The comment isn't especially rule-breaking on any of those fronts. It brought useful context to the original post. I learned something from it. If there were a top-level post about, say, people behaving in a strikingly unruly manner in public, and a reply added that they were black as a partial explanation (and obviously it could only be a partial explanation), there is no way that would get modded, let alone as casually as this. Just like the ungovernable black, the far-left Jew who loathes his host country's past glories and dominant ethnic group, and is politically engaged enough to act on it, is a recognizable type. Both Jews and gentiles have been writing about it for over a century, sometimes sympathetically. It shouldn't be necessary to break out the stats/conspiracy board every time one wants to gesture at it (and doing so would probably only derail the conversation and make the pile-on worse).
I'm mostly a lurker here, but I've noticed that when I do find the motivation to post, it's often to defend others from anti-anti-semitic dogpiling and mod action. Maybe this is my own bias talking, but it seems to be the one topic where The Motte loses all reason in its eagerness to shut down conversation, and the quality of the responses drops off a cliff. Besides the ban itself,
If he is interested in advancing Jewish interests, he is doing a very poor job of it [by opposing Israel]
It's common knowledge (I hope this point is simply consensus so that I can't be accused of building one) that far-left, white-hating, anti-colonial Jews are often, perhaps usually, also anti-Israel. Obviously this would make it hard to argue that Hermer and Sands are part of a conscious international conspiracy to promote Jewish world domination or whatever, but @Cirrus said no such thing. While, if Cirrus took your rebuttal on board, he might have to posit a more complex motivation for the antagonists in this story than raw will to racial supremacy, that is not really a problem for him, as highly prominent Jewish public figures are obviously smart enough to have more complex inner lives than that (that still, demonstrably in some cases, reserve a place for hating white gentiles). For me, learning that both the key figures in the Chagos story happened to be Jewish had the total effect of minimizing the cognitive dissonance/surprisal/confusion I had on first reading OP, and learning that Hermer favors Palestine did little to increase it again.
This doesn’t even make sense from an antisemitic standpoint. If anything Jews want English-speaking nations to dominate geopolitics because they already have ready-made English-language propaganda infrastructure
OP established that whether or not it has anything to do with their Jewishness, Hermer and Sands appear to be acting against national interest, even out of contempt for the English people, as some have alleged. So taking that as given, do you think it is more natural that they should be ethnically English or Jewish? Of course there are many self-hating English people as well so it's not a slam dunk, but I think the point stands. I might have predicted that Hermer and Sands were Jewish on first reading the story, and although I can't honestly say the thought occurred to me, I attribute that to being less vigilant than I could have been (to be honest "Phillippe Sands" should have been a dead giveaway). Thanks to Cirrus' comment I am less slightly less likely to miss such details in the future.
Random accusations toward Jews
"Random accusation" would be if the key figures in the story weren't literally Jewish.
There are people who are obsessed with Jews for some reason, and this is one of the few places that won't immediately shut it down so we get all the witches.
It's honestly not even offensive, just boring and annoying.
It's not that that aren't any decent anti-Jewish takes. It's just that the ones we tend to attract are low-IQ by the standards of this forum.
You're a thoughtful poster most of the time, but here we go with the anti-anti-semitic tropes. It's always the same "low-IQ" verbiage.* What's conspicuously low-IQ about his comment, of all the comments on here? It is at least coherent and well-structured (though short), and it contains no spelling or grammar mistakes. Most commenters who can meet those standards don't have to worry about being tarred as "low-IQ", at least not based on a single post. Admittedly it doesn't take a very high IQ to google someone's ethnic background, but the same goes for any low-effort reply that just serves to add context. "Low-IQ" is boo lights for any criticism of Jews that falls below @SecureSignals' standard of eloquence (which is met by maybe two or three other posters forum-wide).
For every "boring and annoying" antisemitic post on here, there are 10 NPC-level rebuttals. I urge all of you anti-anti-semites to consider if the fact that every drive-by post like this spawns a chorus of affronted Jews yelling "Shut it down!" helps your case.
*I saw a lot of this in the weeks after Oct. 7: according to several prominent internet Jews, not supporting Israel makes you "low-IQ" of all things. Other positions might be perverse, misguided, unsound, averse to facts, ideologically motivated, evil, even dumb, but somehow the word cloud for opposition to Israel and other positions that are facially unfavorable to Jews usually contains "low-IQ". What seems pretty plainly to be going on is that these Jews are leveraging their reputation for high IQ to give their attacks on the "low-IQ" extra bite. After all, they are the final authority on IQ.
ahobata
13d ago
What a terrible post.
I'm surprised white supremacists didn't pounce on this immediately
Why would they? What does it prove, in the most white-supremacist-friendly interpretation? That intelligent Europeans (alone, as far as we know) preferred fairer-skinned partners? Or do you mean that they should have pounced because, in their stupidity, they would have congenially misinterpreted the findings as showing a causal relationship between fair skin and intelligence if they had bothered to read them?
I don't expect them to read.
Is there a single group of people outside of academia that would be more likely to read this paper? I don't know how many read it in full, but it did generate a lot of discussion on RW twitter, much of it reasonably well-informed. The IQ results were flattering enough on their own that there was no need to resort to whatever nonsensical argument you expected to see referencing skin color.
3500-3000 BC - sharp drop
I suggest you draw some vertical lines on the graph. The sharp drop definitely starts before 3500. It looks more like 4000-3500, with recovery starting around 3300. So,
Sharp drop coincides with the Yamnaya expansion
is false. The Yamnaya expansion began sometime between 3300 and 3000, coinciding with the beginning of the slow increase. Note that it took a thousand years or more for Aryan genes to spread to most of the rest of Europe. I too would have expected the Aryan invasion to be associated with a drastic change in one direction or the other, but that's just not what the graph shows.
Big L for Skin heads
I don't think I've heard skinheads referenced anywhere in the last 20 years except as hypothetical boogeymen. Less of this.
Germanic, Viking...
Please google the word "Germanic".
500BC - 1200AD steady decline
I like this one
I'm sure you do.
This steady decline coincides with the continent’s biggest cultural phenomenon : Christianity
How does Christianity explain the 1/3 of the decline that took place before the birth of Christ, or the 1/2 of the decline before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, or that during the interval before Christianity established itself in the more remote regions of Europe, let alone becoming a major force in the lives of the scattered, illiterate farmers that constituted the majority of these regions? The decline would have had to start around ~800 AD for your point to stand, but that is much closer to the beginning of the increase we see in the High Middle Ages than it is to your Christian pre-Socratics.
Another L for the skin heads.
I'm not old enough to remember what the skinheads were really about, but nowadays, the image of a right-wing extremist who passionately believes in the salvific power of both Christ and the Aryan-derived heritable component of IQ is chimerical. (A believer in the latter is more likely to be an antireligious pagan (sympathizer). Actually even he might not exist; I've never heard it claimed that the Aryans' special sauce was their superior IQ.)*
ancestral pillars of white identity... suppressed intelligence [rather] than promoting it
Wait. I thought that the "whiteness" of a historical current, as perceived from the 21st century, as a latent variable modulating its contribution to intelligence, was your strawman, but maybe that was an accidental steelman of you. Is your working theory that whites were dumbed down by the Aryans and Christianity, but we compensated for it through the gradual lightening of our skin? I would think that was unfair, but then I don't understand why you say you're confused. Why would you expect all these unrelated things to have a consistent effect on intelligence?
*The closest I've heard is that their milk-drinking gave them an enlarged frontal cortex (unmediated by gene-culture coevolution) and so maybe a superior memory. I'm not familiar with the physical evidence, but one indirect point in favor is that international memorization competitions are apparently dominated by Mongolians, the one (large) ethnicity that both is Asian and drinks lots of milk. Also, the Aryans seem to have had a knack for epic poetry -- or just very long poetry, in the case of the Vedas -- which is not shared by many other cultures.
Given the plot summary, anyone could have predicted it would be a box office failure. Why they went ahead with it anyway is anyone's guess, surely there was a variety of motivations, but repudiating/disavowing their unsought, deplorable fanbase was probably among them.
Actually, not only was the failure predictable from the plot, the plot was predictable from the existence of a sequel. Can you imagine a world where the lesson they took from Incel 1 was that there's an untapped audience of very online white male social rejects desperate to be shown in an, if not positive, at least "nuanced" light, and the sequel delivered even more on the power fantasy and/or sympathetic hearing aspects? Why does that sound so much less believable than their decision to have their core audience raped in Minecraft effigy?
ahobata
5mo ago
a million Haitians in the united states
The appropriate denominator is the 5-20 thousand (depending what sources you trust) that moved into Springfield recently, since that's where the search for corroborating evidence has been focused, prompted by many other, less dubious grievances about the Haitians' misconduct and failure to integrate.
he actually did it
This was after the war started, after his initial plans were thrown into confusion by Britain's unexpected (because irrational, unfulfillable, and at odds with earlier policy) guarantee to Poland. Hitler insisted even in e.g. private communiques with his generals that he wanted no war with Poland.
His foreign policy record up to that point was that of an able, calculating (if ambitious) diplomatist, not of a megalomaniac who would accept nothing less than the prompt extermination of all racial enemies. In Mein Kampf, he definitely does not present a vision of German annexation let alone genocide of all of Eastern Europe. What he does repeat a number of times is the need for more "living space" while gesturing vaguely to the east (or Russia and her vassal states as the Wikipedia quote has it, i.e., not Poland) and talking up the Bolshevik threat. 90% of his vitriol is reserved for Jews and Communists. The Slavs as such are spoken of in a way more reminiscent of the way the Irish were discussed by Anglo-American conservatives during their early waves of immigration: domestically (in Austria), they pervert democratic institutions with their lower standard of culture and their pursuit of ethnic interest, and take up political space that should belong to the Austrian/Anglo majority. His overarching foreign policy objectives were 1. the destruction of Communism (and, similarly in his eyes, European Jewry), 2. the reunification of existing ethnically German regions under one government, and 3. the colonization of some of Eastern Europe. Since the Poles at least shared Hitler's hostility to Communism, it was hardly a given that genociding them would have been his first choice. As I said before, the Polish leadership recognized this: Soviet policy posed a greater existential risk. In the short term at least, the alliance probably would have been treated similarly to how the Romanian alliance was in fact treated later on: mercenarily, like alliances on both sides of the war, not as a conscious stalling tactic to prepare for their eventual genocide.
Edit: This may downplaying Hitler's imperiousness. The point is that whatever he had in store for the Poles, it was probably better than the predictable consequences of their refusal to accept the weakness of their position.
ahobata
5mo ago
considers your people to be 'life unworthy of life'
Ahistorical. He had never said such a thing about the Poles/Slavs.
brags about how he's going to conquer your lands, kill everyone and move his own people in
Even more ahistorical. Nowhere in Mein Kampf or in any of his private or public remarks does he hint at a plan to subjugate Poland. Not that there were no reasons for Beck to be suspicious of Hitler's apparently moderate stance -- obviously he would not have allowed Poland to remain an equal partner forever even under the best circumstances. But up to this time, Germany's re-expansion had been accomplished without bloodshed and his demands of Poland were not unreasonable, as even the British had generally agreed until they issued their defense guarantee at the last minute, fueling Polish recklessness.
The Polish leadership were more afraid of genocide at the hands of the Soviets than of the Nazis.
ahobata
5mo ago
In that case, this would be pretty misleading:
We trained a model that scored 213 points and ranked in the 49th percentile in the 2024 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), by initializing from o1 and training to further improve programming skills. This model competed in the 2024 IOI under the same conditions as the human contestants. It had ten hours to solve six challenging algorithmic problems and was allowed 50 submissions per problem.
ahobata
5mo ago
With a relaxed submission constraint, we found that model performance improved significantly. When allowed 10,000 submissions per problem, the model achieved a score of 362.14 – above the gold medal threshold – even without any test-time selection strategy.
I don't follow this part. Was the selection random? Then how did increasing the number of generations improve the result?
ahobata
5mo ago
Obviously he's nowhere near Biden levels of cognitive decline, but he was all over the place tonight in a way I don't think I've seen before. Recursive angry tangents where even the initial tack was only tangentially related to the question. Limited vocabulary. Etc. I'm 100% pro-Trump and it was impossible even for me to listen to him for more than a few seconds without tuning him out.
The Springfield situation had the potential to be an excellent talking point, but he flubbed it. "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. This is what's going on in our country." That was it. To someone unfamiliar with the story, this is indistinguishable from the ravings of a homeless schizo. Even granting that Trump gonna Trump, that was not part of the plan. Mounting stupidity is the only explanation.
ahobata
7mo ago
Simple, but low prior. I got ChatGPT to list 30 notorious modern assassination attempts. Of those, all or almost all that come close to fitting the bill were by people with a history of (severe) mental illness. The only anecdote the classmate gave had Crooks calling him stupid for supporting Trump. Both the fact that he is a Trump supporter and that the target of the attempt was Trump make that fact less conspicuous, but still... maybe the simplest explanation for an assailant risking his life to assassinate one of the most hated candidates ever is that he hated that candidate in particular.
ahobata
7mo ago
Well, the story their leader is going with for now is that they couldn't put agents on the roof because it was sloped. That's pretty effeminate.
ahobata
7mo ago
You've been posting on and off about how unimportant this is for 3 hours and haven't been deterred by the uniformly disparaging responses you've been getting. Why not just share your opinion?
ahobata
7mo ago
ahobata
7mo ago
this means it has only become more important than ever to keep Trump out of the White House, to protect the many innocent people who will be hurt by Trump (and his violent, bigoted supporters)
Maybe you added that last bit as a joke, but I think the incongruousness of panicking about violence from the candidate who just came almost literally within a hair's breadth of being brained by (presumably) a Biden supporter would not be lost on most viewers who are not already extremists.
ahobata
8mo ago
He's setting up a round of "would you rather" with the choices being "risk getting bitten by a shark" and "risk getting electrocuted". In the process, he bends the laws of physics and makes a digression in which he humorously mocks "them" for trying to explain away all the shark attacks that have supposedly been in the news lately. The clip got a laugh out of me the first time I watched it (specifically the "because they misunderstood who she was" part). I wouldn't question the mental acuity of any of my 130 IQ friends if they said the exact same thing from beginning to end, modulo style.
There's no comparison between this and Biden-tier gaffes. This isn't even a gaffe, just working-class-coded banter.
How would you apply this model to music, where the direct imitation of nature is naturally more of a niche thing (though it can be quite nice in some cases)? And why are rugged, mountainous locales so popular in landscape painting -- maybe that too is a cultural idiosyncrasy and things like the Lascaux cave paintings represent art in a more pristine state? What makes symmetry pleasant?
Teeth blackening is unusual in that it resembles "naturally" blackened teeth, which are disgusting. Most art fads aren't like that.
I think you give nurture short shrift. The thing is, so does post-modern art, which by prizing novelty (and sometimes ingenuity) over all else, simultaneously rejects the fruits of both biology and culture.
Another parallel is that BIID is also partly driven by a sexual fetish in the majority of cases. I can't find the paper right now, but I recall having read one showing that patients tend to conceal that fact from their doctors and form communities where they help each other find willing surgeons and publicize techniques for duping less willing ones into going along with it. But AFAICT the similarity is shallow, it's just that the gratification of paraphilias is considered a questionable motivation for major surgery by most of the medical community.
ahobata
10mo ago
Journalists had no issue pointing out when a police officer who allegedly did something abusive is White.
Because when gangbangers shoot other gangbangers it's expected. If the shooters are caught, they invariably go to prison. It isn't complicated. Cops are supposed to be there to protect the public
"The police should he held to a higher standard, therefore we should make a big deal of it when the officers involved in an incident are white"? I'm not following your reasoning here.
If there were a case to be made that the race of a police shooter is more important than that of a gangbanger, we would either have to exempt black cops, or be open about the fact that they are, for one thing, way more likely to shoot than their white partners at the same crime scene. I would be very surprised if the alleged racism of white cops towards black suspects were enough to outweigh their less trigger-happy baseline.
In practice, the racial angle is never played in the opposite direction, and with a few exceptions, shootings by black police officers do not make national news. (When I asked GPT-4 (!) to provide counterexamples along the lines of Mohamed Noor, it pretended to misunderstand and gave me a list of black police shooting victims after stipulating it couldn't vouch for the shooters' also being black; when reprompted, it could not find any.)
Even as someone who appreciates the enormity of black violence, particularly black on white, I find it easier to recall the names of white (-coded) on black shooters. Where is the black George Zimmerman? Statistically there should be many of them, but no one comes to mind. Your conflating "white" and "police officer" is telling, in that expectations are higher for both. In my opinion, the correct framing is more that blacks are incapable of being the target of the media outrage machine, which strongly prefers white people when available, and their being a police officer is just a bonus (and relatively frequent compared to the extremely low overall rate of white on black crime).
ahobata
10mo ago
A white nationalist isn't someone who merely wants, personally, to avoid contact with non-white people. If it was, they could achieve that by never leaving their own home, which would also be about as politically effective as moving to Latvia.
ahobata
10mo ago
Republicans obviously aren't immune to blaming the outgroup for their woes, but they are still consistently more likely to endorse the bootstrap perspective. While not a politician, Oliver Anthony was widely feted by them as well as the rank and file. Relevant line from his song:
But God, if you're five foot three and you're three hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
That's a pretty harsh way to talk about your ingroup, but they gobbled it up (so to speak).
you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country
Having just looked it up, I (a non-American) am surprised that needle exchange programs enjoy the level of support among Republicans that they do, but it's still almost twice as high among Democrats, and Republican states are far more likely to ban them. To be sure, this isn't a perfect proxy for embracing personal responsibility; it sets the bar below that. But the difference is still clear: Republicans are less likely to endorse policies that amount to buying people the opportunity to remain mired in their self-induced problems.
Taking a step back, you can believe in people's (qualified) agency without being a full-blown existentialist. All the conservative takes you list are accurate to some extent; if China stopped exporting fentanyl to the US, there would in fact be fewer addicts. It's a difference of degree.
ahobata
11mo ago
I don't know if they pile 'em on enough to spot individual cases, but there are already some known LLM style signatures that can be used to detect subtler uses in collections of documents. https://twitter.com/mishateplitskiy/status/1769433162122232127
Sadly, with the speed at which these detection methods are being developed, I doubt we're in for much Schadenfreude of the Claudine Gay type -- sudden fall from grace after getting away with it for years.
Completely uninformed speculation, but could it just be a holdover from when inflation was extremely high? Cost of living went up faster than many could adjust to; they never got used to it. And it's still going up! The fact that people don't notice the deceleration could be attributed to confirmation bias. Whenever they notice that something has gone up in price, it's "See, the prices really are going up still! And they would have me believe I'm imagining things." They're probably better at noticing price increases now too, anecdotally quite a few people in my circles track them more deliberately than before.
It's similar to how critics of the establishment sometimes allege that announcements that "Inflation has gone down" are misleading. I personally am not misled, but a small part of me might be unconsciously translating "Inflation has gone down" to "Inflation is under control", which it doesn't feel like it is, because prices still seem unreasonably high.
As for why we would be especially prone now to such a post-inflation vibecession, maybe it has something to do with the fact that millennials, who have outsize influence on the vibe economy (on social media), saw the highest inflation rates of their lifetimes through most of 2021, all of 2022, and the first half of 2023, and at least through the remainder of 2023 inflation stayed well above what they'd typically experienced in the preceding 15 years.
ahobata
11mo ago
Martin isn't Jewish if your standard of evidence is posting images of 23andme results not sourced from Google images (he's NW European, mostly English iirc). He's also talked about his Christian background on spaces.
Like most posters in BAP's clique, he's critical of "third-worldist" anti-Zionism and lowbrow antisemitism in general.
I at'd 4 people. You are Jewish, and unless you are including yourself in "those people" you must know at least one of the others to be Jewish. In which case that's half.
I'm sure The Motte has a fair number of Jewish users, and given the highly disproportionate reaction every time a Jew's being Jewish is brought up, it seemed reasonable to expect Jews to be amply represented in the pile-ons. I didn't seriously mean to suggest it was all Jews.
Well, his post (unlike all the replies to it) was an observation about the topic at hand. It wasn't about how finely wrought a theory of Jewish group behavior he could shoehorn two relatively obscure public figures into (and again I don't think Motte users would actually appreciate every throwaway antisemitic comment turning into a paragraphs-long screed about group evolutionary strategy and so on). As a reply, it was up to par. It reduced perplexity. I can see why it would be annoying to be faced with refuting a direct association between an isolated fact and a statistical pattern without any mediating causal link. That said, I feel like that's not an uncommon form of argument around here, so if you don't dispute the pattern (i.e. that Jews are overrepresented compared to non-Jews in radical left-wing/anti-white politics/culture production, and more overrepresented than can be predicted from their verbal intelligence alone), you could just let it go.
More options
Context Copy link