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HBD is not a reason in favour of meritocracy so much as it is a reason against the current undeserved ethnic spoils arrangement we have. That exists by dint of the idea that all people are the same, and therefore all outcomes across groups should be proportionate, with no variance, and any deviation from that is necessarily due to -isms. By shattering the idea that all people are fundamentally the same, we remove any reason to think that outcomes across groups should be the same, which is an important step in shuttering the affirmative action industry.
Once AA and naked racial spoils agitation are removed we will naturally return to meritocracy.
This gets back to that effort-post I need to write, but, for some "outcomes across groups should be the same" doesn't need a reason, because the "should" in that statement is expressing deontic modality, not epistemic modality. That "equity" — equal outcomes across groups — is a terminal value, a moral obligation of our society to provide, and which needs no further justification given its self-evident moral correctness. Like the Jamaican HBD blogger who argued that blacks are indeed genetically predisposed to higher criminality, but that their incarceration rate should be population-proportional no matter how much more crime they commit, as part of his general position that society is obligated to redistribute from 'genetic haves' to 'genetic have-nots' however much is necessary to equalize group outcomes despite the differences in ability, intelligence, behavior, etc.
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Exactly colorblind meritocracy isn’t a stable political equilibrium. I guess I am a progressive in the sense that I do want to see society improve. Americas thirst to improve will always exists. 15% of the American population getting .5% of the seats at Harvard based on a colorblind meritocracy sticks out. All the disparate results will look like something we should improve. The solution back in the ‘90s was blaming black culture. Going back to rich white people lecturing on culture feels like it’s going back and is an example of a wrong policy solution.
The one interesting thing is the wokesters seems to have implemented Affirmative Action for the NBA’s slam dunk contest as the winner the last two years was a white guy with only one NBA star participating and the rest minor leaguers. We’ve gotten a black Harvard President and a white slam dunk winner. But I think it’s better having an old white dude running Harvard and watching Jordan dunk. I don’t think a meritocracy is sustainable without a general understanding of hbd. And I wish Hanania would speak directly on how his color blind meritocracy is going to be sustainable.
The bad black culture meme worked for about 50 years. When that didn’t fix things we got wokism. We aren’t going back to blaming culture and we need a new reason why.
Colorblind meritocracy can be stable. Capitalism should naturally produce one, so most of what you need to is just keep the government small.
Unfortunately, keeping the government small is not stable.
It’s not with a Democracy which most capitalist are.
Yeah. Unfortunately, more despotic governments have their own problems as well.
The American system was better before the successive democratic innovations like primaries. I wish we could have a more stable system.
But I also don't trust the current elite class much, so, we're kind of stuck.
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Only through the lens of blank slatism and a pathological, reality-denying devotion to the idea of equality between peoples. Why insist on believing that evolution stopped at the neck? I cannot fathom it.
If you want to improve society, are you best off using your force multipliers on high value or low value propositions? Why bother spending billions bringing the dismal up to the lofty heights of "barely acceptable, sometimes" when the brilliant could do so much more with it?
Maybe it is time to start leaving some children behind.
Well the progressive worldview is exactly the opposite.
We should help the most needy the most. (Marxists and Christians of the world, unite!)
The low value proposition is the high value morality.
(For the record, people can and do hold these views without being a blank statist. Freddie deBoer, for example.)
Welfare already does that.
There's no additional need to patronise the dismal by pretending for the sake of their egos that they're just as good as everyone else and definitely got their positions because they're awesome and not through several thumbs on the scale, and that they absolutely pay their way and contribute meaningfully.
If you MUST keep a pet population of ethnic underclasses for some reason, I still don't understand why you'd throw good money after bad trying to convince them they're not as obviously deficient as they actually are. Why do we need to throw away billions salving the egos of people who can never meaningfully give anything of worth back?
The message should be to just take your handouts and be grateful. If you want to escape the shame of basically being a pet of the taxpayer, do better in life.
As you can see from looking around, putting a thumb on the scale in their favour just leads them to believe their own hype and demand more and more. They are ironically too stupid to understand that they didn't get where they are through merit at all.
Because if you won't, they'll provide a political power base for those who will.
The normal answer to that would be "But the 60% of the population I'll be taking the billions from are a much larger political power base". Unfortunately the greatest trick the progressives pulled is to convince white people they don't matter.
Not all that hard a "trick" though, given how we're unusually-outbred WEIRDos, and given their ability to keep WWII as one of the core defining narratives of modern society. So long as 'white people thinking they do matter' can be pattern-matched to the Austrian Painter and his snappy-dressed minions (still providing the basic visual short-hand for "evil" in all our entertainment for over seven decades)…
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I’m not a progressive so you don’t need to convince me.
As you can see from looking around, putting a thumb on the scale in their favour just leads them to believe their own hype and demand more and more. They are ironically too stupid to understand that they didn't get where they are through merit at all.
Keep in mind the real demand signal frequently comes from well-off do gooders, who on average are quite intelligent, in the US at least. The underclass doesn’t have political power.
You used italics for quotes. The ordinary way to quote things is to use ">", so that it looks
If that was deliberate, ignore, of course.
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The line from Colonel Jessup comes to mind: “I would rather that you just said ‘thank you’ and went on your way.”
Indeed.
Hence the pipeline of non-Asian minorities enrolling in schools they wouldn’t have gotten into in the first place if not for affirmative action -> Noticing that their white and Asian classmates are far stronger academically -> complaining that professors or The System are racist -> demanding further accommodations.
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Even places that lack the belief in the biological equality of different populations have mostly ended up with some form of racial spoils system à la affirmative action for Malays in Malaysia or on the basis of caste in India, or else simply tried to expel the higher achieving population as Uganda did with the Indians or most Medieval European states did with the Jews at one time or another. The stated explanation is usually some form of "disparate economic outcomes between ethnically or culturally distinct groups are an incitement to violence and the higher achieving group must either pay the rest of us a bribe for their own safety or get out."
Only in places where the different groups exist on a continuum, Latin America for example, do we see less conflict on these particular grounds (I suppose you could argue that the class-based violence that occasionally consumes these countries is a proxy for it, but poor black Brazilians hating their rich white overlords because they're rich and not because they're white seems like an improvement over our situation). It may be trivial to say that there would be no racism if we all interbred until there were no distinctions, but it seems like we might only need to go halfway or less to get that benefit.
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