hbd
phailyoor
17d ago
But they aren't saying that race is the most important part of a person because of HBD, but in spite of it. All white supremacists believe in white supremacy but only a subset of them believe in HBD.
But man I wish we had more liberals/libertarians posting here.
Sure, but most of us aren't filtering that through 7000 levels of irony and then getting butthurt about it being perceived as pointlessly-hostile nonsense.
The problem is that [too much acknowledgement of] HBD is just as destructive to classical liberalism as it is to progressivism for reasons that should be obvious- once you start treating HBD as prescriptive rather than descriptive then there's no reason to be anything but a hardcore turbo-trad. If your political philosophy suggests society should maximize its "gain" from realizing HBD is true and immediately go full Apartheid, then you prevent those with [the characteristic that predicts poor performance] but perform well anyway from properly developing[1].
This is OK for traditionalist societies in which one Knows Their Place(tm)[2], but there's only one way to compromise such that differences are sanded down over time, and that's by giving them more freedom then their characteristics suggest in the chance that, when members of that group beat the average, we enable both a eugenic effect and more effective suggestion that the HBD-disadvantaged group better assimilates. (Whether those things have worked is an exercise for the reader- I assert that they have, that what is left at the bottom probably can't be fixed, and that it is unfortunate that they look that way but our ruthless market system will pay them what they're worth backstopped by our infinite greed above all other moral principles.)
Since the entire conceit of liberalism is that good performers who are worthy of unrestricted freedom shouldn't be held back by bad performers who are not[3] (and those negative consequences of excess freedom correctly fall on the virtueless, which is the fundamental problem trads and progs have with liberalism since charity for those people isn't mandated), we can understand it, but we can't really do anything about it other than offer our velvet glove before we give 'em the iron fist.
That does mean HBD predicts those most likely to get the iron fist are going to be [characteristic predicting poor performance], which means we can have the potential blind spot of confusing [characteristic predicting poor performance] with [poor performance], and the fact we know that means we're vulnerable to the bad-faith rent-seeking my outgroup defines itself by having the right to do because Muh Oppression or whatever.
[1] And now you know why otherwise high-potential modern teenagers and early twentysomethings are so fucked up- arresting development like this has serious group-level long-term consequences, but we pretend it's OK because "at least it's not HBD".
[2] Knowing One's Place is not unique to Traditionalists; after all, Progressives have the same stack vocabulary, they just put themselves on top of it axiomatically, where with the Traditionalists they at least have the notion (albeit as unenforceable as the liberal claim that charity will fix the problems) that those on top are to perform like they're at the top.
[3] And note that liberalism doesn't inherently conflict with HBD categories from being imposed; you can still have a liberal slave-owning society, or one with limited franchise for certain groups, and nearly every place with a tradition of liberalism has been this way at some point. This is another weakness liberals have to progressives, since progressives will argue using liberal aesthetic but will destroy all protections for high performers in the process if left unchecked.
aqouta
17d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
I mean we won huge battles in the fight against affirmative action and knocked the woke racial identarians off their game in a lot of areas. It being discussed less fits squarely in the hypothesis that most of us HBD people weren't actually white nationalists but simply what we've been telling you we are, people who prefer race blindness if they're allowed to have it. Yes, white nationalists continue to exist and they will continue to make white nationalist noises, not really sure why that should matter when discussing HBD.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
17d ago
It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.
Right. The more cynical HBDer will note that the racial caste system establishes itself as a result of HBD... even given heroic efforts to suppress it.
ulyssessword
17d ago
Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites.
Ethnonationalists are (often) also HBD believers, and they say that the important aspect of a person is their race, full stop. You could point to higher intelligence, longer life, better health, or lower criminality among other ethnic groups, but that still wouldn't convince them that someone from another race is better in the ways that matter because that's not what they're judging people on.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
This is pretty much my take on 'HBD' or what I might term the 'neo-racialists'. It is no doubt true that there's genetic variation, on the population level, across the human race, and these variations to some extent correlate with racial categories. I can't really argue with that. However, the HBDers routinely outrun that observation and draw massive, sweeping conclusions about the desirability of using race as a proxy for a huge number of other issues, and therefore organising society, or even treating individuals, on the basis of race. The whole thing is just a motte and bailey.
aqouta
17d ago
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
We must be reading totally different threads. Every time the topic comes up it's people defending what you're calling the motte from blank slatists. Not to consensus build, as I'm sure we have people who cynically want to live in the bailey, but it really seems like the modal motte opinion on the topic is that HBD is obviously real is a large part of various outcome gaps and what should be done about it is to stop trying to overturn every inch of society for a racism of the gaps. It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.
Sounds good, me too. But as with many, many iterations of this problem, I'm gonna notice if your advocacy for no racial politics only gets deployed against a specific type of racial politics, and gives the others a pass. And this noticing is going to crystalize into a policy of rejecting calls to oppose the specific type of racial politics that is currently very effectively opposed, while claiming that the sort of racial politics that is both endemic and enshrined is no biggie. This policy is not itself an endorsement of racial politics, in my view; I am not actually under the impression that the WN or HBD hardliners are actually on my side; as far as I'm concerned, they are also Blue Tribe, and I have no intention of cooperating with them. But neither are inter-blue conflicts my problem to fix. Further, to the extent that Blues are willing to attack people like me on a racial basis, I think defense against those attacks is entirely reasonable. Anti-white racism obviously exists, and opposition to it should be coordinated in all the usual ways.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
17d ago
This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans.
While the tone of your post is a bit aggressive, I do strongly agree with this line of reasoning. I've always been skeptical of hard HBD because I grew up in a rural white town, where there was so much despair and economic struggling.
In my opinion culture is OBVIOUSLY the bigger factor than genes or IQ. And the rise and current downfall of most whites is actually the perfect example. White people used to rule the world with an iron fist, we roamed the seas and dominated everything we saw. Then our culture changed over time, and despite our very similar genetics to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, we have... the problems we have now.
Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites.
I have seen it argued on multiple occasions right here on the Motte that racial background is the "most dispositive" factor in determining human behavior. That is to say that a person's race will tell you more about how they are likely to behave than whether they are male or female, young or old, married or single, rich or poor, urban or rural, republican or democrat, etc...
By extension wether a man is black or white must matter more than whether they are an aged Supreme Court Judge or a Twenty-something meth head. You may claim that the Motte is not representative of the HBD movement or that when users here say things like "most dispositive" or "predictive" they don't actually mean it literally, but it's not a strawman.
My problem with HBD as it typically discussed in rationalist spaces and especially the Motte is that it is itself a massive Motte and Bailey.
The Motte is that broad differences between racial groups are real/exist.
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
You can spongebob meme at me about "dEmoCrAtSaReThErEaLRaCiStS uwu" and call me cringe, but if the truth is "cringe" then cringe i shall be.
As i touched upon below i am increasingly convinced that the reason HBD and other sweeping generalizations about race are so popular amongst priestly caste (academics, politicians, journalists, et al) and on certain parts of Twitter, is that it allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility for the negative consequences of thier policies and behavior. You can't blame me, it is genetics (or some structural "ism") that are the true culprits!
WandererintheWilderness
17d ago
So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.
Does it? The anti-HBD side as you define it could just as well say that the pro-HBDers have gone quiet because their guy is already god-emperor, so they no longer need intellectual grounding to "construct systems of white supremacy" instead of getting on with oppressing non-whites directly.
(Of course, I don't believe either side of the meta-debate.)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
And then you had to go and fuck it up.
YE_GUILTY
17d ago
Hm, thank you for bringing this up.
One thing I remember of the HBD debate is the meta-debate over why it's being discussed at all. The anti-HBD side is not quiet about their belief that pro-HBDers are just racists seeking to deploy this information as an offensive weapon, so that they may construct a system of white supremacy. The pro-HBD side sometimes says that it's mainly brought up defensively, as a counterargument to assertions that the only cause for outcome disparities between racial groups has to be white racism, (and therefore the only solution to outcome disparities is to squeeze white people more until they give up whatever kind of oppression they're doing.)
So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.
And I'm relieved, because I don't want to live in a society of enforced racial hierarchies, whether they're built on IQ or on blood guilt or on anything else.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
17d ago
Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.
This is not what happened at all.
The Republican party chose it's name as an allusion to Plato and classical (pre-Imperial) Rome. A focus on individual virtue/responsibility coupled with a distaste for collectivism bordering on taboo have been consistent threads on the US right going back at least as far as reconstruction, and it is the US left that has been consistently pushing back against that taboo in an effort to promote collectivism/class consciousness.
Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites. That doesn't imply at all that bringing in foreigners, even pretty ok ones would be a net increase in the average quality of the humans in the country. So the motivation for closed borders is not at all inconsistent with HBD ideology. And trade protectionism, while largely supported by the same coalition that supports HBD, is not the same as keeping foreigners out.
Wanting to support the weakest and most vulnerable inside the country is also not really a component of HBD. That's just being a good person.
This post reminds me of this meme just replace christian with HBD beliver
there's a huge mass of white men without jobs
Yes
who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China.
Absolutely not. Job losses and wage depression are a harm in themselves. But few people are arguing that it's the cause of fent zombies. And the vast majority of people affected by illegals and free trade do not become fent zombies.
In fact the mainstream right wing opinion has little sympathy for fent zombies. They would be happy to have the zombies rounded up and disappeared, while also advocating for secure borders and trade protection.
The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work.
Yes
We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans.
Can't even begin to respond to how hateful this message is.
89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force
And it's near the lowest ever
a figure that is likely higher for whites,
You have zero evidence of that.
The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Interesting that all the things rightists propose help (or affect, if you think they're bad) all Americans equally, but you're the one over here projecting your racism on others.
rae
17d ago
There’s also big differences outside of the Hajnal line in Europe itself. Slovenia is a prosperous country with well functioning infrastructure on track to surpass the UK in terms of GDP per capita while Serbia is a poor corrupt autocracy, even if both were part of Yugoslavia and are ethnically south Slavs.
I don’t know any circumstances where HBD is a better explanation than culture and history.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17d ago
but the basic point is valid: the Online Right, insofar as I casually track its movements on Twitter, emphasizes HBD less than it used to.
Liberals used to explicitly believe that their belief system is justified by science, and anything that contradicts it must be not only morally, but factually wrong. This was the background for the rise of the HBD conversation, trying to own those stupid racists by showing how scientifically illiterate they are. After they crashed into that particular wall, head first, several times, and noticed it ain't budging, they decided to avoid the conversation altogether, which is why it also lost a lot of it's utility for the right. It's not even limited to this particular topic, there's a broader trend that Dave Green calls "the death of discourse".
There's a kind of coarser, more vitriolic type of racism and anti-semitism emerging to take its place.
This isn't even specific to the right.
TitaniumButterfly
17d ago
This whole post relies upon an extremely facile (and uncharitable) conception of HBD. I find myself entirely uninterested in the points being made here.
"White people" is a bad category when discussing HBD. I'm not sure if it's quite as bad as 'Hispanic' but it's gotta be close. Skin color matters much less than ancestry even if they usually correlate. Consider Obama, or almost any other high-achieving 'black person' who happens to be heavily or even mostly Hajnali genetically.
Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
I expect non-Hajnali 'whites' to basically end up as an underclass, so it is what it is I guess.
The solution here is more and better HBD, not less.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
One sees it everywhere, even by those who otherwise denounce HBD.
The basic formula is: [My ingroup's positive attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to imitate; while [ingroup's negative attributes] are the random result of circumstance or interest or are entirely mythical. [My outgroup's positive attributes] are random results of circumstance or interest, or are entirely fake; but [outgroup's negative attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to improve or mitigate.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
17d ago
My core point stands uncontested.
"Uncontested". I do not think that word means what you think it means.
HBD the theory hides behind HBD the science in order to try to gain legitimacy as a "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" despite every "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" being half-baked and not capable of standing up to any critical analysis.
Error on top of error. It is not enough to merely declare that every "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" is half-baked. Nor does it matter that something does not stand up to "critical analysis", if you mean that in the postmodern sense. And certainly it is not a mark against HBD that it tries to explain aspects of the world.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
It's literally being debated in the post before yours...
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17d ago
the theory hides behind ... the science in order to try to gain legitimacy as a "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is"
Many such cases: this is a generic problem, IMO, with several branches of science, maybe even every branch with immediate political impact (also economics, epidemiology, climate science, [group] studies). I don't think you're wrong that this even happens to HBD folks who are probably diametrically opposed to plenty of those other examples.
I don't know of a generic strategy to counteract this human failing: my first recommendation would be to reject claims that "the science is settled": the scientific process is never truly settled. But if you go too far in the un-trusting direction, you'll start questioning the concept of childhood vaccinations or jet fuel melting steel beams.
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
- The "heritage American" label reminds me of this. Like white people are Ford model-Ts, outmoded machines that nevertheless have aesthetic and historical significance.
Certainly this can be argued for certain aspects of behavior. For example, educated professional blacks are more likely to commit violent crime than the most impoverished White trash in Appalachia. It all depends on exactly what you're trying to disposit. This can be extended to argue that such White trash is somehow "superior" to more economically advantaged individuals of other races, though I would not personally agree with this conclusion. Anyways this still only applies to groups and even the most hardcore HBD believers would also accept the existence of individual freak exceptions to the rule.
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