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The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
Violent disagreement does not preclude fundamental commonality. Gambino soldiers and Luciano soldiers kill each other, and yet are both members of a single well-defined set. Stalin murdered Trotsky, yet I do not think any fundamental ideological difference existed between the two.
The proper way to draw ideological borders is a non-trivial question.
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity, in the same way that Gambino and Luciano soldiers believe in "their thing", and Stalin and Trotsky believed in revolutionary socialism. That their understanding of the realities of racial identity and what it means are opposed doesn't make any more difference than it does with the mafioso or the revolutionary communists.
Stalin and Trotsky doubtless had many finely crafted ideological differences, but their ideology was largely bullshit, and none of those differences actually cashed out into differences in action: both men believed that they were the champions of an unstoppable progressive force that justified a practically-unlimited amount of murder and destruction in pursuit of "the greater good". As it happens, one beat the other in the power struggle, and the loser got exiled and then killed. The fine ideological distinctions appear to me to be meaningless trivia, because they never cashed out in actual differences in action. I am not persuaded that the details of Trotskyism as an ideology actually explain why he lost, or indicate that he would have been any better if he had won.
how do the differences between the progressive left and the white-identity right actually cash out in action and policy? The progressive left demands discrimination against whites and Asians as racial groups, the white-identity right demands discrimination against blacks and hispanics as racial groups. How is this not Gambino and Luciano, Stalin and Trotsky?
I do not believe that racial identity is necessarily important or inescapable. I believe that it is at least possible in principle for people of different races to live together in peace without either top-down race-based tyranny or bottom-up racial predation. This is a distinct difference between my ideology and that of both the progressive and white-identity types.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
A major component of FC's point is that while they may not be synonyms they are of a kind.
I recognize that to a Marxist Revolutionary the subtle nuances that differentiate Stalinism from Trotskyism will feel critically important, and that Stalinists will be offended by being lumped in with the Trots and vice versa. But to someone who is opposed to Marxism in general these are distinctions without a difference.
Likewise, whether you're a race essentialist who believes in HBD or you're a race essentialist who believes in intersectionality makes little difference to someone who genuinely believes in a colorblind meritocracy because you're an enemy either way.
Literally none of the arguments that you have made applied to the positions that I assume aquota espouses.
You are saying:
I hope you can see that that's a terrible argument.
Most here are trying to say that they aren't racial identitarians, that they aren't like progressives on those matters, that they are pro-meritocracy, and so forth.
Your response is to go back and say that we can lump them in as the same thing, and that protests are vain.
Okay, let's assume that reasoning is legitimate.
Then,
You may try to argue that you're not like those people, but really, you're in the same camp: those who post on the motte, and self-identify as on the right. We should dismiss any such protests.
I of course do not endorse such reasoning, but I hope you can see the parallels.
But please, characterize people's positions fairly, and listen when everyone's telling you that you don't understand, that we're not (most of us) like what you are saying. A claim does not escape being a strawman of someone's position just because there exists someone else in the world who might agree with that claim.
Edit: spelling
I think a more accurate summation would be something along the lines of...
1: Those who argue that racial differences (on average) outweigh individual differences are effectively arguing for racial identitarianism.
2: racial identitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with a colorblind meritocracy
3: Ergo those who argue that racial differences outweigh individual differences are lying when they claim to support a colorblind meritocracy
I hope you can see the problem there
Alternatively, you could accept that the differences (sadly) exist, work on creating a society where people who differ (in any particular way we're talking about) will be treated as well as possible regardless of race, and fight back against anyone trying to use equality of outcome as a measure of racial discrimination (at least, without controlling for base rates).
On average, men are bigger and stronger than women, but the bell curves do have some overlap. We can try to create a world where shorter people can reach the top shelves, and weaker people can open jars, and where hand-to-hand violence isn't a way to resolve conflicts, without turning society into an identitarian battle of the sexes. And we should not look at jobs that require physical strength, see that they're almost entirely male, and claim that this is the result of discrimination against women.
Nor should we classify the job as "a man thing", or try to keep qualified women out of it, or criticize a strong woman by saying she's "acting like a man". But this is all about drawing fine lines and reaching for societal norms which have never existed and which we will only ever imperfectly approximate.
And yes, there will be some people who, for various reasons, attack even reasonable things that can be said. Possibly even an entire political movement full of them. Those people are still wrong. And yes, maybe there's actual discrimination going on, using the word in the bad sense. That's bad too. And yes, so are the people who manipulate or misunderstand statistics to justify the bad discrimination.
It's a long slow process of understanding the world and trying to make it better, without breaking it too much along the way.
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