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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?

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.

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.

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.