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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Far Right HBD Civil War

Bronze Age Pervert recently xeeted on what he believes in the current infeasibility of HBD politically:

While for the sake of truth I think facts about racial disparities should be discussed, it’s not good at all politically. In fact it’s impossible in the present circumstances. Only a myth of race blindness is workable. You won’t convince some populations that they are inferior by birth and deserve their station in life. You won’t even convince “decent people” from high achieving populations of this. On the other hand discrimination to offset perceived past discrimination or natural inequalities is also felt to be wrong (although I think it would be relatively easy to convince modern populations to accept affirmative action to offset natural inequalities, which is another reason pushing this with a political intention is a big mistake). The only solution in short run is race blindness, stopping and reversing all racialization of politics and society. This isn’t my own preference by the way but a statement on fact. The “HBD position” is an impossibility politically and culturally today. Public hypocrisy is the only way out that will be accepted unless you are ready to go the Nietzsche and Gobineau route (and you are not).

This was controversial with numerous pundits amongst the different spheres of the Right: with Woods, Winegard, and Fuentes having opposing views.

I think the question of politically feasibility of HBD is a point of discussion, in addition to—perhaps more interestingly—the timing of the xeet by Bronze Age Pervert—wat means? Is HBD the path forward? In the chaos of the Isreal-Hamas war and the current anti-woke backlash, is the vitalist Right looking to make themselves more palatable?

I think the question of politically feasibility of HBD

What does political feasibility of HBD even mean? It's not a policy it's a theory.

I don't think HBD has anything to do with "deserve". Most of the prominent HBD-people would agree with that, I think. It's not like someone with a genetic disease like Huntington's "deserves" to be sick.

Is HBD the path forward?

I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question that has been bubbling whenever (racial) HBD comes up as a topic on this forum: do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?

Studies of the correlation between education levels that are clear indicators of IQ (ie, a Bachelor's or above) are scarce, possibly because it is almost impossible to actually study because the number of college graduates who actually commit crimes is so tiny as to be nonexistent. Lochner and Morretti found a 30% decrease in murder and assault rates for each additional year of schooling, and that increases in schooling after high school graduation had no discernable impact because the rate of incarceration had already bottomed out. I couldn't find actual data on the topic, but working backward prisoners appear to have less than 4% of the odds of having a Bachelor's compared to the general population.

HBD advocates like Charles Murray and Lee Kuan Yew have both talked about the effects of the Great Sort, that once meritocratic policies are implemented and a majority of working class students have the opportunity to advance through education, the remaining working class becomes increasingly composed of the less intelligent or less conscientious. LKY talks about how labor union leaders in Singapore were initially drawn directly from workers, but this became less practical in recent years because there was no one smart enough to take on a leadership role, so they brought in college educated labor professionals to lead. Murray discusses this as a central thesis of Coming Apart, where he discusses the decline in IQ among working class whites. My own father talks frequently about how when he was young, a lot of white contractors were smart guys who never thought about going to college or just took over the family business, where today young white contractors are dumber and lazier because any white kid who wanted to work and had half a brain got into college.

So if I want to avoid crime, why would I advocate for racial discrimination, and not for economic discrimination? Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race? Which is rather...what we have in our current Capitalist Hellscape, n'est pas? If you want to escape crime, have money. If you want to have money, have good genetics for intelligence and conscientiousness, work hard, and you'll get a job that will pay you enough to move into a restrictively zoned neighborhood where the criminally inclined will be kept out by high housing prices and lack of public transport.

Why do wignats who trumpet HBD findings convenient for them rail against "elites," elites who clearly have the better gene pool?

The political problem with true HBD, in the long run, is that very few people are located at its apex. If I accept its moral bases, I see no reason to help out people below me on its ladder, whether by skin color or by education. And most people are below someone.

The political problem with true HBD, in the long run, is that very few people are located at its apex. If I accept its moral bases, I see no reason to help out people below me on its ladder, whether by skin color or by education. And most people are below someone.

HBD is not a moral claim, but even so what you have described has nothing to do with morality. You are not automatically a good person because you got the smart genes that let you think abstractly and match patterns. You are not automatically a bad person because you got the dumb genes and are in a demographic group that does lots of crime. Your line of thinking is in a sense an inversion of what morality is, now something that you are born with rather than a product of your choices.

Why do wignats who trumpet HBD findings convenient for them rail against "elites," elites who clearly have the better gene pool?

I dont think people actually identify as "wignats", I have only seen it used as a pejorative for people who make unsophisticated arguments about why black people are bad. Or something similar. Maybe your experience with the term is different but asking why wignats do wignat things is circular.

The principled argument is becauase the elites for whatever reason are running our institutions on blank slate theory when it is pretty clear that people are not blank slates. And this is causing bad outcomes. Not every HBDer is Andrew Anglin, there are plenty of Charles Murrays.

I dont think people actually identify as "wignats"

I just use it as a shorthand for "white nationalist," which many on this board do self-identify with, because white nationalist is long to type, infelicitous, and kind of vague (a nationalist can be white without being a white nationalist). Wignat is a fun word, and clearly delineates the group I'm speaking about.

do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?

I don't view blacks of vermin either and I wish people would stop putting this liable on me. Whether you hate those less blessed than you is your own prerogative. HBD is mainly talked about skincolor because it's used as weapon against racial spoils and the blood liable of systemic racism. If you want me to explain why the whites in trailer parks are there, I'll be more than happy to do so.

Blacks are inferior

This is not what HBD says. You can't short cut it, you must say the whole thing out, yes every time. Blacks in americans on average perform worse than white americans on average. There are Black americans smarter than nearly all white americans, they are just rarer white americans who are.

Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race?

Why not indeed? I can think of no reason and thus don't.

If I accept its moral bases

There is no moral basis. It is a theory, not an ideology, not prescription, not a behavior. You believe it or you don't. I will never understand, besides uncharitable status signaling reasons, why people who obviously believe in HBD refuse to admit to it.

why people who obviously believe in HBD refuse to admit to it.

These sorts of people remind me of the Patrick ID card meme, like they admit all the premises to derive HBD are true, they agree that the argument from the premises implying HBD is valid but then when you go "Therefore HBD!", they say no....

And yes, I happily consider people equally "low value" regardless of their skin color if the factors that lead to their "low value" are the same (and skin color/race by itself is not one of those factors).

I want to see a colorblind meritocracy. HBD is just the argument for why the inevitable racial disparities in this colorblind meritocracy aren't a problem.

Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?

Younger brothers, who need understanding and guidance. Try not to be patronising while you're at it.

Ultimately if our world wasn't ending we could notionally preserve all the bloodlines and get rid of low-function alleles through embryo selection, but that's basically all academic.

do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes

Count me as one of these; but then, I'm the "go back to explicitly acknowledging the hereditary nature of ruling elites" guy. Bring back terms like "good breeding."

Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race?

Actually a popular position in some of my IRL circles.

Which is rather...what we have in our current Capitalist Hellscape, n'est pas?

No, we don't. Not since Griggs and "disparate impact," anyway.

Ehh, Griggs vs. Duke Power is overrated by HBD/IQ folks. It's not like IQ tests were ubiquitous before Griggs, were they?

I think the more important problem for large companies is that the PR costs might be large and that PR costs are very salient/legible in a way that employee quality is not, at least no in the short-term (and people are hardly paragons of rationality in the long-term). Like, if you were a CEO and added IQ tests, you can be certain of a media backlash and you're also risking subsequent punishment by the board. Even if you're certain it would improve employee quality, that would (a) be hard to prove and (b) even if you could, it would take years...

Smaller firms,

  1. often just copy larger firms (they are often, in a sense, even more risk-averse than big firms, since all the financial risk is borned by the owner)
  2. often aren't super g-loaded anyway (e.g. mom-and-pop shop, contractor laying flooring, etc)
  3. have less principle-agent problems (arguably, IQ-esque tests are most valuable, because they partially displace hiring favoritism) - like, if I'm mostly hiring people I know and have worked with before, the additional value of an IQ test is ~0

Is there any evidence that using IQ tests generated media blackslashes when using IQ tests was legal?

You know - I've done some searching (Google, Google Scholar) and llm-ing (GPT, Claude, Bard), and I can't really find any evidence I would consider strong

  1. in favor or against significant media backlash against IQ testing potential hires
  2. in favor or against the claim that IQ tests were common before Griggs
  3. in favor or against the claim that IQ-testing of potential hires significantly decreased post Griggs

So, I guess I'm gonna revert to agnosticism.

I would consider court case itself as an evidence that media backslashes would not have been enough (or team Left consider media backslashes too weak to effectively discourage employers from using thing with disparate impact).

I would consider court case itself as an evidence that media backslashes would not have been enough

not have been enough to what?

Doesn't the court case merely prove at least one company wanted an IQ test and at least one organization was willing to sue them for it?

not have been enough to what?

deter other employers from using IQ tests for hiring. If there was only individual harmed, probably helping the individual w/money or other would be easier to do.

More comments

Thanks. Also, Griggs vs. Duke has much wider scope that IQ tests.

To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people.

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differences-in-homicide-rates-are-poorly-explained-by-economics/

Blacks are significantly worse than poor whites in terms of crime. See table 6: Whites in the 10th percentile by income compare favourably with blacks in the 90th percentile. You absolutely should be advocating for racial discrimination and not economic discrimination if you want to be safe. There are countries with many poor whites in Europe - they don't have US murder rates, US urban dysfunction. Only Russia is on par with the US when it comes to homicide. Apparently it takes centuries of tyrannical rule, 70 years of Marxism-Leninism, massive alcoholism and a decade of anarchy and complete social collapse to approximate the social dysfunction of the world's richest country + blacks.

In my experience, working class whites actually show up and work, whereas diversity is more likely to no-show or 're-schedule' into the ether, never to be seen again.

Finally, there is no reason to subordinate nationalism to HBD. Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn't mean they'll help you. Intelligent people are more capable and have more potential. They can also be much more dangerous, insidious and effective. A stupid man robs a drug store for a few hundred dollars, shoots a low-life for dissing his girl. A clever man steals millions from welfare and creates highly profitable, addictive painkillers that kill tens of thousands. Why does a certain kind of HBD-acknowledger worship smart people who clearly don't care about anyone else's interests?

Stratifying by wealth creates a cut-throat, highly materialistic society with ruthless politics of looting. Better to target national identity and social cohesion instead, enjoy the advantages of homogeneity. You want to live in a country full of people who won't play these negative-sum games, who won't steal from their countrymen, who won't profit from their misfortune, who are unified against external threats.

Only Russia is on par with the US when it comes to homicide. Apparently it takes centuries of tyrannical rule, 70 years of Marxism-Leninism, massive alcoholism and a decade of anarchy and complete social collapse to approximate the social dysfunction of the world's richest country + blacks.

Or Muslims. Russia has a large historically-Muslim population with much lower average IQ's.

In my experience, working class whites actually show up and work, whereas diversity is more likely to no-show or 're-schedule' into the ether, never to be seen again.

I don't know about that. IME the best workers from among the poor are hispanic, and working class whites are usually more capable of learning more advanced aspects of their jobs than working class blacks but aren't necessarily better workers.

The fact that there are members of my ingroup who are better than me is only a problem if they don't see me as a part of their ingroup. That's one of the fundamental reasons why many white identitarians invoke implicit and explicit pleas for racial loyalty and lament acts of racial disloyalty, as is the case with past critiques of 'the middle class' or the now white liberal 'elites'.

If you are asking why you should ingroup one group over another it's a simple matter of making friends with people who don't hate you. It would certainly be much harder to specifically ingroup whites over someone else were it not for the high amount of animosity directed towards whites by the other relevant racial groups.

All in all I find your skepticism very odd. Almost like it assumes that HBD came before ingroup bias in whites could even exist. When in reality whites who like themselves and other whites gravitated to the facts found as demonstrable proof of the thing they already knew. Or that HBD became a beacon of truth for many whites who otherwise would not have felt the need to group up with other whites were it not for the relentless blood libel and verbalized hatred directed against them.

YMMV, but HBD emphasis on the dissident right is absolutely correlated with study of intra-racial HBD. This most prevalently takes the form of Indo-European studies, where there is a lot of interest on understanding the intra-European cline of Proto-Indo-European steppe admixture. That heatmap was made by such a DR/HBD hobbyist, they obviously do not shy away from this.

It is of course accepted there are HBD implications in all of this, but the scientific basis for identifying intra-ethnic racial differences also points to a common ancestral ethnogenesis of European people. The differences are real, but they still point to a larger whole which is being (re)discovered.

And there is Gregory Clark, who isn't himself DR as far as I know but his work is very well-received in those circles, and intra-racial HBD is the premise of his work which demonstrates intra-racial correlations in class status.

Thanks for the reading material! That's a lot to dive into.

You seem to be under the impression that you’ve identified some previously-unexamined hypocrisy or blind spot within the DR, when actually this is a conversation topic that is discussed constantly and with great acrimony on both sides by different factions within the HBD-accepting right wing.

On the one side you have the populists. These people engage with HBD primarily as a defensive tool; if white people are being slandered as “privileged” and “systemically racist” because there are X number of white successful people and X> number of nonwhite successful people, being able to deploy scientifically-supported arguments to counter those accusations is invaluable. “No, these disparities are not because white people are doing anything wrong. They are a result of immutable realities which will not be ameliorated by your proposed corrective/redistributive measures. Therefore, it is illegitimate to discriminate against white people, to attack our civic institutions, to clamor for our replacement, etc.”

I think it might be fair to call these guys “soft HBD advocates” or “population-level HBD advocates”. It is not that they, as a rule, reject any intra-racial hierarchy of intelligence/competence. Most of them are happy to talk about “normies” and to discuss what rhetorical/political strategies are likely to appeal to the vast majority of people who are not members of the cognitive elite. However, they believe that the correct attitude for the white cognitive elite is essentially a form of noblesse oblige or paternal care. A 140-IQ white person should love and care for the white working class, and advocate for their interests, because they are basically family. Much as you wouldn’t abandon your family members and join a new family because the new family is smarter and better-looking and has a nicer house, you shouldn’t abandon your less-cognitively-gifted people to curry favor with a rootless cosmopolitan multinational elite. Consequently, these people also tend to be ethnic nationalists/particularists. “I love the Polish nation not because it has the smartest or most athletically gifted or most scientifically-accomplished people on earth, but rather because it is mine. This land is the home of my forefathers, whose blood courses through my veins.” A Polish nationalist would rather all of the doctors and engineers and politicians in Poland be ethnic/native Poles, even if that means Poland isn’t getting the tippy-top cream-of-the-crop most awesome candidates in the world; otherwise, what’s the point of having a Poland at all, as anything other than an economic zone?

On the other side of this debate, you have the “hard HBD advocates” or “elitists”. (The populists would use the derogatory term “IQ supremacists” or “IQ nationalists”.) These are guys like Hanania and Crémieux. For them, they really have internalized HBD - not only on an interracial level, but at the level of hereditary variation producing hierarchies of human individuals at any level of population granularity imaginable - as the key to understanding humanity. To these people, at the extremes, the way to maximize human flourishing is to unlock the full potential of the world’s elite human capital and basically let them remake the world in their own image. In practice, this means flattening and annihilating any and all regional particularities and communal attachments, such that a rootless high-IQ elite individual can set up shop anywhere and have maximum flexibility without needing to fear the interference of the ignorant and envious commoners who also happen to occupy that same location. Lest it sound like I’m being uncharitable, in this recent piece by Richard Hanania he says the quiet part at nearly deafening volume and makes this vision painfully explicit.

Just as intelligence, a moral sense, aesthetic appreciation, and other factors place humans above animals, some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans. Society disproportionately benefits from the scientific and artistic genius of a select few. An important goal of government and public policy is to channel their energies in productive directions and leave them free to pursue their missions. As confirmed by modern behavioral genetics, heredity is the dominant force behind human variation. Egalitarian ideology and concerns over what is called “social justice” are primarily driven by ugly instincts, namely envy and feelings of inferiority. While all rational beings must be utilitarians to some degree, everyone has non-utilitarian commitments. The best ones put an emphasis on beauty, freedom, and progress, rather than pleasing supernatural beings, fealty to some “natural” order, the glorification of imagined communities like nations, or equality of outcomes.

…

In addition to the standard arguments for porous borders, ethnic diversity can be seen as another factor introducing instability and division into society, which make people less likely to unify around shared goals.

Accepting liberal institutions is part of a general recognition that it’s too much to ask for people to have the right ideas, whether you put your faith in the masses or a technocratic elite. The best results have generally come from government being limited, and leaving a wide space for individual choice. Rather than reflecting the will of the people or any such nonsense, democracy is chaos, and chaos is the midwife of progress.

In this piece Hanania literally argues that the ideal society is one in which the common people - and by extension their elected officials - are so polarized and distracted by culture-war trivialities and general anomie that they are unable to coalesce around any shared goals or self-protective measures, allowing high-IQ cosmopolitan elites to essentially act unimpeded and not have to pretend to be responsive to the pig-headed superstitions and irrational communal attachments of the cattle-souled commoners. (Really makes you think…)

Personally, I, like most reasonable people, believe that there’s a middle path between these two extremes. I do agree that populism is doomed to fail because it demands that intelligent people cultivate an ultimately synthetic and unsustainable level of compassion and indulgence toward the great mass of people who are, by and large, not fully worthy of it. However, the hardcore elitists also fail because their ghoulish disregard for the basic non-chosen irrational attachments which make life worth living for the vast majority of human beings requires them to adopt a callousness and a siege mentality which puts them eternally at war against a population which massively outnumbers them and who could become awakened to that fact at any time. From the DR’s current acrimonious polarization is likely to emerge a healthier, more balanced synthesis that finds a way to help rootless cosmopolitans rediscover a natural and unforced love for the people over whom they rule, while also demanding in return that those people improve themselves and thereby make themselves worthy of love. (This will probably involve genetic engineering alongside a massive culling of the most dysgenic and unworthy elements of the population, both locally and on a global level.)

Excellent reply, but once again "well actually, we've talked about this" is being conflated with "well actually, you're entirely wrong." What you seem to be outlining is, HBDers can be split between people who answer the "Why do you want to stop at race?" with "Well actually, the whole thing was just a thin excuse for racial nationalism to begin with" and people who reply "Why would I want to stop at race?" Correct me if I'm missing some nuance here.

I admire, as ever, your effort at synthesis.

What you're missing is that society requires cooperation between classes of people. Neither flooding the country with masses of low-IQ foreigners or flooding the country with high-IQ foreigners who have no attachment or regard for the average person accomplishes that. Accepting intra-racial HBD doesn't change that fact.

Hanania is perfectly fine with a cognitive elite that has no attachment to and despises the average person, or even who views the average person as an ethnic rival. The DR recognizes that is not the formula for a healthy civilization.

What happens if you have a cognitive elite that hates the civilization it is part of and has a racialized antipathy towards it? Hanania doesn't care, as long as they have the highest IQ in the room.

I don't entirely disagree with your point, but:

Regression to the mean is a major issue here. The children of elites frequently do not have great genes, as the elites who spawned them was simply a statistical anomaly. They get to keep their elite status, however.

What we lack for the meritocracy you describe is downward social mobility. I want every high-class idiot out of their positions, but at the moment the upper class is far too secure.

If we had that then I'd be mostly fine with the system yes.

It's typically here regression towards the mean, rather than to. I've known many children of CEOs or eminent researchers who were mediocrities, Hunter aside (who I don't have the misfortune to have met personally) I've known only one who went from PhD parents to petty criminality. The layabout "poet" son of a hedge fund manager moving in next to me may be annoying, but it is unlikely to result in a crime wave in the neighborhood.

That's perfectly reasonable from an individual perspective. I suppose my concern is more with the "layabout poet son of a hedge fund manager" who ends up being handed a sinecure sort of job, or worse, one of actual importance. If that person gets paid $200,000 a year to be worthless, they have already had a worse impact on society than almost any petty criminal. The impact is double if their lineage somehow gets them into a position they're less-than-capable in.

I am much more okay with garbage humans living garbage lives than with mediocre ones rising above their deserved station unfairly, if only because I believe that "who sits at the top" has immense downstream effects on basically everything.

Another relatively common issue is that they actually are competent but still chooses the sinecure because it's comfortable, not contributing anything of value at best.

Exactly. It's bad any way you slice it.

If that person gets paid $200,000 a year to be worthless, they have already had a worse impact on society than almost any petty criminal

Individually, sure. But in aggregate, petty criminals have a worse impact than sinecures.

I flatly disagree with this, though I'm sure data is hard to find.

I see your point, and certainly the idea of idiots at the top is infuriating. But, this is to class-HBD as "what about this one Black guy who is real smart and stuff" is to Race-HBD, right? We're talking averages, so the hypothetical to include bloodline as a valid basis for discrimination goes something like: do you think that on average the children of hedge fund managers are more intelligent than the children of truck drivers? IQ gap among children for SES runs between 6 and 20 depending on which study you like.

That means that anywhere from 5% to 30% of children born to completely average parents are equal to a member of the upper class. Given the massive population difference, it won't take long in any system with significant upward mobility and low downward mobility for the upper class to be heavily comprised of underperforming children-of-statistical-anomolies.

Bloodlines are great ways to discriminate, but only after multiple generations succeeding in a row. High social downward mobility is a must.

I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question that has been bubbling whenever (racial) HBD comes up as a topic on this forum: do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color?

No, this is just another gotcha. "Poor people" are not a race. We could imagine a world where assortative mating was such that there were distinct (if not perfectly so) populations separated by income level; perhaps it would look something like a society with non-interbreeding castes. The US, at least, is not such a place (though it may be moving in that direction)

If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as (in)frequent as intermarriage between race, how would you change your mind?

If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as infrequent as intermarriage between races, that marriage throughout the class was common (that is, that the "class" was not made up of much smaller groups which only bred internally), that there was little social mobility, and that this had been going on for many generations, then we would be in the situation of having genetic castes, which HBD could look at. We are not in that situation. Some aspects of that situation exist -- for instance, there's generational welfare recipients. But though there are black and non-Hispanic white generational welfare recipients, they're largely separate groups.

Assortative Mating and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1754-2021:

Abstract:

Using a new database of 1.7 million marriage records for England 1837-2021 we estimate assortment by occupational status in marriage, and the intergenerational correlation of occupational status. We find the underlying correlations of status groom-bride, and father-son, are remarkably high: 0.8 and 0.9 respectively. These correlations are unchanged 1837-2021. There is evidence this strong matching extends back to at least 1754. Even before formal education and occupations for women, grooms and brides matched tightly on educational and occupational abilities. We show further that women contributed as much as men to important child outcomes. This implies strong marital sorting substantially increased the variance of social abilities in England. Pre-industrial marital systems typically involved much less marital sorting. Thus the development of assortative marriage may play a role in the location and timing of the Industrial Revolution, through its effect on the supply of those with upper-tail abilities.

ETA: bolded the most important sentence

The whole paper is here. But even if I was convinced by the tower of assumptions made there, I don't live in England; the US has long been reputed to have a much weaker class system.

Other evidence exists. For instance, in Sweden, social status decays by about 25% per generation, which is consistent with it being (a) entirely genetic and (b) approximately perfect assortative mating. Similar estimates are found for the US, England, Chile, and China - Japan and India have even smaller levels of decay.

ETA: The alternative interpretation is that there is an absolutely enormous environmental factor. However, given many twin studies (feel free to ask for link) that collectively show ~0 impact of environment on earnings, this seems exceedingly unlikely.

So he's got direct measures of social mobility, but rejects that in favor of a surrogate measure based on correlations of surnames?

More comments

I don't understand your argument here. Human Bio-Diversity, on its face, says nothing about race. Only about humans. If humans are of different ability levels, and it is correct to discriminate based on them, I don't see why I should only choose to discriminate based on race and not on other useful parameters, like education level and income.

I don't understand your argument here.

I think you do. Your argument is just a dressed-up version of "You HBD proponents are just a bunch of racists, if you really believed in HBD rather than just hating the blacks, you'd apply your lens to poor people as well."

Human Bio-Diversity, on its face, says nothing about race. Only about humans.

No, if that was all human bio-diversity said, only the most radical tabula rasa leftists would disagree. HBD as it is normally espoused also says that distinct populations of humans have different average levels of ability, which are genetically determined.

Your argument is just a dressed-up version of "You HBD proponents are just a bunch of racists, if you really believed in HBD rather than just hating the blacks, you'd apply your lens to poor people as well."

I'm really not seeing what your point is here, you've just restated a weaker version of the point I'm making. Who the cap fit let them wear it. You haven't provided any counter evidence. Just because you view it as a gotcha doesn't mean it didn't get ya.

HBD as it is normally espoused also says that distinct populations of humans have different average levels of ability, which are genetically determined.

Yes, and it generally settles on identifiable racial categories as everyday shorthand for those genetic traits. But I fail to see how or why that observation would be limited to one, messy, shorthand when society provides us with an excellent, individually tested shorthand: income and education level. Fine argue that one or the other is better or worse; if I accept HBD's moral bases why wouldn't I want to apply both to benefit myself, my family, my nation? Without a strong racist or wignat element introduced, focusing purely on the IQ supremacy and criminality planks that typically define HBD discourse, what justification is there to not discriminate against poor whites? They've demonstrated all the outcomes you decry as evidence of genetic inferiority.

How many generations of stupidity do I need evidence of before I can write it off as genetics? The stupid children of stupid parents? Stupid children with 3/4 stupid grandparents? We can find many millions of those in America.

You haven't provided any counter evidence. Just because you view it as a gotcha doesn't mean it didn't get ya.

I gave you the main reason it's not true. I don't need to go through a lot of effort to refute a cheap gotcha with an obvious flaw, I merely need point to the flaw.

HBD as it is normally espoused also says that distinct populations of humans have different average levels of ability, which are genetically determined.

Yes, and it generally settles on identifiable racial categories as everyday shorthand for those genetic traits.

The people who are really into it have various sorts of categories. HBD Chick is well known for talking about groups which originate on one side or the other of the Hajnal line. As I mentioned, castes in India fit the bill too. But race pretty much works in the US (at least as long as you split "Asian" up somewhat), and is the most relevant politically.

How many generations of stupidity do I need evidence of before I can write it off as genetics? The stupid children of stupid parents? Stupid children with 3/4 stupid grandparents? We can find many millions of those in America.

More than one, which is why "poor people" doesn't work as a relevant group.

More than one, which is why "poor people" doesn't work as a relevant group.

This seems silly? What exactly is lost by treating "poor people" as a relevant group? I guess I don't see the relevant differences.

It would be quite surprising if they were the same along all traits as elites, because of factors like those originally pointed out by @FiveHourMarathon: there is obviously selection going on as people find their positions in society, and assortative mating will help those clusters to be distinct. I see no reason not to look at additional, smaller, clusters beyond race.

Our default assumption should be that it is partially genetic, since that seems true of a great many things about human differences.

It's fine to compare groups even if they interbreed, as long as it's not an even mixing between them—statistical differences should be preserved (for how long depends on how strong the selection and interbreeding is).

They're not a separate population; all they have in common is being poor. Same reason it makes sense to consider Ashkenazi Jews as a population (in the sense of HBD) but not people born on the Fourth of July.

More comments

Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?

HBD is used as a defense: racial disparities are caused by HBD, not by discrimination.

I'm unaware of anyone claiming that poor whites' problems are caused by discrimination.

https://www.emorybusiness.com/2021/07/08/why-working-class-americans-struggle-to-make-it-and-why-it-matters/

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/may/why-white-working-class-decline

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/10/ban-povertyism-same-way-racism-and-sexism-un-expert

Moreover, it is all over the implied policies of wignats that the working class will and should benefit from instituting racist policies.

Those articles are noticing disparate impact on poor whites, but they specifically are not claiming the same kind of discrimination that's claimed for minorities.

The reality is that internet people promoting HBD already have some influence. It only takes taking more institutions and promoting such views in them to gain even more influence. More of the right should be promoting said facts.

Public hypocrisy is the only way out that will be accepted unless you are ready to go the Nietzsche and Gobineau route (and you are not).

No, it is important to confront racial disparities. Plus, at worst a cultural version of HBD is necessary to be promoted or else the entire centrist and right wing project collapses.

If the answer to "why disparities" is not "they happen", then you can't really even tepidly oppose the left.

So the most politically correct answer should basically be HBD without elaboration as to why.

Else the liberal narrative that distorts reality will dominate.

We just have seen Musk promote some HBD accounts, so things can be pushed further.

Also, it is impossible to promote anything with this mentality as the liberal ideal is to frame anything but submission as racism and you being a bad person tm with various label. And same applies to all the identities, whether feminism and women, blacks, jews, you name it.

I would suggest that BAP stops promoting shit like "Billions will die" and stuff like that in his twitter account, while not promoting abandonment of the field on more reasonable issues.

Moreover, BAP is a Jew. And we see plenty of Jewish supremacists promote their own superiority using all the angles. Plus non Jews who are Jewish supremacists who also do this.

Religious and how the bible says that God had chosen Jews and others should serve them. HBD obviously. Oppression olympics, holocaust/eternal victimhood of how they are the most oppressed ever. Framing any dissent as antisemitism. As supporters of the left who have done good. Or even the idea that favor them so they favor you and they are so accomplished because of cultural reasons, because they are awesome.

These narratives go a step beyond explaining that inequalities exist, but promoting servility towards Jews and justifying hardcore double standards.

Obviously the left's narrative about women and blacks in regards to men and whites is bigoted too and supports superior treatment. Moreover, we do get articles and research in academia about women being superior to men.

If these kind of narratives can exist, why can't a more ethical and moderate and benign narrative that disparities exist, be promoted? In fact it is completely central to the moderate and right wing project to promote such narratives and many right wingers constantly did, in addition to those who didn't do it. The more politically correct version of this, would be something that you are going to find right wingers argue even in the mainstream.

Maybe the reason rightists lose is because a lack of nerve and will to promote consistently views that actually counter the left. The left promotes a bias in favor of its favorite groups and cries racism to dissent. The right agrees. Result -> bias towards said groups. This is basically the entire history of the right, it lose because it was divided between some right wingers who opposed the left, and others who didn't. And then there were some even more left wing like. Those ended up cancelling right wingers whether the neocons in USA or Cameron removing conservatives and preffering liberals in UK.

The most obvious thing to do is to directly argue that yes blacks do have higher crime rates and even be angry at leftists for lying. There is really no point in behaving in accordance to the rules of political correctness. You would lose everything 100 times out of 100. This doesn't mean being as needlessly provocative as possible.

Another issue is BAP's take about democracy being incompatible with this. But the left within a democracy pushed its own agenda at the expense of large % of population by exercising power, passing laws, putting its own people in charge and by promoting its own narratives.

The right wing has tried gatekeeping itself for a century and has being losing while doing so. The left chose a different strategy. The left has tried promoting its own agenda, while framing itself as moderate and moreover fanatically troll the right and tell the right that it ought to behave like leftists to be moderate and not extremists. While using labels for their political opposition constantly, and presenting a distorted picture of reality. I don't want the right to do that, but I do want them to not back off on any matters of truth.

So, in conclusion, it betrays a lack of imagination and not learning from your own mistakes to refuse to outright push for your own ideology. Which doesn't mean to promote the most edgy purity spiral far right ideology out there. Trump's poison of blood statement didn't matter much to most voters, and politician saying something won't be that greatly important. The right should try to take over media/academia with its own people and have them promote HBD. People in power, and in media, promoting your agenda ought to be part of the plan. As we saw with X, once the censorship stops, you genuinely can push this kind of things. If the right ensures an environment where HBDers won't be fired, but would be promoted, but those promoting pseudoscience won't be funded, well that in itself would allow HBD to flourish.

BAP's point is that some people on the right imagine that "if HBD awareness goes 'mainstream', racial spoils systems will end", when in reality racial spoils and denial of HBD are only tangentially connected.

It would be quite easy to have both widespread awareness of HBD and racial spoils systems like affirmative action, because the primary point of these systems is to distribute resources (like well-paid sinecures, social status, political influence) between groups. It's actually a very classically liberal viewpoint to believe that meritocracy must be absolute and that everything should be distributed based solely on talent.

EDIT: As @Ioper says below, this misunderstands the central progressive impulse, which is the drive toward equality. "From each according to ability, to each according to need" is a direct rejection of the idea that talent should be rewarded with a superior quality of life.

And the global viewpoint suggests this, because many nations far beyond the WEIRD bubble practice affirmative action widely even though DEI politics isn't dominant there. Hindu nationalists practice it, the CCP practices it, the Brazilians and Nigerians practice it. Sure, global homogenization is a thing, but in many cases these policies exist for much more mundane reasons than high-minded progressive equality politics, like reducing the chance of explosive civil conflicts.

There's a delusional fantasy among some rightists that if only the (white) public "knew" about HBD, the wool would fall from their eyes and they'd instantly adopt conservative positions on a wide range of policies. In reality, leftist ideas are much more resilient than that. They can justify affirmative action, reparations and so on in countless other ways, and in some cases already have.

And the global viewpoint suggests this, because many nations far beyond the WEIRD bubble practice affirmative action widely even though DEI politics isn't dominant there. Hindu nationalists practice it, the CCP practices it, the Brazilians and Nigerians practice it.

Affirmative action for scheduled castes/scheduled tribes in India predates the US Civil Rights Movement. More generally, racial/communitarian spoils systems are at least as old as democracy - Swiss language politics is one of the oldest examples.

There's a delusional fantasy among some rightists that if only the (white) public "knew" about HBD, the wool would fall from their eyes and they'd instantly adopt conservative positions on a wide range of policies.

Well yes, common knowledge of HBD would make the case for affirmative action stronger- lots of institutions are firmly committed to blacks having equal outcomes, regardless of abilities.

And it’s not unreasonable that a multiracial democracy is very concerned about this- you know and I know that the black-white gap isn’t going away. I know that if alien space bats come and raise the black average IQ to 100 the gap won’t go away. But this is a democracy with equal rights; 13% of the population, in some cases a local majority, being consistently very upset is a bad thing.

Why would it do that?

HBD's big revelation is that the problem with black people IS black people...

Why would it result in stronger affirmative action instead of a return to Pre-Civil Rights segregation like every single liberal insists it would, and pre-civil rights Americans concluded was necessary back when they believed in a folk-version of HBD?

Most likely outcome of HBD being widely believed by white americans would be a hot ethnic conflict which whites would win followed by the same solution they settled upon after reconstruction... if not something more punitive for making them fight the ethnic conflict.

White america no longer has the assabiyah to do that, of course. Technically it never did; southern whites had the assabiyah and there weren’t big enough black communities elsewhere.

They’ll pay the tribute for peace.

What is your age?

anyone over 35 doesn't get this.

All I hear from young white men is that they 100% WANT things to go hot mixed with fedposting that if it doesn't kick off they'll make it happen... AI Researchers, Corporate figures, Military Officers, 7 figure Engineering wunderkinds... the last repositories of talent in America... they're just waiting for the very last of the aging leadership to leave and things to start really failing

Every white boy who went through DEI and feminist consent lectures as a child... all the exceptional ones who landed on their feet... they swore bloody vengeance.

All the talented white kids who experienced wokeness in high school or university ( lived through the struggle sessions complete with threats to destroy their lives when they objected) now feels their ethnicity as keenly as the most apocalyptic nationalists in the early 20th century.

The moderates i speak to don't worry there won't be an explosion... they're terrified of how far it will go.

I’m 27 and a Texan homeowner in a working class, mixed white-Hispanic neighborhood in an r+25 suburb of Fort Worth. I’ve never been screamed at for being white and yes, I have sat through diversity/social justice awareness lectures. Casual racism is common in young white men but fedposting is rare, and this is Texas where the red tribe hates the blue tribe(and Vice versa) and would rather deal with Hispanics than HR cat ladies.

All I hear from young white men is that they 100% WANT things to go hot mixed with fedposting that if it doesn't kick off they'll make it happen... AI Researchers, Corporate figures, Military Officers, 7 figure Engineering wunderkinds... the last repositories of talent in America... they're just waiting for the very last of the aging leadership to leave and things to start really failing.

As Amadan said, most young white men don’t remotely have the hatred for minorities that would be true for that to be the case.

And the reason men under 35 are hotheaded isn’t issue specific but general, since almost all men mellow with age.

Every white boy who went through DEI and feminist consent lectures as a child... all the exceptional ones who landed on their feet... they swore bloody vengeance.

That's quite a claim. All of them, really?

I know this is what you hope and dream of, but no, most "white men under 35" in America are not slobbering for a race war with the eagerness of Palestinian martyr brigades. (A comparison I use intentionally - places like Palestine are where you'll find the closest thing to the mentality you speak of, and even they aren't that unified in their bloodlust.)

I know that if alien space bats come and raise the black average IQ to 100 the gap won’t go away.

What do you mean by this?

Black outcomes are driven mostly by their own bad decisions, with some generational effects. There’s a tendency to fetishize the IQ gap, but the reality is there’s cultural reasons for much of it. And ‘making blacks smarter’ won’t fix the bad culture.

It was demonstrated even in the Bell Curve, that controlliing for IQ, most outcome gaps between blacks and whites go away.

Would the alien space bats which increase black IQ by 15 points also change their personality traits? Given that US blacks speak same language and have same religion as whites, culture would start to converge pretty fast.

At the same time, some of the motivation is because they think that affirmative action makes it more meritocratic, or that they think it is needed to remedy past oppression (and once disparities disappear, we can drop it). Either, it is supposed to reflect how past systemic racism has hurt underperforming groups, or it is to break the system and stop it from hurting those groups in the future, making it even.

If this were more well known, it would become harder to do either of those. Disparities would no longer be thought to be due to systemic racism (well, except that this view would be painted as a variety of racism by many), and there would no longer be the hope of changing it merely by rewarding the underperforming to push them into a different socioeconomic status.

But this is a democracy with equal rights; 13% of the population, in some cases a local majority, being consistently very upset is a bad thing.

Equal rights or equal outcomes, pick only one.

Demonizing the largest demographic and screwing them over doesn't seem to be an obstacle in a democracy. If black Americans weren't told to be upset and if society didn't care that much if they were or weren't upset, it would matter less. And they would be less upset.

They are plenty of upset now, even though they are beneficiaries of systematic discrimination and propaganda in their favor. Tolerating this level of entitlement is and inciting anger is in fact what is especially bad in a democracy. And as the goal of the democracy ought to be the common good, it is also a bad idea to promote as you do the legitimacy of said entitlement of various specific groups. It should be considered a failure state of a democracy if a coalition or alliance of identities mistreat the rest. Especially the majority.

The reality there are a lot of cyclical arguements that their source and bottom is that coalition of progressive and ethnic activists captured power and promoted their ideas in favor of their favorite groups. The pervasiveness of these arguments has to do with movements that pushed them, and before they pushed them, there was less black entitlement and in fact you even had once white Americans rioting for films having black actors in them and things like that. If society could transform from that direction, to the current one which in your mind having such prejudices is a way to keep the peace, then it can be changed again but in a more reasonable end.

So, either one agrees with their perspective and will always find an excuse to not make such groups unhappy. Or they actually reject treating blacks and other demographics as utility monsters. The right should promote not only HBD but also the idea that there should be no special treatment and entitlement for blacks, and try to use power to bring that into fruition.

However, I do think that certain black problems deserve special attention in a manner that is de facto redistributive. Well, to the extend you do have race blind welfare that isn't excesive, they would be beneficiaries as they are now, even without any AA type of policies in societies. And to the extend the police should have to deal more with black criminality, they also would disproportionately be beneficiaries as greater % victims of black crime. Obviously there would be less spending if there was less criminality by blacks. I think it is fair for them to benefit in these ways, but also to acknowledge that they are a community that is beneficiaries of society, and ought not be upset. Which would be more the case if things are framed in the right way and they aren't told they are owed what they in fact are not owed. We would find that punishing criminals, and discouraging entitlement works actually to stop the problems of black anger.

And the police should focus on high crime areas of course. But what about disproportionately black criminals? I care about victims of crime, not the deserving punishment of criminals. And the entitled mentality of a black community to the extend they make unreasonable demands and have a false view of the world and the left wing activists who played some role in inluencing them shouldn't be respected. The goal is as elites have done in democracy towards the left, to actually enforce what you want and change the attitudes as well. Just as the laws were in that direction and Black community leaders were more pro tough on crime in the 90s.

A necessary part of that should be liberals losing influence, and conservatives and tough on crime types taking power and promoting their views and agenda outright, while promoting as black community leaders those who go along. So there is no choice but to play the game of power and promote your own different narrative. You aren't really in opposition to the left wing project if you can't do that and instead favor preferential treatment for groups like blacks, so they aren't upset.

Does this mean that HBD is insufficient? Well yes, and no. Most of the people promoting HBD also want to counter the left's narrative on race and oppose discrimination in favor of left wing groups. The reality is those who want to be liked by the left and share with it their way of viewing the world are unlikely to promote HBD, although some might promote only HBD for Jews and talk about how they are high IQ. This combination of HBD and opposing the left's ideology is a narrative more intellectually successful in opposing the left than if you removed HBD from it.

While theoretically, you could have people who talk about HBD and support AA, in practice it is a rare combo. You do have some who support HBD and align with the left in other ways though.

There's a delusional fantasy among some rightists that if only the (white) public "knew" about HBD, the wool would fall from their eyes and they'd instantly adopt conservative positions on a wide range of policies. In reality, leftist ideas are much more resilient than that. They can justify affirmative action, reparations and so on in countless other ways, and in some cases already have.

What I notice is that this delusional fantasy is shared by many, possibly most, leftists as well, which is what many of them say justifies the immense amount of censorship efforts to prevent HBD from being an acceptable thought. But as you say, leftist ideas are resilient, and it always struck me as both as naive and as counterproductive. Naive because it it takes the most simplistic idea of something like "if people realized people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior], then of course that would lead to more bigotry and racial hatred and dehumanizing of people of [race]" without actually doing the sociological research required to justify such a belief. And counterproductive, because it creates the false notion that the correctness of leftist ideas are contingent on some empirical reality about genetics, leaving those ideas open to appear to be falsified by facts about genetics coming out. And for what gain? None as far as I can tell, since leftist ideas actually aren't contingent upon HBD being false.

Naive because it it takes the most simplistic idea of something like "if people realized people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior], then of course that would lead to more bigotry and racial hatred and dehumanizing of people of [race]" without actually doing the sociological research required to justify such a belief.

Is sociological research really needed, beyond the examples of history? I'm reminded of a piece from "crunchy con" religious right-winger Rod Dreher where he first acknowledged that HBD — he specifically singled out Steve Sailer — is probably correct, scientifically; but then argued that we, as a society, must pretend it is not, actively censor it, and maintain instead a "noble lie" (Dreher explicitly called it that) of egalitarian blank-slatism, because it's "proven" that human beings simply 'can't handle the truth.' The proof being the Jim Crow South and, of course, 1930's Germany.

I seem to remember ame_damnee back at the old place once making a similar argument in response to someone asking whatever happened to 'the pursuit of excellence.' To draw attention to "excellence" would also draw attention to it's lack, and that, it was argued, automatically and inevitably leads to people donning jackboots and building death camps. Again, "the Mid-Century Germans," as some like to euphemize, are all the proof necessary to show what happens when the egalitarian veil receives the slightest puncture.

(Meanwhile, this ignores that the bulk of settled societies throughout human history were quite inegalitarian and believed in hereditary differences, without descending into coercive or genocidal projects of eugenic "improvement." For example, it's hard to find a philosophy more hierarchical and inegalitarian than Confucianism, but AIUI when eugenics came to China, the (greatly weakened) Confucians were pretty much in opposition. And in the West, the now-deleted third verse of "All Things Bright and Beautiful" persisted enough in cultural memory that I remember once hearing it performed in a Bob Hope movie. So there's something more needed beyond just "people are born different" to get to "therefore we must exterminate the lower orders.")

As Neema Parvini said in his New Years stream, the core of the dominant ideology of the present day is that we're still fighting Hitler, if only 'the little Hitler inside each of us.' Letting people "realize people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior]" led to Nazi's once, and we all swore "never again." So what more social science is needed beyond that?

Letting people "realize people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior]" led to Nazi's once, and we all swore "never again." So what more social science is needed beyond that?

This is my core objection, that this isn't what led to Nazis. I don't believe the Nazis' rise to power in Germany was due to scientists dispassionately admitting to a populace that has only ever lived in a Western society of egalitarianism that they are forced to conclude something that they didn't expect or at least know to be true before they did the research, that there are different distributions in important traits such as intelligence when analyzing different groups of people, grouped by what we refer to as "race." I think it was closer to telling people that the Sciencetm proves that those people you already despise really are despicable. Which is far more similar to modern idpol than to HBD, which is one of the main reasons I reject idpol so much, though even then I wouldn't go as far as to censor them.

There’s an important distinction here between the fantasies of “if people realized” and “if people believed”. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a leftist who espoused the former.

Regardless, beliefs about race can and will be used to justify racial animus. Historically, this has happened with phrenology, linguistics, sociology, geography, comparative religion, and especially intelligence. Why would this time be different?

Regardless, beliefs about race can and will be used to justify racial animus. Historically, this has happened with phrenology, linguistics, sociology, geography, comparative religion, and especially intelligence. Why would this time be different?

It probably wouldn't. But justifying racial animus isn't the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to happen but for that justification being as available as it is, or the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to be, on net or in sum, greater than if that justification were not as available. And when a claim is that this idea is so dangerous as to justify censorship, I see it as necessitating at least the former, if not the latter in order to support. Notably, I don't think I've seen any historical examples that look similar to where entire generations of people were force-fed egalitarianism since a young age and then were told that the weight of the data has forced scientists to acknowledge that the distributions of certain traits, including intelligence, are different between various groups of people that we already group together in the class of "race" (as well as "sex"). They always appear to be some variation of where people were already living in what is basically the historical default, i.e. under the belief that different races of people are fundamentally different in a way that makes egalitarianism more of a punchline to a joke than an idea worth serious consideration, and justifying that pre-existing supremacist view by finding convenient pieces of information in science.

Naive because it it takes the most simplistic idea of something like "if people realized people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior], then of course that would lead to more bigotry and racial hatred and dehumanizing of people of [race]" without actually doing the sociological research required to justify such a belief.

There are people right now calling for policies leftists don't like and/or consider racist (restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment). Some of those people (Murray) have explicitly linked these things to their take on HBD. But, even without them, you can easily connect the dots because history didn't start yesterday and none of these arguments are new.

In terms of political intuitions people continue to hold without strong empirical backing...this doesn't seem that egregious.

There are people right now calling for policies leftists don't like and/or consider racist (restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment). Some of those people (Murray) have explicitly linked these things to their take on HBD.

Sure, but policies that we don't like or even consider racist is different from "bigotry, racial hatred, or dehumanizing," because we had to expand the definition of "racist" in order to categorize things like "restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment" within it. So that's just a whole different category of things.

But, even without them, you can easily connect the dots because history didn't start yesterday and none of these arguments are now.

People keep saying this, but every time I see the dots actually connected, I notice that the threads held there by sheer force of will rather than any sort of actual underlying connection.

In terms of political intuitions people continue to hold without strong empirical backing...this doesn't seem that egregious.

As damning of political intuitions as this statement is, it's true. What gets me is that "not egregiously bad in a category of things known for being incredibly bad" is not the standard I want my side to live up to; in fact, I try to make it so that it's only because my side lives up to a higher standard than the other that I choose that side. One of those higher standards is one of epistemology; that the left is more correct than the right because we perceive the world more accurately than the right. Perceiving the world more accurately isn't a matter of believing more true things like "the Earth is closer to 4 billion years than 6,000 years old" but rather about the process by which we discriminate between what is true and what is false. And if we're willing to say that this bit of political intuition is a high enough bar to censor HBD, then that calls into question our epistemic standards in general, which calls into question my belief that ours is actually the better side.

Sure, but policies that we don't like or even consider racist is different from "bigotry, racial hatred, or dehumanizing,"

Both things can be true: the Left could be prone to expanding the definition of racist and "black people are just dumber" is generally seen as racist for a reason.

And yes, I've heard all of the alternate phrasings (X million blacks are smarter than the average white, people as individuals) . It just doesn't play well for a reason. I think there's a general discomfort with "X is (irremediably) stupid", which combines quite well (or badly) with "blacks are less intelligent". People do see worth in intelligence (and success in the market), its absence matters.

People keep saying this, but every time I see the dots actually connected, I notice that the threads held there by sheer force of will rather than any sort of actual underlying connection.

Because, not too long ago, all forms of segregation and dehumanizing talk were justified using these very arguments? Not just "cut welfare that encourages single parent homes" but literally "we can't live around these people because they're prone to degeneracy and violence" (and not always put that politely). This isn't hypothetical, is it?

To me this is like living in post-Christian Rome where exposing babies has been banned for decades and is now taboo. Some people start using the exact same arguments as the exposers used to, but insist nothing that bad will happen this time. In fact, they're offended you'd think they are like those people and annoyed you won't take them at their word that, after you strip fetuses and children of their ensouled status, nothing will change and the status quo that was born out of an explicit rejection of their ideas will continue.

To hear tell, the connections are just paranoiacs connecting dots

And if we're willing to say that this bit of political intuition is a high enough bar to censor HBD

I never said anything about censorship, just that the reaction is not some doeish naivete. Quite the opposite.

Sure, but policies that we don't like or even consider racist is different from "bigotry, racial hatred, or dehumanizing,"

Both things can be true: the Left could be prone to expanding the definition of racist and "black people are just dumber" is generally seen as racist for a reason.

I don't see what this statement has to do with anything, since the policies we don't like or even consider racist has nothing to do with "black people are just dumber."

And yes, I've heard all of the alternate phrasings (X million blacks are smarter than the average white, people as individuals) . It just doesn't play well for a reason. I think there's a general discomfort with "X is (irremediably) stupid", which combines quite well (or badly) with "blacks are less intelligent". People do see worth in intelligence (and success in the market), its absence matters.

I don't see what this has to do with anything either. Sure, it doesn't play well. It doesn't then follow that if this kind of information became common knowledge, then that would cause greater racial hatred or the like.

People keep saying this, but every time I see the dots actually connected, I notice that the threads held there by sheer force of will rather than any sort of actual underlying connection.

Because, not too long ago, all forms of segregation and dehumanizing talk were justified using these very arguments? Not just "cut welfare that encourages single parent homes" but literally "we can't live around these people because they're prone to degeneracy and violence" (and not always put that politely). This isn't hypothetical, is it?

This is what I mean by sheer force of will. First of all, no, they weren't using these very arguments; they were using claims about fact that were similar to the facts that are being claimed now. Arguments are something different altogether. But either way, whether or not these forms of segregation, dehumanizing talk, and, let's be honest, plenty of straight-up murder and genocide, were justified by such arguments doesn't answer the question of whether or not more such bad behavior were caused due to the availability of such arguments.

When I say the dots have no actual underlying connection, this is what I mean; I see societies that were already extremely racist projecting their racism onto science and taking out what they wish. Despite the best efforts of many people, our current Western society has largely based itself around egalitarianism, as imperfectly as it may be.

I think the strongest argument to be made about this is that our egalitarianism is imperfect, and there's plenty of latent and not-so-latent racism hanging around, and HBD being available can "activate" that latent racism and exacerbate it. This would have to be weighed against the value we get from HBD in explaining phenomena more accurately which also help to reduce the rates of racist acts. The calculus on this can never be properly done, but I can see how someone would be convinced that, on net, this would cause more racism than less, and perhaps also worse racism or pushing society in general into a more racist direction, to the extent that censorship is justified. I would disagree vehemently and believe that the person has far too high an opinion of their ability to do this kind of moral calculus, but it's a defensible position. It's not the position I hear from the overwhelming majority of people who want to suppress HBD, sadly, who seem to overwhelmingly just poo-poo the idea that HBD, even if true, could have any sort of positive influences whatsoever.

And if we're willing to say that this bit of political intuition is a high enough bar to censor HBD

I never said anything about censorship, just that the reaction is not some doeish naivete. Quite the opposite.

My original comment was about leftists believing that HBD is so dangerous as to justify censorship of it, so that's the context I was writing into. Maybe it's not doeish naivete, I don't know and I honestly don't care. I think the reaction is naive, but likely more hawkish than doeish, to mix metaphors. If we're not talking about censorship, then I don't know what the conversation is; do you agree with me that it would be better if people on the left didn't believe that HBD was an idea that was dangerous to an extent to justify censorship of it?

Leftists are perennially terrified of rightists, though, it's one of those eternal political dynamics. The right should be more scared of the left, but the opposite happens because the left is more neurotic and sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid; the right often becomes complacent in power, the left often purity spirals.

That said, most progressives worried about HBD rhetoric aren't secretly worried it's actually true. Some are, Ezra Klein is probably one of them, but most believe it actually is racist pseudoscience or whatever.

The right should be more scared of the left, but the opposite happens because the left is more neurotic and sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid; the right often becomes complacent in power, the left often purity spirals.

I've bloviated on this before, so I won't go into it too much, but I have been saddened by the fact that the left sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid and then didn't come to the obvious conclusion that this vigilance must be primarily directed at ourselves, rather than our perceived enemies, because obviously if we are won over by fascism, it will be in a form that we are biased towards, rather than biased against. When I was a youth, there was a pretty well known saying, that "If fascism comes to the United States, it will be wrapped in an American flag," or some variation of the like. This sort of thinking, unfortunately, seems to have led people to thinking that detecting fascism is about detecting the American flag or similar concepts and symbols, rather than the actual point of the line, which is that fascism will be wrapped up in [something we are predisposed to like], with the American flag merely being the example at the time (the culture in which I grew up treated the American flag as an object of derision 99% of the time, but I'm guessing the line was a carryover from the then-recently ended Cold War when the flag probably had higher status).

this vigilance must be primarily directed at ourselves, rather than our perceived enemies

How do you distinguish vigilance from the more pedestrian infighting that comes from zero-sum status games? It’s possible to view every Bernie Bro, every college cancellation, every instance of a snake eating its own tail as the noble policing of establishment tendencies. Or you can be more cynical, and assume that anything and everything is just signaling; the radical is merely adapting to a different ecological niche, and once he has cleared out the old guard, he will set down roots and promptly become an authoritarian. Realistically, the truth has to be somewhere in between. Sometimes freedom fighters are grifters, and sometimes they’re painfully sincere.

I guess I’m asking—what sort of evidence would make you think “the left” is actually concerned with fascism from the ingroup?

How do you distinguish vigilance from the more pedestrian infighting that comes from zero-sum status games? It’s possible to view every Bernie Bro, every college cancellation, every instance of a snake eating its own tail as the noble policing of establishment tendencies.

This is a fair point, and certainly it's possible to interpret those in that way, but my perspective is that it's usually easy to distinguish between self-vigilance and pedestrian infighting by observing how the status of oneself or one's own preferred ideology would be affected. Which is to say, if you're not pushing in the direction that leaves you more open to having your status lowered, then you're not applying that vigilance to yourself, you're applying that vigilance to someone else.

For instance, with college cancellations, when Middlebury students mobbed Charles Murray and the professor who invited him to give the guest lecture in one of the earlier high profile cases a lifetime ago now, were those students doing so with the belief that, through their actions, they would be challenging own sets of beliefs, i.e. most likely what we call modern social justice, CRT, idpol, "woke," etc.? Perhaps things played out that way in a certain point of view, but I would argue that it's clear that their vigilance was directed at an "other," i.e. the Murrays of the world who have beliefs about scientific inquiry regarding hereditary differences in intelligence that conflict with their own, not at "themselves," i.e. the people who believe that Murray giving a talk in some official college capacity (unrelated to The Bell Curve, IIRC - I think it was about his more recent book Coming Apart?) would cause harm.

To use a made-up example, if Ibram X Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how people buying into his lessons - and not in the "oh they're misinterpreting it and applying it wrong" kind of way - could lead to a tyrannical (perhaps not literally fascistic) society in which, say, individuals are forced to submit to others based purely on what races they belong to, and as such, he's pushing forward research to figure out these potential harms and how to mitigate them, this would appear to be vigilance towards oneself. Arguably, this would raise his status and that of his ideology, but that would be done by changing his ideology to a better one through corrective actions; the unchanged one would lose status as that older ideology that we no longer use, because we have a better, fixed one now.

On the other hand, if Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how the Democratic party isn't taking his scholarship seriously enough and, as such, they could inadvertently allow the latent white supremacy of the party to recreate Jim Crow in 21st century America or the like, that would appear to be obviously infighting between two different parts of the left. If Kendi got his way in this fictional example, the result wouldn't be that his preferred ideology gets attacked, damaged, and rebirthed into a better version of itself, it would be a peer ideology that did that, while his own just gained more status by becoming more influential in a powerful institution.

I do think there must be edge cases, and there's probably no simple binary test to check, but in most cases, it's not all that ambiguous.

I’ll agree that in most cases, it’s not ambiguous. It is a much cheaper and easier signal to take shots at the outgroup, so we see more of that.

I find the threshold you describe to be overly restrictive. Consider excommunication, where a heretic is explicitly removed from ingroup membership. Even if none of the ingroup are criticized, I’d consider this to be self-vigilance or self-policing, because the alternative is a tacit endorsement.

The political analogy would be—say a major California Democrat suddenly espoused National Socialism. You’d expect a huge scandal. Loss of support from the DNC, cancelled donations, scathing op-eds. It’d be safe to say that the target is a former Democrat rather than a current one. He has been moved to the outgroup. Democrats, then, aren’t criticizing their own. They aren’t taking a risk with their status, either; this is strictly safer and more politically valuable than continuing to endorse the guy. And yet, I’d still describe this action as self-vigilant.

For a more realistic example, look at the Hillary/Bernie split, which featured accusations that Hillary was a DNC stooge. That was obviously status-jockeying, because the two blocs were at odds, and only one could actually get the candidacy. Competition between peer ideologies. But it was also exactly what you’d expect from healthy ideological vigilance within the general category of Democrats. Now the risks are aligned. It’s exactly the kind of situation you describe with Kendi, where personal preference is risked to strengthen the overall project.

These are scenarios where peer competition on one scale parses as self-policing on the higher level. I think that’s true whenever the marketplace of ideas is working as intended. I’ll go as far as to say this is usually true within the United States! It’s just so adaptive as long as you’re trying to win the next competition up. Me vs. my brother, me and my brother vs. the Hillaryites, me and the Hillaroids vs. the Republicans, me and America vs. the world.

I think in your made-up example, the relevant detail is that it was Nazism, an openly fascistic ideology, that the California Democrat was espousing, rather than that this was a case of excommunicating a heretic. But also, I wouldn't really describe that as "vigilance," though trivially it is, I suppose. When I think about some group of people being "vigilant" in watching out for the rise of fascism, I'm thinking of behavior that's beyond just noticing someone saying "I'm a fascist" and telling them, "Okay, bye."

I don't think there's a "general case" of excommunication of heretics, but I'd say that, very very imprecisely speaking, it seems unlikely to be aiding in vigilance against one's own ideology turning towards fascism, because detecting heretics tends to involve checking if someone is sufficiently submitting to whatever ideology our team likes and then expelling them if they fall short, which is the type of behavior more in-line with fascists than against them. But the specific details matter way too much to say more than that.

In terms of the IRL example, I do agree that what we saw in 2016 was evidence of some sort of ideological vigilance within the Democratic party (dunno if it was "healthy" given that we lost - but without it, perhaps Trump would've won in a landslide instead of merely edging by?). I do think the left in general and the Democratic party in particular has its share of such forms of vigilance, and I'd even guess that it does it better than the right and the Republican party, though my judgment is too biased to be meaningful in that regard.

But when it comes to being vigilant against fascism, I don't think something like "this big tent ideology that I and almost half the electorate follow have lots of sub-ideologies that are in healthy competition with each other" really counts as such vigilance, since that's largely a consequence of the mostly free society and culture in which we live, rather than a specific way to manage the ideology or party. Rather, it's about watching for the ideas that you specifically like and you specifically believe will bring forth a better future; because, for you, it's that ideology that is your metaphorical "American flag" that will wrap up the fascism that you will inadvertently push and bring forth.

If a Bernie Bro (which I was in 2016) said, "By pushing for Bernie to defeat Hillary in the primaries, I am being vigilant about fascism taking over the USA, because this is part of the healthy ideological diversity within our Democratic party by having multiple competing factions attacking one another," I would consider that deluded. That's not vigilance, that's just plain old picking a side, which is perfectly cromulent but not much more*. If he said, "I'm pushing for Bernie, but I'm concerned that if he does gain power, all the great ideas that I want him to implement will lead us towards fascism in ways that I and all his supporters didn't anticipate, and so when Hillary or Trump call him out, I'll listen and investigate," I would consider that at least a significant meaningful gesture towards maintaining vigilance against fascism.

* I think there's a version of this which is vigilance against fascism; if someone with control over the DNC pushed to make it so Bernie and the other underdogs of the world had a better shot, so as to increase the viciousness of within-party competition of ideologies, that seems to be a form of vigilance against fascism. Perhaps even in the case that it's just a DNC voter who is ambivalent about the choice but errs towards Bernie because they figure that bringing up an underdog will help to prevent ossification of ideas within the party. This would have to be balanced against the possibility of allowing an uber-charismatic Trump Hitler-like figure coming in and stealing the party from under us, which is the kind of thing you would expect to lead more towards fascism, but the opposite could be the case, of course, and the specific details likely matter a great deal here.

sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid

Given the sizable fractions of Western electorates who, based on their placement on a social-axis-vs.-economic-axis "political compass," would likely vote for "fascism" if given the opportunity, why shouldn't they hold this view?

There’s more than a few problems with using political compass (memes or otherwise) as a proxy for fascist support. Sampling bias, for starters, but also “skin in the game” and ability to pattern-match. Cheering for fascist aesthetics on Twitter won’t necessarily translate to votes.

I’d expect very low real-world support for an openly fascist candidate. The American cultural memory is so instinctively against it.

Cheering for fascist aesthetics on Twitter won’t necessarily translate to votes.

I'm not talking about aesthetics, or an "openly fascist candidate," I'm talking about, on the "social axis"/"economic axis" plane, that even though we hear a lot from the "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" libertarian quadrant, that is actually the quadrant with the smallest fraction of the electorate, and there are a lot more voters in the (opposing) Fascist quadrant.

I agree that Leftist politics doesn't depend on ignorance of HBD at all. The cornerstone is inequality, not racial spoils.

I imagine very large parts of the left would be very happy if we could get away from the toxic racial spoils stuff and just focus on inequality and helping the unfortunate, regardless of race.

Radical inate equality rhetoric helps the right, not the left since it's so obviously untrue and leads to giving resources to the privileged members of favoured groups instead of the actually unprivileged. It also helps justify inequality in general.

The cornerstone is inequality

I agree, it's upsetness at perceived inequality. The best example is classical Marxism. "From each according to ability, to each according to need" explicitly rejects the idea that difference in ability can ever morally lead to inequality in material living standards. That is the baseline. Litigating HBD vs "culture" or whatever is immaterial.

BAP's point is that some people on the right imagine that "if HBD awareness goes 'mainstream', racial spoils systems will end", when in reality racial spoils and denial of HBD are only tangentially connected.

His point goes much further than that. I agree with this part of his statement, but the part the DR takes issue with is when he says "Only a myth of race blindness is workable." In fact, the myth of race blindness is what has itself proven to be unworkable. It is a myth that is so recent and so destructive. The idea we cannot move past this myth, at least in an esoteric form among elites, is just absurd.

He is correct that red-pilling the normies on HBD isn't a silver bullet. But the point is we need some other myth than race blindness, a better one. A myth that is more in accordance with reality and pro-civilizational and even, dare I say, inclusive on some level. There are definitely some HBD nerds on the DR that think it's a silver bullet. But the better contingents of the DR recognize that HBD reality is more of a motivating force for why we need better myths to congeal society.

This also shows that certain people in the DR like Keith Woods and Nick Fuentes were correct to publicly point out that BAP is a Jew last year. Now that he is overtly pushing the race blindness for white gentiles and ethnic nationalism for Jews card, it's another notch in the belt of the DR showing its model of the world panning out.

Nobody should be surprised that a Jewish nude body-builder larping as a Nietzschean fascist, at the end of the day, really wants race blindness for the white gentiles and ethnic nationalism for the Jews.

In fact, the myth of race blindness is what has itself proven to be unworkable.

I had the exact same thought. Color-blindness could work for whites and asians, and maybe even hispanics, but it has been soundly rejected by blacks and, from what I can see in Canada, indians (no, the other indians). It's not up to me to say whether color-blindness is the way forward, it's on the populations that have rejected it, and because they have rejected it, I cannot maintain it as a goal or ideal any longer.

The point seems to be that the 'myth' of race blindness is not the central principle of the political left. It's a temporal feature of parts of the left in diversifying western countries. But it's not central - as the shift from focusing on 'equality of opportunity' to 'equity [of outcome]' suggests.

The idea of the most famous modern leftist meme on race - remember this one? - is that only equality of outcome, 'to each according to need' matters. And equality of outcome renders the discussion of causes of inequality largely irrelevant. It could be evil capitalists, or racists, or patriarchy, or HBD, or guns, germs and steel, or some other cultural cause; it's not important, for the left only the 'correction' of these inequalities is important, whatever their cause. The right, whether it's against communists in a homogenous country or against progressives in a diverse one, must make the argument that inequality itself is just, because 'equality' - in whatever form - is perverse, empty, and ugly.

Alamariu isn't rejecting white particularism or supporting mass immigration (or at least it doesn't seem like he is, that would be a pretty big shift), he's saying that basing that particularism on a perceived or real hereditarily higher white intelligence (when compared to some, but not all, other racial groups) is flawed. It doesn't have a powerful cultural message, and is only likely to annoy the many whites who have productive and friendly relations with lower performing minorities. Perhaps most damningly, it would expose far more of the public to the fact that Jews and Asians really are more successful than whites in many fields for genetic reasons, which is part of why many antisemitic wignats spend a lot of time online trying to disprove the substantial body of evidence that suggests Ashkenazim are around 2/3 of a standard deviation smarter than gentile whites.

And most importantly, it doesn't actually alter the political conversation in the US. The American right already has a compelling argument against mass immigration for reasons of culture, economics, language, crime and so on - that's why Trump won. And the problems with crime in the ghetto in St Louis or Chicago or Baltimore won't be solved by 'awareness' of HBD either, they're due to much more mundane issues with policing, sentencing, and the way that criminal justice is dispensed in liberal cities. American conservatives dislike illegal immigration from Central America anyway, what they need is a conservative political elite capable of solving the issue, not one focused on litigating what exactly is responsible for why second generation Salvadorans don't go into software engineering at the same rate as Asians.

which is part of why many antisemitic wignats spend a lot of time online trying to disprove the substantial body of evidence that suggests Ashkenazim are around 2/3 of a standard deviation smarter than gentile whites.

Just as an aside, my interpretation of the studies I've seen was that ashkenazim had a higher verbal IQ but lower visual intelligence, and these differences were largely caused by the same alleles which are responsible for a lot of the sphingolipid disorders that are so prevalent in the community.

The argument made by the more intelligent nationalists I've seen is that the Askhenazim IQ curve isn't so far ahead of the white curve as to explain the disparities in outcome (the gentile population is so much larger that there are more gentiles at just about every point on the IQ spectrum), and that jewish nepotism plays a big role in their overrepresentation in a lot of areas. I think this is fairly plausible, not the least because you can point to actual specific instances of this kind of nepotism and discrimination in regular life - see Ivy league admissions offices penalising applicants for rural activities and jewish overrepresentation in admissions offices.

BAP is saying that a right-wing ethos has to be race-blind because it's the "only workable myth." But where does he think this myth came from? It is very recent, it was never believed at any other point in human history, it certainly wasn't believed in the United States or Europe during the peak of its civilizational advancement. Right now it is hard to imagine moving past that myth, but BAP is trying to steer the right wing away from exiting the orbit of that myth. It's subversive.

I agree that exiting the orbit of that myth is not a substitute for creating a better myth or having that influence gain traction among elite influencers, but it's certainly a prerequisite.

he's saying that basing that particularism on a perceived or real hereditarily higher white intelligence (when compared to some, but not all, other racial groups) is flawed. It doesn't have a powerful cultural message, and is only likely to annoy the many whites who have productive and friendly relations with lower performing minorities.

I agree, but it's a false dichotomy to pretend that the only two options are IQ worship and race-blindness. The Romans had a racial-mythos that oriented society. It was not race-blind, but it also did not constantly harp on IQ statistics. BAP saying that embracing race blindness is the only alternative to HBD evangelism is ridiculous. The Roman system was HBD evangelism without any statistics. HBD denial was likewise not established by statistics and charts but by myths.

So BAP saying the right has to accept the race-blind myth, despite its failures, is subversive.

Perhaps most damningly, it would expose far more of the public to the fact that Jews and Asians really are more successful than whites in many fields for genetic reasons, which is part of why many antisemitic wignats spend a lot of time online trying to disprove the substantial body of evidence that suggests Ashkenazim are around 2/3 of a standard deviation smarter than gentile whites.

That's an overstatement, one minor youtuber tried to take that on but it was widely panned.

I also do not see that fact as damning, as I am not an IQ-worshipper. All that matters is the advancement of civilization, that's the only contest that matters. Jews can test and finagle their way into Aryan civilization and Aryan institutions, but don't kid yourself into thinking income and accolades constitute a higher "achievement" than the people that built the civilization and core institutions which are hosting you. Not many Europeans are clamoring to be accepted into institutions in Asia or Israel or to assimilate into Asian Civilization or (lol) Jewish Civilization. It's the other way around.

Greece, Rome, the British Empire, the United States... The genetic substrate for civilizational achievement, and by the same token civilizational decline, is the actual important insight of accepting HBD, but so many get stuck in the local optimum of only caring about IQ and economic outcomes.

The American right already has a compelling argument against mass immigration for reasons of culture, economics, language, crime and so on - that's why Trump won. And the problems with crime in the ghetto in St Louis or Chicago or Baltimore won't be solved by 'awareness' of HBD either

I think it's silly to say the argument is compelling when it is the argument that has been presented throughout the course of the most radical peacetime demographic transformation in human history. Those arguments are obviously not compelling.

I've already granted that HBD awareness won't solve the problems you describe. What it ought to do is inspire intelligent, high-agency people to search for a better mythos. The subversive function of BAP is to try to redirect as many of those people as possible back into the Conservative "We are the real MLK equal opportunity dreamers" 'opposition' to progressivism.

Ok what’s your plan for winning elections on an pro-HBD platform where non-Whites are at least 40% of the electorate?

If you get rid of disparate impact and all the implicit and explicit subsidies that exist for non-Whites you can totally overturn much of the incentives that have been changing Western demographics without having to go and campaign on a platform that insults half the populace.

There’s a reason BAP followed up his tweets by talking about Kazakhstan and Fiji - both of which empower the native population without HBD as a basis for their actions.

If you get rid of disparate impact and all the implicit and explicit subsidies that exist for non-Whites you can totally overturn much of the incentives that have been changing Western demographics without having to go and campaign on a platform that insults half the populace.

No you can’t. You can probably boost white birthrates on the margins in the short term, but offering them a slightly higher percentage of college professorships because they don’t have to compete with affirmative action will not do this.

Well currently in the US we have more people entering the country via claiming asylum than are being born so that’s a good start there if you want to prevent demographic change.

But a presumably race blind society would also phase out things like subsidized small business loans for rich minorities like South Asians and East Asians which help crowd out majority owned small businesses, government contracting set-asides, DEI departments, affirmative action in the Civil Service, etc.

Well currently in the US we have more people entering the country via claiming asylum than are being born so that’s a good start there if you want to prevent demographic change.

Yes, none(and I mean that completely literally; by the time they get to the US they’re economic migrants)of these people are real refugees, but even if they were deported immediately the US would still become (nonHispanic)white minority eventually. Gotta change the birthrates, and no one knows how to do that enough to take effect- and changing official discrimination will do even less.

No you can’t. You can probably boost white birthrates on the margins in the short term, but offering them a slightly higher percentage of college professorships because they don’t have to compete with affirmative action will not do this.

There's a LOT more affirmative action than a few professorships.

It was an illustrative example, but civil servants and professors- and other typical beneficiaries of AA- are not known for their tfr to begin with. My point was that increasing the percentage of whites in high status jobs is not going to boost their birthrate, which is what you need to do to have a whiter country going forwards. And changing small business loan conditions in their favor won’t either.

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BAP is a jewish nationalist who preaches individualism for the goys. His goal is to turn the west into a free market with free movement of people and goods.

The other side are white nationalists who want to preserve European civilization.

BAP would probably not want to see Tel Aviv turned into an Atlanta full of Africans. Diversity for the goyim, nationalism for the jews. Similar to Ben Shapiro who thinks identity politics is lame unless it is for Israel.

-Diversity for the goyim, nationalism for the jews. Similar to Ben Shapiro who thinks identity politics is lame unless it is for Israel.

I wish it was more nuanced than this, but this an accurate heuristic. there is a sort of irony in seeing an American with a Star of David flag and/or Ukraine flag on twitter username accuse someone with a Palestine flag of being anti-American.

BAP is a jewish nationalist who preaches individualism for the goys. His goal is to turn the west into a free market with free movement of people and goods.

The other side are white nationalists who want to preserve European civilization.

The wicked Jewish badwronger vs the righteous good-doer white nationalist.

This is just cheerleading for white nationalism while dunking on the perfidious Jew. Truly content-free other than a big sneer.

No, it points to a bigger trend: nationalism for me, open borders for thee. Ben Shapiro thinks white nationalism is lame while being a hard core zionist. He doesn't actually think identity politics is lame, he just opposes all identity politics instead of his own.

Ben Shapiro thinks white nationalism is lame while being a hard core zionist.

So do and so are most white gentile American conservatives - tens of millions of them - what’s your point?

Most of Alamariu's recent writing on Israel has been strongly negative other than in that he said that Hamas weren't 'bronze age' because they whine to the international community about getting bombed when Israel fights back...which doesn't seem out of line with the rest of his beliefs. The main 'allegation' surrounding his supposed Zionism is that he wore an IDF t-shirt to his college classes to annoy leftist students 20 years ago. That seems pretty embarrassing but I don't think it tells us much.

The other side are wignats like Woods who spend their days crying about Palestinians on Twitter and unironically resharing Finkelstein-type comments about how oppressed they are, which BAP correctly said isn't a very compelling message to most Western conservatives who consider leftist activists, Muslim immigrants and progressives (the rest of the anti-Israel coalition in Western countries) their political foes, not friends.

It is probably different in the US, but in Europe Israel is deeply unpopular among a large part of the right. Israel and the neocons make war, Europe gets flooded with migrants. Borrowing trillions to bomb the middle east, destroy the last of the remnants of the Greek culture in the region, flood Europe with migrants and force feminism on the middle east wasn't popular here. The Palestinians want Palestinians to stay in Palestine, Israel wants a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep.

Israel, apart from having the largest gay parade in the middle east, has worked to destabilize neighbouring countries, finance jihadist groups in Syria and push migrants into Europe. The Israel lobby has been vocally pro diversity, wars in the middle east and immigration. The ADL wasn't exactly on the white nationalist coalition's side. Trying to build a coalition between European nationalists and Israelis is borderline impossible as the two groups have completely different goals. Europeans want Palestinians to stay in Palestine and the middle east to have stable states. Israel wants mass migration from the middle east and a weak Syria/Iraq/lebanon.

As for the Palestinians being weak, they have showed impressive fighting spirit.

In office most European nationalists (eg. Orban) seem to have fine working relationships with Israel. Israel doesn't want Gazans to go to Europe, they just don't want them in Gaza, and are happy to deliver them to anyone who will have them.

In general I don't think it's an important question - outside Britain, France and Russia (in the second, the most prominent nationalist figure is Jewish after Marine Le Pen moved to the center-right, and in the third Putin is quite close with a number of Jews in his inner circle) there are very few Jews in Europe and most will leave quickly to the US or Israel as the Muslim population grows further and attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools and so on increase. There will be very few European Jews left to play any substantial role in the coming cultural conflict between indigenous Europeans and migrant populations from the Islamic world, and many of those who remain will either be politically irrelevant ultra-Orthodox or on the right like Zemmour.

Orban is already sanctioned. He has a small land locked country under immense pressure from abroad. He is forced to make some concessions in order to not end up getting the Belarus treatment.

Israel doesn't want Gazans to go to Europe, they just don't want them in Gaza, and are happy to deliver them to anyone who will have them.

The reality has been that Israel has pushed hard against Syria and we got flooded with migrants. Pushing millions of migrants into another part of the Middle east is destabilizing and greatly increases the risk of them comming hear.

Ben Gvir, an Israeli minister, is openly talking about creating a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ben-gvir-war-an-opportunity-to-encourage-migration-from-gaza/

After decades of Israel Palestine conflict, it is clear that the result has been more migrants to Europe.

and many of those who remain will either be politically irrelevant ultra-Orthodox or on the right like Zemmour.

So far the Jewish population of Europe has been overwhelmingly pro open borders and diversity. For such a small group, they have been incredibly overrepresented in promoting mass immigration.

Blacks are generally regarded to be better athletes than other races. They are also regarded as better dancers and perhaps better musicians overall. If the races are equal on all other fronts, does this not necessarily imply the racial inferiority of other races relative to blacks? Is there an offsetting "advantage" for each of the races that I am missing? The only other one I can think of in the public consciousness would be a belief in Asian superiority with regards to math.

How do strict racial equality believers square this circle?

Most white progressive racial activists don't consciously think that black people are hereditarily biologically superior to whites at athletics or dancing. If you ask them they'll usually say it's culture or some form of geographical determinism that isn't explicitly genetic.

In the United States, the black overrepresentation in professional sports is largely downstream of the pipeline really starting to sort kids by ability early on in puberty(which black kids hit earlier).

I very much doubt it is the largest reason for racial disparities in professional sports, given we have the international Olympics where we can plainly see which (usually homogenous) countries are represented in which sports. The Caribbean overrepresentation in sprinting is due to starting sports training earlier?

Not to mention the assortment that takes places in US sports, e.g. QB vs RB demographics. I know differences in puberty onset is technically HBD (well 'HBD lite' that may plausibly be impacted by environmental factors such as diet/BMI), but I buy that other socio-economic factors definitely impact professional sports participation. Which sport played, which roles, which positions and so on. But to pretend that the number one factor isn't adult biomechanical differences I struggle with- a 6'9'' 300lb man is more likely to be a basketball player than a 6'2'' man regardless of whether they hit puberty 3 years later.

Something like "it's one of the few avenues for success they have so they funnel themselves into them".

From Adam Rutherford:

Just as ACTN3 is not a speed gene, ACE is not an endurance gene. These simplistic reductions of biochemistry betray not just the complexities of their roles in the body but how much or little we know about those functions. “Necessary but not sufficient” is a phrase that geneticists like to use a lot. There is no reason to suppose that the variants of both ACE and ACTN3 that form part of the foundations of elite athletic ability are unique to Africa or recent African descent. Are fast-twitch muscle cells more common in sprinters? Yes. Are they more common in West African people? Possibly. Are they more common in African Americans? Maybe a bit. Are they unique to African people? No. Does the RR allele of ACTN3 or the II allele of ACE make you run faster? No: In elite athletes, they appear to be necessary but not sufficient for athletic success. The difference in regionally mediated success is culture. The utter dominance of Finnish long-distance runners in the first half of the twentieth century ended because the culture of running dissolved. The current dominance of Kenyans and Ethiopians in long-distance running, and descendants of the enslaved in the Americas in sprinting, is because they have cultures and icons of total supremacy.

And Rutherford is writing a normiesplainer where, uncharitably, his goal is to inoculate them against his enemy without facing an unambiguous debunking that torches his own credibility.

Most people aren't that constrained and don't think about it beyond the latter half.

What about American football/basketball where if anything I expect whites have better access to equipment/coaching/practice facilities due to the wealth differential?

So, the presence of the R allele (either one or two copies) is definitely higher in African Americans compared to White Americans, 96 percent compared to 80 percent. The numbers are almost the same for Jamaican people. That doesn’t come anywhere near the observed discrepancy between African American or Jamaican Olympic sprinters and White competitors. If it were just down to that one gene, you might expect to see maybe six elite sprinters being Black for every five White runners.

Take another sport where explosive energy and speed are an asset: basketball. In the National Basketball Association, the ratio of Black to White players has been consistently around three to one since the 1990s, again Black people being significantly overrepresented if the R allele is your sole criterion.

This is an ultra-simplistic argument, as obviously many other factors that are genetically influenced are important in basketball, notably height. In other sports, desirable body form is more variable. In the National Football League, the proportion of Black players is around 70 percent, but like rugby, that is a game where there are highly specialized positions with different skills and physical attributes. Offensive linemen tend to be heavy and strong, running backs tend to have the physique of sprinters, and most are Black. Linemen though are a fairly even split of Black and White Americans. But in the center position within the linemen, Whites outnumber Blacks four to one. Why? We don’t know, but it does not appear to have anything to do with genetics. In Major League Baseball—a sport that requires sprinting and powerful throwing and hitting—African Americans make up less than 10 percent of players.

None of the numbers makes a great deal of sense if biological race is your guiding principle, and patterns in relation to ethnicity are terribly inconsistent both between sports and within them. And while there is uneven distribution of the R allele in different populations, this does not match the makeup of elite athletes in different sports.

If you mean Rutherford and not the average normie that's all he says on those sports. That's his rebuttal.

Take another sport where explosive energy and speed are an asset: basketball. In the National Basketball Association, the ratio of Black to White players has been consistently around three to one since the 1990s, again Black people being significantly overrepresented if the R allele is your sole criterion.

But there are vanishingly few White American NBA players. You can't even get out of the top-5 before you get to guys who are marginal starters on a playoff team. Instead, what we're seeing is that there are disproportionately huge numbers of hyper-talented Slavs; the white NBA stars are Serbs, Slovenes, Polacks. There's a tiny sub-population within Whites that produces a bunch of great NBA players, the entire US white population would get smoked against the South Slavs, and forget the rest of Europe going against them.

But then, all NBA players are extreme outliers, even more extreme than in any other sport as they are all freakishly tall and there are only 160 starters in the whole NBA, as compared to 700+ in the NFL and 420 in MLB (European football has a much more complex talent distribution so it's not as easy to spit out a number, but there are loads of equivalent spots).

I also hold the semi-conspiratorial opinion that racism in College Football and NFL coaching rooms is holding back the white WR, and probably the Black TE, in the NFL. The Top 5 TEs in the NFL are all white, there is only one elite-level white WR. The skill-sets are virtually identical, with differences only of emphasis on blocking versus receiving. The only logical explanation is that coaches see a white kid and put him in the TE bucket right away.

As another user alluded to, and as Steve Sailer has written about, part of what appears to be holding back American white kids from excelling at basketball is that they are attending school alongside blacks, who mature more quickly. A white kid trying to get into basketball in middle or high school is likely to be substantially less physically developed than his black peers of the same age - shorter, less muscular, less physically confident - and this is likely to be highly discouraging and could lead to bullying. Whereas if the same kid had been surrounded by whites who were at the same stage of physical development, he would have stuck with the game long enough to develop fundamental skills and confidence while waiting for his body to catch up developmentally.

Cooper Flagg, currently the top high-school basketball recruit in the country, grew up in rural Maine, far from black kids, which very likely helped him to develop his talents without being put in a disadvantageous position during his formative athletic years. Had he grown up in Atlanta instead, he’d probably have switched sports at an early age, or abandoned athletics entirely.

South Slavs (and Balts), besides being on average quite tall and strong, similarly spend their formative athletic years surrounded by peers who can be expected to develop physically at basically the same rates, creating far less stratified talent/athletic distributions and encouraging them to stick with the sport longer, especially since there are few if any other major sports competing for the same pool of athletes. None of them is going to switch to gridiron football or baseball.

Regarding racial distributions in the NFL, I would dispute your claim that the skillsets of WRs and TEs are virtually identical. TEs are, as a rule, nearly always significantly slower than WRs, especially when it comes to short-burst speed. Genetic differences in the density of fast-twitch muscle would be sufficient to explain most of the racial differences between the positions. Combine that with whatever factors causing the significant overrepresentation of white players at the offensive line positions potentially also spilling over into affecting racial differences in the blocking part of the TE position, and I think you can justify pretty much the entirety of the racial differences without appealing to racism on the part of coaches/recruiters.

Whereas if the same kid had been surrounded by whites who were at the same stage of physical development, he would have stuck with the game long enough to develop fundamental skills and confidence while waiting for his body to catch up developmentally.

This seems unlikely given the rate at which white kids make it to NCAA teams. 70% of NBA players are African American (10% land in "other" which I suspect may include a lot of biracial American kids and Black Africans), while only 53% of NCAA players are African American. It's unlikely that white kids who just needed a little boost to make it to the NBA couldn't make it to some college team, and it is unlikely that they're still "maturing" in college. I guess there theoretically could be a bunch of white kids who just never pursued the sport at all, but that seems unlikely.

RE: TEs

Two thoughts about Travis Kelce

A) Travis is basically a wide receiver at this point. He blocks marginally more than your average wide receiver, but he's not in there to block Micah Parsons he's in there as a pass catcher. He's the number one pass catching option on a division champion team, and if theoretically he was only allowed to line up outside no one can doubt that he would be a better pass catching option that at least half the wide receivers in the league. What's notable about this is that it is common with really great Tight Ends to end up like that near the end of their career, but first they have to spend two to four years playing as primarily or 50/50 blocking. There is no reason to think that he gained speed or agility in that time. Effectively, Kelce (and Gronkowski and Ertz and Goedert) had to earn the right to catch the football by blocking defensive ends and linebackers for years.

B) Travis Kelce has a brother, Jason. In high school, Jason played running back, and Travis played quarterback. Scroll midway through this article for high school yearbook photos. They look similar in build. Once they reached college, their bodies diverged. Jason moved to the offensive line while Travis moved to tight end. The changes in their bodies were not genetic, they were the result of intentional decisions made by each brother to change their body to meet the needs of their assigned position. Jason Kelce decided he didn't need to be as fast, he needed to be bigger and stronger. If Travis Kelce had been assigned to play wide receiver, he would be building his body to be faster. Now presumably they were assigned different positions because of some slight inherent differences in their bodies, but the differences would be much smaller if they didn't train for different positions. This applies to all positions: Travis Kelce might never be as fast as AJ Brown and AJ Brown might never be as good a blocker, but if Kelce trained for speed and Brown trained to block they'd be closer.

The question for those who eschew HBD is how do you deal with the systemic racism arguments? I guess you can say culture.

It doesn't matter. That's the point being made. Both the 'culture' and the 'HBD' arguments are unacceptable to the left. You're not gaining anything by shifting to HBD except epistemic accuracy. Which isn't worthless, and there I disagree with Alamariu. But it's not going to change anything in the culture war.

They can skirt the question without overtly rejecting HBD explanations. The claim that disparities are always systemic racism already engages in massive burden-shifting without regard to the accuracy of HBD explanations. In the absence of biological differences in ability between two groups, there will remain differences in culture, environment, preferences, and norms. There will be cultural effects that are similar to how founder's effects and genetic drift work biologically. Why are Australians great cricketers, but Caribbeans are baseball players? Well, it surely isn't a product of their biological differences and that's obvious for anyone to see. The same sorts of explanations likely carry non-trivial weight for things like what professions groups wind up in, even for someone that's a proponent of strong-form HBD. There can't actually be all that many people that think Filipinos are just genetically really into the nursing profession.

Rejecting systemic racism as the catchall default for disparities does not require HBD.

No but after all of the other interventions fail to correct the difference HBD (dumb name by the way) might answer the question for some.

Why are Australians great cricketers, but Caribbeans are baseball players?

The West Indies (the team that represent the Caribbean in cricket) has produced some of the greatest cricket players of all time. Sobers, Lara, Richards etc. etc. Baseball is really only dominant in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, everywhere else it's cricket. For, (to reinforce your point) cultural reasons due to historical ties to the British Empire.

Huh. Shows what I know about the Caribbean and cricket. Fun fact of the day, thanks!

One of those (national scale) bubble things I think, I certainly didn't know any part of the Caribbean was known for baseball until I moved to the US. But then all the Caribbean people I had exposure to back then were from the "British" side.

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