroughly destroyed its own economy and agricultural production that tens of millions of its people starved to death or sent forth mobs of brainwashed children to smash the graves of their ancestors with sledgehammers or stone their relatives and friends to death on made-up charges to meet a quota.

There are more worlds of difference between the Chinese and British governments than there are in the solar system.

The UK government is committed to replacing the British population with foreigners from all corners of the world, regardless of what voters have to say: https://twitter.com/t848m0/status/1560662923101347840

In 100 years time, judging by present trends, China will be Chinese, albeit old and authoritarian. Britain will be one of several North Atlantic Economic Zones.

It really doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of history, what the Iroquois domestic policy was, if they had a coup or whether they had famines from time to time. Does the nation actually exist as an identity? Does it have sovereignty over land? Those are the most important questions.

This is the key issue here. Why does the UK expect British people to show loyalty to a government that is trying to take their country from them, that has no concept of national interests? If you turn a nation-state into an economic zone then don't be surprised if your soldiers become mercenaries.

It has not within living memory shot protesters en masse in the streets or run them over with tanks. It does not throw its citizens into internment camps for believing in the wrong religion.

Not to say that the UK is as bad as China, but this isn't strictly true. 1971 saw British troops shoot dozens of protesters or just people going about their day indiscriminately with Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy massacre. And 2000 people were interned without trial, some being tortured, in Northern Ireland over 4 years starting in 1971.

China does not claim to represent the white pilot's values, China does not demand any "duty" or "service" from them, the pilot's work in China, if they sign up, would be voluntary on purely capitalist mercenary basis. Not the same thing.

My contention is that the UK is exactly the same and any support of it from Englishmen in its current iteration is also purely mercenary.

When I was 16, I and every other boy in my RS class was made to stand up and recieve chastisement by our then RS teacher, who proclaimed that the world was made for us, by people like us (my school was 99% white working class), that we had it the easiest out of any group of people and that we had a duty to right this imbalance. This is not my lived experience (though I attribute that to my undiagnosed and untreated autism), and it is broadly not the lived experience of young men, who have worse outcomes than their fathers and are expected their bear the dwindling of their piece of the socioeconomic pie and the societal narrative that this is not so with a smile on their face.

And frankly, given the events of the pandemic, I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.

I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.

Well, where you complained (not unreasonably I might add, that is a bit ridiculous) about an unfair upbraiding by your RS teacher for your privilege, ethno-religious oppression in China entails internment, sterilisation, forced labour and physical maltreatment (even torture) in those camps at the hands of state authorities. This really is only a comment someone living in the freedom and prosperity of the West could make. Young Britons have it bad? Hardly anywhere near as bad as toiling in a Chinese coal mine or electronics factory.

The thing about this, we are constantly told that the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide. Meanwhile, individual hatred and institutional bias against whites is slowly but surely getting stronger, yet there are people (often the same people warning us about how dangerous other types of bias are) who tell us essentially, well they're not literally sending you to death camps yet so what are you whining about? Suck it up and quit being such a scaredy-cat.

Why shouldn't we assume that this type of bias is exactly as unjust and dangerous as any other type? Exactly when will it be okay to do something about it more serious than complaining on the internet?

the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide

I don't think you see much of that in mainstream circles, seems a very online sort of thing, but where you do see it I agree that it is hyperbolic and unhelpful.

well they're not literally sending you to death camps yet so what are you whining about?

Much more than 'not literally sending you to death camps' there isn't that much serious bias against whites, not in the UK anyway. There is some 'diversity hiring' (but the available evidence seems to suggest that there are strong effects of in-group bias in hiring, which mostly of course favours whites, so on net even in the direct hiring process I think whites do fine, before one even considers broader questions of socio-economic inequality etc.) but it's hardly sufficient as to constitute a major or even minor concern for any aspiring professional in Britain. This RAF stuff has been newsworthy precisely because it is unusual for such vigorous policies to be in place.

  • -10

but the available evidence seems to suggest that there are strong effects of in-group bias in hiring, which mostly of course favours whites,

Which available evidence suggests that?

Fictitious applications were made to nearly 3,200 real jobs, randomly varying applicants’ minority background, but holding their skills, qualifications and work experience constant. On average, 24% of applicants from the majority group (white people of British origin) received a positive response from employers, but only 15% of ethnic minorities received a positive response.

https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/new-csi-report-on-ethnic-minority-job-discrimination/

levels of discrimination have remained unchanged since the 1960s

This is already not passing the smell test.

I am unable to find the study. It seems to be self-published by the department, but the PDF is unavailable.

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Of course, that assumes discrimination is a result of positive in group prejudice or a result of history with minorities. That is, you stole a base.

(but the available evidence seems to suggest that there are strong effects of in-group bias in hiring, which mostly of course favours whites, so on net even in the direct hiring process I think whites do fine, before one even considers broader questions of socio-economic inequality etc.)

Oh what do you know, it's actually biased in whites' favour somehow. You know, unless you are in the armed forces, or the police, or the media, or working for the royals, and so on.

before one even considers broader questions of socio-economic inequality etc.

Etc in this instance means "other things that don't actually matter and only distract from the issue of blatant racism that is somehow not a problem when it targets white men, but is otherwise the Greatest Sin In The Universe!". I'd love to see the available evidence though, it's not that recent civil service kerfuffle where that guy reckons there must be bias because the demographics don't specifically match those of the population is it?

Oh what do you know, it's actually biased in whites' favour somehow. You know, unless you are in the armed forces, or the police, or the media, or working for the royals, and so on.

The first article is about a case where an employment tribunal ruled the discrimination was unlawful and awarded compensation to the victim. The third article, unless I am misreading it, doesn't quite support your point, either.

And you think the police committing unlawful discrimination to the extent a tribunal was held and they were required to compensate the victim means they are not discriminating? If I had just linked a guy suing them you'd say it hadn't been tried yet. And if you read to the end of that third link, you would learn that the royal staff now complies with the equality act 'in principle and practice', meaning they now use the hiring quotas. That's why it's at the end of the article, so you know the royals have confessed their sins and can be counted amongst the holy - and then the final sentence tells you that this is provisional, and their good grace will be stripped if they slip up.

“Had he not been such an exceptional candidate he may not even have suspected anything was wrong and this unlawful and unacceptable selection process may have been allowed to continue.

Not every discrimination case is provable. If they managed to be egregious enough about it that they got caught, there are certainly a bunch of other cases where the evidence wasn't as strong and they did it without getting caught.

we are constantly told that the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide

Yes, woke leftists say that, and they are wrong. Copying them doesn’t make that argument any better.

Exactly when will it be okay to do something about it more serious than complaining on the internet?

When they do something worse to you than marginally reducing your chances of getting a job.

  • -11

Yes, woke leftists say that, and they are wrong.

They are wrong about white gentiles. And specifically wrong about people who aren't "pre-judging" anymore, they are merely "judging".

Leftists are likely correct about themselves.

Yes, woke leftists say that, and they are wrong. Copying them doesn’t make that argument any better.

If they're wrong, stop letting them get away with saying it.

Of course, you can't, because you aren't in charge. But the fact that neither you nor anyone else can stop them is, unfortunately, significant. It means the society and the structures we have now can't solve this problem, so changes are going to need to be made.

ethno-religious oppression in China entails internment, sterilisation, forced labour and physical maltreatment (even torture) in those camps at the hands of state authorities.

While I fully believed this as far back as high school, I’m not sure I do anymore. Do you have any solid non-western sources for this?

I tend to agree with you. The entire internment camp story appeared out of no where 5ish years ago and was convieniently timed with chilling western-Chinese relations.

The Muslim groups in western China that are oppressed used to be on the US list of terrorist organizations. They were quietly removed from that list a few years ago.

I imagine the Chinese apologist line is that these are Islamist extremists that have executed terroist attacks in the past. They’re surpressing them not unlike how Israel deals with Palestinians.

It’s not at all surprising that western liberals would be up in arms about this. Islamophobia is one of their pet issues.

I have no idea what really goes on in western china. But I certainly don’t think that the state department, cia, ngos, and media are telling me the whole truth. In fact we’ve seen them make up lies out of whole cloth many many times when it serves their strategic interest.

The entire internment camp story appeared out of no where 5ish years ago

Perhaps because that is when the camps were opened?

And note that China has not denied the existence of the camps but of course claims they are "vocational centers."

And see here

And note that China has not denied the existence of the camps but of course claims they are "vocational centers."

Is that a direct translation of "labor camps" from English (or perhaps German "Arbeitslager") to Mandarin and back again?

The Chinese name literally translates as the rather long-winded "Educational Center for Training of Professional Skills."

And note that China has not denied the existence of the camps but of course claims they are "vocational centers."

That's denying the existence of the camps. All that they're "admitting" to is owning buildings.

The Muslim groups in western China that are oppressed used to be on the US list of terrorist organizations. They were quietly removed from that list a few years ago.

The groups being oppressed there consist of entire ethnicities, not merely the organizations within them that commit terrorist acts. Hamas may be a terrorist organization, but Palestinians aren't, unless we are using the same logic that justified Japanese internment camps in the US.

But I certainly don’t think that the state department, cia, ngos, and media are telling me the whole truth.

The whole truth is that the communists destroyed the traditional religious order in western China, which had made its peace with the state, during the Cultural Revolution, and the vacuum was filled by Wahhabis from the Middle East who came in during the decades of economic liberalization. Newly radicalized elements of the Uyghur population advocated for independence and launched a series of terrorist attacks against Han residents and symbols of the government, after which the CCP concluded that Uyghur culture was the source of the problem and must be utterly destroyed. It was at this point that re-education camps were established, cameras were set up at every street corner, and millions of Han colonists were shipped in from the west to either displace the locals or assimilate them through intermarriage, guarded by a militarized police state that scrutinizes the minutest detail of daily behavior and social media history for signs of radicalization.

I know a guy who is from Xinjiang (not a Uighur) and you literally need to present photo ID to enter a grocery store. Even if you don't get out in a camp everyday life is nothing like Britain.

Funny that. During the pandemic you had to show Id to get into grocery stores. And there were certain stores you were banned from altogether.

Clearly dumb, but you're not doing that anymore. They are still doing that in Xinjiang.

Things happen slowly; then suddenly. The whole reason why PRC treats its minorities poorly is Han supremacist world view. That isn’t that different compared to the view that white men are less than (ie everyone else is superior).

So right now being a who’re person in England ain’t the worst thing. But right now is slowly. We may see suddenly soon (or we may not).

I’d love to hear more about Han supremacy and Chinese minority oppression.

I know a girl from work that is Chinese. The minority groups come up every now and then since one of them are from her hometown. I get no sense of supremacy in these conversations. If anything, it’s more of an attitude like “my hometown has this neat minority with cool food and traditional clothes. They have dance troupes and dress differently at official functions.” Kind of like a unqiue little touristy thing.

The whole Han supremacy thing seems more like a Reddit meme or a porting over of “white supremacy” to China. I’m sure there is disparate impact. And 99% of the communist party are Han. But it doesn’t come across as some systematic oppression. Not at all.

Do you believe the reports of mass repression happening in the Xinjiang region in the past decade+ to be exaggerated or fabricated from whole cloth? Do you expect a random Chinese expat (?) to have accurate knowledge about the inner workings of her country, and to share that knowledge publicly?

It's June 4th tomorrow, why don't you ask her about that on Monday to calibrate how much she's willing to say about China's recent history.

I do believe there is mass repression of the Uighur Muslims. I do think its comparable to the Israel/Palestine situation. Not the same. But comparable. And I think the Isralies are assholes when it comes to Palestine. But they have their reasons.

With israel though, there is a massive amount of media out there explaining exactly why their policies are necessary and/or minimizing what the Israelis are doing. That’s where the comparison ends.

To be clear. I don’t support Israel or China using state power to indiscriminately punish vast populations. I just strongly suspect that everyone eats up the Uighur story because they’ve been fed a one sided story and it fits the broader interests of the TPTB.

And back to my original comment, I’d love to hear more about this Han supremacy. That sounds a lot broader than this specific draconian crackdown on wahabbi Islam and their wider community.

I would say that the British State currently has little room to commit any of the atrocities you describe. We have no heavy industry, as most of it was shipped offshore to East Asia and other places around the world and thus no Lithium Miners to abuse for the benefit of the global market. The worst crime that can be attributed on this basis is that the government leaves people who cannot adapt to the information economy to rot.

Morever, outside of the post WW2 waves of migrants, the UK has no immediate different ethnic group to victimise - white welshmen and scotsmen have more in common genetically with englishmen than they otherwise wish to pretend. If there was perhaps a group of Zorostrians who lived in Cornwall/Devon at the turn of the 20th century we may very well have had recent state oppression on british soil.

What about the Irish?

Ireland is not really considered "British" soil in the popular conciousness, NI is seen by everyone barring loyalists as this colonial venture we didn't really clear up. Much of what happens in the UK news cycle doesn't consider NI and May's coalition government was the first time many people actually learned about the separate but equal part of their state. In addition, most of the oppression was done by the loyalist ulster government, who are neither truly Irish nor mainland British, rather than the westminster government.

The oppression was done by loyalists, but the specific atrocities, Balymurphy and Bloody Sunday, were done by the British Army and the Parachute Regiment in particular. Operation Demetrius, when 2000 men were interned, was a British Army operation, so is definitely the fault of Westminster.

Young Britons have it bad? Hardly anywhere near as bad as toiling in a Chinese coal mine or electronics factory.

Have you heard of the Rotherham scandal? I'd say that being discriminated against by the government (which white working class girls are) carries significant costs and problems.

Was it Orwell who said that phrases like "perhaps not unreasonably" are like ink clouds for indefensible political writing?

Saying it about your opponent's point feels a lot less egregious.

I suppose sometimes you really need to spite your face and your nose is an acceptable price.

If all states adopt values antithetical to your own, I think it's a reasonable response to abandon loyalty to nation-states and instead prioritize other loyalties - and if the Chinese give you enough money to set your family up in comfort and style, you might choose them over the nation that discarded you.

I am actually surprised at how well right leaning military men have cooperated with the system. The war in Afghanistan ended with large numbers of migrants comming to Europe. Afghans are the second most overrepresented minority in crime stats in Sweden. The war flooded Europe with heroin. What exactly was going to be conserved by that war? What socially conservative agenda was ever going to be promoted by that war? Yet, thousands of right leaning white men volunteered to die or get their legs blown off to defend the military industrial complex and globalization. The war in Iraq caused a million migrants to come to Europe and has been a disaster for the Middle East and Europe. I can't see any socially conservative goal ever have been achieved through that war. Yet, thousands of right leaning white men got killed in Iraq in order for their kids to be in a class full of refugees.

Libya ended with a million migrants a year coming to Europe and a jihadist trained by the UK government killing 22 girls at an Ariana Grande concert.

Taiwan is important because the globalists wanted to dump wages by moving electronics production to a lower wage country. If China tries to take Taiwan, the counterattack that gets mowed down will be manned by conservative white men. Towards the end, a few elite forces will walk over the bodies of dead polish Catholics in order to raise the pride flag over reconquered Taiwan. In the movie, the white men will be replaced by women of colour.

Israel/Palestine is a conflict between those who want Arabs to live where their grandparents live and those who want millions of arabs to move. The same conservatives who say they are opposed to arab migrations will be more fanatically zionist than what is allowed on Israeli TV.

I am nor surprised that the western militaries are skeptical of conservative white men. The shocking part is how loyal they have been.

This is literally the plot of Shakespeare's Coriolanus - "discriminated-against military leader defects to erstwhile-enemies" is so common as to be a trope throughout history.

A pilot feels, perhaps not unreasonably, disadvantaged by this one policy, so that's grounds on which to throw your toys out of the pram and work for a state which, for most RAF pilots one imagines, behaves in a manner completely antithetical to your values?

I'm less familiar with the UK than the US, but my understanding of the comment was that after 50-60 years of destruction of national cohesion/sentiment/what have you turning what would have been a calling that a citizen takes up to preform their duty into a mere job that an atomized individual takes, this could be the trigger for said atomized individual to lose the last of their belief in the system and finally try to maximize market value.

what exactly does a white person owe a state that actively discriminates against them?

Maybe ask these guys?

  • -16

Why? China is the Nazis now? I don't get it.

If I'm wronged by someone I don't particularly care to modulate my response to what some Japanese megacucks did in the 1940's. Should I? To turn the ingroup/outgroup distinctions on their head a little: How far should jews have submitted themselves to the Third Reich? Does it reflect as a good or a bad on the character of the jewish people who allegedly sold their fellow jews out to nazis?

megacucks

I know it is probably a waste of time to engage with someone who uses such terms, but I would like to suggest the possibility that real men undertake the hard work of trying to get those with power to live up to their ideals. It is children who respond by running away, be it to China or elsewhere, or who take the easy road of engaging in violence. Martin Luther King was a man; Huey Newton was a child. And, not uncoincidentally, King was highly effective, while Newton was counterproductive.

  • -12

"I don't like this institution and have determined that I will not achieve career success in it. I'm becoming a mercenary instead." That's not a "child running away".

Unelected bureaucrats don't answer to me and you. There's nothing you can do to stop them from implementing terrible policies. Your high minded point about "real men" is irrelevant given modern bureaucracies.

If you will support your nation only when times are good to begin with, you were always a mercenary to begin with; it just so happens that the truth got revealed a little more dramatically in these cases.

To push back a bit: this hypothetical mercenary was denied a career or career advancement in England due to his sex and skin. Having been denied success there he sells his skills elsewhere.

I suppose he could "support his nation" by not flying anything anywhere, since his kind aren't wanted flying for the military in his nation. But at that point I'm not going to denounce this hypothetical former pilot as a childish traitor if he flies somewhere else after being denied in his birth country.

There is quite a big difference between "it's bad times" and "my country is creating bad times for me in particular".

Your high minded point about "real men"

I am not the one who initiated the "cuck" discourse.

Okay. Neither am I.

There's nothing you can do to stop them from implementing terrible policies

Except there have been countless instances of enormous shifts in the behaviour of the state apparatus?

Did the Japanese who fought for the US change it in any way? Or did they get to watch their ethnic kinfolk firebombed and incinerated via incendiary and nuclear weapons? Is Japan, under the fading soft power occupation of the US, thriving or is the nation slowly withering away?

The high road was taken by former Group Captain Elizabeth Nicholl. She left in protest to what she was ordered to do. Her replacement receives an award for doing what she was unwilling. She didn't run to China, she didn't flee, she did the maximum amount she could to draw attention to the situation without incriminating herself as an insubordinate member of the RAF. But with the world being how it is, there is no incentive for anyone with power to step away from their racist ideology that ultimately demands white displacement.

As an exact contradiction to the situation MLK found himself in, there is very little fertile ground for white victimary discourse in mainstream politics. It doesn't matter if it's white men or boys getting snubbed from education and employment, or little girls getting raped by the thousands by newly imported browns. MLK wasn't special and he didn't talk to the people. He talked to media and he talked to elites who rode him as a prize horse for a victory lap over the dead south. White people in the UK have no such backing. When they do organize they get ridiculed and ostracized with the full force of the media or they get outright banned and imprisoned.

So I'd ask again, what does a British male pilot owe the state that discriminates against him? Becoming MLK? Overthrowing the government and media hegemon? Or do a Mike Buchanan and speak into an empty jar for over a decade? Surely someone will listen...

did they get to watch their ethnic kinfolk firebombed and incinerated via incendiary and nuclear weapons?

Why do you think they care about their "ethnic kinfolk"? I assume, like most Americans, they were relieved that the invasion of Japan ended up being unnecessary.

Is Japan, under the fading soft power occupation of the US, thriving or is the nation slowly withering away?

Is this a joke? As if Japan did not thrive after the war.

He talked to media and he talked to elites who rode him as a prize horse for a victory lap over the dead south.

The Civil Rights Movement was probably the most successful social revolution in history. And it was not the doing of elites who were out to oppress white Southerners; elites would just as soon no one make waves. That is what elites do.

White people in the UK have no such backing.

No, but they are the majority, and they can organize politically, and politicians who want their votes will listen. Or have you never heard of the Moral Majority, or the Tea Party, or Ron DeSantis?.

successful social revolution in history

Successful it what sense?

It's not done much for black family formation.

was not the doing of elites

Have noticed the coincidence of the non-black founders of organizations like the NAACP?

Successful in overturning the social order that was Jim Crow, obviously.

Have noticed the coincidence of the non-black founders of organizations like the NAACP?

Have you noticed the elites on the other side? And, the NAACP was founded in 1909. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted 55 years later. That doesn't sound like society's elites were working very hard to advance NAACP's goals..

NAACP was founded in 1909

Yes and practiced lawfare and lobbying for 55 years prior to the CRA of 1964. It wasn't non-elites arguing these cases.

overturning the social order that was Jim Crow

If your criteria for success of an act of congress is that it makes illegal the behavior you don't like, I guess it's it's been a success.

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Will you accept being "on the bottom of the progressive stack" if you'll have families?

Actually the Stern Gang and Irgun were full of people who just went directly to the easy road of engaging in violence and they got their country. They were extremely productive and former members of those gangs of violent extremists were elected to high office in the country that they won. History is actually full of examples of men who went and took the road of political violence and were richly rewarded for it, so I'm afraid you might want to retract that suggestion.

I was making a normative claim (as was OP, of course), not an empirical claim about what methods are likely to be successful.

That being said, there is apparently evidence that violent strategies tend to be less successful than the alternative.

And while of course there are examples of men who were richly rewarded for using political violence, there are obviously far more examples of men who were not so richly rewarded. More importantly, I was referring to strategies for social change, not personal success.

Finally, I am skeptical that the Stern gang and Irgun can be credited with the establishment of the state of Isreal, given the Balfour Declaration, world opinion after the Holocaust, and the fact that every League of Nations mandate in the Middle East became independent at about the same time.

And I'm also making a normative claim - turning to violence is not the easy option reserved for children, but a difficult and sometimes necessary path. Violence is a tool that works in some situations and doesn't in others, and trying to claim that it is the reserve of children and the incompetent is just, from my perspective, wrong. That said it took me too long to reply to this so please feel no obligation to respond.

trying to claim that it is the reserve of children and the incompetent

I certainly did not say that it is the reserve of the incompetent. I merely noted that there is "apparently evidence that violent strategies tend to be less successful than the alternative." I intentionally worded that as a relatively modest claim.

As for children, yes, I probably overstated the point. I should have said that it is children who respond with violence as a first resort, or that those who valorize vioIence as the only "manly" response to perceived injustice and who deride those who respond otherwise as "cucks" are children. But I continue to assert that, as a general rule, responding with violence is the easier path, in part because it is the most natural path. That, IIRC, was a central claim of Gandhi/MLK/whoever initially developed the theory of nonviolence.

MLK himself discovered, after his Southern victories against de jure segregation, just how difficult it was to make progress against the de facto kind alone. . . . But to make a blanket statement that real men win victories by ...

Note that I didn't say that real men are always successful in their endeavors. I merely mentioned that MLK was more successful than those who used violence (though as it happens there seems to be evidence that nonviolent resistance campaigns tend to be more successful than violent ones). And it certainly seems unlikely that a violent campaign would have achieved King's goals in Chicago.

But, I really was not making a claim about success rates at all. I was making a normative claim that real men undertake the hard work usually necessary (but not sufficient !) to create social change. Yes, that was a generalization, but I believe it to be an valid one, especially relative to OP's "megacuck" reference.

PS: Re the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, note that it was a declaration of independence, not a declaration of war, and it was precisely framed as an effort to convince Great Britain to live up to its ideas. I would also note that the American Revolution, like the other revolutions in the Americas, was less about social change than about preserving or extending the power of local elites vis-a-vis elites in the metropole.

Yes, there is evidence that nonviolent protest is a better strategy than terrorism, when your audience is liberal enlightenment democratic republic types with some decent baseline respect for he rule of law.

But, surely that is the context for this discussion, is it not?

Also, there’s an argument to be made that MLK started looking much more attractive to the powers that be, who regarded him as a commie radical and had the FBI surveilling and harassing him, once the alternative was young black men open-carrying in the streets.

Didn't most of the successes of the Civil Rights Movement precede the emergence of young black men open-carrying in the streets? The Black Panthers were formed in 1966, for example. Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as head of SNCC in the same year.

why compare the civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance of MLK to the profound obedience of men who took up arms for a government that dispossessed their ethnic group?

Well, I was really contrasting them with those who use violence for political ends. And, I initially suggested them as people who addressed the question ostensibly posed by OP re duty to a society that discrimates against you. It was only after the claim that they were "cucks" that I compared them with other "cucks" like MLK.

But these are very different strategies for securing one’s place in the social order.

As I understand it, leaders of the Japanese American community pushed the government to allow Nisei to volunteer for the military, while simultaneously pushing for more equal treatment. And of course civil rights leaders pointed to military service by African Americans as a reason for ending discrimination. So I don’t know that they are all that different.

The people in power are already living up to their ideals. The ideals of western civilization are that white men are racist oppressors who need to be removed from power to make way for minorities.

The people behaving like children in this situation are the ones saying "We hate you, go away" to highly trained pilots and making a shocked pikachu face when they leave.

some Japanese megacucks

This kind of thing just degrades discourse.

Banned for a week.

A week? That's ridiculous, it wasn't even a swear word.

I think you banned him because you know he is one of the few motters who could and would eloquently and persuasively defend that position.

A week? That's ridiculous, it wasn't even a swear word.

What fucking difference would that make? It's not the words you use, here--it's how you use them.

I think you banned him because you know he is one of the few motters who could and would eloquently and persuasively defend that position.

I think I temp-banned him because next time I want him to lead with the eloquence and persuasiveness you seem to think he has at his disposal. I have quite had my fill of people getting moderated and then responding to me with eloquence and persuasiveness--or at least, with the evidence and effort they declined to furnish in the first place.

I want people to do that before they get moderated, and if they fail to do that often enough, then they're going to eat a ban. That's how this works--as you well know.

Then I think you are being extremely unfair, and not just because you led with "degrades discourse". I assumed you were giving him a slap for badmouthing a group most of us consider heroes, in which case a week seems excessive, but I understand the reasoning. But if it's about his whole post, then I'm at a loss. I don't know what else he was supposed to write in response to a four word post using those guys as a gotcha. But hani did, he demonstrated that the gotcha didn't work on him, and he then continued by explaining his positions. And while a lot of people were venting in that thread, I don't think hani was, I sensed conviction behind his posts and I wanted to see where those arguments went. Has he been dinged for this kind of thing a lot? I didn't think he'd been modded much at all, but I don't have the same data as you.

Are we talking about being unfair or being incorrect?

Hey now, you're supposed to be on the user side now, no hints.

More seriously, unless I am mistaken about hani's interactions with the staff, I think one week was excessive, very excessive. And if I am wrong about that I will distract from my error by asking if anyone knows how one would go about setting up the ban list again.

Thank you for upholding civility standards.

Does it reflect as a good or a bad on the character of the jewish people who allegedly sold their fellow jews out to nazis

Badly of course, but principally because selling people out to send them to their deaths is wrong whether those to whom you are doing it are your ingroup or not. They are no worse (though both are still abhorrent of course) than French or Dutch gentile collaborators who assisted the prosecution of the Holocaust.

That's not relevant to the point. I doubt you think that getting racially discriminated against is right. So from the perspective of a UK pilot who gets treated like some sort of subhuman by his government, is his allegiance to said racist government admirable?

If we are not venerating the loyalty of a subject to their country, what exactly are we doing? By what metric is loyalty to a country that doesn't value you and racially discriminates against you good? Do you just not like China?

Care to speak plainly? The rhetorical questions are getting tired.

It's pretty obvious what he's saying. Japanese-American soldiers fought for the United States in WW2 under a state that was persecuting them to a degree far in excess of what white Britons 'face', and no-one would deny that they were doing the right thing. If people who were being routinely interned can set that grievance aside, I think white Britons can set aside the grievance of a diversity drive in the RAF.

I think I would deny they were doing the right thing.

In fact I think it's pretty easy to establish, according to the American civic religion, that such a conduct isn't in fact, loyal, but traitorous and that they had a firm duty to rebel against tyranny. Especially when the full horror of Imperial Japanese rule was unknown to them.

If Miyagi was a true Patriot, he wouldn't have fought for the army of the State that killed his wife only to return to a country that still hated him, he'd been bombing recruitment centers instead.

If Miyagi was a true Patriot, he wouldn't have fought for the army of the State that killed his wife only to return to a country that still hated him, he'd been bombing recruitment centers instead.

With what end? All that would achieve is assisting an unambiguously far, far worse 'tyranny' in the war.

The survival of his kin sounds like enough of a motivation. And it's only unambiguous to you in retrospect.

It must have seemed fairly unambiguous to the Japanese-American soldiers at the time given that they were willing to risk their lives.

The survival of his kin sounds like enough of a motivation

I am glad that he managed to rise above man's baser instincts.

I'm not. On account of his sacred duty to his family that supercedes the one to the State.

He did not rise above anything. He took the path of least resistance.

I respect the idea of this sacrifice. But is is still a moral error.

Thank you. I would argue that they would have been fully justified in not fighting for a state that had been actively persecuting them. In hindsight they seem virtuous and heroic because public opinion ended up reversing course on Japanese internment, but they couldn't be sure that that would happen two decades before the Civil Rights Act. They would have seemed foolish in a different timeline where the U.S. had remained a country where Japanese were seen as un-American and alien.

Same goes for black soldiers in WW2. Why volunteer to fight for a country that sees you as a subhuman? I think black draft dodgers during WW2 would also have been on solid moral ground.

I'm not denying that they were courageous, optimistic, and virtuous, but simply that their virtue was beyond what could be reasonably demanded in the circumstances. And so I think a young white British man would be perfectly justified in giving the finger to a system that apparently actively dislikes and seeks to diminish his kind. Pinging @Gdanning.

He's plenty plain, rhetorical or not.

  • -12

I don't come to The Motte for wiki links and one liners. That's Reddit-tier discourse. If someone has a point to make, they should state it explicitly so the countours of the argument are plain.

Then you are on a different website than I am, because such comments are the order of the day. Constantly. They do not stop. To call out any single one without making it a hobby is a textbook isolated demand for rigor.

  • -11

FWIW I tend to downvote those, but I often won't engage since there's usually not even an interesting point to be made. I even report ones that are especially egregious, although certain posters on "my side" of the culture war seem to be allowed to get away with low effort snark that I think would get me moderated.

I agree with you that there are a lot of them and that they should be more aggressively moderated since they drag down the discourse.

I think one of the toughest lessons for ethnats to realize is that elite ethnic solidarity, at least for most west-of-Hajnal whites, is and has always been a total fantasy. The English ruling class will never prioritize the English working class or even regular middle class (which pilots, being officers, generally are) over anyone else, especially people of their own class from other lands. They may have affection for their country, for its institutions, and for People Like Them, but they have never much cared for most of its people. There isn’t any solidarity; perhaps there never has been.

They might be delusional to think that they can replace a native working class with an imported one at no loss of performance or deference, but they shall find out either way.

I think most ethno-nationalists have a better understanding of the idea, that the past and current ruling powers are not their friends, than most others. Which is why so many of them see appeal in National Socialism. To that end you don't need ideological conformity and purity from the elites. Just a strongman to tardwrangle them into doing what's good for the people.

But I agree that ethno-nationalists generally go through a sort of metamorphosis where they realize that the object of their affection hates them vehemently and wants to kill itself in the name of diversity and the GDP. If a loved one explains, with a smile on their face, that they want to kill themselves, and that nothing would make them happier, do you constrain them with force and suffer their hate or hand them a rope?

I think most ethno-nationalists have a better understanding of the idea, that the past and current ruling powers are not their friends, than most others. Which is why so many of them see appeal in National Socialism. To that end you don't need ideological conformity and purity from the elites.

Except National Socialism was, in its time, widely popular among German elites, and the movement really needed their help.

Not going to happen now. No mainstream politicians and civil servants are going to cooperate with modern NS, no billionaries and corporations are going to finance the movement, no police and three letter agencies are going to avert their eyes before NS activism, no judges will let NS go with slap on the wrist.

Modern NS dream about new 1933, but establishment of "ethnostate" in today's conditions would mean total overthrow of elite 1917 style. Be careful what you wish for.

Except National Socialism was, in its time, widely popular among German elites, and the movement really needed their help.

I don't believe that's true if by 'elite' we mean politicians, business owners etc.

I mean, no. It wasn't. It was popular with lower and middle classes, the political elites hated it and the businessmen were afraid before they were mostly bribed & coerced to go along.

It absolutely was, if only because the elite at the time was deathly afraid of the communists. Likewise, you overstate lower class support for the Nazis: those people did in fact vote communist far more often.

I thought the general understanding is that the Nazis did well with the provincial lower-middle class, ie. artisans and shopkeepers, and attracted some poor rurals and some elites (in smaller proportions). Urban proletarians largely voted for communists or social democrats.

Yes. And since most societies, definitionally, have fewer elites than they do people in the underclass, you can look at the numbers and conclude the elites supported the NSDAP more than Germany's urban working class did.

'Better than the alternative' is not the same thing as 'popular'.

Nazi leadership were low-class outsiders who weren't at all sympathetic to traditional german elites.

The point being made does not pertain to a rise to power but an aspirational ideology. I sincerely doubt many National Socialists today are drawn to the idea because of its chances of political success and popular appeal.

It's instead about recognizing how the world moves and figuring out a way to wrestle it down to a point where it serves you rather than enslaves you. As an example, you can recognize that the profit motives for capitalist elites exist. To that end you don't need elite conformity to a cause, you just need a few motivated men with a monopoly on violence to stop by their house and kindly ask them to work towards a national greater good rather than their profit motives.

If a loved one explains, with a smile on their face, that they want to kill themselves, and that nothing would make them happier, do you constrain them with force and suffer their hate or hand them a rope?

What makes you think elite whites are killing themselves in the name of diversity and the GDP? I agree they are killing the lower classes of whites but elite white culture and elite white tastes will still be going strong decades into the future. Honestly I would say that at the moment elite white culture and elite white tastes are killing elite non-white culture and elite non-white tastes (and this is probably a good thing).

The elites are not the object of the ethno-nationalists affection, the 'people' are.

Sure, but then the object of the ethno-nat's affection has no control over what is happening and what will happen to them (the 'people' whites justly have next to no power, regardless of what society's democratic delusions may tell them), it's very much not "If a loved one explains, with a smile on their face, that they want to kill themselves, and that nothing would make them happier", they are more like lambs being led to the slaughter by a shepherd who's going to replace them with a more docile, less complaining breed.

For hajnalis in general, yes, elite ethnic solidarity is mostly a fantasy(on the other hand, Afrikaners and Southern Whites had some notable elite ethnic solidarity fairly recently), but Israel, China, Japan, and Russia are examples of much more complete elite ethnic solidarity that isn't hajnali.

A lot of Southern whites are descended from the Scots Irish, who are themselves descended from trans-Hajnal subcultures within the United Kingdom.

Yeah, and Afrikaners are arguably partially dehajnalized.

Is teen marriage unusually common among Afrikaners? According to Hajnal’s original work, the defining feature of cishajnal societies is that the working and middle classes didn’t marry until they had achieved a degree of financial independence from their parents. In the US, Southerners have consistently married younger than Yankees, even before the sexual revolution.

It was when Afrikaans society was forming, I believe. British observers noted the african Dutch to differ from euro Dutch by being poor religious fundamentalists who married their teenaged cousins- which sounds like a pretty good description of partially dehajnalizing to me.

It was when Afrikaans society was forming, I believe. British observers noted the african Dutch to differ from euro Dutch by being poor religious fundamentalists who married their teenaged cousins- which sounds like a pretty good description of partially dehajnalizing to me.

Agreed

What ethnic solidarity is there in Putin’s Russia? Much of the inner circle aren’t Russian, the business elite are pretty diverse, millions of Central Asian immigrants pour into Moscow and St Petersburg over time etc. Putin offered a vaguely nationalist justification for the invasion of Ukraine, but he and the rest of the FSB elite aren’t, by and large, sympathetic to identitarians and regularly throw them in jail, shut down rallies, bookstores and groups and even assassinate them.

China was ruled by Manchus for centuries, and even now the situation for Han in terms of affirmative action and legal rights relative to minority groups is arguably substantially worse than it is for whites in America - China literally exempted minorities from its one-child policy for decades, allowing many to expand much faster than the Han population. Before they’re regularly suppressed, online Chinese dissident rightists regularly complain that Han are discriminated against, some even advance various conspiracies that the Manchurians are still in charge.

Hardcore ethnonationalists (largely under the banner of “religious zionists”) are actually a minority in Israel, but their centrality to Bibi’s longstanding coalition with the ultra-orthodox (who don’t care about an ethnostate) and the center-right who are afraid of terrorism gives them enough power to have a decisive say in policy. Perhaps this counts as ethnic solidarity given Judaism is both ethnicity and faith, but I’m not sure it’s clear that the ‘secular elite’ in Tel Aviv have much more ethnic solidarity than whites, really. They’re just participants in a country with different demographics and therefore politics to the modal European country.

That leaves Japan. I think in many ways the Japanese are just luckier than Western Europeans. Their economic boom happening 10 years later than it did in Western Europe (more immediately postwar) and the fact that Japanese fertility rates in the 1930-1950 period had been very high by Western European standards (~4-4.5 vs 1.8-2 in the UK) meant that there was less need to import Gastarbeiter, and Korea’s immense poverty meant that when they did need them, they could look next door rather than further afield (not that there was much Korean immigration postwar). In Europe, the Germans and even Brits did first look south to Italy, Greece and so on, but the whole region was booming (and most of the poorest European countries were behind the Iron Curtain) so they looked to Turkey, Pakistan, the Caribbean etc instead.

Historically, the rulers of Europe had to appease the rulers of the Church, and the Church cared tremendously for the people of the nation. Also, it wasn’t the peasants and traders fighting in wars, but the kings and the knights.

It is certainly the case that our current batch of leaders in the West do not provide enough for their own people at the expense of foreigners, but this is actually an historical anomaly. If a King in the past did a bad job, he risked being usurped, overthrown losing the support of the Church and landowners, which could mean (ironically) a foreign king being invited to rule as a replacement.

Here's an interesting article that discusses, among other things, mechanisms in monarchies/tribal societies for holding kings and chiefs to account:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-018-0499-3

Same thing happens in all empires, even faded ones like Britain. The core ethnicity that drove the success of a nation is eventually cut off from power and replaced with outsiders, loyal only to the power at the center. The golden age of Ottoman expansion was also the era that native Turks began to be resolutely marginalized within the halls of power and replaced with mostly european renegades, captives, slaves and wives. Over time even the sultan became more and more genetically european, as that's who filled the harems. They maintained a native elite, related to the cavalry forces, and with paths into the imperial bureaucracy, but the mass of Turkish people were entirely estranged from their massive empire.

We can see the same story told throughout history, in Rome, Persia, even Russia. Multi-ethnic societies/empires recruit from the margins and marginalize the majority, because powerful members of the majority are a threat to central power. A powerful member of 1% of the population ain't raising shit. Part of this process is teaching the native elites to hate and fear their own people.

It'd be interesting to see if this stuff was more or less prevalent in the other branches of the military. Back in the Vietnam War most of the racial conflict tended to be concentrated in the US Army: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html

Yet now in the US and Britain we see an emphasis on non-whites in all services, including the air force. I would've thought that the airforce was the most complicated and sophisticated branch, along with the submariners and special forces. As with surgeons and aerospace engineers, these are roles that naturally fall to whites and Asians. Yet it's not being spared diversity: https://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/2022SAF/Officer_Source_of_Commission_Applicant_Pool_Goals_memo.pdf

I love the inherent doublethink in these passages: diversity is key to the success of any organization and enhances the effectiveness of the air force. Yet achieving diversity goals is only 'aspirational' and should not interfere with merit-based processes. If diversity is so good, then how could it interfere with merit-based selection?

This is just a diatribe against blacks

No it's not:

"Racial conflicts (most but not all sparked by young black enlisted men) are erupting murderously in all services."

It's no more a diatribe against blacks than crime statistics are: 'most but not all murders are committed by blacks'. That's literally true today in the USA. And 80% of the article is to do with the other problems facing the US army in Vietnam: drugs, loss of discipline, illicit newspapers urging that troops frag their officers...

Is he supposed to find a statistic to back it up? How can he, given how the Army tries hard to cover up the data:

Among the few pre-World War II War Department records still heavily classified and thus unavailable to scholars are Army documents on racial troubles.

that knife cuts both ways. as always one must consider the source

Yes but ones priors should start with the idea that the population that is generally more violent is…more violent.

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I dunno. The first sentence in the section entitled "Racial Incidents" is: "Sedition and subversion and legal harassment, rank near the top of what might be called the unprecedented external problems that elements in American society are inflicting on the Armed Forces." If that is not a diatribe alert, I don't know what is.

He then goes on to discuss a number of anecdotes, each and every one of which involves black perpetrators.

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.

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.

I think most people, correctly, view the unintelligence as a disaster waiting to happen, that they don't want to be around when it happens. I think many people, especially here, fail to truly appreciate the qualitative difference being stupid brings. It's not like an RPG where you rolls are harder, but you can still occasionally have a streak of good RNG.

For example, lets look at what you can expect of African Americans in their measured average IQ range.

80-89 — Below average

Above the threshold for normal independent functioning. Can perform explicit routinized hands-on tasks without supervision as long as there are no moments of choice and it is always clear what has to be done. Assembler, food service.

This is also the I.Q. range most associated with violence. Most violent crime is committed by males from this range. This does not imply that all males in this range are violent, nor that all violent males are in this range. But when the modal I.Q. of a group is in this range, one may expect trouble with with many male members of that group. When the modal I.Q. of a society or population is raised upward of this range, violence decreases as fewer males fall in this range then, given the shape of an even remotely normal distribution. When the modal I.Q. of a society is below this range to begin with though, raising it may increase violence. The causal mechanism behind the (statistical) relation between crime and below-average I.Q. is likely that lower I.Q. levels inherently tend to go with having less impulse control, being less able to delay gratification, being less able to comprehend moral principles like the Golden Rule, and being overstrained by the cognitive demands of society.

While I agree that smart people often overestimate the intellectual capabilities of people with average or below-average IQ's, the claim that violence is associated with a particular IQ range seems extremely tenuous. Intelligence is important but it isn't the sole determinant of personality, and while there is a correlation between lower IQ and violence in the US owing to the particular populations present here, the opposite trend can be observed in Mexico, where murder rates are lower in plurality indigenous regions than in plurality white ones (Conquistadors were a mean bunch).

Does this mean you think black people are more genetically predisposed to violence?

I think American blacks are culturally (strongly) and genetically (not as strongly) predisposed to violence, and that those genetic predispositions are to some extent shared with southern whites i.e. not from slave ancestry, but from slaveowner ancestry. Black people elsewhere would have to be analyzed independently, as they don't share all of these characteristics. In some multiethnic countries like Mali, the black agricultural population is less violent than the lighter-skinned desert pastoralist population.

Can I ask what your politics are? I think you're consistently one of the best commentators here.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I have a mixture of Asian-style social conservatism and more classically American liberal beliefs i.e. on a personal level I follow the typical "immigrant parent" line, on an intermediate scale I think of Tocquevillian-style local democracy as an ideal, and on a larger scale I align more or less with Hobbes or Xunzi. When I'm feeling witty I call this Confucianism with American Characteristics.

That seems messed up.

This is not really sufficient effort for engagement on the matter. "That seems messed up" signals your disapproval ("that view seems low status") without explaining why you disapprove, or how the observed evidence might be explained in other ways.

(It may help to sub a different ingroup/outgroup to grasp the dynamic here. For example, if the other user had suggested that men are naturally more violent than women, would you say "that seems messed up?" Or imagine they had suggested that young people are naturally more violent than old people, or that people with cognitive impairments are naturally more violent than cognitive normies. Whether any of these claims is actually true or false, you can hopefully see why someone might make such claims, and think of the kinds of evidence that would strengthen or weaken your tendency to endorse or reject such claims.)

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I mean, I don't want to believe this. I take no pleasure in it, but it is simply what I have concluded given the available data and a lifetime of observation. It is as unlikely that every group of humans would be equal in their propensity towards violence as that they would have the same skin tone, the same average height or IQ, or be equally capable of running marathons. Moreover, the difference between any two ethnic groups in terms of aggression will be nothing compared to the difference between men and women, and we have (mostly) managed to accept and internalize the latter.

where murder rates are lower in plurality indigenous regions than in plurality white ones (Conquistadors were a mean bunch)

If you thought the Conquistadors were mean, you should read about the Mexica.

The Mexica were exterminated, though. There’s a million or so nahua(who are their closest relatives) left, but the biggest mexican indigenous population is probably the much tamer maya.

Honestly I’d wager that if you count by genetics rather than language there’s more pure blooded purepecha left than mexica.

My impression is that Mesoamericans are like the Japanese or Germans: capable of committing horrendous acts when sanctioned by the state or their religion, but less likely than most to commit spontaneous acts of interpersonal violence. People who have lived in Guatemala, for instance, have told me that the stereotypes there are that Mayans are shy and docile whereas Ladinos (the local name for Mestizos) are loud and aggressive.

When the modal I.Q. of a society is below this range to begin with though, raising it may increase violence.

Why would this be the case?

And what is this website, anyway? Is it trustworthy? A quick look around gives me the impression that the guy is a nutcase.

When the modal I.Q. of a society is below this range to begin with though, raising it may increase violence.

Why would this be the case?

I think the mechanism would be that it makes you smart enough to realize that you can solve your immediate problem with violence, but not smart enough to realize that it will make you worse-off in the long term (assuming your environment is such that violence really is bad for you in the long run).

80-89 — Below average

Above the threshold for normal independent functioning. Can perform explicit routinized hands-on tasks without supervision as long as there are no moments of choice and it is always clear what has to be done. Assembler, food service.

This website seems scarcely believable. Only at 130 does one apparently 'just capable of writing a legible piece of text', yet he a moment before described the 120-9 range as masters students, lawyers etc. who are surely capable of writing 'an article'? Where are his sources? Just looks like complete dross he plucked out of the air.

Progressives seem to believe this more strongly than conservatives

If anything it is, of course, the exact opposite. "They deserve to be at the bottom of the ladder because they are stupid" is the essential line of race conservatives. Therefore, welfare, affirmative action, criminal justice reform, etc, are a waste of time at best, and counter-productive at worst. The progressive line is "they are not stupid, so if they are at the bottom it can only be because society has placed them there." Therefore, welfare, affirmative action, criminal justice reform, etc, are necessary.

I don't think that's opposite. The progressives aren't questioning that stupid people belong at the bottom, they're tacitly agreeing that stupid people belong at the bottom and arguing that minorities are secretly intelligent if all the cultural biases didn't keep underestimating them. The argument is "they aren't stupid so they don't belong at the bottom with the stupid people", not "it doesn't matter how smart they are, they still deserve good outcomes anyway"

It does seem relevant that progressives are in favor of downward redistribution though. "The market needs to set wages based on scarce traits like intelligence, but the unintelligent should still get healthcare, free college, public housing, and childcare subsidized by redistribution from the intelligent" might imply a different moral judgement of the unintelligent than 'the unintelligent should be at the bottom and get nothing but their market wages".

I don't think I would categorize that as a "progressive" position though, that just seems like classic liberalism. Maybe with a wider reach, and an ignorance of economic incentives. But I'm not opposed to the general idea of redistribution. But the progressive position is usually that the market does not need to set wages based on scarce traits, a "wage gap" between groups is evidence of discrimination and needs to be fixed at the source. Rich people should give their money to poor people not because they are more capable and competent and thus should subsidize the less able, but because their wealth was stolen in the first place by discriminatory institutions and exploitation of the disadvantaged. The advocated policies are similar, but the justifications, and the extent of them, are very different.

Maybe I'm setting up too weak of a straw man to knock down. Obviously there are more and less extreme people along the way. But if you find someone claiming "minorities need social support because they're less capable than whites" they are going to be tarred and feathered in progressive circles as an evil Nazi, not held up as an orthodox progressive who says what they're all thinking.

yeah, somehow lead poisoning is still holding back blacks even though whites and Asians in same environment or worse environments do better, and lead levels have been low for half a century now.

There is no one strain of denial.

You have the people arguing IQ isn't even real. As in it can't be measured and different "types" of intelligence are totally uncorrelated with each other.

You have people arguing that IQ is real, but their is no racial IQ gap because the tests are racist.

You have people arguing that IQ is real, and seemingly admitting there is an "achievement gap" between blacks and well... everyone. But they will never utter the word intelligence, have no plan to deal with the substantial population permanently lacking in "achievement" and beyond all help. They just believe that somehow, this time, and with enough white guilt, lots and lots of tax payer money, and totally neglecting the needs of every other demographic, you can nurture all those young black geniuses into their full potential.

IMHO, given the way our institutions are continually abolishing all means of measuring competence, I think some combination of the first and second strains of denial are winning the day. Probably a majority of the first strain that disbelieves in IQ at a fundamental level. Or is so far down the "everything is a social construct" rabbit hole that they disbelieve being good at things has any relevance to whether you should be rewarded handsomely for them. Even Doctors. Because "racism".

"they are not stupid, so if they are at the bottom it can only be because society has placed them there."

But if you actually prove that they are stupid, then what?

This is MathWizard's point: progressives don't actually disbelieve that the stupid deserve to be at the bottom of the pile, they simply disagree about who are the stupid ones.

Yes,if they really are stupid, that undermines the argument of progressives. But I was responding only to MathWizard's claim that progressives think stupid = morally inferior, which is quite silly.

The original quote:

Progressives seem to believe this more strongly than conservatives, and use it as one of their primary attacks against the right.

That description is straightforwardly true, supportable by innumerable examples from across our popular media, entertainment, academia, etc. Progressives and Blues generally do in fact treat stupidity as a moral failing when talking about white people and particularly about Reds. It is not unreasonable to assess their insistence that Blacks cannot possibly be less intelligent on average with the way they treat Reds, whom they loudly and frequently have insisted are significantly less intelligent on average, and have spent decades mocking for this failing. There is no way to reconcile their treatment of the perceived lack of intelligence of their collective outgroup, with their treatment of the factual lack of intelligence of a collective ingroup.

"progressives believe stupid = bad more than conservatives but conveniently don't think about it" always looked like a sneer to me rather than an accurate assessment. Progressives do think uneducated = bad.

It's not enough to just be educated, though. Trump has a B.S. from Wharton, and yet many of the progressive attacks on him focus on his perceived lack of intelligence.

George W. Bush went to Yale and he was famously seen as an idiot by the left in the 2000's merely because he had a few malapropisms and committed the largest foreign policy blunder in my lifetime. If your family is loaded and you're not an eloquent speaker people will assume that your degree wasn't really earned. The right is similarly dismissive of Jill Biden's PhD because she got it after Joe became a senator.

The right is similarly dismissive of Jill Biden's PhD because she got it after Joe became a senator.

It's more than reasonable to be dismissive of something that doesn't exist, such as Jill Biden's PhD, since Jill holds a Doctor of Education (EdD) and not a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

Equating EdD degrees with PhD degrees is a common misconception—one that EdD holders are in no hurry to correct—as they get to gas themselves up with the prestige of a PhD using a degree obtained at a much lower difficult setting. Academic stolen valor: plus it's not like one would expect even Education PhDs to be all that tough either, in the first place.

Jill Biden has a Ed.D which is a doctorate in education, and enables you to make more money if you are a teacher. It is not a Ph.D. A Ed.D is a practical degree, for people who plan to teach. Most schools pay you more the more education you have, so it makes sense to get the qualification. At Delaware, where she got her degree, you need a portfolio rather than a dissertation, and and Ed.D is part-time for 3-4 years as opposed to a Ph.D. which is full-time for 5 to 6 years.

It's not enough to just be educated, though. Trump has a B.S. from Wharton

It's not enough to be credentialed. Does it show that Trump went to college? There certainly isn't much emphasis on it from his own side: as someone removed from American politics I had not heard of his education before.

Can it not be both?

Let us be blunt IQ does not measure "intelligence" it measures "academic aptitude". To the degree that there is any correlation at all between IQ and positive social outcomes it is because our society has chosen to use academics as a means to sort winners from losers. This coupled with general laziness (actually calibrating your test cases is hard yo) is why that progressive professors are always grading on a curve rather than knowledge and understanding of the material.

You don't have to see unintelligence as a specific moral failing or believe it impossible to be both unintelligent and righteous in order to recognize the fact that, broadly speaking being intelligent is better than being unintelligent

Better in the sense of being more competent and thus better able to enact ones will on the world and accomplish desired outcomes. Not better as in "this person tries to make the world a better place instead of being selfish". Intelligence is comparable to being physically strong, or talented at piano, or a skilled actor. It can be impressive, and can accomplish more good things if used for good, but it doesn't actually make you a good person and if you use it for evil then it just makes you a more impressive villain who accomplishes more evil.

I agree that the intelligence axis is for the most part orthogonal to the evil/good axis but i still think you're downplaying just how important intelligence is. Intelligence is the primary quality that seperates men from beasts. It was a necessary part of nearly every societal advancement ever made. Almost everyone would be better off if they, their neighbors and their countrymen were more intelligent. If one group is on average less intelligent that reflects very poorly on that group and that's true even without adding any mythos about intelligent being equivalent to moral virtue. Now that doesn't mean we should stick our heads in the sand to avoid truths that are offensive but i don't think pretending they're not offensive is helpful either. Personally I think the best way to make the truth of HBD more palatable instead of downplaying the importance of intelligence is downplaying the importance of race. A white man with an IQ of 80 is less intelligent than a black man with an IQ of 120. Population means mean nothing when evaluating individuals.

Almost everyone would be better off if they, their neighbors and their countrymen were more intelligent.

"Better off" is not "morally superior". Neither is "healthier", "safer", or "more productive". Not even "less prone to addiction". Generally, crime rates are used as a proxy for morality, but this is a foolish thing to do: there are a lot of ways to be an absolute shit to your fellow humans without breaking the law. And sure, crime is a more immediate problem, and lower-IQ people commit more of it, and that's a problem that has to be managed... but it wasn't low-IQ people who built the current race-war narrative into the memetic hazard it's become, or who make effective law enforcement impossible.

You completely missed my point. My point was that intelligence is important enough for reasons outside of "moral superiority" that even if we all make it very clear that intelligence is not the same as morality that acknowledging one group is more intelligent than another will still not be easy in the same way that acknowledging one group is more athletic is.

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?...)

I don’t care if the smart kids realize it. I literally said as a 6 year old I realized all the football players were black.

My point is sometimes their knowledge you don’t need to yell out. People know it but they don’t talk about it constantly.

I was always fond of the 90s vision of diversity, AKA the RPG party: everyone is different and has different strengths and weaknesses, and by specializing, and working together, and dividing tasks appropriately, we can achieve greater things than we could alone or if everyone were the same.

And to some extent this is a fictional exaggeration, some people are just better at nearly everything than some other people. But even then, comparative advantage is a thing that can provide mutual benefits (I bet Elon Musk would be an excellent fry cook, but the fact that someone else does it means he has more time to do his thing, even if they're not as good at frying as him). But to some extent it's straight up true. If you tried to make me be a lumberjack I would be absolutely awful at it. There are literally millions of Americans better suited to the job than me, many of whom are less intelligent than me. The fact that they can do their thing and I can do mine is great, and I'm glad they exist, even if a hypothetical version of them with all of their existing talents plus my intelligence on top would be better.

This matches my pet theory exactly. Something I've noticed is that people who strongly hold the "stupid = bad" axiom (though I might characterize it more as the equivalent "intelligent = virtuous" axiom) often tend to be quite intelligent themselves and also enjoying the fruits of their intelligence. E.g. they make a lot of money in white collar work that they got through excelling at school, and they also have little trouble with the law or finances due to being pretty good about planning their behavior. It's led me to believe that much of this belief in this axiom is tied up with one's ego, that believing in the virtuousness of intelligence rather than the dumb luck of it allows one to more easily justify the cosmic rightness of one's good lot in life. And that deep belief that the reason one lives a better life than others is because one earned it by being more virtuous is a hard thing to let go of, especially if your worldview also posits that the luck of birth having any impact on one's lot in life relative to others is wrong and ought to be destroyed wherever possible.

I've said similar things myself on this topic previously. Everyone is biased to think that their own attributes are better and more valuable than other peoples'. I've struggled this myself, and do still retain some subconscious sense of superiority for my own intelligence. But philosophically I reject the premise on a conscious level, and I think that has helped keep my ego in check somewhat, though definitely not entirely.

There's an underappreciated element here IMO: the instinctive refusal to utter fighting words while not being a fighter. The brain is capable of marvelous feats of self-deception & motivated reasoning not only in order to protect its self-image, but also to physically protect itself from harm, ie. by preventing the adoption of beliefs that will get its owner's ass kicked.

How often do we straightforwardly tell another person "I'm smarter than you"? I've never done it; I imagine most people haven't. With good reason: it's a challenge, 'fighting words', as it fairly directly implies 'so we should do things my way if we come to a disagreement' AKA 'I'm in charge now.' This isn't something any social structure can let stand, but modern white America even less than most, with its reliance upon poorly-defined social hierarchy for avoiding conflict. (See: VKR's Gametalk) If you're middle class, went to university or worked for a corporation, chances are very good that you've been extensively trained to subconciously avoid conflicts of precisely this type, and it may well be that this taboo is load-bearing. Scaled up, saying 'my group is smarter than your group' has even more serious social ramifications, again independent of the statement's truth value. Pretending it isn't so may be the best alternative.

The standard response to inconvenient truths, at least as far as I can tell, is to change the subject and not talk about them, not to actively deny them. The only time I've ever told someone to their face that I'm smarter than them was when having petty arguments as a child, usually at some point where it escalates to them calling me an idiot and me going "well actually..." and bragging about my grades and advanced math.

But I have never never never pretended to be the same or lesser intelligence than someone I'm not. Nowadays when I get complimented for being smart, I get embarassed and shrug it off as unimportant rather than bragging, but I never never never lie and pretend that it isn't true when we both know it is. There's a difference between choosing not to actively announce certain truths to avoid conflict, and lying about them to protect yourself when confronted by a hostile crowd. And there's a vast gulf between that and actively opposing and arguing against people saying the truth that you yourself secretly agree with. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's way more rare than strategic silence.

I have tried debating liberals on this, and it's not just leftists who are hostile to HBD. It usually ends up going in circles. they start by denying that IQ is real or that it measure anything. i ask why are some people better at {math,engineering,physics, etc.} than others, and it's a sort of cognitive dissonance of conceding that there is some innate ability or 'thing' that is unequally distributed but at the same time not the same as intelligence.

I think HBD is glaringly obvious and true, that's probably the biggest redpill I've swallowed since growing up.

I personally wish for us to do something about it. While I'm not outright against drastic measures like sterilization of the retarded, I think there are simply kinder and more broadly palatable options sitting there on the table and that Western society simply ignores by sticking it's head up its own arse.

HBD is a fact, what policy ramifications it entails is a statement about your priorities rather than about HBD. Some find it to be in violation of their heartfelt belief in fundamental equality, and being idiots, choose to ignore reality instead of reassessing their beliefs. Others leap up at the opportunity to be xenophobic, to expel the unsightly other given that they have a mildly defensible pretext for it.

Personally, I think the only lasting solution to the issue of HBD is going full steam ahead on genetic engineering or other forms of cognitive enhancement. It's a silly artifact of evolution that the color of one's skin should have anything to do with one's intelligence, and we should be uplifting everyone to be the very best they possibly can be, and where it's too late for somatic improvements, at least offer them the option of making sure their kids get dealt a better hand.

Leaving aside that there are a bazillion other excellent reasons to do the above other than HBD, it's a no brainer, and it fundamentally disappoints me that civilization as a whole fell prey to absurd taboos. We're leaving trillion dollar notes on the floor and then covering them up with our dung.

I'm not even calling for the establishment of a race of Ubermensch, I want everyone raised up to as close to equality as possible, but I don't want to rely on frankly stupid and unproductive endeavors like trying to spend billions more on educating the uneducatable.

Or at the very least, the US should realize that if they're in a hole, they ought to stop digging, or throwing trillions more into the money burning pit to absolutely no avail.

I'm not even calling for the establishment of a race of Ubermensch, I want everyone raised up to as close to equality as possible

Why?

Seriously, why do you think it should be some sort of teleological objective of mankind to have everyone calibrated to be of equal ability?

Even if these abilities are high, this is still some kind of Harrison Bergeron dystopian shit.

"Raising people up" is, in fact, the exact opposite of Harrison Bergeron dystopia.

The problem is that if equality is your primary goal and "raising up" is only a preferred method, you quickly realize there's not a lot of raising you can do, but lowering is a lot more practical.

Nothing in the grandfather post indicated the poster was in favor of lowering people down. Let's try taking people at their word.

The post said:

I want everyone raised up to as close to equality as possible

It's ambiguous as to whether equality is the goal and raising up the desired method, or not. But if it is, then the unsuitability of the method quickly leads to other methods of fulfilling the goal.

I'm sincerely baffled you find that statement ambiguous. I'm finding it really hard to take your reply in good faith.

My opinion is that there's a physical ceiling on how far it's possible to enhance one's capabilities, and everyone deserves an opportunity to get there.

I don't think a society of everyone with Olympian physiques and Nobel level IQs is in anyway dystopian, and that's lowballing it in terms of what's possible. If there are minor variations, so be it, but I don't want people to suffer needlessly from drawing the short straw in genetics, there's nothing else you have less control over after all.

To sum it up:

  1. Offer everyone cognitive and physical enhancements.

  2. Let them choose which ones to avail.

  3. If it's even a remotely sensible society, you'll end up with everyone at Pareto optimal points, and the world will be a far better place. Anyone not taking up the offer is an idiot, and no tears should be shed for them.

The end result approximates almost perfect equality, but that does not mean that I want equality for its own sake. Let everyone be the best they can be, and it'll work out.

It might be a bad idea to try to adjust every individual to be of equal ability, but I am not sure that it would be a bad idea to raise up every population to be of equal average ability if it could be accomplished through the sum of voluntary decisions made by each set of parents. Of course you would need to fix the definition of "population" (say, US census categories as of 2020) to prevent later complications.

I haven't given much thought to the idea, but I would probably be against mass involuntary sterilization of people with undesirable characteristics. A method of implementing eugenics which I find far more defensible, and I think many people would agree with me, would be to sterilize criminals. There is a lot of overlap between criminals and people who a eugenicist would want to prevent from reproducing. Objections that it's involuntary are inapplicable, because we already do horrible things to criminals like imprisoning them, or even, depending on time and place, executing them. You could frame it as just another punishment, or to prevent children being raised in abusive households, etc., without publicizing the eugenic effects.

In America, Black people would of course be disproportionately affected by this, which would upset some on the left, but it would also mean that the difference between Blacks and Whites would narrow over time. (And Whites would be affected more than Asians, and so on. All the racial differences would narrow.)

If this had been implemented, say, two generations ago, in the 1970s, we would already be seeing huge results. As is, however, it seems kind of pointless because by the time we start seeing results, genetic engineering will likely already be widespread.

sterilize criminals

You'd need to get them early. Offer vasectomies as the diversion program for first-time violent offenders, or accept nominations into the program from their high schools or truant officers.

The objection to that plan is that most criminals have already reproduced by the time they’re convicted, isn’t it?

It's a silly artifact of evolution that the color of one's skin should have anything to do with one's intelligence,

No it's not. Those who went away from ancestral environment are more likely to change. As color of skin is a proxy of going away from ancestral environment, it is no surprise is correlated with something else.

I don't mean it literally, of course I'm aware of the evolutionary pressures that changes in the ancestral environment might have produced.

Imagine if, like Orks from Warhammer 40k, painting an F1 car a different color made it faster. That would be an awkward state of events, and to the extent that the human body is a machine too, I want as much phenotypic diversity as possible with trading off something important like intelligence.

Imagine if, like Orks from Warhammer 40k, painting an F1 car a different color made it faster.

But it isn't what happens. In shop there are, say, professional photo cameras in black color and toy children cameras in pink but their color has no bearing on features that make them different.

I want as much phenotypic diversity as possible

Where would you stop?

What about, say, blue, green or purple skin? They are missing. And I want tentacles too.

Honestly sterilisation is not even needed, given how modernity is reducing the natural birth rates of the lower classes below replacement. Give it a few generations and they'll wipe themselves out of their own accord. All that we need to do is let it run its course among the lumpenproles while subsidizing better human beings to have more children (e.g. tax breaks as a percentage of your income for each child you have work to do this well, a woman who's earning $20k get $2k from a 10% cut, while a woman who's earning $200k gets $20k from the same level of cut) and work towards developing artificial wombs so that we can grow superior humans directly.

how modernity is reducing the natural birth rates of the lower classes below replacement

Lower classes are actually above replacement in USA. In middle class, income is correlated negatively with TFR and doesn't go up until top 3% in income. I guess if we take TFR vs IQ instead of TFR vs income then it doesn't have inflection point at the right.

more broadly palatable options

I may be misremembering. I seem to recall a minor skirmish in the 90's culture wars around billboards in California that were advertising cash payments for volunteering to be sterilized.

It seems we pay the underclass to reproduce now, would we see better outcomes if we paid them not to?

I mostly agree with you, but I think if we do go the genetic engineering route it will be even more critical that we take care of the cognitively impaired than it is now. Because there is no way we figure out optimal genetics without fucking up a shitload of people in the process. And a world where you can get executed or neutered because you didn't want to be dumb, but were already dumb enough to trust a shady pharmaceutical company to make you an ubermensch, is definitely a dystopia.

It's a silly artifact of evolution that the color of one's skin should have anything to do with one's intelligence,

It isn't. And frankly even with gene modding the genetics of body features are so intermeshed whatever you do to enchance some one's intelect WILL have an effect on how they appear on the outside, indeed their whole body will change in subtle ways, some times only AI will be able to tell they were genemoded, some times you'll be able to tell yourself just by looking at them, wheather it will be entirely new skin colors, or facial features or hair distribution or whatever.

You can't just change one organ, it doesn't work that way with our genetics. Everything is masively horizontally integrated. You change one thing, you will change a dozen other systems and organs at the same time.

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

That’s surprising

Neat! Thanks for the info.

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.

I mean, sure, but also, I knew plenty of dumb kids that were so dumb they didn't even understand how dumb they were. They just thought life was "unfair". When their poor impulse control caused them to punch other kids in the head when they got bored, it was "unfair" that they got in trouble. And frankly, the apple rarely fell far from the tree, and their parents were also so dumb they didn't understand how dumb they were. Everyone was just "unfair" to them.

But they were all white, so nobody gave a shit. There weren't enough of them to band together and demand schools stop punishing their children for randomly punching other kids in the skull. They had no cards to play against other white parents who didn't want their children punched in the skull, even if they had somehow organized.

That this is not how things play out currently when dumb parents of politically salient skin color complain about their dumb kids getting punished for randomly punching kids in the skull is a large part of why my kids will never enter a public school. The entire system is held hostage by the most violent, lowest performers because race card. All you can do is flee.

parents of politically salient skin color

Worse, the system is redesigned to not punish anyone. Not the dumb black kids, dumb Hispanic kids or dumb white kids.

I constantly wonder what it is about the dumb people looking alike that makes it politically salient.

It's not about intelligence, it's about violating one of the basic tenets of our civil religion - that making a comparison between "black" and "white" which imputes negative characteristics to "black" is bad and wrong, because easily pattern-matched to bad, unenlightened white southerners and colonialists from the 19th Century.

The number of Americans living in Mexico surged by 75 percent last year compared to 2019. The Los Angeles Times reports that this has angered locals, who are “fed up” with Americans coming to their country, speaking a foreign language, raising rents, and displacing their culture. For these Mexicans complaining about being replaced, I am playing the world’s smallest violin.

While this guy apparently just dislikes Mexicans, I've seen American rightists go like "Mexicans hate Americans immigrating to Mexico when THEY are the ones immigrating to America?" and I've never quite understood the point - the Mexicans staying in Mexico are obviously not the ones immigrating, are they? (Well, they might have done it at one point, or might do it at some point, but at that moment they're obviously not invading the USA or whatever).

Mexicans staying in Mexico are obviously not the ones immigrating, are they?

No, but their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers, or uncles are, and they are benefitting from the nearly $60 billion in remittances sent home annually by those expats - roughly 4% of Mexico's entire GDP.

Quite. The Mexicans in Mexico are the ones puppeteering the Mexicans in the USA: "Go to El Norte and send us some money" style. So yeah, they are invading the USA, in the same way that George Bush was invading Iraq - he isn't personally the boots on the ground, but the boots on the ground wouldn't have been there if he didn't direct them.

Is there no real difference between these two invasions? Something that might make it nonsensical to use the word "invasion" to describe both? Like the fact that Bush invaded using tanks and missiles and the Mexicans are "invading" by getting jobs?

Some (me) would say the Iraqi one is much more benign because that invasion didn't leave millions of American-Iraqui colonists / anchor-babies there to cause further demographic and political disruption in perpetuity.

Yes, those millions of children who will mostly attempt to earn their living and keep their heads down are much worse of a scourge than the trajectory Iraq was on since 2003. Clearly.

Uh, the recent migrants have mostly not been from Mexico.

No, but their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers, or uncles are

I dunno, are they? I'm not sure about Mexican immigration to USA, but traditional immigration pattern when it has come to Euro immigration in USA (or, say, Indian immigration to UK etc.) has been that it's been on a village basis - some villages are accustomed to sending immigrants to foreign countries (and generally each village has a typical region or city where the young people go when of age and unable to find local jobs), others are accustomed to sending them domestically to some big city. If someone's living in Mexico City, their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers and uncles might very well also live there, as that is the custom where they come from.

The Mexicans staying in Mexico still get very self-righteous about American attitudes regarding immigration - see AMLO's criticisms of DeSantis's immigration policies. Everyone loves talking about migrant rights when it's their in-group that benefits or their out-group that suffers. It's a different story when there are migrants who are driving up your own rent bill.

In reality the only people competing for rental apartments with American expats in Mexico City are the Mexican upper-middle class, who for the most part are indistinguishable in politics (and complexion) from the PMC of the rest of North America.

Not to mention a huge contingent of Americans hate the Mexicans who are immigrating to America.

The ire is probably misdirected when it's from Americans at the Mexicans that stayed and are irritated at American immigrants to Mexico, but I think the actual sentiment is more like, "goddamnit, can you libs at least notice that the Mexicans aren't being lunatics when they're sick of Americans and Americans aren't just being racist when they want people here to speak the damned language?".

Mexico is bursting at the seams with dogs. These dogs are not family members. They are alarm systems, beasts of burden to be used, abused, and thrown away. Locals will sometimes say, “They are working dogs,” but this is not a good enough reason to chain your dog to your roof and neglect it for years. Walking down streets full of starving, chained-up dogs exposes one to a constant stream of psychic pain much like that which famously drove Friedrich Nietzsche insane. As the story goes, one day in 1889, Nietzsche saw a horse beaten to death in the streets of Turin. He lost his mind, had a mental breakdown in the street, and never wrote again. (Of course, Nietzsche may have actually lost his mind because untreated syphilis ate his brain.)

I find this pearl-clutching a little hollow when most Westerners eat animals for breakfast lunch and dinner. Close the factory farms first, then you can get all high and mighty about Mexican dogs.

we’ll start seeing more chained-up, neglected dogs.

The point is that there is no coherent moral framework under which this is a bad thing while simultaneously meat-eating is fine.

Do you really not understand the difference in how people perceive pet species and food species, or are you ignoring it to make a point?

Yeah but the point is that I don't think there's any genuine moral difference there, so it doesn't really make sense as a stick with which to beat Mexican society.

I take it you don't hold with Newtonian Ethics?

While I suppose it's a plausible moral system, where our obligation to pets fits in in that scheme doesn't seem obvious. Which is to say that lets say most Mexicans subscribe to something resembling Newtonian Ethics, they could simply and quite plausibly regard dogs as further from them (or maybe in Newtonian terms they exert less of a pull than humans) such that their obligation is sufficiently small as to not worry too much about mistreatment.

Travel blogger Jake Nomada affectionately refers to the “lack of common sense found in many areas throughout the region” as “the Latin Hammer.” Some examples he lists include getting stuck in traffic for hours because road workers were on a siesta break, getting scammed by landlords, and bribing narcos.

Is there anything in this section (other than time-period specific technology) that would have been out of place in the US 100 or 200 years ago? For example, the behavior of early Mormons makes it seem like skepticism and common sense literally hadn't been invented yet:

Unlike the story I've [the author] been taught in Sunday School, Priesthood, General Conferences, Seminary, EF Y, Ensigns, Church history tour, Missionary Training Center, and BYU... Joseph Smith used a rock in a hat for translating 2 the Book of Mormon. In other words, Joseph used the same magic device or “Ouija Board” that he used during his treasure hunting 3 days. He put a rock – called a “peep stone” – in his hat and put his face in the hat to tell his customers the location of buried treasure on their property. He also used this same method for translating the Book of Mormon, while the gold plates were covered, placed in another room, or even buried in the woods. The gold plates were not used for the Book of Mormon we have today.

One of the key witnesses is described as:

The following are some accounts of the superstitious side of Martin Harris: “Once while reading scripture, he reportedly mistook a candle’s sputtering as a sign that the devil desired him to stop. Another time he excitedly awoke from his sleep believing that a creature as large as a dog had been upon his chest, though a nearby associate could find nothing to confirm his fears. Several hostile and perhaps unreliable accounts told of visionary experiences with Satan and Christ, Harris once reporting that Christ had been poised on a roof beam.”

Among other fantastic claims. There's a lot of crazy stuff in that link. And this wasn't the Borderers in Appalachia--Joseph Smith's ancestors were definitely Puritan and Mormonism began in upstate New York.

Safety is expensive. Car seats, climbing harnesses, etc. If something has to be done, and you're poor, then you'll just have to do it in the unsafe way. How many Darwin Awards went to hillbillies using guns for things they shouldn't have?

Overall I don't see a good reason to believe that these are problems inherent to a particular ethnicity of people rather than contingent on education, wealth, and possibly culture.

I think it’s also a part of the de masculinization of modern American and European culture in which all risk of any sort are horrific and to be avoided even at the cost of actually living.

I'm all for facing certain risks head-on and accepting that some amount of risk is unavoidable in a life worth living. I don't know what's to be gained from neglecting even basic safety regardless of context. At least Pasha's post from today is about taking risks to have fun, explore, and learn things. Risking disability or death when it's easily avoidable for misplaced machismo is the opposite of masculine, in my opinion. "Duty is heavier than a mountain. Death is lighter than a feather." Your duty as a traditional man is to take care of your family. Can't do that if you're crippled or dead. Put aside your ego and do the boring but important things; that's actually the hard part.

I'm all for facing certain risks head-on and accepting that some amount of risk is unavoidable in a life worth living. I don't know what's to be gained from neglecting even basic safety regardless of context.

Most of the complaints about risk come from people who don't really understand the risks though -- I will do things at heights which make onlookers shit their pants, mostly just so that they will shit their pants. Also for the lulz; it's fun, and work is supposed to be fun! But these things are less dangerous than the drive to work, for me.

I've also seen people do stuff that makes me shit my pants at work, but they don't have a deathwish -- they figured out a trick that makes people shit their pants, and can do it safely. Like trapeze artists.

(Nybbler's welder was probably using a torch -- it's actually not that hard on the eyes, the googles are quite bright compared to arc helmets, and are mostly there in case of spatter)

Nybbler's welder was probably using a torch

No, an arc. I know the difference.

Huh -- I've caught the odd flash, and it's pretty blinding even in the short term.

Was he like, doing short tacks while looking the other way? I've seen that before, but unless he was already blind actually looking at the weld sounds rough. (I don't think you'd be able to see anything anyways?)

Was he like, doing short tacks while looking the other way?

Yeah, pretty much. Looking up, more like. He was doing repairs on some metal stairs parallel to the ones I was using (in the US of course both sets would be closed off, or they'd have built some sort of temporary barrier between the repair area and the open stairs), and I noticed because the flash was pretty bright even from where I was. There was a visor right next to him, but I guess he thought it was too hot or maybe it was easier to see where to start without it.

This one actually makes kind of sense from an efficiency perspective if you don't have an auto-darkening helmet -- the classical approach is to line up your stinger with the helmet up, then kind of shake your head side to side until it drops. This is a PITA if you are doing a lot of small discontinuous welds, and once you've done a few you don't really need to see what's going on with the weld pool to do an OK job. Auto-body workers do a lot of this when welding panels (to keep the head spread out and not warp them); I think I've seen a torch-head designed s.t. it's just the right distance from the panel if you press the nose of it up against the work that it makes a nice tack weld but hides the arc.

tl;dr -- that's pretty safe by Mexico standards; lots of people in the US will do it to if OH&S is looking the other way. (although maybe not so much anymore with auto-helmets being pretty cheap)

A lot of this safety stuff is genuinely good and useful and not using it is idiotic, like the example nybbler gave above you.

It doesn’t make you a ‘real man’ to unnecessarily risk life and limb when there’s a trivial mitigation. It makes you reckless and stupid.

Safety is expensive. Car seats, climbing harnesses, etc. If something has to be done, and you're poor, then you'll just have to do it in the unsafe way.

It's that, but it's not just that, it's also attitude. I've seen Mexicans (in Mexico) arc welding without eye protection when the eye protection was right there. Personally I think we could use a little more of that attitude in the US, but maybe not that much; vision is important.

What should be done about racial gaps in IQ?

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.

This article is not the worst thing I've ever read on the subject, but it's frustrating how readily people go to the strawmen/weakmen/worst-case-scenario in these discussions.

If you don't personally think of native intelligence as high-status, then you aren't going to much care if (say) Asians are more likely to have it than Native Americans. In fact many people throughout history have treated native intelligence as either neutral or low-status; in some circumstances it might be bad to be smart (recall the manioc example from The Secret of Our Success). Because the "Information Age" has imbued nerds with social cachet they haven't always enjoyed, this is less often the case today than it has been in the past.

Progressives are (like most Westerners) far too quick to run to the Nazi analogy, but their underlying concerns are more, I think, a combination of their own eugenic instincts and their concern that social programs not be dismantled. Because progressives tend to think of intelligence as high-status, they also think of it as the sort of thing that should be distributed "fairly" (i.e., as equally as possible, whatever that means). But because progressives also tend to think we should "follow the science," specifically through government intervention in the human condition, they tend to jump immediately from facts to action plans. Tell a progressive that you've developed a low-cost, low-energy, non-polluting technology that turns dirty water into clean water, and they're immediately wondering how that technology can be deployed to benefit of humanity. Tell a progressive that you've found the genetic cause of a particular disease, and they're immediately wondering how we can turn that discovery into a treatment. The progressive mindset is fundamentally one of engineering the human condition.

To a deeply conservative mind, the proposition that "some people are stupid, it runs in families just like eye, hair, and skin color" is not only so blindingly obvious that researching it seems like a huge waste of time money, but also just a fact of life from which no particular conclusions need be drawn. Oh, sure, maybe you have second thoughts about marrying the handsome boy when you realize he's kind of dull; you think "do I really want to have this guy's dull children?" But this is not substantially more eugenic than secretly hoping that your children get your wife's red hair.

But the deeply conservative mind is living in the human world, not attempting to renovate it. So when a progressive is presented with mountains of meticulously-assembled peer-reviewed evidence that (1) IQ is substantially predictable along the lines of racial heritage and (2) IQ substantially influences the quality of a community's culture and economy, they don't just shrug their shoulders like a conservative. They start to wonder--how can we use this information to engineer the human condition? And the human mind, in its wonderfully inventive way, starts making suggestions: sterilize the idiots! Increase high-intelligence immigration from other nations! Uh... date white men and Asian women, perhaps?

In this way, progressive opposition to the very expression of the data on these matters is a kind of "telling on themselves," so to speak. It's not that they think the only logical thing to do would be to murder anyone with a low-IQ; it's that even a cursory grasp of HBD painfully illustrates the incredible shortcomings of progressivism as an ideology. If it turns out that your life is good, not because of anything the government has done for you, but because you live among the right sort of people, then huge swathes of social policy are just pointless and wasteful expenditures, fruitless attempts to engineer the human condition that can never, ever succeed until we literally engineer the humans themselves. This is incompatible with Western liberalism, and further exposes the daylight between "liberal" and "progressive." It threatens to unravel such entrenched political interests that the only possible response from the ingroup is to taboo the subject entirely.

It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.

Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.

I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.

progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people

They don't, though. Or rather, they do in cases where society has attached the word "eugenics" to a particular activity, but primarily a matter of social signaling. I cannot think of a more obviously eugenic practice than elective abortion; "the time is not right to have a child" or "this child is genetically defective and so I will terminate the pregnancy" is an extremely eugenic decision, and of course abortion is a keystone of American leftist politics. Virtually every human I know is at least weakly, and often strongly, eugenic in every way that makes any practical difference. Progressives have always loved eugenics, and still do; they just hate the word and its historical associations.

replaced by deep concerns about ableism

In particular, a progressive is far more likely to abort a Down syndrome baby than a conservative. In some especially progressive parts of the world, Down syndrome has essentially been eliminated via elective abortion. I admit that I regard most cries of "ableism" as fundamentally unserious for this and other reasons (like the progressive advocacy of assisted suicide for non-terminal and/or psychiatric maladies). You have to separate the signaling from the substance, though.

You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.

Even if, say, their children turn out to cause a crime wave? Surely that can't be right. Anyway you're not entirely mistaken, but the case is essentially overdetermined here.

There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.

Sure, but it's important to notice the difference between tabooing a word and certain specific historical examples, and actually disavowing a concept. Eugenics remains a fundamentally progressive idea; progressives just stopped calling it that. This is a very common approach to progressivism, shedding unpopular names for things while keeping their practical substance intact (see e.g. "cultural Marxism").

I think you’re totally misunderstanding the motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion.

Eugenics requires perceiving oneself and one’s progeny as part of a larger biological project - as merely one tiny branch of the human genetic/ancestral tree, the long-term health of which requires careful and intentional cultivation. Eugenics is a fundamentally communitarian endeavor. It’s about wanting humanity as a whole to be improved, using individual instantiations of eugenic breeding/sorting to direct the overall genetic health of the population in the direction of iterated improvement.

A middle-class American progressive woman who aborts a fetus with Down Syndrome is not thinking like this at all. Her decision could be framed in two ways: one is as a purely selfish decision - “If I have to raise a massively burdensome and defective child for the rest of my life, it will be financially catastrophic, require massive amounts of resources and effort, and will substantially decrease my quality of life.”; the other is to see it as an act of mercy for that child - “It would be better not to be born at all, than to be born as an incurably defective and mentally/physically retarded person, incapable of independence and entirely dependent on the indulgence of others for my entire life.”

Neither of these require, or in fact in any way involve, any orientation toward how your decision to abort a child ties into the larger genetic health of other future humans. Many of these women are some of the smartest and most capable individuals in our society; if they were primarily motivated by eugenic thinking, why on earth would they be deciding against perpetuating their superior genetic stock just because “it’s not the right time for me personally”? Abortion is clearly the dysgenic course of action in that case, barring fetal abnormalities.

“It would be better not to be born at all, than to be born as an incurably defective and mentally/physically retarded person, incapable of independence and entirely dependent on the indulgence of others for my entire life.”

This still qualifies as eugenics. Eugenics doesn't have to be about "humanity as a whole". You can think about eugenics on the level of a single person.

But how is this eugenics specifically? Yes, Down Syndrome in particular is a genetic condition, but what about aborting a fetus with any other sort of detectable congenital condition, i.e. hydrocephaly, missing limbs, etc.? I think that these are all motivated fundamentally on a recognition that some people’s lives are doomed from the very start to be unpleasant, short, or burdensome, and that if one had the ability to spare such people a life of suffering and extreme adversity, it is morally correct, or at least permissible, to do so. I think it’s coming from a totally different perspective than progressive eugenics proper.

I think you’re totally misunderstanding the motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion.

The motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion was not the point, there. The point was that progressives do not oppose eugenics per se; practices of a eugenic character are in no need of special particular motivational states in order to be eugenic practices.

Eugenics requires perceiving oneself and one’s progeny as part of a larger biological project

So, yes, if we're talking on a personal level about individual motivations, the science of "improving stock" (as Galton put it) is something individuals are not necessarily thinking about when they make decisions of a eugenic nature. But this was a discussion about policy, and I was responding to someone else who suggested that progressives oppose eugenics, which is simply not true. Progressives are fine with a wide array of eugenic practices, so long as people don't talk about the eugenic character of those practices (especially, while using the word "eugenics").

America’s destiny, then, is barbed wire—or, just as often, crushed beer bottles—adorning every fence in every neighborhood.

An interesting hypothesis. If only there were some way to test it, such as looking at any of the currently existing majority Hispanic neighborhoods in major US cities.

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.

the thing is, the actual Nazis did not use IQ tests. they never used them, unlike the US.


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