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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Seems pretty stupid. It wasn't Asian empowerment that put someone like Ketanji Brown-Jackson on the Supreme Court - it was good old-fashioned American racial patronage. The idea that black Americans are so incompetent that they can't partake in political patronage is just wildly uninformed and ignores the masterful play of figures like Jim Clyburn, who is likely responsible for Biden's promise to pick a black woman for the court, regardless of merit.

Whenever I see this kind of thing I'm reminded of what was said about the Irish... or the Italians.

To be clear, these groups ran organized crime networks that caused a ton of trouble. I don't really understand the perspective that people thought the Irish and Italians were corrupt, and boy-howdy were they wrong. Irish and Italian immigrants really did cause a lot of problems.

To be clear, these groups ran organized crime networks that caused a ton of trouble. I don't really understand the perspective that people thought the Irish and Italians were corrupt, and boy-howdy were they wrong. Irish and Italian immigrants really did cause a lot of problems.

Right, but the point is that anyone at the time who made an HBD argument using that as evidence was laughably wrong. And maybe we should notice a pattern.

Let's talk about pattern recognition. According to the progressive viewpoint, we're supposed to believe that the correlation between IQ scores and life outcomes is some sort of coincidence. We're supposed to believe that IQ tests are somehow biased against blacks and in favor of whites, and just sort of ignore how people from India and China score.

We're supposed to believe that tech companies are thick with a form of white racism that loves those Indians and Chinese but hates blacks and Hispanics. We're supposed to believe that the differences in development between Asia and Africa are total historical happenstance.

We're supposed to look at the great black uplift project that has spent fifty or sixty years accomplishing practically nothing concrete, and just nod along with those progressives when they assure us that this failure has absolutely nothing to do with those pesky IQ scores. We're supposed to avoid noticing that "structural racism" only really seems to keep those low-IQ races down.

There's an entire litany of convoluted unfalsifiable pseudo-religious argumentation that's required to explain why the world we live in just happens to look and function exactly like an HBD/IQ world but totally isn't really.

But we're the ones not recognizing patterns. Right.

I'm not sure what to say besides 'you have spectacularly failed the Ideological Turing Test at every turn, maybe spend 5 minutes pretending your opponents were human beings and then consider what they would say about each of these topics'.

  • -12

Less antagonism, please. You can make the argument without casting aspersions.

I kind of feel like if someone says 'these are the stupid and absurd things you believe', 'No I don't' should be an acceptable answer, even if it's low effort.

But yes, I could have just said 'Wrong' simply instead of using more words and getting more heated. So, sorry about that.

It is an acceptable answer, and I don’t mean to imply that you’ve acted with low effort or in bad faith.

The only problem with using more words was that you started to make it personal. Stick to your opponent’s claims and I’ve got no complaints.