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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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…
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