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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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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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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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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.
Ehh, Griggs vs. Duke Power is overrated by HBD/IQ folks. It's not like IQ tests were ubiquitous before Griggs, were they?
I think the more important problem for large companies is that the PR costs might be large and that PR costs are very salient/legible in a way that employee quality is not, at least no in the short-term (and people are hardly paragons of rationality in the long-term). Like, if you were a CEO and added IQ tests, you can be certain of a media backlash and you're also risking subsequent punishment by the board. Even if you're certain it would improve employee quality, that would (a) be hard to prove and (b) even if you could, it would take years...
Smaller firms,
Is there any evidence that using IQ tests generated media blackslashes when using IQ tests was legal?
You know - I've done some searching (Google, Google Scholar) and llm-ing (GPT, Claude, Bard), and I can't really find any evidence I would consider strong
So, I guess I'm gonna revert to agnosticism.
I would consider court case itself as an evidence that media backslashes would not have been enough (or team Left consider media backslashes too weak to effectively discourage employers from using thing with disparate impact).
not have been enough to what?
Doesn't the court case merely prove at least one company wanted an IQ test and at least one organization was willing to sue them for it?
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 (in)frequent as intermarriage between race, how would you change your mind?
If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as infrequent as intermarriage between races, that marriage throughout the class was common (that is, that the "class" was not made up of much smaller groups which only bred internally), that there was little social mobility, and that this had been going on for many generations, then we would be in the situation of having genetic castes, which HBD could look at. We are not in that situation. Some aspects of that situation exist -- for instance, there's generational welfare recipients. But though there are black and non-Hispanic white generational welfare recipients, they're largely separate groups.
Assortative Mating and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1754-2021:
Abstract:
ETA: bolded the most important sentence
The whole paper is here. But even if I was convinced by the tower of assumptions made there, I don't live in England; the US has long been reputed to have a much weaker class system.
Other evidence exists. For instance, in Sweden, social status decays by about 25% per generation, which is consistent with it being (a) entirely genetic and (b) approximately perfect assortative mating. Similar estimates are found for the US, England, Chile, and China - Japan and India have even smaller levels of decay.
ETA: The alternative interpretation is that there is an absolutely enormous environmental factor. However, given many twin studies (feel free to ask for link) that collectively show ~0 impact of environment on earnings, this seems exceedingly unlikely.
So he's got direct measures of social mobility, but rejects that in favor of a surrogate measure based on correlations of surnames?
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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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BAP is a jewish nationalist who preaches individualism for the goys. His goal is to turn the west into a free market with free movement of people and goods.
The other side are white nationalists who want to preserve European civilization.
BAP would probably not want to see Tel Aviv turned into an Atlanta full of Africans. Diversity for the goyim, nationalism for the jews. Similar to Ben Shapiro who thinks identity politics is lame unless it is for Israel.
The wicked Jewish badwronger vs the righteous good-doer white nationalist.
This is just cheerleading for white nationalism while dunking on the perfidious Jew. Truly content-free other than a big sneer.
No, it points to a bigger trend: nationalism for me, open borders for thee. Ben Shapiro thinks white nationalism is lame while being a hard core zionist. He doesn't actually think identity politics is lame, he just opposes all identity politics instead of his own.
So do and so are most white gentile American conservatives - tens of millions of them - what’s your point?
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I wish it was more nuanced than this, but this an accurate heuristic. there is a sort of irony in seeing an American with a Star of David flag and/or Ukraine flag on twitter username accuse someone with a Palestine flag of being anti-American.
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Most of Alamariu's recent writing on Israel has been strongly negative other than in that he said that Hamas weren't 'bronze age' because they whine to the international community about getting bombed when Israel fights back...which doesn't seem out of line with the rest of his beliefs. The main 'allegation' surrounding his supposed Zionism is that he wore an IDF t-shirt to his college classes to annoy leftist students 20 years ago. That seems pretty embarrassing but I don't think it tells us much.
The other side are wignats like Woods who spend their days crying about Palestinians on Twitter and unironically resharing Finkelstein-type comments about how oppressed they are, which BAP correctly said isn't a very compelling message to most Western conservatives who consider leftist activists, Muslim immigrants and progressives (the rest of the anti-Israel coalition in Western countries) their political foes, not friends.
It is probably different in the US, but in Europe Israel is deeply unpopular among a large part of the right. Israel and the neocons make war, Europe gets flooded with migrants. Borrowing trillions to bomb the middle east, destroy the last of the remnants of the Greek culture in the region, flood Europe with migrants and force feminism on the middle east wasn't popular here. The Palestinians want Palestinians to stay in Palestine, Israel wants a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep.
Israel, apart from having the largest gay parade in the middle east, has worked to destabilize neighbouring countries, finance jihadist groups in Syria and push migrants into Europe. The Israel lobby has been vocally pro diversity, wars in the middle east and immigration. The ADL wasn't exactly on the white nationalist coalition's side. Trying to build a coalition between European nationalists and Israelis is borderline impossible as the two groups have completely different goals. Europeans want Palestinians to stay in Palestine and the middle east to have stable states. Israel wants mass migration from the middle east and a weak Syria/Iraq/lebanon.
As for the Palestinians being weak, they have showed impressive fighting spirit.
In office most European nationalists (eg. Orban) seem to have fine working relationships with Israel. Israel doesn't want Gazans to go to Europe, they just don't want them in Gaza, and are happy to deliver them to anyone who will have them.
In general I don't think it's an important question - outside Britain, France and Russia (in the second, the most prominent nationalist figure is Jewish after Marine Le Pen moved to the center-right, and in the third Putin is quite close with a number of Jews in his inner circle) there are very few Jews in Europe and most will leave quickly to the US or Israel as the Muslim population grows further and attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools and so on increase. There will be very few European Jews left to play any substantial role in the coming cultural conflict between indigenous Europeans and migrant populations from the Islamic world, and many of those who remain will either be politically irrelevant ultra-Orthodox or on the right like Zemmour.
Orban is already sanctioned. He has a small land locked country under immense pressure from abroad. He is forced to make some concessions in order to not end up getting the Belarus treatment.
The reality has been that Israel has pushed hard against Syria and we got flooded with migrants. Pushing millions of migrants into another part of the Middle east is destabilizing and greatly increases the risk of them comming hear.
Ben Gvir, an Israeli minister, is openly talking about creating a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ben-gvir-war-an-opportunity-to-encourage-migration-from-gaza/
After decades of Israel Palestine conflict, it is clear that the result has been more migrants to Europe.
So far the Jewish population of Europe has been overwhelmingly pro open borders and diversity. For such a small group, they have been incredibly overrepresented in promoting mass immigration.
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What does political feasibility of HBD even mean? It's not a policy it's a theory.
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I don't think HBD has anything to do with "deserve". Most of the prominent HBD-people would agree with that, I think. It's not like someone with a genetic disease like Huntington's "deserves" to be sick.
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BAP's point is that some people on the right imagine that "if HBD awareness goes 'mainstream', racial spoils systems will end", when in reality racial spoils and denial of HBD are only tangentially connected.
It would be quite easy to have both widespread awareness of HBD and racial spoils systems like affirmative action, because the primary point of these systems is to distribute resources (like well-paid sinecures, social status, political influence) between groups. It's actually a very classically liberal viewpoint to believe that meritocracy must be absolute and that everything should be distributed based solely on talent.
EDIT: As @Ioper says below, this misunderstands the central progressive impulse, which is the drive toward equality. "From each according to ability, to each according to need" is a direct rejection of the idea that talent should be rewarded with a superior quality of life.
And the global viewpoint suggests this, because many nations far beyond the WEIRD bubble practice affirmative action widely even though DEI politics isn't dominant there. Hindu nationalists practice it, the CCP practices it, the Brazilians and Nigerians practice it. Sure, global homogenization is a thing, but in many cases these policies exist for much more mundane reasons than high-minded progressive equality politics, like reducing the chance of explosive civil conflicts.
There's a delusional fantasy among some rightists that if only the (white) public "knew" about HBD, the wool would fall from their eyes and they'd instantly adopt conservative positions on a wide range of policies. In reality, leftist ideas are much more resilient than that. They can justify affirmative action, reparations and so on in countless other ways, and in some cases already have.
Well yes, common knowledge of HBD would make the case for affirmative action stronger- lots of institutions are firmly committed to blacks having equal outcomes, regardless of abilities.
And it’s not unreasonable that a multiracial democracy is very concerned about this- you know and I know that the black-white gap isn’t going away. I know that if alien space bats come and raise the black average IQ to 100 the gap won’t go away. But this is a democracy with equal rights; 13% of the population, in some cases a local majority, being consistently very upset is a bad thing.
Why would it do that?
HBD's big revelation is that the problem with black people IS black people...
Why would it result in stronger affirmative action instead of a return to Pre-Civil Rights segregation like every single liberal insists it would, and pre-civil rights Americans concluded was necessary back when they believed in a folk-version of HBD?
Most likely outcome of HBD being widely believed by white americans would be a hot ethnic conflict which whites would win followed by the same solution they settled upon after reconstruction... if not something more punitive for making them fight the ethnic conflict.
White america no longer has the assabiyah to do that, of course. Technically it never did; southern whites had the assabiyah and there weren’t big enough black communities elsewhere.
They’ll pay the tribute for peace.
What is your age?
anyone over 35 doesn't get this.
All I hear from young white men is that they 100% WANT things to go hot mixed with fedposting that if it doesn't kick off they'll make it happen... AI Researchers, Corporate figures, Military Officers, 7 figure Engineering wunderkinds... the last repositories of talent in America... they're just waiting for the very last of the aging leadership to leave and things to start really failing
Every white boy who went through DEI and feminist consent lectures as a child... all the exceptional ones who landed on their feet... they swore bloody vengeance.
All the talented white kids who experienced wokeness in high school or university ( lived through the struggle sessions complete with threats to destroy their lives when they objected) now feels their ethnicity as keenly as the most apocalyptic nationalists in the early 20th century.
The moderates i speak to don't worry there won't be an explosion... they're terrified of how far it will go.
I’m 27 and a Texan homeowner in a working class, mixed white-Hispanic neighborhood in an r+25 suburb of Fort Worth. I’ve never been screamed at for being white and yes, I have sat through diversity/social justice awareness lectures. Casual racism is common in young white men but fedposting is rare, and this is Texas where the red tribe hates the blue tribe(and Vice versa) and would rather deal with Hispanics than HR cat ladies.
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As Amadan said, most young white men don’t remotely have the hatred for minorities that would be true for that to be the case.
And the reason men under 35 are hotheaded isn’t issue specific but general, since almost all men mellow with age.
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That's quite a claim. All of them, really?
I know this is what you hope and dream of, but no, most "white men under 35" in America are not slobbering for a race war with the eagerness of Palestinian martyr brigades. (A comparison I use intentionally - places like Palestine are where you'll find the closest thing to the mentality you speak of, and even they aren't that unified in their bloodlust.)
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What do you mean by this?
Black outcomes are driven mostly by their own bad decisions, with some generational effects. There’s a tendency to fetishize the IQ gap, but the reality is there’s cultural reasons for much of it. And ‘making blacks smarter’ won’t fix the bad culture.
It was demonstrated even in the Bell Curve, that controlliing for IQ, most outcome gaps between blacks and whites go away.
Would the alien space bats which increase black IQ by 15 points also change their personality traits? Given that US blacks speak same language and have same religion as whites, culture would start to converge pretty fast.
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Demonizing the largest demographic and screwing them over doesn't seem to be an obstacle in a democracy. If black Americans weren't told to be upset and if society didn't care that much if they were or weren't upset, it would matter less. And they would be less upset.
They are plenty of upset now, even though they are beneficiaries of systematic discrimination and propaganda in their favor. Tolerating this level of entitlement is and inciting anger is in fact what is especially bad in a democracy. And as the goal of the democracy ought to be the common good, it is also a bad idea to promote as you do the legitimacy of said entitlement of various specific groups. It should be considered a failure state of a democracy if a coalition or alliance of identities mistreat the rest. Especially the majority.
The reality there are a lot of cyclical arguements that their source and bottom is that coalition of progressive and ethnic activists captured power and promoted their ideas in favor of their favorite groups. The pervasiveness of these arguments has to do with movements that pushed them, and before they pushed them, there was less black entitlement and in fact you even had once white Americans rioting for films having black actors in them and things like that. If society could transform from that direction, to the current one which in your mind having such prejudices is a way to keep the peace, then it can be changed again but in a more reasonable end.
So, either one agrees with their perspective and will always find an excuse to not make such groups unhappy. Or they actually reject treating blacks and other demographics as utility monsters. The right should promote not only HBD but also the idea that there should be no special treatment and entitlement for blacks, and try to use power to bring that into fruition.
However, I do think that certain black problems deserve special attention in a manner that is de facto redistributive. Well, to the extend you do have race blind welfare that isn't excesive, they would be beneficiaries as they are now, even without any AA type of policies in societies. And to the extend the police should have to deal more with black criminality, they also would disproportionately be beneficiaries as greater % victims of black crime. Obviously there would be less spending if there was less criminality by blacks. I think it is fair for them to benefit in these ways, but also to acknowledge that they are a community that is beneficiaries of society, and ought not be upset. Which would be more the case if things are framed in the right way and they aren't told they are owed what they in fact are not owed. We would find that punishing criminals, and discouraging entitlement works actually to stop the problems of black anger.
And the police should focus on high crime areas of course. But what about disproportionately black criminals? I care about victims of crime, not the deserving punishment of criminals. And the entitled mentality of a black community to the extend they make unreasonable demands and have a false view of the world and the left wing activists who played some role in inluencing them shouldn't be respected. The goal is as elites have done in democracy towards the left, to actually enforce what you want and change the attitudes as well. Just as the laws were in that direction and Black community leaders were more pro tough on crime in the 90s.
A necessary part of that should be liberals losing influence, and conservatives and tough on crime types taking power and promoting their views and agenda outright, while promoting as black community leaders those who go along. So there is no choice but to play the game of power and promote your own different narrative. You aren't really in opposition to the left wing project if you can't do that and instead favor preferential treatment for groups like blacks, so they aren't upset.
Does this mean that HBD is insufficient? Well yes, and no. Most of the people promoting HBD also want to counter the left's narrative on race and oppose discrimination in favor of left wing groups. The reality is those who want to be liked by the left and share with it their way of viewing the world are unlikely to promote HBD, although some might promote only HBD for Jews and talk about how they are high IQ. This combination of HBD and opposing the left's ideology is a narrative more intellectually successful in opposing the left than if you removed HBD from it.
While theoretically, you could have people who talk about HBD and support AA, in practice it is a rare combo. You do have some who support HBD and align with the left in other ways though.
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At the same time, some of the motivation is because they think that affirmative action makes it more meritocratic, or that they think it is needed to remedy past oppression (and once disparities disappear, we can drop it). Either, it is supposed to reflect how past systemic racism has hurt underperforming groups, or it is to break the system and stop it from hurting those groups in the future, making it even.
If this were more well known, it would become harder to do either of those. Disparities would no longer be thought to be due to systemic racism (well, except that this view would be painted as a variety of racism by many), and there would no longer be the hope of changing it merely by rewarding the underperforming to push them into a different socioeconomic status.
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Equal rights or equal outcomes, pick only one.
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I agree that Leftist politics doesn't depend on ignorance of HBD at all. The cornerstone is inequality, not racial spoils.
I imagine very large parts of the left would be very happy if we could get away from the toxic racial spoils stuff and just focus on inequality and helping the unfortunate, regardless of race.
Radical inate equality rhetoric helps the right, not the left since it's so obviously untrue and leads to giving resources to the privileged members of favoured groups instead of the actually unprivileged. It also helps justify inequality in general.
I agree, it's upsetness at perceived inequality. The best example is classical Marxism. "From each according to ability, to each according to need" explicitly rejects the idea that difference in ability can ever morally lead to inequality in material living standards. That is the baseline. Litigating HBD vs "culture" or whatever is immaterial.
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What I notice is that this delusional fantasy is shared by many, possibly most, leftists as well, which is what many of them say justifies the immense amount of censorship efforts to prevent HBD from being an acceptable thought. But as you say, leftist ideas are resilient, and it always struck me as both as naive and as counterproductive. Naive because it it takes the most simplistic idea of something like "if people realized people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior], then of course that would lead to more bigotry and racial hatred and dehumanizing of people of [race]" without actually doing the sociological research required to justify such a belief. And counterproductive, because it creates the false notion that the correctness of leftist ideas are contingent on some empirical reality about genetics, leaving those ideas open to appear to be falsified by facts about genetics coming out. And for what gain? None as far as I can tell, since leftist ideas actually aren't contingent upon HBD being false.
There’s an important distinction here between the fantasies of “if people realized” and “if people believed”. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a leftist who espoused the former.
Regardless, beliefs about race can and will be used to justify racial animus. Historically, this has happened with phrenology, linguistics, sociology, geography, comparative religion, and especially intelligence. Why would this time be different?
It probably wouldn't. But justifying racial animus isn't the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to happen but for that justification being as available as it is, or the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to be, on net or in sum, greater than if that justification were not as available. And when a claim is that this idea is so dangerous as to justify censorship, I see it as necessitating at least the former, if not the latter in order to support. Notably, I don't think I've seen any historical examples that look similar to where entire generations of people were force-fed egalitarianism since a young age and then were told that the weight of the data has forced scientists to acknowledge that the distributions of certain traits, including intelligence, are different between various groups of people that we already group together in the class of "race" (as well as "sex"). They always appear to be some variation of where people were already living in what is basically the historical default, i.e. under the belief that different races of people are fundamentally different in a way that makes egalitarianism more of a punchline to a joke than an idea worth serious consideration, and justifying that pre-existing supremacist view by finding convenient pieces of information in science.
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There are people right now calling for policies leftists don't like and/or consider racist (restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment). Some of those people (Murray) have explicitly linked these things to their take on HBD. But, even without them, you can easily connect the dots because history didn't start yesterday and none of these arguments are new.
In terms of political intuitions people continue to hold without strong empirical backing...this doesn't seem that egregious.
Sure, but policies that we don't like or even consider racist is different from "bigotry, racial hatred, or dehumanizing," because we had to expand the definition of "racist" in order to categorize things like "restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment" within it. So that's just a whole different category of things.
People keep saying this, but every time I see the dots actually connected, I notice that the threads held there by sheer force of will rather than any sort of actual underlying connection.
As damning of political intuitions as this statement is, it's true. What gets me is that "not egregiously bad in a category of things known for being incredibly bad" is not the standard I want my side to live up to; in fact, I try to make it so that it's only because my side lives up to a higher standard than the other that I choose that side. One of those higher standards is one of epistemology; that the left is more correct than the right because we perceive the world more accurately than the right. Perceiving the world more accurately isn't a matter of believing more true things like "the Earth is closer to 4 billion years than 6,000 years old" but rather about the process by which we discriminate between what is true and what is false. And if we're willing to say that this bit of political intuition is a high enough bar to censor HBD, then that calls into question our epistemic standards in general, which calls into question my belief that ours is actually the better side.
Both things can be true: the Left could be prone to expanding the definition of racist and "black people are just dumber" is generally seen as racist for a reason.
And yes, I've heard all of the alternate phrasings (X million blacks are smarter than the average white, people as individuals) . It just doesn't play well for a reason. I think there's a general discomfort with "X is (irremediably) stupid", which combines quite well (or badly) with "blacks are less intelligent". People do see worth in intelligence (and success in the market), its absence matters.
Because, not too long ago, all forms of segregation and dehumanizing talk were justified using these very arguments? Not just "cut welfare that encourages single parent homes" but literally "we can't live around these people because they're prone to degeneracy and violence" (and not always put that politely). This isn't hypothetical, is it?
To me this is like living in post-Christian Rome where exposing babies has been banned for decades and is now taboo. Some people start using the exact same arguments as the exposers used to, but insist nothing that bad will happen this time. In fact, they're offended you'd think they are like those people and annoyed you won't take them at their word that, after you strip fetuses and children of their ensouled status, nothing will change and the status quo that was born out of an explicit rejection of their ideas will continue.
To hear tell, the connections are just paranoiacs connecting dots
I never said anything about censorship, just that the reaction is not some doeish naivete. Quite the opposite.
I don't see what this statement has to do with anything, since the policies we don't like or even consider racist has nothing to do with "black people are just dumber."
I don't see what this has to do with anything either. Sure, it doesn't play well. It doesn't then follow that if this kind of information became common knowledge, then that would cause greater racial hatred or the like.
This is what I mean by sheer force of will. First of all, no, they weren't using these very arguments; they were using claims about fact that were similar to the facts that are being claimed now. Arguments are something different altogether. But either way, whether or not these forms of segregation, dehumanizing talk, and, let's be honest, plenty of straight-up murder and genocide, were justified by such arguments doesn't answer the question of whether or not more such bad behavior were caused due to the availability of such arguments.
When I say the dots have no actual underlying connection, this is what I mean; I see societies that were already extremely racist projecting their racism onto science and taking out what they wish. Despite the best efforts of many people, our current Western society has largely based itself around egalitarianism, as imperfectly as it may be.
I think the strongest argument to be made about this is that our egalitarianism is imperfect, and there's plenty of latent and not-so-latent racism hanging around, and HBD being available can "activate" that latent racism and exacerbate it. This would have to be weighed against the value we get from HBD in explaining phenomena more accurately which also help to reduce the rates of racist acts. The calculus on this can never be properly done, but I can see how someone would be convinced that, on net, this would cause more racism than less, and perhaps also worse racism or pushing society in general into a more racist direction, to the extent that censorship is justified. I would disagree vehemently and believe that the person has far too high an opinion of their ability to do this kind of moral calculus, but it's a defensible position. It's not the position I hear from the overwhelming majority of people who want to suppress HBD, sadly, who seem to overwhelmingly just poo-poo the idea that HBD, even if true, could have any sort of positive influences whatsoever.
My original comment was about leftists believing that HBD is so dangerous as to justify censorship of it, so that's the context I was writing into. Maybe it's not doeish naivete, I don't know and I honestly don't care. I think the reaction is naive, but likely more hawkish than doeish, to mix metaphors. If we're not talking about censorship, then I don't know what the conversation is; do you agree with me that it would be better if people on the left didn't believe that HBD was an idea that was dangerous to an extent to justify censorship of it?
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Leftists are perennially terrified of rightists, though, it's one of those eternal political dynamics. The right should be more scared of the left, but the opposite happens because the left is more neurotic and sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid; the right often becomes complacent in power, the left often purity spirals.
That said, most progressives worried about HBD rhetoric aren't secretly worried it's actually true. Some are, Ezra Klein is probably one of them, but most believe it actually is racist pseudoscience or whatever.
Given the sizable fractions of Western electorates who, based on their placement on a social-axis-vs.-economic-axis "political compass," would likely vote for "fascism" if given the opportunity, why shouldn't they hold this view?
There’s more than a few problems with using political compass (memes or otherwise) as a proxy for fascist support. Sampling bias, for starters, but also “skin in the game” and ability to pattern-match. Cheering for fascist aesthetics on Twitter won’t necessarily translate to votes.
I’d expect very low real-world support for an openly fascist candidate. The American cultural memory is so instinctively against it.
I'm not talking about aesthetics, or an "openly fascist candidate," I'm talking about, on the "social axis"/"economic axis" plane, that even though we hear a lot from the "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" libertarian quadrant, that is actually the quadrant with the smallest fraction of the electorate, and there are a lot more voters in the (opposing) Fascist quadrant.
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I've bloviated on this before, so I won't go into it too much, but I have been saddened by the fact that the left sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid and then didn't come to the obvious conclusion that this vigilance must be primarily directed at ourselves, rather than our perceived enemies, because obviously if we are won over by fascism, it will be in a form that we are biased towards, rather than biased against. When I was a youth, there was a pretty well known saying, that "If fascism comes to the United States, it will be wrapped in an American flag," or some variation of the like. This sort of thinking, unfortunately, seems to have led people to thinking that detecting fascism is about detecting the American flag or similar concepts and symbols, rather than the actual point of the line, which is that fascism will be wrapped up in [something we are predisposed to like], with the American flag merely being the example at the time (the culture in which I grew up treated the American flag as an object of derision 99% of the time, but I'm guessing the line was a carryover from the then-recently ended Cold War when the flag probably had higher status).
How do you distinguish vigilance from the more pedestrian infighting that comes from zero-sum status games? It’s possible to view every Bernie Bro, every college cancellation, every instance of a snake eating its own tail as the noble policing of establishment tendencies. Or you can be more cynical, and assume that anything and everything is just signaling; the radical is merely adapting to a different ecological niche, and once he has cleared out the old guard, he will set down roots and promptly become an authoritarian. Realistically, the truth has to be somewhere in between. Sometimes freedom fighters are grifters, and sometimes they’re painfully sincere.
I guess I’m asking—what sort of evidence would make you think “the left” is actually concerned with fascism from the ingroup?
This is a fair point, and certainly it's possible to interpret those in that way, but my perspective is that it's usually easy to distinguish between self-vigilance and pedestrian infighting by observing how the status of oneself or one's own preferred ideology would be affected. Which is to say, if you're not pushing in the direction that leaves you more open to having your status lowered, then you're not applying that vigilance to yourself, you're applying that vigilance to someone else.
For instance, with college cancellations, when Middlebury students mobbed Charles Murray and the professor who invited him to give the guest lecture in one of the earlier high profile cases a lifetime ago now, were those students doing so with the belief that, through their actions, they would be challenging own sets of beliefs, i.e. most likely what we call modern social justice, CRT, idpol, "woke," etc.? Perhaps things played out that way in a certain point of view, but I would argue that it's clear that their vigilance was directed at an "other," i.e. the Murrays of the world who have beliefs about scientific inquiry regarding hereditary differences in intelligence that conflict with their own, not at "themselves," i.e. the people who believe that Murray giving a talk in some official college capacity (unrelated to The Bell Curve, IIRC - I think it was about his more recent book Coming Apart?) would cause harm.
To use a made-up example, if Ibram X Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how people buying into his lessons - and not in the "oh they're misinterpreting it and applying it wrong" kind of way - could lead to a tyrannical (perhaps not literally fascistic) society in which, say, individuals are forced to submit to others based purely on what races they belong to, and as such, he's pushing forward research to figure out these potential harms and how to mitigate them, this would appear to be vigilance towards oneself. Arguably, this would raise his status and that of his ideology, but that would be done by changing his ideology to a better one through corrective actions; the unchanged one would lose status as that older ideology that we no longer use, because we have a better, fixed one now.
On the other hand, if Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how the Democratic party isn't taking his scholarship seriously enough and, as such, they could inadvertently allow the latent white supremacy of the party to recreate Jim Crow in 21st century America or the like, that would appear to be obviously infighting between two different parts of the left. If Kendi got his way in this fictional example, the result wouldn't be that his preferred ideology gets attacked, damaged, and rebirthed into a better version of itself, it would be a peer ideology that did that, while his own just gained more status by becoming more influential in a powerful institution.
I do think there must be edge cases, and there's probably no simple binary test to check, but in most cases, it's not all that ambiguous.
I’ll agree that in most cases, it’s not ambiguous. It is a much cheaper and easier signal to take shots at the outgroup, so we see more of that.
I find the threshold you describe to be overly restrictive. Consider excommunication, where a heretic is explicitly removed from ingroup membership. Even if none of the ingroup are criticized, I’d consider this to be self-vigilance or self-policing, because the alternative is a tacit endorsement.
The political analogy would be—say a major California Democrat suddenly espoused National Socialism. You’d expect a huge scandal. Loss of support from the DNC, cancelled donations, scathing op-eds. It’d be safe to say that the target is a former Democrat rather than a current one. He has been moved to the outgroup. Democrats, then, aren’t criticizing their own. They aren’t taking a risk with their status, either; this is strictly safer and more politically valuable than continuing to endorse the guy. And yet, I’d still describe this action as self-vigilant.
For a more realistic example, look at the Hillary/Bernie split, which featured accusations that Hillary was a DNC stooge. That was obviously status-jockeying, because the two blocs were at odds, and only one could actually get the candidacy. Competition between peer ideologies. But it was also exactly what you’d expect from healthy ideological vigilance within the general category of Democrats. Now the risks are aligned. It’s exactly the kind of situation you describe with Kendi, where personal preference is risked to strengthen the overall project.
These are scenarios where peer competition on one scale parses as self-policing on the higher level. I think that’s true whenever the marketplace of ideas is working as intended. I’ll go as far as to say this is usually true within the United States! It’s just so adaptive as long as you’re trying to win the next competition up. Me vs. my brother, me and my brother vs. the Hillaryites, me and the Hillaroids vs. the Republicans, me and America vs. the world.
I think in your made-up example, the relevant detail is that it was Nazism, an openly fascistic ideology, that the California Democrat was espousing, rather than that this was a case of excommunicating a heretic. But also, I wouldn't really describe that as "vigilance," though trivially it is, I suppose. When I think about some group of people being "vigilant" in watching out for the rise of fascism, I'm thinking of behavior that's beyond just noticing someone saying "I'm a fascist" and telling them, "Okay, bye."
I don't think there's a "general case" of excommunication of heretics, but I'd say that, very very imprecisely speaking, it seems unlikely to be aiding in vigilance against one's own ideology turning towards fascism, because detecting heretics tends to involve checking if someone is sufficiently submitting to whatever ideology our team likes and then expelling them if they fall short, which is the type of behavior more in-line with fascists than against them. But the specific details matter way too much to say more than that.
In terms of the IRL example, I do agree that what we saw in 2016 was evidence of some sort of ideological vigilance within the Democratic party (dunno if it was "healthy" given that we lost - but without it, perhaps Trump would've won in a landslide instead of merely edging by?). I do think the left in general and the Democratic party in particular has its share of such forms of vigilance, and I'd even guess that it does it better than the right and the Republican party, though my judgment is too biased to be meaningful in that regard.
But when it comes to being vigilant against fascism, I don't think something like "this big tent ideology that I and almost half the electorate follow have lots of sub-ideologies that are in healthy competition with each other" really counts as such vigilance, since that's largely a consequence of the mostly free society and culture in which we live, rather than a specific way to manage the ideology or party. Rather, it's about watching for the ideas that you specifically like and you specifically believe will bring forth a better future; because, for you, it's that ideology that is your metaphorical "American flag" that will wrap up the fascism that you will inadvertently push and bring forth.
If a Bernie Bro (which I was in 2016) said, "By pushing for Bernie to defeat Hillary in the primaries, I am being vigilant about fascism taking over the USA, because this is part of the healthy ideological diversity within our Democratic party by having multiple competing factions attacking one another," I would consider that deluded. That's not vigilance, that's just plain old picking a side, which is perfectly cromulent but not much more*. If he said, "I'm pushing for Bernie, but I'm concerned that if he does gain power, all the great ideas that I want him to implement will lead us towards fascism in ways that I and all his supporters didn't anticipate, and so when Hillary or Trump call him out, I'll listen and investigate," I would consider that at least a significant meaningful gesture towards maintaining vigilance against fascism.
* I think there's a version of this which is vigilance against fascism; if someone with control over the DNC pushed to make it so Bernie and the other underdogs of the world had a better shot, so as to increase the viciousness of within-party competition of ideologies, that seems to be a form of vigilance against fascism. Perhaps even in the case that it's just a DNC voter who is ambivalent about the choice but errs towards Bernie because they figure that bringing up an underdog will help to prevent ossification of ideas within the party. This would have to be balanced against the possibility of allowing an uber-charismatic
TrumpHitler-like figure coming in and stealing the party from under us, which is the kind of thing you would expect to lead more towards fascism, but the opposite could be the case, of course, and the specific details likely matter a great deal here.More options
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Is sociological research really needed, beyond the examples of history? I'm reminded of a piece from "crunchy con" religious right-winger Rod Dreher where he first acknowledged that HBD — he specifically singled out Steve Sailer — is probably correct, scientifically; but then argued that we, as a society, must pretend it is not, actively censor it, and maintain instead a "noble lie" (Dreher explicitly called it that) of egalitarian blank-slatism, because it's "proven" that human beings simply 'can't handle the truth.' The proof being the Jim Crow South and, of course, 1930's Germany.
I seem to remember ame_damnee back at the old place once making a similar argument in response to someone asking whatever happened to 'the pursuit of excellence.' To draw attention to "excellence" would also draw attention to it's lack, and that, it was argued, automatically and inevitably leads to people donning jackboots and building death camps. Again, "the Mid-Century Germans," as some like to euphemize, are all the proof necessary to show what happens when the egalitarian veil receives the slightest puncture.
(Meanwhile, this ignores that the bulk of settled societies throughout human history were quite inegalitarian and believed in hereditary differences, without descending into coercive or genocidal projects of eugenic "improvement." For example, it's hard to find a philosophy more hierarchical and inegalitarian than Confucianism, but AIUI when eugenics came to China, the (greatly weakened) Confucians were pretty much in opposition. And in the West, the now-deleted third verse of "All Things Bright and Beautiful" persisted enough in cultural memory that I remember once hearing it performed in a Bob Hope movie. So there's something more needed beyond just "people are born different" to get to "therefore we must exterminate the lower orders.")
As Neema Parvini said in his New Years stream, the core of the dominant ideology of the present day is that we're still fighting Hitler, if only 'the little Hitler inside each of us.' Letting people "realize people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior]" led to Nazi's once, and we all swore "never again." So what more social science is needed beyond that?
This is my core objection, that this isn't what led to Nazis. I don't believe the Nazis' rise to power in Germany was due to scientists dispassionately admitting to a populace that has only ever lived in a Western society of egalitarianism that they are forced to conclude something that they didn't expect or at least know to be true before they did the research, that there are different distributions in important traits such as intelligence when analyzing different groups of people, grouped by what we refer to as "race." I think it was closer to telling people that the Sciencetm proves that those people you already despise really are despicable. Which is far more similar to modern idpol than to HBD, which is one of the main reasons I reject idpol so much, though even then I wouldn't go as far as to censor them.
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His point goes much further than that. I agree with this part of his statement, but the part the DR takes issue with is when he says "Only a myth of race blindness is workable." In fact, the myth of race blindness is what has itself proven to be unworkable. It is a myth that is so recent and so destructive. The idea we cannot move past this myth, at least in an esoteric form among elites, is just absurd.
He is correct that red-pilling the normies on HBD isn't a silver bullet. But the point is we need some other myth than race blindness, a better one. A myth that is more in accordance with reality and pro-civilizational and even, dare I say, inclusive on some level. There are definitely some HBD nerds on the DR that think it's a silver bullet. But the better contingents of the DR recognize that HBD reality is more of a motivating force for why we need better myths to congeal society.
This also shows that certain people in the DR like Keith Woods and Nick Fuentes were correct to publicly point out that BAP is a Jew last year. Now that he is overtly pushing the race blindness for white gentiles and ethnic nationalism for Jews card, it's another notch in the belt of the DR showing its model of the world panning out.
Nobody should be surprised that a Jewish nude body-builder larping as a Nietzschean fascist, at the end of the day, really wants race blindness for the white gentiles and ethnic nationalism for the Jews.
The point seems to be that the 'myth' of race blindness is not the central principle of the political left. It's a temporal feature of parts of the left in diversifying western countries. But it's not central - as the shift from focusing on 'equality of opportunity' to 'equity [of outcome]' suggests.
The idea of the most famous modern leftist meme on race - remember this one? - is that only equality of outcome, 'to each according to need' matters. And equality of outcome renders the discussion of causes of inequality largely irrelevant. It could be evil capitalists, or racists, or patriarchy, or HBD, or guns, germs and steel, or some other cultural cause; it's not important, for the left only the 'correction' of these inequalities is important, whatever their cause. The right, whether it's against communists in a homogenous country or against progressives in a diverse one, must make the argument that inequality itself is just, because 'equality' - in whatever form - is perverse, empty, and ugly.
Alamariu isn't rejecting white particularism or supporting mass immigration (or at least it doesn't seem like he is, that would be a pretty big shift), he's saying that basing that particularism on a perceived or real hereditarily higher white intelligence (when compared to some, but not all, other racial groups) is flawed. It doesn't have a powerful cultural message, and is only likely to annoy the many whites who have productive and friendly relations with lower performing minorities. Perhaps most damningly, it would expose far more of the public to the fact that Jews and Asians really are more successful than whites in many fields for genetic reasons, which is part of why many antisemitic wignats spend a lot of time online trying to disprove the substantial body of evidence that suggests Ashkenazim are around 2/3 of a standard deviation smarter than gentile whites.
And most importantly, it doesn't actually alter the political conversation in the US. The American right already has a compelling argument against mass immigration for reasons of culture, economics, language, crime and so on - that's why Trump won. And the problems with crime in the ghetto in St Louis or Chicago or Baltimore won't be solved by 'awareness' of HBD either, they're due to much more mundane issues with policing, sentencing, and the way that criminal justice is dispensed in liberal cities. American conservatives dislike illegal immigration from Central America anyway, what they need is a conservative political elite capable of solving the issue, not one focused on litigating what exactly is responsible for why second generation Salvadorans don't go into software engineering at the same rate as Asians.
Just as an aside, my interpretation of the studies I've seen was that ashkenazim had a higher verbal IQ but lower visual intelligence, and these differences were largely caused by the same alleles which are responsible for a lot of the sphingolipid disorders that are so prevalent in the community.
The argument made by the more intelligent nationalists I've seen is that the Askhenazim IQ curve isn't so far ahead of the white curve as to explain the disparities in outcome (the gentile population is so much larger that there are more gentiles at just about every point on the IQ spectrum), and that jewish nepotism plays a big role in their overrepresentation in a lot of areas. I think this is fairly plausible, not the least because you can point to actual specific instances of this kind of nepotism and discrimination in regular life - see Ivy league admissions offices penalising applicants for rural activities and jewish overrepresentation in admissions offices.
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BAP is saying that a right-wing ethos has to be race-blind because it's the "only workable myth." But where does he think this myth came from? It is very recent, it was never believed at any other point in human history, it certainly wasn't believed in the United States or Europe during the peak of its civilizational advancement. Right now it is hard to imagine moving past that myth, but BAP is trying to steer the right wing away from exiting the orbit of that myth. It's subversive.
I agree that exiting the orbit of that myth is not a substitute for creating a better myth or having that influence gain traction among elite influencers, but it's certainly a prerequisite.
I agree, but it's a false dichotomy to pretend that the only two options are IQ worship and race-blindness. The Romans had a racial-mythos that oriented society. It was not race-blind, but it also did not constantly harp on IQ statistics. BAP saying that embracing race blindness is the only alternative to HBD evangelism is ridiculous. The Roman system was HBD evangelism without any statistics. HBD denial was likewise not established by statistics and charts but by myths.
So BAP saying the right has to accept the race-blind myth, despite its failures, is subversive.
That's an overstatement, one minor youtuber tried to take that on but it was widely panned.
I also do not see that fact as damning, as I am not an IQ-worshipper. All that matters is the advancement of civilization, that's the only contest that matters. Jews can test and finagle their way into Aryan civilization and Aryan institutions, but don't kid yourself into thinking income and accolades constitute a higher "achievement" than the people that built the civilization and core institutions which are hosting you. Not many Europeans are clamoring to be accepted into institutions in Asia or Israel or to assimilate into Asian Civilization or (lol) Jewish Civilization. It's the other way around.
Greece, Rome, the British Empire, the United States... The genetic substrate for civilizational achievement, and by the same token civilizational decline, is the actual important insight of accepting HBD, but so many get stuck in the local optimum of only caring about IQ and economic outcomes.
I think it's silly to say the argument is compelling when it is the argument that has been presented throughout the course of the most radical peacetime demographic transformation in human history. Those arguments are obviously not compelling.
I've already granted that HBD awareness won't solve the problems you describe. What it ought to do is inspire intelligent, high-agency people to search for a better mythos. The subversive function of BAP is to try to redirect as many of those people as possible back into the Conservative "We are the real MLK equal opportunity dreamers" 'opposition' to progressivism.
Ok what’s your plan for winning elections on an pro-HBD platform where non-Whites are at least 40% of the electorate?
If you get rid of disparate impact and all the implicit and explicit subsidies that exist for non-Whites you can totally overturn much of the incentives that have been changing Western demographics without having to go and campaign on a platform that insults half the populace.
There’s a reason BAP followed up his tweets by talking about Kazakhstan and Fiji - both of which empower the native population without HBD as a basis for their actions.
No you can’t. You can probably boost white birthrates on the margins in the short term, but offering them a slightly higher percentage of college professorships because they don’t have to compete with affirmative action will not do this.
Well currently in the US we have more people entering the country via claiming asylum than are being born so that’s a good start there if you want to prevent demographic change.
But a presumably race blind society would also phase out things like subsidized small business loans for rich minorities like South Asians and East Asians which help crowd out majority owned small businesses, government contracting set-asides, DEI departments, affirmative action in the Civil Service, etc.
Yes, none(and I mean that completely literally; by the time they get to the US they’re economic migrants)of these people are real refugees, but even if they were deported immediately the US would still become (nonHispanic)white minority eventually. Gotta change the birthrates, and no one knows how to do that enough to take effect- and changing official discrimination will do even less.
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There's a LOT more affirmative action than a few professorships.
It was an illustrative example, but civil servants and professors- and other typical beneficiaries of AA- are not known for their tfr to begin with. My point was that increasing the percentage of whites in high status jobs is not going to boost their birthrate, which is what you need to do to have a whiter country going forwards. And changing small business loan conditions in their favor won’t either.
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I had the exact same thought. Color-blindness could work for whites and asians, and maybe even hispanics, but it has been soundly rejected by blacks and, from what I can see in Canada, indians (no, the other indians). It's not up to me to say whether color-blindness is the way forward, it's on the populations that have rejected it, and because they have rejected it, I cannot maintain it as a goal or ideal any longer.
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Affirmative action for scheduled castes/scheduled tribes in India predates the US Civil Rights Movement. More generally, racial/communitarian spoils systems are at least as old as democracy - Swiss language politics is one of the oldest examples.
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Yeah, BAP just seems to be crying about more effecient and higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy. It's literally no different to the usual complaints black people have about whites. BAPs laments come from the same place as those ones (namely envy) and should be discarded. The only difference is that unlike whites who for some reason listen to the unfounded complaints of blacks, we're not going to listen to the ones of whites. You set up this system, and now we're beating you at your own game!
Also this Indian Bronson dude (first time I am hearing of him) has a profile picture of a dude holding up a gun with no trigger discipline. That on its own makes me negatively predisposed to him, people have died because others couldn't keep their index fingers straight. It's something which needs to be shamed and removed from society.
I feel I should at least devil's advocate on this since while I think @SecureSignals believes this (please correct me if I'm wrong), he didn't actually spit it out and an argument unspoken cannot be debated.
HBDers aren't only interested in intelligence differences among races, although that's what they're most (in)famous for. Many of them also consider personality traits to plausibly differ substantially among the races. If true, this is relevant to policy because the proportion of a population with certain personality traits can greatly affect its ability to thrive, potentially even more so than raw intelligence. The most commonly-cited as relevant would probably be %sociopaths and %WEIRD, although I'm not especially-well-versed in HBD so people may have made other claims.
In particular, there is a claim by some white supremacists (including, from what I recall of that post, BAP) that East Asians have high relative intelligence but low %WEIRD (and thus high propensity to corruption). The conjectured scenario is that allowing East Asians to float to the top of Western society will result in institutional decay because they are statistically more likely to be corrupt.
I am not especially convinced of this; I have a low prior on cognitive differences between various groups of non-Africans due to the smaller timescales involved, and while shame cultures are currently quite common in East Asia and rare in white countries, I'm not convinced that that's more than a cultural coincidence. This is also, shall we say, a very convenient hypothesis for white supremacists, which increases the likelihood of it being floated even if false.
One case where I absolutely am sold on this, though, is thinking that eugenics on personality traits has a large potential to explode societies that practice it. I may doubt differential evolution for 40,000 years is capable of producing large gaps in these kinds of statistics, but artificial selection probably is and gene editing certainly is. And of course, if your designer babies are all geniuses in addition to being 10% sociopaths, that makes it worse, not better.
What is religion and culture, if not a mechanism for coordinating the breeding behavior of the masses? Culture itself is eugenics on personality traits. So when we talk about European culture throughout the ages, including the innumerable pressures on those populations (Kingdoms and Empires, Black Death, European feudal system, etc.) that is synonymous with discussion of eugenic selection for a European type. In the Roman era that culture looked different in some ways, but similar in other ways, to Christianized Europe.
Another, more explicit instance of this, is Judaism as a eugenic program for the selection of a Jewish type. The myths, the rituals, the symbols held dearly by the flock, actually lead to the formation of a type of person. One of the myths in Genesis is the patriarch of the Jewish people, Jacob, using media and "culture" to direct the breeding behavior of a flock of sheep, which he inherits by making them all speckled. Of course, in the bible flocks of sheep are symbolic for people. This is ancient and esoteric knowledge.
So given your own premises, accepting this fact, you should have an extremely high prior probability that people who were selected throughout the millennia in Asian culture are not the same as people who were selected in European culture, because culture is nothing except a program of eugenics or dysgenics depending on the frame of reference.
In the same way, my chief concern is dysgenics, not on maintaining a stasis that has never really existed. What would a eugenic culture look like in the 21st century? That is the question that concerns me, not maintaining homogeneity or something for its own sake, and certainly not a myopic obsession with IQ nationalism like you see in the rationalist sphere. At the same time, I am extremely concerned with a culture that accelerates dysgenic behavior and dysgenic changes in population.
The distinction I'm making is selection power. Culture does have selection effects, but they're noisy and very weak compared to "generate 10,000 embryos via IVF, the one with the highest genetic score for trait X is selected, rest are destroyed". And I'm not even sure that the cultural traits we're concerned with go back that full 40,000 years; Confucianism doesn't exactly predate Confucius.
Selection is a thing, yes, obviously, but honestly at this point I don't think it's currently worth worrying about. High-power eugenics techniques are coming to fruition, nuclear war's pretty likely in the near future, and we could all be killed by AI or whatever in the next couple of centuries. It's like worrying about rain acidification eroding a limestone cave when the cave also has an armed nuclear bomb in it; the current direction of the trendline is of no consequence because there is essentially no chance that it will have enough time to go anywhere before getting scrambled.
You sorely underestimate how quickly evolution happens. It only took a few very silly ideas to become memetically enshrined in our collective consciousness to radically alter the genetic trajectory of the United States. And that's only within our own lifetime.
Evolution does not take hundreds of thousands of years. Events like the Black Death, Feudal Law which likely led to a genetic pacification of European people due to persistent executions of something like 2% of the most criminal population annually, will change a population within several generations. The feudal system likewise brought higher TFR for the upper classes which functionally led to the genetic replacement of the lower classes and the emergence of a Middle Class. You cannot ignore the millennia of evolution in Europe and assume that they are selecting for the same type of personality as in Indonesia, or that these differences are not radical enough to lead to powerful selection effects. They absolutely are.
And I've already presented a very clear example of memes becoming genes in the form of the Jewish religion, although I don't mean to single Jews out because we are all products of the same forces, it's just one of the clearest cases out there of myths and symbols leading to the selection of types of people, and not over tends of thousands of years, either- much faster than that.
Embryonic selection is not high-power, it is extremely low power. High-power eugenics is filming a Movie that convinces people they should be really concerned about demographic change and organize to mass deport illegal immigrants to keep the country majority white. Or making a movie that convinces them they are an evil person if they care about racial demographics (high-power dysgenics!).
Embryonic selection cannot hold a candle to the high-power eugenic technique of planting an idea into the heads of the collective consciousness. And the rationalists most eager to pretend that something like embryonic selection is a substitute for the harder task of memetically challenging the Culture are just proving they are still slaves to it just the same.
Ah, perhaps I should specify more fully. Widely-deployed embryo selection is far higher-power than culture. This is because, if you kill/sterilise the most offensive 2% of the population every generation, you're only cutting off a bit of the tail - and a tail imperfectly correlated with the genes, because penetrance is not 100%. Embryo selection is powerful because you can cut off 90%+ of the distribution, and you can select on genes directly.
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The complaint he has about Asians at Harvard seems somewhat valid. If there's a large tendency among them to just go for a comfy upper-middle class professional lifestyle, than these people have no business being at an elite school, if 'elite' is to have any meaning. Harvard should probably select people in a different way. 100% there are way you can figure out who has leader potential and who hasn't.
It means they should be at 2nd tier schools which can adequately prepare them for their careers, and leave places for the real elite - intelligent, ambitious, ruthless people for others who are a better fit.
Indian Bronson is a known bad actor, associated with J.Arthur Bloom who is some sort of fed baby and who Thought to be involved in some BS 'deradicalisation' meaning channelling all politics that may change the status quo into fruitless directions.
Might I just note that taking people with a known absence of morals and putting them in charge of your society falls under the heading of Bad Ideas?
I'm not a totalitarian. No one should be 'in charge' of society.
Is there a plan for putting that wish into reality that you're not sharing? If not, I fail to see the use of stating the 'should's in this case. The question was if you really think putting elites that are ruthless in charge of society is good for us.
Who is 'us' here?
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Isn't BAP's point that he thinks Han people are relentlessly ruthless in their pursuit of sociopathic ambition to the point where it degrades culture? He says:
I don't mean this as a gotcha, but the biggest frustration I have around "race discourse" is that people seem to just ladle on negative adjectives to the race under discussion instead of being precise. Are they smart-but-passive rule followers, or smart-but-sociopathic rule breakers?
No, he says too man Asians who graduate from Harvard just become highly paid upper-middle class professionals instead of actual elites- business, media, political leaders etc.
As any population, mix of both. Consider e.g. the illegal taxi thing.. It's rule-breaking of a useful but only mercantile kind. Doesn't impress him in the same way, e.g. Chinese seizure of Vancouver would.
He's right though that the Chinese with their ideas are going to wreck a system that evolved to work for a population much more prone to guilt and ideas about morality.
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Just winging an answer here, but I think the idea is that when it comes to personal gain they don't feel guilt and will ruthlessly defect against norms to get what they want. If caught, they will feel shame, which is distinct. C.f. the staggering rates of academic misconduct right down to cheating in university, which afaict is much more a Han problem than anyone else's.
OTOH, when it comes to official dogma, they don't seem interested in questioning it much at all. Much more conformist. This is a difference on average and there will be exceptions. But, they're two different things. Conflating both with 'rule following' is the problem here.
Scandinavians seem the same way re: conformity. It's interesting to wonder why and how. Again, the off-the-cuff supposition would be that Scandis are that way because they evolved in high-trust societies with low corruption and could generally benefit from believing the authorities, who were generally correct and benevolent. Whereas the Han evolved in a low-trust environment where people questioning authority tended to have their families exterminated to several degrees. Point deer make horse. Not questioning authority is beneficial either way, but for very different reasons, and so will play out differently.
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I believe the synthesis would be, “They assiduously follow rules when the local context has a rigid and actively-vigilant authority structure which can be reliably expected to hold them accountable for transgressions. They break the rules when in a context where the authority is lax, or when the rules can be easily gamed. In both cases, their attitude toward the rules is not motivated by an intrinsic sense of guilt (conscience), but rather by a keen social awareness of what it’s possible to get away with at any given time and in any given context.”
Well congratulations, you’ve just described all humans in every historical context, with compulsive rule-followers being the rare exception.
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Coherent, thanks.
I guess my response would be an addendum: "And that's a good thing." People are universally selfish, and I'd attribute better success at recognizing when to follow rules and when to break them as just a natural outcome of intelligence instead of a lack of character. (I also recognize that many would see that just as a defect in my own character.)
I think there is an additional distinction to be made here though. Towards what end was the rule broken?
Rule-breaking to achieve the true honest to god objective more effectively? Good.
Rule-breaking to accomplish apparent/personal objectives (that are often orthogonal or antithetical to the true objective). Understandable, but bad. Think of fluffing up meaningless KPI's and other forms of underhanded rent seeking.
In my observation, non-westerners (including the elites) don't have a strong cultural taboo towards the second kind of objective. (And what's the problem as long as you and your family is richer off in the end?). Westerners don't either, but a higher enough proportion of them do, for it to be worth something.
Ofcourse if you are observing a system with a birds eye view, it's obvious why the second system is worse.
It's hard to quantify this but it just feels to me that placing an utmost devotion to the honest to god objective even at the cost of one's own status and wealth is a very.... Christian/Western notion. Other cultures do that as means to an end towards personal status/wealth, not vice versa.
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Whether it's good or bad, while a fascinating discussion, is not germane.
It is at odds with how Western civilization works. We expect the individual to police himself and society with an internally consistent ethic and guilt. God is always watching you in particular.
And the people who are educated to form the elite of Western society should understand and hold to Western values. In principle.
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"trigger confidence" is an emerging meme in the gun culture. People turned "trigger discipline" into dogma, and then into cliche, and the fact is that if you are comfortable around guns, having your finger inside the trigger carries no significant risk of an accidental discharge.
I did a bit of small bore shooting during my time at university and we had an hour long lecture when I started about how we MUST MUST not put our finger around the trigger before they would even let us get into a sling. There were plenty of examples in the lecture of things going wrong and the aftermath of these accidents and while I personally don't mind guns (in the hands of the right people of course, I absolutely mind them in the hands of the wrong people) I would not be comfortable around someone holding a loaded gun like that. To me proper trigger discipline is an act of basic courtesy to your fellow shooters signifying you value their safety.
I don't particularly disagree, just pointing out an interesting social pattern. People who do disagree often point to the numerous examples within the firearms pantheon who evidently did not follow the rule rigorously.
What is actually happening, I think, is that it became a low-effort callout, and thus grew associated with people who were evidently in it for social points rather than actual gun safety, and normal social dynamics are doing their thing from there, helped along by the mutual disdain between what one might uncharitably call old-timer "fudds" and the younger Cawladooty crowd. It's interesting to watch the norms shift in real-time.
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True under normal circumstances, but in exactly the sort of stressful situation where self-defense might become necessary (e.g. in a building where there's a shooter) I'd expect having your finger inside the trigger guard to indeed risk accidental discharge.
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It's very low cost to have trigger discipline, and very high cost if something does go wrong because you don't. It might be an insignificant risk, but why take the risk at all? If nothing else, the competent people using trigger discipline so the incompetent people follow along too is a good idea. Because I guarantee you if there was a policy of "You're only allowed to have your finger inside the trigger if you're comfortable with guns", you'd see a ton of people who aren't comfortable but want to pretend they are putting their finger inside.
If I were to argue the other side, I think I would start with "because life is irreducibly risky, and it is better to consciously accept that fact than to chase increasingly marginal safety measures. At some point, you need to draw the line and say 'this far and no further'".
Mainly, though, I'm just interested in the evident social dynamics. Status games are really good at eroding norms.
I agree with that to a degree but I think it's all about costs. If I was told that to increase gun safety I should wear a piece of plastic on my finger that may slightly increased safety but caused me significant annoyance(as a made up example), I wouldn't want to, because it wouldn't be worth it. I agree there are lots of things like that where our culture is insisting in ever more costly measures for ever more marginal gains. But keeping fingers out of the trigger feels very low cost with a benefit that's more than marginal.
Interesting comparison: trigger guard safeties. I bought a Garand recently, and putting it on safe entails pulling a metal tab in with your trigger finger. Since this tab is on the front of the trigger guard, taking it off requires the user to put his finger on the trigger, then push out. It’s not something I expect to actually be dangerous, but I can see why it has been unpopular compared to thumb safeties.
I'm actually more surprised that more bones aren't made about the safety on the SKS (or to a lesser extent, the SVT-40, though those aren't exactly common in the US)- you have to sweep the lever down towards and behind the trigger to disengage it and if you do it BAD-(lever)ly enough you could probably fire it with the same finger stroke. Maybe the people who fire their guns accidentally this way probably successfully cover it up since this type of gun can slam fire if you fail to clean a part that takes effort to remove.
I think the second biggest reason thumb safeties aren't popular is just because modular trigger assemblies don't lend themselves to it (the Garand is basically just a purpose-built bolt-action rifle conversion anyway, and with the trigger where it is there's very little room in the action itself for it). Safeties that directly block the hammer from moving are better than those that just disable the trigger, too, so if you can get away with it, why not? (For that matter, the AR-15 can't be put on Safe when the hammer is down, which would probably prevent people from seeing not being able to do that as "unsafe" by itself simply due to being a gun everyone and their dog owns.)
Also, competitive shooting with the meta gun(s) in Production requires you to pull the trigger when you don't intend to shoot to lower the hammer down, all the way, on a live round, on a gun that has no firing pin block- so it'll go bang if you drop it in the right place just like SIG P320s did. It's true that nobody's downrange when you do it, but it's still the most common gun handling thing apart from actually shooting it. The preferred 1911s can also do this, but you're starting those with the safety on so it's much less of an issue.
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Oh man, that’s almost parody. Like something a conspiracy theorist would attribute to Feds. “We need to cull the gun population!”
I like having some cliches on which to fall back. The laws of gun safety are pretty good ones, and they make it way easier to impress the overall strategy on a new shooter. If that’s cringe…then I don’t want to be based.
There's a steelman where establishing 'vital' rules that must necessarily broken on a regular occurrence is counterproductive for all but the dimmest bulbs. Mike Rowe's Safety Third talk is a more generalized version.
Saying that you can't get hurt if you follow these simple rules in every circumstance isn't even strictly true -- ricochet matter! -- but even were it true, it's not very useful, when you have to break those rules on the range, dry-firing, tearing down some guns for cleaning, doing common drills. It's 'okay', because you're only breaking one rule at a time! But while Trigger Discipline ends up being the thing people focus most on because it's so visible in every photo, it's also one that -- as Sig has proven at length -- is particularly awkward for how consistently you have to break it for a variety of situations.
I don't agree with it, myself, still: Cooper's Four Rules are about producing habits, not behaviors. But it's less obviously crazy.
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Actually, the system was set up explicitly to keep you all out, you can be the top of the hierarchy in your own nation and see how that works out. Only very recently did that change. But it certainly was not how the system was set up, and not the system under which western civilization was actually created such that there are uncountable numbers of people like you begging to join it.
This isn't the sort of discourse we expect here. Direct personal attacks aren't allowed. You have two AAQCs, a warning and a tempban awhile back, but you are very clearly defying the rules here, and that can't be allowed. Take a week off, and please refrain from such behavior in the future.
It's a shame too. After this you guys seemed to rein it in, and actually converge on a real discussion. Still, rules are rules.
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Who says I'm not trying to adapt? I can be accused of a lot of things, but not trying to adapt isn't one of them.
Exactly, which is why the system itself is so important. Let's not pretend this system isn't a brand new upheaval and that it was always set up to be this way. It wasn't, they are only now allowed to join in on this Western hierarchy at this point, this is a grand experiment with a lot at stake.
I know he's being tongue-in-cheek provocative when he says "higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy", and I greatly prefer that banter to 2rafa's "the real British are the people who drink tea and attend Wimbledon". But I'll respond in kind: the Western hierarchy was built and was at its long best before this suicidal sociological experiment that has graciously allowed him to pretend he is one of us.
I'm sorry, do you realize how recent the mass immigration of cognitive elite in University, tech. etc. actually is? Absolutely none of what you mentioned can be attributed to the impending demographic replacement of the cognitive elite. So they have no "rightful place", it's just an experiment to see what happens when we replace the cognitive elite that built Western civilization with a cognitive elite that built worse civilizations in other parts of the world.
It turns out, there was a measurable genetic change due to non-European migration to Imperial Rome immediately before its decline and collapse (which was later completely erased by the barbarian invasions). I'm not saying that is going to happen in the United States, I'm saying BurdensomeCount is the Arab merchant who shows up in Rome in 300 CE and claims he is taking his rightful place in the Roman hierarchy.
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This whole thread is not great. You guys are winding each other up, and I think it likely you all know you're winding each other up. You've got several AAQCs, a couple warnings, and three tempbans. This time, you did the best job riding the line so congrats on that, I guess, but you're still getting a warning for your contribution to the general melee. This is a warning: adjust course, please.
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I don't expect a response since you're on Mandatory Vacation, but I have a mildly funny anecdote from the Olden Days, before we moved off-Reddit.
I had someone DM me asking if I was Indian Bronson, and not knowing about the Twitter personality, I interpreted that as an accusation of being Julius Bronson, or an Indian equivalent. I reacted with quite a bit of annoyance, since I certainly didn't think I was within 6 degrees of separation from JB, but he later clarified he meant this dude.
After looking him over, I can sorta see why someone might suspect we're the same person, but you can take my word for it that we're not.
(The dude in his profile picture is Amitabh Bachchan, and given that you've always been vague about which South Asian shithole you hail from, I'll take that as clear evidence it's Pakistan, since even the most sheltered upper-class Muslim from India would have at least recognized the most famous Bollywood actor alive)
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This post is pretty clearly bait, and it's bait of a sort that you have racked up seven warnings and four tempbans for. When this post came through the filter, my initial reaction was to let it be, given that you didn't start this thread, and your comment seems primarily aimed at BAP, mirroring his own zero-sum ethnic hostility back at him. The problem with bait, though, is what that it attracts, and the escalating vitriol this post inspires is exactly the sort of thing we do not want here. If it were an isolated incident I'd argue strenuously for a warning, but this is pretty clearly your thing, and we have been giving passes to similar borderline comments from you all week. You were last warned just over a week ago, and your response seems to be an increasing commitment to ride the line.
Given the givens, a 20-day ban seems appropriate here. When you return, kindly desist from this sort of behavior.
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Can I just take a moment to say:
Racists do not describe themselves as racists. They always have beliefs that re perfectly reasonable and normal from their own perspective, and generally have either sources of evidence they consider authoritative or arguments they consider persuasive to validate those beliefs.
That being said: are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
And if not, who in the world could we call a racist, then?
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
But in many cases, it's pretty easy to tell when that stuff is all happening above someone's bottom line. This also relates to epistemic learned helplessness, with people being rightly skeptical of arguments and citations that seem persuasive but are highly optimized to seem that way by lots of distributed effort in some cases, but being more amenable to those types of arguments when they come from certain people/groups or support certain things they're disposed towards.
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
Racism is simply not well-defined. Let's say for example that a person usually genuinely tries to judge black people as individuals rather than making assumptions about their behavior based on the fact that they are black. But this same person, being aware of racial crime statistics, also crosses the street when he sees groups of young black men hanging out outside stores. Not out of any hate toward black people, but just because to him his personal safety is more important than trying to always judge people as individuals.
Is this person racist or not? I would say no, but there are others who would say yes.
Do I think that BAP usually genuinely tries to judge black people as individuals rather than making assumptions about their behavior based on the fact that they are black? No, I do not. I have not read much of BAP's stuff, but based on what I have read he pattern-matches, to me, to people who generally tend to be racists even by my definition. So yeah, I am ok with saying that he is probably a racist, by my definition of the word.
I think that probably everyone or almost everyone at least to some degree stereotypes others based on what ethnic groups they belong to. To me one of the main things that makes someone a racist by my definition of the word is that rather than seeing this stereotyping as an unfortunate but inevitable result of the fact that we all have limited knowledge of other people and limited cognitive resources to devote to evaluating other people, he valorizes the stereotyping as a good thing.
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I just think racism as a moral failing is just not that important. I think there are probably a lot of truly shitty people that aren’t racists and some nice people who are racists.
Generally, I’d care more about whether someone is generally nice to other people, are they hospitable, do they actively create harm for others, are they a narcissist, etc compared to racism.
Well, famously, racism has led to a lot of “actively create[d] harm for others”, so stances like this seem poorly thought out when latent racism at an individual level can and does turn into actual discrimination and much worse at a societal level.
To invoke Godwin, there were so many “generally nice” Germans in 1936. They just were specifically not as nice to a certain minority, widely persecuted for some centuries such that it was considered normal in polite society (and still today on certain college campuses).
Sure. It can. But so can people who believe in the government control of the means of production or people who believe in say Islam.
And right-thinking people/societies should also frown upon those things. We can even agree that racism (even the 1995 version) is overrated as a terrible thing, compared to say Marxism, in Western culture.
I’m just pointing out you can’t defend “individual cases of racism aren’t so bad really” very well without ignoring the piles of skulls, ancient and modern.
Many people in this thread are proving the point that the Left torturing and drastically overextending “racism” as a term wielded as The Worst Argument in the World has largely backfired as far as improving racial issues. Some in this thread go so far as to say Classic Racism is/was fine actually, and some of us are pushing back on that.
I’m not saying it “was fine actually.” I’m saying if someone is classically racist, they are pushed out of polite society in a way that wouldn’t be the case if they had larger moral failings. See for example Michal Richards v. Mike Tyson. One said “nigger” and was pushed out of polite society. The other is celebrated whilst being a rapist. I think we have our priorities mixed up.
Fair.
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Why is discrimination an issue?
Making decisions on what kind of people you are interested in associating with is an everyday thing.
Do you immediately give your banking details to the 'IRS agent' with an Indian accent who randomly calls you?
That's discrimination right here. You used available information to you to make a snap judgment that you would not interact with a certain individual, and you are selectively deciding not to let them accomplish their goals.
There is no civilization without discrimination. Trust is only possible on a local level where you are not interacting with strangers but with people with a known history and known ties to your community, skin-in-the-game.
You’re employing a sense of the word “discrimination” not particularly relevant to the sense of “X race need not apply” or “separate but equal” and other race-based discrimination that was done at scale and often enshrined in law.
I'm simply making the case that discrimination is essential.
In situations where you need to urgently determine whether somebody is trustworthy or not, you will use all available information for this decision, physical markers of age, sex, race, class, employment, attitude, smell...
If your child disappeared suddenly and you were told a female cashier saw somebody take them away, do you go ask the bearded cashier to give you more information?
What's wrong with having rules? Nobody is entitled to interaction with anybody else.
Just because you think your kids would do better surrounded by Brahmins than by inner-city Irish kids, doesn't mean you can just force Brahmin families to sign up to your schools. If Brahmins decided that within their own school inner-city Irish 'need not apply', who are you to change that?
It would suck if all the businesses around me suddenly decided that they no longer wanted my business for whatever reason, but that is unlikely.
And perhaps if they did, it would have something to do with my behavior.
You are right that Freedom of Association is tricky because it goes both ways and resolving such tensions is difficult.
You’re still wrong about conflating different senses of “discrimination”.
I have no argument against “noticing patterns” or “stereotype accuracy” or simply having any given preference, in a way that many in today’s society consider to be racism (in my view overextending the concept).
But that is distinct from say Jim Crow or the Final Solution.
Your last line is exactly the issue: blunt discrimination at scale gets away from treating individuals as individuals. In a free society, there will always be tension about the state needing to intervene in any given case.
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At the corporate society/government level? Moral hazard. The people making the rules and the people bearing the costs of those rules are almost never the same people (the universal example being "child" vs. "adult").
You yourself buried the lede: "something to do with my behavior", yet... it obviously doesn't, should you be an above-average member of that group we're judging by. By keeping formal groupings like this out of law, we ensure that said above-average members have the opportunity to keep more of what their surplus of virtue/intelligence/time preference inherently provides them; the fact that this isn't having the eugenic effect we're hoping (above-average examples of a below-average group prosper -> should reproduce more, and vice versa) is due to a different societal failure mode that has yet to be addressed.
And sure, most of that is only on paper, but those words being there gives some social cover to defectors should they choose to skip the tax (i.e. a restaurant that seats blacks with the other customers in a cultural milieu where society at large doesn't like that- having to sit in the back is effectively a tax, since you'll have to spend more money just to get the same experience that whites get just by walking in the front door).
One solution to this problem is to say that there isn't enough discrimination, and reach for intersectionality- where the amount of tax you should be charged is proportional to the inherent costs of your immutable characteristics (and thus the sum of tax you owe or are owed). One look at how the gynosupremacists (and the PMC in Covid times) use this should tell you all you need to know about the success of this approach- they always exempt themselves from the taxes. It's very hard to guarantee fairness when you're trying to levy taxes this way; that's why the compromise for the last 60 years has been "well then, don't", and why attempts to change this, universally have all been/are all in bad faith.
By contrast, the ability to "have rules" (in the sense that you mean it there) means that now you not only have a dysgenic effect on the people you'd want to elevate, but a eugenic effect on people that you don't- in this case, below-average Brahmins who otherwise lost the genetic lottery that shouldn't be in that school anyway. So you'll get better results by being able to exclude them, and if you're going to exclude them for the same reasons you'd exclude the Irish... why the extra rule?
Of course, the inability to have rules directly leads to two problems. The first is concern trolls being rewarded for taking "is it because I'm black?" seriously- charitably, they don't fully appreciate/understand that eliminating the tax also has the side-effect that most people who get caught by the more objective standards of behavior are going to be members of a group with below-average ability to follow it.
This is why the justification for the tax eliminations is "immutable characteristics"- we're lying about the fact that behavior isn't actually fully mutable downstream of group membership. The side effects of that lie mean that the compromise is now vulnerable to a society taking concern trolls/"is it because I'm black?" seriously- and can back it up by saying "well, it's mostly group X in the statistics" with nobody else having the context or ability to say "that's exactly what we should expect given purely behavior-based standards are statistically rarer to meet for people of group X".
It also breaks down when you run into biological specialization between groups- specifically, between men and women- because each have a different set of anti-social behaviors, are done with the same evil intent, and have the exact same results as far as community finances and stability are concerned. (In a society where the words of women have equal power to the fists of men, misuse of the former should obviously be taken as seriously as the latter.)
The second is deadweight loss caused by levels of indirect signalling. Take the example of "good schools"- the deadweight loss, in this case the difference between how much it actually costs and how much it has to cost to exclude the people who would break the school, is instead captured by a bunch of different actors (the ability to afford a home in the suburbs, the ability to get your kid there and back, the ability to afford the school in the first place). Sure, these things are in and of themselves desirable, but the ability to signal that you can afford it is baked into everything you buy to do that and adds up- if you simply had a "no IQ under 110" policy, or (less efficiently) a "no group whose membership predicts lower intelligence", that loss wouldn't have to be as large.
That's a good thing if you've ever talked to a child, you would understand why you don't want to put them in charge.
That's only a problem for a minority of a minority. By definition, not the concern of the majority of the majority (that is the people who make laws).
I'm not hoping for eugenic effects. Perhaps if we're hoping for eugenic effects for a minority group, we would hope that excluding them would incentive the above-average members to break away and lead their group to success... somewhere else.
I don't see the issue with that. If they are above-average, then paying that tax shouldn't be a problem to them. They should also be able to understand that the experience they're coveting is a product of the work of a group they do not belong to, that they may not be able to obtain from their own group, and value that accordingly. If they can obtain the same experience from their own group, then what a great bargain for them!
A very simple question of logistics. If you're looking for 10 workers who can lift 50 lbs and you can hire somebody to test 50 candidates for the job, do you have them test 25 women and 25 men, or instead test 30-40 men until you get 9-10 workers and perhaps spend the remaining time looking at a few abnormally large women?
Nothing prevents you from excluding both the Irish and the lower-achieving Brahmins. If the Irish are significantly under-performing and also causing additional problems (disorder, violence, social inadequacy) then you're just saving money in admissions, discipline, remedial programs...
Answer: yes - instead of having a whole ChatGPT-like paragraph of non-committed denial hoping not to get sued.
It seems that we do already agree as you point out that the Western society we live in already has discrimination, just not the 'right' type of discrimination.
The compromise has been 'don't discriminate against groups that the post-WW2 globalist consensus has deemed to be special', not really 'don't discriminate' in general. Is there really somebody living who with a straight-face can say that they do not support one form of discrimination or another?
Any progressive not supporting 'safespaces' for queers, POC or women, 'my body my choice' for aborting mothers not antivaxxers?
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It is completely relevant since "disparate impact" considers discrimination in that sense discrimination in the sense you are referring to.
I don’t consider “disparate impact” to be a well-developed concept that is actually relevant to distinguishing between “discrimination” of an individual vs. “discrimination at scale” because intentionality matters for the types of discrimination I’m trying to discriminate between, and disparate impact is indiscriminate about intent, or any actual causal chain really.
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The term "racist" has been elevated to some enormous sin. Actual convicted murderers are treated with greater empathy and care than vile "racists". And so of course the term is frequently used as a weapon with little regard for the actual situation in question. So many people instinctively defensively resist that often lazy sneer.
It really is overused as an all-purpose dismissal of anyone insufficiently progressive. And also yes, BAP is actually a racist for real and not in some lazy weaponized sense. Words also have meaning separate from their use as weapons, and BAP is indeed a racist.
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I'd probably be fine calling him a racist but this really is hinging on what your definition for racism is. It doesn't appear that he has a deep seated hatred or irrationality based on race and some people might reasonably require that. It's one of many reasons we should probably taboo our words more often. If we're determining whether to call him a racist because when we apply that label it means we'll engage with his ideas differently(or not at all) that seems like it's removing and not adding to our objectivity. If we're doing it because we want to have a neat taxology of who the racists are then I question the purpose.
I'm honestly really fine dismissing what he says because it's an anecdote and he seems like the kind of edgy person to exaggerate, hell I'm engaged and deeply in love with a "Hanoid" or whatever he called them. But I don't need to do this based on some weird label technically.
As I said in my comment above ( https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176997 ), I respect that this is a consistent definition of “racism”, but I think that it is miles away from how people actually use the word, because it implies that large swathes of the most aggressive supporters of eg segregation and slavery did so for non-racist reasons. If you’re deeming the Cornerstone speech non-racist because it doesn’t specifically have “I do not like black people” in it, for example… I don’t think the definition’s very useful.
It’d be like having a definition of “totalitarianism” so strict that the fact that it calls itself the democratic people’s republic of north korea, and didn’t explicitly say “we do not respect democracy or individual rights here” on the tin, was enough to muddy the waters for me.
Sure, it's not quite the definition I use, but I'll point out all definitions have problems like this because people genuinely differ on how wide of a scope they want "racism" to cover. I frankly just try not to use the word because it's heat strength outpaces any useful light application. Of course people have always sought to weild heat where ever it can be found.
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I have no idea what the word racist means anymore. The definition has expanded to include, in theory, everyone, making it a useless descriptor.
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A while back Costin Alamariu/BAP got heat from other far rightists for not using the term "ZOG" (Zionist Occupied Government) and by extension for being a Jewish immigrant from Romania. He tried quite unsuccessfully to publicly promote "Global N*gger Communism" as an alternative term instead. Also constantly uses the word "n*gro". It's not a Eastern European cultural lost in translation deal, as he was raised in one of the richest parts of New England and went to no less than three Ivy league colleges, so the connotations in US culture of how he uses those terms would be quite well understood. He's as racist as water is wet.
Generally depends on the type and how they gauge their audience at the time.
Are those asterisks yours or his?
Mine.
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is he actually Jewish? maybe quarter . i dunno .
According to a DNA test he posted he's ethnically half Askhenazi, half Greek & Balkan, and has a child baptism certificate from some orthodox Christian denomination. https://twitter.com/costin_eats/status/1701431178199261642
Presumably religiously mixed parents.
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Denounced as Jew with the standard recitation of anti-Jewish tropes.
So he's Jewish enough for the local self-described white nationalists to name him.
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I really don’t think people in this space grapple with this question, and questions like it, nearly enough.
Many of my complaints about how this “IDW-ish slice” of the Internet discusses racism would be addressed if, after reading someone’s comments about how leftists have used the word “racism” into meaninglessness, I got the impression that they had proactively, introspectively, honestly asked themselves the following questions:
I agree that a lot of left-wing people abuse the term “racism”! But that’s, like, step negative one of an actually introspective conversation. I don’t see many people here actually grapple with “what do I think racism is?”, instead only arguing the negative.
For example, imagine if I did this with something that was more of a sacred cow of these parts — imagine if I argued “right-wing people have abused the term free speech into complete meaninglessness because almost all of them invoke the first amendment in response to private actors criticizing them or banning them from a forum etc”. You can’t really deny that a large number of people actually do this all the time, but this is a terrible comment, right? What I need to do is actually engage with the idea — “what do these people mean when they say free speech? What restrictions do I think should be put on private platforms to honor free speech? What social norms should surround censorship of unpopular statements by private actors?” and so on.
So responding to a right-wing person complaining about free speech with “right-wing people have used this term so loosely I genuinely have no idea what they mean anymore” would be unbelievably lazy. It’s fundamentally my job to understand what they mean, and all my comment shows is that I’ve blatantly refused to do that, and chosen to believe that they mean nothing.
And in terms of my actual statements, this makes me completely indistinguishable from someone who actually doesn’t believe in free speech at all, and would have no objections to the government passing a law to ban spoken racism, doesn’t it?
In the same way, imagine the perspective of someone like me, a person with the opposite view to the prevailing zeitgeist around these parts when it comes to racism. Try to remember that if all you do is make this negative argument (“leftists have abused the term racism so much it’s meaningless now”), I have absolutely no idea if you are someone whose beliefs are closer to “the thing that most young Americans in 1995 would have called racism is in fact bad, but it barely exists and leftists exaggerate it” or whose beliefs are closer to “the thing that most young Americans would have called racism in 1995 is in fact good and more people should do it”, and those are completely different arguments to have. And the process of trying to get to the point where I know which of these you’re actually saying is exhausting and 90% of the time I fail. Many of you I uncharitably suspect of switching between the two whenever it’s convenient for you to do so.
TL;DR: What I really want is for you to be proactive in telling me which you mean, rather than just talking about what you don’t consider to be racism. If this is not racism, what would I consider racism? Did the majority of people who supported segregation do so for racist reasons, or not? And so on.
This complaint only makes sense if you think of words as having intrinsic or "correct" meanings. If you instead treat words as just vehicles for conveying ideas, then you could just answer "who in the world could we call a racist, then?" with "nobody, using it to describe people is pointless because it doesn't mean anything". And I think that's a reasonable answer if you're not going around calling people racist. If the word "racist" doesn't have to mean anything, then you can just not use it if you think it wouldn't help people understand the idea you're trying to convey.
No it isn't. It's the speaker's job to convey their idea in an easy-to-understand fashion. If there was an argument on this site where people were conflating the philosophical concept of free speech with the first amendment, then when I make a post in next week's thread about the philosophical concept it's my responsibility to clearly indicate that I'm not talking about the first amendment. If there were posts saying that the concept of "free speech" is incoherent and meaningless, then it's contingent on me to specify what exactly I mean by free speech. If enough people are confused, then it's probably better for me to not use the phrase "free speech" at all, and replace it with something like "the right to not be punished for conveying my opinion about the election".
So to answer your object-level question, you could (and should) directly say that you think "BAP has an unconscious bias against black people, regardless of their individual intelligence or behavior". If you want to know how a poster compares with the average 1995 American, you could ask "Do you think the average American in 1995 would agree with that statement? Do you agree with that statement?". You don't have to specifically use the word "racist", especially when you know it won't help people understand your point.
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You look at what they say and do, and build an argument that regardless of whether they're willing to admit it, they're biased.
Applying negative or positive modifiers to your interactions or judgements of people based not on their individual actions, but on their stated or perceived racial identity.
The statements you listed seem like obvious examples of racism, so your definition seems like a poor one. Why personal animus? Why not impersonal animus? Why rely on animus at all; how you treat people is relative, and if you treat some people better because of their race, that's racism, just as if you treated other people worse because of their race.
Do you honestly think most of the regulars here would disagree with the above in principle? Of the ones who would disagree, do you honestly think they'd claim not to be racist? There's varying degrees of actual WNs here, and seeing them explicitly argue that racism is good, actually is hardly an unknown occurrence.
I don't see why that is supposed to be a bad argument. I can see I disagree with it, since "free speech" was commonly understood to be about much more than the strict text of the First Amendment, but the First Amendment does not, in fact, constrain censorship by private actors in general, right wingers do, in fact, sometimes get sloppy with their arguments and imply it does, and this does, in fact, muddy the waters of the conversation. It is not unreasonable to conclude that a term has been so misused as to no longer be useful, in which case the proper thing to do is to taboo the term and agree on another that better communicates ones' ideas.
And in fact, arguments more or less identical to the one you've presented as clearly bad have been a common part of the debate here since the community's formation. I've engaged in a large number of productive discussions that started with a comment very similar to "the right-wing conception of free speech is incoherent", and those discussions have shaped my thinking on the nature of rights and government.
Questions like these are the obvious next-step in the discussion, but registering disagreement is still the first step. Ideally, one does more than one step per comment, but life is often less than ideal, and it seems to me that a clear statement of disagreement is often a good first step.
Sure. Then one can attempt to discuss free speech with you, ideally more than once and from a variety of different angles, and build a model over time of the nature of your worldview and values. One can ask questions and contemplate the answers, note which arguments you make and which positions you commit to over time, and note whether these appear to be motivated by principle or convenience. One can note how you engage with those who disagree, whether you argue in good faith, and so on. In this way we come to know each other over time, and when we find a sharp mind, much can be learned even if agreement is never achieved.
I offered some definitions above; would those satisfy your request? If, as I believe, the large majority of regulars here share approximately that same definition, as evidenced by their previous comments, why would stating it each time be necessary? If you were a newcomer and were unfamiliar, why not just start asking questions?
...But then, of course, we get to the flipside.
It's always nice to see common ground. But the question is, what follows? Where does this apparent agreement lead? If the term has been abused, what consequences result, and how should we think about them? If the common way of talking about race is in fact fraught, how do we talk about it instead?
Here's a recent conversation I engaged in with someone who seemed to be, at least by my definition above, a racist. Your argument is that people here have something of a blind-spot toward actual racism, that we've just handwaved the question away rather than taking it seriously. Do you think that critique applies to my arguments in that exchange? If so, how? I'm up for continuing the conversation if you are.
You say:
I would not endorse either of those statements, though I'm much closer to the former than the later. I do not think young people in 1995 had a good understanding of the problem of racism, because they failed to anticipate the results of their actions and the consensus they rallied behind. I do think most of the things they considered racist were in fact racist, but some of them were not, and some of those were intentional lies sold to them. It seems to me that the opposition to racism typical of the 90s simply failed on its own terms, and any serious conversation on the subject needs to engage with that fact front and center. If you'd like a more in-depth elaboration of this idea, you can find one starting here, with the meat being the arguments from exhaustion, blindness, dementia, sociopathy, and senescence laid out here. If you have thoughts or disagreements with the arguments outlined there, I'm again up for it if you are. More generally, I'd be interested to know if you think that discussion grapples sufficiently with the question of racism and race relations, and if not, what you think it missed.
In any case, I think I am a pretty good example of someone who rejects Progressive discourse on and definitions of racism, while still considering actual racism to be a problem that needs to be addressed, in one's own reasoning most of all. I hardly think I'm alone in this position, and I think there would be even more joining me if there remained any real hope for positive-sum solutions in the near-term.
More generally, I think you severely underestimate the credibility problem inherent to this subject from the perspective of many of the people commonly posting here. There's a reply to you from @Nybbler, below, that basically amounts to "the term 'racism' is actively counterproductive". If you disagree, why not outline your view of how the term and the discourse employing it has delivered net-positive outcomes for our society or subsets thereof? If you are disinclined to engage with Nybbler, I'd be happy to take up his side of the argument; I certainly do not believe that either the term or the general discourse have been positive-sum across our society in recent years. For an example, see the discussion some years back of Progressive attempts to address racial gaps in discipline in the public school system. Stuff like that is where a lot of the pitch-black cynicism over the discourse surrounding "racism" comes from, and that was before BLM and the riots and the murder wave, and hard data about the intentional social interventions that brought those things about.
Does any of the above shift your priors that the question of racism isn't seeing thoughtful engagement here? If not, I'm interested in your further critique, either of the above or of other specifics you find relevant.
That … was my point, yes? The point was that “clearly and consistently stated personal animus” is trivially a bad definition for “racism” in that it fits basically none of the actual examples that nearly everyone agrees to be racist, and yet many here consider the idea that racism can include unconscious bias to be some recent redefinition of the term that makes it meaningless.
Again, that’s precisely my point! The discussions start there, not finish! Almost everyone here who wants to argue “leftists have abused the term ‘racism’ into meaninglessness” are specifically saying that because they do not want to have a conversation about what racism is; they are trying to end the discussion there. The equivalent for free speech would be, if a right-wing person started talking about any more nuanced idea of what free-speech is than some ridiculous strawman, and I responded with “this entire discussion is a trap and I refuse to engage”. The moment a right-wing person says “free speech”, I get to assert that they can only mean the dumbest and most incoherent version of that concept, and when they try to explain that they don’t, I plug my ears and say that what’s coming is a deliberate trap.
As I’ve said, there’s something very honest about the open white nationalists, as much as I disagree with everything they stand for. Frankly I don't consider them reachable; I'll be cordial enough but I don't think there's realistically any chance I could change their minds or they mine; the worlds we see and our values are just too far apart. What frustrates me more are the Classical Liberals who will tell me that racism has been abused into meaninglessness by the Left and so what does it even mean anymore, who can possibly know, I guess we’ll just have to ditch this entire memeplex completely because it’s corrupted, when they’re surrounded by white nationalists.
(Seriously, guys, your “like, what even is racism anyway, man? Is it even, like, a thing?” comment does not feel very genuine to me when you have to have scrolled past the white nationalists responding to me to make it in the first place. Imagine being a libertarian in a left-wing space where your responses were three-fourths "Conservatives and neolibs will call absolutely anything Communism these days, they've turned that word into complete meaninglessness, like are there even any actual communists left? Whenever a right-winger says something is Communist I just ignore them" and one-fourth "Stalin did nothing wrong and we must immediately enact a worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat and seize the means of production". I know it's cringe but the only word that I can think of to describe the effect of this is "gaslighting".)
What frustrates me more is suspecting that the Classical Liberal in question is not that classically liberal at all.
I do think that most of the regulars here, excluding the white nationalists, will resolutely refuse to engage the question of whether “racism-as-unconscious-bias” is a meaningful concept or not in that it points to an actually existing thing in the world that is useful to point out, yes, doing their absolute best to derail that conversation at every stage. I think that they will argue that because the Left has abused that term into meaninglessness, we can’t have any discussion at all about this, and so I guess if a leftist wants to call them racist, then it just do be like that sometimes. I think they will temporarily adopt definitions of racism that require conscious and explicit bias without noting that this trivially doesn’t work for almost all of the standard cases. I think that they will talk about how Ibram X Kendi is dumb, or liken anti-racism to a religion, or talk about superweapons and cancel culture and free speech and thoughtcrime, and generally do anything possible to avoid the question I’m trying to drive towards.
That’s just … been my experience, at least, as I remember it.
You asked for peoples' definitions of racism, and I offered: "Applying negative or positive modifiers to your interactions or judgements of people based not on their individual actions, but on their stated or perceived racial identity." Do you recognize a difference between that definition and "clearly and consistently stated personal animus"? I think my definition covers all of the examples you gave for racism the local norms miss. If so, would you agree that I at least am not exhibiting the tendency your critique is aimed at? If not, what is my definition missing?
In that first link I offered, would you say that the guy I was arguing against was displaying "clearly and consistently stated personal animus"? His claims seem pretty similar to several of the ones you claim are missed by the local understanding, and yet I recognize his arguments as clearly racist, and argued against them. Would this be more evidence against your thesis? If not, again, what am I missing?
At this point, I've offered a definition, per your request, and an example of that definition being applied. Does this seem useful to you?
I think you are mistaken in two ways. First, I think while there are some people who are not interested in the conversation, there are more who will take it if offered. I am certainly one of them. Second, I think you are misunderstanding how conversation works here. I straightforwardly believe that "leftists have abused the term "racism" into meaninglessness". That is my best understanding of reality, and so it is my starting position if you wish to discuss the term with me. I have what seems to me to be a fairly clear model of how and when the term was eroded, which I've already taken the liberty of offering up, and which I'm more than happy to elaborate further on if you'd like. And of course, if you disagree, I'd greatly enjoy hearing your best arguments and evidence of how the term is meaningful, together with examples of how it has been usefully employed in recent years, and which positive outcomes resulted, and how those positive outcomes outweigh the negative outcomes associated with those uses. Would you agree that I, at least, don't appear to be trying to end a conversation by that statement? And if conversation is what you're looking for, by all means, let's commence!
In fact, you and @guesswho have gotten a fair number of replies in this thread, and in addition to being willing to argue my own position, I'd be happy to defend those of others that I do not myself consider racist. You argue that the white supremacy contingent is at least honest, but it's the "classical liberals" equivocating that you really object to. Well, can you point to that sort of equivocation in this thread? Arguments that aren't obvious WN talking points, but are playing with ambiguities? You seem to have called out @The_Nybbler for exactly this based on his tar-baby comment. I'd be happy to argue the other side of that one, if you like, since I think "racism" is, in the current era at least, a tar-baby.
...None of this happens, though, if you demand that people agree with you from the start as a precondition to conversation. I argue a number of controversial positions here on a fairly regular basis, and I always go in assuming that most people here are going to not only strongly disagree, but start from the position that my argument is straightforwardly stupid. That's half the fun of it, and I can't think of a time when it prevented me from finding good discussion. But if you aren't willing to actually make an argument, I can't very well make you, can I? All I can do in that case would be to point out that you complain that people aren't looking for conversations, and then refused the conversation when it was offered in good faith. And in fact, that has been my experience of how these conversations generally go, much to my displeasure.
It seems to me the response there is to argue that it is not a trap, perhaps by giving some examples of how and why the question genuinely matters. Alternatively, ask them why they believe it is a trap, and ask them what evidence could change their mind. This can't stop a person from stonewalling you, but it also can't stop you from making it very obvious that they are stonewalling and acting in bad faith, which is frowned on quite strongly here.
I straightforwardly believe the above, and yet I continue to argue vociferously with WNs. Since I think the term racism is useless, I don't bother accusing them of doing a racism, I just straightforwardly argue that their positions are obviously wrong on the merits, based on easily-available evidence. This has the added benefit that when they say something that would usually be judged racism but is in fact accurate, like citing Black crime statistics, I don't have to pretend they've committed a mortal sin by saying true things. Nor am I required to recognize solidarity or fraternity with them; they aren't on my side, and if by some miracle they were to achieve significant power in the future, well, Second Amendment Solutions work on WNs too.
The arguments you describe have frequently been present on the previous incarnations of this space, and are ubiquitous most other places, so I don't have to imagine anything. It never stopped me from making my case. Don't let it stop you from making yours.
Is it "derailing the conversation" to offer evidence of how the term and the people employing it have caused repeated, large-scale disaster far out of proportion to any concrete benefit they've delivered, especially in recent years?
Put another way, if someone genuinely disagrees with you about the usefulness of the term "racism", how should they go about making their case to you?
Well, I can easily promise not to make any of those arguments. And while I am pretty sure I disagree strongly with the point you're driving toward, I do want you to make it as clearly and cleanly as possible. How am I doing so far?
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It's a tar baby. Grappling with it at all is a fool's game. If I won't consider calling someone "racist" a superweapon, why is it so important to know who deserves the label and who doesn't?
This seems like a masked way of saying “that thing you call racism, I don’t consider bad”, but with some strawmanning and the pointless jargon of “super weapon” thrown in.
I didn’t say you must consider racism a “super weapon”. I said I’d like you to tell me whether you think racism in any form exists and whether you think it’s bad.
I think you’ve just said you either think it doesn’t exist or it isn’t bad, but again, I absolutely do not know for sure, and it’s exhausting to try to tease this shit out from people who really seem like they’re trying as hard to conceal it as they can.
If you start posting in a form, you should learn some of the forum's jargon. If you don't, and you encounter some, you should at least not criticize someone else's forum for using jargon that you, a newbie, don't understand, especially when you go on to ignore the point made with the jargon. A superweapon is an accusation which automatically makes the targets out to be in the wrong because of generalizations about a group.
You didn't say he should call it one. He figured out it was one all on his own!
That's a trick question, because the next question will be a gotcha which takes his answer but substitutes racism as you define it for racism as he defines it. If he says that racism is bad, you can then act as though he agrees that some progressive bugaboo that's commonly called racist is bad.
Can you describe some examples of this abuse?
And assuming you do describe them, can you then understand that Nybbler might necome vulnerable to this abuse if he said "sure, racism exists and is bad"?
Guy, I know exactly what the term is being used to mean; that’s precisely why I said it’s pointless jargon. I appreciate the gatekeeping, though. Extremely normal behaviour to unofficially require everyone posting be familiar with the collected works of one specific blogger, even to the point of constantly referencing some of the stuff from a decade ago that he’d probably rather you forgot about. (This last bit is a reference to the “paranoid rant” from way back when, by the way, in case it wasn’t clear.)
Highly good-faith argumentation on display here. Do I get to write fanfic about the various dishonest and hypocritical things you’re going to say to me and then assert my fanfic as indisputable fact, or do only you and nyb get to do that for me?
It makes sense to guard against this sort of tactic even if it's just a possibility. Nobody actually needs to be able to read your mind in order to realize "maybe I shouldn't say something that's vulnerable to tricks". If you personally weren't going to use any such tricks, blame the left-wing abusers you describe, for messing things up for honest people like you.
If you don’t care at all about speaking in good faith, then yes, it does make perfect sense.
So your rules appear to be “many left-wing people are bad because they argue in bad faith, but when I do that, it’s actually still the left’s fault because they made me do it”.
For the millionth time, I have to argue - why don’t they get this excuse? Why isn’t their bad-faith argumentation justified by yours?
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You're about a decade too late for this sort of thing to work.
What it means is that the term "racist" is used to indicate "ultra-bad-person-you-should-hate", that the criteria for "racist" are loose and variable, and that any attempt to pin it down is fruitless; no matter what criteria you can come up with to separate "the real racists who deserve the ultra-bad treatment" from those who don't will immediately be widened by those using the term in bad faith to cover people who shouldn't be.
I’ve been round these parts long enough to know that you wouldn’t have accepted it eight or so years ago either, and were saying much the same thing then.
To put you both on the same page rather than anonymously calling Nybbler out for things he said 8 years ago, you are reddit.com/user/895158, yes?
Incorrect. I am some other wrongthinker who must be rooted out and destroyed as quickly as possible. (Not nearly as notorious as that one; I only ever posted very occasionally.)
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I have no idea if @papardus is /u/895158, but this sort of call-out serves no purpose but antagonism. There is no requirement that Motte users announce their other Internet identities. Yes, that means even a known troll and troublemaker from reddit would be allowed to post anew here under a new name and be given a fresh slate. (As has, in fact, happened, and in many cases, such people unsurprisingly immediately revert to their previous behavior and get banned.) There are circumstances where you could politely ask someone directly if they are someone you think you recognize from elsewhere, but "I just want to put you on the same page" ain't it.
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Eight years is less than a decade, indeed.
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There are weapons below superweapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're a murderer isn't a superweapon, it's a normal weapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're gotten an abortion is a superweapon.
Similarly, if people are racist, calling them racist isn't a superweapon. It's a superweapon when you try to apply it to non-racists, but that doesn't mean the original term doesn't have a true and important context.
Calling someone "racist" is a superweapon; it's a superweapon even if it would have happened to be justified under some previous reasonable definition of "racist". As soon as someone who is not aligned with current progressive thought accepts the validity of "racist" being a super-evil thing, it will be used against them; they will find themselves in interminable arguments trying and failing to defend themselves against accusations of "racism" for doing such things as using the term "tar baby". Part of the reason it's a superweapon is that trying to defend yourself against such accusations is in itself considered proof of them.
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Why would that be absurd? Why do you believe the term is useful at all? Why do you believe that “racism” indicates a real and important phenomenon worth caring about? What if the word was never anything other than a boo light, intentionally devised as a way to pathologize what is actually a totally normal and healthy outlook?
There is nobody on earth who, upon honest reflection, would agree that “Yes, I just hate minorities because they’re ugly and stinky and it’s bad to look different from the way I look.” That is a caricature which exists only in the heads of racial egalitarians and “anti-racists”. In reality, even the least introspective, most unreflective “bigot” has actual specific reasons - even if it’s at the level of anecdotal examples and life experience - to believe that there are important differences between the traits and the history of various groups, and/or that limiting the interpersonal interaction of those groups is optimal. I don’t care if they wouldn’t put it in those high-falutin’ terms. Even if you gave them truth serum and ample opportunity to freely articulate the contents of their own minds, they wouldn’t commit to “just don’t like ‘em, simple as” as an honest reflection of their internal mental state.
Racism isn’t real. Believing in important racial differences is certainly real; I believe it, as do probably a plurality of commenters here. Believing that an optimal society ought to achieve some level of separation/segregation between groups is also real, and is a far more controversial position even in this community; I advocate for the managed and non-coercive separation of black Americans from non-blacks over time, but it’s not because “I just hate the darkies and want them to die”. I have (what I think are) sophisticated reasons for believing what I do; I reasoned myself into this position over time, and did not start from a simple visceral aversion to people who look different from me.
A small number of people today even still believe that some races ought to rule over others, or even that some racial and ethnic groups should be exterminated! I don’t believe that, and I’ve never interacted with anyone who does (I suspect that the vast majority of people who do say these things are simply LARPing or doing a bit) but I don’t deny that such people are real. However, they are still not “racist”. They have actual reasons for believing that the conditions of the world are such that extreme measures genuinely are necessary for the preservation and improvement of mankind.
I could turn this around on you and ask: “Do you own pets? You do? Oh, so you irrationally hate animals? You want them enslaved in your home, rather than free to rule themselves?” And you would rightly respond, “No, I just don’t think humans and animals are precisely equal, and that the natural order of things is for humans to domesticate certain animals and to use them for our benefit, as long as we’re not overly cruel to those animals. I love my cat, but I wouldn’t let him drive a car, or vote in a presidential election.” But if I was absolutely committed to the proposition that speciesism is a useful and important concept, it would be easy for me to distort your beliefs to make them fit into a model that pathologizes them.
This is essentially what I believe that you’re doing with the term “racism”. Let the term go. It was never valuable to begin with. Nobody here cares if you think we’re racist or not. The term has become fully disenchanted. You might as well call us all heretics. Or “enemies of the Emperor of Assyria”. Engage with our ideas on the object level, and stop worrying about whether or not they fall afoul of your made-up boo word.
Well, it would certainly be convenient for you if we'd stop using a "made-up boo word" to describe the beliefs of racists, and I am (to a limited degree) sympathetic to your argument (put forward with more good faith than @The_Nybbler does) that "Racism has become so weaponized as to get my hackles up as soon as I hear it."
However, it looks to me like you basically want to argue for policies and an ideology that would, under any reasonable definition, be considered "racist" - you would just prefer we not use that word, because it now has a negative connotation, and you believe that your policies and ideologies are actually good and reasonable and therefore should not be besmirched with negative connotations. It reminds me of David Duke, back in the day, who did the same dance you and nybbler do, but less elaborately (and less convincingly, because you could practically see the wink and the smirk when he did it): "I'm not a racist, I'm a racialist. I don't hate black people, I just love white people!"
Yes, of course you're correct that hardly anyone hates other races because "they're ugly and stinky" or "just because." The most unreflective might simply hate them because they've always been taught to hate them, or because they have had mostly negative interactions with them. The more reflective will advance more sophisticated arguments like you do about IQ and HBD and how we should agree to an amicable separation so they can peacefully flourish in their own ethnostate and reach their full potential yadda yadda.
But I think insisting that "We should accept the reality that black people are dumber and more criminal and we should bring back segregation, but don't call that racism, because that's made up" is a nonsense argument and you're engaging in it for purely rhetorical reasons. Racism clearly does exist; we're just disagreeing over whether or not it's a bad thing. Would you argue that the many black people who hate white people are not racists? Are @BurdensomeCount's triumphalist screeds about how white people deserve to be made to lick the boots of his folk not racist?
This is precisely what I am disputing! I have to believe that you are not actually this dim and mendacious. My entire point is that it is not in fact reasonable to consider my ideas “racist”. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s reasonable! You’re simply appealing nakedly to consensus and pretending like you’ve made an argument.
No, it doesn’t!
Yes! Obviously, yes! I am explicitly saying that these people are not racist. I have never said anything otherwise. Have you ever once seen me complain about “anti-white racism” or “reverse racism” or anything like that? No! They are anti-white, and I dislike them for that reason. Their beliefs are bad for my people, which is why I oppose them. But in many cases they are based on completely sensible, well-reasoned motivations. I don’t oppose them because they’re “racist” in some abstract sense of “it’s bad to prefer one group over another and to advocate in favor of that group, even when such advocacy negatively impacts another group” or “it’s bad not to like people because of their group identity”. It’s perfectly fine to do either! I just don’t want it done against my group, because that would be bad for my group. What about this is difficult for you to understand? Why do you keep acting like you’ve exposed some secret ulterior motive of mine?
Again, as both I and @SecureSignals noted, your argument here is structurally identical to an accusation of heresy. “Well, clearly you recognize that God is real, and the Bible is true - you just hate them!” And we are responding with “No, actually we reject your whole frame.” Again, just because a lot of people believe something does not mean it’s reasonable, or that people who reject it are doing so dishonestly.
What do you think I mean when I use the word racist? What do you think most people mean?
So your argument is "Racism is completely sensible and well-reasoned, so please don't use that word because it's a boo-word."
Exactly. This is the point you are missing. I understand that you are arguing that beliefs that are conventionally called "racist" are actually perfectly fine and reasonable beliefs. Go ahead and argue that.
I reject your objection to the word itself, not because I disagree with your ideology, but because I refuse to stop using a word just because you would prefer it not be used because it has negative associations. If I say your beliefs are racist, and you feel like that's a boo-word and I'm saying you're just like the KKK (which I am not btw), you are entitled to point out how your beliefs are different from the KKK's.But you are not entitled to tell me "Yes, I believe in racial discrimination and segregation, but don't call that racism because racism doesn't exist." You would like us to use some more politic, less pejorative word, but "racist," whether you like it or not, is an actual word that describes actual beliefs. The dispute is not over whether those beliefs exist, but what we should think about them.
Absolutely not. It's more akin to you saying "I do not believe in God and I think religion is fake and gay - but don't call me an atheist, that's a boo-word."
Let’s take a step back and check the extent to which you and I actually disagree.
Do you believe that there is such a thing as a slur? By this, I mean a word which is inherently designed to contain within it the implication that the thing being indicated is bad? And such that there would be no way to use the word in a value-neutral way?
Take the word “faggot”, for example. If I call a gay man - let’s call him Travis - a faggot and he protests by asking me to stop using that word, I can defend my usage of it in two ways. One of those ways - riffing, perhaps, off of the famous Chris Rock bit, is, “I’m not calling you a faggot because you fuck guys. I’m calling you a faggot because you’re mincing all over the place, acting all effeminate, and a man shouldn’t act like that. A straight guy can be a faggot too, if he acts faggy. Nothing specifically gay about it.” But of course, Travis is well aware of the history of this word, and that it was always designed and intended to target gay men, and simultaneously to conglomerate a number of behaviors commonly associated with specifically gay men and to anathematize those behaviors. So Travis understands that I am either mistaken or (more probably) lying.
The second way I can defend my usage of the word is to say, “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be a faggot! Being faggy is a totally normal and reasonable thing for a person to be.” Travis would likely respond, entirely reasonably, “Then why didn’t you use a word that doesn’t carry an insulting connotation? Why not call me, I don’t know, a queen? It’s not something everyone likes to be called, but at least it’s not a word that someone has only ever used to insult me.” If I were to reply, “No, I’m going to continue to say faggot. Everyone knows what it means, and yes, the vast majority of people who use it and/or have ever used it meant it insultingly. But I don’t think it is, so I’ll keep using it.” Do you think Travis would believe that I am being fully up-front with him?
By tabooing the word “faggot” and forcing me to describe him in a more value-neutral way, or at least to disaggregate the various assumptions contained within the word, Travis can at least get me to try and explicitly demonstrate that the various aspects of a supposed “faggot” are, independently, things worth caring about or drawing attention to. I would also need to demonstrate that such aspects do, in fact, typically come together in a particular package, and that the person whom I’m currently calling a faggot possesses all of those aspects.
What I’m saying is that “racist” has always been a slur. That it was coined by someone who intended it to refer to a cluster of things he thought were bad, and that it was popularized exclusively by people who all agreed that being racist was a bad thing. And that it is impossible to use in a value-neutral way due to its history. With which parts of this do you disagree?
Doesn't all of this apply to words like "wrong", "selfish", or "boring" as well? Sometimes people create words to refer to things that they think other people shouldn't do. Not all of those are slurs.
I continue to believe that the word "racist" is perhaps the best one-word description for the policies you've said you'd like to pursue. You see racial divisions between people as extremely important and would like to completely restructure society along its lines; I consider the extent to which you care about this, the extent to which you think racial division is important, to be extremely irrational - so irrational that the only way I can really try to understand it, though I would keep this to myself normally, is to start postulating things like trauma, depression, a ridiculously sheltered upbringing, and so on, to explain to myself how someone can get to where it seems like you are. I don't say those things as insults, I'm just trying to really make it clear that "that is racist" to me is not "you hate black people", it's kind of a statement in the epistemic universe of "you are depressed"; it's my own observation that you probably have a certain bias.
Setting the prescriptive stuff aside, at least descriptively, basically every American, including almost every attendee in the crowd at CPAC, would agree that the policies you're calling for can be accurately called "racist". The crowd at CPAC would immediately, reflexively jump to your defence once they saw that I was a left-wing person calling someone racist, but if you honestly explained your beliefs in front of the crowd in the way that you did above, there would be much clearing of throats, embarrassed murmurs, and rapid changing of subjects coming from the crowd.
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I agree that racist has inherently negative connotations for historical reasons. ("Racists" in the past wouldn't have used the word to describe themselves because it was essentially a universal belief. Segregationists in the 50s did not call themselves "racists" but they probably would not have shied away from the label either.) I do not agree it is a "slur." You compared it to calling someone a "faggot," but I think it would be more comparable to calling someone a "homosexual." A term that is both descriptive and at one time had very strong negative connotations, and still does with some people. If I call someone a homosexual because he's mincing around acting effeminate, it would still reasonably be understood as an insult. But if I describe people who engage in same-sex relations as "homosexuals" and am told that I shouldn't use that word because it's a slur, I'm going to ask them who decided that.
You advocate racial discrimination and segregation as reasonable and desirable, and you would like to taboo the word "racist" because to most people, "racist" has very negative connotations. I can understand why you would like to persuade people to use words without that baggage to describe your beliefs, but that does not mean anyone should feel obligated to accommodate you. Even here on the Motte, if someone just dismissed you with "Wow, you are such a racist," they would likely get modded, but describing your beliefs as "racist" is accurate. You may object to it, just as there are in fact gay people who now object to "homosexuals." Maybe you will be as successful as the "queer" community is at pushing for linguistic shifts. Or maybe you can rehabilitate the word "racist." But you are not the sole determiner of what a word means and how it is used, and just because it would suit your agenda to taboo the word or claim it "isn't a real thing" doesn't mean it does not, in fact, describe a real thing.
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As long as you cop to the fact that your beef is not fundamentally with some recent progressive redefinition of the word “racism”, but with the entire idea that racism, including old-school “I don’t trust the blacks” racism, is actually bad, which it seems to me like you have, then I respect your honesty but will do everything I can to prevent people who think like you from ever (re-)gaining political power.
Basically, I’m specifically annoyed by people who masquerade as your classic anti-woke Classical Liberals but who actually have white-nationalist sympathies, or who are mindkilled enough about politics that they don’t even know or care themselves what their beliefs are as long as they’re on the other side as the wokes, and I don’t think you’re masquerading or hiding anything.
I think many of your beliefs are wrong on the object level about human societies and psychology, I think your beliefs are still unbelievably unpopular in normie right-wing circles, and I hope to God they don’t gain traction there.
Edit:
I completely agree with you here, except that I actually think many left-wing anti-racists understand well that this is not how racism works. To me, it’s precisely the right-wing anti-woke contingent who don’t understand that people who actually supported segregation had a more complex internal narrative than “minorities are bad and I don’t like them”. To me, I’m the last person on this forum who needs to be told this (in fact, I just said it myself over the course of many more words, but in service of an argument whose conclusion was in the opposite political direction).
My impression is that the dance seems to be: right-wing Classical Liberals and I think that old-school pro-segregation racism is wrong, and you don’t. You and I think that old-school racism (though you wouldn’t call it that) was always more complex than people who deep-down believed “I just don’t like the minorities”, and right-wing classical liberals think “no, the idea of racism actually was that simple, and described most supporters of this ideology, until the progressives changed the definition and now it’s meaningless”. You and right-wing classical liberals oppose describing those “more complex reasons”, if indeed they do exist, as “racism”, while I think that the reasons are at once more complex than “I don’t like the blacks”, but will also call them “racist” (though I’m not a fan of the one-word description and will explain over and over again with many many words that the way I am using the word “racism” allows for more complex reasons - it’s not the conscious reasons that word is pointing at when I say it).
I have no evidence to support me, but I don't think that's constrained to right-wing anti-woke—I think that's pretty conventionally usual. (Consider how much people are taught that it was due to prejudice?)
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I think a good comparison is the word heretic. Imagine you are an atheist and a puritan accuses you of being a heretic. Do you say "yes, you are right I am indeed a heretic." Only if you are trying to be provocative, but really you would just dismiss the entire frame of that question. No, I'm not going to admit to you that I am a heretic, I'm not going to accept your frame of the world by embracing that label, I dismiss the label altogether.
I don't have to imagine I'm an atheist, I am, and I'd happily confirm that I'm a heretic relative to any particular religion's dogma that defines me as such. I know that I meet that definition and don't have any problem with the word because it is has no moral worth to me.
The way that example is different from the one we're talking about here is that the people who meet a standard definition of racism don't want to be called racists. You imagine an atheist wouldn't want to be called a heretic, but why should we care? We've actively rejected that frame, so we're not embarrassed about being accurately labeled.
Whereas most racists have not actually rejected the social frame that gives rise to definitions and accusations of racism. They still want to be an upstanding member of that society, and they still want to think of themselves as morally correct within that society. So they want that society to drop it's own labels and definitions in order to accommodate them.
That's very brave of you, you could write "I am le heretic!" all day long and get updoots on Reddit.
If someone though is sincerely accusing you of being an infidel or heretic and you confirm their accusation you are accepting their frame of reference.
When you say you will "happily confirm you are a heretic" it's a "what are you going to do about it?" play. But if you actually lived in a society where that accusation had weight and social consequences, and you opposed the conventional wisdom for what entailed heresy, you would not accept that label for yourself or use it to describe your beliefs.
Yeah, that's how communication works.
Words have meaning, and have meaning in context. Just because you disagree with an opponent's worldview doesn't mean that words within the context of that worldview stop having discrete and coherent meanings.
There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be a heretic to Christians even if I don't believe in Christianity, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question. There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be (for example) a racist under the utilitarian definition of racism, even if you reject the empirical racism as a politically meaningful concept, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question.
It makes sense that you would want to 'reject the frame' if you think you can evade social sanctions thereby. That's a pretty normal thing to do, especially if you think the social sanctions are unjust.
But my point is,. just acknowledge the fact that by doing so, you are running from the truth and trying to muddy the waters. There's a true matter of fact that you're denying because you think people will react to hearing it badly/unjustly.
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In a society where it’s illegal to be a heretic, one has to hide one’s atheism to avoid prosecution and the points here about wordplay are irrelevant.
If I’m an atheist in say Iran, then the label is not the problem, it’s that my deconversion from Islam is a tad illegal.
Even in the US the label of apostate or heretic doesn’t matter in terms of “accepting their frame of reference”; what mattered is how my family/friends/society responded to my deconversion. It’s the object level, not the label.
Similarly, if say one has clear racial animosity, many people can find that abhorrent without ever needing to invoke the word “racism.” That term has been abused, but the 1995 version was much less so.
The hard bit is that certain facts about reality do seem to be “racist” or “sexist” and the toxicity of these labels keeps polite society from understanding reality in certain policy areas, inconveniently. That doesn’t make it better for those who really just dislike a given race or sex and/or want to discriminate against them and want those labels to disappear.
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As a factual statement, a non-believer is an infidel. That's what infidel means. As a factual statement, someone who believes in racial discrimination and segregation is a racist.
You can reject the religion that labels nonbelievers infidels, and you can reject a society that abhors racism, but the words still have meanings that accurately describe a set of beliefs or lack thereof.
Yes, there are social consequences for being a racist, as there were at one time harsher social consequences for being an infidel. I understand why you would like to remove the social consequences for being a racist. That does not, however, change the factual meaning of the word or your beliefs. You and @hoffmeister are trying to argue that "racism doesn't exist," when what you're actually claiming is "racism is good and shouldn't be stigmatized." Those are not the same arguments, and the objection to the word "racist" is one of tactical semantics, because of the negative weight "racism" has today. You would prefer a less freighted term - like, say, "racialist" - but that doesn't mean "racist" is not an accurate label. You might not like someone calling you a racist. I would not like someone flinging "infidel" at me as an insult, especially if it potentially carried more serious consequences. But I cannot honestly say I'm not an "infidel."
Yes, this is my exact point. If I reject a religion that labels me an infidel or heretic, I am not going to accept that label to describe myself or my own beliefs. This is really basic stuff, nobody does this, except for farming upvotes on /r/atheism which falls under the "intentionally provocative" mode of embracing that label only as a power flex.
I reject the religion that frames the entire concept of racism which, by the way, relative to world history is a brand new concept tightly coupled with our own post-WWII civic religion which is exactly what we reject. "Words have meaning", exactly, which is why it is stupid for you to demand that I accept the framing of a religion that I reject by embracing that word to describe myself. Words have meaning, so I refuse to play along with that garbage and humor a religious fanaticism that I oppose.
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But could you be so blasé about labels like heretic or infidel if they carried with it serious social repression? If you couldn’t get a job, or lost all your friends or contact with your children if people knew you were an infidel, would you still happily accept the label? Racist is a label that still carries those kinds of consequences for those so labeled. Heretic and infidel really don’t outside of heavily religious communities.
Right, that was the point of my last paragraph.
People who meet society's current definition of racist just want society to change its beliefs or norms so that they're not punished. The idea that 'racist' is an incoherent or meaningless category is primarily a rationalization to justify that effort.
Saying that the social sanctions for being racist are too extreme and should be mollified is a real position that can be argued.
Saying that people are using 'the worst argument in the world' or 'labels as superweapons' to apply those sanctions to people who don't actually deserve them under the original purpose and intent of those sanctions is a real position that can be argued.
I don't think 'that word doesn't mean anything because I don't want it to' is a real argument, here. I think it's mostly a rationalization to try to dodge the issue, and society won't accept it.
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Isn't a heretic 'a believer who practices some heresy' -- which lets atheists specifically off the hook on that charge? (and puts Puritans in jeopardy, incidentally)
So the right response would be something about glass houses I suppose.
“Apostate” is what we atheists get.
Still no go:
The term apostasy comes from the Greek word apostasia ("ἀποστασία") meaning "rebellion", "state of apostasy", "abandonment", or "defection". It has been described as "a willful falling away from, or rebellion against, Christianity. Apostasy is the rejection of Christ by one who has been a Christian.
So long as you never did believe, you are in the clear on that one. Although the Papists do feel that fallen Rationalists merit a shout-out, amusingly:
Apostasy a fide, or perfidiæ: Perfidiæ is the complete and voluntary abandonment of the Christian religion, whether the apostate embraces another religion such as Paganism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, etc., or merely makes profession of Naturalism, Rationalism, etc.
Rationalism has a specific technical meaning along the line of "denying the role of faith in holding beliefs".
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An atheist is specifically not a heretic, and in puritan society atheism would in fact be a valid defense against charges of heresy.
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I'm ok with calling both you and BAP racists. After all, isn't everyone?
A note of advice, when I write comments like this I say 'I'm fine with calling him, you, and myself that; after all, isn't everyone?'
It gives a bit more plausible deniability.
Not me, I'm the exception that proves the rule. I have better things to hate people over than race.
Are those better things 'things that correlate with race so closely that my actual effects on the world are indistinguishable from a racist', by any chance?
Nope.
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Thanks for commenting, Ibram X Kendi.
Edit: meant as a positive acknowledgement of posting I like, not some sort of spiteful barb.
I don't think that this was a particularly-well-aimed barb; JTarrou is not someone who frequently Body-Snatchers-screams at people claiming them to be racists. I'm not 100% sure whether his comment is mocking "everyone is racist" or at least semi-seriously saying that "everyone is racist and that's fine", but TTBOMK neither of those are positions in common with Ibram Rogers.
I don't mean it as a barb. I support pointing out that of course almost everyone is a racist according to prominent commentators. So let's correctly (?) call almost everyone a racist all the time.
To the degree this word is a weapon, it loses effectiveness when the broad Kendi-style definition is repeated.
I see.
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This has not been my experience. I have several family members, friends, and coworkers who will unabashedly admit to being racist, or to hating blacks, Jews, and sometimes Hispanics and Asians. They usually have their reasons (and the reasons are usually not wholly irrational), but they don’t shy away from the racist label. Now, these are all red tribe individuals (using Scott’s definition—they include Democrats, Republicans, and the politically indifferent) and are mostly blue collar. I’m guessing blue and grey tribe racists would be less willing to self-identify as such, which might explain your perception.
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BAP’s openly a racist, so obviously he is one, sure. I’m sure he’d agree with your description.
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This statement is odd. When racism had a socially dominant position, racists did in fact openly call themselves racist, and made lots of statements that very explicitly endorsed racism. And in fact, the majority rejected this state of affairs, and took concrete steps to minimize their influence on society
Why not try it, and see if anyone disagrees? Here, I'll do it myself. Ahem:
It seems obvious to me that Bronze Age Pervert is a racist, and I would be quite surprised if either he himself or any of his supporters or admirers would disagree. Further, I think it unlikely that anyone here disagrees, and I think the likelihood of disagreement would be negatively correlated with level of participation.
Is it fair to say that your general thesis here is that either this community or society generally err on the side of avoiding false accusations of racism, with the result that actual racism goes unaddressed? If so, were it to be demonstrated that your chosen example openly identifies and is commonly recognized as a racist, and suffers the attendant consequences of being so identified, wouldn't this rather undermine your thesis?
If you want to argue that racism is "cloaked", it would help to provide an example of actually cloaked racism. The problem here, obviously, is that unambiguous racism isn't cloaked, and sufficiently cloaked racism appears indistinguishable from non-racism. Especially in the modern context, where we have purported "white supremacists" of Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American extraction, and the argument is that their fellow "white supremacists" are just refraining from discrimination on the basis of race to better hide their single-minded devotion to racial discrimination.
Is this actually true? I'd agree that many people openly stated beliefs that we'd label as racist, but I am curious if there are examples of "mainstream racists" (e.g. Wilson, segregation-era Southern elected politicians) openly describing themselves as racist.
Looking into the term, it seems to have originated in 1902 by Richard Henry Pratt, who said:
It doesn't seem to be something originating as a positive self-descriptor.
Ironically, he is better known for this quote:
Contemporary times would give him a certain label.
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Sure, but I don't actually give a shit. By some standards, I'm a racist, whether I self-identify that way or not. Some people are deeply invested in the position that Democrats are the real racist. Some insist that even saying, "I have black friends" is racist in and of itself, while others counter that genuinely having black friends is dispositive of the opposite.
The only reason any of that matters at all is the power of calling things racist. I reject the premise, I don't buy the idea that some idea being "racist" has any relevance to its accuracy. I think BAP is wrong about this, I wrote as much below, but it has nothing to do with whether he's a racist.
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Is BAP a racist? I say he obviously is, and I can defend this with quotes from him.
You also think he is. Fair enough.
He even thinks he's a racist.
However:
No, because that's attempting to build a consensus. "We" aren't "OK" with things here. I think BAP is a racist. You think BAP is a racist. If someone else wants to argue to the contrary, it is the spirit of The Motte to hear him out.
This isn't the girl's middle school lunchroom. If you want to play consensus forming and shaming games, you have the entire rest of the internet to do so. Why you come back here, ban after ban, dogpile after dogpile, to a place where you are unwilling to abide by the rules and culture, is beyond me.
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What you are trying to do here is to use “racist” as a thought-terminating cliche, which eradicates the need to address the arguments being made on their merits. It is not surprising that you do it, as this strategy has worked amazingly well for last 60 years. The problem is that this only works if all sides of conversation share the same assumptions, that being racist is the worst thing ever, and it automatically entails you are wrong. Overusing this strategy has led to many people rejecting this assumption, and being much less impressed by the “racist” card.
Yes, BAP is racist, but the real question is, is he right or wrong?
What if, hypothetically, the consensus position - and I do want to stress consensus, this is not some far-left opinion, this is an opinion that the vast majority of Americans would agree with - that there do exist at least a certain number of people who have a certain kind of bias that makes them dislike certain racial groups, and who either hide that or are not aware of it themselves, is just true as a matter of empirical fact?
You seem to be saying “even if it’s true, you’re not allowed to Notice the Racism”. If I were talking to someone who openly admits to being disgusted by interracial marriage and wants to outlaw it, you want me to engage with their abstract arguments as to why it should be banned, and you want me to not acknowledge at all the hypothesis that their opinion might have something to do with the fact that it disgusts them.
I would hope you don’t this tack when it comes to other cognitive biases. If there were a left-wing poster who always defended the Democratic Party at every single juncture, like they clearly compromised their own stated principles over and over to desperately defend the Party’s actions no matter how much of a hypocrite that made them, would you really argue that pointing this out should be completely haram? I agree that engaging with their object-level arguments also is good and necessary, but do you really think that pointing out this pattern of behaviour over time is not acceptable?
It’s not “what if”, as this is clearly true. The question is, rather, so what?
No, feel free to acknowledge it, but so what? People are free to form their opinions based on disgust, and this is not considered to be any sort of demerit to their position, except in a couple of progressive hobby horses. For example, most gun control advocates are disgusted by guns. Should we discount their opinions based on that?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make in this paragraph.
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The reason you ask is not because of definitions or qualifications, but because it's an epithet you want to use against someone you find contemptible. So I say no, I'm not comfortable using that word for BAP, because it's an anti-white cudgel which will never be used neutrally.
Of course Alamariu is racist, but you want to call him that because you think it is a moral failure, a sin, and you'd like to build consensus around that perspective.
I would counter that objectively blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the US are all more racist as a group than whites, but that the concerns over racism are always, always pointed against whites in defense of the tawny races. It is for this reason that I reject your unstated premise.
One simple change and you arrive at the so-called racist conclusion. Once again Stormfromt-or-SJW shows that we're not so different, you and I. The difference is that you hate your own race and I love my own race. The way in which you hate whites is the way in which BAP hates Indians. And if you protest that you don't hate whites, I will refer back to your own argument that is obvious, and by your fruits you shall be known. That no amount of nuance can distract from the anti-white results.
You in this case might as well be you, plural, because I've heard this argument before and rejected it years ago. Twenty years past and I might have agreed with you, but in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty four, I simply don't care about racism, and neither should you, and neither should anyone. It's usefulness has expired, unless you want to shit on whites.
I think you replied one level too deep
Yes, sorry about the mistake. Not sure how that happened.
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I can sort of see the argument in the sense of 'it is more likely that the Asian diaspora will take over in the next few decades than it is that African descendants will cause an issue'. However, most people are concerned more about the stability of their day-to-day existence. BAME immigration might not imperil the 'macro' as much, but has more everyday living consequences in terms of violent crime and people subsisting on handouts.
Since I can't respond to that, I'll respond to the top reply as of now.
We had a strange rash of extra-spicy top level posts being deleted last year. But it died down recently. I hope this isn't it coming back.
@thenether appears to delete their comments regularly... looking at their profile I can't see any comments at all...?
With the help of archive.is, this is the original top-level post of @thenether:
Building off the HBD post below, Bronze Age Pervert has another recent tweet on these matters. In his opinion, focusing on black "dysfunction" is misguided because the focus should be on Asians and Indians:
I'm not really seeing the argument here. The US has experienced a lot of Asian immigration and it doesn't seem like it's approaching anything that could be described as "civilization-ending". And are Eastern and Southern Europeans any less "corrupt" than Asians and Indians? Whenever I see this kind of thing I'm reminded of what was said about the Irish:
or the Italians or any other group that came to the US and is now completely assimilated. The least BAP could do is provide some evidence, but I've seen that's not very common in his writing. It's more about vibes and feelings.
Kudos to you for combatting the deleter menace. If people are actually discussing the post and it's not a misplaced comment, then it shouldn't be deleted. Often when I'm 5 or 6 replies deep I look back at OP to see what we were talking about originally.
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I don't think he's wrong entirely, but he's wrong to attribute it to prejudice from having a bad experience with blacks. He's doing the same sort of psychoanalyzing that the left loves to do (if you dislike X it means you are secretly X).
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You linked an older thread, this is his thread from yesterday and yes I think he's on the mark. IQ nationalism is a failure mode of HBD awareness.
This doesn’t address OP’s primary complaint, which is lack of evidence.
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I think the similarity is less with the Irish and more with the historical German immigration, didn't cause problems for the English but was changing the culture until the English forcibly eradicated their culture at the time of WWI. BAP probably doesn't expect the dominant US culture to be able to pull off something similar with a larger Chinese population.
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In order to establish whether there are ethnic category differences in civilizational potential, we would need to measure the propensity to feel guilt rather than shame, the extent to which different groups instinctively feel the sharp pain of empathy when considering another’s suffering, the extent to which there is a natural domesticated interest in making others’ happy, and perhaps the extent to which emotions and trustfulness can be read on their face. No amount of checks and balances can actually stop a society filled with the sociopathic/“gunners” from corrupting institutions (we see them do this today as is (I am from New Jersey)), so BAP’s hypothesis is not invalid, just unevidenced.
The interplay between racial genes and morality has actually been studied recently, but I haven’t taken the time to delve in:
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-7
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-8
I don’t find it impossible or even improbable that different groups would have different levels of prosocial tendency (obedience, guilt, interest in the feelings of others). I’ve seen the role of genetics at play in my dogs who have vastly different characters despite only diverging 1000-2000 years ago. And frankly I also think this discussion is pretty important. Which doctor would I rather have, the intelligent one who uses all their cognitive energy for self-gain, or the less intelligent one who has a permanent cognitive reserve dedicated to checking his own moral behavior? The former is going to prescribe me unnecessary pills, not actually be interested in healing me, and may scam my insurance by sending me off to cousin doctors when it’s not necessary. The latter will take a little bit longer, but more efficiently arrive at the actual purpose of his social role.
Francis Fukuyama has some interesting political philosophy that tries to do big picture, Jared Diamond style analysis of why some regions have a less stable history in terms of whether a central ruler governing the local areas of its domain was able to assert power over long periods.
In this analysis, India is noted as being unstable in terms of central government, instead suffering waves of conquest by foreign powers from the North, I forget the historical elements. This led to, or exists alongside, to cultural tendencies towards nepotism, with family being more important than society broadly speaking. This is pretty awful paraphrase probably but the idea of different peoples having different cultural tendencies is not unusual.
But I think the power of culture is that, people, especially second-generation often grow up adopting the customs, and culture, of the country they live in. Such is cultural development for everybody. I think America still has a culture of meritocracy that should maintain, I mean presumably cultures are constantly at risk of change due to other, but often don't change. In any case, cultures are increasingly merged.
That wasn't because of foreign invasions. The extreme caste endogamy started during the Gupta empire, an empire of local origin, and during the middle of a long pause in foreign invasions.
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“Meritocracy” in a ruthlessly capitalist country can easily incentivize sociopathy (or at least an efficiency of mind that discounts actual moral feelings to a degree reminiscent of sociopathy). Let’s say I want a job at Google. Any evolved instinct to care for others or to experience guilt about moral choices (getting answers from a previous student; is working at Google even moral?) takes up cognitive space that could be allotted to my repetitive studies and task-list completion. It’s trivially easy for a sociopath-ish student to understand that he needs to pretend to have moral feelings and to do the requisite extra-curricular to signal this; these are small barriers in the pursuit of self-gain. Once he is a manager or CEO and running our nation’s search engine and algorithms, he’s not going to magically experience moral compunction about the consequences of what he’s doing. He was never trained in that, he was selected for having the least of that, and he may not even have it in him. Anyway: Google job secured, mates secured.
This is different than the selection in effect within a devoutly Christian society, as was common in European history (back when everyone genuinely believed the religion). Acting Christlike and having Christ-ian moral feelings were genuine sexual section factors on their own, and were also factors in being selected for high positions. (You also had interesting things like the practical wisdom of the society being clothed in Christian language, easily accessed to those who believe but less accessible to sociopaths). Obviously it was far from perfect as a social technology, but I think that this likely led to an increase in prosocial gene proliferation. People weren’t chiefly judged on their widget production but on their faith (capacity for moral and social feelings) and their imitation of the singular moral paragon.
What I mean by all this is that it’s entirely possible Europeans have higher prosocial genes due to 1400 years of evolutionary selection, that this is pro-civilizational, but that our current “widget meritocracy” is ultimately anti-civilizational because it rewards self gain through widget production which (because cognition is zero sum) necessarily punishes those with substantive moral feelings.
I'm not sure on selection of prosocial genes, will think on this - Fukuyama puts it culturally with regard to practises of Roman Catholic church disrupting familial inheritance etc
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The regions of Europe that became Christian later tend to due better than those that became Christian sooner. I.E. Northern vs Southern Europe. Saint Paul was converting Greeks in the 1st century, and Albanians were ruling and converting the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries; yet, these countries are basket cases compared to Finland or Lithuania. The last bastions of Paganism in Europe.
The regions of Europe that became Christian later were also much, much flatter, had more interior waterways, and in many cases had easier access to the Atlantic Ocean. I.e. factors that support large, contiguous empires, industrialization, and overseas colonization/trade vis-a-vis the Roman Empire's mediterranean core which was functionally centered around coastal enclaves largely isolated from eachother by rough (and expensive to economically develop) terrain. The southern European and Levant states didn't even have a non-Gibralter route to the world's oceans until the world-spanning empires who did have Atlantic ocean access were already established.
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If Christianity helped to spread "prosocial genes" in population, we would observe that people who were Christian the longest - Greeks, Sicilians, Southern Italians, Spanish and other Mediterrannean peoples - would be the most "prosocial" and people who were Christian only for short time - Nordic and Baltic peoples - would be wild raging two legged beasts.
Do we observe it?
The people who were Christian the longest would be various tiny middle eastern ethnicities. I think the largest and best continuity are the Maronites, who’ve been an endogamous Christian group since well before the Islamic conquests and who are doing quite well by the standards of ‘minority group living in a shithole country ruled by terrorists’. Ditto for Palestinian Christians(Arab Christians actually outcompete Jews in the Israeli education system) and copts.
The longest continually Christian ruled territory is probably northern Italy, although plausibly some other part of the carolingian empire(maybe the Ile de Paris) has it beat. And northern Italy, unlike the south, has outcomes similar to germany.
‘Christianity is mildly eugenic, but not enough to overcome most confounders’ fits the data we have. There’s plausible explanations; monogamy, reduction of cousin marriage, monasteries as a dumping ground for autists. I wouldn’t say there’s strong evidence but it seems to lean in that direction.
And these people are typical Middle Easterners, not "pro-social" at all outside their family and clan.
Why you exclude Central (with Rome) and Southern Italy? Excepting small and short lived emirate of Bari it was in solid Christian hands since Constantine.
Your picture of Christian history seems too rosy. Autists and other mentally ill were seen as possessed by devil and treated accordingly. Monasteries were, for most of Christian history exclusive institutions, serving as dumping ground for excess unmarried sons and daughters of aristocracy (mostly daughters), and were tiny, not enough to influence general genetic composition of population.
So what caused European specific high IQ genetic development? More plausible is theory of Peter Frost it was work from home.
More technically, cottage industry and distributed manufacturing.
In other civilizations, succesful craftsmen (presumably with high IQ and conscientiousness scores) moved to cities where they thrived and prospered until they died of disease. In Europe, guild system specific in European civilization prevented it, and distributed manufacturing evolved as workaround.
Under this system, craftsmen stayed in their villages, worked with material brought to them by merchant and sold him the finished goods. It was miserable existence combining drawbacks of city and country, life at complete mercy of the trader.
Still, succesful craftsmen had large families, who, unlike children born in plague pits that were premodern cities, survived. This way, by series of historical accidents, high IQ and conscientiousness genes spread in the population. Until end of guild system and development of capitalism put end to this process.
Yes, at least on this issue, Elon Musk is full of shit.
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You would need to account for the infusion of genes into eg Sicilians (8%+) due to the Muslim conquests, and then also account for whatever the Northern Europeans were doing with their own religion prior to Christianity. Always found it interesting that Odin is also a figure who sacrifices himself on a tree to benefit the world: “I know that I hung on that windy Tree nine whole days and nights, stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to my own self given, high on that Tree of which none have heard from what roots it rises to heaven. None refreshed me ever with food or drink, I peered right down in the deep; crying aloud I lifted the Runes, then back I fell from there.”
No, Odin sacrificed to learn secret of the runes for himself.
Anyway, you just disproved your previous assertion that Christianity was necessary to evolve "prosocial genes" in population. If old Germanic religion was as good, the Northern Europeans could stick to Odin and Thor and would be just fine.
It’s only disproven if you discount all the complexity of the question. Southern Europe had an influx of conquering Muslim genes and Jewish genes, whereas Northern Europe did not. And while we don’t know a ton about Norse Paganism, the figure of Odin shows interesting overlap in emphasizing the idea of self-sacrifice for social benefit, which is actually not common to all religions (as an example it’s absent in the figure of Muhammad). Rather than seeing Christianity as wholly distinct from every other religion, we should just consider the underlying social technologies of the religion and how they influence sexual selection — couldn’t Odinism have some but not all of the benefit of Christianity? I also wouldn’t deny that there are independent variables from geography (cold winter theory).
Except, in the myth, the benefit was learning secret of runes, the myth says nothing about how it was useful to anyone else than Odin.
??? Mo was happily married and living well, and sacrificed it all to preach his message to unfriendly audience, faced hatred, persecution, and finally had to flee his hometown to save his life.
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Replying to myself, but a tangential topic to look at would be whether the religion in a given civilization promoted prosociality the most or whether it promoted memory the most. There are religions where collecting information guaranteed greater chance of resources, mates, and offspring (Islam (the Hafiz), Judaism (The Rab)). In Christian Europe, the religiously informed priesthood generally did not have children, being celibate.
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I think mapping personality/behavior to race/ethnicity is iffy . This is entering into 'big 5' levels of vagueness here.
Blacks being more extroverted than other races is an elephant you're trying not to notice.
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I don't. I think it's obvious on the face of it. Genes and culture co-evolve. The question isn't if there are differences, the question is how significant they are on average.
Traits like aggression, impulse control, parental investment, fidelity, industriousness, cleanliness, and aesthetic preferences are all present in animal species, vary among subspecies, and are clearly genetic in origin -- especially in species without culture to speak of. Can branches of humanity, having been split off for hundreds if not thousands of generations, which evolved in very different environments (and very different cultures), possibly not have some substantial drift here?
A common sentiment around here is how silly those are who imagine that evolution stopped at the neck. Sure, (specific subspecies of) black people can run faster or have more fast-twitch muscle fibers, and that's because of genetic divergence, but no way could they be less intelligent!
But one of the weirdest things to me about many of the people on this board is that they will then go on to do the exact same thing with neural architecture. Sure, different populations have vastly disparate levels of intelligence, but no way could the same factors which cause that have substantial differences upon personality!
Let a collie be raised by cats, and it will try to herd things.
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It's about neither evidence nor vibes, it's about provoking a reaction in his audience. Nothing he says is serious. The man says his idols, and his model for the future, are pirates. The guy is a comedian.
In this case, his audience is fellow DR types, he wants to tell them to go fuck themselves, to get them to examine their beliefs, but in a way that they will have trouble countering.
Anybody on DR twitter has a pretty strong immune response built up against being called a racist for hating Black people, for thinking Black people are inferior. They've heard it all before and will spit out a knee jerk response before they even get all the way through reading BAP's tweet. If BAP wants to gadfly those people, hold a mirror to them to make them examine their beliefs, he can't criticize their racism for being hateful.
So instead, he criticizes their racism for being lame, for being off-target, for being stupid, for being insufficiently clannish and exclusionary. He uses their racism to question their values, but using values that they profess to care about: their manhood, their robust self-confidence, their ethnic particularism.
I think this is in part true, but it's also true that both he and his audience genuinely believe that Chinese, Indians, etc genuinely have spiritual racial qualities that make them deleterious to civilization. And it's possible to troll to make people think, but his trolling has - in practice - had the effect of creating a culture that vibes their way into genuine belief in nonsense. The idea of racial differences in psychology itself isn't implausible - we had a discussion about the racial characteristics of the Chinese a while back, and I found the arguments to the effect of few significant differences other intelligence to be much more persuasive than the ones claiming more significant differences. But the 'vibe' surrounding BAP isn't one that even engages in such arguments in ways that might lead to changing one's mind, in favor of an aestheticized sense of intellectualism and 'old books'
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What is his goal in doing that? Just to troll?
That's basically all he does. Trolls to cause people to examine their assumptions. His homoeroticism and his offensiveness are (at their best) to shake loose people's assumptions.
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He gets a lot of media converge. that alone makes me sus. Why is the media promoting this guy so much? Reminds me of Richard Spencer, and that ended well.
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BAP is nonsensical. I don’t even care that he’s a racist; his general ranting doesn’t even make sense. Everything from the gay softcore porn to the obviously-fake ruritanian accent to the justifications for his racism is just nonsense he uses as an aesthetic shield. I don’t think he cares about HBD except occasionally using it for rhetorical points. And as far as his opinion on ‘the Han’ and ‘the bantoids’ goes, well, there are examples of majority Chinese judiciaries that generally function well(China, Taiwan, Singapore), and the main issues with the US legal systems stem from negrolatry, not nepotism.
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The level of wanton illegal immigration in the last three years, and the last four months in particular, are so incredibly unprecedented that you simply cannot look to the past for comparison.
This is civilization-ending, but the civilization doesn't end overnight, and by the time you would agree with the seriousness it will be too late to do anything about it. It might already be too late.
Is that true? I don’t really have a head for the numbers here. How does it compare to the more regulated immigration in the gilded age, or the Cold War levels?
Currently more illegal immigrants are entering the US (over 300k) than children are born each month… that is unprecedented in US history. If it continues we will add an additional 40 million immigrants every decade i.e. a population equivalent in size to the existing African-American population.
A quick search turned up this:
And it's backed up with additional coverage:
Notice that these numbers are not the same as a lasting immigrant population. Last time I looked at this, most encounters ended in detention or expulsion. Sometimes one followed by the other. They also weren't unique; some number of border crossings are repeat visitors who've been thrown out each time.
Take a look at the October and November numbers here. I'm seeing about 46,000 "Notice to Appear" admissions for each. Even assuming every one of those disappears, immediately, into the general population, it's a far cry from the 300,000 that's getting reported.
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Do you have a source for numbers on the amount of illegal immigration? All the numbers I can find are at least a few years old so don't tell me anything about the last three years. e.g., Wikipedia has charts that only go up to 2016.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/border-numbers-fy2023
2.5 million encounters in a year sure seems like a lot. Presumably some were encountered, sent back and came again, others were never encountered at all.
It's also significant that over half were non-Mexican, Guatamelan, Honduran but from other countries.
Recall the scare about a PLA 5th column entering the US? I don't know about that but it looks like the US borders are so open they're sucking in people from other continents.
That is more recent than any chart I could find. The Wikipedia page I linked has that data going up to 2021 and I had also found it on Statista going up to 2022. Statista does mention a methodology change in March 2020, although it doesn't sound like it should affect that number.
But that's counting encounters at the southern border, which is very different from the count of illegal immigrants (which, admittedly, is a hard thing to count). Is the idea that you expect that number to be proportional to the number who make it across that border unnoticed? I'd worry about changes in enforcement over time adding a lot of noise there, especially if there's any policy changes encouraging repeat encounters for the same person. Also, this is ignoring illegal immigrants that enter through other methods; are you particularly more worried about the ones crossing the border illegally as opposed to overstaying visas?
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Whats the actual deal with the Chinese illegal immigrants? Are the numbers actually high? If so are we to interpret this as the situation in China being much worse than we thought, or is it some clandestine operation? The latter seems super implausible. If the numbers of captured people are really that high I can’t imagine nobody would be caught with a suspicious gadget or spill the beans on interrogation.
According to NBC, it's primarily political refugees. People who aren't feeling safe in China looking for somewhere rich and unwilling to extradite. Though it makes sense to sneak in some sleeper agents too - it's not like it's hard to procure guns or explosives in the US.
You can definitely be persecuted for speaking out, and everyone knows this. It’s also very hard to verify that you’ve been persecuted, so a whole lot of people claim refugee status who haven’t actually been persecuted.
We had a guy join my church for a few weeks, and he reported that he’d also attended Baptist, Mormon, and a whole bunch more. According to my Chinese wife accumulating a big list of churches you’ve attended is a strategy for claiming religious refugee status.
You can just list off different churches you've attended and pattern-match to somebody else's semi-recent claim of repression?
It didn’t make much sense to me. My best guess is trying to accumulate people that can confirm that you attended church services.
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IIRC religious refugees are resettled with their coreligionists by preference.
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There's lots of illegal Chinese immigrants. The trick is most of them come in legally for a brief stay and then just never leave. Their immigrant relatives help them get set up in America and they live relatively prosperous lives here compared to their lives in China.
And more recently many people of nationalities spanning the globe are pouring over the southern border. And a few of them are also Chinese. But presumably some other sort of Chinese people who can't easily scam the American visa system.
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I believe the actual process is: the illegals seek out border patrol to report to and then are released into the US with a court date.
And as you said: then there are the others who don't bother with that and don't show up in encounters statistics.
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I feel so seen, so known, so recognised! 🤣
Many English criticisms of Ireland are/were factually accurate, but incomplete and lacking context.
There's no question that 19th century Irishmen and women generally lowered the tone of the US, though.
If you follow this line of thinking further, though, isn’t the North of England, all of Scotland, all of Wales, and northern Ireland from roughly infinity BC until 1650 also extremely well-described by this, and isn’t this exactly the population that made up most of what would become the United States as it existed in 1776? It wasn’t the Norman-descended Roger Fitzwilliam doing most of the fighting at Bunker Hill, but rather the descendants of Scottish peasants and Yorkshiremen who had spent the previous thousand years continuously assassinating all of their earldormen. And it’s not like the Normans and Anglo-Saxons weren’t continuously killing each other in blood feuds as well; the latter invented the weregild, after all. And the former, well, is it an improvement over clannism if instead of just killing those outside your clan, you kill those inside it too? And I haven’t even gotten to the Vikings, whose genetic and cultural contributions to the North are huge and unmistakeable!
(I’ve clearly talked myself into the position that the above quote, meant to refer to Ireland, is in fact a universal description of all pre-modern societies without a consistently-enforced-over-time-and-space rule of law - and for most of our ancestors this is a very recent development.)
Yes, this is exactly the sort of "context" I was gesturing at (but failed to actually write) in my comment.
Strictly speaking, in the 1840s, the median Irishman was undoubtedly at a lower "civilisational level" than the median Anglo - but there are truer explanations for this than "the Irish are eternal untermenschen".
For example, you mentioned the Border people of the Scottish lowlands, and the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, who played an important role in US history - go back a thousand years for the second half of the first millenium though and you'll see that these peoples are descendants of Irish colonists in western Britain, which is at odds with the eternal untermenschen hypothesis.
For that matter, the median Irishman today is a little bit higher in a material/human capital sense than the median Englishman (though this is only a development of the past 20 years or so)
Are you saying that the group that was essentially sent by the English to colonise Ireland during the Plantation was actually in large part the descendants of earlier Irish colonists who had migrated to western Scotland? And are you referring to Irish colonisation by the Viking kingdom based in Dublin in the late first millennium, or are you referring to an Irish colonization that happened much earlier?
The latter. There were Gaelic polities that preceded the big Viking one - this is how Scotland came to speak Gaelic, and how the Picts were pushed east prior to Viking invasion
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Image taken from life of my phizzog on the right 😂
I didn’t expect to think “Florence Nightingale: WOULD” today. Yet, here I am.
The idealised version might be different from the real Florence, but if your alternative to that is Bridget, I can understand your choice 😁
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I was not expecting a @FarNearEverywhere self-doxx/face reveal today, but I’m here for it.
That's me on a good day! 😂
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It’s best to understand this as a completely irrelevant internecine feud between minor dissident right personalities, in this case between Indian Bronson and BAP. These two racial minorities are committed to litigating which of their respective groups is ‘worse’, classics include IB telling a white interlocutor to ‘get replaced’ after a racially charged remark about Indians was made. Apparently they have met each other in real life too. With regards to the Chinese, BAP has decided that Tibetans are noble Bronze Age pagans oppressed by the CCP, and so has a sworn hatred of the Han. It’s all childish nonsense, but so is much of the DR.
That said, it’s obvious to me that large scale Irish and Italian immigration did have a deleterious effect on corruption and graft in American politics, sure, especially in big cities on the East Coast, even if things worked out ‘fine’ in the end.
Twitter feuds like high school, but add 30 iq points
The DR ironically despite being putatively anti-diversity , is very diverse . if it were just limited to WaSPs there would be close to no one.
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I definitely took issue with BAP's last post, but I do agree with this one. Why would it be childish nonsense to identify the replacement of the cognitive elite of a civilization with racial foreigners (in 1 or 2 generations no less) as anything other than extremely significant? Can you think of similar events in human history where this happened that were not the result of conquest or colonization?
It's more childish, although more socially acceptable, to pretend like this doesn't matter or mean anything significant because of "meritocracy" or something.
Italians and Irish are European, and they completely assimilated. Identifying the assimilation of European immigrants to bank on the assimilation of non-European immigrants seems childish to me all right... the DR says that there's a racial component to the ability to assimilate. The DR also says that Irish and Italian are European. You say that DR is wrong because the Irish and Italians assimilated, that does not follow.
Blacks did not assimilate. Neither did Jews, their retention of their ethnic particularity continues to be highly significant in American politics, and very arguably detrimental to non-Jewish white people, unlike Italian and Irish identity.
Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?
From what I've seen, the Chinese are quite likely to assimilate into the white population as soon as the flow of new immigrants is cut off by the motherland's catastrophically falling birthrates, and tend to be quite politically apathetic relative to their population size outside of issues like college admissions. Even in the event of a war with China I wouldn't expect any sort of large-scale treachery, although if the government tries the whole internment camp thing again and rounds up some Koreans by mistake there will be federal casualties.
Indians on the other hand are both more politically astute (compare Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy to Andrew Yang as presidential candidates) and have multiple overlapping factors holding back complete assimilation i.e. stronger religious traditions (especially for Muslims that demand conversion upon marriage), a tradition of arranged marriages that seems to be making a resurgence among sexually frustrated zoomers, and a larger population reservoir to draw new immigrants from. In that sense Indians are much more like Jews and will likely persist as a distinct and politically salient population for far longer than any East Asian group.
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Im not saying that declaring the replacement of much of America’s cognitive elite with Indians significant is wrong (I recall writing a long top-level post that made the argument that it would be significant several years ago). I’m saying that the catfight between IB and BAP is childish, which it absolutely is, along with the babyspeak and many other things.
So you really think the US doesn’t look any different if large scale immigration from Ireland and Italy never happened? That seems ridiculously unlikely. And there is still evidence that different white gentile demographics vote differently, and Irish and Italians are still overrepresented by some margin at the top of the Democratic Party compared to other gentile white groups.
As for Jews, non-Orthodox (and the orthodox have less political influence and are more Republican) Jewish American intermarriage rates today substantially exceed those of Irish and Italian Americans in the middle of the last century. You just don’t agree that it’s assimilation because Jewish intermarriage is predominantly with progressive white gentile elites (many indeed of Irish or Italian descent), who obviously don’t share your politics.
Asian Americans have intermarriage rates of about 30%. So maybe? The question is more about the kind of society they’ll assimilate into, since as with the Irish and Italians you can’t replace the people and not replace the country.
As you know, intermarriage is the only true means by which assimilation occurs, and that was banned with great social and legal penalties for the vast majority of American history.
I do think the US looks different without large scale immigration from Europe but that's not the question... I would mark "assimilation" not as there are no longer any demographic correlations but as their identity not being salient in culture or politics. Some families identify on a surface-level as Italian or Irish as family lore or aesthetic, but it's not a salient part of the American political struggles. This is in sharp contrast with Jewish identity which continues to be an extremely salient component of political and cultural life.
I think my definition of assimilation as the identity no longer has saliency in political or cultural struggles works here. Look at the CW thread, issues of Jewish identity and advocacy come up all the time (and it's not entirely my fault for that either). They are politically, culturally, geopolitically extremely significant. Do we get to look forward to Asians and Indians behaving the same as Jews, retaining an intense identification with their actual (and not even fake) homelands and ethnicities?
I won't pretend to be able to predict the outcomes of the impending Hapa ethnogenesis, but early results do not at all look promising. What I will say is that this is monumentally more significant than the integration of European groups which are all much more similar to each other than any of them is to Asian populations.
It's almost comical because all of this shows how correct the DR's model of the world is.
European groups come to America. They retain demographic differences but assimilate into the White identity of the nation.
How can any reasonable person possibly compare that to the impending Hapa ethnogenesis? We aren't even talking about assimilation, we're talking about ethnogenesis. It's also fair to relate the assimilation of European groups as a white ethnogenesis.
That's why this is all more significant than childish loyalties to a non-existent "meritocracy." The real question is the question of ethnogenesis and its civilizational implications, and it's only the DR that actually appreciates that.
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Seems pretty stupid. It wasn't Asian empowerment that put someone like Ketanji Brown-Jackson on the Supreme Court - it was good old-fashioned American racial patronage. The idea that black Americans are so incompetent that they can't partake in political patronage is just wildly uninformed and ignores the masterful play of figures like Jim Clyburn, who is likely responsible for Biden's promise to pick a black woman for the court, regardless of merit.
To be clear, these groups ran organized crime networks that caused a ton of trouble. I don't really understand the perspective that people thought the Irish and Italians were corrupt, and boy-howdy were they wrong. Irish and Italian immigrants really did cause a lot of problems.
Right, but the point is that anyone at the time who made an HBD argument using that as evidence was laughably wrong. And maybe we should notice a pattern.
Strong disagree. What happened here, I think, is that there were several decades of brutal selection in an environment with a much weaker social safety net. Some substantial portion of the 'worst' Irish (etc.) simply failed to reproduce, and the ones left over are, naturally, closer to the Hajnali average. Plus intermarriage.
As for Italians, 'Italian' is not a race and Italy as a nation is a pretty new idea. Northern Italians are white. Southern Italians are something else. And to this day you'll see huge disparities between the two, modulo the same process as befell the Irish above. C.f. the Hajnal Line.
See also, http://www.anechoicmedia.org/blog/european_politics/
European races were and are different from each other in important ways, as breeds of dog or any other animal subspecies differ. This extends to all areas of life.
And yes, we can bring in large numbers of high-IQ non-Hajnalis and they will be perfectly capable of keeping their noses clean and contributing productively to society. But do they want to live in the same sort of society we do?
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Let's talk about pattern recognition. According to the progressive viewpoint, we're supposed to believe that the correlation between IQ scores and life outcomes is some sort of coincidence. We're supposed to believe that IQ tests are somehow biased against blacks and in favor of whites, and just sort of ignore how people from India and China score.
We're supposed to believe that tech companies are thick with a form of white racism that loves those Indians and Chinese but hates blacks and Hispanics. We're supposed to believe that the differences in development between Asia and Africa are total historical happenstance.
We're supposed to look at the great black uplift project that has spent fifty or sixty years accomplishing practically nothing concrete, and just nod along with those progressives when they assure us that this failure has absolutely nothing to do with those pesky IQ scores. We're supposed to avoid noticing that "structural racism" only really seems to keep those low-IQ races down.
There's an entire litany of convoluted unfalsifiable pseudo-religious argumentation that's required to explain why the world we live in just happens to look and function exactly like an HBD/IQ world but totally isn't really.
But we're the ones not recognizing patterns. Right.
I'm not sure what to say besides 'you have spectacularly failed the Ideological Turing Test at every turn, maybe spend 5 minutes pretending your opponents were human beings and then consider what they would say about each of these topics'.
I think that you're right, and that a progressive would never talk about things like this, but I do think he makes some points, and I'd really appreciate it if you could explain how you interpret them, or think that someone on the left might interpret them, instead of merely saying that if we spent five minutes it would be plain. Because, to me, it's not plain.
Here's what I see:
You're right, this is a strawman. Most people recognize that IQ tests are to some extent valid. Progressives would say something more that variation between IQ scores and life outcomes between groups are both due to the differences in how they are treated. (E.g. structural racism.)
I'm pretty sure this is a thing that is not infrequently believed. Look at all the talk of racist tests. Do I think everyone believes this? Certainly not, Asians have a reputation for being smart in the general population, I think. But I'm pretty sure that this is true of some people, and it is not uncommon to think that there is no IQ difference between groups.
I don't know that I've actually seen any explicit account of why Indians and Chinese do well, but it certainly does seem like if you want to stick solely to a "systemic racism" explanation (which, to be fair, it is by no means certain that a progressive will do), it would seem like you have to do something like this to explain the disparity: if disparities are always and everywhere due to racism, well, here is a disparity. In actuality, I expect most would think something like what I said before—that people think that Asians are smart, or have tiger moms driving them to success, which is, of course, far more accurate than that it's due to racism.
I don't think most progressives think about this much. I'm sure some think it's related to the extent to which they were subjugated by colonial powers and fallout from that.
I think that you're right that progressives would never talk like this, insofar as they would never mention that latter point, but his point stands: eliminating disparities has been a failure, and so it seems silly not to at least consider that the disparities might not be entirely environmental.
Yeah, this does seem like a mis-modeling of how the left think it happens, and you are right that this was a failure for him to model the other side. The left would see both failure and lower IQ scores as a consequence of racism, not as some great unknown.
But I think the overall picture is fairly clear. If you want to deny differences between groups, saying that they are due to racial dynamics in culture, I think something not too far from what @somedude is portraying his opponents as thinking seems like it needs to be believed. Yes, I don't think it's very plausible. But I think a lot of the reason that this sort of thing doesn't come up, but is implicitly believed, is because it's prevented from being considered, and a great many people have an aversion to addressing things like this, because they implicitly think it is a bad (as in, morally) thing to have these sorts of views.
Frankly, I long had the same impulse, and am certainly not convinced that every HBD poster here is a paragon of virtue.
But I don't actually know what you yourself think, @guesswho, and I will have a far better time understanding what your view of all these matters is if you tell me, instead of asking us all to imagine our own version of your views (or that of the typical person on the other side). I would rather learn than fight strawmen. This place is a little of an echo chamber, sadly; a breaking of the monotony would be lovely.
In more detail:
The correlation between IQ and income is real, but IQ and wealth are pretty much uncorrelated. Meritocracy-enjoyers like to focus on income alone, but wealth is generally the better indicator of quality of life and economic influence and political power and etc.
The correlation between IQ and income is strong; according to first google result, IQ explains 21% of the variance in income. That is actually a big correlation for a social science paper, but it still leaves 79% of the variance to be explained by other things. Structural racism being one of the hundreds of those things. (probably someone can find a paper with a higher correlation than that, but it's not going to be 1. There's huge variance over other factors).
Yes, IQ scores are an outcome of a system that involves both heredity and environment.
So the charge here is an attempt to conflate different arguments in order to muddy the waters.
The first argument, where people say the tests themselves are biased, is often a reference to a historical argument. A bunch of the figures Murray cites to show blacks being dumb are from older studies that were very definitely biased against blacks in a bunch of ways, including subject selection and other basic methodological stuff; people can look up those debunkings if they want details.
The second argument, where people say that IQ tests are not neutrally measuring innate potential with 100% accuracy and this is probably affecting blacks more than other groups, is not necessarily based on current testing instruments having the same documented problems with language and cultural context and etc. that old ones have. It doesn't rule that out as a factor, but it's not all the claim is based on; lots of other factors, from worries about childhood lead exposure in black neighborhoods to an intergenerational history of being excluded from academia plus underfunded or just bad schools plus etc leading to poor test-taking skills or low enthusiasm/effort for testing to questions about methodology and subject selection to etc. etc.
There are lots of reasons a social science measure may get confounded by other variables, conservatives agree with that point so hard that they want to throw out social science altogether half the time, except the HBD narrative requires this one single measure is 100% accurate and measures only the one specific thing they want it to measure and no other factors. Basically, no to that, there's still the normal room for confounds and plenty of reason to think black people would be uniquely confounded on this measure for environmental and cultural reasons.
'Believing there's no IQ difference between groups' is an uncharitable framing. The real belief is more like 'Does not believe current levels of evidence are sufficient to confidently conclude there is an innate genetic difference in IQ between groups', plus the assumption that until that is proven the utilitarian-optimal policy is to assume the null and look for other factors behind unequal outcomes.
Gotta go make breakfast, I'll see if there's time to do more later
On the whole, point taken. I read that "variance explained" can be misleading, in a way that underestimates the importance. Now, I don't actually know whether that applies here, as I don't know enough statistics, but from my epistemic status, it's entirely possible that it does.
While this may be true, (I don't know myself, but I assume you have some idea what you're talking about), people also often say this of modern tests where such a bias would be significantly less plausible.
I assume many of these could be tested. (e.g. see here). I would think a broader answer to some of these questions would be to look beyond America. National IQs do some of that, but not entirely (as subsaharan Africa is not exactly known for being the most functional).
I don't think this is true. There are a great many people who think there is no IQ difference between racial groups. But after explaining, you are right that it would be flawed when applied to your views.
I think the assumption there might be questionable. Racial pressures have clearly had fairly substantial effects on our society, including putting people where they are not qualified to be, even in relatively essential positions. At the same time, this makes it harder to hire for merit in general, as there's some level of explicit racial preferences that's legally dangerous to have, requiring it be laundered through lower standards and more subjective evaluations.
To be fair though, you do only say that it should be that there is no "innate genetic difference," which means you could recognize group differences in merit in practice, and think that the de facto racial quotas are bad.
But more broadly, if differences in groups are due to societally-caused unfairness, vs. that that's just the way things are, that might affect what we want to do with society, so it does have practical implications that we should care about. (Of course, a mix of causes is entirely possible.)
Going back to the "ideological turing test" point, I do think your views are more nuanced than many others who would take a no innate IQ gap stance, so I don't think that he failed as badly as you seemed to be saying. (You didn't contest otherwise in the last post, but just to reiterate.)
I do not accede to this consensus.
This is the conclusion pushed by a decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push, the opposite side of an equal decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push proclaiming the strength of diversity and so forth. Neither of the simple stories told by either side is even nuanced and complex enough to be 'true' in an empirical sense.
Has a black woman ever been promoted into a job she's incompetent at? Sure.
Has a white man ever been promoted into a job he's incompetent at? Oh FUCK yes.
We can start that list with 'every person I've ever worked for, and most presidents' and expand it from there.
Like evolution, capitalism is powerful force towards progress in the aggregate, but incredibly dumb and random at the individual level. Meritocracy is a nice idea, but it doesn't actually explain how the economy works beyond a small macro-scale correlation. The rhetorical picture painted that every hiring decision is 100% meritocratic and optimal, such that applying any new pressure on the selection process is necessarily a step away from optimality, is a pipe dream.
Has a black woman ever gotten a diversity nod when they weren't the strongest candidate on paper? Sure.
Would they have actually hired the best candidate on paper, or would they have hired someone that goes to the same yacht club as the CEO, or is tall with a firm handshake? Networking and presentation are very real things in this arena.
And I do actually believe the 'if two runners have the same speed but one has bad form, recruit the one with bad form' argument, and the 'diversity in backgrounds leads to broader problem solving across the team' argument. I expect a properly-calibrated push for diversity to lead to stronger teams.
That may certainly be countered by improperly-calibrated pushes for diversity driving things down, but I'm not convinced the hiring process in general is well-calibrated enough for that to matter, and certainly no one ever offers statistical data showing a national downward trend (or w/e) when making this argument.
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I would hope that anyone on this board has more nuanced views than 'many others' on their side.
Not just because we're supposed to be smart and thoughtful, but because 'many others' is such an inane standard in the modern world. It could refer to a collection of a few dozen tweets from anonymous posters, it could refer to some clickbait article writer being provocative for pageviews, it could refer to some idiot politician with no knowledge of the subject repeating slogans for votes, etc.
I think if we accept those weakman versions of our opponent's arguments as the correct thing to engage with and argue against, or especially as in this case if we assign those weakman views to the entire other 'side', we're both committing an intellectual sin, and making any possibility of discussion and learning impossible and pointless.
Also, more to the point: OP wasn't just saying 'some people in the world exist who believe this', they were using that as a framing to make an empirical argument that their beliefs were correct and the other side's were wrong.
If you just want to sneer at the other side or describe why you hate them, pointing at their weakmen and how annoying/dangerous they are is fine.
If you want to argue that your beliefs are right and theirs are wrong, then you absolutely have to engage with the strongest possible arguments in favor of their beliefs, or else you've demonstrated nothing at all.
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Linked article is hilarious in that it says blood lead levels haven't been higher for black people in the last ten years... so throughout the infancy and childhood of the black people currently taking IQ tests.
The fact that they take this as refuting the lead example is a pretty on-the-nose example of how competent/honest I expect the HBD side to be in citing statistics, no offense.
At any rate, yes, lead exposure in poor blacks has been falling for decades, and the IQ gap has been dropping for decades. We'll see what it looks like in another decade or two when the tested population mostly consists of people he's claiming have no differential in childhood lead exposure (though again, that's just one of many possible factors, chosen as a random example).
Yes, but note that it was international tests that had the biggest defects in teh original Murray citations. Note how we said that China was way ahead of us on education for decades, because they tested their smartest kids and we tested everyone. Note how doing these tests in Apartheid Africa or something would have given a big white/black IQ gap, but again with pretty obvious environmental confounds. Every country has a unique history of confounds and a unique testing environment, Africa has been a target of colonialism from all sides for a long time, anyone who's not a real expert in local matters is going to have a hard time interpreting results.
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What makes you think structural racism is more important than other thousands things? If hundred of things explain 79%, and they are equally important, this leaves 0.79% to structural racism.
USA Blacks speak same language as Whites and worship same religion amongst many branches of Christianity. That is unlike South Africa where native languages were different. This alone removes largest environmental factors.
There are none. Blacks seem less intelligent everywhere. In tropical countries. In temperate countries. In landlocked mountainous countries. On ocean shores. In market economy countries. In planned economy countries. In dictatorships. In democracies. In Muslim countries. In Christian countries. Everywhere since we have written history. You're making extraordinary claim, which requires evidence.
you're simply unrolling it to make more verbose. John got email from person who calls themselves a prince and asks John's help to retrieve large sum of money. John says that until there's enough evidence, it's utilitarian to consider email author as a scammer. Would it be uncharitable to say John believes he got email from scammer? (oh bad analogy, lol).
And I think you're liar. Your real belief is "if there are anything which proves significant differences in IQ between races beyond doubt, it should be hidden and denied". Your side (Eric Turkheimer) has said it. https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-ed5850b028d1 You're trying to hide it with many words.
If you were trying to make a serious refinement on helping others to understand your position, you could say which kinds of evidence could make you reconsider subject.
I warned guesswho for getting antagonistic, earlier, and the same goes for you.
Please refrain from accusing other users of lying. If you simply must do so, bring more evidence than academics on “their side.”
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There are plenty of progressives who will insist that IQ is just a number with no significant meaning. Reddit is full of them. (There are also plenty of people with high IQ who don't consider themselves progressive who will say the same thing)
I wonder how many people who say that believe that and how many just say that because they don't want to get canceled?
For those who don't believe IQ holds any meaning, I bet if you told them that they were smart, or a certain group was smart, they'd lap that up with no problem. But be more precise in your language and suddenly it's a problem (because it can reveal inconvenient truths, such as IQ averages across populations).
These same people will then push EQ as a valid concept even though it's nowhere close in terms of being defined as an actual statistically and scientifically valid concept like IQ. Or will say something like "High IQ people have low EQ."
"Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow". Force them to hear it without openly disagreeing, force them to say it, and they'll come to believe it. And if they don't the next generation will, and we're there already.
And yes, their beliefs are inconsistent. That doesn't mean they don't hold them. And if you can get them to confront the contradiction, they'll drop the part that isn't socially relevant.
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Just world fallacy, believing that everyone is born with an equal number of skill points but just allocated differently.
If IQ is real and some people have more of it, then there must be another totally real domain, such as EQ, in which those people are deficient.
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Who/whom, as always.
For the Reddit set, IQ is The ScienceTM in select situations such as where antivaxxers are found to have lower IQs*, but racist pseudoscience otherwise.
* And in the anti-vaxx example, they are generally displeased if someone asks whether race was controlled for.
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Less antagonism, please. You can make the argument without casting aspersions.
I kind of feel like if someone says 'these are the stupid and absurd things you believe', 'No I don't' should be an acceptable answer, even if it's low effort.
But yes, I could have just said 'Wrong' simply instead of using more words and getting more heated. So, sorry about that.
It is an acceptable answer, and I don’t mean to imply that you’ve acted with low effort or in bad faith.
The only problem with using more words was that you started to make it personal. Stick to your opponent’s claims and I’ve got no complaints.
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Actually no, average IQs among underclass/working-class Irish immigrants were substantially lower than WASP IQs - to say nothing of the rampant problems with predisposition to alcoholism prevalent among the Irish at the time - and these problems were substantially more pronounced among Southern Italian and especially Sicilian immigrants. The idea that the Irish and the Italians were every bit as capable and hard-working and freedom-loving as the native WASPs is a total fiction, only possible to believe given the intervening centuries during which the long and painful process of assimilating those populations into American society took place. The fact that many Irish and Italians intermarried into WASP families, thus reducing the genetic distinctiveness of those populations over time, does not mean that the populations were not originally genetically distinct, nor that they did not originally have significant hereditary differences which contributed to differential life outcomes between those groups.
Ok, so modern immigrants from Italy or Ireland will not have those mixed genes, and should be subjected to the same expectations of criminality and incompetence?
Keep in mind that in the cases of both Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, and Italian immigration around the turn of the century, the people coming to America were not a totally representative sample of the native populations of the source countries. The waves of Irish who flooded into America after the Potato Famine were destitute peasants. Subsistence farmers. “Shanty Irish”. The Sicilians who came over to America were coming from arguably an even more backward and violent society than that. Selection effects are very real.
And yes, there is in fact a substantial native Irish criminal class today, involved in drug trafficking and petty crime. An Irish person from that stratum of their society would indeed be expected to be a highly suboptimal addition to American society. Ditto for an unemployed Sicilian goombah. There are very substantial cultural and genetic/ancestral differences between people from different parts of Italy; a fair-haired descendant of Milanese Lombards is, on average, going to display reliably different traits than a heavily Mediterranean-descended Neapolitan or Sicilian. (And both will be different from a Sardinian.)
Underclass Europeans usually don’t get to immigrate to America; even Albanian refugees and Moldovan brides are somewhat selected for being a cut above average compared to their social stratum(granted that stratum may well be Albania). So modern Irish and Italian immigrants are probably highly successful for the same reason Nigerian immigrants are.
Modern immigrants, yes. But OP’s question was implying that there was no important dissimilarity between 19th-century European immigration and 21st-century European immigration. The modern American immigration regime for non-border-jumping legal immigrants is indeed very selective and expensive, and for that reason I would expect an Irish or Italian immigrant in 2023 to be highly dissimilar to an impoverished Ellis Island immigrant.
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It would seem like different races do different crimes, which has been my argument for a while . If your bitcoin gets stolen, bank records stolen, nft rug-pull, or crypto exchange goes bust, it was not African Americans who done it. Japan and south korea has a kid porn problem. Italians have a mafia problem. South America has a political corruption problem. Russia has a cybercrime problem. Every country, race ,ethnicity has problems. just focusing on blacks ignores other crime and groups.
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Even beyond the Mafia stuff, Anarchism used to be huge among Italian immigrants and they carried out some pretty horrific terrorist attacks and assassinations.
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I mostly agree with you.
Part of the occasional optimism on the dissident right seems to be the idea that because European colonialists found subjugating large parts of the world pretty easy in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, these people are actually naturally subservient, supposedly lack white cunning or warrior spirit and so on, and are generally less competent, and therefore as soon as the West is shaken from the slumber of white guilt it will actually be pretty easy to re-establish maintain control over everyone else, just like South Africa pre-94 for example. This is pretty specific but I’ve seen it many times, including from BAP.
I recall a post here that cited some extremely high homicide rates for young Italian American men at some point in the 20th century, likely similar to those for young black men today.
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Are you baiting to have it be cited here, to make BAP look better? Okay, you win. That «recent tweet» is half a year old. The actual argument he makes is this one.
For what it's worth, I (as a person inclined to be somewhat positive with regard to East Asians and utterly pessimistic about any political proposal of BAPsphere) think this is his strongest thesis in ages. He actually enumerates plausible (and I think true, but of course one can protest and demand statistics to back up the inflammatory etc. etc.) factual premises and delivers his conclusion, he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish, and he mostly speaks like a real person with a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy, rather than a flamboyant auto-caricature.
And of course you would not see «civilization-ending» outcomes. China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired. It is not absurd that the Irish have destroyed a certain America (as @2rafa often argues) – but now that the Irish are Americans too, they get to weigh in whether it was a good or a bad thing, and they're not going anywhere anyway.
You see, culture is fragile, human practices are fragile, valuable conventions are easy to ruin and hard to restore. Consider the following bizarre analogy. Add a random homeless person off the street to your household, have him eat and sleep together with your family (assuming you have one) – it will probably be ruined (some idealistic people have tested this approach). Add a random well-behaved stranger – nothing outwardly catastrophic will happen, you might become friends even! And splitting domestic chores, and paying rent – think of it! But your family will change, will become something pretty nonsensical. Maybe Bryan Caplan would argue that your household income will increase, that your children will be more likely to prosper, thus it is moral and proper to make this choice? The philosophy that BAP subscribes to detests and rejects this sort of crude economic reasoning, deems it subhumanly utilitarian. I suppose a real American must call BAP a sentimental fool then.
"Skrewl"??
School, it’s one of those babyspeak things.
I think Rush Limbaugh coined that one.
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BAP insists on talking like Borat swallowed a 1932 encyclopedia Britanica for some reason.
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I’m not sure if he’s talking about native born American Chinese or simply students from China here. If he’s talking about Chinese students coming to American universities, it’s hardly surprising that they don’t donate — they aren’t Americans and have no reason to invest in American universities. They’re coming to get the name-brand diploma and afterward a good number of them go back to China. If American kids were graduating from Mexican universities, it’s unlikely they’d donate to their schools either.
I don't think there exists the distinction that you think exists.
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Maybe if you're used to his non-standard spellings and such. He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me (albeit a very clever one, though not as much so as he seems to think).
Misspellings are allegedly a mechanism to invoke algorithmic suppression and not have your content revealed to the general audience. I do ignore them.
People generally do not become any smarter with age so that is okay. If one can make an argument at all, it can be made at 15 and with a teenager's mentality. Except when an argument depends on accumulated experience, like his time in academia.
You say this like arguments that depend on accumulated experience are some weird niche issue that barely ever comes up in real life.
If I were to negatively compare someone to a 15-year-old, what I would typically mean is along the lines of "You're making the same mistakes that most of us grew out of when we were early teenagers, but somehow you haven't learned from them yet". For example, talking like a sesquipedalian thesaurus and thinking it makes you sound intelligent (it does - but not to intelligent people), failing to clearly distinguish between the real world and one's own feelings, being unable to model other people as independent agents with their own desires and fears, and so on.
So, which of those defects are present in his thread?
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That’s a lot of words to basically say “merit wasn’t being properly measured and when properly measured for it Asians don’t measure up.”
Now whether it is true is a different matter.
I think the confusion is between merit vs potential. Merit would seem to measure how qualified someone is based on the usual objective things like GPA. potential is what happens after graduating.
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That's a few words to express a fairly unjustified level of disrespect.
No, Asians really are meritorious as far as potential for educational and professional attainment goes. They get high scores, and those scores translate into life outcomes. A 99.9th percentile SAT taker comes in, a 99.9th percentile employee comes out and waves a diploma proving his or her value to the employer. This is a perfectly reasonable meritocratic system, as meritocracy has been defined for a very long time.
BAP is a romantic who believes that merely excellent outcomes are not what elite education is about; that the objective of such institutions is finding and riding the coattails of geniuses and heroes. Glory isn't just a better-ascertained «merit».
His whole point seemed to be “sure they come out and do perfectly respectable nice upper middle class jobs but they arent doing something great or amazing”
He is saying greatness is the goal which means merit is how great could you become
This would be fine if he had anything to back it up, but his only "evidence" is complaining that there are no Chinese Feynmans... but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century.
Incidentally, by my count 7 of the last 50 Nobel laureates in Physics and 3 out of 16 Fields Medal winners were Asian.
It's worth noting that this is roughly inline with Asian representation at Harvard today (14%) and most Nobel laureates were born before 1950 -- research labs weren't really accessible to a billion Asians then. So not sure how meaningful those numbers are in either direction.
(Side note: interestingly, Fields Medal winners cannot be older than 40).
I noted that there is the question of whether he is right.
I guess the question so what is the right denominator for determine over or under representation.
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This is cope, of course. Our Feynmans are called names like «Ilya Sutskever» and «Noam Shazeer», or if you want a Gentile, «Alec Radford». The focus of frontier research has shifted from bits to bytes and from public institutions to for-profit companies, while professional celebs have picked up the slack of mental representation for heroic figures. But sci-fi valorization of flashy fundamental physics results, partially driven by military agendas of the XX century and purely aesthetic raygun gothic midwittery, persists; and so people try to explain the non-real phenomenon of our era lacking Feynmans.
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good find. the extended thread was omitted
I never bought into this trope that east asians lack creativity to counterbalance high Iq. I don't see it. for the math paper I'm working on, most of my sources are from Chinese authors.
Do they not donates as much? I dunno. The evidence suggests Asians are big donors:
Same for foreign gifts: Interests based in China contributed over $168 million to 46 American colleges and universities during a six-month period in 2021 https://www.thecollegefix.com/nearly-170m-in-contracts-and-gifts-flowed-to-u-s-universities-from-china-in-2021/
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There is an argument to be made that many of the scientific achievements and breakthroughs were low-hanging fruits that were inevitable to be discovered. It's just that the Enlightenment took place in Europe and thus most of the low-hanging fruits of scientific knowledge were thus discovered and produced in western nations. (Not to disparage the works of these great scientists and inventors, but if someone is making the argument of why another population is not producing great works, well there is a reason for how these great works were created, and as @you-get-an-upvote make's in a comment down stream "here aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century." Scott Alexander made a similar argument last year on why there aren't any more Einsteins which I largely agree with his reasoning here.
Whatever your thoughts on modern technology may be, many tech companies that provide entertainment or convenience to us today were founded or cofounded by Asian Americans. YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Yahoo, Snapchat, Nvidia and many more exist thanks to the vision and hardwork of Asians. Maybe these tech companies are the low-hanging groups of the Internet era, but that just illustrates my point further.
I will acknowledge BAP's argument is specifically mostly about Chinese people and not Asians in general... but I doubt that's a distinction that matters in enrollment into Universities. Racial breakdown in admissions only goes to the level of Asian, after all, and many Chinese surnames are the same/similar to surnames from other countries near China. The only way to know for sure is if they are a foreign student enrolling directly from China, but foreign students are always a small percentage of people admitted and foreign students are usually not eligible for many scholarships/financial aid, meaning they pay the full tuition. So the universities are making money off foreign Asian students through tuition. Regarding donations "in 2022, more than 80 percent of the donations came from 1 percent of the donors", so it really shouldn't matter whether the other 99% of people that attended these universities donated. Besides, given the clear anti-Asian bias against admissions in a university such as Harvard, I imagine that would have an impact on an Asian's decision to donate to Harvard.
Also, I don't buy his argument that discrimination against Asian Americans leads to dropping the idea of meritocracy. If I'm straw-manning his argument here then please let me know, but he's essentially saying
There are better explanations that better explain the affirmative actions of Universities, such as social justice, equity, cultural Marxism, etc and I don't think the fact that Asians were being discriminated against played a big role in the creation and propagation of these ideas. At best a minor justiciation but I seriously doubt anyone in university admission made a train of thought the way BAP did for his hypothetical University admissison officer.
I can't believe it. So much of BAP's argument is built on shoddy premises, the only one that I can't rebut or hasn't been addressed by someone else already is his observations regarding the behavior of Asians when he was going to school since those are his observations and I didn't attend the school he went to, so maybe what he observed is true, but that's just a minor piece of the overall argument.
I think the lack of geniuses comes more from systemic issues in education. Asians aren’t producing geniuses, but neither are whites or Hispanics or blacks. But our system is not only not set up to produce geniuses, but to stymie the development of any who happen to come along.
From age 5 to finishing your BS degree, success is based on your ability to sit still, follow directions, and produce reams of worksheets and essays on topics you don’t care about. Any actual genius would be bored stupid. The removal of gifted classes means that you move at the speed of the stupid kids in the class who don’t understand anything or care that much. The system is poorly suited to teaching independent thought, as it needs to teach to the tests and hit all of the objectives. Having open ended discussions doesn’t produce measurable results so teach kids to regurgitate the correct answers.
The grant and publication system also locks in mediocrity. If you need to get grants to have a job, and you need to show that your experiment will work to get the grant, you pretty much have to stick close to what is known. Adding the publish or perish mandate makes it more difficult to peruse big projects because they take too long. So where could these breakthrough ideas come from? Nobody has the money an$ freedom to think big.
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It's a sane reason to dislike the Anglo-American tradition of clinging to rheumatoid institutions that turn A into B when what you need is something that turns A into C. But look, they say, enough of the C's you get are B's as well, or there's a second institution that turns B into C as a side effect, or B and C are interchangeable in current conditions.
But then something changes, and everyone starts to cry about how inefficient the institution is, we need 10 of C, but it's producing only 8 of them, we need to fix it to make more B. Fuck no, you don't need it to make B, you need a different institution to make C!
It's not a revelation that the Ivies dislike Asian students because they are not donating as alumni. But you know what they should do? Use projected total donations as the admission criterion. Hire some actuaries and build a table that estimates how much every applicant is likely to earn and how big of a share of their total lifetime earning they are likely to donate to Harvard and admit the most profitable applicants. Oh, a future high earner claims to be unfairly judged to be stingy? No problem, they can sign a contract with the university and get a donation-sized price of admission.
What about the prestige of the institution? Well, come up with a figure of how much money you are willing to sacrifice and make your admission essays about the ways in which the student will glorify the existence of your university.
Oh no, such primitive, mercantile approach is ruining the vibes-based reputation of your institution? Tough fucking luck. Oh no, other colleges that promise the best education for the least amount of money are stealing the brightest applicants? Mission fucking accomplished.
There are a lot of (I assume) illegal contract types that could make this easier. I wonder how admissions would change if Harvard demanded 5% of lifetime earnings of all its students, maybe with a billionaire heir waiver in exchange for a one-time $50m donation.
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That would be telling; it would be common knowledge that they were just a self-licking ice-cream cone at that point and they would lose their prestige. They have to pretend to be something else.
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