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One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"
The fundamental problem with HBD as it is typically advocated by dissident progressives and users here on theMotte is that if the hypothesis is correct (and that is a big "IF") the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero. Accordingly I feel that it only appropriate to question why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested in their opposition to "blank slatism". I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team.
Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people? Consider the story of the dangerous teen who was going to die of a heart condition, got a transplant refused for being obviously low-value, got national press attention for being black, got the heart transplant and promptly got himself killed in a police chase a couple of years later?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-teen-who-got-heart-transplant-dies-car-chase-n334001
Can't you conceive that people think it's unjust? There's not many spare hearts floating around, he was given a rare chance due to race (and naivete) and squandered it.
Or the Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread where this liberal sees a formerly white suburb being violently ethnically cleansed by blacks but he and the authority figures can only process it through the lens of 'damn, it'd be racial dynamite - we'd better cover it up so the Klan doesn't hear about this!' and 'well pretty soon the problem will be solved because there won't be any more elderly whites living here'.
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984
Or the Rotherham grooming scandal where vast-majority Pakistani Muslims were raping vast-majority white girls only for the police to cover it up lest they seem racist. That got swept under the rug, along with all kinds of cases where blacks murder whites - but there's always coverage on the latest updates for the Emmett Till case, or the ongoing worship of George Floyd as some kind of secular saint. The privileging of blacks over experienced air traffic controllers recently, or pervasive diversity quotas throughout the Anglosphere (the RAF for instance). University entrance quotas.
People think these things are unjust and they see HBD as a way to counter the root cause - the narrative of white racism causing innately equal groups to stratify. They see insult as well as injury when the media goes out of its way to present whites as incompetent, bad-tempered and criminal: https://twitter.com/stupidwhiteads
What happened to colour-blind meritocracy? It got eaten by DEI because blank-slatists conclude that different outcomes are caused by discrimination. Unless you have HBD, there's no chance of getting colour-blind meritocracy. The fallback narrative of 'oh, if we went out and told US blacks they were actually just stupid and violent, they'd have a massive violent tantrum' is silly. They already are massively violent and bitterly resentful of whites. Strengthening and heightening that attitude with anti-white media worsens the problem. What kind of social stability are you buying that's worth wrecked cities, obliterated communities, endless crime, occasional mass riots and (since in this context we're accepting HBD but being too cowardly to admit it) knowing that you'll be paying this price forever?
If we don't get rid of the racism narrative now, what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees' show up from sub-Saharan Africa complaining that we oppressed them/droughted them and demand free things? Or when superintelligence gets made by the Google/Microsoft blob that pre-program in the racism narrative?
I can conceive it I just don't believe that's the real motive.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians. As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit. The greatest trick the DNC ever played was convincing the media and a whole generation of idiots with PHDs that they weren't the real racists.
This just isn't true. Most bush-era democrats or academic leftists, or any way you can interpret 'pushing DEI' back then are not now pushing the idea that blacks have lower average IQ and that this has significant policy implications. Where do you get these ideas?
You are wrong, the reason that Ryan Long, Bill Burr, and the Babylon Bee's various bits about woke people and racists believing essentially the same things are so funny and have gained such traction is because it is true.
Wokes may be secret HBD believers- for my part I think most of them really do drink their own koolaid, but sure, a lot of what they do pattern matches to having HBD beliefs but worshipping blacks for whatever reason- but they're definitely not pushing HBD.
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You’re conflating “having beliefs that appear the same” with “the same people.”
I don't think I am. Neither in Specific cases like Spencer, Yarvin, Unz, Sailer, Et Al. Nor in the more general category of Secular Progressive Blue/Grey-tribe Academics who mostly reside in California.
As I've observed in previous threads on the topic, that the Sunni and the Shia consider themselves to be completely different and often go to war against one another does not invalidate "Muslim" as a meaningful category.
Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.
Yarvin was a libertarian before he was a reactionary.
Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 and was "He was publisher of The American Conservative from 2007 to 2013". "He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly"
Sailer "Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][12] "
As far as I can tell, you are just factually wrong. These people were not pushing 'DEI' during the 'bush administration'. Which is what you claimed. And their ideology before being reactionary seems to have mostly been conservative.
Even if you were right about those people, it wouldn't matter because you claimed "I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now". If that was true, then there would be around 50x more people pushing HBD. A lot of people were pro-diversity two decades ago.
Also, people change ideologies sometimes. Reactionaries have to come from somewhere if there were fewer of them 20 years ago. But a lot of them seem to have come from conservatism.
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I think the reason that it isn't true is that people whose job it was elect Democrats, or who wrote intersectional social theory papers, or worked on diversity in HR during the Bush administration are, almost entirely, not currently HBD believers. I don't really see what the 'wokes are racist' youtube video has to do with that.
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