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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.
Can you please elaborate on your reasoning here? We have a situation that looks to be a total confirmation of HBD premises - the predictions that HBD theories would make on this topic have been proved correct, and you view this as evidence that HBD is wrong? I'm not trying to be glib here, I really cannot understand your reasoning. It also looks like you forgot to include the > for the second quote as well.
I will try.
HBD as typically expressed here on theMotte is a strong normative belief in biological determinism. This believe is in turn used to justify opposition any cultural or social intervention that isn't explicitly configured along racial and intersectional lines.
"it's all genetics" they'll say, "teacher quality has pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes" they'll say, and these claims will be used to explain why teaching black kids to read is a waste of time, and why rationalists need to make dysgenics a priority. [To be clear this isn't a straw man, it's the baseline] (https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/63701)
HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes, they blame the melanin content of the other guys skin rather than a result of the defect-defect equilibrium that they've been actively rooting for.
What we are seeing in South Africa now is a failure of basic civic structures and trust, this has fuck all to do with skin color but it does have a great deal to do with social cohesion.
The skin color of the leadership seems pretty important to SA.
There are some caveats to full HBD. North Korea, East Germany, etc. These show that poor government can hold good populations back. SA is an example of a good minority government even benefiting a probably less talented country as a whole. But also demonstrates a soft-HBD possibility that there exists certain populations that are incapable, or at least less capable of good governance in a democracy of democracy adjacent regime.
And yet somehow less important than whether the leadership are a bunch of Marxists.
Unclear. Is it because the leadership are Marxists that they don't have the state capacity to prevent rampant pillaging of powerlines? There have been Marxist societies - Stalinist Russia, or Mao's China, or Kim's Korea - that were capable of protecting state infrastructure and harshly punishing those who, without approval from the relevant political authorities, harmed it.
Is it because the leadership of SA are Marxists that they have a turbo-charged affirmative action system (called "Black Economic Empowerment") which crippled many major businesses and state enterprises? It's more LBJ "Great Society" than "all power to the proletariat."
Is the SA leadership's Marxism the reason that they appear to be functionally innumerate?
I don't know, and I have a hard time believing it's not a larger issue, of which culture/ideology is one aspect.
So there was this one time I was at work, and a friend of mine arrives extremely late. No biggie, we're all IT dudes, and there was nothing urgent, but it was unlike him, so we ask him what happened, and he says: "well, here I was, sitting on the bench at the station, waiting for my usual train when I hear the announcement 'due to theft of the overhead power lines, all trains in the direction of <<city>> are cancelled'". It was already after communism though, so maybe it's beside your point.
That's the same "Cultural Marxism does not exist / isn't Marxism" cope all the Marxists always use. The answer here is yes. Marxist oppressor-opressed analysis is what's responsible for affirmative action.
That one might come down to post-modernism.
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