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It's actually insane to me that much of the the left in America thinks white supremacy not only is a threat to America but literally the biggest threat. I have been visiting some family in California this week and I have really gotten to see the white lib in their natural environment. Before this trip I had thought that the complaining about white liberals by conservatives was just a round about way to criticize other groups that aren't acceptable to attack and they were overemphasizing how bad they are. I have actually changed my mind on this and I think they have become quite deranged. Literally everything is seen through the lens of race and white/POC. These were people who had pretty moderate political views from what I remembered but they are no longer moderate. I was so annoyed by their beliefs but I didn't want to argue with them so I just kept silent.
However, I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job. I think we can imagine what a white nationalist government would do.
First of all, their immigration policy would obviously promote having a white majority. The US obviously fails this. Its immigration policy has transformed a country that was once 90% white into a country where whites will be less than 50% of the population in 20 years and this has happened in people's life times. This isn't some slow demographic change. It was deliberate in some cases and merely allowed in other cases. A white supremacist country would simply not allow this to happen. We've seen ethno states from Nazi Germany to Israel. In the case of Israel, they prioritize keeping Jews the majority and try to get more Jews to move there. In the case of the Nazis, the took it to the extreme and exterminated non-Germans. The US does the opposite of either of these, allowing non-whites to become a majority of the young people and of births in about 50 years.
The second things they would do is prioritize whites over non-whites. Does the US do that? DEI and those kinds of organizations and philosophies are designed to hire more non-white people and less whites. On my job review I filled out, I was judged on 20% of my review on DEI type stuff, one of which was hiring more "diverse" candidates. It is illegal to specifically hire whites only and even if it wasn't the country would hate you if you actually did it. All kinds of programs have been set up to get more non-white people into elite institutions through affirmative action and other policies. The isn't a single government program that was created to specifically help whites, but the same can't be said about all other groups. Biden literally said he would only consider a black woman for VP and on the Supreme Court. Their competition in the Republicans would never dream of explicitly saying they'd only pick a white man.
In a white supremacist country ran by white supremacists, white supremacists would also be liked by the population and government. Except again this doesn't happen. If you are a white supremacist openly, you will be hated and fired from your job. If you try to be a public intellectual and organize a pro-white organization, you will be kicked off of social media and be removed from the banking system. People will say it is okay to physically harm you. If you get famous enough, you will be the most hated person in America like RIchard Spencer. You will be sued and attacked by left wing lawfare, again like Richard Spencer. If you want to be like and be successful, being a white supremacist is literally the worst thing you could be other than a pedophile.
This has real world consequences where it makes people think in insane ways. Look at this insane reddit thread I found on rdrama. These people literally think being concerned about millions of people crossing the border a year is racist and white supremacy. I know many people like this, including in my own family. This delusion is then propped up by academics and intellectuals. Probably 75% of every "smart" person out there who is educated in elite institutions believes this to some degree.
I don't really have anything else to say other than I'm just baffled that so many supposedly smart and rational people don't think through their arguments and beliefs. Cartesian doubt is apparently out of style. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy or racism is anywhere close to the biggest issue the US faces.
I think you are missing the linchpin of the worldview, which is an axiomatic assumption that persistent group differences in outcomes can't be just, natural or accidental. The fundamental equality of groups (rather than individuals) is as close to a central dogma of faith as you can get for the dominant secular religion, and everything you observe follows quite easily from trying to square this belief with observed reality. Do you have a better explanation for US statistics that does not violate this belief than that somehow, despite superficial appearances, pro-white bias must have found a way?
(Regarding the bafflement, surely smart and rational people being unwavering in a religious belief should not be surprising, given humanity's track record.)
Cultural differences can make a very big difference- Asia adopting memes from Christendom is why it had so much catch-up growth despite by HBD it should have had better outcomes earlier. Assimilated Jews are fantastically successful, unassimilated ones are not.
It's not hard to point to cultural factors in the AADOS community which explain the income gap, and there are perfectly reasonable cultural-happenstance explanations which don't rely on HBD. White progressives are simply uncomfortable with a narrative that most people are responsible for their own station in life, more or less.
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It is such a strange belief.
It is saying in effect society writ large matters but micro cultures don’t matter. That is, the overall structure of society causes some groups to fail but an individual group culture is at best orthogonal to success. That is an extraordinary claim.
It assumes that genetics apply for individuals but not groups despite clearly there being a genetic difference between groups (eg whites and Asians look different). Again this is an extraordinary claim.
So to believe that difference in group outcome is proof of discrimination relies upon two extraordinary claims.
Very few people, especially ones who'd be considered "normies" by any sane criteria, think about the logical structure of their beliefs deeply enough for these sorts of questions to ever occur to them. This is true even if they are straightforward factual beliefs and not mere signalling (and I agree with a few others that what's going on here is more a complex mix of the two than straightforwardly one or the other).
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I think with some people here you might be talking cross purposes with regards to equality. Underneath the progressive dogmatism and irrationality, there is a real debate to be had about the importance of socioeconomic and political equality, that I think people want to get to; but they mostly get swept up in the first category with the common satirical image of the 21st century progressive that they don't want to be associated with.
Race will always be a dead end that will lead nowhere, if you want to use it as a proxy for trying to attain some level of material equality with another group.
Diversity or equity? Pick one. They're basically antonyms.
I think you'll find it agreeable that diversity without the dogmatism (and in particular the virulent progressive strain of it) is a good thing, and a certain amount of it is necessary for a healthy and functioning society. The same can be said for equality as well. But, I reject your dichotomy as a false dilemma. I think the research bears out the notion that greater levels of equality, or rather the lack of inequality if the former is too politically charged, leads to better overall outcomes. Saying this as a far-right leaning person myself doesn't necessarily make me uncomfortable either. Liberals not leftists have a monopoly on terms like diversity and equality.
The research is written by people with an agenda. The US has both more "inequality" and better overall outcomes than the rest of the western world, which argues against that rather strongly. Same for "diversity"; lots of research up and down swears diverse teams do better, then we look around and we find homogeneous teams which did really extraordinary things.
I'm all for being skeptical of motivated reasoning, but I'm not a priori dismissive of a body of research that does exist, that seems to lend to support for more equitable societies being healthier. I'm aware of absolutely 'no' research, save for somebody pointing it out to me, that suggests less equitable societies have lower rates of crime, poverty, life satisfaction, etc.
Your last point is interesting to me. I'm not even aware of a reputable institution that claims diverse teams do better. That is if my understanding of "diverse" is calibrated to mean the same thing I think you're implying.
That term "healthier" isn't well defined and is generally used to hide circular definitions (the research will include in its definition something which is equivalent to inequality itself). The people pushing this can generate as much research as they care to.
The business journals are full of such claims, so I think you just don't consider that field reputable (as indeed you should not)
Well I can't confess to being well read on any business journals, so unfortunately I can't comment on them. If your remark is meant more generally to gesture in the direction of pointing out how much garbage is littered throughout the social sciences, this isn't pointing out anything researchers haven't known for a long time. I deal with it quite regularly myself. That said, I don't see much opportunity to engage further with your remark, as it doesn't actually address any of the direct claims that are made. Not that I'm faulting you for it, I don't have much time to read books people throw at me either. But based on what I've read as highlighted above, this at least does pass the sniff test to me. I'll leave it to someone else to tear the data apart.
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Nomenym didn't say "equality," they said equity, which is not the same thing. To quote a passage repeated in various places:
(Emphasis added.)
You can see how trying to equalize all outcomes between individuals and groups and increasing diversity are goals at tension, yes?
Fair enough. However I think my usage still converges with the point you're making quite well.
If by that you mean there are always innate and fragile fault lines that underlie the mutual cooperation and peaceful engagement of diverse groups, sure; I have no problem with that. Lee Kuan Yew (the founder of modern Singapore) thought race and religion were two of those things, which is why they required delicate social managing to keep the peace between diverse cultures and ethnic groups. So we know it can be done. Not saying it's easy. I'm not even saying it's always desirable. Only that it's possible.
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This isn't even true though, is it? Almost everyone knows that black people are faster sprinters, that Kenyans win marathons, etc...
People understand how genetics works, observe it in their own life, and comment about it frequently. There are almost no people who truly hold the absurd "tabula rosa" worldview.
It's all post-hoc rationalization. Social signalling comes first and then people work backward from that. They'll claim a tabula rosa viewpoint when pressed, but when the subject of which race has the biggest dongs comes up, they'll have a bad case of amnesia and revert back to the HBD thinking which they know to be true.
This why you can't convince any of these people with correct arguments about HBD. It's not about HBD. They already believe in HBD! It's about social signalling, and by saying politically incorrect things you are being impolite and low status.
I don't think that most of them are consciously deceiving others by secretly believing in HBD but not admitting it. Many of them simply never think about any kind of HBD to begin with. They have literally never noticed that most of the best sprinters are ethnically African. Others have noticed HBD when it comes to physical skills, but have literally never thought of the idea of applying it to intelligence or behavior. And there are some others who have thought of applying it to intelligence or behavior but have decided that it does not apply. Which is not even necessarily such a crazy decision to make. I personally think that, while, HBD is definitely somewhat applicable to intelligence and behavior, the arguments in favor of it are not as air-tight as many people around here believe. For example, typical HBD views do not neatly explain how the Germans went from having no scientific achievements or large-scale civilization around the year 0 AD to being world leaders in math and science, living in one of the world's most complex and organized civilizations, by about 1900 AD, and they do not explain why I should assume that black people will not be able to do the same thing at some point.
They obviously notice. A sprinter like Dafne Schippers got a lot more attention because she won despite being 'different.'
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I don't think that most people think about Kenyan runners at all, but if they do, they can surely also chalk this up to something non-genetic like life in some parts of Africa just happening to involve really good running training.
A... pink slate?
You mostly can't convince religious people with correct arguments either; if they (or, more commonly, their children) are persuaded at all, it is usually precisely by status gradients. To the extent your argument works for progressive antiracism being fake, it seems that it would do likewise for religions - but then that fakeness is surely moot, since smart people have lived, killed and died for it in droves.
Lol. My bad.
Great analogy. Wokism is similar to a religion in many ways. The beliefs of wokists are fake. Similarly, the religious disputes between Protestants and especially Catholics during the Wars of Religion was fake as well. Do you think the average person cared about doctrinal disputes? Of course not. They might have pretended to care. But not enough to actually learn enough about religion to adequately explain the differences. These were, after all, mostly illiterate people.
So why were they fighting? Tribalism.
”Man is born gay, and yet everywhere they are marrying their beards.”
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I think you'd be surprised how many people simply wouldn't even get that far. I've been told by a lot of people that it simply has to do with the elevations of those runners' countries of origins or something. That's all it takes to wave it away, and if that fails, they can always just suss out that you're trying to prove a broader wrongthink narrative, AKA "arguing in bad faith."
Many people won't even believe that male and female humans have different physical performance in sports for any reason but different socialization. Whether they were thinking backwards is an irrelevant question now, because the firmware is now complete and they just have trouble accepting genetic differences being real in general.
While I find this plausible, I haven’t seen this myself. Could you link me to any actual instances of this argument being made non-ironically?
One time I got into an argument with a woman who would not concede that men have a higher sex drive.
I've seen that on Reddit (from men, even!) and it makes me laugh every time. Granted, it's Reddit so what would one expect, but still. I've seen more than one person unironically try to turn "men have a higher sex drive than women" into "haha these loser virgins think women don't have any sex drive". It's so bizarre that they are dedicated to denying what every generation prior accepted as a basic fact of life (that while women want sex, on average they don't want it nearly as much as men do).
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I obviously don't have a transcript, but I've had this argument with my sister many times. She's even gone so far as to deny that men become more muscular than women when both lift weights.
I have dated several girls who refused to believe there are any innate differences between men and women. To the point of melting down a bit when they tried to play wrestle with me and discovered that their exercise regimen of an hour at the gym every day doing cardio and weights was no match for my exercise regimen of lying on the couch every night inhaling chips ahoy.
The Williams sisters at the height of their career versus the 203rd ranked tennis player was a big eye opener for me, he smoked them both with basically no issue.
"Height of their career" is not accurate, neither had won a major title at that stage. They were emerging players. I think Serena was 17 at the time.
Not to say the result would have changed if they had played a few years later, but still.
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Invite her on here.
Sorry bro, she's married.
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In my subjective experience here in Sweden this has almost entirely gone away. It used to be fairly prevalent in the late 90s/00s but then both statistics and young teenage boys comfortably beating elite professional women over and over again got media attention and the narrative went away.
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