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Some notes on stuff I read and the work of Luke Smith

I have been binge-reading the essays Luke Smith wrote on his website, LukeSmith.xyz, and have also finished more than a quarter of Watership Down. It is slightly harder to start reading physical books again, as I am used to my Kindle and mostly read short form on my computer and phone. Great book so far, but the comment is about Luke Smith.

Some essays by Luke Smith I liked

In particular, I liked his podcast on the book against method by Feyerabend, and I have been trying to draft out a post that is not haphazard, concise and makes a novel point.

His critique of libertarianism ending in feudal states was probably correct. My main point, though, is an admission of defeat, weakness rather. How do I survive in a world where the heuristics people hold holy on both sides end up being wrong so often?

You have religious reactionaries on one side who stick to their beliefs just because they were born with them; on the other hand, you have the rest of the world, where you find shades of post-enlightenment thought. In his essay 'Not Even Libertarians Believe in Libertarianism', Luke quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, in a rather casual manner

Nietzsche, in I forget which book (probably Genealogy of Morals), noted that moral philosophy is kind of the opposite of other sciences. In moral philosophy, we know beforehand what is “right” and “wrong,” and its goal is not so much to discover new truths as to concoct a framework that helps us understand the system of why things are “right” and “wrong.” We do not “discover” new moral truths.

This later connects to his other podcast where he discusses Against Method, largely agreeing with Feyerabend's viewpoint of Epistomological Anarchism and in another podcast notes the gaping flaws with Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow with the help of Gerd Gigerenzer's books such as Simple Heuristics in a Complex World and later uses his other work Mindless Statistics to showcase the modern academic stat raindance.

I provide this context because I feel unsure of what to believe in as a person. I grew up seeing a bunch of superstitions that made no sense, did not care much about god and slowly became a reactionary when I realised the cathedral or the modern elite simply used the scientific method as a garb to justify bio leninism or values like it. The essays I read have, however, made me question the very means and sources of what I can even trust. Do you simply agree to go along with your maulvi who is fine with you marrying a girl who is barely done growing up or do you deconstruct everything and reach a point where you can later either deny the existnece of gender or worse, be an hbd obsessed online type who cannot see his own people as anything beyond iq scores.

The ancients here in India tried their hand at this problem with the Dharamshastras, before the lawbook of Manu, the Manu Smriti. These texts were not the word of god, something that is difficult to explain since the thinking and the people behind these ideals are long gone. I mean to simply ask how one can know what's right in a way that sounds dumb.

Is the world just humans trying to understand systems too complex for them, and all efforts are kinda wasteful, at least in the current model of the world? How do you decide what you think is wrong or right? The Maulvi example is helpful since people deny and outright ignore the existence of all religious mandates that are at odds with modernity. Modern banking and democratic values have dented a lot of orthodox people in parts that are not in the West. My post is terribly worded, but I cannot honestly tell people what is right or wrong in a consistent way, i.e. by seeing tradition as the all-knowing lindy culture machine fighting modern "logic".

This post will get downvoted badly, I cannot fully explain the entirity of my inability to grasp what is correct as both the opposing forces here are wrong in many ways, but I am unsure if you can live in a world that does not inevtibaly bend towards one and goes through pointless pain because of it. Marrying within your caste or race works; it worked before we understood IQ as a metric that has clear scientific backing, and the very ideas of genetic tests with coordinates and a detailed breakdown of your haplogroup. At the same time, man evolved from a primitive state where religion, even though it came after a certain point, was the new thing compared to the pre-agriculture past. Is the answer to just never think, meditate and go on with my life, should I break down only some things with arguments, or do I simply find the first old scripture that agrees with me?

I know that the Dharmashastras did try something in this regard, and like most things religious, I presume they were ahead of their time. But yeah, I am beginning to question some things, not because I am anti-vaxxer or something, I am not, I do lean towards modern meds being good in nearly all cases, I just don't know how many of these Chesterston fence issues we will face. Most religious preachers, popular ones, are mostly incorrect; my intellect can sense the outright stupidity and dishonesty in many things, and I hope I can get some personal anecdotes or any advice on how one deal with these issues. Learning philosophy to convince others of your preconceived notions, for instance, sounds dishonest, yet many do it.

This ties into culture war heavily, I know that having women not marry young, allowing heterogenous societies, and deconstruction lead to chaos, do I need to wait for science to approve of it, but conversely, how can I deny the existence of many modern phenomena that I know are true? Hinduism conveniently has sects that do not care very much about any of this, but I want to finally see reality for people reading this who know more about the world than me

Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.

I don't understand how the use of quotation marks in general would be worthy of a ban, or what you mean by "scare quotes". E.g. writing HBD as "HBD" probably just means he thinks it's a euphemism that he doesn't really agree with, but he's using it here for the sake of clarity as that's what it's often referred to. None of his other use of quotation marks seem bad either.

This seems like a ban based on vibes alone. Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!

Since when did population ratios matter? They certainly didn't matter to the British Raj or to the conquistadors. Sure, the power gap between whites and everyone else is smaller than it was in 1870, or even 1492, but most of the other ~7.2 billion people on Earth simply can't constitute a real existential threat to whites, you don't even need HBD to justify it. Even wrt China, they're a unproven upstart that lacks the proven track record of Europeans in global dominance.

seeing only one kind of racial solidarity as unacceptable is A) illiberal and B) corrosive to multicultural societies.

I offer an explanation, not an excuse. As for multicultural societies, their myriad weaknesses have already been extensively detailed, what's one more?

Presuming that all that stuff about IQ in HBD is true, then we can make those schools more efficient for turning 75 IQ people into 90 IQ people and measure our success based on how well these schools accomplish this. Instead of being upset that we're not consistently turning 75 IQ people into people capable of working 120 IQ jobs and trying to fix it by pouring more money into such a futile project.

I replied already but wanted to address a different point more fully. I don't think public education changes that much if we embrace HBD. E.g. even if we can't turn inner city black youth with 75 IQ into doctors, it still probably is worth sending them to public school to try to get them up to 90. What's the alternative?