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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25291 thread views

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

Even if the Aitchbeedee hypothesis is true, that does not make black people's condition hopeless; nor does it justify slavery or Jim Crow laws.

It means that nature herself is racist, and reparations are owed in the form of IQ-increasing genetic engineering disproportionally paid for by white people and East Asians.

It means that nature herself is racist, and reparations are owed in the form of IQ-increasing genetic engineering disproportionally paid for by white people and East Asians.

I genuinely think that if it were presented in these terms far more white people would be open to the idea of reparations: "Gnon was cruel to you, and to atone for our slavery we are going to raise you to the same level as ourselves" <- Very few people could reasonably object to this.

I have no problem presenting it in those terms, and would far prefer it to handouts or AA. It's just that we're gonna have to wait a bit longer until it's an option.

If every African-American woman was paired with an average IQ 'white' breeder, and the offspring selected for behavior and darkness, it would only take a couple generations to close the gap.

Nobody really wants to solve the problem.

Sperm is almost infinitely scalable, just use Clarence and a hundred other high-iq black people.

Clarence Thomas? He is noticeably more light-skinned than average US black. So the result would be whitening, too.

wait a bit longer until it's an option

What are we waiting for? The filters that are likely responsible for the disparities evident today are still available, they're not used.

What filters?

I think the strong form of HBD as propounded by some - African-Americans are inferior, it's in their genes, nothing to be done about it, it's science - isn't true.

What I think we don't have yet, and buried under the genuine problems from racism and poverty and culture, is a fair assessment of the IQ of the general African-American population, and where their strengths lie.

I think it's accepted that, for instance, women are on more of a bellcurve than men for mathematical ability, so we're all clustered mostly around the middle. Men have more tails - a lot more stupid men but also a lot more brilliant men, relatively speaking.

So it could well be that the unique heritage of current African-American population is clustered around the middle of the bell curve - not so stupid, but also not so brilliant. This would explain why affirmative action of the "jobs must be awarded according to share of the general population, so if 25% in the demographics then must be 25% in academia, STEM, et." don't work out well; that does not mean there are no black geniuses, just that proportionately there are fewer than if measured against Asian and white population. So realistically, without racial bias, you would get (pulling figures out of thin air) 5 Asian guys and 4 white guys and 1 black guy in the Top Ten jobs, instead of "we must have 2.5 black guys so hire on the less able guys to make up the figures".

But since we still do have to grapple with the effects of racism and so forth, we're nowhere near a neutral measurement and data.

What I think we don't have yet, and buried under the genuine problems from racism and poverty and culture, is a fair assessment of the IQ of the general African-American population, and where their strengths lie.

We have standardized tests and we've had them for almost a century. We can sift by poverty, even. At this point "racism and poverty" are pure cope and "culture" is a very thin reed. The mean is lower, it's not just lesser variability (which is somewhat controversial for sex; the PISA tests don't show it, for instance)

Okay, so even accepting that the mean is lower, I think culture does have a very large part to play. Given all the talk about polygenic selection and other interventions to increase IQ, intelligence on its own is not the thing that determines if people are more civil. Would it be better to be smart and vicious rather than dumb and vicious? For the smart vicious person, yes. For the rest of us, no. If you don't work on changing the surrounding culture to "hey, maybe we should have a sense of civic values and not accept that you can be loud, violent, and criminal in public with no consequences", then having smarter babies who grow up with "it is totally your right to swipe expensive goods off shop shelves and anyone who tries to stop you is committing assault and is a racist to boot" as their upbringing is not going to be an improvement.

The whole founding myth of our society is egalitarian. There is no world where one race is acknowledged as genetically inferior to another, where said race does not then see it justified to commit any number of terrible acts to tip the scales back in their favor. If HBD is accepted, violent crime often becomes the most logical decision since thanks to genetics you're better equipped for that than most normal work, unless you've got a knack for sports or something. You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?" they're going to say screw it and flip the system.

There is no "changing the culture". Either we keep the equality myth, or we go back to segregation. There is no theoretical America where the "inferior" believe they are inferior and still continue to politely play along with our scheme. This entire myth from the start has been a willful concession. We need it to function.

You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?" they're going to say screw it and flip the system.

Well yeah, if you're telling an entire people "Not one single person of you is smart enough". The Irish got this too, including our friend the infamous Mr. Lynn, about how dumb they were (90 IQ?) and then, gasp, suddenly amazingly in just one or two decades we'd jumped up to being "just as smart as the English". Wow, how could that have happened?

If HBD could be neutral on "Some of you are just as smart, but it's not in the same proportion of the general population as the Asians, who are better than the whites, who are better than you on the raw figures", then we might get somewhere. Jason is going to college, but there will be five Jasons, not fifteen as demanded by proportion of general population, because the top level means only five Jasons as against fifteen Guos as against ten Chaunceys. Not because of racism, because of the bell curve, which does not mean telling an entire people "none of you are good enough".

The expectation "everybody goes to college", because governments saw this as the easy way to raise people up out of low-paying jobs - get a degree, get a white-collar career, be successful in life - has done damage to everyone.

And as a start, we could drop terms like "inferior". 'Not as smart on an IQ test' doesn't mean 'lowly dog whose only purpose in life is to shine my shoes and carry my water'. If you're going around thinking of yourself as "superior", that's a nasty trap. You're not virtuous enough not to be corrupted by it, or understand what the luck of the genetic draw meant for you.

Equality isn't a simple fact based on evidence. It's an ideological cornerstone. Sure, HBD isn't claiming some people are inferior to others in some kind of holistic sense -- what you lose in some area, you usually gain in others. But intelligence IS the golden stat for success, more than ever before. If you're unintelligent, charisma can make up for that. If you have neither, good luck.

The way our current ideology works is that anyone who's failing can blame those in charge for holding them down, it's a consolation. There is no way we can fly directly in the face of that.

If you're unintelligent, charisma can make up for that. If you have neither, good luck.

I would say not charisma, but being a decent human being. That includes a sense of civic and personal responsibility, self-esteem (not in the "I'm great just as I am" sense but in "I'm a human being and I should live like one, not a wild dog" sense), and being willing to keep the rules and work hard.

A 90 IQ person who is naked and screaming out of their mind on drugs in the public streets is much more visible, and much more of a problem, than the 90 IQ guy who gets up every morning and washes his face and goes to work sweeping the streets. Telling the 90 IQ people that "you can't help it, poor darling, so go ahead and smash car windows to steal stuff to sell for your habit, and be loud and violent and aggressive in public" is a hell of a lot worse for them, for us, for everyone.

Telling 100 IQ people the same thing is just as bad. Switching up the laws so they can steal up to $950 and it's a misdemeanour, and then you don't even bother prosecuting misdemeanours, because of the systemic racist incarceration injustice of the past and present, is even worse for everyone - it hurts the people trying to live respectable lives in that community as well as people outside it. Yes, you should have expectations for Jamal and Cletus and Jose to be respectable citizens, not pass them out of school even if they've never learned anything, then tell them if they don't get into Harvard this is discrimination and that means they can do what they want since that's 'your culture'.

The Irish long had a reputation as ignorant, drunken, violent idiots. The Catholic Church gets a lot of stick for trying to play Victorian respectability games and impose a moral agenda on the country, but it would have been ten times worse if we had been permitted, caressed, and encouraged by American and British middle class to upper class liberals that "Poor dears, you can't help yourselves, this is your culture, go ahead and live like that, don't even bother 'acting Anglo' by trying to get sober, get a job, and not fight in the streets".

The Irish long had a reputation as ignorant, drunken, violent idiots. The Catholic Church gets a lot of stick for trying to play Victorian respectability games and impose a moral agenda on the country, but it would have been ten times worse if we had been permitted, caressed, and encouraged by American and British middle class to upper class liberals that "Poor dears, you can't help yourselves, this is your culture, go ahead and live like that, don't even bother 'acting Anglo' by trying to get sober, get a job, and not fight in the streets".

Sure, I agree with all the points you make. That's how it should work. But the dynamic we've (unfortunately) evolved into is a very unhealthy, unrealistic one that works like so: Americans who are not white males or asian males are actively being held back by those in power. There is a glass ceiling put in place via systemic discrimination, and this ceiling is the only thing preventing black men, hispanic men, white women, etc. from making exactly as much money and holding exactly as much power (as a group) as white men and asian men. As the actual, genuine glass ceilings that limit these so-called marginalized groups continue to disappear, this ideology loses its ground and becomes axiomatic: The glass ceilings are disappearing, yet marginalized groups still underperform, which is proof they're being systemically oppressed because all groups are equal. It actually means the racism and sexism must be even worse than we expected, because all those barriers were removed and yet these groups are still underperforming. This is the source of all the systemic racism stuff, it's like dark matter -- it must exist somewhere or the theory falls apart.

Equality of birth is one massive concession, man. We have conceded so, so much to these people and they still aren't happy. Imagine what happens if we say screw it and affirm HBD: total chaos. No, that's never going to happen. What might happen is something suggested up-thread; something like reparations based on HBD, where we start handing out cash to "marginalized groups" on the basis of their assumed oppression, but really it functions as a "sorry you're not smart enough for the white collar world" type thing.

This entire myth from the start has been a willful concession. We need it to function.

It's worn through, and we're not getting it back. To maintain its pretense requires pretending such a level of malice on the part of whites (and Asians!), and concomitant punishing of that "malice", that it is no longer acceptable either.

You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?" they're going to say screw it and flip the system.

OK, fine, then we shoot them. It's not a good solution but it's better than tearing the country to shreds because they can't accept reality.

OK, fine, then we shoot them. It's not a good solution but it's better than tearing the country to shreds because they can't accept reality.

When it came down to it, the Boers notably chose not to save their position by genociding the Kafirs.

America will not make a different choice, let's not be stupid here.

One group defending itself from another group trying to "flip the table", even with guns, does not necessitate genocide. You can shoot the attackers until they stop attacking, and then stop shooting.

You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?"

What "entire" people? The most black-pilled anti-woke "IQ fits these shifted normal distributions and has unavoidable effects and measures all forms of intelligence and is entirely genetic" theory still only has about a 1SD racial difference, so it makes predictions like "there are only 6 or 7 million African-Americans smarter than the average white person" (41e6*normcdf(-1) in Octave) and "there are only 2 or 3 million African-Americans smarter than the average tech or law worker" (41e6*normcdf(-1.6)). Admitting that those numbers aren't nearly as high as we'd like them to be, so even if we observe them we should really be open to other explanations ... would that be the end of the world? Let's imagine that the most black-pilled pro-woke "Everybody needs role models who are specifically of their own ethnicity" theory is also true, simultaneously ... and we're still generally left with millions of good candidates! Not with the full ten million we'd have liked from a population that size, but it's at least an adequate fallback, no? Even at the top of estimates for college professors an IQ-based meritocracy would give us tens of thousands of high-end African-American candidates, way lower than we'd have liked, but still enough that there'd be no need to tell smart African-American kids aspiring to quantum physics research "try Foot Locker"; you could still just tell them "oh, you mean like those guys? great!"

I get what you mean. The problem is your average Joe will never see it that way. This is ideology we are talking about, its function is borderline spiritual. Only one standard deviation means nothing to the masses, this would be interpreted as an open declaration of war.

It's probably that the aggressiveness also stems from genetics. Though I suspect the shoplifting is mostly culture. And yeah, that can be improved, but only if people in charge (whether black or white) insist on holding underclass blacks to the same standards anyone else is held to. Which isn't happening.

That's the tragedy. The fucking white idiots who go "Well, that's their culture" (and I see this with some white underclass in my own country, so it's not confined to black/brown people) ought to get the Lord Vetinari Mime School treatment.

Being loud and exuberant may be part of culture. Being aggressively loud, violent, and threatening in public is nobody's culture except criminals and scumbags. I know it's a meme to say "Democrats are the real racists" but the liberals and lefties who want to excuse Jamal from going to jail for fifteen counts of theft because, you know, it's society's fault and property rights are white supremacy really are being racist - they're saying you can't expect anything better from Jamal because, poor dear, he's stupid, ignorant, violent and criminal by nature, nothing can be done about it. So it's not fair to send Jamal to prison, he's not white, you can't hold him to white standards of behaviour because he doesn't have the intelligence, sense of conscience or self-control of a white person.

That's nonsense. Jamal is a thug not because of his skin colour, because there are plenty of white, Asian, and Hispanic thugs, but because a combination of never expecting anything more from him, never punishing such behaviour, and enabling it, means he learned way too early in life that he can be a thug and get away with it. Jamal may also be stupid, violent and criminal by nature, but again, plenty of white people like that too.

I will say that augmenting human intelligence is one of those things that humanity seems very close to being able to do, either genetically or technologically, and could happen a lot sooner if people were spending as much time and energy on it as they are on perfecting the art of autonomous killing machines for warfare. Although I do hope Ukraine wins.

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?

The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community". I happen to be an uppity big-lipped nigger myself. But I do my best to refrain from feeling any sense of community with the "urban youths". Rather, I exist primarily online, as a being with no face and no race. When I am forced to exist in meatspace, I think of myself primarily as a competent and diligent employee, not as a black person.

Individualism!

The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community".

This may be an ideal solution, but I do not believe it is an easy solution. A community collectively and instinctively puts people in categories, assigns default characteristics to people in these categories, views the categories as part of the identity of its members, and views the categories as competing factions. If you think you can easily (or totally) escape buying into that factionalism, I think you are under an illusion. The trick is not to eliminate identity groups as functional units of society, but to make the competition between them honest, healthy, and based on furthering interests that are shared among the identity groups.

I feel the OP's pain. But the closer you are to God, the less it will matter to you whether you are a member of a group that happens to suffer from an epidemic of foolishness (whether it is biological or cultural). Moreover, if your people are acting like fools, you dissociate yourself from the foolishness precisely to the extent that you call it out. For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays. As a Southerner from Alabama, my people have a history of hypocritically identifying as Christian while also having racist contempt for blacks. If I call those sins out, I am not stained by them. I can actually feel my conscience being freed when I acknowledge them. But, to the extent that I remain silent about those corporate sins of my own people, and at the same time identify as members of those groups, I am truly guilty by association (whether I am individually an offender or not).

The same thing goes for other groups. If you are a Muslim and that is part of your identity, that does not make you part of the problems of Islamic fascism, genocidal antisemitism, and terrorism -- but, if you aren't talking about those problems in the Muslim world and calling them out, then you are part of the problems -- even if you don't advocate for Sharia law, or hate jews, or fly airplanes into buildings. Similarly, if you are black, and you aren't talking about the problems of black supremacy, anti-intellectualism, deadbeat dads, serially pregnant welfare moms, gang violence, or whatever you honestly see as the problems in your community, then you are part of those problems. On the other hand, if you are vocally calling them out and trying to address those issues, then you are not part of the problem -- and also, you are fundamentally part of a bigger identity group called "Honest, caring people".

So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too? What does that life even look like? We're not all born to be sin eaters for our ingroups or large targets for our outgroups, and that shouldn't be an expected life trajectory. Most people are just humans trying to get by, and that is alright.

So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?

Of course not. This all-or-nothing, fall-on-your-sword straw man was first thing the Devil ever said: "Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”"

Most people are just humans trying to get by, and that is alright.

It might be "alright", whatever that means, but it makes them lesser men. We (Americans) live in a relatively free, safe, and prosperous society because the founding fathers and continental soldiers answered the call of duty to a higher purpose than minding their own business. We owe them a monumental debt that we can never pay back. We can only pay it forward by living up to their legacy of duty and sacrifice.

"We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." [Pericles]

"Of course not. This all-or-nothing, fall-on-your-sword straw man was first thing the Devil ever said: "Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”"

This is kind of the opposite of my statement. I'm not guilty because I don't stand up for every cause every time. The Devil also never said anything, because it isn't a real thing.

This is kind of the opposite of my statement.

These are the statements I am comparing:

  1. @AhhhTheFrench: So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?
  2. The serpent: Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?

They are both phrased as questions; notably both use some version of "actually"/"really", and both suggest a narrative that, in order to do right, you have to go to onerous extremes -- which makes a great excuse to do as you please. Generally, I think it is a common pattern when someone is confronted with a duty, that they respond by saying, "What am I supposed to do, Give away all of my stuff? go around jumping in every time someone is getting bullied? Starve myself so kids in Uganda can eat? Never have any fun? Fall on my sword over every little thing? etc. etc. etc.

Your statements of "duty" were very declarative, should I not have taken that at face value? Perhaps they were only vague suggestions of possible prosocial behavior, but they were not phrased thusly.

Your statements of "duty" were very declarative,

I cannot tell which "statements of 'duty'" this refers to.

For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays.

Not to derail, and it's possible that you're still right, since I don't know what exactly constitutes hatred for you, but I do think the scriptures are pretty clear that homosexual sex is bad.

Of course, we should not discount the possibility that the scripture might be irrationally and immorally hateful.

As NelsonRushton below pointed out, the condemnation of homosexuality in Christian traditions seems to stem from Mosaic law. If there is a chapter in the gospel where Jesus urges his followers to stone the sodomites, I must have missed it.

Almost no Christians strive to consistently follow Mosaic law. If a person with intact foreskin who likes his bacon and shellfish, talked back to his parents and works on Saturdays complains about gay sex being against the bible, I have a hard time taking them serious.

(Of course, I fully support the right of Christians, Jews and followers of weird atheist joke religions to not engage in gay sex for religious reasons, or for any other reasons for that matter.)

Perhaps I ought to reference this old comment I wrote.

To sum: not every commandment in the Mosaic law is doing the same sort of thing. We can divide them into moral, ceremonial, and judicial commandments.

Only moral laws apply to us today. If you like I can flesh that out more, but really, see the comment I cited above.

In the new testament, there are several passages that speak against homosexual sex:

Romans 1:26-27: "For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error."

1 Corinthians 6:9: "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."

Jude 7: "just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire."

Of course, we should not discount the possibility that the scripture might be irrationally and immorally hateful.

You are free to think so, of course, but, given that @NelsonRushton describes himself as a Christian, I think it's likely that he has a higher view of the scriptures than that. Jesus and the apostles, at least, took the scriptures very seriously.

Not to derail, and it's possible that you're still right, since I don't know what exactly constitutes hatred for you, but I do think the scriptures are pretty clear that homosexual sex is bad.

Important enough question for a derail, IMO. What constitutes hatred, for me, is taking carnal delight in the pain and loss (or prospective pain and loss) of another person. This is as opposed to indignation, by which I mean making a judgment that someone's conduct is immoral and, if it rises to a certain level, calls for punishment. In that light, my case is twofold. First (as I think @Felagund anticipated),

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. [Matthew 25: 42-45 KJV]

Jesus doesn't say "I was in prison for something I did not do and ye visited me not", or "I was in prison for a minor offense, and you visited me not". The people who count as the least of our brothers include people who have actually committed a major offense. So I think it is consistent, and indeed only right, to judge an action as a sin without hating the person who committed it. If my brother drove home drunk from a night on the town, or even murdered someone, I could acknowledge that as wrong, or gravely wrong in the latter case, without hating him.

Second, the Bible does condemn homosexual sodomy. Just as strongly, it condemns witchcraft, idol worship, working on Saturday, cursing your parents, eating meat of an animal that been strangled, consuming animal blood (e.g., blood sausage), premarital sex, and many other things which call for the death penalty under Mosaic law. Some of these prohibitions, including idol worship, consuming animal blood, and eating the meat of a strangled animal, carry over explicitly into New Testament law [cf. Acts 15]. Bible believing Christians, as a rule, do not take all of those seriously as sins, let alone call for death by stoning for all of them -- so they have to square with that one way or another.

But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person, is not only hypocritical but blasphemous -- insofar as it also recklessly puts your bigoted words in God's mouth. Yet, as a group characteristic, that is what Evangelicals [my people] have historically done, and to some degree continue to do, in large numbers by comparison with the general population. I'm not saying we all do it or ever did; I am saying that (1) we did/do it significantly more than our outgroups in the Western world (e.g., white collar Democrats), (2) those of us who do not vocally acknowledge that are part of the problem.

The people who count as the least of our brothers include people who have actually committed a major offense.

Yes, certainly. Jesus associated with prostitutes and tax collectors, etc.

Second, the Bible does condemn homosexual sodomy. Just as strongly, it condemns witchcraft, idol worship, working on Saturday, cursing your parents, eating meat of an animal that been strangled, consuming animal blood (e.g., blood sausage), premarital sex, and many other things which call for the death penalty under Mosaic law.

It's useful to understand what's going on under the mosaic law. Laws are conventionally divided into three sorts: moral laws, which apply universally (e.g. Thou shalt not murder); ceremonial laws, which were for Israel as a church, roughly, and so no longer apply post-Christ (e.g. food laws); and civil laws, which were for Israel as a government (e.g. cities of refuge).

I take it you would argue that the law against homosexual sex is a ceremonial law, and now longer applies, whereas I would argue that it is a moral law. The biggest reason I would argue that is the repeated affirmation of the same in the new testament (Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, Jude 7, 1 Timothy 1). I'll note that I don't think that the prescription of putting them to death is necessary, as we are no longer living under the civil law of ancient Israel.

You bring up the case of the various commands in Acts 15.

I think Paul illustrates that he treats some of those differently from others. 1 Corinthians 10 is illuminating: Paul speaks against partaking of what's sacrificed to idols, but not because there's anything problematic about it itself, but for the sake of others. Compare that to early in the epistle, where Paul talks about sexual immorality as inherently problematic.

So it's at least plausible to me that some of the commands in Acts 15 are intended to be for the sake of peace and people's consciences, but I'm not entirely certain. But I think other parts of the new testament are sufficiently clear that sexual immorality is bad, and homosexuality shows up in lists forbidding things that are clearly considered to be inherently bad, not bad for the sake of others.

But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person,

Is this really a depiction of what is going on typically?

I'm young, so I can't speak to what was common decades ago, and it's entirely possible my circles are unusual, but in most cases where I've heard people condemn homosexuality, they're usually quick to affirm that heterosexual lust is also bad, lest they be misunderstood.

I take it you would argue that the law against homosexual sex is a ceremonial law, and now longer applies, whereas I would argue that it is a moral law.

Not so much. I don't emphasize the distinction. I think the need to emphasize the distinction arises from a position that the Bible is infallible and that its stated precepts are invariably eternal, which I do not believe. Do you?

The former, not the latter.

@NelsonRushton: But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person,... Yet, as a group characteristic, that is what Evangelicals [my people] have historically done, and to some degree continue to do, in large numbers by comparison with the general population @Felagund: Is this really a depiction of what is going on typically?

Note that I didn't say "is" and I didn't say "typically"; I said historically in disproportionate numbers. Indeed, I don't see it as much as I used to -- but, then again, I don't hang out with as many old rednecks as I used to. Here is one anecdote. In 1997 a gay nightclub (the "Otherside Lounge") was bombed in Atlanta, Georgia; 5 people were injured, one critically, though no one died. A nominally Christian group calling itself the "Army of God" claimed responsibility. That much is not indicative; there are whackos who identify as everything and their existence in small numbers doesn't necessarily reflect on anything. What is more notable is that I heard someone who was not (viewed as) a whacko, on his regular radio show, minimize and nearly excuse the bombing on the grounds that it targeted gays. Before you read the next paragraph, I invite you to guess whether the speaker was (a) a leftist pundit, or (b) a Christian pastor.

Of course he was a Christian pastor. His words as I remember were, "You may have heard that a gay bar was bombed in Atlanta recently. Well, I wouldn't worry about that too much. God bombed Sodom and Gomorrah." This was 1997 in Athens, Georgia (1 hour from Atlanta). It was not a hot mic moment; it was apparently his planned public remark on the event, which he expected to be assented to en masse by likeminded brethren. Now that was a tail event (that is, strange and unlikely); it surprised me to hear it, and even a person my age (56) from the deep South could have gone their whole life without hearing anything that bad from someone in a position of public authority. But what is more important is that, given that somebody did say it, I think any reasonable person who has been around that block would guess (b) rather than (a) -- because we know which group is more likely to have that kind of tail event, and the tail is indicative of milder tendencies of the same sort in larger numbers, of which I saw many.

So it's at least plausible to me that some of the commands in Acts 15 are intended to be for the sake of peace and people's consciences, but I'm not entirely certain.

It's plausible, but I don't think the Christian rednecks who despise gays in the name of God have thought it out far enough to get off the hook; I don't think any Biblical argument justifies the actual level of focus they put on sexual deviance as a sin relative to others that would be rationally subject to the same argument, and I don't think their animus is targeted wholly at the acts rather than the actors. (Nonetheless, those people would be voting with me on almost every living political issue of today -- and if there is ever another civil war in America we will be on the same side. In fact, if it comes to a shooting war, I wouldn't be surprised if they are about the only ones on that side that actually fight.)

Laws are conventionally divided into three sorts: moral laws, which apply universally (e.g. Thou shalt not murder); ceremonial laws, which were for Israel as a church, roughly, and so no longer apply post-Christ (e.g. food laws); and civil laws, which were for Israel as a government (e.g. cities of refuge).

I think the word "Conventionally" here appeals to a vague and precarious authority. I know that there are Hebrew words for the three sorts of laws, and that the idea of giving them different levels of force in modern times goes back at least to Aquinas -- but his scriptural basis for it [Summa Theologica, Question 99] seems pretty thin to me, and most discussions of the distinction that I see give no scriptural basis at all. Anyway, whether it is Aquinas's argument or not, I would be curious to know if you (@Felagund) know of a Biblical argument for the distinction in force, for us today, between the three kinds of laws.

I'll note that I don't think that the prescription of putting them to death is necessary, as we are no longer living under the civil law of ancient Israel.

This suggests that you believe it was necessary and proper, in ancient Israel, to judicially stone people to death for homosexual sodomy, idol worship, sabbath breaking, adultery, premarital sex (in the case of women), etc. To be clear, is that your view?

So that you know where I am coming from, this is my view of scripture (now in my Motte bio): I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I believe there is noise in the signal.

Yeah, fair. People are too eager to inflict harm on their opponents.

I think the word "Conventionally" here appeals to a vague and precarious authority. I know that there are Hebrew words for the three sorts of laws, and that the idea of giving them different levels of force in modern times goes back at least to Aquinas -- but his scriptural basis for it [Summa Theologica, Question 99] seems pretty thin to me, and most discussions of the distinction that I see give no scriptural basis at all. Anyway, whether it is Aquinas's argument or not, I would be curious to know if you (@Felagund) know of a Biblical argument for the distinction in force, for us today, between the three kinds of laws.

I wasn't aware of there being three Hebrew words, that's interesting. That said, you wished for arguments that they have different levels of force.

Reading Hebrews will make it really obvious that there was a ceremonial system which is no longer in force.

The new testament continues to make commands, which are called the law (see, for example Jesus summarizing the law), so some is still in force in some sense.

That only leaves the question of whether the civil law still applies.

I would think that the commands to live peaceably with all and to submit to those ruling over you would suffice to show that executing the civil law is not necessary, at least for those who are not the ones not in power.

I don't know that I have anywhere to point off the top of my head for those in power, but seeing as it describes what they are doing as for the good of the people, I assume that means it's okay with other sets of laws than the exact set of penalties prescribed in the pentateuch.

Does that suffice? If you have any particular ones of those that you're curious, I could more explicitly cite the passages of scripture I'm gesturing at.

This suggests that you believe it was necessary and proper, in ancient Israel, to judicially stone people to death for homosexual sodomy, idol worship, sabbath breaking, adultery, premarital sex (in the case of women), etc. To be clear, is that your view?

I'd have to double check for each of those that stoning was what was enjoined, but in the spirit of answering the question in the sense in which it was meant, yes.

So that you know where I am coming from, this is my view of scripture (now in my Motte bio): I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I believe there is noise in the signal.

I think it's worth noting that Jesus and the apostles seemed to treat the scriptures as of incredible authority, even in minute matters. Assuming Jesus knew something about what he was talking about (seems reasonable, if you think he's God and all that), and assuming that was conveyed to us accurately (seems reasonable, as it wasn't super long, and was by eyewitnesses), then we probably should be taking scripture pretty seriously.

Yeah, fair. People are too eager to inflict harm on their opponents.

I don't think this admits enough. I do not believe that Gays, especially gays who are not gay/trans activists, are "opponents" of Christians; they are people who many conservative Christians view as wrongdoers (for example, I think it would be very strange to call, say, Douglas Murray, an "opponent of Christians"). More importantly, "People" at large do not profess a sacred precept of loving their enemies, so it is not egregiously hypocritical of "people" to be eager to inflict harm on wrongdoers.

I'd have to double check for each of those that stoning was what was enjoined

Here you go:

  1. homosexual sodomy: If there is a man who sleeps with a male as those who sleep with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they must be put to death. They have brought their own deaths upon themselves. [Leviticus 20:13, NASB]

  2. idol worship: If there is found in your midst, in any of your towns which the Lord your God is giving you, a man or a woman who does what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, by violating His covenant, 3 and that person has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, or the sun, the moon, or any of the heavenly lights, which I have commanded not to do, and if it is reported to you and you have heard about it, then you shall investigate thoroughly. And if it is true and the report is trustworthy that this detestable thing has been done in Israel, then you are to bring out to your gates that man or woman who has done this evil deed, that is, the man or the woman, and you shall stone them to death. [Deuteronomy 17: 2-5, NASB]

  3. sabbath breaking: “For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a sabbath of complete rest to the LORD; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death." [Exodus 35:2, NASB]

  4. adultery: If a man is found sleeping with a married woman, then both of them shall die, the man who slept with the woman, and the woman. [Deuteronomy 22: 22, NASB]

  5. premarital sex (in the case of women): “But if this charge [of premarital sex] is true, and they did not find the girl to have evidence of virginity [on her wedding night], then they shall bring the girl out to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death, because she has committed a disgraceful sin in Israel by playing the prostitute in her father’s house; so you shall eliminate the evil from among you. [Deuteronomy 22:20-21, NASB]

More comments

Eh, it really shouldn't matter to you all that much if you are personally smart, that's suggestive that your family is also relatively smart and that (assuming you pick a good partner), your descendents will also be decently smart (regression to the mean notwithstanding, unfortunately the influence of your family on your children doesn't "factor through" you completely).

It's just so unfair

Life is what life is. There are highly intelligent people rotting away in the third world while 80 IQ clueless imbecilles in western welfare states who only have it in them to take out more than they put in live decent and comfortable existances. No amount of rage from me or anyone else at this injustice is going to change this so I've come to accept it and move on. I have extended family in the former situation too so it's not like this is just a theoretical problem for me.

(I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken - provided it was slaughtered in a Halal way - I very much would not eat a chicken that had human level intelligence and would be horrified if such a being was treated like how we treat chickens today)

Eh, it really shouldn't matter to you all that much if you are personally smart, that's suggestive that your family is also relatively smart and that (assuming you pick a good partner), your descendents will also be decently smart (regression to the mean notwithstanding, unfortunately the influence of your family on your children doesn't "factor through" you completely).

I could see it mattering to someone if they have groups that they identify with that are more extensive than their family.

I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken

I technically agree, but there's such a huge difference between even the least intelligent 1% of humans and chickens that it doesn't matter. Everest is a lot higher than Ben Nevis, but they're both obviously mountains and not molehills.

You can simply adopt eugenicism and the desire to improve black intelligence through DNA as your primary worldview, as opposed to nihilism (which I think is also an adequate choice...).

Think a bit more deeply, and it will seem far less important. The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.

Yes, if we keep using academia as the way we pick our upper classes, IQ is going to be important, and the current black population will be at a disadvantage for a long time. But that's a big "if". If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.

The problem is not relatively minor (but important at the margins) IQ differentials, it's a social system that outsources elite production to an IQ-loaded institution.

I'm short on time so this is more of a low-effort drive by than I'd like but:

A perpetual irritation to me is how so many people, even in spaces like this, think "HBD" means "IQ differences" while missing the much bigger, much more interesting picture.

Traits such as aggression, impulse control, parental investment, fidelity, industriousness, cleanliness, punctuality, aesthetic preferences, and innumerably more are all present in animal species, vary among subspecies, and are clearly genetic in origin -- especially in species without culture to speak of. Can different branches of humanity, having been split off for hundreds if not thousands of generations, which evolved in very different environments (and very different cultures), and admixed with separate strains of alt-hominids (neanderthals, florensis, etc.) possibly not have some substantial drift here?

Just the last few hundred years alone have had enormous amounts of different selection pressures on different populations.

When I think of HBD, IQ is one of the least-glaring things that stands out to me. There are smart and dumb people in any group, though yes the average and the tails certainly do matter. But the character of a people is also heavily genetic. The societal conditions which will allow them to flourish (or keep them in miserable persistence at best) vary widely. Even if there were no average IQ difference, we are not built to flourish with each other. Attempts to do so only result in sinking to the lowest common denominator and generally curtailing the highest potentials of all groups in the case of xenophilic multiculturalism, or all groups but the dominant one in most historic human societies.

Not that you're necessarily making this mistake, but OP didn't mention IQ and I think it's tragically myopic to think of IQ first when considering HBD. It just happens to be one of the easiest things to measure.

The great American experiment, though fraught with strife, has produced the most powerful and dynamic technological and economic hegemony the world has ever seen. We take all comers and turn them into God Damn Americans. DON'T BE A SUCKER

I do wonder if part of the nightmare that is modern courtship stems from wildly incompatible personality types getting involved.

If you lived in a village of people very similar to you, it seems far more likely you'd find a great match.

But the character of a people is also heavily genetic.

I don't know how much I should believe this, because culture is certainly also passed on.

Yes, but culture is downstream of genetics. I want to distinguish here between 'culture' and 'incentives' (especially negative incentives) because you can easily get anyone to behave by hitting them enough times.

With that out of the picture, people can only thrive in a culture to the degree that their genetics allow them to. Put another way, genetics is like a foundation and culture is like the house built on it. People who are not suited to the culture will chafe under it and do worse in it and generally fail to participate in the way that those suitable would.

Over time and with selection pressure, this works out because those capable of conforming do, and reproduce, and those incapable of conforming 'drop out' and fail to reproduce.

Alternatively, the culture shifts (generally degrades) to accommodate those less-suited.

Yes, but culture is downstream of genetics.

Sure. But it seems to me like there is a considerable range of expression in cultures for the same population. See, for example, the impacts of the spread of Christianity, well, everywhere. East vs West Germany is probably another good example: lasting differences still show up today, but that started out as just a line on a map drawn by occupying powers.

I don't think I understand your confusion. Yes, culture also has effects. It is comparable to asking whether training affects dogs. Sure it does! It has an enormous impact. But the collie still wishes to herd.

Very strongly disagree here. IQ is correlated with performance in all complex intellectual tasks. If you dropped everyone into an every-monkey-for-himself anarchic pre-industrial hellscape, the warlord of the gang that eventually won would be high IQ. The best traders in financial markets are high IQ. People who win in politics are high IQ, whether that's democratic politics or authoritarian elite politics.

If by "high IQ" you mean an SD or two above average, I absolutely agree. Being smarter than the average bear is a big advantage. If by "high IQ" you mean "higher IQ means more success", then it's obviously wrong. There's a bell curve to functionality for IQ too. Everyone who runs an institution is probably above average IQ. But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything. Leaders are also all high in ambition, social dominance, that sort of thing as well.

Intelligence is hyper-optimized. Like, for instance, physical skills. Good athletes are not necessarily smart, but they tend to be above average, and at the top of any sport, they are usually quite smart. But at the top end, say, bodybuilding, the proxies being chased are so remote from reality that it ceases to be functional. People who wind up in charge of things disproportionately have some athletic background or pursuit, although not necessarily a high-level one. Does being athletic predict success? Yeah, kinda. Does that mean the strongest person is always in charge? Not even a little. If you could invent a test that would score athleticism, you'd see a good correlation with both sporting success and with life achievement. Should we re-orient society to min-max this AQ?

I'm not bagging on IQ so much as urging people to consider other factors and a wider context. Yes, intelligence is important for a whole lot of things. So is everything else.

But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything. Leaders are also all high in ambition, social dominance, that sort of thing as well.

The absolute highest IQ people- above 160 or so- produce more than their fair share of Ted Kazcynskis. But the 130-150 demographic is actually running things.

The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.

how did you get from this to this??

But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything.

IQ is a proxy of a proxy. At the top end of the scoring distribution, the proxy stops working, because the sort of people so totally maxed-out on one ability are incapable of living normal lives or talking productively to normal people.

Sort of how height is predictive of NBA ability, but the tallest people can't play sports.

The fact that IQ predicts academic performance is because IQ measures something that is genuinely useful, and it’s not limited to book learnin.

If you disappeared everything to do with standardized testing and academia, i.e. explicit measuring and sorting, in any decent meritocracy you would end up with a similar distribution to how things are now.

It’s a cope to think IQ “fetishization” is because of how we use it to sort elites.

We don’t choose our elites using the Olympics because athletic ability is not what tends to matter. Also note that plenty of our elites are not “selected” in even a dysfunctional meritocracy. Talent and ambition rise to the top when it’s not explicitly prohibited from doing so.

Furthermore, you’re overestimating IQ and how it’s used for selecting our elite/upper class. Plenty of people are very smart but don’t achieve wealth/power/influence because they don’t seek it. Which is to say that if you take the top 10% in any domain you care about, they will almost certainly be smarter than average, but not necessarily even top 20% in intelligence. Standardized testing tends to set a “must be this tall to ride” baseline, but it’s far from the only factor institutions select on.

Unless our elites are figureheads, we can't use arbitrary characteristics as filters. If they are figureheads, there's still the problem of choosing the men behind the throne.

If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.

I'm not completely certain that's true. Actually I'd be shocked to learn that Olympic medalists averaged less than an IQ of 110 or thereabouts. Looking at the 2022 Winter Olympics, just to grab a quick example, some events were swept by Asians. Figure Skating, for example, was a near-total victory for Asians. The entire Men's singles podium were Asian, and the Team Event nearly so. Freestyle skiing also had a strong showing from China (three of six Golds medals), and South Korea did very well in Short Track Ski Racing. Similarly in the 2020 Summer Olympics, Japan and South Korea dominated the Archery events, China took silver in both Artistic Swimming events, every single podium in Badminton went to an Asian country, Japan took Gold in Baseball (to the embarrassment of my American chauvinism we only took Silver), and Japan and China took several medals in Boxing.

There’s a bit of a confounding factor on a lot of Olympic sports— which is that especially for those you mentioned, being able to compete requires a lot of training at very early ages. Winter sports have a second cost sink— the equipment and venues needed to train for these events is expensive. Thus for a lot of sports, your ability to even reach a level of competition where it would be worth training you to compete in the Olympics requires tens of thousands of dollars and years of very focus training. And thus if you’re not of reasonably successful stock, including intellectual ability, you won’t get the opportunity to try.

Boxing, running, basketball, soccer and other similar sports are light enough in equipment that it’s at least plausible that you could be from a working class family and be able to try.

Serious question - does it actually matter to you, assuming that you yourself are intelligent?

What does the existence of an urban underclass mean to you if you yourself are intelligent, choose an intelligent wife, and have intelligent kids?

Why do other people who have nothing to do with you besides the color of their skin have to do with you, provided that the world is AT LEAST colorblind (and to be quite honest, the world is a lot more favorable than colorblind to talented black kids right now)?

Because he will be judged according to his tribe. If you’re a white foreigner in a distant land with only a few white people, and one of your fellow whites becomes embroiled in a huge scandal for committing horrific crimes, you will pay a price for that even if you did nothing. If HBD becomes widely accepted in the West, it will affect in perception all black people, even those who are very smart. If a woman crosses the street before you walk past because of her experience with the ‘urban underclass’, you can’t simply exempt yourself from this insult because you’re not part of it, you are being judged on the basis of race.

And I assume also some sense that these are his people, his tribe.

But part of the truth of HBD is that there is variation within the races even as there are clear patterns of difference between them. It says that a highly intelligent person is much more likely to be jewish than black, not that there are zero intelligent black people. Convincing people of the truth of HBD means getting them to accept that a 99th percentile black person might only equal a 90th percentile jew means there will be way more jews than blacks at high achieving levels, but also that it means the 99th percentile black is EQUAL to the 90th percentile jew.

Honestly, the only reason a black executive or Harvard grad is assumed lesser than any other person with the same qualifications is because everyone knows affirmative action and other DEI interventions exist. If we didn't have them then we would see vastly fewer black Harvard grads, but the ones we did see would be judged more as Harvard grads than as generic black people because the former trait would not be mediated by the later.

American slavery and Jim Crow might be relevant.

It's much harder to deny that individual genetic differences in IQ exist than that group differences exist - the science on the former is, in fact, settled. And if one views race as little more than different distributions of genes caused by ancestry, what's truly different about being low IQ because your two parents were vs being low IQ because you're of a certain race? In either case, an identifiable group of people is noticeably dumber. So, race HBD or not, the moral problem persists anyway, replace "race" with "class" in your post and little changes.

And "fruitless all along" - not at all, few hereditarians claim blacks didn't benefit significantly from desegregation and civil rights, few claim the IQ gap didn't close at all. And genetic enhancement is coming!

Also, just a guess, decent chance OP is a troll.

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

A common, characteristic-of-our-time response is "Why should you care? You're an individual. If the portion of your tribe doesn't apply to you, what does it skin off your back?" This is @BurdensomeCount's answer. I think that's fine, but it only works for certain people. The reality is most people do care about their tribe. We're not atomized. The heat map of our moral concern goes from family, to self, to tribe, to confession/creed, to human. We care about tribal welfare only one degree less than ourselves. So it is with you.

So. Let's talk about me. While this may be a luxurious piggyback on your own problem, I'm also dour on my tribe recently. My tribe is a superset of the puritans in Albion's Seed — it doesn't include all 'whites', but neither is it just white americans who descended from those guys with buckles on their hats. It is the group on whom the terrible weight of God's judgement presses. I am talking about blood rather than confession to be clear; this feeling can and has been channeled to a million creeds. How do I know who's in my tribe, then? I just do.

My tribe is currently willing itself to subjugation. They want the destruction of our history, the destruction of our communities, and they're eager for genetic replacement: I don't think we're actually willing ourselves to extinction, as anti-progressives (usually cavalier or borderer white) accuse us. Rather, our tribe wants to place ourselves, we horrible fiends, under a yoke of penance to the fargroup. In practice, this might lead to tribal extinction, but that's just my prediction.

On the dissident right, there are attempts to blame this on (((a certain group of people))). And while it may be that jews are exploiting their curious situation as whites-allowed-to-be-racist to the hilt, on the whole, this explanation is just an offramp. The hard truth is puritan-adjacent whites have a will to self-destruction, and this is probably fundamental to who we are. It's not going away.

I could pray for God (or more effectively CRISPR) to remove this trait from my tribe. (This is what @campfireSmoresEaten just suggested.) But that would be genociding us beyond the wildest dreams of the activist holding an "Abolish Whiteness" sign. We are the people under God's weight. What's worse, the narcissism and greed one centimeter underneath that facade is also who we are.

For you: it may be your tribe's doom is to be a lekking species, wild, stupid, violent, and feral, and that you as a non-central member must watch them destroy themselves. Any attempt you might make to "fix" this problem would also be genocide.

A few thoughts on how to cope:

  1. Aim for better rather than perfect. Lots of people have noticed that black communities used to be more functional. At the very least, they had two parent households and much lower crime. What were the features of this world, and how can you get closer to it?
  2. Look for optimism in history. Your tribe exists for a game-theoretic reason. While it may be maladapted and flailing here, it thrives elsewhere. In this sense, doomerism is a counsel of hope; when the current system either eats itself alive or revolutionizes, there will be another chance for your tribe to flourish.
  3. Focus your mind on eternal or "spiritual" matters. I'm not a christian but this is what they mean when they talk about fallen man and the love of God.

/images/17122411166078324.webp

Most people do care about their tribe, but it's really historically weird for your "tribe" to be "a population of millions of people who happen to share some genes in common with you".

Empires are extremely common in history. Arguably a lot more common than independent cities or nation states.

That probably doesn't rise to the level of community as what you're calling a tribe here. But then again neither does a whole race.

"Christendom". "I am a Roman Citizen."

How do I read your plot? It seems to be intended to communicate a function of one dimension, distance from the center, but it's given as a 2D plot structured to include radius. What other information is present?

How do I read your plot?

It's a well-known graph from this study on the moral differences between liberals and conservatives. (See page 7.) I don't know why they chose a radial graph rather than a sensible line graph, but the brackets represent:

(1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence

and the color heat represents relative moral weight a person puts on that group compared to the average person.

I don’t think progressive whites actually have a self destructive instinct, I think they would rather cede influence to non-whites than conservative whites and are staring down the barrel of having to cede influence to someone.

What is the gun in this analogy? Because in any interpretation I can draw it is one of their own making. And that's not beating allegations of self destructive instincts.

The same demographic trends that have affected all sorts of other groups. Conservative whites are the odd ones out in having avoided it, not liberal whites for undergoing it.

Some points:

  • Equality of treatment and moral worth still holds and is still valid, even in this world. One does not become deserving of human rights by virtue of capability.
  • All of Douglass' argument still holds. Intelligence does not justify dominance, especially given past experiences. We may all one day hand over governance to a being of superior intellect in the knowledge that it will rule us with greater wisdom than ourselves, but oh boy, white people ain't it.
  • Related: the more AI grows, the less IQ matters. Who cares if you're smarter or dumber than somebody else? The Singleton is smarter than all of us put together at any rate.
  • If we get a positive takeoff, IQ doesn't matter at all. You can just ask for more!

Why not?

If your IQ is, say, 130, it's going to be 130 regardless of what the rest of your group's is. It doesn't mean anything for you personally. If anything it means you lucked out harder than otherwise.

The only reason I care for it is as a means of destroying the blank slatist idea that there must be parity of outcomes between groups, and thereby eliminating the unjust affirmative action policies that unfairly hold the brilliant back to promote the mediocre above their competence.

Yes, it massively sucks that so many resources have been wasted on chasing an impossible, pointless mirage. But if the best time to fix the mistake was decades ago, the second best time is now. Any policies founded upon falsehoods will be ineffective compared to ones founded on truth.

I’m guessing OP cares about their community’s well-being, not just their own intelligence.

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?

Why is OP's race his community, however?

I understand that ethnic identity being tied into genetics is an extremely common thing, but it's not obvious that it should always be so.

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.

(Emphasis added) This is the part that sticks out to me as false. Presuming that HBD is true and black people have an average IQ of 85 or whatever, this doesn't imply that these issues you name, i.e. crime, poverty, ignorance, in black communities are necessarily intransient. Even if we want to think of the black community as a "community" in some meaningful sense rather than just a bunch of people who happen to have certain genes in common (something I personally don't want to, for any race, but it seems most people insist that we must), it doesn't imply that that this community must have these problems permanently or in the long run. What it does mean is that attempting to solve these problems the exact same way that we have and do solve these problems for other "communities" such as the "white community" or "East Asian community," but more is pointless.

I'm reminded of something people sometimes say about the gender culture wars, that boys get treated like defective girls (e.g. when they're physically violent, aggressive, or restless in classrooms). Some people insist that we ought to just keep pushing boys to be more like girls even harder and punish them even more when they fail, but there are plenty of people who believe that "HBD" (or perhaps more accurately behavioral sexual dimorphism) in this realm implies that we ought to solve boys' problems and girls' problems in different ways. I don't see why this couldn't be the approach to solving these issues in the various communities if it turns out that HBD is indeed true.

Again, my personal preference would be that we ignore the entire notion of "[race] communities" altogether and summarily execute tar and feather shame ignore anyone who insists on analyzing populations on this basis and allow individuals to navigate a world of individuals forming communities with each other based on other characteristics, but that seems like a non-starter these days.

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 notice™. 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.

Do you really trust those numbers? 70s is can’t tell left from right putting on shoes is a struggle range. That implies literally half the population is literally retarded.

https://www.themotte.org/post/898/smallscale-question-sunday-for-march-10/192964?context=8#context

While I can't speak as to the validity of the numbers in any rigorous manner, as my comment illustrates, not all people with low IQ are made the same.

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.

I don't see that the struggle was fruitless. The way that black people were treated under slavery was abominable, truly awful, and was never justified by HBD.

Second, I think we're close - maybe within a generation - of having the understanding of genetics to very very quickly identify if a gap exists and close it through non coercive means like embryo selection. So I think you should be optimistic.

If you focus on the gaps, you'll see gaping maws everywhere. An incel may see all the reasons why they're undateable. A Black-pilled HBDer may see themselves as inherently slower.

If they can't start with seeing themselves from their strengths, they are unlikely to grow into the best they can be.

I know many retired E-9s of color. The oldest is a Vietnam veteran. He needed help taking the placement test in the way his white peers did. After he got that help, he did the right thing and passed it down to his mentees. It's not just innate intelligence that gets passed down, but also experience. Experience, expectations, and emotions.

There's a strain of community activism called Asset Based Community Development. Like many programs, they started with the initials (ABCD) and made a bacronym. Unlike many other programs, they prefer a bottom-up approach. They assume people, all people - limited though they may be - have put in the work to get good at something. Good enough that they should be valued.

I don't know what your life goals like like. You may not reach the intellectual & career heights of people that we write about. (SPOILERS: most of us here won't either.) But if you can operate in your zone of excellence, and help a brother or two get at least half as good as you are - that's still a life of positive impact.

This post really gets my troll senses tingling. An account that's less than a week old posting about HBD, which is probably the most offensive topic a leftist would come across. Then starting said topic with "as a black person". Then not really saying much but vague agreement. I could easily see this post being the result of a leftist forum user from some other site saying "Hey guys, I'll go to that place where Nazis justify racism, and pretend to be a black man agreeing with them. Then they'll show us what they REALLY think!!!"

If this isn't the case then I'd suggest posting that essay type post sooner rather than later, as you'll get more interesting answers that way.

There was a "as a black guy worried about my low-IQ genes contaminating my white girlfriend and our future kids" post on the reddit SSC culture war roundup thread shortly before it was permanently canceled. I didn't bother responding to it, but it was so clearly bait. Just the perfect example of intolerable wrongthink.

This place is more rightwing than it was on Reddit

Agreed. We seem to somehow be undergoing reverse Conquest's second law...

reverse Conquest's second law...

I suggest we call it "Scott's Law of Witches" after this post. The outgroup refer to it as the "Nazi Bar Problem" but we don't want to promote "Nazi" as an epithet for right-wing views in the large gap between Mitt Romney and the actual NSDAP.

As far as I can tell, the motte is mostly pro-HBD and anti-equal protection laws. That makes us at least fellow travelers to what Nazi means in practice.

As far as I can tell, the motte is mostly pro-HBD and anti-equal protection laws. That makes us at least fellow travelers to what Nazi means in practice.

I think that a majority of mottians might agree with Scott Alexander that it is likely that the Ashkenazi Jews have some genetic intelligence advantage compared to most other ethnic groups.

"Pro-HBD" seems a weird term to describe that, it makes it sound like people pick their beliefs to signal group membership instead of what they perceive to be true. Like they are fanboys of some sports team.

I believe that the surface gravity on Earth is roughly 9.8m/s^2. I don't like this fact, and think it would be amazing if earth was less dense and had only 2 m/s^2 surface gravity. I would thus be annoyed to be called "pro-gravity".

My relationship to HBD is similar, except that I believe it to be more of a minor quirk than a driving force of history. What we should do about it is that we should try very hard to identify the relevant genes and then CRISPR the hell out of the next generation.

"anti-equal protection laws" can mean many different things. I am broadly for colorblindness and meritocracy, which means I am broadly against affirmative action.

To the degree that the state makes it hard to fire employees for stuff, I think it is probably more consistent to add ethnicity to other criteria like sex/gender, sexual orientation or even political leanings.

Being treated equally for these things by the state is non-negotiable. There might be a few mottians dreaming of turning the US into a "white ethnostate", and I don't particularly object to calling them fellow travelers of the Nazis, but I would be surprised to learn that it is a majority of them. "We should not hand out driving licences / passports / concealed carry licences / permissions to have kids to Males / Republicans / Lesbians / Blacks" sounds fucking un-American to my European ears.

I think one effect is that people with moderate opinions are much less likely to comment on a thread than people with strong opinions. People who argue about gender until the comment depth reaches 20 are likely either feminists or men's rights people. People who argue about class relations ad nauseam are likely to be Marxists. People who thrive on HBD discussions are more likely to be (prescriptive) racists than people who thrive on discussions about economics are.

I don't like this fact, and think it would be amazing if earth was less dense and had only 2 m/s^2

Earth would have had no air, then.

Any organization that is structurally committed to letting rightists speak freely (such as this forum) is, in some sense, already an explicitly rightist organization, and would therefore be exempt from Conquest’s second law.

I miss when Free Speech was a heavily left-wing-coded principle. I expected more right-wingers to start adopting it as they realized they were losing control of the culture and could no longer be confident of not getting the short end of the stick, but I was way too naive about how many left-wingers I expected to avoid doing the opposite.

This post really gets my troll senses tingling. An account that's less than a week old posting about HBD

Doesn't help that he hasn't responded since...

he had a bunch of posts in the filter. I've approved them.

It's only unchangeable if we allow the combination of the eugenics taboo and a lack of long-term planning to deny us the use of current technologies like embryo-selection and potential future technologies like polygenetic genetic-engineering. (To say nothing of the possible individual enhancements opened up if we manage to achieve brain emulation.) Remember the general population of whites and asians is also less intelligent than intellectuals tend to assume, because they associate with a highly selected subset. A large fraction of the population struggles with tasks like "interpreting a simple bar graph". It's also getting worse, with current dysgenic trends. Just achieving and maintaining the sort of humanity that many people already assume exists requires transhumanism, for every race.

Afterwards we can look back on the statistics about stuff like intelligence and crime and obesity and depression the same way we currently look back on 50% infant mortality rates and widespread stunting from malnutrition. Though of course the biggest leap would be curing aging, if we ever achieve that I expect a lot of the other improvements would seem like a sideshow by comparison.

Slow clap. So many people on this forum totally ignore the technological tools that we will all be using very soon. They are examining the future through the static lense of history and not taking into account the monumental shift in evolution that bioscience is about to unleash (if we even stay biological). The hot takes about the Hassidic Jews or the Amish taking over using 2,000 years of outbreeding others are wild to me in the face of robotics, computation and genetic manipulation. Even the "please have more kids" crowd that has been so vocal lately is missing the forest for the trees. It just doesn't really matter in the face of the almost unimaginable change coming at humanity over the next 100 years.

Frequently when people feel this way about HBD, especially as it relates to themselves on a personal level, it's based on a misconception. A common caricature of HBD is that there's an identifiable property of "blackness" that has causal powers; almost as though black skin itself were some foreign organism exerting a downward pressure on your IQ, and if you could only shed your skin then you would unlock the full potential of your inherent abilities. This is completely incorrect.

The mechanisms that determine your IQ and other psychological traits are the exact same mechanisms at work in every other human, and at a purely physical level they have nothing to do with race. "Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race.

That being said. It is a corollary of HBD that the pervasive dysfunction seen throughout Africa and black communities worldwide is in part caused by genetic factors. You are within your rights to think that this is a tragedy - but what of it? We live in a world that's filled to the brim with tragedies great and small. People die of disease, accidents, and violence every day, rich and poor alike, wise or foolish, virtuous or ignoble. HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.

You may be interested in the emerging possibilities of genetic engineering to increase intelligence and other eugenic psychological traits; but this is fraught with its own philosophical quandaries.

"Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race...HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.

I think these are the sorts of things Westerners say because they have an atypically low focus on group honor. No man is an island, we all have a tribe and that tribe and its success matters.

"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters. Both in that the first affects individuals and that we can easily see it being otherwise. We know how to vaccinate groups, we don't know how to raise IQ.

All of this Coleman Hughes "focus on individuals" stuff is essentially an ameliorative tactic to save individualism and group agnosticism, but that only makes sense if groups are the broadly same. As the dissident right joke goes: "individualism and freedom for all (* obviously for 130 IQ Anglos)". On this view, "equality" and not caring about groups works because they just assumed power would be limited to those capable of handling it. And then everyone forgot range restriction and became optimists.

Once we actually accept that blacks can't be "130 IQ Anglos" all sorts of group judgments can flow from this that should concern any individual. For example: I'm African (my post history goes back so I can't be accused of being a troll - and you can probably find me on reddit with minimal effort too tbh). There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds. That argument has historically worked against me (which is why Western nations mainly took white people and didn't even consider African migration) and may again, if people come to believe it again.

Am I supposed to go "well, as an individual, this is not my concern"? Are my opponents supposed to say "oh, okay then"? I cannot escape my race except under the very system HBD destroys.

People here have pegged me as a HBD supporter, but actually I think a lot of HBD is exaggerated or worse. A prime example is HBD supporters claiming that African countries have such low IQ that by Western standards most of them would be mentally retarded. That's a violation of common sense and shows that something's obviously wrong with the HBD idea. The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."

That's a violation of common sense and shows that something's obviously wrong with the HBD idea.

Why? Beyonce owns a sweatshop in Bangladesh that makes clothes and shoes. There are lots of modern industrial productions, including state of art modern electronics, in poor South East Asian countries. AFAIK there are none in sub-Saharan Africa. It's all minerals and crops. When intl megabrand grows something in Kenya, they don't really need local workforce, they need soil and climate. My common sense says that "mentally retarded" is accurate if they can't even sew shoes.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians.

The 5 IQ point advantage for East Asians is much smaller than 20 point IQ genotypic gap with most Africans. It makes entire sense to ignore 5 points gap while consideing 20 points gap. Also, East Asians countries strangely underperform in scientific output compared to their IQ. The 5 IQ gap is about Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Malaysia, Philipines and Indonesia are much lower.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."

Can I translate this as "in an anti-HBD West, people don't cite arguments specific to HBD in their immigration policy"?

I'm pretty sure that the West wouldn't give Asians preferences over whites in immigration whether the West was anti-HBD or not. Exactly who the immigration benefits is far more important than any sincere concerns about how smart the immigrants are. For that matter, you don't even need HBD to say that current immigrants should be Asian because they're higher IQ, and nobody supports that, either.

The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.

Here is a blog post by Kirgegaard arguing this:

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation/

When people think of retarded people, they mostly have in mind someone who has Down syndrome, or a similar severe genetic disorder. … They usually suffer from some kind of syndrome, which is why it’s usually called syndromic retardation. But the more important point is that Down syndrome does not just make your intelligence very low, it also causes other behavioral defects. As such, people with Down syndrome are not representative of people with <70 IQ.

It was noted by Jensen:

Many of the latter [minority lower-class children], despite IQs below 75 and markedly poor scholastic performance, did not seem nearly as retarded as the white middle-class children with comparable IQs and scholastic records. […] EMR [educationally mentally retarded] children who were called ‘culturally disadvantaged’, as contrasted with middle-class EMR children, appeared much brighter socially and on the playground, often being quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal IQ except in their scholastic performance and in their scores on a variety of standard IQ tests. Middle-class white children diagnosed as EMR, on the other hand, though they constituted a much smaller percentage of the EMR classes, usually appeared to be more mentally retarded all round and not just in their performance in scholastic subjects and IQ tests. I asked myself, how could one devise a testing procedure that would reveal this distinction so that it could be brought under closer study and not depend upon casual observations and impressions.

So in a sense HBD is exaggerated, because we have a (mis)conception of what a person 25 IQ points below the norm is like, which is skewed by those with quite heavy mental problems. Thought experiment: Imagine you are the person 2 standard deviations below the norm, simply because you are a 100 IQ person who stumbled into a neighborhood full of extremely bright Caltech/MIT students. There are things in which you notice a difference, like everyone seems to do math in their head quicker than you can tap on your phone to open the calculator app. Maybe you browse funny Instagram stories, instead of wasting your free time in obscure internet boards where users post walls of text about arcane topics. But in most ways you wouldn't seem "retarded" to the genius egg-heads, but them and you would socially interact quite normal.

"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters

Most black people in america live perfectly fine lives by any standard, and would continue to do so under the policies suggested below because they're neither career criminals nor people who benefit from upper-class affirmative action. Nobody's "fucked".

There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds

I think it's very likely you'd pass the IQ test / be able to buy your way in under a better immigration system. Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?

Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?

Shit, that is a good point.

The desirability of selective immigration follows from HBD, but the desirability of race-based selective immigration does not. It does mean it's a shortcut that can be beneficial, but that's all; skimming the cream of populations has generally worked for the US.

If you take migration to be about short-term goals like getting engineers, sure. If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no? Yes, your Nigerian quantum physicist is going to work great, what's going to happen in three generations? Especially given they might (almost certainly, in some countries like the US) assimilate into the existing non-migrant population of the same race...

That is the killer.

In any case, it doesn't need to follow in some absolute way. Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear. That alone makes being concerned rational, and that alone makes the "focus on the individual" refrain unconvincing. People are not failing to understand individualism as the Harrisian-Hughesian argument goes. It's not confusion, it's experience.

I don't know that regression to the mean is all that much stronger for African geniuses than non-African geniuses. It might not be stronger at all, for all I know.

Also: in three generations the human race will be either extinct or so radically changed as to make such considerations irrelevant. Or we will be ruled by hyperintelligent but benevolent marmots. (It's the first one)

Uh, if Nigerian engineers with a 115+ IQ are intermarrying with AADOS women(I don’t think they are; I believe they get mail order brides from the same tribe, and prefer their children to intermarry with whites over AADOS) then it would boost the AADOS IQ. Regression to the mean doesn’t happen that quickly.

then it would boost the AADOS IQ.

Yes. However, for some cases it will increase AADOS IQ but decrease USA IQ.

Regression to the mean doesn’t happen that quickly.

All (or most) regression happens in 1st generation.

If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no?

Not really, no. Regression towards the mean says a 120 IQ person from a race with a low-mean-population IQ probably has a lower genetic contribution towards IQ than a 120 IQ person from a higher mean IQ population, but they're still going to have a higher genetic contribution towards IQ than their population mean.

Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear.

Historically, skimming the cream has worked out well for the US. Our problem populations are where there was probably selection for currently undesirable qualities (American descendants of slaves), and fairly unselected populations (overland migrants who get a LOT of help)

You absolutely raise valid points. I didn't have the time to treat the issue with the nuance it deserves, so I tried to find something brief that approximates my overall view. I do think that at some point you have to find a way to accept the things you can't change and carry on anyway. But there are still many possible attitudes that someone might take towards HBD, and I don't want to diminish the complexity of the issue.

I do understand the feeling of group honor (racial or otherwise), and I understand how it can matter even in cases where you're not "directly" impacted as an individual.

This is the sort of thing that's best worked out in an extended dialogue with the person in question, rather than me or anyone else pontificating about how you should feel.

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

This is where already being a depressive is useful: I've become depressed about much less substantial things, so I simply told myself that this was just my latest excuse.

I'm still depressed, but I don't have this totem in my head I can blame. Tomorrow I may not be depressed, regardless of how we do on Raven's Progressive Matrices tests.

If the worst version of HBD is true (I believe some version is but am agnostic about how unfixable some problems are), if the "crazy" Lynn numbers that even some DR folks seem to be squeamish about are accurate...fuck it.

In a sense, nothing "changed". We all knew growing up that Africa had a disproportionate share of failed states, as kids we believed Asians were better at math and like the two Asians we knew were and I honestly think the older, less educated generation believed in HBD and would just nod along here.

If anything, all it means is that I don't have to spend time reading the huge "it's not HBD it's..." corpus or feeling like I have to do something about it (my father is still fighting the good fight and laments that his constant complaints* have made his children cynical about joining him and trying to help the old country). Just move on and live the best life you can. Even if it was malleable, I'd probably have a minimal-at-best role in changing fate anyway. If it isn't...why the consternation?

If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink. Not because it doesn't matter and we can all be individuals. But because there's nothing else.

* One of his confessions was he felt embarrassed because he goes to the Westerners and asks them to take African agency more seriously, meanwhile even basics don't seem to be done and I quote "our economy doesn't amount to a hill of beans".

Are you African?

As far as I know he is.

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 have always drawn a sharp distinction between technical questions and political ones. To me, "Is HBD true?" Is distinctly the former, while most any question about actually applying that knowledge is the latter.

I'm not a strict utilitarian: I think we can and should have guiding principles in how we approach political questions, regardless of the technical merits. I can think of plenty of likely true technical facts that, applied, lead to all kinds of evil: "Replacing retirement and social security with mandatory euthanasia centers increases paperclip production long-term GDP" might be true, but I find any attempt to enact such a policy morally abhorrent. But I also don't think we need to willfully blind ourselves to the idea as a whole to avoid enacting reprehensible policies: we simply make a moral choice not to do evil.

There will be disagreements about the morality of some cases, but I think there is a legitimate (near-)universal consensus that killing people at retirement is wrong. Much of the Culture War seems to revolve around the moral edge cases (abortion, for example) and largely binary views on morality.

In short, I don't think you should need to concern yourself with whether or not population-level statistics apply to you, and in return we as a society should agree to, in general, ignore those statistics (willfully, if necessary) when interacting with individuals on principle. Because that's the egalitarian society I would want to live in.

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?

There were many hundreds of African societies pre-Colonization with their own codes of conduct and methods for enforcing it. Genetic descendants from these societies may have a harder time conforming to English Common Law, but that doesn't mean that crime and poverty follow necessarily from a lower average IQ score.

I don't view it as a racial thing. Take race out of it and we can have more productive conversations with people outside the Very Online Right. Everyone knows that some people are smarter than others (even if someone believes everyone is smart in their own way, they have to admit that the child with Down Syndrome has less than most.)

How do we as a society accommodate this? How do we provide everyone with a role that challenges and interests them, while providing for their needs? How do we include everyone in the social contract, so that breaking the law becomes offensive to everyone? How do we ensure that top talent goes into the positions that need it, and these positions are rewarded enough to encourage the smartest people to do their best? How do we do this without screwing everyone else?

I'm not talking about changing laws, but first societal attitudes. We first have to agree that these are good things. Right now, the conversation shys away from acknowledging differences and puts everyone into the same grind together.

There were many hundreds of African societies pre-Colonization with their own codes of conduct and methods for enforcing it.

You don't need to tell me this. Pre-colonial Africa has been my main focus of study as an aspiring historian. I admit that even as a HBD-convert that one of the fallacies that the majority of that crowd seems to subscribe to is the idea that literally all of Black Africa was in the Stone Age pre-European contact which I know for a fact is wrong.

one of the fallacies that the majority of that crowd seems to subscribe to is the idea that literally all of Black Africa was in the Stone Age pre-European contact which I know for a fact is wrong.

I’m as deep into that “crowd” as anybody here, and I can say confidently that I have heard nearly nobody make anything close to such a claim. The existence of large-scale agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is well-known, as is the Bantu Expansion and the fact that the Bantu were able to achieve the level of dominance they did partly because of their mastery of metalworking. So no, your characterization of the “HBD crowd” is uncharitable and misinformed.

What is usually claimed is that nowhere in Sub-Saharan Africa do we find any evidence of written language, of the invention of the wheel, or of two-story buildings. Do you dispute these claims?

Ethiopia did have a pre-colonial writing system, but Europe didn't independently invent writing either so this isn't really a win for whites. Even Amerindians have Europeans beat on the "invent written language" score. Europeans did probably invent the wheel, though it was invented only one time (not counting its invention in the Americas; score another for the Maya), and spread from there. I don't know where the idea that it's some super basic, easy "bare minimum" invention came from, to the point that "they didn't even have the wheel!" is a ubiquitous dunk on blacks from your crowd.

Not sure about two story houses.

EDIT: Here's a meme I've seen thrown around pretty regularly which implies that pre-colonialism, blacks didn't have roads, farms, or houses so it seems like somebody on your side thinks SSA was stone age prior to European contact.

What is usually claimed is that nowhere in Sub-Saharan Africa do we find any evidence of written language, of the invention of the wheel, or of two-story buildings. Do you dispute these claims?

If your claim is that these things were not widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa or were more "primitive" than they were in another places then no I don't dispute that.

But to claim that those things were non-existent in Black Africa is just inaccurate. See Ajami, Nsibidi, Adinkra, etc.

/images/171234563718316.webp

So, how archaeologically well-attested are these? I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I’ve also encountered a number of hotep-adjacent spaces where tendentious claims are presented as “facts that YT doesn’t want you to know* and then it turns out to be a massive exaggeration or an outright fabrication. (Or to be claiming for black Sub-Saharan the accomplishments of non-black peoples like the Egyptians, etc.)

I appreciate you engaging. My views on race and my generally unfavorable attitude toward blacks are well-attested and easily searchable in this community, but I’d be quite happy to have some intelligent and open-minded black individuals to engage fruitfully with here. I’m cognizant of the effect that spending as much time in the dissident-right echo chamber as I do can have, and if you can provide valuable correctives to any shortcomings in my knowledge, I would appreciate it.

The central thesis of HBD is that differing selection pressures produce divergent results between populations, and intelligence is one of the features that vary in this way. It's a pretty straightforward example of evolution, broadly understood.

The very word evolution means "change." Why would anyone consider a process of evolution to be static, immutable, unchangeable?

HBD does not claim there is no path out of the conundrum you observe. I'm not saying there are easy fixes--though I believe there are a great number of small policy changes that might produce results on the margin--but I'm baffled by the take that "HBD = nothing can change."

The way for average black IQ to rise is for black women to choose intelligent black men to father their children. This is not impossible.

The way for average black IQ to rise is for black women to choose intelligent black men to father their children. This is not impossible.

sounds even less likely that mass genetic editing. Also, making male fertility eugenic might be not enough if female fertility is dysgenic

It is very unlikely that all of the issues disproportionately affecting African American communities are the product of HBD. West African and Caribbean countries whose populations are genetically very similar to African Americans have huge variation in violent crime rates, for example, strongly suggesting these are malleable.

More generally, why would the squalor and violence seen in some African countries and diaspora populations be less fixable than the squalor and violence seen in the Europe of centuries past was? According to the New Yorker this week, the homicide rate in medieval Oxford was as high as it is in New Orleans today, some sixty times higher than it is now.

This is probably a troll, but if it isn’t I work regularly with intelligent and capable Africans in finance, here and in Africa itself, who are very bullish on the trajectory of black civilization in the coming years and decades, and who have every reason to be. Despair is certainly unwarranted.

It is really quite amazing how genetics so horribly strikes Haitians but not to remotely the same degree other black Caribbean populations or black Africans or black British people, etc. It does make one suspicious that maybe a second factor could be at play.

why would the squalor and violence seen in some African countries and diaspora populations be less fixable than the squalor and violence seen in the Europe of centuries past was?

The HBD answer would be 'because Europeans have genes conducive to building societies that aren't shitholes and Africans don't'. Now it's a lot more complex than that but a big chunk of Africa's problems are in fact due to the people living there being too dumb to do useful work.

On the flip side there's clearly a lot of non-genetic fruit to be picked, even if it's not exactly low hanging. EG the black tax is a major drag on economic production.

Black tax pretty well might have genetic basis too.

How did they lower the rates in Europe?

Are those pressures being applied to violence prone populations today?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114

The "genetic pacification" hypothesis is such an article of faith among HBD-inclined internet RWers, that I expected it to be, if not accepted by the mainstream, at least a niche topic popular with hereditarian autodidacts, a la Ashkenazi IQ or something like that. So I was surprised to find that it appears to be based solely on this single paper, and that this single paper sucks.

The proposition that there was a huge sea-change in public, ecclesiastical, and official attitudes towards the death penalty in the high middle ages is supported by reference to a single work (La peine de mort by Carbasse), and two or three quotes from prominent theologians. Maybe it's true but the authors haven't done a very good job establishing that.

Later the authors acknowledge that A) they don't know how many of these condemned men procreated before their executions, B) they don't know how many were executed for non-violent offenses, C) they don't know how many murderers escaped detection. They just kind of say 'well our model is imperfect' and keep moving. The authors don't even attempt to quantify any of the aforementioned problems, despite the fact that any one could completely collapse the thesis if the numbers were wrong. Maybe the data for quantification doesn't exist, but in that case the authors shouldn't pretend this papers is anything but idle speculation.

The murder rate dropped all over Western Europe over the time period in question, but the 'execution rate' the authors use of 0.5 - 1% of the male population every generation appears to be based solely on England and Flanders. Was it the same in Germany and France, where the homicide rate also dropped precipitously? The Scandinavian countries? Did they even check? Does the data exist?

a comparable proportion [to those executed, died] through extrajudicial executions, i.e., deaths of offenders at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial.

The above appears to be a case of "I made it the fuck up," or at least the authors don't cite anything to back it up. Nevertheless, it's the justification for boosting the 0.5 - 1% of violent men removed per generation to 1 - 2%, which naturally is better for their conclusion.

They also assume that the heritability of violence was the same in the Middle Ages as it is today. I doubt it, though there's no way to know since no one was doing heritability estimates in 1300. But again, this is necessary for their argument to go through.

Then there's this bizarre section

Eisner’s control theory is vulnerable to another line of criticism. In societies of Western European origin since the mid-20th century, external and internal controls on behavior have weakened, while “bad boys” have become more positively portrayed in popular culture. This cultural change seems to have caused a modest rise in violence among young men of European background, but nothing comparable to what existed a millennium ago (Eisner, 2001; Spierenburg, 2008, pp. 3–4). If strong external and internal controls had alone caused the pacification of social relations, what is to prevent a return to the earlier, less peaceful state once they have been relaxed? This prospect is evoked by Muchembled (2008, p. 8) in his history of violence in European societies. It also comes up repeatedly in works of modern fiction from Lord of the Flies to A Clockwork Orange, whose characters revert to barbarism when freed from the restraints of civilization. In reality, this reversion to barbarism has not happened.

The argument seems to be "We think 'bad boys' are cool now, but murder rates haven't exploded! Could this be because the murder genes were bred out of us????" Sure, why not?

All of the above is besides the point, since we have much firmer historical evidence from much more recent times that very high homicide rates among large populations can collapse quickly enough to rule out genetic explanations. The 19th century Mediterranean littoral, in particular, suffered from homicide rates equal to those of the most crime-ridden American cities today. Southern Italy had homicide rates of 30/100k, Corsica about the same, in Greece this was even higher, up to 50-60/100k. Spain had a homicide rate of about 10/100k in the mid-19th century. By the early 1900s, Mediterranean homicide rates had fallen several times over, down to the 1-3/100k range. Anglo-American homicide rates in the American west were also several times higher than those back east, despite the same genetic stock. I don't have the sources on any of these on hand, but I can go find them if anyone wants. The whole idea of 'genetic pacification,' is entirely superfluous, when there is good evidence that environmental factors are sufficient to produce manyfold reductions in murder rates in much shorter periods of time than the entirety of the middle ages.

This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.

*This paper being an exception, where it's so bad it's obvious even to me.

This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.

This is (a bit) like being skeptical of biology because you read one of the thousand papers about how cinnamon cures cancer or something. Every field had bad papers, and every field has cranks on social media that believe the bad papers, even if the ratio is more like psychology than physics for HBD. If you focus on the good arguments, I don't think this is an issue.

And yet, the replication crisis is real, so much so that 'every field has bad papers' can very well be that bad papers are norm, and good papers the exception, to the degree that 'the field' is based on the bad and not the good and can be routinely disregarded when appeals to academic authority are made.

I am making an explicit and factual claim that the field of biology has established a very large number of undeniably true and useful complex claims. I'm also claiming that the scientific consensus on the heritability of IQ and other traits is strong enough that it's clearly true. Also that, while the scientific consensus isn't there on racial differences in the heritable parts of IQ, the evidence is strong enough that one should believe it. I think that most of the "HBD Cinematic Universe" as in the things people believe on twitter is shoddy and false, but the core results are independent from that!

As are the core claims, because the core claims as much from what people believe on twitter as in the non-consensus-but-valid research.

Skepticism and not deferring belief is as valid against a non-consensus as it is against the replication-crisis-tainted consensus, as the counter-establishment types are operating in the same fundamental ecosystem, with the same underlying incentives: to over-claim, under-demonstrate, and fail to replicate without selective utilization of data.

When the bad research is the norm, and not the exception, skepticism of anything from the field is warranted and sensible. The issue is not that one of a thousand papers are compromised- it's that upwards to 900+ of the 1000 papers are compromised, and if you can't determine which are which, 'look for the good ones' is meaningless admonishment.

I am confident in the core claim that there is a >=50% genetic component to general competence, or a 'general factor' of intelligence, ie IQ, and that potential caveats (gene environment interactions etc) are unimportant. That's also supported by mainstream science. The only remaining core claim is that various races have, on average, significantly different amounts of that. The science there is less strong, primarily I think because researching that topic head on with the millions of individual datapoints you need is something a big biobank might not want to happen. But nevertheless there is some science there, if you take polygenic scores for individual IQ and compare black and white individuals, the average black score is lower, and ... I struggle to think of alternative explanations for the patterns of racial differences in achievement across the world. Say the black/white gap is systemic racism, there remain many large, persistent, and universal-across-subject gaps with no clear environmental explanation.

I'll be honest, I agree with @Ben___Garrison below that this post is just a little too pat, reads just a little bit too much like someone trying to flatter the preconceptions of certain Motters, and indicates just a little too much awareness of those issues to be someone new here. And there are a few other flags I won't discuss publicly that make me suspect you are a return guest.

That said, we prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, and if you are sincere and who and what you say you are, I apologize for the suspicion, but understand that we deal with trolls and LARPers regularly. But I would earnestly encourage you to engage and talk more.

As to your actual point, as someone who believes HBD has much explanatory power (but I'm not a "hard HBDer," meaning I don't believe black people are just genetically predestined to always be an underclass or that it's evidence we should divide and segregate ourselves racially), I would echo what other people below say, that first of all, being a member of a group that is, on average, disadvantaged does not necessarily say anything about you as an individual, and that secondly, there's no reason to think that average gap can't be narrowed over time, and third, even if it is permanent and unfixable, we are all human beings and the goal should be to give everyone the opportunity to live their best lives, with equal justice under the law. Sounds hokey, I know, but I really believe it.

I've commented before (much to the derision of the some of the other HBDers) that I think one problem with HBD is that even if it is true to the fullest extent, it does not present a clear course of action, because "push all the races apart and create bantustans for the inferior ones" is morally repugnant, and also it would be nearly impossible to get the "inferior" ones to just accept that yes, they suck and it sucks to suck and they should accept their lot.

So, as an (alleged, sorry, I am still suspicious) black man, what would you suggest should be the message to the black community, if you really believe that the worst implications of HBD are true?

I'll be honest, I agree with @Ben___Garrison below that this post is just a little too pat, reads just a little bit too much like someone trying to flatter the preconceptions of certain Motters, and indicates just a little too much awareness of those issues to be someone new here. And there are a few other flags I won't discuss publicly that make me suspect you are a return guest.

I swear I'm not a troll, and I'm genuinely new here. I came here mainly because I know it's a forum where most users seem to be pro-HBD but not in a 4chan racist way

So, as an (alleged, sorry, I am still suspicious) black man, what would you suggest should be the message to the black community, if you really believe that the worst implications of HBD are true?

I don't know, and that's the problem

My essay for next weeks thread is mostly going to be about racial sociology, black existentialism, the origins of "wokeness", why this HBD-realization is so devastating to me, and why it can often be hard for us (black people), to separate facts about the group we belong to from assessments of our individual self-worth. So stay tuned for that ig

As advice, one thing that is not explicitly banned but somewhat frowned upon and which makes people suspect a troll is writing a top-level post and then not engaging at all with the comments. You can't answer everything, but most regular people would at least be reactive for a short while after writing the OP.

it does not present a clear course of action

  1. cease race-based affirmative action (and affirmative action more generally)

  2. smart people should have more kids

  3. embryo selection (possible today), more direct genetic engineering (possible within a few decades)

None of these necessarily follow, though I agree that they are all things that one is more likely to think if it is true.

because "push all the races apart and create bantustans for the inferior ones" is morally repugnant

It's morally repugnant socially (I can't speak on the roots of your personal belief) because we believe that the bantustans are the outcome of white neglect and oppression (even if we place the blame far back in the past or through some dubious logic : e.g. "white flight" where white people just ruin neighborhoods by...leaving)

If tomorrow we just accepted that Black neighborhoods aren't bad because white people took the secret suburb sauce but because low-IQ blacks (disproportionately large group compared to other races) ruin them in a variety of ways then the entire situation changes.

Even if white people were not inclined to abandon blacks, it would be a totally different relationship - certainly there'll be less apologizing for enforcing the law. And things like desegregation and white flight can now be reframed - white people were simply trying to escape the predictable consequences (violence, destruction of legitimately earned wealth) and so on.

White people are then victims, and the fact that the entire federal apparatus is causing excess deaths and loss of opportunity for white people for simply being genetically lucky is what's morally repugnant.

This is exactly the argument the DR makes.

That's the motte.

The bailey is something more like literal bantustans which are kept in a state of immiserated oppression and subjugation, with little chance of escape even for the hardworking and conscientious, because "they deserve it" and because you despise them.

That is what I think all DR projects would actually lead to, no matter how high-minded and reasonable they pretend they want to be.

What does DR stand for? Sorry

Dissident right

"Dissident Right", generally perceived to be white-identitarian.

I don't think it's going to be good (because many normal people have their own spiteful ideas) but if we ever hit this hypothetical (re)acceptance of this theory, it won't be DR Twitter accounts running the show.

YMMV by region I suppose.

The bailey is something more like literal bantustans which are kept in a state of immiserated oppression and subjugation, with little chance of escape even for the hardworking and conscientious, because "they deserve it" and because you despise them.

On the understanding that I am vehemently opposed to the end-state you describe here, it's worth asking how much worse that end-state is than the status quo. "immiserated oppression and subjugation" seems like a reasonably applicable description for the current black underclass environment, and we are probably losing a fair fraction of the hardworking, and probably not a few of the conscientious too.

The current situation is very, very bad.

Assuming you're not a troll, props to you for the intellectual openness to be willing to even consider this.

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.

I don't think this is true. First, there were genuine injustices being suppressing people, and it's good that those are gone. But secondly, there's still a ton of room for growth. At the very least, every axis where things have gotten worse can be at least as good as the previous state, and that's just the minimum. There's plenty of room for growth across the board.

It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient.

I'll note that this is not implied! Even most hereditarian IQ researchers think that the IQ gap is not purely genetic, and all of those other things seem like they can be modified more easily than IQ. They certainly have changed over time, and there's still a long way to go in which things can be improved. (Of course, bringing about large-scale cultural shifts is still no easy matter.)

On a less serious note, I didn't know that intransient was a word. It's a little funny that it's meaning is not super far from intransigent, though it makes sense. in+trans+eo vs in+trans+ago, I think.

I'll also note that there is, of course variation. If what people say is accurate, and the US black mean is one SD below the white one, then that still means that about a sixth of blacks are smarter than the white average. That's definitely not nothing.

I can't disagree with much of the general sentiment, though: it isn't fair, and I certainly understand caring about the people of a group that you identify with more broadly.

I'll also note that following Richard Hanania, white conservatives probably have to accept this too, a little: the liberals have captured education and the universities, and so the average conservative white IQ is lower than the average liberal one. (Again, averages. There's a ton of overlap.)

I'm not sure how this will be change populations in the future, as different groups of people have more or fewer children, or as IVF+genetic screening and selection have effects.

TO BE FAIR, I don't want it to be 'true' either, in the sense that I wish the truth was something different, even if the underlying idea of humans having diverse phenotypes which have impacts on behavior were true.

Any joy I'd get for being a member of a 'superior' group dissipates when considering how my own capability to effect change is practically nonexistent.

I'd prefer the world where HBD was 'true' but IQ and cognition were a bit more malleable (in the positive direction, hit someone in the head with a hammer and it's malleable downward). Then we could probably cooperate towards a better place on the payoff matrix where the tradeoffs aren't so severe.

There are a ton of failure modes for that world too, don't get me wrong. But the world we're currently working with has molochian incentives that we currently can't budge without committing certain atrocities (which wouldn't guarantee success!) is endlessly frustrating.

Imagine by comparison that we figured out that the laws of physics somehow dictated that it was impossible to get a human-sized payload past the orbit of the moon without investing literal continent's worth of resources to it. To the point where we would have to simply accept that we were stuck on this planet and whatever resources lay beyond are simply not going to be available.

I'd hate that truth, and would rage against it, but ultimately the universe would care just as much about out fate whether it is true or not.

Instead, thankfully, getting past lunar orbit is merely very difficult but affordable.

Kinda like how the potential brainpower we as a species can marshall is limited by our number of geniuses and most humans are just not able to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the species. If we could reach an intelligence 'takeoff' where we could boost low IQ humans to some reasonable degree then we could be improving our lifestyles a lot faster than we are.

And we're getting to the point where a broad 'uplift' of human intelligence might fall into that 'very difficult but affordable' category. Or it could be a long way off, but at least its visible.

How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

Reframe your locus of concern to yourself, your immediate family, and your local community, and see what if anything you can do there.

It is entirely possible for a particularly committed (and wealthy, in this case) individual to push back against entropy/moloch in their local environment. Care less about the fate of 'humanity' in the abstract (aside from existential risks) and more about the humans within your personal dunbars number.

Effect change where you can effect change. That's how you avoid nihilism.

Assuming this is not just a troll, and so taking an opportunity to stand on a soapbox.

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.

And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.

If it is true, it does not mean it has to continue to be true, and knowing it is true is the fastest way to fix it. That's how you deal with it without becoming nihilistic.

Further, racial differences in IQ, if true, really shouldn't impact your (or anyones) assessment of you. Maybe you're top 1/1000 in iq, maybe you're top 1/100, but either way your actual intelligence is what it is. The ball you drew is red, regardless of it it came from a bag with 99% red balls or 1% red balls.

Assuming this is not just a troll, and so taking an opportunity to stand on a soapbox.

Hey, about what follows below. That's my line. I don't object harder only because I think its a genuinely important message, about having the courage to face reality being a necessity for fixing it, heh.

And I agree, group differences in IQ doesn't mean you can't assess individuals. If a black guy scored above average in an IQ test, why would I care that he's black? That's the toxic thing about AA and diversity hires, they make it difficult for the genuinely talented to stand out, and the people discriminating against them are correct to do so, in the absence of any way for them to prove that they're better than their compatriots.

The cavalcade of replies along the lines of 'don't worry champ, you'll beat the odds!' look, sound and feel... silly.

Sure, if you abstract yourself to the point of just being an idea you'll be fine, but human beings are obviously not ideas. They exist as biological entities. Genes expressed in an environment. We are a 'social animal'. We exist in groups. We interact with groups. You don't exist as an idea. You exist as a part of a greater whole.

Someone saying bad things about your 'whole' looks, sounds and feels bad!

I wish that the individual, reason driven, enlightened and fair minded people could understand and empathize with the emotion being displayed in the OP. Being part of a 'whole' that is in some ways lesser than another is a constant feeling of badness. The aforementioned minded, who want to rise above such silly emotions, or simply lack them, need to understand that they are a minority of a minority. Telling someone who feels to simply not feel is silly. You can't understand what the person is talking about and give such an answer. It's not smart, reasoned or enlightened.

I'm reminded of Joseph Sobran, who hit on a similar type of a fundamental misunderstanding of just why some of the emotional expression that exists continues to persist, to the endless bafflement of the 'enlightened' few.

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.”

Well he would say that, while apparently feeling very envious himself over the power of Jews to puppet the US around the world stage like a marionette (according to him).

I am not understanding the relevance of your comment. Why wouldn't he, allegedly, feel 'envious' over "the power of Jews to puppet the US around the world stage like a marionette"? Is there supposed to be a contradiction here?

Because he puts his western white heritage (unsurprisingly...) at the top of the world hierarchy in your quote, while he spent much of his life writing about the Jews pulling all the strings. That dude just slowly became more bitter at life till it killed him young.

The jews didn't pull strings to get the white man to the top. They pull strings to control the white man because he is at the top.

Beyond that I am starting to see your point. Which is that you don't like Sobran. Which is fine. What I don't get is how your dislike of him is relevant to my comment and the sentiment being pointed out.

The contradiction is "towering over the rest of the world is great, as long as it's us doing it, but not when it's the hated Jews".

That's not a contradiction.

The implication of "towering over the rest of the world is great" is that it's based on a principle. Any such principle that doesn't outright say "and no Jews" or equivalent would approve of Jews doing the same.

I have to admit the quotation marks threw me for a loop. That's not what Sobran said so I'm failing to understand where you are drawing these implications from.

Sobran is not saying that towering over the rest of the world is a good or bad thing. He is just stating a fact about the world. The white man does tower over everyone. There is barely a place left on earth that isn't directly impacted by the consequences of his feats. Construction, transport, information. Every element that facilitates the world as we know it is there because a white man, in one way or another, put it there.

How you, or the previous replier, manage to insert jews into the equation is confusing me a lot. How does it relate to the point being made?

I don’t particularly want HBD to be true, either, but it doesn’t actually say you, personally, are low in intelligence. It says black people are more likely to be low in intelligence compared to other races. That doesn’t mean we think George Washington Carver was secretly a white man pulling a Black Like me. It means that on average there are fewer George Washington Carvers than Henry Fords. I mean this is the motte; our average is a white guy 3 standard deviations smarter than the average White guy.

Nor do I think American blacks are performing near their intellectual limit given America’s context- cultural problems are a bigger factor. And nor are American blacks that badly off right now either. They have a standard of living similar to the average in Western Europe instead of much higher like white Americans. Obviously I think they’d prefer to have a higher one, but having a standard of living similar to France or Germany isn’t a catastrophe. And most of the other problems they face are either hallucinated(many of the claims about police violence) or culturally self-imposed.

Is the average white American actually much better off than the average west European?

By leaps and bounds. At least in my travels. It also depends on the criteria. If you don't like being fat then being born in Europe is much better, if you like having 50%-100% more disposable income, America is better. London was dirt cheap to me when I was there recently, and I don't come from a wealthy state. France and Portugal, even more affordable. I loved Germany, also affordable (bring cash), Prague was not as cheap as expected.

But yeah, generally prices were half or less what I would pay where I live, and salaries were also half, so in the states you make twice as much for the same job and you pay twice as much for food and lodging, hard goods are cheaper in the USA regardless. Best deal is earn in the USA and spend it elsewhere.

Just going off household incomes, yes- the average white American is about 10% wealthier than the average dutchman, and most Western European countries are a bit poorer than the Netherlands. Obviously there’s intangibles but white Americans have a higher standard of living than any major country in Western Europe.

The average American is more affluent than the average west European but how much depends on how you define both affluence and western Europe.

The more striking difference is the level of UMC pay, where Americans really and unequivocally are much better off than their European counterparts.

UMC?

Upper middle class

Upper middle class. 95-99.5th percentile.

I was too poor to know what that meant. :(

replies suggesting that the history of slavery and Jim Crow might have something to do with black underperformance

Even during slavery, African Americans had the highest literacy rate of any SSA group. They had a greater attainment of complex skills as a consequence of being skilled slaved and/or freed in the North. How do you reason that it’s possible for slavery to cause black underperformance, when we know that their skill level was worse before slavery? Lastly, if I enslaved you to work all day and inflicted corporal punishment whenever you misbehaved, and I did this for a decade, do you think after the decade you would be a better or worse worker? When a slave from the south was freed in the north and went on to work a productive life as a blacksmith (or something), what caused him to be unhindered from slavery that hindered the others?

I would expect a worse worker. You have removed internal motivation.

But Indian and East Asian authoritarian/disciplinarian parenting styles — at their most extreme — result in physical punishment and shaming without regard for “internal motivation”. Yet this produces the highest performing capitalist worker bee cohort. Marine training is also externally-focused, yet military science tells us this produces good soldiers and common wisdom tells us this results in disciplined young men after service. Having food to eat and a roof over your head is also intrinsically motivating as is, we are talking about the late 19th and early 20th century where there is no welfare state, but in the case of slaves their habits are optimized for productivity.

Internal motivation is probably a meme concept. Do we mean, “has the skill of foreseeing the positive versus negative consequences of their current behavior?” This is instilled by slavery, where reneging of daily duty results in salient physical punishment, and fulfilling the duty in abundance may result in greater rewards. The difference post-slavery is that the foreseeing of reward/punishment is applied only to money and the consequences of money, so it is a little more delayed in consequence, but it’s the same neural circuitry.

There's also Russian and Chinese governance in the 18-20th century - pretty unpleasant! Russian serfdom and Chinese landlord control were roughly equivalent to American slavery, often worse at times.

Yet Russia and China still turned out pretty well, in terms of performance.

But Indian and East Asian authoritarian/disciplinarian parenting styles — at their most extreme — result in physical punishment and shaming without regard for “internal motivation”.

I'm pretty sure they are still associated with considerably more internal motivation than slavery.

Well, why do you think so?

Because slavery is done for the interests of the slaveowner and at least in theory, authoritarian parents are acting for the long term benefit of the children. And even callous authoritarian parents are not going to be as callous as slaveowners.

Why would the knowledge that a parent has been acting for longterm benefit increase a person’s internal motivation regarding longterm planning and delayed gratification?

And even callous authoritarian parents are not going to be as callous as slaveowners

But there are no shortage of high performing Asians who genuinely feel that their parents were callous in their adolescence, showing no love, driving them like a slave.

When they say they were driven like a slave that's metaphorical. It isn't actually the same thing as being driven like a real slave.

Kids are not, generally, capable of understanding the distinction.

Because slavery is done for the interests of the slaveowner

Reproduction is done for the interests of the parent.

Kids are not, generally, capable of understanding the distinction.

No, I think they understand the distinction perfectly (in that there is none). "Slavery" might be a loaded term (parents and adults more generally will take reflexive offense to children calling it this, even if you ignored that it's an insult to their legitimacy on its face because it is loaded, something children also are well aware of), but in their defense it is a perfectly accurate description of the situation.

[Mistake-theory description of biological reality below]
Children are, by their nature, property; something they have in common with women. Scalable primary resource extraction is difficult to impossible to establish for them. Thus, sons work for you until they become too large to physically dominate (which is the definition of "adulthood" for men), daughters you sell at physical maturity (the definition of "adulthood" for women) to the highest bidder (they're a net loss otherwise), and your wife is such a purchase.

Now, this isn't to say that some fathers treat that property very well- as if they didn't own it, almost (and property that has 2 legs needs to be motivated pretty strongly to stick around; you can do that through love or fear, fear is easier and always your fallback option as a father but it's less productive in the long run so generally worth putting in the effort to not do that)- but that doesn't make the balance of power any different and selfishness on the part of the parent (or the surrounding society- like Asian nations and their ludicrous education systems, or certain US states where the State will punish you if you're let outside) will always push that balance towards fear.

Really, at the end of the day, we're just haggling over the price. For example, something that can break this reality is if scalable primary resource extraction in terms of a man's body is completely obviated by mechanization/technology/market forces- if that happens, the bride price goes to infinity, and with that men can no longer meaningfully own women. This happened to children at the same time for the same reasons, so you had a lot of effectively-emancipated "teenagers"... until the Great Depression put a so-far-permanent end to that (with a slight rebound for them around the '60s).

Chains that set lightly upon you are still chains; what harm does noticing them do?

If I had to describe my race politics in a word, I would probably pick 'color-blindness'.

Also, I do not vote on comments up or down, and do not think that giving people unlimited votes will result in voting patterns which give useful information. My suspicion is that when the motte was on reddit, there were a lot more non-racist lurkers with a reddit login which voted comments up or down.

Someone is wrong on the internet is not enough to get me to write a reply. If someone claims that ethnic Nigerians can never become "real" Americans, I tend to just shrug and get on with my life.

White nationalism seems silly to me. Classic historical ethno-nationalism is typically much more exclusive than just saying "if your skin is white enough, you are in", and instead select much smaller ethnicities like Romanians or Danes. Of course, anyone who wants to turn the US into a white ethnostate should consider if they might not be better served by emigrating to whatever country has the lowest non-white population. Russia looks pretty white to me, just saying.

The most successful states of their time were rarely ethnically homogeneous. Take the Roman Empire or the US. Functioning as a multicultural society seems kind of a superpower.

If you are an American and want to only live around white people, Maine exists.

Very nice and extremely white places(Maine, Iceland, Denmark) aren’t hard to find. If you’d like to maximize your purchasing power I hear Argentina is like 90% light skinned, unlikely to go to war anytime soon, and eager for American dollars to be spent there.

If you’re looking for the actual literal whitest country in the world, it’s probably Latvia or something- absolutely no one moves there(unlike Russia, the US, Germany, etc) and there’s no native non-whites unlike in the US or Russia.

If of course you want a place to live that’s upper 90’s percent red tribe white, that’s West Virginia.

White nationalists mostly don’t live in or move to any of these options, although a few move to Orania I think all of those already lived in South Africa.

Have you considered why white identitarians are not moving in greater numbers to white European countries?

I will use myself as an example. Right before Covid, I started looking into the possibility of becoming certified to teach English abroad. I was trying to figure out a way to get out of the U.S., at least temporarily, and to make a decent living while doing so. It seemed like one of the few ways for a non-highly-skilled immigrant to Europe to contribute positively, in a way that would not actively compete with or take jobs away from local citizens; my English fluency was something I could bring to the table that the average Eastern European can’t, and I could contribute positively to a local economy and culture.

However, the Covid lockdowns and their effects on travel decimated the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) industry, and even if they hadn’t, the reality is that very few Americans can successfully get long-term well-paying jobs in Europe, due to EU labor regulations. I would have had to have invested in a Master’s degree in Education to have any hope of earning a stable and long-term salaried teaching job anywhere in the EU; without it, and without an established background as a professional teacher in the U.S., my job prospects in Europe would have been pretty entry-level. This is fine for recent college grads taking a “gap year”, or people who are just that desperate to get a chance to live abroad, but for someone like me, in my thirties and needing to earn a real living with the opportunity to save money, it just wasn’t financially realistic. And of course it would have been even less realistic if I already have a family and kids that I needed to bring over there and support.

There is also the issue of having nearly no established English-speaking expat community in many of those countries. The prospect of becoming fluent in Latvian, or Slovak, or Serbian, at this point in my life is quite dicey; I would be a very obvious foreigner, too late in life to truly assimilate into the local culture, for the entirety of my life in whatever country I’m moving to; if my entire stance on immigration is that it’s bad for people to move in large numbers to a country, despite not speaking the language and not being able to assimilate, it would be pretty hypocritical for me to then go and be exactly one of those immigrants.

And if Latvia did decide to open itself up to large-scale immigration by Americans, and to make its culture more accommodating to such people, the types of people who would come would be, overwhelmingly, liberal cosmopolitans who would immediately set about dismantling what made Latvia so functional and appealing in the first place. I was always aware that by coming over to Latvia to teach their children English, I would, as a matter of practical reality, be giving those children the tools to move away from Latvia, or to open their minds up to the poisonous ideology emanating from the Anglosphere and to sever them from their roots. In one sense, I would be selling them a valuable product that they desire, but in the other hand I would consider that product quite likely to be deleterious to them and to their native culture in the long run; I’d be little better than a pornographer or a drug pusher.

For white racially-aware individuals to start moving to European countries en masse, there would need to be clear reasons to believe that this would not lead to them being a ghettoized and distrusted population in those countries. Perhaps some right-wing European billionaire (do any such people exist?) could open a bunch of schools that would teach European kids English, but at the same time also teach them conservative Eurocentric values? This could maybe employ some smart DR guys like me who are temperamentally suited for teaching, but it’d still have to find some way to pay us a decent enough salary to make it worth it. Past that, I just don’t think the jobs are realistically there for most of the guys who’d be theoretically interested in them.

A couple of points: first, in terms of English proficiency being a cultural solvent - English already is the lingua franca of Europe, as it is in many other parts of the world. When an Italian meets a German, 9 times out of 10 they will speak English. When a Finn meets a Spaniard - English (although the Spanish are generally pretty bad at English). And so on.

If Europe is to achieve some manner of proper confederation and thereby preserve itself as anything other than a relic over the next century or two, it needs a language with which to do this. English in Europe (and remember it is after all a European language) doesn't just mean Americanisation, it also means the coalescing of pan-European consciousness.

So English proficiency is not purely a malus, or purely a tool of globohomogenisation.

Secondly - I know you're talking about Latvia as a long shot in terms of migration and integration, but actually its neighbour just to the north, Estonia, explicitly is pursuing a strategy of welcoming ambitious foreigners from the likes of America. They've set up an E-residency scheme that's kind of notoriously open to abuse, but it's meant a lot of foreign tech setting up shop there. Estonia is a more reasonable shot for someone of your profile to move to and integrate into, if you're interested

Oh believe me, I did plenty of research into the different countries that would be realistic destinations. I’d looked everywhere from Estonia to Macedonia and everywhere in between. I’d actually eventually settled on focusing my efforts toward non-EU countries like Serbia and Montenegro, just because of the greater ease of getting a job as a non-EU citizen.

Ultimately the issue is that English teaching in most European countries simply does not pay enough to make a living, and the long-term prospects of the industry on the continent seem to be very dire due to technological advances. I am certainly still interested in moving to Europe, but I’m likely going to need to rethink my path there around something other than TEFL.

I presume that white nationalists are attached to the places where they live- you live in SoCal IIRC and are a white nationalist. There are few places in the US you could move to that would be less white; I assume that you did not select SoCal as a place to live on the basis of wanting to only live around whites.

The point was that white nationalists obviously have a program beyond just ‘not have to see brown people’, because that option is available. I was addressing the ‘why don’t they just move to Russia’ idea floated in the post I was responding to.

I assume that you did not select SoCal as a place to live on the basis of wanting to only live around whites.

I didn’t choose SoCal at all - I was born here, and have lived here my entire life. Certainly I would not have actively selected it, given my current views, had I been born elsewhere. (I also dispute your description of me as a “white nationalist”, although I doubt you would find my protestations about that term persuasive.)

But yes, obviously any individual white nationalist/white identitarian/race realist/etc. will have other desires and life goals competing with the desire to live exclusively among other white people. Nothing is stopping me from moving to rural North Dakota, except for the weather, the lack of jobs, the generally poor lifestyle, the fact that I don’t know anybody there and would not be even close to anyone I know or anything I care about. And those same complaints apply doubly to moving to a country where the people don’t even speak English or have any cultural reference points in common with me. Now, would I still rather live in Latvia than in, say, Jackson, Mississippi? Yes, certainly, even despite all of the issues I’ve just listed. But there are options in between - like moving to a college town or affluent suburb in a relatively white and conservative state - that achieve most of the same goals without presenting quite so many obstacles and tradeoffs. And racially-aware whites in this country are in fact making this choices in great numbers right now. I plan to do so myself in the near future.

I didn’t choose SoCal at all - I was born here, and have lived here my entire life. Certainly I would not have actively selected it, given my current views, had I been born elsewhere.

Given that you are in your thirties, you chose to live there even if it was the default choice. You could easily have moved to Kansas City or Tulsa or whatever.

(I also dispute your description of me as a “white nationalist”, although I doubt you would find my protestations about that term persuasive.)

Then, uh, what are you?

I think your point is fair, but I would not describe either Kansas City or Tulsa as great havens for white identitarians. Both have longstanding racial strife. I’m actually not sure where such a person would want to go, if being around white people were the main concern.

Maine, as I pointed out in the beginning of this comment chain, has a negligible non-white population. If you're less committed to the US and can work remotely, Argentina has decent quality of life for American remote workers and a fairly relaxed visa regime, while being overwhelmingly white with a completely negligible black population. If you're less committed to living in a non-shithole, all the nonwhites left Ukraine when war broke out and the only new ones who arrived are serving in the Russian army.

Vermont or New Hampshire?

Given that you are in your thirties, you chose to live there even if it was the default choice. You could easily have moved to Kansas City or Tulsa or whatever.

Kansas City is over 25% black - for comparison, San Diego is less than 6% - and has a very significant black crime problem. Tulsa is only 15% black - so, again, still nearly three times as black as San Diego - and also has higher rates of both violent crime and property crime. Moving to either city would not be an upgrade in any of the QOL issues I’m concerned with, with the possible exception of housing costs.

As far as I’m concerned, the central sociopolitical conflict in America is between white and black. The other racial groups in the country are, at best, big players in the centuries-long psychodrama that has always existed between whites and blacks here, since long before the United States was a country. As I’ve explicated many times in this community, I believe that if blacks were to peacefully separate, both politically and geographically from whites, America could pretty much deal with the remaining non-white groups without too much issue. The removal of blacks from the political picture would also almost necessarily mean the dismantling of the Civil Rights Commission infrastructure and the resulting racial spoils system; without any strong pragmatic incentives to define themselves as separate from whiteness, non-whites in this country would, I believe, assimilate quite effectively in time, assuming immigration numbers can be swiftly brought under control and a restoration of the once-default expectations around the cultural/political hegemony of European-descended people is achieved.

I do not seek the creation of a purely-white ethnostate on American soil, both because it would be impossible to achieve, and because it would be unnecessary and would exclude and alienate a great deal of valuable human capital. The situation in Europe is quite different, and I would like to see European states remain >80% white for the foreseeable future.

Comrade, if you wish to practice your unique way of life, you may move to your autonomous oblast! Sure, it’s far away from any industry, but…

An individual white nationalist does not have any influence over where jobs are, or how expensive the housing market is. You might as well tell them to move to remote Alaska. Iceland and Denmark are silly because, were they accepting many immigrants, I bet white nationalists would move there. Maybe even Latvia, too.

A white nationalist isn't someone who merely wants, personally, to avoid contact with non-white people. If it was, they could achieve that by never leaving their own home, which would also be about as politically effective as moving to Latvia.

About that.

Mills’ office said the goal is to figure out the best way to harness the economic potential of New Mainers and it has set a target of attracting 75,000 new workers by 2029.

Fifty years ago you would have all of western Europe, now you're saying it's just down to Iceland and Denmark. Running away to increasingly remote places every few years isn't a winning strategy.

Russia looks pretty white to me, just saying.

Russia is only about 70% ethnically Russian, from memory. Eyeballing it, at least half of the countries in Europe would have a higher % of their primary ethnicity.

Russia is only about 70% ethnically Russian

80.85% of those who declared ethnicity at 2021 Census.

Spending a lot of recent time with higher class Africans, any benefit of the doubt that they are civilizationally capable faded.

I don't think this conclusion can be justified unless "they" is defined more narrowly than it would normally be defined in this context. I'd suggest that higher class Africans are selected for ability to retain power, which is not competency at ruling to benefit the people.

I don't think these views are more common than they used to be. They've always been here in a certain proportion, and they'll likely always be in any area of discourse that allows open debate.

I think you are right however that a certain proportion of the left has stopped pushing back against these and other views in this community. But it's not a mystery why they did so. They made it very plain why: they tried to spin themselves off into another community where moderation was controlled by left wing people and when that failed, they kicked us off the orange website.

The "liberal" PMCs became tired of pretending they have liberal ideals. They're still running the show at Reddit. You're in the pit with the rest of the undesirables.

they tried to spin themselves off into another community where moderation was controlled by left wing people

There is always /r/theschism, our Evil Twin (or maybe we're their Evil Twin). Set up in good faith (I do give them that much) as a place where the left leaning could express themselves without being dogpiled by all us (reads notes) pitbull Pence lovers. They don't seem to have as much activity as on here, though that too may be a part of the whole evaporative cooling thing. There was even a great opportunity for me to have a punch-up with one particular post if I wanted, but I do try to avoid just haunting the place looking for something to be offended by and then leaping in to have an argy-bargy, so I didn't even stick my head up for that one.

I don't go around looking for left-leaning sites to have fights with, and I'm sort of sad that the Schismatics never stuck around here because it would help balance out the right-leaning views, but you can't force people to join up with your community if they don't want to.

There was even a great opportunity for me to have a punch-up with one particular post if I wanted

When I saw that, my first thought was that this seems to be engaging on the wrong level, but my second was to wonder what you'd make of it. I'm still curious, if you're up for a non-argument explanation of what you personally think?

I don't really want to start a fight about it. There's much to be said on both sides (she said weaselly); I do find "to be deep in history is to cease to be Catholic" annoying myself, and I'm an unregenerate Papist. You could equally well end up Orthodox, or even the Oriental Churches might like a word there. And we've deliberately jettisoned so much of our history anyway, Benedict made a brave effort to re-introduce things but he was swimming against the current, so in many instances we're functionally indistinguishable from Protestants.

That being said, you have to end up somewhere. You can go on being a spiritual tourist, but if you insist on finding the one perfect setting where every single box is ticked on your list and it's all totally in tune with your preferences and prejudices, you're going to end up in a church of one. And Protestantism has split off from the Mother Church, no denying that, Trail of Blood notwithstanding, or Branch Theory, or any justification that "Well actually we're not a new denomination".

And Protestantism has split off from the Mother Church, no denying that, Trail of Blood notwithstanding, or Branch Theory, or any justification that "Well actually we're not a new denomination".

I deny it.

I don't think the natural unit of churchhood is adherence to Rome.

Hence, Luther and the other protestants were engaging in reforming the existing church of Germany (and Switzerland, the England, Sweden, etc.), not the creation of new institutions.

This has become less obvious as time has passed and denominations are no longer locally separated, and so the tendency is to think of it in terms of sects instead of in terms of the community of Christians.

I could refight the Wars of Religion here and it'd be fun, but I will refrain for the sake of peace, love and a currant bun.

You think Luther would recognise modern Lutheranism, with lesbian bishopesses for one thing?

You think Luther would recognise modern Lutheranism, with lesbian bishopesses for one thing?

Probably not; I imagine he would think that the ELCA and whatever else would need to be reformed. Remember, his ecclesiology, much more than yours, allows for institutions to start off healthy and then stray further.

But I suppose I don't get your point. Are you happy with the current state of Roman Catholicism everywhere? The German bishops? The current pope? Blessings for same-sex couples?

(And there are strands of Lutheranism which are healthier. The LCMS is somehow both conservative and pretty large, which is fairly unusual for more traditional protestant churches.)

Is there some way that that previous question was supposed to relate to my previous comment that I'm currently not seeing, or was that just meant to be a sample of the refighting the wars of religion that you would do?

Are you happy with the current state of Roman Catholicism everywhere? The German bishops? The current pope? Blessings for same-sex couples?

(1) No (2) Should all be defrocked (3) Not a fan but he's not Satan or an anti-pope (4) Again, not a fan, but once again that will likely be taken as an excuse by those who would do it anyway to go farther than intended

I think if we brought Luther forward in a time machine, he would recognise the Catholics as much the same as he had been fighting, but he would have no idea what the Lutheran church had become. So yes, I'm sticking to "the Reformers did found new denominations, not just reform the existing church". For one thing, they pretty much 'reformed' in different directions from each other, and the Anglican mess under Henry was "I'm only reforming" so he happily burned at the stake both Catholics for opposing him and Protestants for going further than he wanted. And when his son came to the throne, he had been influenced by the very Protestant nobility around him to take the 'reforms' even further. Then Mary tried reversing that with no success, and Elizabeth (and her spymaster) settled on making it a political question rather than religious - so now you would be executed for treason, not heresy, for not being in line with the state church and the monarch as its governor.

More comments

No, but I don’t think Boniface would recognize the current crop of German Catholic bishops either. All of the major churches in Germany are transforming into something that wouldn’t have been deemed Christian a century ago. The only difference is that the EKD is a bit ahead of the RCC.

I sadly have to agree.

I wonder if there'd be some way to coordinate them joining at once, if they're interested, so that they wouldn't have to worry quite so much about being alone, and so that we could get a little more diversity of thought.

I wouldn't want to start a war, though.

I had completely forgotten that that place existed. I think they could have had a much more interesting arc if the moderator drama at the outset hadn't dampened their early momentum.

me too! I wonder if there's a chance to have a glorious reunion with them. /r/thereunification? Or some sort of organized debate event?

Any chance we can coax them back with - what appeals to liberals/lefties? Vegan burgers and spring water? It'd be great if some of them did drop back here occasionally, even as missionaries trying to divert us all back onto the right path and the right side of history.

they kicked us off the orange website

I must be out of the loop; when did “we” get banned from Hacker News?

The color theory of politics strikes again.

Down with mutualist-liberal-national-conservative-lib-left-social-democratic-fujimorist-catalan-christian-catholic-protestant-distributism and its various silicon valley lackeys!

I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right. Part of this was because of failures on the left but I also say Musks buying twitter was a big boost and COVID had a great deal of just be nice to the crazies thru the pandemic. It’s not just Motte going right. Maybe I’m in a bubble but I’m basically expecting as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.

A second point for violent crime isn’t a real risks is it negates all of the costs society bares to mitigate violence in the US. We spend a lot of money on prisons. And a lot of money trying to boost black schools. Chicago’s economics would be a lot different without these costs. You also would not have had the ghettoization of the southside of Chicago. More urbanization does increase agglomeration effects. If America never had slavery I am fairly certain we would have universal health care. I don’t know if on net this would be a good thing because I think we would be less FU capitalist which probably hurts growth in other ways. Without black people American politics would be a lot more like Canada, but a super power.

Hijacking latest comment to repost the deleted comment from nowimjustcurious:

Observation: TheMotte is considerably more rightwing than it was on Reddit.

A couple of three recent comments serve as a demonstration.

Several days ago, I wrote a post summarising an essay in a leading white nationalist magazine. Replies were relatively diverse, but the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically. To wit, the most upvoted comments argue that "Americans" should not include non-white people, and that desegregation was a mistake, and that you shouldn't let black people watch your children (really?).

Likewise, in an attempt to play devil's advocate, I made a recent comment about the "suffering" of white people in response to the HBD post from @PresterJohnsHerald. It's currently sitting at 10 upvotes, and even more interestingly, there is only one reply! I anticipated there would be a lot of rebuttals, like the fact that crime is overwhelmingly interracial, that far more black and white people get along than hurt one another, that your chance of dying from a homicide is statistically negligible, and that the solution obviously can't be segregation. Conversely, replies suggesting that the history of slavery and Jim Crow might have something to do with black underperformance are sitting below zero votes.

I guess what I'm asking is: where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

I wonder if there should be a formal mechanism for preserving top level posts, or other important contextual bits.

On a slightly related note, what is the preferred way to request the mods to check an account for suspicious activity? It seems like there have been an unusually large number of new accounts dropping in, concern trolling/making low effort posts, then ghosting recently. Though brigading or getting linked from somewhere else seems plausible as well.

On a slightly related note, what is the preferred way to request the mods to check an account for suspicious activity?

Report the post. That said, we notice more than you think we do and it's likely we have already noticed and/or are discussing a suspicious-looking poster.

“Where are the liberals at” The liberals are on the entire rest of the internet. The whole reason it’s the Motte and not R/the Motte is that R/the Motte was worried about getting banned off of Reddit. If someone’s opinions are broadly in line with the liberal consensus there’s a million other places they could discuss things instead. We’re like the American colonies during the English Civil War: People come here because they risk getting beheaded elsewhere.

as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.

Which is not a landslide at all. Trump's cap is at best 322, realistically 312 (MN the difference), hardly above Biden's 2020 result. To go any higher he'd have to start pulling some pretty preposterous states out of the bag. In any case, Trump's polling margin even in true swing states is low single digits, the economy has 6 months to get even better and Trump still has his trials to contend with. It's way, way too early to predict a 'landslide'. A week is a long time in politics, six months is an eternity.

Violent crime is the biggest converter from lib to con because it disproportionately affects affluent urban liberals (who are more likely to live in big cities, donate to political parties, be involved in politics, be involved in media etc).

If you live in a distant outer suburb of Dallas or Phoenix it’s unlikely that the Summer of Floyd had much personal effect on your neighborhood, which had no homeless people or significant crime before and after 2020.

If you live in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or Santa Monica, or the Mission, or in the Loop, you will 100% have seen a significant decline in the ‘social fabric’ / urban quality of life since 2020. There are many reasons for Reagan’s landslide victories but a part of them were that rich urban Democrats had gotten very fucking tired of decay. Sure, Mondale still won NYC (although not the state), but Reagan got 40% of the vote in the city.

Even in Manhattan Reagan got close to 30%, Donald Trump got 9%. And Reagan wasn’t merely charting the decline of the GOP in NYC; he got like 50% more of the vote in Manhattan than the several previous Republican candidates. And that discounts the big shifts the Dems made on crime too.

Hanania has written about this, but big cities becoming shitholes is one of the surest ways to shift the country to the right.

Yet, Biden won the 2020 election, did much better in the midterms, the Democrat's have continually won special elections, and so on.

Now, it's true cities have shifted to the right some (even though that's somewhat overindexed by people online). Eric Adams replaced DeBlasio in NY, various other more center-left/centrist Mayor's got elected in Phiadelphia and other major cities. All these people won fairly easy - it was a little tougher for Adams, but RCV is made to create a close final round. In a typical two round system with an actual campaign, he probably wins 55-60% initially.

But, any politicians rightly or wrongly, actually perceived as just Republican's in sheep's clothing will lose. Eric Adams, the woman in Philadelphia who won, etc. were all able to basically run as "Democrat's who understood crime was bad," and had progressive policy positions other than that. Like, Eric Adams has had some wacky ideas and endorsed Bernie in 2016 after all!

On the other hand, in Los Angeles, Rick Caruso was basically a rich centrist who got coded as Republican be he was a developer, was white, and went a little too far on some issues, and also, his opponent, Karen Bass was a normie center-left Democratic congresswoman, which mean she got massive support from every elected Democrat in California.

Then, in Chicago, it was even worse, because Paul Vallas, who worked under Obama and whatever, seemingly got deep in the same pool of stuff that shifted formerly centrist people right, and said a bunch of dumb things on radio shows and in campaigns, that allowed a black self-described socialist to beat him, despite the crime issue htere.

The actual problem for this idea of a right turn in the cities overall is things are worse than say, 2015 by some measures, but in many cities, things are already better than they were in 2020, and nowhere got close to the 80's and 90's numbers that allowed right-leaning Mayor's to actually win power. In 2024, even our criminals are lazy and don't do their jobs.

Plus, there are other factors - the Republican Party is a more conservative party socially, and it's more of a nationalized political space. In 1989, you could be a fairly liberal New Yorker, but throw a vote to Rudy, because hey, he's a prosecutor, but he's socially liberal, etc. Now, any right-leaning candidate has to deal with the fact that his base base of 10-20% Republican's in a major city have been radicalized, the median urban voter simply does not trust Republican's and has never voted for one in their lives, and you not only have to answer for whatever wacky things Republican's do in Alabama or Texas, you have to denounce it, or lose those votes.

So yeah, in 2022, there was a shift in NY & CA, especially among Asian & Latino voters for two reasons - the abortion issue was strongly off the table, and crime was a major issue. In 2024, I question whether we'll see the same shift. Yes, Trump will do better than he did in 2020 because of electoral polarization, but I simply don't buy the polls showing the greatest racial realignment since Civil Rights (I also don't believe Biden is suddenly winning older whites either).

Racial realignment is often swamped statistically by how Hispanics vote, and many Hispanics seem to be swing voters (see huge bush gains between 2000 and 2004, Trump’s fluctuating polling among Hispanics etc).

I don’t anticipate a black-white realignment for the same reason I don’t anticipate white South Africans suddenly voting for the ANC instead of the DA. Black voters (disproportionately middle aged and older women who are part of established Christian communities in the South) have their political machine, like many other American tribes historically, and it’s part of the Democratic Party. Some edgy black podcast hosts might entertain Trumpism, but young black men are the least likely to vote of any demographic in the US (iirc) and they’re unlikely to start doing so in great numbers soon.

That's the other thing - the most movement is among basically, the exact profile of people most likely to not vote.

As I said, according to Catalist, which is the best voter database showed Biden got 62% in 2020 and Democratic candidates got 62% in 2022 among Hispanics - if that number is 55% or 57% in 2024, would not be a huge shock. I just don't think the polling showing Trump winning Hispanics by 15 or 20 pass the smell test.

But, as been pointed out by many, because of the actual demographic makeup of voters, if Biden does a point better among white voters because college educated whites move even more in his favor as a result of Dobbs and Trump focusing on 1/6 and 2020, that basically evens out, and ironically, probably helps Biden more in the blue wall states of WI, MI, and PA.

I am in Argentina now for a bit. And being here makes me more racists. Salaries are down like 20% in a few months in real terms and farther away from where I am at I am fairly certain there is real poverty. Yet things feel chill and feel safe. I see far fewer cops than I would in any major city in the states. In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners. It keeps making me think is this what society would be like in a 100% European ancestry country.

From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.

Looking at Argentina homicide rate, 4.62 in 2021, only slightly below pre-Floyd USA.

Why would this make you specifically racist? To me, this outcome is likely more driven by cultural/racial homogeneity than this homogeneity being of a certain race or not.

Buenos Aires had a homicide rate about the same as NYC in 2022 (so post-Floyd).

From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.

One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did. Only about half, possibly far fewer, of Italian Argentines were from the South - more than 40% were from the north, 10% from the middle. Meanwhile almost all Italian Americans are from Campania, Calabria and Sicily.

It’s Italian-Americans who, if you look at the regional performance of Italy, should be in the shit. Yet the Italian Argentines, many of whom are descended from northern farmers and merchants who left in the mid-19th century, seem to have been unable to arrest the decline of their country.

The Spanish genetics are also broadly from the highest quality regions of that country (still with the highest incomes), like the Basque Country. Argentina doesn’t merely have mediocre PIGS EU handout genetics, it actually has cradle-of-the-Renaissance, competent-Milanese-industrialist genetics. It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.

HBD starts to quickly break down as a predictive theory once someone tries to use it to make predictions that are anything other than the most basic and obvious, such as "all else being equal, a civilization made up of whites will tend to outperform one made up of sub-Saharan Africans".

HBD doesn't explain, for example, why Northern Europeans went from being primitive forest-dwelling villagers to the world's intellectual elite in only 1500 years. There are some hand-waving theories about Christianity reshaping incest rates and so on, but they all have the feel of someone trying to cherry-pick ideas in order to try to make HBD seem more robust than it deserves.

HBD also doesn't explain why Han Chinese still didn't know that the Earth was round more than 1500 years after Europeans figured that out, even though today they have very similar measured IQs to Europeans.

However, with all that said, the reality is that Argentina is much less white than Italy. The average Argentinian has more non-European blood than the average Italian does, and a lot of the average Italian's non-white blood is probably from various MENA groups that, historically, far outstripped native Americans in terms of technological development.

Argentina has so mismanaged its economy for structural reasons that it cancels the whole thing out, though.

If Milei ends up building a durable political coalition my guess is the country becomes very talked about in right-wing circles. It’s big weakness is geopolitically its very isolated.

I have been thinking about how would this country develop in the global economy of the 21st century as it is a country that HBD models would predict to be rich but is not. It does fit the communists exception to the model in a lighter firm of Peronism/Kirchnerism.

For what I know about trade economics though it’s not in a good place. They speak the wrong language for entry into the elites of the global market - English. Geographically isolated so it is difficult for them to plug into a larger industrial clusters (Poland entering the German industrial machine). Commodities only get you some wealth and they aren’t as well positioned as Australia to be a Chinese mine. Time zone does seem to be an advantage. Probably not enough true Brahmin types to compete in big tech or chip making which are industries where geographical location matters less (not bulky). Northern Italy does plug into the larger German industrial base and has a lot of machine tooling industry.

The country still feels like it should be carving out niches in the global economy and perhaps this will happen if the politics are truly changing. One or two Skype level tech firms would make a lot of sense. Something like a high-end state consumer good company too. A firm comparable to Sub-Zero.

The isolation is an excuse, come on. Singapore is rich despite being surrounded by much poorer countries, a rich and competent Argentina would have replaced/supplanted Miami as the center of Latin American finance, all global corporations in the region would have their Spanish-world HQs there etc. Uruguay is in a tough spot because it’s small. Argentina is large enough to do well.

Isn't the point that Singapore is the opposite of isolated? It's in one of the most strategic locations on the planet and is a massive shipping hub on the way to very wealthy places. Argentina is on the way to where? Miami is the Latin American finance hub because it's on the way to... in the Estados Unidos.

Miami is the hub because it’s the only Latin American city that’s a nice place to live. It’s actually not geographically more efficient that deals between, say, a Colombian and a Peruvian investment fund needs to be conducted via Miami than that they should be conducted via Buenos Aires. The problem with LatAm is instability and a lack of places the global PMC want to live, which is why Miami is the capital of Latin America. It’s not that it’s in the US except in that the US is safe and stable; if it was about the US market or access to Wall Street they’d be based in NYC, but they’re not. They wanted a Hispanic city that was nice (and Spain was too far).

It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.

And North Korea should be South Korea.

The difference is that NK has been under one management since (effectively) 1945. The East German effect is well known, even if Korea is the most extreme example.

Argentina has had many governments, many skilled and intelligent senior officials who have genuinely attempted to transition to a prosperous market economy even if stymied by various longstanding political movements and interests. That they’ve all failed to arrest the catastrophe is kind of unique. Everyone knows communism is retarded, the conundrum with Argentina is that even economic mismanagement in the first world (see Greece and Italy pre-Euro) shouldn’t lead to Argentina-esque conditions for 70+ years in a row.

Everyone knows communism is retarded

No, they don't. Lots of people think communism is great. Poor people, in general, think Communism is great. Intellectuals think Communism is great (though many are smart enough nowadays to not call it that). Venezuelans think Communism is great. The big exceptions among the poor are Cubans and many Eastern Europeans, and some right-wing Americans.

To your mind, is there no difference between the various flavors of social democracy and communism? Because:

Intellectuals think Communism is great (though many are smart enough nowadays to not call it that).

simply isn't true. Most leftist intellectuals would support various levels of welfare, various levels of socialization of the healthcare system and so on but aren't interested in a centrally-planned economy, one-party rule, state-run media, etc.

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Yep. For poor people in societies that have limited social mobility, such as early 20th century Russia, communism actually is kinda great. It's not just a delusion. The reason is that for really poor people, it makes more sense to roll the dice and risk a small chance of getting killed during the revolution and subsequent communist regime, as opposed to just accepting a 99.99% chance that they themselves and their descendants will just continue to indefinitely be really poor.

It's in societies like modern America, where even the poor have it not too bad and social mobility is a bit better than in early 20th century Russia, that one can argue that communism is probably a bad idea even for the poor.

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Ok, among widely-reputed non-Marxian economists, Argentina is interesting because even bad economic mismanagement, in a market or quasi-market economy, shouldn’t result in a disaster of Argentina’s scale. No mainstream economist is confused as to why Venezuela’s a shithole. Argentina is genuinely a mystery. None of the usual explanations work, even a series of terrible governments shouldn’t do this much damage.

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One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did.

They even got a pope out of it! 😀

In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners.

Where are you seeing this? It's not at all common in the US, excepting major disasters where the National Guard gets called out. Admittedly, New York sees the state of the subway as such a disaster currently, but my American sensibilities are always thrown when I've come across gendarmerie in Europe: our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them. But uniformed soldiers patrolling airports and tourist hotspots is common in other First World countries I've been to.

our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them

Honestly, that was a bit of a culture shock when I went there; I wasn't expecting to see someone standing around with a rifle at what I'd consider low-ready in the tube stations or just casually walking around, but the English and the French (at least; I'm pretty sure this is normal for everywhere inland) are armed to the fucking teeth. Some of them are subtle, like "this person isn't distinguishable from a normal guard, but the gun she's carrying was never made only in semi-auto... so what the fuck's so important back there?".

It's kind of disingenuous to say "yeah, British cops don't have guns" to New World audiences, because New World countries don't have soldiers on the streets whereas they're so common in Old World countries that their residents find it completely beneath notice.

Maybe I draw more of a distinction on the presence of pistols vs. rifles; pistols are defensive weapons that aren't front and center in any interaction you have with someone carrying one (there's an assumed continuum of escalation there where the cop has to pull it out first), rifles are very much not (they can't be carried in as neutral a manner). Serve and protect vs. seek and destroy.

In the British police, firearms units are seen as a plum job because you don’t have to spend as much time dealing with the public and doing shitty regular policing. In London there are hundreds (if major event) or dozens of police who sit around in vans with machine guns 24/7 so that in the event of a ‘marauding firearms’ (the official term) terror attack they can have a sub-7-minute response time for a unit whose entire training revolves around killing terrorists.

Honestly it’s a totally different mentality. In the vast majority of the USA I can walk around with a pistol on my hip after a greater or lesser degree of paperwork; the same thing the cops carry quite literally if I desired to do so. We’re simply much less used to the idea that the cops are armed and we aren’t- sure, the police have ar-15s and shotguns in their squad cars and there’s special squads with machine guns, but when you see police working security or standing about on the street they’re usually not much more heavily armed than the civilians can theoretically be.

seek and destroy

It's more remind and dissuade.

With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.

A nice secondary or tertiary benefit about spending time in a LatAm country is experiencing the relative lack of pro-black and pro-latin(x) (ironically enough) propaganda, and relative lack of anti-white and anti-Asian propaganda. It’s a breath of fresh air.

I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right.

Anything recent that seems to be the US moving to the right is a special case that bypassed the obstacles that keep the right from gaining any power. Supreme Court rulings are the biggest example, but Musk buying Twitter is another. We never see the US move to the right because those obstacles have actually gotten weaker, so I'd say that they are one-offs and don't mean the US is moving to the right.

where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

Lack of external pressure + Evaporative cooling + community sentiment

On Reddit, there was some degree of pressure on both the mods and the users to avoid the attention of the admins. Leaving Reddit meant that they were no longer bound by those restraints and the least motivated posters were left behind. That in turn drives more people away who don't want to spend all their time debating HBD, etc...

Community sentiment has an effect of its own. To quote someone from the post-mortem on the SSC sub:

When the topic comes round very often to "Shall the Foo-men be castrated, drawn and quartered? I think maybe yes," it eventually dawns upon the Foo-men that they are in fact not welcome.

Of course, it goes beyond the general sense of hostility that drives people off and into the problem of moderation. Even if they're not biased by nature, internet moderators are unpaid humans and they're going to tend to look at users generating a lot of reports and angry responses as troublemakers, even if the quality of their posting is well within acceptable parameters.

the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically.

It is a little sad, for The Motte, that it can be assumed people upvote arguments whose conclusions they agree with (as opposed to meritorious arguments on all sides).

It is sad, but that's how most people vote, even here.

People also tend to upvote a nice, spicy polemic, even if they don't necessarily agree with all of it, because it's so deliciously heterodox, pisses off the right people, or tells off one's hated enemies.

People also tend to upvote a nice, spicy polemic

Incidentally, I don't care for the term "spicy" as a euphemism for things that are uncomfortable, or potentially expensive, or potentially dangerous to say. If someone declines to make an objectively reasonable post because it is spicy", then maybe they just don't like spicy stuff; different strokes! On the other hand, if someone declines to make a post because it is uncomfortable (or expensive or dangerous), they are keeping their head down, or perhaps cowering, instead of speaking the truth. There are times to keep your head down, but there is never a time to deceive yourself about the fact that you are keeping your head down.

I use spicy to mean "inflammatory, or meant to be inflammatory." That doesn't mean there isn't a place for such, but most of the time they are high heat, low value.

By "inflammatory" do you mean (a) inflammatory in the eyes of a reasonable person, or (b) something that will, if widely seen, get a lot of people riled up, reasonably or unreasonably?

I have not spent nearly as much time thinking about how I define "spicy" as you have. I suppose trying to explain one's meaning to someone who was just venting about a term he doesn't like was a mistake.

Unfortunately it's inevitable even if every single voter fully intended to vote for quality, not agreement, simply because of the fact that you notice flaws in arguments that you disagree with much more easily than in those you agree with.

"Already, we see why the typical answer “If you don’t like your community, just leave and start a new one” is an oversimplification. A community run on Voat’s rules with Reddit userbase would probably be a pretty nice place. A community run on Voat’s rules with the subsection of Reddit’s userbase who will leave Reddit when you create it is…a very different community. Remember that whole post on Moloch? Even if everyone on Reddit agrees in preferring Voat to Reddit, it might be impossible to implement the move, because unless everybody can coordinate it’s always going to be the witches who move over first, and nobody wants to move to a community that’s mostly-witch."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/

While you may be right, I'd quibble with considerably. Moving from Reddit is going to do that regardless because Reddit's rules make a place more left wing because they restrict what you can talk about to begin with. And you lose people that would prefer Reddit over other places and they'd probably be more left wing just going by the idea that: 1) someone using reddit at all is more likely to be left wing. 2) people leaving reddit for another site are more likely to be right wing. The entire idea that the motte leave reddit at all is explicitly right wing coded. Discussing HBD is right wing coded. Discussing trans issues is right wing coded (I say that because discussing means there's more than one view represented). In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded. Most of the people I know and most of the people I encounter are left wing and have no interest at all in talking about anything to do with actual issues, they have their stance they've taken and if you talk about it deeper you're a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, shitty person. Unless you're dedicated to proving right wing people wrong in every situation you're simply a bad person. I've heard this many times. And I suppose it's mostly a confluence of most people being left wing and most people really being unable to tolerate content they disagree with and being almost wholly uncurious. But all that being said, it's like IG-111, we're here because we're witches and they allow witches here. The 1000 witches problem is never really going to go away.

I do think that you're posting this in bad faith, however. Considering your examples of most upvoted comments are sitting at 7, 10, and 18 votes and your summary of each being both inaccurate and uncharitable. Why did no one respond to your HBD post about white suffering, because almost no one cares about HBD anymore. The idea that HBD has been talked about to death has been talked about to death, here. But you made it very clear in your post that you didn't believe what you wrote, it wasn't a trick like that post about one movie destroying a child's brain. Do you believe that no one read your disclaimer or that no one here respects steelmanning an argument they don't believe? Is that why you didn't bother to link to it? You brought up none of those rebuttals yourself but instead make a top level post calling people out who actually had the courage to make a post about something they believe and you're mad because they got a marginal amount of internet points and that nobody brought up your own points. It's hard enough to have the energy to argue your own thoughts, now you want us to argue yours as well.

"In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded."

Again, as I said downthread, this is only true if the only issues you care about are right-wing.

So yes, it'll seem left-leaning people aren't interested in talking about 'issues' if the issues you're concerned about are proving specific racial groups are less intelligent so we can spend as little on them as possible and make it OK to discriminate them again as been stated by multiple people here, how best to limit women so their only option is to have babies as multiple people have stated here, how everyone who doesn't believe the election was stolen from Trump is part of the Deep State, a RINO, or some other insultincluding Trump-appointed judges or people in the Trump WH who supported him 100% until the 2020 election, with perfect right-wing opinions otherwise, or how transgender people are discussed here, which is a lot of the basic "issues" brought up here, then yeah, you're not going to get a lot of arguments from even normie centrist people - they'll just think you're a weirdo.

Honestly, this is the reverse of some of the very left-wing friends who think 90% of the American population is fascist because they don't want to abolish all police, start bombing Israel (and I say that as somebody who wouldn't mind actually sanctioning Israel), banning cars, stopping fossil fuel extraction, and so on.

Again, as I said downthread, this is only true if the only issues you care about are right-wing.

I don't know if an issue can even be left or right wing, rather than there being a left or right position on each issue. But even accepting your framing, I don't see how this is accurate. Take something like the trans stuff, for years it was progressives pushing it, and it is only now starting to get some organized pushback, so if issues can have sides, that one's definitely theirs. Are they any more open to debating it? Not from my experience, you get banned on sight on any left leaning forum if you stray from the orthodoxy. Same was true for BLM, same was true for MeToo, same was true for COVID. Where is all this vibrant left-wimg debate you're talking about?

You're assuming I'm right wing because I have that opinion. Call me self-deluded if you want but most of my opinions are far left of anyone here. Though I read your union and abortion til birth opinions sound pretty normal left wing to me but I admit I live in a bubble. Most people I know are all or nothing and don't really care about nuance about things, if they believe in unions they believe in every aspect of unions if they think abortion should be legal they make no distinctions on it about how it should be practiced at all. I know it's because they mostly don't care about meting or puzzling out complexity but I also think even if you sat them down and made them think about it there's only a small proportion of people who would be moved to make specific lines about how much of their belief should be used in government mandates/laws. But I live in southern California, maybe that paints my life different.

But I didn't mean to suggest that right wing people are the only ones that will talk, I mean to suggest that it's right coded right now, because they're not in power, because they're the minority, because they will let the discussion touch ends they don't like or want possibly or probably because of those reasons.

Left wing people, in my experience, limited as it may be, will shut down conversations with insults or insults by proxy the moment it becomes even close to being about something they don't like. I've had right wing people talk to me about deep state stuff and it starts off with "I know you think I'm crazy but this is what I believe..." and when I question it they get excited that I'm interested and tell me more like the more they say the more I'll believe. And when I questioned the Steele Dossier's accuracy I had someone switch their tone of voice to the way you talk to a very small child and question my mental fitness and this was just a mild like "I don't know it seems kinda far-fetched..." And that's from people I know, people I don't will just respond with things like "oh so you're a shitty person" or more likely use the originator of a claim or opinion or the biggest name espousing it and then call them a piece of shit so they don't have to call you one. I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy and cordial to talk about a discussion where I was in full agreement with them, but I don't know that I'd consider that a discussion.

The odd spread of opinion on the motte in either incarnation has been a puzzlement for both posters and mods alike for years, to the point where, imho, the mods give far too much leniency toward left-aligned posters in an attempt to foster a more 'even' debate forum. A laudable goal, I suppose, but not without it's unintended consequences.

Again, imho.

How the motte as a whole has developed hasn't been a surprise to me. At all.

Please allow me to explain my point of view.

Also, please excuse my generalizations, as I'm going for brevity, and relying primarily on my personal experiences.

I've been around a time or two. Long enough to see how forums develop, primarily in the fandom arena. Fandoms as a whole tend to lean left. Often, most fandom forums will also include 'off topic' areas that allow for political discussion.

While you could likely quibble with the ratio, I think it's fair to say that the most vociferous voices in these off-topic forums are going to lean heavily left. This creates a board culture that slowly dominates more and more, accelerating depending on how the spread of moderators and their personal opinions go.

This creates a specific argument culture - the majority of posters are left aligned, posting frequently, and have a plethora of free time to do so. If any right-aligned posters decide to wade into that pool, they're going to be faced with large opposition - gish galloping, low-level harassment in the form of having to deal with multiple posters attacking their view without pause, and so on. This creates stress, which can result in bad behavior(despite their opposition never being called out on it), often resulting in mod action, which creates a feed-back loop of self-satisfaction for the left-aligned posters and mods. This creates a perceived trend - right-aligned posters cannot debate or argue their points, hence their ideas are not good, and so on. A chilling effect occurs, as right-aligned posters realize the juice isn't worth the squeeze, the environment is hostile, and the mods - supposedly neutral arbitrators - will not be on their side.

So. This reinforces a perceived board culture, and what few right-aligned posters that debate such things will typical be extreme outliers, as they've been hardened by experience and can handle operating in a hostile environment.

However, a curious thing can occur. Off-shoot forums can develop, much smaller, taking population from the larger as a whole yet not having the numbers or involvement. Off-topic forums are put in place, including, yes, politics.

And a different environment emerges. When the playing ground is made even, suddenly it's the left-aligned posters acting badly because they're no longer operating in an environment they're familiar with. One on one, they can no longer rely on gish-galloping or numbers, and their opponents are well-experienced handling rapid-paced one-on-one debates(they have to be, to survive this long). Suddenly, the shoe is on the other foot - and the resultant behavior is so explicitly bad, even if the mods would normally be left-aligned, the size of the forum can't hide the behavior. It's clear, explicit, gains attention, and the mods have to play by the stated rules whether they want to or not.

Such off-topic areas are often shut down in quick order, likely due to all the mod-actions that result from it. I suspect this is due to all the left-aligned posters constantly abusing reports in the background, resulting in an over-sized headache the mods don't want to have to deal with, but this is pure suspicion on my part, lacking in any explicit evidence.

The motte exists in it's current forum because it's a level playing field, rigorously enforced. When their is conflict with the mod's decisions as a whole, it's often in the form of special treatment toward the left-aligned posters as a whole, but the mods have limited choices. The wider internet as a whole has inculcated a specific attitude in most left-aligned posters that does not lend itself toward even debate. They exist in an environment that encourages gish-galloping, low-level harassment, and confidence that the mods will take their side in most matters. They're used to low-level chilling effects and love-bombing in the form of most posters taking their side.

You say the motte is more 'right-aligned'. It is, likely. From the perspective of most left-aligned posters that wander in, because they're used to a radically different debate environment, populated by posters with similar opinions, where their perspective is rarely challenged, and where ideas in opposition to their own are rarely presented in a cogent fashion(and when they are, there's no guarantee it will remain).

The motte as it stands is the result of evolutionary pressure focused on political debate exerted on the wider internet as a whole and this forum in specific. Factors elsewhere do not exist here. This is a strange country, with different rules and pressures.

If you want a more neutral forum, find better left-aligned posters that can operate with those rules and pressures. Otherwise, don't be surprised when they decide to instead debate and argue in places where they can flourish.

You say the motte is more 'right-aligned'. It is, likely. From the perspective of most left-aligned posters that wander in, because they're used to a radically different debate environment, populated by posters with similar opinions, where their perspective is rarely challenged, and where ideas in opposition to their own are rarely presented in a cogent fashion(and when they are, there's no guarantee it will remain).

This is an understatement.

Themotte is clearly right-leaning, it is not just that it's right-leaning compared to reddit or something. Posts of similar quality will get more upvotes if they're right-leaning, and the median comment is right-leaning.

(And lest you think I'm one of the left wing posters, as you described it, I assure you, I'm not.)

Unfortunately the OP deleted his comment. But I think what you say is largely true. Especially about the course that almost every other forum takes- I've seen it on RPG and boardgame forums, on fan fiction forums, on writing and literary forums, even (to a lesser degree) on tech forums. Some of the places I hang out at which are ostensibly "apolitical" have threads explicitly about "How can we support Biden in the election?" You can imagine what would happen if someone started a thread about how to support Trump.

I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.

(But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing.")

Join the Federation, circa ~2360. Excellent fit, and a good measuring stick besides. Would somebody be uncomfortable as a member of Picard's crew? If so, they're not likely to be an ally to you or me.

I am in the same boat. On here, I am one of the most liberal posters. On Reddit, I would be mis-perceived as some sort of fascist by many people just because I think that racial groups differ in average intelligence (although I don't support discriminating against people because of it) and I don't want to be forced to use trans people's preferred pronouns (although I am completely fine with trans people being trans).

When I read stuff on here, I find myself annoyed by all the authoritarian social conservatives. When I go to Reddit, I find myself annoyed by the wokes.

Increasingly, the only political discussion forums online that I really enjoy are ones where people frequently make fun of, or at least criticize, both the left and the right.

(But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing.")

I'm probably throwing stones while in a glass house, but I can't help the feeling you've been tying your own rope here. Unless I'm conflating you with other left-leaning posters, I seem to remember years and years of assurances that everything is fine, and us other (some possibly now ex-) classical liberals were overreacting when we were warning about the wave of coming cultural changes.

I don't think I ever said "Everything is fine" but I will admit to not seeing just how quickly and severely things would change and remaining in the "It's just a few crazy college kids" camp for too long. That said, the reason I was on the Motte in the first place was because I was finding myself not sympatico with other people who were supposedly on "my side."

I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.

This is mostly my experience as well. I'm a liberal more than I'm a leftist, and in the past, those used to be aligned, but now, leftism has morphed into something that is openly and explicitly anti-liberal, and in that conflict, I'll prefer liberalism every time. As such, a forum like this which is both very right-wing and very liberal is far more interesting to read and to partake in than basically any left-wing forum that I know of. I dislike the right-wing racialism/ethnocentrism, but given that the left side is no better at that stuff, I'll take the liberal discussion about the right-wing than the illiberal (lack-of) discussion about the left-wing.

But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing."

Because no one believes you. Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism. People make fun of self-identified "classical liberals" because the label has been spoiled by bigots hiding behind a mask of libertarianism (libertarianism that for some reason only seems to extend as far as their own preferences). I like meritocracy too, but I've met too many people for whom 'meritocracy' means never having to think about how society allocates opportunities.

I could go on, but I'm on my phone and that makes composition awkward, so I'll leave it at this: I find this comment darkly hilarious because the kind of people who populate the Motte are exactly the reason you are treated to a presumption of bad faith.

  • -15

Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism.

Why can't conservatives be 'classical liberals'. If you look up a list of historical classical liberals it's people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Ronald Coase. People like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were considered neoliberals. They were and are considered conservatives as well!

People usually call themselves "classical liberals" because they pointedly want to distinguish themselves from social conservatives. What I am saying is that many/most (though not all) such people are just garden variety conservatives who are embarassed by their own socially conservative views and/or the association with other conservatives, so they come up with stories to tell themselves (and others) how the party left them behind or the SJWs forced their hand or something similar, the point of which is say "I am not really a conservative."

So what would you consider a classical liberal that is neither a conservative, nor a woke progressive?

That would depend on the actual content of their beliefs, since someone calling themselves that could be almost anything from a center left neoliberal to a blue tribe conservative to white supremacist who isn't quite ready to take off the mask.

Statistically, my money is still on conservative in denial.

That's not what I'm asking. You shouldn't have to invoke other people to answer the question of what classical liberalism is according to you.

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There was a meme originating during Gamergate about "being thrown into the pit with the rest of us". This is how the throwing is accomplished -- anyone who doesn't sign on with the progressive program in its entirety is branded a closet conservative.

Except that's manifestly untrue. The center left and far left squabble incessantly without the former being forced out. Some gamers have a meltdown because some gaming journalists called them sexist isn't being thrown in a pit, but it is sort of telling.

  • -11

If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.

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I won't say you're wrong that this is how many of my "fellow liberals" think. You are wrong if you are accusing me of actually being an "embarrassed conservative" who actually believes in my heart of hearts that white men rule by divine/genetic right and I'm just pretending to believe in classical liberal values because they flatter me.

As for other Motters, I won't speak for anyone else, but from what I have seen, the people who claim to be liberals really are; the white nationalists or white nationalist-adjacent don't claim liberalism. I can think of a couple of regulars who've claimed they used to be liberals ("before they got mugged by reality" as one person put it) - I am not sure if someone getting blackpilled puts the lie to classical liberalism.

You are wrong if you are accusing me of actually being an "embarrassed conservative

I am not trying to accuse you of anything. I am telling you why this political narrative is not taken seriously.

the white nationalists or white nationalist-adjacent don't claim liberalism

The people I am describing are not white nationalists (they are frequently racist, but not ideologically so). They are embarassed conservatives. I use that turn of phrase for a reason - they are people who like to think of themselves as liberal even though their political priorities and sensibilities are overwhelmingly right-wing. I know no shortage of people like this in real life by dint of the fact that I used to be one, and the almost universal pattern was that when push came to shove they'd come down on the conservative side of an issue. Sometimes this was just lack of perspective - they couldn't conceive of how a gay man or a black woman might have a different experience with - but often it was just disregard.

I think you're just exhibiting the traits I am protesting. So if I have to wear the "right-wing" label if I continue to believe things that made me a liberal in the 80s and 90s, then sure, I guess I'll have to wear that label before I will accept the progressive redefinition of "liberal."

I don't know what to tell you, man. If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be. That's not some semantic sleight of hand on the part of the modern progressive movement; that's a normal aspect of how politics change. I'm more left-wing/less conservative than I used to be, partly because my views changed, but in large part because things I still believe became less conservative.

And that is apart from how certain phrases can serve as political euphemisms that convey a meaning quite distinct from their literal one.

I don't necessarily think this framing is wrong, but this certainly isn't the kind of anodyne charity deployed in the wild.

It's all well and good to say that 90s liberalism would drift into a kind of conservatism as times change. What I see is progressives habitually claiming that this new strain of 'conservatism' is actually the latest genealogical strain of fascism and white supremacy that traces its lineage to Nazism or similar. You see the difference, and so you can surely understand why that tribe may balk at this "No no, you really are technically right-wing" insistence.

I agree that some of this is 'embarrassed conservatism' being expressed by people who probably identified as good liberals up until the 2010s give or take. But some of this is because there are consequences to being frankly conservative. Few are going to honestly embrace the conservative label if that immediately and unfairly typecasts them as villains.

If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be.

Am I more right-wing, or are liberals more left-wing? If "free speech" used to be left-coded and now it's right-coded and I am still pro-free speech, who changed?

I feel like there are a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in, so they still hold onto the word liberal despite abandoning the ideology.

It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.

The reality is the modern left is not liberal for any coherent understanding of the term, this is not even ship of Theseus territory, it is an almost total abandonment of liberalism as an ideology. The principled liberals who used to be on the left were all collectively shocked(or shocked later when they finally noticed) as the rug got pulled out from under them and their massive wide spread cultural support vanished over night in the face of woke. As I vaguely gestured to above, I think this is mostly a politics as fashion thing, and all the people who would have smashed the like and re-tweet buttons on "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," on a hypothetical 1995 twitter, ended up smashing the like and re-tweet buttons on "Freezepeach" on the real 2015 twitter.

A great place to watch this in the wild is, if you have the temperament for it, any Destiny content. Destiny is basically a liberal, and when he talks to progressives he will make liberal arguments, and you can see the sort of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as they try to square a sort of vague background respect for an under-specified liberalism, with their totally illiberal current positions and thinking.

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This is entirely a dilemma of the Left's own making when they chucked liberal principles and meritocracy aside and left various flavors of the Right to make those appeals. I get that there are legit criticisms of those concepts, some of which resonate even with me. And yet I really thought "racial quotas in every field" was something that would have been rejected by my estwhile peers; a strawman from right-wing media to be scoffed at, not enthusiastically endorsed. And sure, some would argue that not all leftists would support those endeavors if they were truly aware of the extent of them, but they sure do have a habit of digging their heels in if the subject is brought up.

After prematurely evacuating that hill and leaving it to the savages, you're a little suspicious that 'classical liberalism' is being contamined by a bit of white identiarianism? With all due respect: I hope that's some really tough shit the Left has to chew on for a long time. I'm not a WN by any measure, but there's no way we were going to have this collectivist-tinted racialized 'discourse' without that appearing on the menu. They deserve their shot.

Maybe that meme contamination is what will ultimately kiill 'liberalism'. The ick factor. Or maybe one day people will get sick of the progressive rule of the day when it has nothing to show for its actions, and thing start snapping hard in some other direction.

I guess what I'm asking is: where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

I may kind of qualify?

While I appear on themotte: I have limited amount of time that I can spend on "someone is wrong on the internet".

And there is only so much that I will spend on arguing with handle abbreviated to SS about holocaust denial. It can be sort of interesting but only in low doses. (the same goes for other witchy topics)

Many other topics seems to be equally witchy in noninteresting way, where I have no competence or interest or are extremely USA-specific in a boring way.

And when something is on topic, it is often of so low quality that it is eyerolling.

Yeah - like, there's an argument on this thread about leftists not wanting to argue.

But, this isn't true - go to a Democratic/left-leaning well-educated group of political types and ask them about health care, taxes, etc. and they'll be a bunch of different ideas thrown around.

It's just yes, I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.

Note, even controversial stuff is fine if it's based in actual reality - if somebody wants to argue we should stay out of Ukraine because America shouldn't involve itself in European power politics or something like that, OK. But, if it's arguing about how America helped an illegal coup in 2014, and Ukraine is full of Nazi's, then yeah, there's not much to talk about.

Same thing on immigration - if you want to talk about economics versus culture, or criminal rates or whatever, again, we'll probably disagree heavily, but there's something there. If your belief is well, immigration has basically been too high since anywhere from 1830 to 1970 depending on the poster, and our racial mix has been terrible since then, then there's not much to talk about.

In general, when I try to get involved here is when something is insanely wrong on a basic thing, when I think the actual left-wing view is being wrongly thought out, or something like that. But in general, this place is less interesting, not because it's more right-wing, but I already know the responses to anything the moment an issue or story gets brought up.

Which, I'm sure one could say about left-leaning forums or arguments, but y'know, we're right and you're wrong. More seriously though, on the issues I care about and don't have 100% firm opinions on, like health care, taxes, spending, foreign policy, and so on, there are plenty of conversations going on in left-wing, center-left, and centrist spaces. But, if you're only interest is proving social freedom of women has gone too far and we need to IQ test everybody to put them in their proper place in society, then yeah, left-leaning spaces probably do similar.

This is part of the issue. There's an extent to which I'm willing to engage in fruitless internet debate, and yell at brick walls about how perhaps a certain group of people aren't the source of all evil, but only an extent.

In general what I want to find are thought-provoking, interesting ideas that I couldn't have predicted or would not have otherwise considered, or perspectives from people with life experiences and areas of knowledge far outside my own. But some of the Motte's most popular hobby-horses are the opposite of that - ideas that are predictable, tendentious, and frankly just not very interesting.

It's not about perspectives being right-leaning, necessarily. I hang out and chat in a number of different right-leaning spaces, and they're all very different. The Motte leans more in the nerdy-libertarian-alt-right direction - very few traditional conservatives here, but a lot of people from over-educated progressive backgrounds who are interested in 'heretical' viewpoints, and as such end up constructing big yet idiosyncratic intellectual frameworks for things, and are usually way too online. By contrast, when I hang out with 'normie' conservatives, God-and-guns-and-low-taxes type conservatives, they usually have a wider range of interests, are much less interested in systematising, and have more straightforwardly anti-authoritarian politics. Or for another, when I hang out with religious conservatives, the ones involved with church and activism and doctrine and so on, again the culture is quite different, with its own language and interests. Notably both the normie-conservatives and the religious-right-types would, I think, utterly hate the Motte. I can just seem them in my mind's eye - the former would call the Motte a bunch of pretentious racists with their heads up their own assholes, and the latter would call them un-reconstructed neo-pagan sophists. The right, much like the left, is full of factions and disagreements. The Motte isn't 'right-wing' simpliciter. It leans in the direction of a very particular type of oddball who has been externally characterised as on the right, but is not really at home there.

We have prolifically-posting religious right motteizeans who get AAQCs and have good moderation records. It's certainly true that we have relatively few conservative normies, however.

I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.

I think this is a pretty heterogenedous collection of topics in terms of how debatable they are.

I think that the 2020 election almost certainly wasn't stolen and I have not seen any good evidence to the contrary. I think the legitimacy of the 2020 election is debatable, but not very.

The Jews clearly don't control everything, that is not debatable. Jews are obviously heavily overrepresented in elite positions compared to their population size, and it is interesting to talk about why that is. But the idea that the Jews control everything is not debatable because it is simply ludicrous.

How smart or not specific racial groups are is highly debatable. It is obviously true that different racial groups differ significantly in average intelligence. I don't think there can be any reasonable debate about that. However, there is a lot of worthwhile debate about why they differ in average intelligence, what the detailed nature of the differences is, and how easy the differences are to change going forward. Nature vs nurture when it comes to intelligence seems like a pretty interesting and worthwhile debate to me. People who lean on the "nature" side of things aren't necessarily frothing racists who want to hurt other ethnic groups, although many are.

As for the idea that we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, this one basically boils down to preference. I personally consider people who want to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies to be disgusting, and I mock them wherever possible. However, my point about preference is that unlike the previous three topics, this one does not boil down to a disagreement about facts. It boils down to largely irrational preferences and matters of taste. Liberalism vs authoritarianism, for example. Hence, it is in nature different from the previous three. I personally am more liberal than the majority of people here, but I also understand that I cannot argue people who do not fundamentally find authoritarianism objectionable out of their authoritarianism by using facts any more than I could argue someone out of thinking that a particular kind of food tastes good. So, while I deeply loathe authoritarian social conservatives and find them repulsive on a fundamental level, nonetheless I can see that the core of the debate that I have with them boils down to preferences rather than disagreements about fact. It is thus a very different kind of debate than the debate over whether the 2020 election was stolen.

But, if it's arguing about how America helped an illegal coup in 2014, and Ukraine is full of Nazi's, then yeah, there's not much to talk about.

I don't understand this part. I mean, we can debate the extent to which America helped the 2014 revolution, and the answer might indeed be "very little", but to me it seems hard to dispute that America at the very minimum stood by and cheered for the revolution. And cheering counts as helping, even if on a minimum level. In reality, I find it hard to imagine that America, with all its three letter agencies, did nothing except cheer. I don't necessarily think that America instigated the revolution, but I would be surprised if it did not at the least jump in and try to take advantage of it once it started.

Is it the "illegal coup" part that you specifically disagree with? As far as I know, the legality of what happened is disputable, but to me it seems that at the very least one can make good arguments that what the revolutionaries did amounted to an illegal coup. It being illegal does not automatically make it immoral, of course. That is a separate debate.

Yanukovych was legally elected, inasmuch as anyone in a corrupt country can be legally elected, in an election considered fair by international observers. He then fled the country during massive violence between security forces and revolutionaries, with both sides blaming the other for having started it.

Whether it was an illegal coup is up for debate, but I don't see why you would automatically assume that anyone who considers it one is unworthy of talking with.

People who consider it an illegal coup aren't even necessarily against it, although most are. I'm sure that one could easily find many intelligent Americans who believe that the American revolution was an illegal coup, yet also a good thing.

Or is it more the "full of Nazis" part that you find objectionable?

Not the same person, but I would not be really interested in "how America helped an illegal coup in 2014, and Ukraine is full of Nazi's" discussion as for me indicates that person is overestimating importance of what USA did and denying agency of people in Ukraine. Either because they are hilariously USA-centric, pushing Russian propaganda or using this to engage solely in tribal warfare.

And we do not have any useful info how much USA helped but no indication that it was really significant. So we have simply no real material to discuss.

"illegal coup or something else" focuses on definitional warfare which is the least interesting type of topic.

"and Ukraine is full of Nazi's" pushes me toward "Russian propaganda repeater" (and no, I am not denying that they have some Slavic people dumb enough to propagate failed ideology that supported extermination/enslavement of Slavic people - or use nazi symbols as lame contrarianism or for trolling reasons or due to massive stupidity). But "Russia denazifies Ukraine" take is just so bad that I would need to be really bored to engage.

So Ukrainian war is interesting, but I am more interested in say evolution of drone warfare (I am listening to Perun presentation right now), first-hand accounts (I have read recently interesting interview about Polish volunteer with some stories about various pathologies in Ukrainian command), geopolitical implications, analysis how much stored materiel Russians used up already based on satellite imagery (bought by random civilian!) and so on.

Not definitional tribal warfare.

how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.

Do you not see women having fewer if any children as an issue or do you simply disagree on the solutions offered? Do you think the people who agree with you politically see it as an issue? If yes, what kind of solutions do they offer?

But, this isn't true - go to a Democratic/left-leaning well-educated group of political types and ask them about health care, taxes, etc. and they'll be a bunch of different ideas thrown around.

These are not "arguments". They are discussions about technical policy implementation details; discussions among friends who already agree on the underlying foundational political issues.

You know you're in a political argument when you feel like you've got skin in the game. It's a fundamentally anxiety-inducing process. If there's no anxiety, then you're dealing with policy, not politics.

Politics is that which you can't afford to get wrong.

I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies [...] immigration has basically been too high since anywhere from 1830 to 1970 depending on the poster, and our racial mix has been terrible since then

These are, in fact, exactly the sorts of issues that lead to political arguments. The fact that you are explicitly claiming that you have no interest in discussing these topics is further confirmation of the thesis that leftists are not interested in arguing with rightists.

I don't particularly begrudge you for this. But, either way, it is evidence for the point being made. It's not evidence against it.

If you don't think there's any anxiety in intra-left/center-left arguments about health care, I guess you weren't around those arguments in the mid-to-late 2000s.

But regardless, the issues you care about are real and true and matter, while yours are fake and just surface level.

Now, it is true that no, if you truly think we need to limit women's ability to get a college education/heavily tax childless people or think it was a bad idea to let the Irish or Italian's in, or the only people correct about the 2020 election are people who support Donald Trump, then yeah, I don't want to argue with you about this. But, I do actually wish those people had louder voices, because as we're seeing with abortion, the actual right-wing view on these issues - not even the Trump view, but the actual hard-right view is highly unpopular amongst normie people. It's why for example, in states where even the GOP did well, pro-"2020 was a stolen election" candidates for offices like Secretary of State ran behind basically all other GOP candidates.

Sometimes, the best argument is just letting people put forth their actual views, and letting other people react accordingly.

Yeah - like, there's an argument on this thread about leftists not wanting to argue.

But, this isn't true - go to a Democratic/left-leaning well-educated group of political types and ask them about health care, taxes, etc. and they'll be a bunch of different ideas thrown around.

It's just yes, I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.

As another left-leaning poster, this is the answer I would give to the top-most comment here about why I didn't post any pushback on the comment they were referencing. The topic is something that's so far out of my wheelhouse and expertise that I just have nothing to add or push back on in a meaningful way.

But I think the point about leftists not wanting to argue is less about actually having a desire to argue about this kind of stuff and more about tolerating arguments about this kind of stuff. I'm really, really glad that I get to participate in a forum where people with opinions like that post or the points in the part I quoted above feel free to state such opinions openly. Partly because someone expressing their opinions is, in itself, a good thing, partly because I want the opportunity to learn from the arguments of such people who might even respond to my own comments in other topics, and partly because I want people with such opinions to explore their opinions and collaborate with each other to create better, stronger versions of their arguments which then provide me greater opportunity to learn from them. I can appreciate and even benefit from all this without ever wanting to actually argue with them. And I think it's a shame that most mainstream leftist spaces that I know of just don't have this kind of tolerance.

I mean, I think it's fine to have open discussion, but not everywhere has to be an open discussion. If you have a forum with lots of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, and don't want to deal with people asking about IQ, Jew's, or the 2020 election.

Now, sure, actual prominent people should know right-wing arguments and be able to push back against them (Mayor Pete is actually really good at this), but I don't really care if the forum x that happens to have a politics section doesn't want a long argument about whether the Civil Rights Act was good or not. The other reality is most arguments in reality are both people with actually bad arguments with incorrect information - which is fine, mostly, because an argument on Facebook or your cousin's BBQ is not the end of the world.

Again, I'm fair about this - if some pro-life Facebook group doesn't want pro-choice people arguing in the comments, that's A-OK.

I'd also point out when you see people make better arguments than you can on topics, and nothing shifts, there's no reason to further argue. So, when the people with the 93 annotated links and actual statements from various court decisions can't push away somebody from various ideas about 2020, what am I going to do?

Oddly, those other forums, even when they have plenty of white people, don't seem to have problems with people complaining about white "privilege" or the duty of white people to alleviate it. Only women and minorities can reasonably expect their sensibilities to be protected.

I mean, I think it's fine to have open discussion, but not everywhere has to be an open discussion. If you have a forum with lots of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, and don't want to deal with people asking about IQ, Jew's, or the 2020 election.

Sure, not everywhere, of course. I don't think anyone is claiming that it has to be everywhere. I don't think the population of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, is what's relevant here, though; it's the population of people who are intolerant of such issues. Many women, minorities, LGBT people have been pushed/pulled toward a belief system that causes them to choose to take offense at such issues, but there's nothing intrinsic or fundamental about those people that makes them intolerant.

I'd also point out when you see people make better arguments than you can on topics, and nothing shifts, there's no reason to further argue. So, when the people with the 93 annotated links and actual statements from various court decisions can't push away somebody from various ideas about 2020, what am I going to do?

Most internet arguments don't end in any arguer's belief apparently shifting and conceding. That's generally not the point of internet arguments. This doesn't mean that their beliefs didn't shift, and it also doesn't mean that some lurker's belief shifting. And for me, personally, simply learning the way that someone I disagree with (and continue to disagree with) chooses to structure their arguments in an apparent good-faith effort to get me to change my mind is something I find value in.

We didn't change that much. The jump from being a thread in /r/slatestarcodex to being /r/themotte was much sharper. /r/themotte started from the beginning as "the portion of the community that was willing to platform HBD", which was what the other side most strongly objected to, so using pro-HBD sentiment as evidence of how we changed seems lacking to me.

I mean, even Scott was a racist all along, he just being esoteric about it.

I anticipated there would be a lot of rebuttals

The position "whites suffered as a response to the civil rights revolution" is an unimpeachable fact that even people on the pro-CRL side agree with, just with a positive valence. Justice for the robbed implies stripping goods from the robber. Why should you expect a rebuttal? Perhaps the word "suffering" implies sympathy for those injured? But even mass murderers and child molesters suffer.

and that the solution obviously can't be segregation.

I'd certainly contest that this is obvious. You seem to be asserting this on moral rather than empirical grounds. Even morally, the weak form of segregation is "allow people to self-select their own communities as they like", which is a proposition most people agree is moral unless you specifically rephase it in the race context.

EDIT: While we're here, "don't let black people watch your kids" is an uncharitable rewording of @RandomRanger's post. He says it's bad to send your children to a mostly American black school/community, which is quite compatible with "letting black people watch your kids" in the case of a black acquaintance, peer, or credentialed teacher/pastor/nanny. The point is that a large group will tend to the population average, not that every member of that group is the average ― this is a standard anti-racist motte and bailey.

Likewise, in an attempt to play devil's advocate, I made a recent comment about the "suffering" of white people in response to the HBD post from @PresterJohnsHerald. It's currently sitting at 10 upvotes, and even more interestingly, there is only one reply!

I can only speak for myself, but I was so bewildered by trying to judge if that comment was even serious, that I just scrolled past without interacting with it in any way.

But also, I'm reminded of a post I read somewhere on the internet about how a lot of good scientific work came from monks, in part, because they had to seriously engage with the heresies of the day in order to figure out how to merge them into a christian worldview, so at a given day some christian would be reading and thinking about a lot more anti-christian or problematic arguments just so he could avoid embarrassing himself in a debate. In that sense, I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right. The level of in-depth pushback you can get for progressive arguments in this place is just far above what you'd get elsewhere. And then you either put in a lot of time and research to convince some people that your culture tells you cannot be convinced and should not be listened to, or ... stop engaging.

I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right.

I think this hits the nail square on the head. For example, I think there are some good arguments against strong HBD based on evolutionary biology, but you never hear those kinds of arguments articulated by people on the left because it would require them to actually listen to the pro-HBD arguments and think carefully about them, which most are not willing to do.

It would be interesting to have a yearly poll about our users' political beliefs.

I think you're right. It's clearly more right wing then it was on reddit. I don't think it's hard right, but there's something to Scott's post about witch tolerance.

So, the thing about self-described user belief is most people, right, left, centrist, libertarian, reactionary, whatever are sometimes quite self-deluded about their own positions, and relative position within the wider world.

Like, I'm a left-wing social democrat with what would be described as pretty SJW/woke/whatever views on most social issues - but I'm well aware my combination of wanting mandatory union votes for all employers over 10 non-family employees yearly plus abortion 'til birth puts me to the left of 95-96% of the population. Unfortunately, too many of my leftie friends have outsized views on what people support.

Another is salience.

A thing some people try to do, and I'll charitably say for non-prominent people is they're unaware they're doing this, is there are a lot of people who'll describe their views as centrist or liberal, and when defending themselves, go over the various issues they're center-left on, but the only time they mention those issues is when they're defending themselves against attacks they're not a right-winger.

For prominent people, that's how, as a left-wing social democrat who doesn't mind reading opposing views, is how I figure a "the left is going too far" person's griftiness. For example, Matt Yglesias is cranky about some things and thinks the non-profit complex in DC and nationwide is hurting various causes, etc. but also regularly talks about how the GOP wants to ban abortion nationwide and cut Social Security & Medicare.

OTOH, there are various other pundits who anytime a left-leaning person (especially a liberal coded MSNBC-type) criticizes them, goes into the whole, "now, I'm the true leftist because I call for x, y, and z", but then they never talk about x, y, and z again, and go back to complaining about kids on campus or whatever." Honestly, I prefer the reactionaries and right-wingers here who are honest about their beliefs, as opposed to the pundit lying about what they truly care about.

plus abortion 'til birth

Asking genuinely out of interest and not to start a fight or as 'boo outgroup' (before any of the mods get itchy trigger fingers), as someone as vehemently on the opposite side of this, could you expand? For the 'hard cases' (which I am assured are the only tiny exceptions in the second trimester and nobody is doing third trimester abortions) or "no I mean everyone, if last week you wanted the baby but this week you had a row with your boyfriend and want to abort his kid, even if it's due to be born in two weeks' time, totally your right and your choice and the clinic is this way"?

I would like to get an insight into the reasoning there from someone who does hold this view, rather than at second- or third-hand. Don't worry, I have no intention of shaking my rosary beads at you!

I think the number of women and doctors who would both agree to say, in week 38, to randomly decide to do an abortion is basically zero, and basically all Republican-led abortion restrictions put far too many hoops in front of couples in the middle of the worst moments of their lives, just because of a lack of trust of women, doctors, and random religious beliefs.

As I think I've said before, actual European abortion laws (appx. 15-weeks plus exceptions you can drive a truck through) would probably be fine with a mass majority of the voting public. But, Republican's even when they claim they are, don't actually put forth France-style or German-style abortion laws, so that's led to a massive reversal in support for said 15-week abortion bans (they're now underwater in the US), and much increased support, with 55% noow believe women should be able to get an abortion if the woman wants it for any reason, up from 38% in 2006.

If there was some indication of some large numbers of women having abortions at 37 weeks willy-nilly, my view might be shifted, but even the case people like to trot out - Kermis Gosnell - was mainly women who only went to him, because of restrictions put upon earlier abortions that made it harder for those women to get them then. Obviously, still terrible what he did, but these women were not coming to him at week 37 going, "y'know, baby seems kind of a drag now."

There's a reason 90-something percent of abortion are in the first trimester, and even then, most of those in the 2nd trimester are more, "I didn't have enough money/time to wait out the state-mandated waiting period/etc." than "I decided 4 months in babies are no fun."

To clarify, you think it's morally wrong (barring unusual circumstances), but think it should be legal (because trying to filter only for such circumstances imposes too-substantial costs, and you expect low rates of problematic late abortions anyway)?

I think the number of women and doctors who would both agree to say, in week 38, to randomly decide to do an abortion is basically zero

Then there should be no harm in outlawing it, right?

@TracingWoodgrains

Any chance you could run another iteration of the survey?

Not really something I have the bandwidth for atm, unfortunately, but I'm happy to provide the questions as a base template for anyone wanting to run it again.

I think bringing back user viewpoint focuses would be a positive change, as well.

Do you want to start that back up?

If mods give an OK, I’ll make a main motte viewpoint focus and nominate another user in it.

Every time you write a top level post, it's a focus on your viewpoint!

The board is more right wing but a lot of the most low-quality racist users have also left and/or been banned. There are far fewer slurs and there is far less generic trashy racism than there was on Reddit. I’m surprised people don’t remember what it was like to have constant drive-by posting from people unfamiliar with the subreddit and rules who came over from MDE, Opie and Anthony and other DR shitposting subs.

I pretty much never report anything these days. I’ve literally reported maybe three or four comments in the last couple of years here, whereas on Reddit I’d report regularly. You may remember I was highly opposed to the move from Reddit and predicted it would be the death of the community; I have been pleasantly proven wrong.

Arguing that the CRA was unconstitutional doesn’t mean it was immoral or even a bad idea; I think a lot of federal authority is unconstitutional but agree that it’s in effect necessary for the functioning of America as a modern state. But the CRA should have passed as a constitutional amendment given its sweeping constitutional scope.

I'd argue the same goes for the high quality posters as well, at the very least in terms of engagment.

The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?

What high quality posters do you think we're missing? Feel free to PM if you think it would cause drama or something.

(imo there's really only one notable poster I can think of who's been conspicuously absent lately, other than that I think the quality is doing ok, maybe even better than it was ~6 months ago.)

@DaseindustriesLtd dropped off on posting, I think. (If you see that, is that a pun on dasein?)

@faul_sname always had high-quality exchanges, but was never as prolific.

Both seem to still be around, but don't say things all the time.

In terms of why I'm not so active it's mostly the "had a kid 2 months ago" thing, not anything to do with Motte quality.

Congratulations, then!

That was a pun, but also an unfulfilled (except in very narrow personal scope) promise of engineering a Dasein, yes.

I've concluded that discussing American culture war is largely fruitless for a third worlder like myself, on the edge of Singularity to boot.

I find it very sad that the Motte never found a way to maintain activity. Guess Zorba also found things to do.

The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?

This is the big change. When I go back to 2020 /r/themotte threads, I revel in all the glorious paragraphs and long good-faith back-and-forths.

There has been some churn of high quality users, but go back to 2016/2017 threads and the average writing quality isn’t very high relative to today’s.

It has the great advantage of being interesting though -- "long 'high quality' screeds on boring topics" vs "interesting and often insightful off-the-cuff remarks on hot CW issues" is an easy choice for me, personally.

True, but in part there was also more happening and a lot of topics were not yet overplayed.

Our overall traffic is down, but I think we lost high-quality users and shitposters in about the same proportion. So I don't agree the overall quality is down; we just have fewer posts overall. And this was pretty much inevitable as a result of moving from a very large platform to a very small one.

I was mildly against the move at the time (I think Zorba might have pulled the trigger too early.) That said, it's important to remember why we moved. It was inevitable that we would have been kicked off of reddit eventually, and probably sooner than later. Many of the conversations happening here simply would not be allowed on reddit today.

Since there is close to no inflow of quality posters it is a problem, especially since we're close to reaching scarcity tipping point of quality posters so as that they have no other quality posters to talk to (or who're willing to engage).

To be clear, I'm not claiming to be a quality poster, I'm just pointing out that we're bleeding quality engagment in general, and have been since almost immediately after the original split from ssc. The liberal/leftwing exodus was easier to notice but we have lost plenty of rightwingers as well, who've not been replaced.

Fundamentally the issue is a lack of quality inflow, of any ideological flavour. It seems to happen to more than this community. Perhaps people are just on substack and twitter now, idk.

Perhaps people are just on substack and twitter now, idk.

I suspect this is part of it. The Motte is just not as rare of a forum as it was a few years ago, before the rise of Substack and Musk buying Twitter. The big woke push to deplatform those who disagreed with them ended up forcing people to actually create their own forums, and they did so successfully.

That is part of the reason why I am significantly less worried by wokism than many of the other people here. From where I sit, it seems to me that wokism has substantially receded from its peak of a few years ago, and there is little danger of it achieving a hegemonic position of dominance in the West's politics.

I think there probably is reason to worry about it capturing institutions, still, because there are many woke people, and things like diversity statements serve to filter out dissenters.

But I agree that he left has lost some of the cultural dominance it once had, and resistance to it is significantly less fringe.

I do worry a little about whether generational change will make things worse.

What makes The Motte special isn’t its ideological leaning; if you want to discuss HBD, reactionary politics and so on there are (and long have been) many other forums and communities for it. I think what makes it special is the focus on discursive long form writing, which is different in kind both from blogposts on Substack and from microblogging on Twitter/X.

The Motte is just not as rare of a forum as it was a few years ago, before the rise of Substack and Musk buying Twitter

Yeah, but I think this might be only temporary. I don't think Musk will be able to hold on to Twitter in the long term, and even though it's a lot better now than it was before, Musk's Twitter still seems to favor the woke. The guys running Substack seem to have their heart in the right place, but let's just say I learned not to put my trust in California based companies that profess free speech. Even if they remain devoted to the principle, I don't think centralizing one of the last remaining forms of independent internet media is completely benign.

That is part of the reason why I am significantly less worried by wokism than many of the other people here. From where I sit, it seems to me that wokism has substantially receded from its peak of a few years ago,

So what? The receeded level is still miles above the baseline of when people started warning against wokism. If you want to tell yourself to talk yourself down from doomerism, fair enough, but "there is little danger of it achieving a hegemonic position of dominance in the West's politics" sounds more like an excuse to not do anything about it, in which case I have some pretty harsh words for you.

It is a problem, but really, if y'all want more people here, you have to go recruit them. We (and especially Zorba) can only do so much.

I'm not asking you to. I don't think this can be solved.

People are either writing long form stuff on places like substack or they're in private discord servers/group chats when they want to discuss stuff.

I'm just mourning a bit.

Let’s ask kulak to put a recruitment pitch on his sub stack…

That would be counterproductive

Our overall traffic is down, but I think we lost high-quality users and shitposters in about the same proportion.

Probably true, but when you have a group of high-quality users that would fit on a school bus vs an infinite tide of shitposters (who seem to be more inclined to set up alts and get even more shitposty when banned, rather than just saying "fuck those guys" and carrying on with life) this is not a sustainable state of affairs.

Speaking of traffic, is there anything in the pipes that might get us more new blood?

I do think that the forum could have scraped by for a couple more years on Reddit, but there was also the risk that the chilling effects of admin threats and mod policies in response to those would have left the forum too weak to execute a move as successfully as it did when the time came.

but the net upvotes tell the story

...that I'm not interested in at all...

First, I just can't get into the mindset of someone who cares about votes beyond them being a metric of engagement, but more importantly, and I've been gesturing at the idea for a while, but I'm done with this entire "democratic" framework of analyzing anything. Any forum will have it's share of high-, mid-, and low-frequency posters, and a whole bunch of lurkers, why should the former be judged by the latter? Why should anyone care what people who don't bother to say anything think?

where the liberals at?

Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.

Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

Same answer as above. As long as we were all on the same site progressives could swing by and drop a comment or a vote, now that you have to register and check up on the place separately, a lot don't bother. The other side doesn't have many other places to go, so they disproportionately end up here.

Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.

Well maybe but that's sort of the point. If this is simply a right-wing reddit that doesn't say a great deal for it really.

If this is simply a right-wing reddit

It’s not.

The quality of discussion is higher than anywhere on reddit, and unlike reddit, the admins have no interest in censoring certain political viewpoints; leftists and rightists alike are welcome.

Let's be honest here - nobody is censored here, but it turns out, people don't like arguing 20-on-1 anywhere in society, regardless of ideology. Which is true of left-leaning spaces as well, for conservatives. But, well, those spaces don't do the whole "we're not censoring viewpoints" thing, they just say forthrightly, 'yeah, this is a place for people who agree on x, y, and z. Like it or leave.'

Are you claiming that any space that claims to operate on a neutral principle of free speech is fundamentally duplicitous because it's just going to end up coalescing around a consensus viewpoint anyway?

I don't think it's always duplicitous, but I think anybody who seriously thinks the reason why this place is more right-leaning is some belief that in a free and open debate with nobody limiting it, the right-leaning argument wins is kind of lying to themselves, when in reality, the way the right wins these supposedly open spaces is saying enough things that trigger basically the fight or flight part of people's minds.

I'm a nearing middle-aged white guy, so the silly to frankly, terrible things said in this forum brush off my back, but a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc. So yeah, I can see why many people if in a community where what they think is open racism/sexism/bigotry against them is accepted, they say bye, and leave that community. Some people will hang around and still fight, but the reality is, most black people in 1960's America didn't have to argue about whether they deserved to use the same bathrooms as white people, and likely would've left any group arguing that. Obviously, not zero, but most people aren't argumentative weirdos like we are.

So yeah, the general tilt of any community will eventually become more of that, one way or the other. Also, in many cases (this isn't true here), there's a silent majority that's not as extreme, but also are effected by the community. YT comments section are kind of a perfect example - in a lot of cases, they're utterly rancid, no matter the topic, even when a creator doesn't want that. Because somebody whose basic belief about a YT video is, "that was all right," isn't going to post.

You aren't wrong that it's understandable why The Other, as you put it, mostly wouldn't want to participate here. But what solution do you propose? I think it's appropriate for boardgaming and RPG forums to have rules saying "no Holocaust deniers" or "You cannot say black people have low IQs," because even if there is some intelligent debate to be had there, it's so contentious and inflammatory that it would eclipse what everyone is ostensibly there for. The failure mode in those places is that the consensus opinion settles on not only "No Holocaust denial" but also "No opinions at all that would upset a leftist social justice activist."

And it's not that leftists are particularly censorious compared to rightists. It's just that almost all the hobby and public discourse spaces are dominated by leftists. Righties who are so fond of pointing out that leftists ban all wrongthink are kidding themselves if they think their side ever was, or would be, more tolerant of "free speech" by the other side. (Some are even open about this, and merely bemoan the fact that they happen to be - currently - on the losing side.)

So here, we allow all the disreputable and shady and inflammatory opinions that are too toxic for other places, and the inevitable side effect of that is that people who find those views too toxic are not going to stick around and engage with them.

Either you have actual free speech (which means putting up with ideologues full of hate for their outgroup, who will drive everyone in their outgroup off) or you don't, in which case you have a forum that basically allows only one point of view and will polarize against any form of ideological diversity.

Once you've reached "no Holocaust deniers" you've already set your feet on the slippery slope known as "viewpoint discrimination". The last conceivable step is "no politics except directly related to <hobby>", and that (and the previous one of "no politics at all") both depend on moderators not willing to agree with or fall for the whole "Your views are politics and mine are just common decency" thing.

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a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc.

Could it be that the (current) left is generally self-selected as a group of people that could be said to have 'thin-skin'?

If a single woman has some strength of character and she hears some kind of offensive speech, she's not going to immediately demand censorship by the government. Then that woman can go on and listen and research more right-wing arguments once past the shock of 'somebody disagrees with my teacher, the talking heads on TV, journalists, etc'. And she can become right-wing.

If she doesn't have character, then she can stay within the safe confines of the media-approved opinions, and she'll cowardly switch opinions every few months when the newest update of progressive beliefs comes in.

It's a fragile coalition as well, for example your Other includes TERFs and transpeople, or LGBT and muslims, or open borders supporters and Ukrainian nationalists...

anybody who seriously thinks the reason why this place is more right-leaning is some belief that in a free and open debate with nobody limiting it, the right-leaning argument wins is kind of lying to themselves

I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that. That's certainly not what I was saying here.

the way the right wins these supposedly open spaces is saying enough things that trigger basically the fight or flight part of people's minds. [...] a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc. So yeah, I can see why many people if in a community where what they think is open racism/sexism/bigotry against them is accepted, they say bye, and leave that community.

This explanation assumes that leftist constituencies have a unique monopoly on being emotionally/materially invested in political issues, which is simply not true.

It's easy to find examples of anti-white/anti-male rhetoric in leftist spaces (I really did try my best to join the discussion on radfem blogs in the early '10s where most commenters thought that men were uniquely and irredeemably violent, that they were the cause of all social problems, that women should live apart from them and reduce the male population as much as possible, but I usually didn't last long before getting banned). Or just pick any hot button issue, unrestricted immigration from Central/South America, trans surgeries for kids, AA/DEI programs that explicitly take job offers and college admissions spots from whites and give them to non-whites... these are not abstract intellectual exercises, people perceive these things as very real and direct threats to their way of life. If rightists are still willing to entertain leftist viewpoints on these issues, then that does in fact indicate a higher baseline propensity among rightists to listen to and engage with opposing viewpoints. Blacks/women/immigrants are not the only ones who have ever felt "vulnerable".

I think this place is mostly forthright about saying, "Yeah, this is a place for people who are willing to expose themselves to 20-on-1 arguments based on the strengths of their arguments, regardless of political leanings. Like it or leave." That such an environment tends to draw a more right-wing crowd, I think, is mostly down to modern leftism rejecting liberalism, which leads both to leftists having access to more mainstream forums where challenges to their views get censored and to leftists just not wanting to go to places where such challenges are tolerated. And the vicious cycle that follows.

It's easy to say that when you know you'll always be on the side of the 20:1.

Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."

No, I think it's because most people here are right-wing. Which is fine to have solid views - God could come down from Earth, say, "actually, all abortion is evil according to your Creator, and all aborted babies end up in Limbo forever" and I'd say, "cool, I don't care. Sounds like you have a shitty ideology." But just admit that, instead of just being, "well, I've heard all the arguments and mine were the most logical and true."

That's the reason I only comment here to put forth the actual left-wing view on stuff, instead of the imagined one, to push back against obviously incorrect stuff, and stuff like this, where it's not really a political issue mostly,

Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.

I know the response will be 4chan and it's antecedents, but 4chan was always the place for edgy losers who couldn't follow the relatively loose standards of the Internet, and the fact the young Right is basically all 4-chan adjacent is probably why all decent youth polling still shows them as overwhelmingly left-leaning, because the alternative is the people who were seen as edgy weirdos in 2004, let alone 2024.

That's why even though I dislike it, I'm fine with Elon changing the rules on Twitter/X. Now, he's currently paying the price for it, because it turns out people don't like 'nudes in bio' bot responses, and all the other stuff that has bubbled up, but it's his house, his rules, as long as he's not breaking any other laws. Now, the way he has happily limited the free speech rights of certain groups when certain governments come calling makes him a hypocrite, but that's another story.

Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed.

Minds can be changed all the time.

That's definitely easier with factual, rather than value-based points, though.

I don't think the right bar for persuadability (at least, when we mean it as a virtue) is whether a sufficiently capable rhetorician could persuade someone: I don't want good speakers to be able to convince me of false things, especially when I'm well grounded in reality and the reasons why what I think are right. Rather, it should be whether they respond to reason and evidence in a sufficiently unbiased manner.

I'll concede, though, that yeah, there's probably some bias.

Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."

I think fictional made-up examples are less than worthless.

Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.

This is just a strawman. Approximately no one argues that "liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism." I am middle-aged, and I was there in the early 2000s too. Yes, there were TOSs and bans and such. What makes it still liberalism is that bans and such were meant to be viewpoint-neutral. This isn't an easy thing to strictly define, but certainly one side choosing to respond to an argument with offense or choosing to claim that it activates some "fight-or-flight mode" in them merely for seeing such arguments was clearly not considered proper grounds for such bans.

As long as we were all on the same site progressives could swing by and drop a comment or a vote, now that you have to register and check up on the place separately, a lot don't bother.

Yeah, I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Having to sign up (and then needing approval) certainly would add friction to participating, but at least something of that sort seems necessary. (And there are some occasions, like brigading being harder, where friction is good.) I don't know what the optimal amount is.

Some of us get rate limited. The people here love Mike Pence the same way people on reddit love pitbulls. I was banned there for pitbull hate speech.

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The people here love Mike Pence the same way people on reddit love pitbulls.

I find your opinion here fascinating, please expand. I really want to know the correlation there, and where are all these secret Mike Pence love-ins on here that I've somehow missed? Guys, what am I, chopped liver? You don't think that even given the religious divide between us, I can't appreciate an elder gentleman? Where is my invitation to the Top Sekret Mike Pence Admiration Society and Fan Club? 😁

Also, I do find the 'getting pissed at Pence' viewpoint anthropologically interesting, it's like the notion of the Torturer VP who was going to set up the gay concentration camps, just you wait, never went away. I'm honestly surprised, though given the general level of historical literacy I should not be, that nobody tried comparing him to Torquemada.

There isn't anyone on here who I know loves Mike Pence. (Though I'm sure there are a bunch might like him.)

We're allowed to downvote you for preferring sneering to substance.

You got banned for shitposting. Your constant complaints about "this is the sort of post that gets upvoted here" are bizarre in light of your own conversation style.

The thesis of the post you've labeled "desegregation was a mistake" was actually "the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional", which is not the same thing.

As for the "suffering" of white people, why should that be so shocking? I mean, the language is overwrought by conservative standards, but with all the dramatards around here we're used to that. Believe it or not, discriminating against white people does in fact cause them to suffer. As does committing crimes against them. If you go for the reductio, you might just have to consider your counterpart will not consider the conclusion 'absurd'.

I guess what I'm asking is: where the liberals at?

Liberalism used to mean equal opportunity (but not equality of result), and color-blind policy. That's gone on the left, and exists on the right only among those not really paying much attention to politics (and thus wouldn't be here). Many of the leftists that show up quickly lose interest when they realize they can't force those who disagree in line by calling them "racist" or otherwise attempting to shame them. Or they get really frustrated with sharing a forum with people whose views they find repugnant and "flame out" with a ranty post, though it's been a while since we saw one of those.

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs. It's always going to be difficult for left wingers or liberals to post amongst a much greater proportion of opponents, which means they leave, which means the proportions become even more slanted, which means more leave, and so on.

It was a regular complaint on the subreddit that the posting populace was excessively slanted, but there was at least still the possibility of new entrants to keep it from tipping completely out of balance.

like the fact that crime is overwhelmingly interracial

Wait is this a typo or am I missing something?

In the US context don't most statistics support violent crime being primarily intraracial?

See for example table 6 of the latest FBI Crime in the U.S. or table 13 of U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Victimization, 2021. Excluding the Hispanic origin category, Both show >75% of perpetrators of violent crime being from the same grouping as the victim.

My memories of the earliest days are very fuzzy, but as far as I can remember even in the /r/slatestarcodex days, this forum always had a noticeable rightist bent, simply in virtue of the mere fact that it allows rightists to speak freely. If you're one of the few places that doesn't subject witches to trial by water, then you're going to attract an unusually high percentage of witches, even if that's not your explicit goal.

That being said, I think we have hit an all time low when it comes to the number of active leftist users, and I think that's due to a couple factors:

  • I think that the average leftist simply isn't interested in dialogue with rightists. This is evident in how they moderate their own spaces. Frequently when leftists get power, they simply ban (certain) right-wing views. If they don't want to deal with rightists in their own spaces, why would they want to come here and deal with us here? There's a reason that the left has become the party of deplatforming. I think it's pretty straightforward.

  • Regardless of how open you are to dialogue, it can be mentally draining to be the only one arguing for a certain viewpoint while everyone else is against you. Once leftists start to self-select out of the discussion, more and more of them will start to decide it's not worth staying as they become a smaller and smaller minority, creating a vicious cycle. We also don't have an easy free source of new users because people can't just stop by with their reddit account when they see this place linked on subs like /r/sneerclub or whatever.

  • Users with unpopular viewpoints are more likely to feel embattled by the general forum atmosphere, more likely to get heated during debates, and thus more likely to get banned. I don't want to litigate the cases of specific users here, but I can think of at least a couple examples of this.

I want to push back on this bit:

I think that the average leftist simply isn't interested in dialogue with rightists. This is evident in how they moderate their own spaces. Frequently when leftists get power, they simply ban (certain) right-wing views.

The average person is not interested in dialogue with genuine disagreement. Christian forums ban atheists, prolife forums ban planned parenthood apologists, socialist forums ban capitalists, etc, etc.

Do I think left wingers are generally worse about it than right wingers? Yes, but I also would think that.

Do I think left wingers are generally worse about it than right wingers?

there were polls on how likely a person would be unfriend those politically opposite views, so big yes.

It's perfectly understandable in those contexts. The vibe shift in my lifetime is nominally non-political spaces taking these stances. I used to be part of several forums with off-topic 'Politics' sections, and despite being consistently lopsided towards the at-the-time Left, the Right was still represented. There were numerous conservative posters whose names I recall to this day after years of arguing with them. Now that type seems to be quickly run out or banished, should I see them at all. There's an autoimmune response where there used to be some tolerance.

I didn't consider /r/pcgaming a 'leftist space'. But make a glib remark in support of JK Rowling and at least the admins reveal it as such.


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