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In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
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Notes -
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
Not sure I count as white nationalist, but my definition would be basically "supermajority ethnically descended from the Ecumene", with the cutoffs of the Ecumene being the Sahara in the south, the Urals in the northeast, and somewhere around Persia in the southeast. This seems like the most sensical definition in terms of genetics (Persia, of course, was the most porous boundary there, hence the lack of clarity).
The usual argument here is regression to the mean. Genes and environment both have effects on phenotype, and it's tricky to separate them. If one accepts arguendo that white people are genetically predisposed to WEIRDness, then when filtering for phenotypic WEIRDness you're filtering more strongly on nonwhites, which means they will on average have greater environmental contribution, which means compared to similarly-WEIRD-phenotyped whites they would have less genetic tendency toward WEIRDness. Thus, their children would be predictably less WEIRD; they would regress toward the mean.
(NB: I am actually agnostic about the main object-level claim here; HBD is not my forte, and particularly among humans who aren't either sub-Saharan African or *nesian - i.e. Eurasians, North Africans and Native Americans - I'm sceptical of claims of large differences given the short timescales involved and similar subspecies heritage. I'm merely pointing out the logical consequences of that claim if one does accept it.)
Why wouldn't the ecumene include Ethiopia and India?
Regression to the mean is an argument for having higher or lower trait thresholds for certain races, but not for excluding those races altogether.
My understanding is that they weren't quite as well-mixed with Europe/Mediterranean. Certainly, on a superficial level, it's much easier to distinguish Indians and Ethiopians from Italians than it is Arabs. There's definitely a line-drawing problem in Persia, as I said, because indeed there was a lot more geneflow between the Ecumene and India than there was between e.g. India and China.
Agreed.
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