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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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.

I'm not old enough to remember what the skinheads were really about

Whites and blacks getting together in racial unity and roughing up newly arrived pakistanis in UK in the 70s?

This Is England (2006) is a fun movie about that. Green Street is also a fun but different movie. The Brits need to keep their white working class around just so that we get more of these movies, IQ be damned.

If you like Green Street, I would suggest The Football Factory as a very realistic/funny look at the same stuff.