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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28511 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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You think Jeb Bush's marriage is dysgenic?

Jeb is the son of an elite American political dynasty. His wife is the daughter of a rural Mexican migrant worker he met doing charity work at 17. This is dysgenic if you care about intelligence and eugenic if you favor cute latinas.

Is Mitch McConnell's marriage eugenic because he married an east Asian? Assuming they had chosen to have children.

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Ultimate eugenic 'melange' is finding the very best genomes and mating these together. It'd probably be a mix of all these, yes.

McConnell did not find his wife in the backwaters of rural China. They met when she was working a high-level government position. Her father founded a shipping company and she received a degree from Harvard. If anything their relationship might be dysgenic for her. It is not simply that Jeb’s wife is Mexican that makes it dysgenic (after all, plenty of top tier Mexicans), but where in Mexico he located her and how. There was zero selection going on for intelligence and so we can reasonably assume a dysgenic effect (like, if these pairings occurred 100 times, for sure it would be dysgenic on the whole, though there could be a few times where it is non-dysgenic out of chance). The implicit point is that we receive millions upon millions of latin Americans just like Jeb’s wife who will be marrying higher quality Americans and eventually alter the gene pool. You need to be extremely racist and/or track family trees to prevent a deleterious IQ effect as an American, and a lot of Americans will simply select for perceived attractiveness over IQ.

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Unquestionably, yes.

Why only factor in IQ? Given that things like moral preferences, health, and a good portion of culture come from genetics as well, doesn’t an IQ-maxing breeding strategy destroy those other three things?

Who said I’m only optimizing for IQ? I think that a genetic intermingling of gentile Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews, and East Asians would maximize the good qualities of all three groups, while dulling some of the problematic extremes of each.

I believe that all three groups have something obvious to be gained by combination with one or more of the other groups. You get Ashkenazi verbal dexterity and high factor of personality, and lose the neuroticism and the propensity for balding and vision problems. You get European creativity and earnestness, and lose the extreme individualism and pig-headedness. You get Asian diligence and orderliness, and lose the extreme conformity and dishonesty.

She might be an exception to the averages. It makes no sense to be convinced that the marriage is dysgenic from an intelligence point of view unless you know something about what her individual intelligence is actually like.

It’s possible that the rural Mexican woman that Jeb met as a 17yo is actually a genius. It’s incredibly unlikely, given the information we know about her and the fact that Jeb selected her from a low number of women in the exact town he was performing charity work in. We can make reasonable assumptions here. As /u/AhhhTheFrench fails to point out, Jeb was honor roll at a prestigious high school, magna cum laude at Yale, then became enormously wealthy as partner of a top real estate firm. His wife’s bio details are just the basic “wife of politician” charity stuff.

Don't bring a knife facts to a gunfight race war! I'm joking about that @coffee_enjoyer, but I see no evidence of JEB! being particularly bright. I'm reading his bio here and it seems like a life of tryhard failing up. The man almost got expelled at the finishing school Andover (repeating 9th grade!) due to bad grades. I did summer soccer camps and stayed in the dorms with Andover kids, not a hard school to stay in... parents tend to send their less exceptional kids there to polish them up a bit, or to get better at a sport with a super senior year and not waste their eligibility years.

Meanwhile Columba Bush managed to marry into one of the most powerful families in the world while coming from basically nothing, has managed to avoid the pitfalls that can come with that, and now has three children that seem smarter than JEB! Who is the dysgenic one here?

Not only that, but she managed to do it without the aid of being really good-looking. She wasn't some kind of gorgeous beauty when younger, she was a completely unremarkable-looking woman.

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