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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested

Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people? Consider the story of the dangerous teen who was going to die of a heart condition, got a transplant refused for being obviously low-value, got national press attention for being black, got the heart transplant and promptly got himself killed in a police chase a couple of years later?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-teen-who-got-heart-transplant-dies-car-chase-n334001

Can't you conceive that people think it's unjust? There's not many spare hearts floating around, he was given a rare chance due to race (and naivete) and squandered it.

Or the Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread where this liberal sees a formerly white suburb being violently ethnically cleansed by blacks but he and the authority figures can only process it through the lens of 'damn, it'd be racial dynamite - we'd better cover it up so the Klan doesn't hear about this!' and 'well pretty soon the problem will be solved because there won't be any more elderly whites living here'.

https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984

Or the Rotherham grooming scandal where vast-majority Pakistani Muslims were raping vast-majority white girls only for the police to cover it up lest they seem racist. That got swept under the rug, along with all kinds of cases where blacks murder whites - but there's always coverage on the latest updates for the Emmett Till case, or the ongoing worship of George Floyd as some kind of secular saint. The privileging of blacks over experienced air traffic controllers recently, or pervasive diversity quotas throughout the Anglosphere (the RAF for instance). University entrance quotas.

People think these things are unjust and they see HBD as a way to counter the root cause - the narrative of white racism causing innately equal groups to stratify. They see insult as well as injury when the media goes out of its way to present whites as incompetent, bad-tempered and criminal: https://twitter.com/stupidwhiteads

the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero

What happened to colour-blind meritocracy? It got eaten by DEI because blank-slatists conclude that different outcomes are caused by discrimination. Unless you have HBD, there's no chance of getting colour-blind meritocracy. The fallback narrative of 'oh, if we went out and told US blacks they were actually just stupid and violent, they'd have a massive violent tantrum' is silly. They already are massively violent and bitterly resentful of whites. Strengthening and heightening that attitude with anti-white media worsens the problem. What kind of social stability are you buying that's worth wrecked cities, obliterated communities, endless crime, occasional mass riots and (since in this context we're accepting HBD but being too cowardly to admit it) knowing that you'll be paying this price forever?

If we don't get rid of the racism narrative now, what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees' show up from sub-Saharan Africa complaining that we oppressed them/droughted them and demand free things? Or when superintelligence gets made by the Google/Microsoft blob that pre-program in the racism narrative?

Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread

I don't see a thread, just a single post with no responses.

Do I need to create a Xitter account to see the rest? Because that's not happening.

Twitter removed the ability to view threads without an account, yes. It is very annoying.

I admit I made a new account on an alt email after nitter got zucked... Alas it's not even on threadreader.

I can conceive it I just don't believe that's the real motive.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians. As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit. The greatest trick the DNC ever played was convincing the media and a whole generation of idiots with PHDs that they weren't the real racists.

  • -18

pushing HBD now

That's Steve Sailor, Amren, VDARE, James Watson, Kevin McDonald, Jared Taylor, Richard Lynn, Phillip Rushton... These guys weren't pushing DEI through Bush era, they've been consistent. See the enormous list:

https://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/

If anything it's the Joe Biden's of the world that switched camp from 'I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle' to 'white Europeans are going to be a minority by 2017 and that's the source of our strength'.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians.

Like who?

Either start naming some Bush-era pushers of DEI who have transitioned to pushing HBD or stop foisting your hallucinations on us. You're constantly saying goofy shit like this while everyone else scratches their heads. Like this post from last week.

Yes and it's no coincidence that those Anti-policing pushes have been spearheaded by the same class of people who are spearheading HBD awareness, namely secular progressive Democrats.

Like... what? Progressive Democrats are spearheading HBD awareness? Gosh all the progs I hear from on Twitter and Reddit sure will be surprised, so why don't you just go ahead and list some of these progressive anti-policing Democrat HBD advocates for us?

@HlynkaCG why don’t you pony up and answer his question? It’s been ten hours since this question was posed to you, and you haven’t replied, despite answering other, less incisive, questions more recently.

You constantly claim that “nobody ever answer your questions” (despite having received countless high-quality answers of the years, all of which you forget immediately after reading them) so your lack of a rejoinder to this (presumably very easy for you to answer) question is pretty conspicuous.

Imagine the partisan-flipped alternate universe version of this. Bunch of progressives sitting around an internet forum all baffled while one of the other users rants about conservative Republicans pushing their LGBT ideology. When someone says they support LGBT he gets really combative and insists they're really a conservative, when someone asks exactly which Republicans support it he feigns blindness.

I mean this is just getting stupid. He insists on inserting himself into these conversations but then also insists on holding them in a fantasy world that only he inhabits.

As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit.

Looking at the election map of 1916, I see Wilson opposed by a coalition of New England Yankees and the places they settled in the upper Midwest. As best I can tell, these same Yankees and their intellectual descendants at the colleges they founded are the ones in charge of the Democratic Party today and peddling the latest racist "anti-racist" dogma.

I think the fact that New Hampshire broke the other way kind of throws a wrench into your theory.

That the brahmins in Cambridge and New Haven hadn't quite achieved the level of state control that they wield now doesn't mean that they weren't backing Wilson

New Hampshire has always seemed like the odd man out in New England to me due to its strong Scotch-Irish/Libertarian heritage, but I digress.

Having considered it more, I suppose I can agree with a version of your thesis that goes like this (writing this out more for my own understanding than yours):

What those in the early-20th century called Progressivism produced a generation of technocrats (including Wilson, Hoover, FDR, etc.) who for several decades controlled both political parties while fighting a (to them very real and serious but to outsiders insignificant) battle amongst themselves. The technocrats recently lost control of the Republican party and what many HBD-believing folks on the new/dissident/alt/whatever-right are trying to do is re-establish the yang to the Democrats' yin while ignoring the bubbling cauldron of resentment into which both the current elites and their would-be shadow elites are soon to fall.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now

This just isn't true. Most bush-era democrats or academic leftists, or any way you can interpret 'pushing DEI' back then are not now pushing the idea that blacks have lower average IQ and that this has significant policy implications. Where do you get these ideas?

This just isn't true.

You are wrong, the reason that Ryan Long, Bill Burr, and the Babylon Bee's various bits about woke people and racists believing essentially the same things are so funny and have gained such traction is because it is true.

  • -17

Wokes may be secret HBD believers- for my part I think most of them really do drink their own koolaid, but sure, a lot of what they do pattern matches to having HBD beliefs but worshipping blacks for whatever reason- but they're definitely not pushing HBD.

You’re conflating “having beliefs that appear the same” with “the same people.”

I don't think I am. Neither in Specific cases like Spencer, Yarvin, Unz, Sailer, Et Al. Nor in the more general category of Secular Progressive Blue/Grey-tribe Academics who mostly reside in California.

As I've observed in previous threads on the topic, that the Sunni and the Shia consider themselves to be completely different and often go to war against one another does not invalidate "Muslim" as a meaningful category.

Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.

From 2005 to 2007, he was a PhD student in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University. He joined the Duke Conservative Union, where he met future President Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller.[37][39] His former website says he did not complete his PhD at Duke in order "to pursue a life of thought-crime"

Yarvin was a libertarian before he was a reactionary.

In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of the Silicon Valley.[15] Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin's mind-set.[13][16]

Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 and was "He was publisher of The American Conservative from 2007 to 2013". "He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly"

Sailer "Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][12] "

As far as I can tell, you are just factually wrong. These people were not pushing 'DEI' during the 'bush administration'. Which is what you claimed. And their ideology before being reactionary seems to have mostly been conservative.

Even if you were right about those people, it wouldn't matter because you claimed "I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now". If that was true, then there would be around 50x more people pushing HBD. A lot of people were pro-diversity two decades ago.

Also, people change ideologies sometimes. Reactionaries have to come from somewhere if there were fewer of them 20 years ago. But a lot of them seem to have come from conservatism.

Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.

And before that he was a student at UC Berkeley and also a self-identified Marxist, ditto Yarvin. The whole "Black Bloc kid gets mugged and starts posting hitler-memes" is such a common origin story amongst NRxers and the dissident right that it's become a meme on conservative forums. It is this archetype that I am referring to when I say that sometimes they are literally the same people.

Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 ...

No he did not. Unz ran as a third-party candidate against incumbent Republican Governor Pete Wilson on a "revenge of the nerds" platform and he lost.

Between this and the "race norming" post up-thread where you conveniently pretend that the NFL hasn't been collecting Wonderlic scores on every new player as they enter the league since the late 70s your claims made throughout this thread have just been consistently factually wrong and it is this sort of aggressive confidence in one's own ignorance that typifies the HBD discourse here on theMotte and makes it so insufferable.

curious if you can reply to my comment on your post here? if i'm wrong i'd like to know i'm wrong but i cant find the evidence for your claims

And before that he was a student at UC Berkeley and also a self-identified Marxist, ditto Yarvin.

I do not see anything about UC Berkeley on his wikipedia page. I see

attended St. Mark's School of Texas, then Colgate University for one year before transferring to the University of Virginia.[37][39] In 2001, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago

Can I have sources for Spencer and Yarvin being self-identified marxists in college? I searched for a bit and was unable to find anything for either. If Yarvin used to be a communist then I definitely should've known that. It's not implausible for Spencer, but

no he did not

Wikipedia directly claimed that "He unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Republican in the 1994 California gubernatorial election and for U.S. Senator in 2016" and then

Unz made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the 1994 California gubernatorial election, challenging incumbent Pete Wilson. He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly.[11] He came in second place to Wilson, receiving 707,431 votes (34.3 percent).[12] Newspapers referred to Unz's candidacy as a Revenge of the Nerds and often quoted his claim of a 214 IQ.[13][11][1][9]

Do you disagree with that?

Between this and the "race norming" post up-thread where you conveniently pretend that the NFL hasn't been collecting Wonderlic scores on every new player as they enter the league since the late 70s

I believe they ended up using the same baseline assumed intelligence for black and white players, not individual historically collected scores?

I think the reason that it isn't true is that people whose job it was elect Democrats, or who wrote intersectional social theory papers, or worked on diversity in HR during the Bush administration are, almost entirely, not currently HBD believers. I don't really see what the 'wokes are racist' youtube video has to do with that.