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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29162 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Jim Crow worked and lasted for a long time. So did slavery. Those are sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass that is much less intelligent, much more impulsive, and much more violent than average.

From "The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State" by Freed Reed:

That intelligence is genetic should be obvious regardless of technical knowledge. Any dog breeder will tell you that Border Collies are brighter than beagles, that if you mate smarter dogs to smarter dogs, within a few generations you will have a strain of smarter dogs. If intelligence were cultural as we are obliged to say, almost on pain of death, all the children who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses. Were they?

A dread question: Is it not now obvious, has it not been obvious for a very long time, that blacks cannot function in a technological society? A few, yes. Most, no. This is the case worldwide. Low intelligence, perhaps accompanied by poor impulse control, explains well the urban chaos, the crime, the poverty.

We are accustomed now to the intractable gap between blacks and whites. The gap appears on all tests of cognitive capacity and academic achievement: all of the IQ tests, the SATs, GREs, MCATs, LSATs, ACT, National Merit, AFQT, and others. This is so predictable as to make the value of pi seem capricious. The politically correct attribute the disparity to racism, institutional racism, unconscious racism, structural racism, poor self-esteem, white privilege, slavery, colonialism, culture, environment, and different learning styles. Do we really believe this?

...

A question no one asks, at least not out loud: To what extent are blacks dependent on the charity of whites? What would happen if all public assistance, all programs specifically or de facto for blacks were withdrawn?

Without affirmative action, racial quotas formal and informal, blacks would almost disappear from universities and the white-collar world. I think we all know this, but most recoil from the implications. I don’t blame them.

I am not sure that we all understand the extent of the affirmative programs and the distortions they cause for society. For example, on exams for promotion in police departments, by a large margin the top scorers are white so that, if departments advanced the most qualified, blacks would almost disappear. The same pattern exists for any job requiring intelligence. This can easily be confirmed.

What would happen if Section Eight housing were abandoned, Head Start, AFDC, free lunch and breakfasts in inner-city schools, food stamps, and all the rest? I do not recommend doing this–the consequences would be hideous–but do suggest thinking about it. The conclusion will probably be that blacks are in custodial care. If this is not true, tell me why it is not.

...

What is to be done? The policies usual in countries of the First World do not work. As a white man my inclination is to favor color-blindness, equality of opportunity, and advancement by merit. If East Asian kids outperform white kids academically by a wide margin, which they do, then they should get into Harvard and the white kids should not. Neurosurgeons should be chosen by competence and nothing else. Affirmative action lowers standards for society as a whole, sometimes dangerously.

All true, but… Realistically, meritocracy works well only in a monochrome population. If I, white, fail to get into CalTech in astrophysics, I will be disappointed but will not complain of unfair discrimination. I just wasn’t smart enough. But it is very different when a race in its entirety fails to gain entrance. It creates a de facto partitioning of society. In today’s America, merit isn’t going to work.

...

What do we do if –when–genetics makes the obvious undeniable? What then?

From "What If HBD Is True?" by AntiDem:

But now let us turn to solutions. If HBD is true, what do we do? What happens next? First, we must be realistic about what will not happen. First, blacks are not going to disappear from American life, nor should they be required to. By right of history, it is their country as much as it is anyone else’s whose ancestry is not American Indian, and the idea that that many people are going to go… where, exactly?… is sheer fantasy. What else will not happen is that the current welfare state will not continue at anything close to its current level for all that much longer. The economic writing has been on the wall in terms of that for a long time now.

...

Economically, if HBD is true, a Buchananite protectionism seems to be wise. Immigration and outsourcing should, in that case, be severely restricted by law, and tariffs raised sharply to protect American-made products. Some limit to the degree of mechanization of jobs might also be worth considering. This would do much to return to America – and to Americans, black and otherwise – the sort of working-class jobs that do not require exceptional academic or technical abilities.

Socially, it seems as if some degree of voluntary separation may be advisable. Despite centuries together, right next to each other, blacks and whites remain vastly different from one another in innumerable ways. Perhaps an acknowledgement of that reality, instead of further attempts to erase it when all previous attempts have failed, is the better course. The worst possible way to make some people genuinely like others is to try to force them to do so, and the sad reality of human nature is that good fences often really do make good neighbors. Perhaps some more space, with each group able to live more in accordance with its unique culture, attitudes, and worldview, yet still free to voluntarily associate (or not associate) with each other as they please, would do something to reduce tensions between the races. It seems to be at least worth trying – certainly nothing else that has been tried so far has proven to work very well.

In terms of criminal justice, too many blacks are imprisoned now. Certainly some – those who prey on the person or property of others – should be imprisoned, and few blacks would disagree. But many more are imprisoned for victimless drug offenses, and this should end. The War on Drugs has been a dismal failure, and should be discontinued, with drugs decriminalized. The problems associated with drug use among blacks should be handled by the black community itself.

...

These are my suggestions, and I believe them at least worth considering.

From "Radish defends slavery" by the Dreaded Jim:

You favor abolishing welfare: What do propose to do with all the able bodied people that are too lazy or too violent or have too short a time preferance to hold down a job?

Once upon a time, such people were put on the chain gang. Progressives did not like private individuals owning slaves, but they just love governments owning slaves. Look how they loved communist china, and look how bitterly outraged and indignant they became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees, rather than slaves.

And from "Economic efficiency of slavery" by the same:

For tasks requiring intelligence and independent judgement, for the kind of job where one would ordinarily employ a contractor or high level free employee, slave owners generally gave one of their best slaves an incentive environment approximating that of a high level free employee, where the slave had a future career path, the opportunity to save and invest, to own money and buy assets, including buying other slaves, indicating that slavery does not work to get such tasks done – hence the failure of the Soviet Union.

However for many tasks, tasks suitable to stupid people, tasks for bad people, tasks where you want people to reliably do as they are told rather than make good decisions, the sort of tasks that most black people are suitable for, slavery was markedly more productive and efficient than free labor, with the slave producing more value for himself and his owner with less labor, than he did when freed.

When the slaves were freed, they became for the most part, considerably worse off economically, having to work harder and getting less to eat.

...

Economists find this outcome most strange, but there is no mystery to it. When stupid people, prone to short time horizons, get to make their own decisions for themselves, they are apt to make stupid decisions.

A slave maid could not steal the silverware, because she could not own anything. An employed maid could steal the silverware, and probably would, and would be the worse off for it. An employed maid might well beat the baby with stick as thick as her arm because her mistress spoke sharply to her. A slave maid would not, because her mistress could do worse.

If masters and slaves were better off than employers and employees, an economist would ask, why could they not just cut a deal to do what they previously did, only without chains and beatings, do the same tasks in the same way, only as employees?

The answer to that question is: that the former slaves, once freed, could not credibly commit to stick to such a deal, and generally did not stick to such a deal, thus economically worse off. Stupid people, prone to violence, with short time horizons, needed masters.

Well, if you think that slavery is "sane" and you are consistent, then if hyper-intelligent aliens ever came to Earth and tried to enslave humanity to work in the unobtanium mines in similar conditions as what blacks experienced in the American South, you would justify it and side with the aliens. And that would be your choice, but I would still shoot you the first chance I got.

I'm not fresh on the status of the value of propagating existence around here. I feel like there is a contingent of folks who would argue that it is the primary, if not only, value underlying nearly everything else. So, I'm left wondering about this scenario. If morality is purely relative/subjective, such that the aliens just have the morality they have and there is nothing objective separate from that, is it better to mine unobtanium in slavery (for a while, at least; not sure how to discount future probabilities) or to just be exterminated?

I’d just like to register my repugnance with your axioms and your conclusions. Statistics are not people, and people who believe in eugenics and dysgenics believe (in my experience) in genetic destiny far more than statistics does.

I think that eugenics should be practiced in order to eliminate as many genetic disorders and conditions as are reasonably possible. Cystic fibrosis is absolutely a genetic destiny with a sharp and severe impact on quality of life and I don't see why we should just accept that some people are going to be born with horrible conditions when it is within our power to fix it totally within one or two generations.

The Motte: “I’d like to eliminate genetic disease from the human genome.”

The Bailey: “Only the genetically fit should be allowed to direct civilization.”

I am a distributist who does not believe that anyone should be "directing civilization" beyond the collective will and actions of the people, because I don't think "genetically fit" is really properly definable. The subtler personality traits required to be a good leader depend on the circumstances of each present moment - a nation stuck in a bunch of permanent wars and a nation who just discovered a brand new deposit of a critical economic resource need very different personalities in charge to get the best outcome. The strength of my eugenic position gets solely to wiping out the egregiously bad (genetic disorders) and then just not subsidising and encouraging dysgenic breeding like we do now.

I’m Objectivist-adjacent, so I have no desire to live under a “collective will.” It usually results in the stupidest possible policies being enacted.

I hope, based on your earlier reply, by “dysgenic breeding” you mean genetic disease and not anything related to race.

I’m Objectivist-adjacent, so I have no desire to live under a “collective will.” It usually results in the stupidest possible policies being enacted.

You do not actually have a choice here. I said "collective will and actions of the people", which translates to the desires and actions people actually take - you might not want to let other people make decisions for you, but you do have to live with the decisions they make for themselves.

As for dysgenic breeding I wasn't thinking about race at all - but it absolutely would fail the disparate impact test. I don't particularly care what colour the inhabitants of the trailer park are (skin colour is correlated with a bunch of the things I care about despite not being the basis for these decisions), but I freely admit that these policies will be better for asians than just about any other group.

I find it hard to believe that an employed maid could beat a baby because of low time preference but a slave maid wouldn't. Are you claiming that a slave maid would be punished as soon as her deed was discovered, but for an employed maid, the employer would wait a while before punishing the maid? That seems unlikely.

I think the point is that the employed maid could merely be fired while the slave maid would be beaten or killed herself. But as with most Dreaded Jim material I suspect it was written to optimize for provocativeness rather than sense.

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