ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
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User ID: 2458
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
9mo ago
I agree, as I said it's completely possible to be a pro-DEI race-realist, it's just that it would necessitate a different narrative and a different set of supported policies and rhetorical positions. I think Cofnas believes (and I agree) that progressivism wouldn't survive the necessary shift in rhetoric and policy advocacy. I think you also underestimate how rational people are. There are some true believers but I think you underestimate the extent to which people are willing to change their mind based on facts. Look at the shift in attitudes towards the Soviet Union among western intellectuals after the Hungarian and Czech revolts and their suppression by the USSR. There are certainly some people who are beyond convincing, but the ascendency of this worldview requires the cooperation of so many people that I can't believe the zealots are more than a small fraction. I also don't see any better arguments, so if you value argument as a political tool at all I'm not sure what the alternative to talking about HBD is.
A rare miss from Hanania. Much of the piece is just railing against people he doesn't like using group differences for their own political projects. Obviously this happens, but these people are incredibly fringe and have no power (although you'd be almost forgiven for believing otherwise if you spend a lot of time on twitter). Hanania seems to pretty much acknowledge he believes HBD is true in the essay, so I won't even get into that argument in this post.
The reason talking about HBD is important is that so much policy is based on the false premise that not-HBD. How can you even begin to attempt to fix education without addressing the inevitable racial gaps in ability grouping and standardized testing? Hanania's example about the politician slickly changing the subject is very stupid imo. Cofnas is right that smart people and the elite opinion-makers that have an out-sized influence on politics and policy will not be convinced by these cheap tricks. If you want to eliminate the injustice and (worse) inefficiency of policies based on blank slatism then you need to convince the intelligentsia. These people will not be convinced by changing the subject. I think popularizing HBD is much more likely than western elites saying "liberty is so great that it's worth racial inequality". That tradeoff has already been rejected. What might work is the knowledge that correcting disparities via school lunches or iPads for schools or preferential admissions/hiring will not work.
I do have some sympathy for the argument that the marketplace of ideas doesn't really work and political movements aren't based on good arguments. Even the environmentalist position, as long as it acknowledges the achievement gap which is pretty much impossible to deny, entails blacks in the US being underrepresented in any meritocracy. Of course, progressive environmentalists will never say that "obviously affirmative action means less-qualified applicants are hired, but those applicants are less qualified because of lead/food deserts/redlining/racism so it's good and right to balance those disadvantages out" even though that's the logical consequence of acknowledging the achievement gap and being pro-AA. The coherent position is rarely the one stated or defended, but Hanania's argument that we should therefore not talk about HBD doesn't follow. Arguments are soldiers, but forcing progressives to twist themselves into knots trying to explain why non-blacks so struggle to run 100m in under 10 seconds is a good rhetorical tactic. There is an enormous corpus of literature that's essentially blank-slatist racial cope, identifying environmental causes for black underachievement which can only conceivably be remedied by the types of policies Hanania has spent the last few years fighting. I don't see any rhetorically viable response to this corpus from an opponent of DEI or whatever the race-communism buzzword is these days other than HBD. Basically, I agree with Cofnas and don't think Hanania really refutes him.
It's also very strange to cede the idea that truth has value in political discussions. Falsity has costs. Propagating the truth about Lysenkoism wouldn't have destroyed the USSR or communism as an ideology but it may have saved many lives. Talking about HBD is likewise not a silver bullet, but if it's true then there's a lot of alpha in acknowledging it, if only to reduce the inefficiency of policy based on false premises. Also, Humans are irrational but that doesn't mean there's no advantage in making arguments based on true rather than false premises.
I'm not sure if Hanania is really trying to distance himself from his Hoste days, if he's making some attempt to increase his mainstream palatability, or if he just genuinely has a bad opinion. Whichever it is, not talking about race differences is how you get SCOTUS opinions saying that "in 25 years, affirmative action will not be necessary". That quote from the Grutter case upholding affirmative action is a direct link between the false premises Hanania doesn't want to correct and the laws that he wants to change.
For those reading this who are unsure of the facts but have noticed that many proponents of HBD are obnoxious and/or have politics you find objectionable, let me just say that autism is a superpower and the truth of a statement is completely orthogonal to how it's used in political discourse. In general, you can have whatever moral or aesthetic preferences you want, but you should be interested in having as accurate a view of the world as possible, if only to implement your preferences effectively. There's room for progressives who want racial preferences in embryo screening or genetic engineering to close the achievement gap! Effective politics may be possible without concern for the truth but effective policy is not.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
11mo ago
Yes, I’d just add that when other people try to give non-vibes reasoning, I see it as vibes with extra steps.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
11mo ago
You seem to want to say these things are wrong in some objective sense, I don’t. The way you’re arguing this supports my view. You want to say some things are wrong, so you feel the need for an intellectual framework for saying so. Constructing an intellectual edifice so you feel justified in saying what you already believe is just the vibes approach with unnecessary casuistry.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
11mo ago
I'm not 100% sure I know what set of beliefs you're referring to when you talk about rationalist atheists, but it seems completely plausible that the view that certain moral sensibilities are ingrained in (most) people as some sort of pro-social or pro-fitness evolutionary adaption would be under that umbrella. It seems rational to say that morality is based on vibes much more than logic, and the many attempts at applying logic to it can only be justified if you subscribe to the intellectual equivalent of the labor theory of value.
If you mean someone who believes morality should be a logical system that only presumes doing harm or causing suffering or whatever is evil, then I can see your point. I think the "in our society it's harmful" argument fits that framework, although of course that leaves open the possibility of it being ok in other societies.
Both the evolutionary and the milieu arguments are rational (as I understand the term) justifications for the daughter rape prohibition, they just don't rely on a from-first-principles approach to morality, which IMO is a good thing since such approaches are very stupid.
Sorry if this came off as a defensive rationalist atheist screed, I don't identify as a rationalist and have many issues with the movement. I just don't think it's fair to say that they can't defend a position that they largely don't hold. The rationalist position as I understand it is that there is no problem of morals, morality is subjective and it's largely pointless to debate it or point out inconsistencies in what the public feels icky about. That's also my position, so maybe I'm just projecting and your criticisms are valid.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
1yr ago
I really like your point about journalistic standards. Did you come up with it or did some blogger? If it’s the latter let me know so I can follow them.
To add to your critique of the good old days of journalistic standards I’d like to point out that journalism wasn’t necessarily better (although there may have been more high-effort investigative work, I don’t know) so much as it was centralized to the point that heterodoxy was mostly invisible. It’s a common view that journalism was less political and more truth-seeking but I think this is mostly the result of the media being so powerful as to create the political water that discourse took place in. If you read Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent you can see many of the same criticisms that heterodoxers such as frequent this site make today. The journalistic standard of honesty can be stretched very far with some motivated pilpul. Maybe in the 19th century it was different.
Chomsky mentions centralization as one of the main causes of the state of affairs he critiques, and I have to agree. It doesn’t seem that news organizations are capable of being apolitical, in that case why not favor a decentralized media ecosystem wherein no organization has the power to shape the discourse?
The main argument against it I can see is the danger of ignorant plebs being manipulated by demagogues, which might have merit but cedes that capital J Journalism exists to manufacture consent.
The internet might give us the cure to Gell-Mann amnesia. I’m not sure it will actually be better but like many disaffected very-online people I dislike the current roster of media institutions and am happy to see them fail.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
1yr ago
I think something like this does actually exist (read about Young Thug's little gangbanger warlord lifestyle if you want an extreme example) but the key thing is money, not that they victimize whites. You see the same thing with athletes, non-gang-affiliated musicians etc. Money confers status, but I don't think that has anything to do with Kulak's point due to money seeming to confer similar status to violent criminals and basketball players. I think property crime would be directed outward more because that's where the money is than because of racial solidarity/animosity.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
1yr ago
You're right. I should have included in my post that I don't think believe it's reasonable to think that black people in crime infested neighborhoods aren't aware that most of the people being victimized live near to and look like them. The poll that was posted seems to support that.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨🎓
1yr ago
My bad, I'll edit it.
One thing Kulak implied that is simply untrue is that criminals in the black community are tolerated/supported because they victimize whites. While black on white crime is certainly higher than the reverse, it isn't high compared to black on black crime. Most crime is intraracial, and the burden of black violence falls predominantly on blacks themselves. I broadly agree with him on crime but on this he's completely wrong as can easily seen from homicide statistics: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
While there is certainly an element of this, it heavily depends on where the trial is held. Progressives and blacks have their biases and will be much more lenient towards black on white crime than vice versa, so in San Francisco a "sickle-cell crisis" can be used as an excuse for murder. The reverse biases do exist, I'm sure there are towns in the US where whites are advantaged by the local judges, police, and jury pool, and the "gay panic" excuse for murder would be accepted. The point is that neither are universal at the criminal justice level, because criminal justice is mostly a local system.
The main issue as I see it is that the interests of one tribe are disproportionately advanced by the federal government. Local group bias in either direction is unavoidable, but the federal government seems to fall quite firmly on one pole of the bias. SCOTUS obviously contradicting the letter of the law forbidding discrimination based on race to allow discrimination beneficial to blacks is probably the most flagrant example, but there are many others. I agree with Richard Hanania that this general pro-black and pro-"protected group" bias on the part of the federal government falls under the umbrella of civil-rights law, and that much of the cultural down-stream effects we see today such as "wokeness" and progressive insanity in San Francisco criminal justice are largely a consequence of these laws and how they're enforced.
Cherry-picked examples of terrible jury and prosecutorial decisions relating to street-crimes are the lowest-level example, both causally and intellectually, of the wider trend in America of the federal government protecting some groups more than others. All of this is to say that yes, blacks are certainly privileged in the courts of some parts of the country, but imo that will always be true under any reasonable local or national policy. The issue that should be addressed, and that charitably I'll assume he's trying to address rather than just riling up his readers, is the bias on the part of the institutions that are supposed to be universal. It's axiomatic to me that institutions serving and governing everyone should be objective in the race-blind sense, but they aren't and many people don't even seem to think they should be. I don't think Greer's argument well supports his conclusion that blacks receive legal preferential treatment in this country, although I agree with that conclusion at least on the federal level.
I think given the relevance to so many current political issues, and the fact that so many elites and so many policies operate under the belief that it isn't true, it's actually just important to talk about in general. I agree that most of the people who do talk about it are cringe, but that doesn't affect the need to talk about it.
There really doesn't seem to be any way to respond to the progressive objections to Hanania's preferred positions other than to talk about it. If blank slatism is true, doesn't the free market just perpetuate the underclass status of an ethnic group that could otherwise be just as successful as others? Aren't we missing out on a huge number of doctors and engineers by not trying to remedy the environmental factors causing such a huge disparity in every measure of cognitive ability?
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