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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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That was always beyond his influence.

No but "your community and all their future generations are condemned to poverty and violence" is decidedly more depressing than "your community was hurt in the past due to no fault of their own, but is slowly building a better life, generation by generation".

your community and all their future generations are condemned to poverty and violence"

But HBD doesn't imply this. First of all, by most reasonable historical standards, the "black community," at least in the USA, is one of the least violent and certainly one of the least poverty-stricken communities that has ever existed. It's empirically very possible to reduce these things, and the question is how much further can we reduce them, through what methods, at what cost? As I alluded to in my other comment, IF HBD is true and we accept that it's true, then we would realize that treating the "black community" like it's a defective "white community" is a fool's errand that will only be helpful through sheer luck and coincidence and likely quite harmful on net. I don't see why we couldn't come up with creative new solutions to reduce the poverty and violence in the "black community" even further than we have already, but for that, we need the problem solvers to have an accurate perception of the problem.

It's possible that the relational nature of things will mean that the "black community" will always be behind the "white community" and others in things like poverty and crime, but that's a problem only to the extent that people insist on viewing things in a racial/group-based lens. This is a curse that may be with human society as long as we are around, at least until Senator Jay Bulworth's proposal that we all fuck each other until we're all the same color comes about, but it's possible to have more or less of it, much like how poverty and crime will always be around, but it's possible to have more or less of it. I think a few extremist activists bloviating about how 1% of black community are in poverty with a murder rate a whopping 1 out of 100,000/year instead of the 0.5% of the white community in poverty with a murder rate of 0.5 out of 100,000/year would be a better state of things and even acceptable.

Men are going to be more violent, more suicidal, more criminal, and shorter-lived for a long time.

But that doesn't fill me with dread?

In general, why does "my group" need to be those whp share trivial immutable characteristics with me?

Yes, you could say that his blood family is also black. But so what?

Which is a great story for a generation, but what happens when you try to signal clearly that you aren hurting them and they're still mired in poverty and violence?

Now they think you're hurting them when you've stopped and blame you for their poverty and violence.

I'm making the specific point that "Why do you care if HBD if true if you got yours?" is an insane response to somebody talking about how belief in HBD shapes their view of their community.

Imagine if OP was talking about how his family has a heritable disease and half of them die before they're 40. It'd be insanely callous to say "Why do you care? You tested negative for the disease, right?"

If someone is bad at something and you calously tell them they're bad at it it's not the kindest thing.

But if you tell them they're actually really good at the thing and their lack of success is because their opponent was cheating, and you'll help them avoid cheating opponents, that may work for some time But years later when they're still bad at the thing and remain unsuccessful how long will they keep trying before they start blaming you for being part of the whole cheating edifice.

Your heart being in the right place isn't going to help the fact that they still fail and you watching for cheating didn't prevent that outcome.

Where did I endorse affirmative action or lying?