This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A few tweets are catching my eye on college education today.
Seems like a lot of low IQ people are getting college degrees. IQ<90. Let’s be serious those people can’t do intellectual work. I actually think the modern world would be very confusing for people with an IQ well above there let alone doing intellectual work.
https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1679712417419341827?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
There is a big discrepancy in repaying student loans between males and females. Being that the gap begins immediately I assume it has nothing to do with child birth. Perhaps hoping to marry a guy who will buy them out? Females do have more pressure to entering the dating market earlier versus developing personal finance.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1679787590680031232?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Hannania had some affirmative action takes lately. Here’s one on mainstream conservative embracing hbd.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1679861286392434688?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Maybe it’s low effort to post a bunch of tweets but I’m noticing a trend here of the Supreme Court ruling getting people talking about issues in higher education and attacking it. These all seem to be attacking in slightly different directions but it seems a debate has been started on the right.
IMO Hannania keeps saying Musks buyout of twitter has helped the right a lot with activision. Protests work now. Lack of censorship helps them get there more intellectual debates out there which they couldn’t before.
That's not necessarily a problem. There are a lot of positions which require people who would be able to follow instructions, show up on time, do what they are told without rocking the boat and not go crazy from working in a boring plastic-covered cubicle for decades (or at least not too soon so that training costs would be recovered). The school grades used to do this function, or tests, but now the school releases people who literally can't even read their own diploma, so that went out of the window, and tests are racist, as we all know. So the college certificate guarantees the owner can minimally function within the social environment and do whatever motions are necessary to get the degree, ergo with high probability they can do the functions that are necessary to keep the job. Even supposedly "creative" professions nowdays produce 90%+ second-hand repetitive derivative crap. Plenty enough space for people with a diploma and not stellar IQ, especially if they speak the correct jargon - which is another thing the diploma would give them.
I have pretty high IQ (didn't really test since late teens but it's high) and the clown world is extremely confusing to me. But my work - which requires a lot of creativity - does not require me such levels of understanding, and arguable almost no work does. Most require you to be effective in a pretty narrow bounds.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree and was a bit amused when certain people on the right, who seem to think everything can be quantified, were gasping that he paid tens of billions for a business that was either barely making money or none at all. But this ignores the central role Twitter has in our politics. It is, as Musk noted, the closest thing we have to a "town square". Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram are not political in the same way. Sure, Whatsapp forwards can have political content but there's no "public arena" aspect to it as on Twitter.
This is something the left has understood intuitively for a long time. All those conservatives making fun of those humanities NGO losers didn't understand the latter were playing the long game, and a different game at that. A slow filtering into the institutions where the main currency is social clout and influence. That's basically what Twitter generates. Whoever controls it, has a very strong influence on public discourse.
For the same reason, when boomer conservatives gave up on cities and told everyone to ignore university and just focus on money, look at where that led us. The steady march of insanity from the 1990s up until 2020 couldn't have happened without unilateral surrender. Elon isn't even that right-wing, but at least he's fighting back. IMO, his Twitter purchase shouldn't been seen as a business investment so much as political activism.
P.S. it also seems Threads is tanking badly after a brief surge, so there's that. D.S.
More options
Context Copy link
It's a nice angle to constantly dab on the blacks and just call it 'being against affirmative action'. Do blacks emotionally read 'affirmative action' in the same way I read 'whiteness'?
Surely some blacks (and even more of their diverse progressive allies) do. But that reflects badly on those people, seeing as whiteness – as per the infamous Smithsonian definition – is basically just being a decent person (or at least a non-troublesome employee), whereas Affirmative Action is never just affirmative action, never just redistributing the pie of prestige; it carries costs that may measure in lives.
Specifically Hanania cites the story of King/Drew aka «Killer King» Medical Center in Los Angeles, created in response to race riots and operated by representatives of «black community». The overall impression he seeks to convey is one of absolute fraud and profanation in service of ethnic prejudice; incompetent, criminally insane and malicious people playing doctor, giving up halfway and playing longhouse; callously watching deaths of their patients; covering up tragedies with an attitude that'd be chillingly pragmatic if it weren't also naive and self-defeating due to their stupidity. When, in defense of Affirmative Action, Justice Jackson argues – duplicitously and libelously – that black babies have a higher chance to survive in the hands of black doctors (implying that they risk death in the hands of non-blacks), it's precisely mitigations to Affirmative Action fiascos of the King/Drew type, removing high-risk babies from hands of low-skilled doctors, that make her argument superficially plausible.
Right-wing ideas on Culture War topics usually have at least three tiers of radicalization (iceberg meme.jpg). Tier Zero is Hlynka or Sowell-style conservative critique of raw denial, where problems with the default liberal narrative exist but may still be plausibly excused by pure social mechanics – liberals are just wrong about which ones. Tier One is where HBD, sex differences and such innate factors are recognized, but only myopically: people stick to the defensible, scientifically rock-solid motte of standardized aptitude measurements, merit, and economic optimality. Tier Two is where science is thinner, but subtle effects add up to extremely ugly conclusions. This is where you understand, among all else, that it's never just about IQ or SAT; that a great share of MtFs are not «women in man's body» or «men deluded about being women» or even «perverts» but something far more problematic; that… but it's stagnant due to most people chickening out earlier (after all, even in the tiniest niche there'll be crazy people dedicated to sniffing you out), thus rife with esoteric bullshit and self-serving ideology, and can get you banned even here. This isn't thebailey,org, after all.
But There's a Tier One and A Half. It's what you conclude once you allow yourself to think about implications of Tier One for even a little while.
IQ is meaningful because the complexity of everyday life is g-loaded. Conscientiousness and lack of bias are meaningful because tradeoffs of every line of work test human character. Abandon those measures or their solid proxies, and the demerits can compound, until catastrophic tail events become the norm and the civil structure collapses like South African power grid.
It doesn't take much. The society relies overwhelmingly on Swiss Cheese defense: the simplest way to prevent disasters is to use cheese types with small holes. Affirmative action makes the holes in the cheese bigger. An unqualified nurse injects more sedative than needed. A careless doctor doesn't check it in time. A corrupt supervisor doesn't pick up the early signs to remove them, then covers up the fatality. A racially motivated activist excuses the track record by saying whitey don't pay up enough. You create a bubble of horror where there was none.
I am not sure about Hanania's playbook. He flirts with banal racists and disses conservatives for not embracing the strong points of progressive paradigm. It may be incoherent. But his political intention seems simple. I presume it's just delegitimizing those horror-creating processes and mainstreaming opposition to them, so that the world where progressives win will be livable. To that end, he will troll and dunk and do whatever, but he won't swear fealty to any political team that's playing house instead of instrumentally shaping reality.
Sorry to necro but can you explain what tier two is? I can’t figure out what the HBD informed view of MTFs is and my curiosity killing me. You can send via PM if you don’t want to elaborate on here (if you feel like elaborating at all)
It doesn't have much/anything to do with HBD, just appreciation of how AGP works. Sorry to get your expectations up.
I missed this thread when it was still new. Are you willing to go into any more detail about how AGP works and how it's something "far more problematic"? I'd really love to hear your take.
Like the other guy said, feel free to PM if you don't want it to be public for whatever reason.
More options
Context Copy link
Ah I misunderstood the paragraph, but now I’m left wondering what makes the MtFs far more problematic than mere weirdos or perverts. Is it just something like what Sailer says about the AGP types?
More options
Context Copy link
Tough, stereotypically maximally manly men, often unironical veterans of gorilla warfare with hundreds of confirmed kills who in advanced age suddenly find they were, deep inside, little girls all the time, are small percentage of transgender population.
They are, as Steve Sailer noted, the public faces and enforcers of the movement, but they hadn't started it and are not leading it.
Are they?
You are right, not so small minority (but still a minority)
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2022/06/10/study-estimates-transgender-youth-population-has-doubled-in-5-years
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is it the tier where you leave quokka island and get thing called opsec, where you grok that 120 IQ pencil pusher who can be trusted is preferable to 160 IQ creative genius with sus behavior and connections who might be working for something or someone else?
The tier where you, for example, understand you should not hire for sensitive position in your business graduate from prestigious university with perfect score who just happened to be born in well known mob family? Where you, for example, understand you should not hire for great power super duper secret weapon project people who are overtly sympathetic to another great power?
These conclusions do not look to me as overly ugly, but I never identified myself as quokka.
What "super problematic thing" you are hinting at here? Transgenderism as ancient demon waking up?
Imagine that small group of
illuminaticommunistscastration fans walked the long march through institutions from obscure 90's Usenet discussion group all the way up to top world's professional association deciding global standards of health care.Imagine that old well connected and respectable billionaire mafia family decided to throw their money and influence for for the issue of gender affirming care.
Imagine global pharma industry enthusiastically jumping on the bandwagon, and then imagine that Western propaganda machine made this cause into new hip thing and made gender affirming treatment the coolest thing ever, with the whole democratic, free and civilized world following suit.
This is far more depressing and blackpilling matter that any schizophrenic ooga booga stuff can ever be.
More options
Context Copy link
It's an easy deflection for whites to puff out their chest and present themselves as simply being too good to take ethnocentric hatred against them seriously. And whilst the Smithsonian definition might be well suited to that sort of backhanded flattery as a literal definition, it's hardly representative of the emotional sentiment being conveyed when Noel Ignatiev states that 'treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity', or what 'progressives' mean when they talk about 'abolishing whiteness' in general. They don't see whiteness as a collection of flattering traits.
The problem I have is the question of where trolling, dunking on and otherwise owning the libs will lead. If Hanania is playing by some sort of 4D chess rhetorical playbook, that's fine. But it elevates him only slightly below the typical 'conservative' he would otherwise lament when it comes to actual policy. Being against affirmative action and not going full bore HBD is like kicking a hornets nest without any protective clothing on.
On top of that, in his own words, Hanania can recognize the obvious motivations of folks who grasp at any straw to argue against subjects he likes, like immigration:
So is Hanania just looking for justifications to argue against his 'main concern' regarding blacks, which have very little to do with affirmative action? Hoping that no one will notice the same obvious thing he notices with regards to immigration? Because on its face, there is nothing wrong with affirmative action until you try to fit it around a population group that has a normal distribution of traits below the minimum system requirements. Which is US blacks.
I can agree Hanania is incoherent, like you say, but I'm also doubtful his opposition is anything more than 120 IQ takes to own the libs and your racist grandma with. To that end expending effort on talking about him like he matters is degrading.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It does seem a bit of a dog whistle. The problem today is the right needs to show that blacks are failing because of intrinsic lack of ability. I don’t think this is something the vast majority of people on the right have been in favor of for decades.
The lefts favorite political tool right now is Blacks underperform on this metric if we do “x” policy we want then we won’t be racists and blacks will perform.
Anything that pushes back against the left on these political tools is going to be indistinguishable from just blasting blacks. It ends up being an argument of blacks are failing because blacks are dumb.
In that sense it's much less dog whistling than it is gatekeeping. Though I don't remember if Hannania goes full bore HBD or if he toes the 'conservative family values' line.
Given that Hanania doesn’t like conservative family values much…
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It’s never exactly been a secret that you can’t really fail out of university, so the 90 IQ graduates doesn’t shock me. It’s been something of an open secret since I was in college in the 1990s that at least a quarter of all incoming freshmen are not reading or writing on grade level and thus need remedial classes. It’s also not much of a secret that there are a lot of easy majors (communications is a big one) that we’re known as being the kind of classes that could be passed easily by people too lazy or stupid to read the textbooks. Outside of STEM, almost no majors have a required GPA for the program, so kids don’t fail out no matter how much they flunk, and anyway, you can withdraw up until the midterms and not take a GPA hit.
Is this just an American thing? Half my engineering class dropped out in the first year at my Canadian university and I know several people who flunked out of university, often from general arts programs. You can't get more than a certain number of F's or you will be kicked out and it happens regularly. I know people who barely graduated too, despite working hard.
The standard joke at my school (and many others) was that the limit as GPA approaches 0 of engineering is business. That is, those failing the hard majors would switch to easy ones rather than drop out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A friend of mine's wife once was begging me for help with an assignment for a class for her communications degree. The assignment was to watch a TED talk and write four sentences about it. That was the entirety of the assignment. She needed help.
I don’t want to imply anything weird but isn’t “woman asks man’s help with very easy thing” a common flirting tool?
Yeah, but I'm gay and she's married to my friend, so I don't think that's what she was going for in this case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That doesn't seem to be consistent with the high dropout rate, the fact that low GPA is the best predictor of dropping out, and that apparently 1 in 6 first-year students are placed on academic probation
Dropping out is the students’ choice. The university itself will never kick out a student. And I think this is why they’re so interested in by-hook-or-by-crook loan forgiveness. The schools get their money either way — the loans were guaranteed by governmental decree that you couldn’t discharge the debt in bankruptcy. The sticky problem was that students who saw their debt climbing and were having trouble were dropping out because they didn’t want the debt for a degree that they were having trouble getting. Forgiveness removes that economic pressure to either finish or do something else.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you've seen all of these, I'm sure you've seen the brain-damage inducing tiktok reels of people doing NPC impressions. In lieu of better commentary, I'll share my favorite meme referencing it:
/images/16894046285113533.webp
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link