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Now, here's a mod action I don't feel remotely bad about enforcing.
So far, you have been a pretty terrible denizen of this forum, and this comment, submitted to an expired thread, takes the cake.
The Motte doesn't forbid the discussion of racial differences, be it HBD, disapproval of ghetto culture or anything else. Hell, look at me, I'm on record as endorsing HBD, and I'm a mod, though my policy proposals are rather different from the usual garden-variety racist.
What it doesn't allow, is a top-level comment in the CW thread that can be boiled down to:
At this point, it would be easier for me to list all the rules you didn't violate than what you did. At the very least, this is booing the outgroup and sneering as hard as possible, with only a minor figleaf in that you're merely relaying the observations and commentary of an Uber driver.
You could have made a much better comment covering the same territory, racism or racist-ideologies (dictionary definition) are tolerated and often popular on the Motte, but we still have standards. If a regular made such a shitty comment, they'd be lucky to get away with a warning. You haven't earned that much forbearance.
While I'm here, we might as well discuss the overall pattern of your comments-
Self-promotion is tolerated, as you have done several times in the past for your Substack, but being a regular with AAQCs like Kulak makes it far more palatable.
Anyway, enjoy being banned for a week. It'll only get worse if you don't get better.
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Without black people, the success of modern day America would not have been possible
Downthread there is a comment from @RandomRanger where he talks about how high income blacks are still just as criminal as low income whites, using this to argue that we shouldn't treat poor people of all races the same and that the negative effects of the black population today are so bad that putting them in the USA leads to social dysfunction as bad as that in modern day Russia.
It's quite heavily implied that blacks are a problem and their presence leads to a worse USA compared to a hypothetical counterfactual where they weren't there. I don't think this is quite right, I actually think an even stronger argument can be made for the exact opposite belief, namely that it is a direct consequence of having so many blacks that the USA is as advanced and developed as it is today and that a USA which never had them would be one where everyone (including whites) was much poorer today.
The argument itself is simple. Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK. This comparative lack of "democratic socialism" and a much lighter touch of the government on private enterprise has paid off in spades for the US which has gone from being only slightly more prosperous than the UK/France/Germany etc. to being significantly more so over the last few decades.
One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy, which consequently lead to it becoming significantly richer per capita as the virtuous cycle paid off. My answer is simple: the US had too many black people for this sort of redistribution to be palatable to the ruling white classes. Hence the US escaped the economic havoc and destruction (compared to the counterfactual) such policies lead to in the long term and was able to grow and expand unshackled which eventually lead to everyone's living standards improving massively. Indeed as the tastes of the ruling class have changed and become more accepting of the sorts of behaviours displayed by low class black Americans so too have we heard louder and louder calls to redirect more and more money to the poor from those who might do something useful with it.
By now it's very well established empirically (just look at Europe) that when white people as a class get governmental power and there aren't too many lower class people around who have a very dissimilar modus vivendi that your average high status white would find disagreeable to fund they introduce "democratic socialism" and start taxing people/companies/transactions (discouraging innovation and hard work) and use the money to set up a welfare state (discouraging innovation and hard work). This predictably leads to less innovation and growth, which leads to large scale economic welfare loss for the population as a whole. The final result of this is that everyone ends up poorer and worse off, little different from the purported negative impact blacks have of the population as a whole.
Just like how blacks (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their elevated crime rate etc. wherever they are, whites (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their very high propensity to introduce "democratic socialism" wherever they are. Now of course there are lots of whites that don't think this way and are honest to goodness capitalists, but equally lots of blacks never steal or otherwise commit crimes. Just like the existance of such blacks doesn't mean blacks as a class don't cause large scale social damage through elevated crime incidences, the existance of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage through promoting bad economic policy.
Indeed because economic growth is contagious and spreads its boons all over the world, it's not just Americans who would be worse off if there were no blacks and consequently American whites had fallen to their instinctive impulses of taxing the productive to give to the unproductive. A lot of the high living standards around Europe and the rest of the world are due to techonologies that were developed and matured and brought to market due to substantial efffort from Americans safe in the knowledge that they would stand to personally benefit from its successes. Without this engine of growth and productivity in America it is well possible that the developed world in this alternate universe 2024 would still have living standards no higher than our world managed in the 1960s.
Many white nationalists are perfectly at home with noticing the bad consequences of black people as a class on the sum economic welfare of the USA. However they fail to notice the more pernicious but potentially even worse consequences of letting white people with their "lets minimise harm, even if it scuttles the economy" approach run rampant over the country like it would have done had there not been a large class of black people 100 years ago the whites were less happy to redistribute money towards.
I've been meaning to compose a small questions Sunday post on this topic but haven't really gotten my thoughts in order on it. But I think it fits here, so I'll try: does concentrating wealth in the "innovators" at the expense of the lower classes to generate wealth on the "a rising tide lifts all boats" theory actually work? My particular concern is that "technology level" is not a scalar; just because a civilization puts more effort towards developing technology doesn't mean they're developing the right technologies. And what are the "right" technologies is always going to vary based on who you ask, and in an unequal society, who you're asking is whoever has the money (relative weighting here; obviously no real society is going to be 100% exactly equal in wealth across its population).
We see this in the pre-Civil-War South where there was no economic incentive to automate labor that could be done by slaves, probably hurting them economically in the long-term. Did/do we have a similar lack of emphasis on labor-saving devices for domestic work because that was seen as the domain of women, or did things like the washing machine and various kitchen tools really get invented more or less as early as they reasonably could have? Another angle on this is the general tendency of tech companies to make their products in a way that makes money for VCs, not to be useful to consumers (see "enshittification"). I've seen this proposed as a fully general argument against capitalism: innovations that solve problems are greatly disfavored over innovations that allow for rent-seeking / produce profit.
... as you can see, this isn't a top-level Culture War Roundup post because my thoughts on the matter are not well-organized.
I haven't read it yet, but this is much the argument of Acemoglu's new book "Power and Progress," that it's perfectly possible for technological innovation to not spill over into benefits for normal people.
Before him, the tech history Joel Mokyr argued that the middle ages were more technologically innovative than classical Rome, but of course quality of life was very low.
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That's easily disproven by the widespread adoption of the cotton gin and sawmill.
This is a fascinating question. There were washing machine designs which didn't reduce the amount of work involved to where it is today but were a significant improvement over a washing board in... wait, really, the 1790s(https://infogalactic.com/info/Washing_machine)? Yep, massively labor-saving devices for laundry were first patented in the 1790s and there was an electric version in 1904. But it seems like washing machines caught on about as quickly as people could afford them- infogalactic says 60% by 1940.
Now I want to put a pin in it there, because permanent press fabric(another innovation that greatly reduced women's household work dramatically) wasn't a thing yet, and before it you had to iron everything extensively. And I don't know if anyone here has extensive experience ironing but it's not a quick process and I'm given to understand that before electric irons it took much longer. Of course infogalactic says(https://infogalactic.com/info/Clothes_iron) that the first popular electric iron was introduced in 1938 and became widespread over the course of the 40's and fifties, so we're talking about roughly the same timescale.
Back to the pin, I don't think that to a middle class or richer family(and poorer ones wouldn't have been early adopters of washing machines for obvious reasons) would have avoided buying a washing machine because "eh, the Mrs. stays at home, and I don't care how hard she has to work", but that labour saving devices, if they caught on slower than was reasonable to expect(although it doesn't seem like they did), did so largely because, well, generally high income inequality made servants cheap for anyone who could afford one. And IIRC most middle class families in the era before washing machines hired out their laundry for poor women to take home and bring back cleaned and ironed; that's why washerwomen are such a cliche in older literature. Middle class families had servants at least part time because that's pretty doable when income inequality is extremely high. Poor women obviously worked much more under this system, but, uh, so did their husbands, I think the balance of the evidence suggests that being poor in the past just involved a lot more work.
That points to a different hypothesis, that husbands love their wives and are willing to spend a reasonable portion of the household budget to make their lives easier, but that they prefer to do so in ways which make economic sense.
So, I think what we have here is evidence that income inequality has clear net negatives and people in the past weren't pointlessly evil or oppressive. But we already knew that.
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I think this can be better explained by the Constitution, which heavily values individual rights, specially property rights . America has always been an ownership society first, not a redistributive one or egalitarian one, and even to this day despite wokeness, such differences persist between the US and Western Europe . Also, white rulers in Europe are perfectly fine with high taxes and redistribution to help migrants even if the money is wasted.
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Based on my very layman understanding of the relevant research, this is entirely plausible.
And many more I don’t bother to quote now.
Increased ethnic diversity is ruinous for popular support of redistributive social programs.
I'd say the point of your post is a reasonable extrapolation from relevant recent publications.
I really think the key here is cultural diversity rather than racial/ethnic (though of course the two correlate strongly).
If we imagine Protestants and Catholics, or assistance going to the Irish or Italians (yes, different ethnicity, but still pretty white), or French and Spaniards, or squares and potheads, or broad-brush USA history and "approved work ethic" Jesús-loving Asians, I think only the last group is gonna get the government cheese.
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Why do you assume the US would have similar politics to European powers?
Everywhere where whites are a large enough contingent and wield power and there is no smaller group they really dislike ends up with these sorts of politics. Canada is just north of you guys and has a large welfare state. Aus and NZ aren't that different either.
Of course, Canada”s elite were quite famously loyalist who hated the American experiment.
Is your contention that all white people are the same?
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Canada has a much larger native population than the USA, about 5% of the total population now, who have similar life outcomes to america's blacks. They also receive a huge amount of bespoke welfare. So I think that's some evidence against your theory.
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Even if black presence lead to some opposition to welfare, it is anachronistic now to praise it since blacks have used their influence to promote more redistribution and have gotten a decent % of whites to go along with it, in addition to groups like Jews being supportive.
And then to add to those blacks and that share of whites have supported the party of mass migration and redistribution. We also had black nonwhites migrants who also support more redistribution and quotas.
The leftists who want mass migration for their goals are strategically smarter than a libertarian which believes it would benefit their political goals. Of course, the leftists are also wrong if they want certain societal metrics to improve. But in terms of more % of redistribution, then that is more likely to happen with more diversity. Maybe at best a small amount might lead to situations of limited welfare, but the coalition in favor of the specific diverse groups, did not only push for more goodies for their side, but also for changing the demographics as we have seen.
Plus, a right that tries to appeal to multiracial groups might become less anti welfare. And moreover, in a situation where such programs become entrenched and goverment is accustomed to high spending, who is to say that the eventual evolution of conservative establishment isn't to support more spending but with less racial criteria. Or at worst, to become the left as the Torries have done in Britain.
They are not increasing diversity -- they are increasing demographic groups which promote redistribution, the effect that in current USA it increases diversity is purely coincidental. For countries which already have demographics which promotes redistribution, they don't want to change demographics.
I disagree. Biden outright promotes as a good thing to reduce white %. Racial ethnic animosity is part of it. It is also about the left winning politically.
It is true that the goal isn't diversity per se. It is about groups that are desirable vs undesirable group. If a place is say 100% black, there wouldn't be calls to make it more white, for example.
I'm sorry, I don't get the part on which we disagree, I do agree with this your comment.
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Depends on what you mean by it. If you consider homicide ratios, US areas with Black population are much, much worse than modern Russia and similar to impoverished, hungry Russia in 1990ths.
Strong wellfare state is relatively recent phenomenon. And USA was already rich compared to Europe in mid-19 th century, almost certainly even before that.
I would agree on the point, thought, that many white nationalists would want to build "socialism for whites only" and make ruinous decisions regarding economy, and, not mentioned in your post, ignore dysgenics in white community.
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Black people of course played an important part in America's success. But leaving that aside, the rest of your post assumes without making an argument that welfare and redistribution has a strong, negative impact on growth and innovation, which is far from clear cut. America has been richer than Europe for a while, but significant divergence is pretty recent and didn't happen at the height of European statism / redistribution, but rather in the past few decades, a period during which many European countries passed (some extent of) liberal reforms and America correspondingly increased its own welfare state and involvement in the economy. Likewise, highly redistributionist countries like the Scandinavian nations still top charts for most innovative in the world, have robust growth, etc.
It we're going to compare small, high-iq, high trust populations, if silicon valley, seattle, or nyc were its own country, it would surpass it.
Notably these are the highest tax areas in the United States. My point is redistribution has a pretty questionable impact on innovation and growth.
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The US does have a Europe level welfare state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending
We just choose to fund this through deficit spending, but that's how Americans pay for everything, both individually and collectively.
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You will find very few places in the world that don't follow this "empirically established model" despite having negligible white populations; in fact, this sort of thing is ubiquitous in the third world, just with much worse outcomes. Ghana cratered its own economy by abandoning the successful model left to them by the British and transitioning to a centrally-controlled, price-fixing regime set up in the name of social justice and wealth distribution; that decision was made by third-worldist hero Kwame Nkrumah, and persisted for decades until it was partially abolished by the coincidentally half-white Jerry Rawlings. India has a welfare state and affirmative action system that no Western state can match for its all-consuming presence in the lives of ordinary people. No one on Earth loves redistributionist politics more than black and brown people do. Europe is certainly more socialist than America, but relative to the rest of the world, not so much.
Affirmative Action? Sure, India Numba Wan 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳
Welfare? I don't really see that being the case. Both the quality and breadth of amenities available to many Western welfare states I can name, such as the UK, utterly dwarfs the kind of coverage an Indian can expect.
We have free public healthcare. It is not terrible, it manages to provide maybe 50% the care, if not the comfort, of say, the NHS. Medicine, in both senses of the word, has strong power laws. The easy and cheap (free) availability of say, the WHO's top 100 list of essential medications means maybe 90% of patients presenting with a disease can get curative treatment.
But healthcare isn't the only part of a welfare state. There's housing, and India doesn't have anything like free/extremely subsidized public housing, along the lines of council flats and so on.
Food? Well, if you really like rice and lentils. You might even stave off most of the obvious nutritional deficiencies.
The welfare system in India is, of necessity, the bare minimum needed to ensure nobody starves to death or dies without at least one disinterested, overworked and underequipped doctor laying hands on them. Maybe you get cheap electricity and water. Subsidized public transport. Education, and quality at that once you're past high school, IITs and AIIMS (or most government run medical colleges) are far more prestigious than their private, for-profit counterparts.
I can't think of any aspect that makes the welfare state here more all-encompassing, and not just in terms of how much it can offer the average person. Western welfare states almost all offer better and more.
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I'm not sure I buy this line of thinking.
The argument is that less distribution of resources (aka high wealth gaps) leads to a more productive society, yet if you look at the countries with the greatest gini coefficients there's a large overlap/correlation with the poorest countries and the countries with the largest wealth gaps.
There is also an argument to be made that slavery actually hampered the economic growth of the South. It may have made a few individuals very wealthy, but the reliance on slave labor in agricultural production led to a slower growth in industry and the development of cities. There is also a dispute that farms with slaves outproduced cotton relative to if those regions did not have slaves. So the economic condition of the South may have been better off if there was no slavery (and thus much less blacks).
Also, the USA's economic strength relative to Europe was already well ahead by the late 1800s, fueled by America's abundant natural resources, the development of railroads, increases in population and industry, and the development of new patents and technologies. Two world wars devastated Europe while the United States was left largely alone, putting the USA in a prime position to become even more dominant on the world stage.
Many modern technologies such as computers and nuclear power were developed/accelerated during the United State's rivalry with the Soviet Union. The space arms race during the late 1950s accelerated the growth of Silicon Valley. When the Soviet Union got an early lead in the space race with Sputnik, President Eisenhower created both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA would fund nearly 70% of computer technology research in the US in the early 1960s. NASA had huge demands for integrated circuits, which led to the explosion and growth of Silicon Valley. ARPANET was also developed as a way to mitigate the threats of Nuclear war by allowing a nationwide communications network, which would eventually lead to the creation of the Internet. In other words, the technologies that enabled the United States to greatly surpass its European counterparts were developed and created in response to the Soviet Union and had nothing to do with the fact that there were some black people in the United States.
In terms of attitudes against redistribution hampered by the existence of a black population, what was stopping them from making a system of welfare just for whites? The more likely answer is that America's culture of individualism played a bigger role in slowing the growth of the welfare state relative to their European counterparts rather than racist attitudes against specific groups of people. I'd also like to point out that the richest cities and states in the United States also tend to have the greatest amount of welfare. Yes, you could argue that they would be even richer without the welfare, or that the welfare came after economic growth, but GDP per capita continues to grow in the US even with the vast expansion of welfare programs, while Europe has seen a stagnation since the early 2008s.
Here are some more likely explanations for the growing wealth differences between Europe and the United States. Americans also work more hours on average compared to Europeans (US: 1811 hours, France: 1511 hours, Germany 1341 hours per year). Furthermore, Americans are more entrepreneurial compared to Europeans. Here is a Gallup poll showing the difference in attitudes. A greater percentage of Americans start their own businesses, and an even greater proportion of Americans build billion dollar businesses compared to Europeans.
Maybe attitudes on race might play a factor, but it's insignificant compared to other factors.
This is very, very false equivalence. Wealth gaps are product of both policies and qualities of population. If you add low IQ permanent underclass to a country, keeping its economic policies same, then GDP per capita does down and Gini up. If everyone has same ability, then very intense competition doesn't create major difference in wealth. It's competition, not wealth gaps per se, creates economic growth.
I dont see strong correlation of what you claim on 2d plot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-vs-gdp-per-capita-pip Very low GINI index doesn't help Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia grow economically. It's just a reflection that these countries quite homogenous in regard to IQ.
Also obesity and number of HIV+ people in US continues to grow. Probably obesity is not harmful and even good for economic growth.
I'm not claiming this, this was my summary of BurdensomeCount's argument. If it's an uncharitable summary of his view then fair enough but he literally said "Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK." A distribution of resources would lower the wealth gap.
Also, I don't see any reason to believe the bell curve of IQ distribution has significant differences between countries. The only statistics I've ever seen was on median/average IQs by country/race, not on the IQ distributions in each country. If you have any studies on this I'd be interested in seeing it, as I could not find anything. Regardless, there are literally 0 countries in the world where everyone has the same or similar amounts of ability. I don't see any reason to believe that Ukraine, Belarus, or Armenia is quite homogenous in regards to IQ. If you look at any IQ bell curve charts on race, you'll see that there is a common bell curve pattern. The best example of one bell curve being thinner or flatter on the tails is in regards to gender (women being more clustered around the mean) but even that gender difference still has gaps between the smartest and dumbest. You're claiming the bell curve of IQ in a place like Ukraine is extremely tight around the median but I see no evidence for it.
That's a logarithmic scale on the X-axis, most of the countries with a high Gini coefficient are quite poor. You can see the richer countries are clustered to the bottom right with the United States being the exception. I'll admit I didn't do a great analysis writing from my bed late at night and only spot-checked the map chart in my link, which showed that the countries with the largest Gini coefficients were mostly in Africa/South America which are poorer 2nd/3rd world countries. I took the data from your link and organized it by the most recent data for each country sorted by highest to lowest Gini coefficients (which you can see in the table below) and you can see the years vary, so doing any actual statistically valid analysis on this is quite difficult. A quick correlation on this data shows -0.36 which admittedly is a weak correlation, but this is by weighting each country equally regardless of population, and this is a univariate analysis which is not a good analysis for something as complex as this topic. As I pointed out earlier the dates aren't even the same, ranging from 1992 to 2021.
Anyway, I'm not making any claims in terms of the impact inequality has on economic growth as a whole, I'm providing some counter-evidence to BurdensomeCount's claim, which is that the lack of a redistributive welfare state leads to economic prosperity. I doubt any of the top 20 (or even top 50 except the United States) in the table below have a strong welfare system, yet these countries are not economic powerhouses. My rebuttal of BurdensomeCount's argument does not mean I believe a low Gini coefficient leads to economic growth. It should be clear from my points further down in my previous post that I believe there are other factors other than inequality that better explain economic growth and development.
In retrospect using the Gini coefficient alone is not a good analysis as it doesn't reveal much about welfare, and you'd want to look at changes in GDP per capita over time, but at this point to properly do a statistical analysis is a lot of effort for what is a rebuttal of an argument which in of itself doesn't even have statistical backing. I still think my general point here stands, which is that BurdensomeCount's argument is wrong.
What are you trying to say here? My point is that wealth redistribution is not a major factor in the economic growth of the United States compared to Europe and I'm not sure what your statement here either refutes or adds to the discussion.
If you actually believe obesity is good for economic growth then I'm genuinely curious as to why you think so.
Edit: Reworded my last point to be less antagonistic, I just assumed you were being sarcastic but I realized I don't know if that's true.
Table of Gini Coefficient Data
/images/17044029569390996.webp
This is correct, but I do not think BurdensomeCount's thinks redistributive welfare state and gini index are interchangeable (I don't). This is my main objection.
There are lots of countries with large percent of GDP in wellfare system having very high Gini index regardless.
adding individual bell curves with averages far apart does not look like bell curve.
Fair enough. But see my point on the correlation between welfare spending and Gini below.
I have organized and sorted the data for you in my previous post, can you pick out a few countries (other than the US) that are high on the list and has a large percentage of GDP in welfare system?
I've also tried to add some stats on welfare spending, there isn't much, so I put togther a new table below using what sources I could find. Newly added data in new columns is from here: https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm
If the country is missing that means there was no data on the percentage of GDP spent on public spending.
The correlation between Gini and % spending is -0.61, the correlation between % spending and GDP per capita is 0.36. Again, the same caveats as the previous analysis, except this time we also don't have much data on the highest gini coefficient countries so any analysis here shouldn't be used for any serious argument, but we now see a medium/strong negative correlation between public spending and gini coefficient. I mean is that such a surprise? If you don't like the use of gini coefficient then look at the correlation between GDP per capita and welfare spending and you see a small positive correlation. You could correctly point out that correlation != causation and the more likely explanation is that richer countries distribute after getting their wealth (to do a more appropriate analysis on this we would have to look at changes in GDP per capita over time) but my point is that welfare distribution is not a major factor in economic growth/development and there are more likely answers.
The populations are likely weighed heavily in one race or the other, not like those populations have equal distributions, and again this reveals very little about the tail end of the IQ distributions which is more important when we consider your argument on large gaps in ability leading to higher wealth gaps. Do any of the countries below have significant amounts of populations with differing means of IQ to properly explain the inequality outcome? I'm not saying your argument has no value, if we were looking at specific countries such as the United States there's definitely some merit, but as a general trend across all the countries, I don't think IQ gaps are the main or primary explanation for the higher Gini coefficient in these countries.
List of countries with high Gini index: Namibia Zambia Central African Republic Eswatini Colombia Mozambique Botswana Belize Angola Saint Lucia Zimbabwe
That is such an arbitrary cutoff that conveniently cuts off all the high gini coefficient countries, don't do this.
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obese people have slightly shorter life expectancy compared to non-obese ppl but spend more on food and other services . Govt. spending on obese ppl good for healthcare sector but makes society worse and is misallocation of resources.
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The timing of this narrative isn't correct. By 1950, the United States was already much richer than Europe. Furthermore, the United States does have a massive redistributist state across multiple levels of governments. I don't think your premises are even in the ballpark of correct analysis.
Bombed to rubble Europe was presumably poorer than recent WW2 victor America in 1950.
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Also, there have been times when the Western European GDP-per-capita has been closer to US and times when it has been farther away, with the current day having the greatest gap during, at least, the postwar times, starting from 2008, even though the welfare state has at least not gone through extensive further development during that time (considering the ACA and the Biden admin projects, the US has probably been more active in welfare state development than Europe as a whole, during this period).
I think the argument is that the welfare state's consequences are more apparent in the long run, as you get e.g. intergenerational welfare dependency, people not saving enough for their own retirement, people choosing safe careers rather than taking risks (and getting taxed heavily on the rewards), people not having kids because they trust in the state to look after them in their retirement etc.
True, the US has some of these incentives, but arguably not to the same degree as Western Europe.
There's also the argument that the rising dependency ratio with an ageing population is when the welfare state really becomes a drag, and the developed world is facing a rising dependeyc ratio due to demographics. Most welfare states were created for completely different population structures. That's why, despite rising taxes, cuts to services, and reforms, the fiscal outlook in most of Western Europe is still bleak: no matter how you walk, it's going to be uncomfortable to walk in shoes that are too small.
I don't know exactly how I'd calculate it, but I'm curious what fraction of increasing worker productivity (or perhaps GDP) is effectively getting thrown at balancing (for now) the changing costs of the welfare state.
People talk a lot about what fraction of wealth generated goes to workers, but I've never seen what fraction over time goes to recipients of the welfare state (pensioners, disability, housing assistance, Medicare/Medicaid).
The data is there to be combined, I think, because data on levels of transfers/taxes is available due to this debate: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/measuring-income-inequality-a-primer-on-the-debate/
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There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
Right, my point isn't that Europe is catching up, it's that it was already behind before either side of the pond had much welfare spending. We can even see that going back another 50 years. The United States has been more productive than Europe for a long time, shows no signs of that changing, and doesn't require welfare spending as a determinant to explain it.
And sure, the spending isn't as bad as it is in France, but it is comparable to Switzerland, Ireland, and Norway. Also of note is that in actual dollars rather than percentage of GDP, the United States is spending just as much on transfer programs, it simply has a larger economy. The United States shovels piles of free housing, medicine, food, and cash at its poor. In any case, the deviation between American and European productivity started way before this became a problem.
There were reasons for the US to be ahead back then that no longer apply, though. The two World Wars. The greater importance of land and natural resources to GDP back then. The US having a large internal free trade zone.
Currently the US operates with a pretty significant human capital disadvantage from the high black and indigenous population.
There's also a straightforward theoretical explanation for high taxation and welfare spending to reduce GDP level path: Diversion of resources away from investment and towards consumption, plus deadweight loss from high taxes. Why knock yourself out if it's only going to make a small difference in after-tax pay?
I'm not sure it's true that the US spends as much on welfare as Western Europe. I've looked into this before, and IIRC several of those countries spend more. But even if it does, this doesn't contradict the claim that the US is richer because it spends a smaller percentage of GDP on subsidizing consumption.
Consider that if I consistently spend 50% of my income on consumption and invest the rest, eventually I will end up spending more on consumption than my coworker who has the same salary and consistently spends 90% and saves 10%, precisely because limiting my consumption spending to a smaller share of my income has enabled my income to grow faster.
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The black population of the Union states was negligible in the late 1800s, but it was there that the U.S.'s great agricultural and industrial innovations were born and took root. The "Great Migration" of southern agricultural black laborers north to the booming industrial cities occurred after the great gilded age of American lassiez-faire capitalism, and well into the urban progressive movement (which itself smoothly transitioned, after flirtations with fascism and communism, into the FDR welfarist coalition that dominated the mid-20th century, and whose institutional bones we're still building).
This is a very doubtful proposition. The U.S. is several times larger than the other major industrial powers in the world (Germany, UK, France, Japan), significantly more diversified in resources, and - these are the big doozy - didn't get bombed flat or invaded during WWII, and didn't lose an entire generation of elite young men in WWI. Instead, WWI put America in the position of having the allies mortgage their empires to us in exchange for food, war materiel, and ultimately intervention (WWI debts to the US weren't fully cleared in the UK until I think 2003?), and then the physical destruction of Eurasia in WWII put us in a massive comparative industrial advantage.
We tried to. It led to the stagnation of the 70's and early 80's. We then elected Reagan (as the Brits elected Thatcher) to try and shake the system loose, to varying degrees of success.
And then also sucking up all the cognitive capital from the rest of world, which contributed to the creation of the tech and financial industries.
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Blacks have nothing to do with avoiding the perils of 'social democracy'. It was Anglos who refined and upheld the ideas of limited government and laissez faire faire economics. That's why Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK and the US did very well, even without diversity. The US is simply the best endowed with natural resources - of course a country the size of Europe is going to do well, given centuries to build up in peace. They had enormous amounts of farmland, coal, oil, two ocean access, great river networks and no strong enemies in their entire hemisphere - an absurdly good base for a country. And then there's demographics: majority-black countries do poorly. Countries like Brazil that got even more diversity than the US are mediocre at best. All the richest and strongest countries in the world stem from European or East Asian roots, including America.
The obvious conclusion is 'Europeans and East Asians are the best at running civilizations' not 'a certain proportion of blacks make the country more functional by constantly stressing its economic-political immune system'. Especially when there's huge evidence to the contrary for the second theory! One of America's most prestigious institutions just fired a black president for plagiarism - the harm to meritocracy is clearly severe. Enormous amounts of welfare and affirmative action go into propping up a dysfunctional group, lest they launch massive riots like in 2020. The cores of American cities are blighted and too dangerous for useful work, Americans don't feel comfortable taking public transport (which is normal in countries with less diversity). If America had no blacks, it would be a stronger, richer country.
Just look at the US right now - there is no shortage of redistribution! There's a huge amount of redistribution of both wealth and status flowing to blacks. Consider the discussion about 'reparations' or how Trump of all people promoted this half-trillion dollar platinum plan to give blacks more, better jobs and businesses. The thesis that 'blacks prevent redistribution' is clearly wrong.
And if you want to blame whites for this admittedly significant problem, India does just as badly if not worse. It's absolutely mired in ethnic spoils politics, as self-made-human has pointed out in the past. You can't say "the existence of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage" when whites have made the strongest and most functional civilizations in all history. Maybe if you were Chinese, you could get away with it, though I'd point out that China has its fair share of social problems and can at best be considered a peer of the Western, European world. China runs rings around India in all aspects of competence - manufacturing, development, military strength, safety, research, quality of life and so on.
Whites invented capitalism and industrialism. The Amsterdam stock exchange is the oldest in the world. Complaining that whites aren't pro-capitalist enough is ridiculous.
Also worth noting that the US had a national minimum wage long before many countries in Europe (e.g. the UK or Germany) and some European countries (I think Sweden and Denmark?) don't have national minimum wages.
The US beats Western Europe in many aspects of regulation, which is partly why the US economy does better, but there are exceptions.
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Counter example: Much of Latin America has had leaders far to the left of what the US has ever had, despite far more diversity.
Looking at IMFs map of government spending as a percent of GDP it is difficult to see a trend. Homogeneous Asian countries are low in government spending. Brazil is high in government spending.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND
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Is this supposed to be a top-level post? If so, I would advise against it, if you're going to make one of those we do expect more effort put into it.
If this was meant to be a comment to the discussion below, then it's fine, but in that case you should delete and repost it.
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I read a fascinating article on Jewish Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi, with interesting takes on Anti-Colonialism and nationalism. Memmi was an odd man out of sorts. He was a secular left wing revolutionary in Tunisia who advocated for a secular tolerant left wing state. He was a staunch Anti-Colonialist, believing Anti-Colonialism was the true fulfillment of French values, as embodied by the French Revolution. He wanted a Tunisia that was tolerant of minorities, and believed himself to be an Arab Jew. This did ultimately, not pan out, as he was asked to leave Tunisia in either 1956 or 1952(its a really long article, so the location of the dates is inexact for me to find).
He started out life as a staunch Zionist, being from the poor Jewish ghettos of Tunisia. The Jews of Tunisia were Pro-French, and received numerous benefits over their Arab muslim neighbors. They did, according to Memmi, sympathize with the Arab Tunisian struggle for independence and freedom. The Pro-French attitude was entirely motivated by self preservation, as Jews in Tunisia(or at least poor Jews. Rich Jews believed a utopia of tolerance in a secular state would come about. Only Poor Jews recognized the true reality of what was to come....and poor Jews made up most Jews of Tunisia) believed that if the French left, they would be persecuted by their Arab Muslim neighbors. While Memmi started out as a Zionist, he transitioned to the Anti-Colonialist and Left Wing Socialist position as I stated above, coming to the belief that Jews could live in a tolerant Tunisia.
This idealism did not hold up with the contradictions of nationalism and national liberation. Albert Memmi and Jews of Tunisia were not well treated by the new independent Tunisian government. Anti Jewish decrees made it impossible for poor Jews to make a living.
As it turned out, Anti-Colonialist National Liberation movements were often religious, ethnic nationalist, conservative and violent. This shocking realization to Memmi would influence him towards Socialist Zionism, believing that Jews and Zionism must have a place in internationalist thoughts in a distinctly Jewish and independent position.
One of the interesting things to come from Memmi, is the Left's support of Third World Regimes that were intolerant, chauvinistic and conservative, under the name of Anti-Colonialism. Often times, the Left supported these regimes, and even worse, the violence they took, turning a blind eye to their acts. However, these regimes did not adopt the secular tolerant leftism of Memmi or the French Revolution. Memmi wrote "“discovers that there is no connection between the liberation of the colo- nized and the application of a left-wing program. And that, in fact, he is perhaps aiding the birth of a social order in which there is no room for a leftist as such."
He also came of the belief that the problems of Anti-Colonial Regimes were not problems that came from the Colonizers, but problems inherent in the populations themselves. While Colonialism perverted both Colonized and Colonizer, leaving psychological problems for both, that they are ultimately not the cause of the now independent and previously colonizeds problems.
I do not do the article justice. Id recommend reading it, for interesting takes on Leftist support of Anti-Colonialism and the anti-colonialist regime. https://fathomjournal.org/albert-memmi-zionism-as-national-liberation/
It seems self evident to me, that all national liberation movements, classified as left wing, are but a step away from nationalistic chauvinism, classified as mostly right wing. Nationalism as supported by the Left, will ultimately rebound and make authoritarian and Anti-left wing regimes.
One interesting example I can think of is Iraq under Baathism. For those who dont know, Baathism is basically Fascism. And I mean this quite literally, it has most of the distinctive characteristics of 1930s Italian Fascism, except in an Arab context. One primary belief of Baathism, is Arab Socialism, a non-marxist socialism dedicated to the national rejuvenation of Arab culture. Italian Fascism and National Socialism of the Nazis, predominantly believed in a Non-Marxist form of socialism in rhetoric, if more mixed and pragmatic in terms of practice. Baathism is not your average Far Right populist movement, but a distinctly fascist ideology. Although, there are many far right populists who are Post-Fascist in thought, like Brothers of Italy, from which the Prime Minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni, leads.
Ive done readings on Meloni herself and her post fascist thought. Interestingly, I've read that Ethnopluralism and Anti-Colonialism, along with socially conservative and Anti-immigration sentiments are major tenets of neo-fascist and post fascist far right movements in Italy. This is labeled as Third Positionism.
What does Italy and Third Positionism have to do with Albert Memmi? Italy and Third Positionism represent the kind of socially conservative, nationalistic and anti-internationalist beliefs that Memmi was against. Another interesting factor is how Third Position thought interacts with Zionism and Jews. The Likud and Far Right in Israel are unexpected outgrowths to Memmi. He believed that Zionism would cure the Jews of his neurotic diasporic characteristics, and that Zionism would be an end to Judaism in a sense, turning the Jews into a normal people. He was both right and wrong.
Like any normal people demonstrate, there is a predisposition towards nationalistic and socially conservative thought. His belief of a new tolerant left wing Zionist Jew has given way to Jews as now more religious, more nationalistic and more right wing people.
It is likely, given everything I have wrote and all the evidence, national liberation and the lefts defense of Anti-colonialism is self defeating. What are The Mottes thoughts?
Obviously the modern left is extremely anti nationalist for its outgroups, calling fascist to oppose migration and supports to extreme degree the nationalism of is itsgroup. This does relate to decolonization movement but paints colonization of europe as decolonization.
Antifascism and opposition to nationalism has always attracted figures like Stalin, some of the worst mass murdering wanabees, and extremists who actually commited the worst attrocities. People like Lazar Kaganovich or Leon Trotsky, or Lenin were not fascist, and yet their legacy was monstrous. And so was of figures like Stalin.
The bad thing about extreme nationalism is complete disrespect of other group's rights, and support of your group dominating and mistreating others. This is the bad thing about fascism.
The antifascism that pathologilizes opposing being dominated, would perceive the people who were attacked by Italian fascist imperialism as acting fascistically when they nationalistically opposed it. Indeed this was the claim of the USSR originally that it was imperialism to opposeit.
Your comments about opposing migration being fascist is dangerous and offensive and nonsense. Especially when considering how the left supports the dehumanization if not the murder of those called fascists and large majorities of people oppose mass migration in many countries.
Much of its evil was done under the banner of antifascism and opposing chauvinists.
Oh, and zionism when the USSR and Israel was allowed and it was a more left wing movement commited its attrocities and was extreme nationalist a plenty. A significant part of the left is willing to make compromises with extreme nationalism and call this antifascism.
This applies to those who align to an extreme degree with third world nationalism and see Jews as white oppressors, or align with the zionists but are also very anti european.
You offered an extremely reductive take which is like reading communists in how constrained it is to your prejudices. This take does not provide a solution and misses the fact that national liberation can in fact liberate people from foreign oppression and tyranny.
There isn't a solution but the same pathological far leftism that self justifies itself through pretending anything else is fascist. In reality, it isn't the case whatsoever and moreover the actual historical fascists also opposed far left extremism, and if it didn't exist and cause the damage it did, their movement wouldn't have risen. The officially antifascistic regimes have been some of the most oppressive regimes to ever exist in human history and commited also genocides against ethnic groups. Part of their extremism has to do with pathologilizing as fascism the common national sentiments of peoples, and then seeing themselves falsely as superior beings who have the right to punish those who don't share their false vision.
What is the alternative? I think trying to take into consideration the interests of different ethnic groups and oppose one group being expansionist and dominating others makes sense. It is true that what rises as opposing oppression can eventually lead to extreme situation.
The template of international justice which unlike the left's extremist must make room for the human rights and continuing existence of also Europeans, but also non European ethnic groups, is a better alternative than what the far left has to offer. And is certainly not fascism.
The connection between supporting your own rights and then going further than that should not lead us to the stupid notion that is pathological by default for a group to do so. For seeking to lack any support for your rights, being afraid of being overzealous leads to pathological altruism and supporting zealotry for a different group. Which part of its zealotry includes their demand that their outgroup are complete pushovers. So I am afraid, there isn't a better alternative if we are interested in the best worldwide system that to seek some sort of compromise between different groups nationalisms.
From that perspective, one can have a problem with fascism and left wing decolonization, and third world marxist nationalism, and zionism, for failing to do that.
In general it isn't good and a case of moral excellence for a group to lack the healthy notions of what is right and wrong and to be apathetic to their own mistreatment.
We also should see extreme antinationalism, and extreme collectivism against identity, whether it is for atheism against religion, or any identity, as itself a dangerous collectivism. What Trotsky called approvingly collectivism of individualism has proven to be just as tyrannical and oppressive collective and tribe than any other. It is a self-delusion to believe that this path is a way to avoid the negatives of tribalism. To the contrary, it goes further against human nature and requires greater fanaticism to maintain and inspires greater resentment still as it has to pathologilize many millions of normal people who are in fact nationalistic.
In fact, I must again empathize that in terms of destructive legacy, this movement which carries the banner and label of antifascism far outshines fascism. They just have had the chutzpah to constantly point fingers at others and never self reflect.
It is also often a target of infiltration by nationalist subversives who try to promote the strategy of promoting extreme antinationalism to their outgroup, while pretending to be against nationalism dishonestly and also promoting the idea of (limitless) nationalism for oppressed and no rights for supposed oppressors. Part of this is because it is in fact quite easier to make a coalition to destroy nationalism (for group X), if you are to include actual nationalists who hate X group nationalism. So some of the supposed anti-nationalists compromise in such manner to identify the evils of nationalism with a particular group.
While opposing genuine oppression of foreign extreme nationalists can be legitimate, and genuine moral national liberation activity, this idea of dogmatically treating regardless of the facts groups as permanently fixed oppressors and oppressed is indeed nationalist chauvinism of worst type.
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Can anyone provide an example of Meloni being fascist, post-fascist or fascist-adjacent in practice?
Illegal immigration, mainly from Africa, doubled under her watch. She explicitly got into power on a promise of preventing it. Italy has a fairly large navy. It is an absolutely trivial matter for them to prevent illegal immigration by sea. Australia shows it can be done, Tony Abbott promised to stop the boats and then he just did it. The Italian government simply chooses not to. They choose not to send the boats back, they choose not to arrest the NGOs.
Fascism is all about action as opposed to theory. There's no talking the talk, just walking the walk - political violence is preferable to endless liberal-democratic debates. And it's hard to think of any political violence more politically correct (from a fascist POV) than expelling or blocking Africans entering the country. Meloni is a neoliberal in practice, indistinguishable from Boris Johnson, Macron or Merkel. Even Tony Abbott is a neoliberal (albeit slightly more sincere with voters), he was fine with legal mass immigration.
These politicians don't have any national concept more substantial than ideology. As far as they're concerned, as long as you believe in French values, you're French. Maybe you can't wear a burkha. But the core of fascism is a genuine biological nationalism: if you don't have that, then you can't be fascist.
Meloni was a vice president of Alleanza Nazionale between her first election in 2006 and AN merging into a big-tent right-wing party headed by Berlusconi in 2009. Her current party, Fratelli d'Italia, split out of said big tent in 2012, and mostly consists of former AN members.
Alleanza Nazionale were part of the capital-F Fascist political tradition, in the sense that they are the institutional successor of the MSI, which was explicitly founded after WW2 as a successor to Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party. The party had a complex relationship with the Mussolini family, which ended up with Allesandra Mussolini abandoning fascist politics and joining Forza Italia. The founding documents of the AN explicitly referred to the party as "post-fascist".
I am happy describing someone holding a leadership position in an explicitly post-fascist political party as post-fascist. I do not think this is controversial.
I am personally happy describing someone holding a leadership position a right-populist political party in the political tradition founded by Benito Mussolini as fascist without the "post", although reasonable people can disagree about this.
Yes but what fascist policy has she implemented? You're talking about classifications, I'm talking about action.
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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:
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?
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.
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Something like "it's one of the few avenues for success they have so they funnel themselves into them".
From Adam Rutherford:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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."
Actually a popular position in some of my IRL circles.
No, we don't. Not since Griggs and "disparate impact," anyway.
Is there any evidence that using IQ tests generated media blackslashes when using IQ tests was legal?
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).
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.
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Thanks. Also, Griggs vs. Duke has much wider scope that IQ tests.
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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 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.
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.
So he's got direct measures of social mobility, but rejects that in favor of a surrogate measure based on correlations of surnames?
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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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 indeed? I can think of no reason and thus don't.
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.
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.
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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.
Or Muslims. Russia has a large historically-Muslim population with much lower average IQ's.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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