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How would you even measure 'greediness'? My experience has been that it's basically just a word used enviously. If I'm a tenant who can't afford rent, then landlords are greedy. If I'm a low-paid worker, then my boss is greedy. If inflation is making food more expensive, then supermarkets are greedy.
Antisemites don't think Jews are greedy because they've observed it, they think Jews are greedy because Jews are rich, and to the envious, rich=greedy.
By contrast, it's pretty easy to notice intelligence effects dispassionately. Even blank slatists notice that Asian kids do well in school.
Holy Thread Necromancy Batman!
There was a time before IQ tests, there was even a time before schooling. Would intelligence still have been noticeable? Sure, but in inchoate ways. You'd notice who was intelligent and who wasn't, but not in ways you could easily measure. Then we'd go on to invent things like testing, apply it to diverse groups, and we'd be able to see this in numbers.
Meanwhile, HBDers like Sailer are peddling that the racists of the 1800s were correct in their inchoate understanding of the racial differences between whites and blacks; BUT those same racists were completely wrong in their inchoate understanding of Jews. Sailer argues for a biodeterminist approach to capability, but a blank-slatist approach to morality: humans all start out with no genetic moral tendencies.
But why would this be the case? Looking around, dispassionately, even Blank Slatists notice that humans have different moral tendencies, and folk traditions would hold that they seem to be genetic in nature, the same folk traditions that HBDers say were accurate about intelligence. Take it from the horse's mouth:
Moreover, I disagree that greed is not understandable or measurable as a negative trait. Any more than the other six deadly sins aren't measurable or understandable as negative traits.
"Wrath isn't actually bad, the weak call the strong Wrathful out of envy of their strength." (Tbf, this is, like, half of Nietzsche)
"Lust isn't actually bad, incels call the beautiful lustful out of envy because they can't get laid." (Tbf, this is most of the incel discourse)
"Pride isn't actually bad, losers call the proud sinful out of envy because they have no achievements to be proud of."
I should admit I am somewhat taking the piss here, I don't believe that HBD is true in the way it is typically presented. But I find it difficult to argue, using HBD premises, that antisemitism is ridiculous and unscientific.
I think what weakens the 'Jews really are greedy' hypothesis is that every market dominant minority has been accused of being greedy. Chinese in southeast Asia, Indians in former British colonies, Boers in South Africa, Parsis in India, Igbos in Nigeria.
The complaints are exactly the same ones that medieval European peasants and Confucian scholars made about merchants generally. That they were greedy middle-men who didn't charge 'fair price' and who didn't produce anything themselves. Sometimes the targets of these complaints were an ethnic group, sometimes they weren't. But the root of the complaints seem to always be envy, and the fact that humans prefer moralistic condemnation to the cold, impersonal reality of the forces of economics.
Honestly, it sounds like you're just trying to tar HBD by association. What you've written suggests that you're uncomfortable with the reality of racial differences in intelligence, and so you want to associate it with the primitive Jew-hatred of the past.
And every poor peasant/slave minority has been accused of being some mix of stupid, lazy, racist, violent. Romans on the Germans, British on the Irish, WASPs on Polish and Italian immigrants, Americans on Mexicans. Does that undermine your arguments about blacks?
Further, there's no logical reason why two different minority groups in different parts of the world can't both be greedy.
You're making the anti-HBD arguments that any Vox thinkpiece by a history professor at a mid-tier liberal arts college would make, which would be dismissed by the HBDers when it comes to intelligence.
No, because we have actual scientific evidence. There actually are racial differences in IQ, in brain size, in reaction time, in educational attainment and we can measure these things objectively. What anyone thought in the past is irrelevant. The fact that one group of people in the past believed (correctly) that there were racial differences in intelligence doesn't mean that another group of people in the past believing that Jews were unusually greedy or sneaky (without evidence) is correct.
You may want us to talk about the past because making an anti-HBD argument is easy that way, because everyone in the past believed a mixture of true, false and crazy things and its easy to pick and choose. But the only thing that matters is hard evidence. If someone presents actual evidence that Jews are greedy or that all racial groups are equally intelligent then I'll update my beliefs. But if you are (I assume) trying to convince me away from the hard-HBD position, telling me that I'm obligated to hate Jews as a consequence of that belief isn't very convincing.
Come now. I've been around the block. I know better than to try to convince any mottizens of anything, let alone that they're obligated to do anything.
I'm making the point from the first that Jewish or philosemitic HBDers who are shocked, shocked to find the same arguments turned around strike me as tragicomic figures, in the classic leopards eating people's faces party mold.
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The stereotype around here is that Jews are misers, something more quantifiable than "greedy". Penny-pinching, huge effort to eke out a bit more profit, etc.
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