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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   27727 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Racial grievances have more to do with the fanning of racial grievances than with actual grievances. Or, put it another way, blacks seemed happier about their status in the 1990s than they do today, even though today they benefit from much greater affirmative action.

People are bound to notice that blacks do worse in society. Here is the menu of choices for how to deal with this problem. I think there's a clear winner.

  1. Blacks do worse because they have lower IQ on average (this is the truth, but I just don't think it's something that can be accepted by black people if explicitly said).
  2. Ignore the problem (this is the 1990s solution)
  3. Blacks do worse because of terrible racism in society. Until blacks do just as well as whites we have to tear down every structure of society. (We are here).

In an ideal world we'd be at #2. Scientists and policy makers would understand that #1 is the truth but it's not super polite to talk about it.

Don't want #2? Well, I hope you've enjoyed the last 10 years of racial grievance politics. Because the next stop is Brazil then South Africa.

No, In an ideal world we would be at a point where racial Difference in IQ are acknowledged and an attempt is made to "help out" the underperformers. (Affirmative action without the pretense of "systemic racism" and without scapegoating whitey for failure to achieve).

Further the affirmative action would be scaled by "personal" IQ so you would be able to help out white trash/trailer park dwellers at the same time.

The problem with affirmative action is that most jobs aren't just sinecures meant to provide someone with a socially approved level of status and monetary support; they are shit that actually needs to get done, and shoving an 85-IQ black guy into the civil engineering position in the name of equality is going to fuck up your building. Generalize, and the more affirmative action you have, the more you fuck up your economy and your government.

Welfare/UBI doesn't that have problem, but it has the alternate problem that unearned wages destroy people. Freed from the responsibility to work for a living, they revert back to pathological r-selection, like Spiegelman's monster. The males compete for women based on who can be the biggest thug rather than who can be the best provider; the women compete for males based on who can be the most sexually available rather than who can be the best mother. You get generation after generation of single mothers and criminals who think of welfare not as charity for which they should be grateful, but as a their entitled birthright.

The best solution is to just admit the truth about HBD, do nothing to promote equality, and let blacks carve out the best lives they can on the idea that everyone can contribute to society thanks to comparative advantage. But in order do that, you need to get rid of things like the minimum wage and zoning that forbid people from making a living if their productivity is not high enough.

And if black envy stoked by race hustlers is never going to accept that they are going to end up on the lower end of society through no fault of white's own, then the only alternative is physical separation. Let the blacks have their own country (carved out of Southern states, most likely) and let the whites have their own country, and never the twain shall meet.

When encountering HBD for the first time, this sort of thing was also my conclusion on what a good, fair system would work like. From what I can tell, one of the most prominent mainstream faces of HBD, Charles Murray, largely follows the same reasoning, leading to him supporting UBI (which isn't IQ-based affirmative action, but is meant to alleviate some of the same problems, by guaranteeing that no matter how bad you are at making money due to any reason, including low intelligence, you have some guaranteed income you can depend on for survival).

This is one reason why I find the argument that HBD needs to be suppressed, lest people use it to justify racism. Believing that belonging to a race that happens to have average high IQ or even having high IQ oneself entitles one to greater rights and privileges than those who don't happen to belong to such a race or don't happen to have high IQ is something separate and distinct from believing that different races have different average IQ, and the latter doesn't cause the former.

Because the next stop is Brazil then South Africa.

We'll never be South Africa because we're never going to have a black majority.

Probably not, but there's a > 50% chance the world will be majority black by the end of century.

The population of Nigeria today is greater than the population of the entirety of Africa in 1950. Around 2060, Nigeria will surpass the population of the U.S. unless there are open borders.

And while Africa's growth rate is slowing, the developed world is slowing even faster.

So never say never.

blacks seemed happier about their status in the 1990s than they do today

Did they? I wasn't watching the news back then, but Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson seem to have had a lot of racial grievances then, to the point of starting racial pogroms targeting Koreans and Jews.

Guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were around but they were also well outside the mainstream, and widely mocked as racist grifters. Recall that Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright was actually seen as something of a scandal back in the day.

Yes, I think so. I don't have data from the 1990s, but in 2001 70% of black adults were satisfied with race relations in America. That persisted until 2013 before collapsing to just 33% by 2021. Thanks Obama?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx

The best way to improve race relations is to stop talking about it so damn much.

The added irony is that the election of Obama was sold at least in part as the final nail in the 'The U.S. is racist" coffin by accepting a black president over another stodgy white guy.

Like the symbolic importance was there, even if we grant that not all racism would evaporate and in fact certain racists would be inflamed by his election.

The lesson that instead seems to have been imparted is "IDENTITY POLITICS ARE EFFECTIVE!" and Obama himself ended up fanning racial animosity. I had such a turning point at the Cool Clock, Ahmed moment where he intentionally brought attention to a trumped up racial incident on the side of the grifters.

We sure felt (to me) ready to move 'past' deep racial grievance as a nation circa 2010, but I fear that it has turned into a spectacular method of forcing others to do what you want, so sociopaths will of course leverage this as much as they can.

Remember: anyone who actually remembered what racism actually was retired by 2010 (assuming an age of 20 in 1950, they’d be 65 in 2015).

Thus there was nobody there to fact-check the sociopaths. Due to the conditions that enabled racism to be abolished not persisting, the sociopaths naturally re-instituted racism.

Unfortunately, ignoring the problem is not stable, because there will always be someone who breaks the taboo and blames racism. Which means that explanations like (1) (which include "culture" as well as HBD, the common element being that the problem lies with blacks, not whites) must remain, if not on the table, at least at the ready to respond to such violations. There's no static equilibrium but there can be a dynamic one... but not if you allow the supertaboo of racism to cover all (1)-style explanations.

If the elite can be convinced of HBD, then they can punish people who break norms. So, yeah, I guess the ideal would be to convert the elite and then feed race blind pablum to the masses.

A free society will always have race baiters like Cornel West and Al Sharpton. But in the 1990s, it felt like the damage caused by these people was more contained.

But in the 1990s, it felt like the damage caused by these people was more contained.

You mean the decade of the Rodney King riots, “superpredator” discourse, and OJ Simpson?

Yep. It was actually pretty great. At the start of the decade, crime was near all-time highs thanks to 2 decades of urban decay and lax law enforcement.

A tough-on-crime approach put so many murderers in jail that the murder rate fell by nearly 50%. Many major cities like New York saw even larger gains with a corresponding urban renewal that (temporarily) stemmed the white flight to the suburbs.

Had the policies of the 1990s been allowed to persist until today, the U.S. would have the lowest murder rate in 100 years, maybe ever.

A tough-on-crime approach put so many murderers in jail that the murder rate fell by nearly 50%. Many major cities like New York saw even larger gains with a corresponding urban renewal that (temporarily) stemmed the white flight to the suburbs.

Had the policies of the 1990s been allowed to persist until today, the U.S. would have the lowest murder rate in 100 years, maybe ever.

Right, I don’t disagree with any of this, I’m just trying to understand what you think are the reasons for why America stopped pursuing those policies. You refer to “race baiting” and “fanning the flames”. Okay, yes, obviously fuck Al Sharpton and Cornel West. But why do you think so many people (both black and white) were susceptible to their messaging? How do we get people to stop taking them seriously?

My basic theory is that blacks in this country are always going to go through cycles of militancy and complacency, and whites are always going to react with their own cycles of hardness and softness. I’m seeing early signs that whites might be ready to shift to a period of hardness, but this will inevitably soften once the proximate causes (Floyd-style race riots, racial grifters overplaying their hand, etc.) fade from memory.

In other words, like I said, the 90’s colorblindness wasn’t bad - I’d be perfectly fine living in it indefinitely, even if it would require me to really hold my tongue at times, especially since I have been on the receiving end of black criminality multiple times in my life - but it was not built to last. The inherent tensions and historical wounds between blacks and whites will continue to recur until either real parity is achieved - perhaps through serious and targeted eugenics and gene therapy - or separation is achieved.

I know, my position is basically "let's try it again and maybe it will work this time". But that's a legitimate position I think. We touched the stove and we got burned. Maybe next time we won't touch the stove. At least until the memory starts to fade again.

I know, my position is basically "let's try it again and maybe it will work this time".

I don't think "maybe" needs to be the extent of the plan, though. The transformation from the colorblind 90s to the ever-present race conflict of today didn't happen spontaneously. It was done due to people openly and explicitly pushing for this to happen. We can try again, but excise those elements this time.

Now, that's easier said than done, as it would likely require a great reformation of academia such that they all - not just the "hard" fields - actually take concepts like empiricism and logic seriously. And the forces that pushed this in the first place will continue to innovate, to come up with new, creative techniques to subvert our ability to see individuals as individuals. But having been burned once, we're at least somewhat better equipped to notice and stop these guys before it's too late.

Unfortunately, getting anything like this seems a pipe dream at this point. It'd also be working uphill, since it seems that race consciousness and racism is the human default. Which is one reason why academia had such an easy time turning their ostensibly antiracist efforts into scaffolding to support overt racism.

What about option 4: Political and geographic separation?

That's a stable equilibrium but there's not really a path from here to there ever since the American Colonization Society went bust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society

Just learned that they only dissolved in 1964. That's surprisingly recent. I wonder who the last person who moved to Liberia was. Huge and obvious own goal.

In any case, if you look at trends in demographic movement, there is always movement away from black majority areas and to white majority areas. All racial groups want to be near whites. So you're not going to get segregation without violence. For me, I'll take 1990s race-blind society please.

In any case, if you look at trends in demographic movement, there is always movement away from black majority areas and to white majority areas. All racial groups want to be near whites.

Brookings claims otherwise, with blacks moving back to the South.

(makes me wonder if there is strife between the "returned" northerners and the southern blacks... my guess would be yes)

I'm not going to take the time to try to find taboo information on Google right now, but I recently saw data showing that when you look at Census blocks there is a huge correlation between white percentage and positive net migration (and the opposite for blacks).

This is obvious right? All the blackest cities in America are shedding population. All the exurbs are growing.

If a black person moves from Detroit to the Atlanta suburbs they are moving from a black area to a white one. "The South" being used as a stand-in for blackness is a blunt instrument and wrong.

Sounds like a race war-complete option. Alternatively, you can always geographically separate yourself on an individual basis.

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