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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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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.

Hannania had some affirmative action takes lately.

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.

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?

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 small percentage of transgender population.

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

The number of teenagers and young adults in the United States who identify as transgender has doubled in the past five years, according to a new study.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf

Percent of each age group that identifies as transgender in the U.S.

13 to 17 1.4% 300,100

18 to 24 1.3% 398,900

25 to 64 0.5% 766,500

65 and older 0.3% 171,700

13 and older 0.6% 1,637,200