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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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As a black person...I really really really don't want HBD to be true

This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.

I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

I'll probably have a longer more essay-type post for next week's thread but I just want to get my raw emotions about it out here before then.

It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair

I mean, I don't want HBD to be true either dawg, but I have to face the facts.

The most credible studies for average IQ in India peg it in the upper 70s or low 80s. We have a very heterogeneous population with some groups having significantly higher IQs than others, and no end of drama surrounding it, because in the absence of knowledge about HBD, it's inevitably attributed to classism, casteism, historical privilege yada yada. Hence almost 80% AA quotas in many things.

I don't come from an upper caste background, far from it, we just skirt above the borderline for being so low caste that I'd get some gibs from it, as opposed to just being fucked in the ass for no good reason.

The primary reason Indians have such a reputation for wits abroad is because the majority who have the ability to cross several oceans and settle there have some unusual combination of intelligence, entrepreneurship and courage. They're almost certainly more likely to be upper caste, to the point that Silicon Valley is beginning to noticeā„¢. For the wrong reasons, of course. Do you know why a lot of upper caste Indians in the West have such virulent disdain for lower cast FOBs? It isn't all rank casteism, many of them even from the more reputable places like the IITs are AA hires, and they represent a form of persecution or discrimination against the upper castes. As I must reiterate, I'm not upper caste for crying out loud, and my family were war refugees fleeing a genocide, but in this manner, all Indians who aren't lucky enough to be scooped up by AA are equally screwed in academics and even government employment, so I empathize more with the upper caste guys despite not being one.

But so what if my particular caste or ethnicity isn't the smartest? My family has no shortage of talent, and that's genetic too. They made the mistake of being conscientious professionals and deferring childbirth, which how you end up with high mutation load and thus me. It's not like there aren't any smart people in the black community, even if the odds are stacked against them from before birth. A lot of the dysfunction is cultural as well, how much, I have no idea. My main beef is with people who say it's all cultural and/or intentional discrimination, the latter being farcical in the US, given how much money is poured into attempts to uplift them, to no avail, which is in turn taken as a sign that the Bottomless Hole needs to filled with more $$.

While I mostly agree with @FeepingCreature, except on the issue of values, where I genuinely consider smarter humans to have more moral worth (though you have to be VERY retarded for me to think you have none, or undeserving of a life with minimum dignity), my primary issue with HBD denial is aggressive redistribution and racism of the gaps, but I've long advocated for genetic engineering to help solve the disparity. It's doable, without compromising whatever physiognomic features are dear to you if you really care. Iterated embryo selection is enormously promising, it could be even better if national genetic databases in the US and UK weren't so leery of letting researchers do IQ research on them, because of the implications. Still, that's largely moot, since we likely won't have time to deal with it before AI replaces even the most cognitively talented natural human and thus makes dick or brain measuring a bit redundant.

I've come to accept that India will probably never catch up to China. They're just smarter. But that's not much skin off my back. And it'll all be ogre soon enough.

India is really interesting. I just looked up a map of rich/poor Indian states, but for example Tamil Nadu, which is shown as quite wealthy, has relatively low Brahmin but high Dalit demographics. I would have expected the reverse.

Funny you should mention that, I recently went on a date with a psychologist whose doctor boyfriend was Tamil Brahmin, and was forced to breakup with her because his family threatened to disown him because he dared date outside the community.

In her words, his parents were adamant about upholding their tradition of marrying from very specific sub-castes within the wider TamBram community. If they chose their specific sub caste, then he'd end up marrying cousins, and so they threw a wider net.

Which turned up precisely one girl in all of India who met the criteria. And who was earmarked for marriage with him, regardless of what he had to say on the matter.

Anyway, despite being a dude who was apparently into examing her back and pointing out the perfect places to extract bone marrow, he lacked a spine himself. Either way, they take their endogamy fucking seriously, and thus have a lovely combination of incredible thalassemia rates and also very high IQs.