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I used to be a blank-slateist, both about race and gender. Fully believed that absent racism and childhood inequality in education and nutrition, etc., we'd see proportional representation of black and white and Asian and Australian Aboriginal Nobel prize winners.
I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.
Likewise, I mostly believed the second wave feminist idea that men and women would all be more or less equal and share roles and aptitudes equally if not for sexism. I started seeing the holes in this sooner, but didn't get completely redpilled* until I was past college age.
I definitely believed "It's just some crazy kids on college campuses who will grow up once they hit the real world" for too long.
Like some of the others below, I used to be pro-marijuana legalization and even considered that it might be better to legalize hard drugs. I think marijuana is kind of a disaster, and like alcohol, if I could magically make it disappear I would, but it's too late now. But experiences where harder drugs have been decriminalized and everything we are seeing in meth country convinces me that drugs are just fucking bad and while I don't want to go all police state and I recognize the failures of the War On Drugs, miss me with libertarian bullshit.
* redpill probably implies too strong a shift, since I still think most redpill guys are outright misogynists - literally, as in they really don't like women and resent the fact that they still want to have sex with them and need their permission to do so. However, I think it's an apt term in the sense that I really did come to an "awakening" about sex differences that I had been in denial about for most of my life.
Appreciate the post and my intent here isn't to argue but to suggest a next step in this thinking.
You do accept that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together. Or I assume you do; that you're in favor of prisons and facilities for people with severe mental issues.
So the next step here is to acknowledge that a lot of the traits which make people suitable candidates for such institutions are at least substantially hereditary and that different ancestral groups express them at differential rates. And, sometimes, this can be really staggering. Especially at the tails.
Would you want as neighbors an ethnic group where almost none of the members are particularly valuable, roughly half are basically decent people, roughly half are at best borderline-incapable of productive employment (and tend to ruin social institutions which were designed to expect higher-quality input), and maybe five percent are extraordinarily-prone to violence, crime, and so on? Those tails make a big difference.
The reason I generally come around to agreeing with you that 'ethnostates' aren't the answer to this problem (though I think they're a great solution to other problems) is that there's enough individual variation, especially given the amount of admixture that is occurring/has occurred, that it'd be a silly place to draw the line between "Our kind of people" and "Stay over there away from us."
Sure, but those people exist among all demographics. We don't put put someone in prison because he comes from a high-crime demographic; we put him in prison because he committed a crime.
As literal neighbors, living next to me? No. I feel sorry for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. That said, I would still want any individual Haitian to be judged as an individual.
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What changed your mind? Life experiences? Books (if there are any, I'd appreciate if you could list them)? Something else?
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