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What sort of political options on the ground do radicalized youth like Mr Vawda have?
The almost openly genocidal EFF?
Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, even more intense ethnic conflict.' I suppose this goes to show the power of nationalist feeling - it can override all other considerations.
I think this also highlights the importance of HBD. Some people on this forum have disputed its value, saying 'so what do we gain in the real world from this knowledge'? We'd gain useful information about the destiny of states that go from white rule (indigenous fighter jet programs, first heart transplant, nuclear program) to black rule (mass unemployment, constant power outages, ludicrously high crime/murder rate). We'd know it was unlikely that South Africa, along with Brazil, would be a meaningful part of BRICS, the source of future world economic growth. Useful investing information! And we'd know that since the situation in South Africa was very unlikely to markedly improve, future racial conflict is likely as the economic gap between black and white remains.
If anything, I'd say it demonstrates the exact opposite.
Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, and even more intense ethnic conflict.'
It just goes to show that culture matters.
How does believing in HBD equate to wanting any of that? HBD is a descriptive theory; understanding that the differential in human capital between the white minority and the black majority does not suggest any particular course of action or policy recommendation for the country. In fact, the knowledge that the current precipitous decline in material and cultural standards is a direct result of the dispossession and disenfranchisement of whites can easily lead to a belief that the country needs more international investment and intervention by foreigners, given that it’s blindingly obvious that the native blacks are not ever going to be able to maintain anything close to the first-world standards that prevailed in the country during apartheid.
Absolutely, HBD is simply a fact, what policy you wish to enact about it depends on your ideology.
A white supremacist might crow at the evidence showing their superiority and demand extradition of underperforming minorities.
A woke person (who miraculously comes to accept it), might still want AA or desire that the topic be suppressed so as to prevent the former from winning in the court of public opinion (this might already be the case, at least for some of the smarter HBD deniers).
Me? I see it as a glaring reason we need to work on somatic or germline cognitive enhancement, so that skin color and other phenotypical features become utterly uncorrelated with performance, in the same manner that the paintjob of a F1 car doesn't really change its performance. (Barring brand liveries of course, I'm sure some teams have better cars and drivers)
I have some unfortunate news for you: the face predicts the brain. The appearance of one's face is derived to a significant degree from the neural crest, and differences between brains actually do lead to differences in faces in such a way as to make it possible to accurately determine a wide variety of mental and personal qualities about people from their face. Just looking at someone's face gives you enough information to make fairly reliable predictions about their political affiliation, levels of dominance, kindness, sexuality, trustworthiness etc. While skin-colour might be something you can arbitrarily adjust (and albinos do make the case that this is possible), facial features do actually reflect the brain behind them in significant ways. So while you might be able to change skin-colour with no particularly long-lasting consequences, those other phenotypic features are going to be an issue.
I hardly see this as an insurmountable problem, especially when more advanced plastic surgery makes aesthetics entirely a matter of choice. It all seems tractable to me, but then again I'm not overly beholden to the human form, if the cost of raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible requires sacrificing some facial diversity, I couldn't care less!
Sufficiently advanced plastic surgery is a good response, and I don't think it is necessarily MORE magical than perfect germline editing for intelligence anyway - we're already in science fiction territory here anyway.
That said, I do find the idea of raising everyone as close to "maximum intelligence possible" to have a few other issues... what levels of autism/aspergers/other disorders are you willing to tolerate in exchange? There've been a lot of discussions on here and in other HBD spaces about how IQ isn't actually an unalloyed good, and I think the "maximum" intelligence reachable is more a matter of making certain trade-offs rather than just assembling every single high-IQ allele. There's even a specific mutation which boosts IQ but also causes blindness - if you're going for the maximum IQ, do you have that mutation?
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