site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

With a single day remaining until the next weekly thread, I thought I would squeeze this in:

Trump Won't Announce Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Via Executive Order, Says Analyst: 'He Would Likely Buy BTC In The Background'

Polymarket is giving 28-30% odds as of 1/12/2025 of Trump implementing the strategic crypto reserve within his first 100 days in office.

I remember a month before the 2024 election , polymarket gave 60% odds of Trump winning. That seemed too high at the time (although in hindsight obviously too low) , but didn't feel that confident either way. But taking the "No" side at 30%-- or a 30% return for the next 100 days--seems like a no-brainer. Trump dithering and nothing happens seems way more likely than only 70%. Trump has a long history, from what I can see, of falling short of expectations and letting donors down. I remember before his first term people were expecting drastic reforms and basically nothing of that sort happened. I would put the odds closer to 2-5% of the reserve than 30%.

from the above article:

Van Straten added that Trump, who is pro-Bitcoin, would likely buy in the background instead of making a public announcement. “No advantage announcing to the world about a BTC reserve as the price will just run away from him. He will just buy in the background.”

The evidence that Trump is suddenly pro-bitcoin still is not that strong. i cannot see him "buying in the background" either. I don't see him taking that sort of initiative.

The most likely scenario was Trump restricting the sale of the seized Bitcoins held by the U.S. government, Van Straten said.

I don't see this happening either. Bitcoin held in US treasury will continue to be sold despite Trump being in office. Donors, supporters, and pundits will wonder why he isn't doing anything about it, and i'm like were you asleep during his first term? This is what is expected, which is doing nothing.

This market will resolve to "Yes" if the US government holds any amount of Bitcoin in its reserves at any point between January 20, 2025, ET and April 29, 2025, 11:59 PM ET. Otherwise, this market will resolve to "No".

Note that the US government confiscating Bitcoin does not count as holding Bitcoin reserves.

The primary resolution source for this market will be official information from the US government and/or the US federal reserve, however a consensus of credible reporting will also be used.

What if Trump tweets that, "the United States holds $X of bitcoin reserves", but he is just referring to the bitcoin that has been confiscated?

My prediction remains that Trump takes all the existing seizures and orders they be put in a bag with a label that says "strategic reserve" since it fulfills his promise, requires no law and politically costs nothing.

The market seems to be expecting a ton more than this now. Irrationally in my opinion.

I won't claim it's going to be a catalyst for the next crash, but this whole business definitely looks like a "sell the news" event.

In the end it may not matter to anything but narrative since all this talk is dwarfed by the ETFs. Nobody seems to remember when Germany sold the bottom.

Meta ends its DEI program (internal memo, Ars Technica verification). The company is disbanding its DEI team. It will no longer use "diverse slate hiring" (intentional seeking-out of candidates of particular underrepresented minorities). It is "sunsetting our supplier diversity efforts", which probably means that they will no longer privilege minority/women-owned suppliers.

It is ending the perception that it has representation goals. Yes that's convoluted, but how else does one interpret this statement:

"We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it."

The stated reason for the shift in policy:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics.

That is, they expect to no longer be sued based on "disparate impacts", but possibly sued based on preferential treatments. This... makes sense for a company to do. McDonalds is doing it; Walmart did it more than a month ago.

I expect more companies to follow suit (quietly or loudly). My question is: are there any corporate for-profit true-believers who will stick with the DEI initiatives? Ben and Jerry's, maybe?

Trump will decide whether or not to enforce the TikTok ban (yes, it may happen the day before he takes office, but presumably if his justice department says ‘we won’t take any enforcement action’ then in effect the ban won’t happen, the same way that they aren’t sending the FBI to arrest every legal weed dealer in Colorado).

TikTok being banned and that ban being enforced (meaning no US advertisers can buy TikTok ads directed at Americans) likely leads to billions of dollars in bonus ad spend for Meta given they control all competing platforms except Snapchat. Ad budgets are mostly fixed, cut out one platform with hundreds of millions of American users and existing platforms with the same reach all profit.

You don't consider X a competing platform to Instagram, Tiktok etc.?

People boycotting meta over lack of DEI are not going to suddenly go over to X.

I was asking in the context of advertisers redirecting their TikTok ad spend to competing social networks if TikTok is no longer a viable platform.

To an extent, but it gets much less ad spend than the other platforms, is less conducive to serving ads, and has stable or slightly declining MAUs so seems unlikely to attract much more ad spend in the near future once some reversal of the anti-Musk cancellation effort takes place, which it already has.

Apple:

https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/10/apple-opposes-investor-calls-to-end-its-dei-efforts/

Investors will vote on four outside proposals at next month’s annual shareholders meeting. Apple is urging shareholders to vote against those proposals, including one that calls on the company to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The shareholder proposal, submitted by the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, claims that DEI “poses litigation, reputational and financial risks to companies, and therefore financial risks to their shareholders, and therefore further risks to companies for not abiding by their fiduciary duties.”

Though the company doesn't like such external proposals as a matter of principle, and may have adviced shareholders to vote against it regardless how they feel about DEI internally..

Yay it's now a tiny bit easier to be hired at Facebook (if you're white)

At least for engineering, the bar was never raised or lowered to actually get hired, they just fucked with the top of the pipeline. So for what they called under-represented minorities the standards were lowered to get a call back on your resume and to get to the first set of screening interviews performed by engineers. But once you reached that point the pipeline didn't differentiate.

I'm sure given the size of the company and how so many are outwardly ideological on these issues that there was some very concious bias being applied by interviewers, but that won't change because we're done with the company officially endorsing DEI.

The pipeline absolutely differentiated. Maybe URMs didn't formally have to meet a lower bar, but if one of them failed the bar, recruiting would send them back through the loop to collect more "signal" until that URM passed. Given that interview performance has a random component, what tech did is statistically indistinguishable from lowering the bar for URMs.

Why? The white percentage will stay exactly the same or decline slightly, the black and Hispanic numbers will go down, the Asian numbers will go up. That’s how it works everywhere that “stops” DEI / affirmative action.

Not much room for the Asian numbers to go up at Meta in particular, frankly.

It depends. For example, when affirmative action was banned in the UC system, both Asian and white numbers went up at UCB and UCLA, and black and latino numbers down, although I forget if it was acceptances, enrollments, or both.

That was in 1996 though, plus the numbers crept up over time (and the white numbers declined significantly) since then despite the ban remaining in place.

The percentage of "white" people has dropped by large amounts in that time, partly because of mixed race people choosing to self-identity as non-white to get a leg up.

At the extreme edge, see Elizabeth Warren who self-identified as Native American because of a 1/1024 share or something.

She identified as a Cherokee because her grandparents(from Oklahoma) told her that's what they were; that it turned out not to be true is unsurprising. There are a lot of white people in Oklahoma who call themselves Cherokee, and sometimes they have Cherokee ancestry and sometimes they don't. Either way, you can't visually distinguish Cherokee Indians from regular white southerners; my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten, but other elders have told me that they have weak genes and a Cherokee woman was provided a dowry by the government at some vaguely defined point. Basically, though, Cherokees are the US equivalent of, like, Argentines. It's not implausible that a random white-looking person from the appropriate part of the country be Cherokee, and this is common knowledge for a certain generation.

my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten

Was he a Mormon, by any chance? Back when they considered dark sin to be a curse from God, the LDS church officially taught that Native Americans’ skin would lighten if they became Mormon. I haven’t heard of any similar beliefs outside of that group.

No, he belonged to the church of Christ, scientist. He didn’t go to doctors and believed that personal physical health and appearance were downstream of attitude and closeness to God. To him, study, virtue, and prayer made a person healthy, strong, wise, successful, and physically perfect. He was a true believer in that stuff.

I don’t know how far off base he was from official Christian Scientist teaching. But it seems like a connection that someone of a certain age could easily make from dogmatized faith healing.

More comments

The most likely reason for that is they came up with ways around the ban.

The percentage of Asian students kept climbing at places like UCB, but white enrolment is essentially the same as it was before prop 209 passed in ‘96. All the data is publicly available.

According to the interactive graph at kidsdata.org, the proportion of young (<18 years old) white persons in California has fallen from 40% in 1995 to 28% in 2010, and still remains under 30% as of 2021. The percentage for Asian increased slightly from 2000 to 2021. Latino went from 41% to 51% from 1995 to 2010. Perhaps it's partially a flight from white as @jeroboam suggested, but likely it's mostly just the Great Replacement doing its thang.

So if percentage of enrolled students at UCB being white is "essentially the same" in 1995 as it is now, that does imply affirmative action was disadvantaging whites prior to the 1998 admission class (first class in which the ban went into effect).

This graph, for UCLA, also suggests affirmative action disadvantaging both whites and Asians. In the first admission year after the affirmative action ban went into effect (1998), the percentage of UCLA acceptances that went to whites increased from about 29% to 31%, and the percentage of acceptances that went to Asians went from 37% to 40%. Latino decreased from 20% to 10%, and black from 7% to 3%.

However, one can Notice that the percentage of Unknowns going way up from 1995 to 1998 (from 6% to 15.5% or so), before decreasing thereafter. Possibly, with affirmative action in the spotlight in California, due to Asians and white applicants going "oh shit" and selecting "Unknown" or "Prefer not to disclose" on their applications. Adjusting for this, the percentage white increases from about 31% to 37% from 1995 to 1998, and Asians 39% to 47%. Latinos decrease from 21% to 12%, and blacks 7% to 4%.

This reinforces my earlier recollection that the affirmative action ban led to UCB and UCLA white and Asian numbers spiking up, and latino and black numbers going down, the effects receding only slightly in the years thereafter. It does however look like, at least for blacks, UCLA found some way to increasingly put their thumbs on the scale starting around 2005.

The line graph I have in mind went quite a few years into the 2000s—it showed that Asian and white numbers spiked up after the ban, then decreased slightly each year for a few years (as the admission committee tried to pull different non-explicitly racial levers to decrease the white + Asian rate [and increase the black + latino one]), before plateauing for the years thereafter (there’s only so much blood you can squeeze from a stone). During the plateau period both the Asian and white numbers were still noticeably higher than pre-ban.

As it should be tbh, and what we would expect if the previous status quo was a world where Asians were being hurt even worse than white people because of DEI (it was).

I think it depends on the brand. Companies that cater to left leaning and left coded things or hobbies will likely continue and maybe double down a bit. Things geared to the general public will probably quietly drop DEI, I expect any company that’s right coded will be shouting from the housetops.

That certain companies are drifting away from DEI doesn't imply that that the relative prevalence of DEI policies is largely a function of government disposition, nor even that those programs were uneconomical or counter-productive. In many ways it seems likely that extensive DEI stuff was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. When capital was scrambling about for productive uses, putting some of it into DEI to try to improve hiring/retention/productivity may have been perfectly rational, even if it has ceased to be now interest rates are higher.

I admire how you structured this post in such a way as to make refuting it require about a thousand times the effort you put in to it. Is any of that actually your perspective though? Do you believe the relative prevalence of DEI policies is not largely a function of government disposition? Do you believe those programs were economical and productive?

Those programs were uneconomical but it wasn't just a function of goverment disposition. Nor is it really easy to separate the goverment from the NGO networks, rich donors, intelligence agencies, and ideologues who marched in institutions and support this ideology not only through their influence in business but as journalists, academics, lawyers, and yes goverment officials and of course donors of political parties. And of course for some of the people in a system that rewards these ideologues might be doing it also to get higher positions.

There is something to the logic of extreme disloyal plutocrats that might prefer, sometimes in a short sided manner even from a $ point of view when one considers human capital and also willingness of migrants to redistribute resources and positions at expense of productive workers and vote badly, that labor pool is as big as possible. With costs such as welfare costs given to society, but even that wouldn't necessarily lead to DEI, except as a compromise to the kind of attitute the migrants and their supporters have. Still, I don't think that is the primary factor but more so the ideology of hostility towards the group subject to DEI due to a combo of motte and bailey radical egalitarianism and tribalism for the identities benefiting (including by people who don't belong in those groups) and anti-white racism.

Even in regards to economic interests. Rich people and corporations have a minimum duty to their nation to not commit treason and act at its expense, so any desire to expand the labor pool cannot simply be accepted as legitimate and they ought to be reined in and even subject to criminal prosecutions if their vision of economic success it at the expense of their country. In a better functioning system, Facebook and Zuckerberg shouldn't be allowed to lobby for mass migration for example.

Your critique of @HaroldWilson is a touch indelicate, but fair.

Let me try to steelman.

Under ZIRP, a lot of companies, especially those with Silicon Valley style startup funding, raised more money than they could reasonably deploy. There are a lot of reasons for this but, suffice it to say, it was quite common up until 2020 for a startup founder to have far more money than he or she knew what to do with.

The one thing you can't do is not spend the money. So, companies would do all sorts of odd stuff. Usually, you just overhire sales and marketing as even if the ROI isn't great, you're still probably driving revenue. Others would launch new product lines willy-nilly. Others would turn into acquisition firms without saying so.

It stands to reason that DEI may have been an actually earnest attempt to capture talent that had been "overlooked" somehow. You can say "well, the very fact that they think the talent was overlooked is evidence that these people have horrible biases blah blah blah" - but that's thinking too deeply. They had too much cash, they had to do something with it, and this was the very noisy-random something they came up with.

DEI as a plan doesn't make any sense under this theory though. You are a startup. Your first 10 guys are all still there. You know them. They aren't DEI in the slightest. You went to the same school as this potential DEI hire, you thought she/he was a dunce not worthy of being part of your SR design team that is now literally your company.

The only reason you are going for DEI is because your funders want it. Why they want it is a black box to you, but it is because either the government or their funders are demanding it. This will always be the case because DEI is the most inorganic type of movement. People will often refer to it as race communism, and usually such ridiculous descriptions of large movements are not well founded, but that one is. The demands of DEI ask a team to violate both ingroup preferences and competency preferences. Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you. Such a system will almost never be ground up or organic.

Look, I'm no DEI fan at all. My previous comment literally said I was going through the exercise of steelman-ing.

When you say things like "Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you" you're demonstrating that you don't want to think through the other side's position, you just want to yell at it - which is exactly one of the core criticisms of DEI.

This is what's at the heart of the Motte - this community demands more than "boo outgroup." This is why there's literally the boo outgroup reporting button.

I tried to come up with a rational market explanation for DEI. It could very well be wrong. Your counter, however, was "no, actually DEI is just stupid and evil."

No one thinks there aren't some DEI true believers. The problem with your hypothetical is not that. It is that thinking people at a dynamic startup (statistically started by a small group of white & asian men with technical backgrounds) are all of the sudden going to go through an organic switch from thinking about bringing in people they know can do the job to thinking about hiring in a different way. And they then, again, organically start hiring based on the criteria that the university scolds who discriminated against them before would like them to?

No, that is a terribly unlikely mechanism. Because they had too munch money to spend they hired DEI candidates? Thats not how engineers work. They loathe on-boarding even competent people. They would rather buy 1000 servers to sit in an empty closet.

You are operating under the assumption that a positive perspective towards the left and DEI is the ethical way to go and accurate.

You haven't established that anti-dan perspective is uncharitable and unfairly describes the DEI policies. You are just asserting that it is booing his outgroup. Ironically, you are attacking as an outgroup people who have a more negative view of DEI and the left. That kind of thing isn't harmless. Far left extremists who were too defensive about the failures of their ideological perspective have probably been among the most destructive forces of the 20th century, including towards their hated right wing outgroup. In general right wing lack of conformity to leftist ideological dogma and their more negative perspective is directly related to plenty of hatred towards the right by leftists who feel entitled to conformism to their ideology and falsely believe it is somehow bad to have a more negative perspective of it.

Underestimating the DEI problem and to the extend it is about incompetent people getting a benefit at expense of those they dislike not only can lead to unnecessary excessive hostility but can lead to underestimating a genuine problem.

Since people who are incompetent and dislike those they replace are benefiting by DEI and that is a central part of it, I don't see any valid reason to dismiss this as inaccurate.

Understating genuine problems and far left extremism and even the racist hatred that has been part of such movements must be taken more seriously because it a much more central problem to the reaction to left wing extremism than people being too unfair towards it. It how the slippery slope happens, through insufficient backlash, which has been what has been observed rather than too much right wing backlash.

Also backlash that leads to reversal of bad policies and agendas would be good thing. I see no reason to be invested in defending the honor of DEI. If people have a more negative view of failed policies, that is a good thing in fact.

You are operating under the assumption that a positive perspective towards the left and DEI is the ethical way to go and accurate.

I don't think you understand what steelmanning means.

It doesn't mean "Adopt a positive perspective of the other side's point of view."

It means "Try to understand why they think the way they do." Assume they act out of rational (to themselves) motives, even if it's purely self-interest. At the very least, you should be able to describe their motives in a way they would agree with.

Do you think anyone carrying out DEI policies would agree "My job is to hire incompetent people who hate me?" I suppose a very cynical person who actually hates DEI but just does it because it's their job might. But surely you can imagine what an actual believer would say that would make sense from their perspective.

It has nothing to do with believing that their perspective is accurate or ethical.

You can of course insist that the only reason your enemies do anything is that they are stupid and evil, and this may be a satisfying and self-gratifying thing to believe, but it's probably not accurate either.

I am interested in the reasons people genuinely do things and far more so the substance of what they support and not the way they will present what they are after since of course people constantly present things too favorably in a manner that distorts things. Whether they are lying to others or to themselves, the positive version of a strawman where it is a positive distortion is a bad thing and not something that should be accepted without exploring where it is wrong.

Censoring reality for the sake of political corectness is bad, but I don't object to someone explaining where a negative conclusion is too negative. And of course being overly charitable towards the left comes along with being overly uncharitable to both those harmed by the left and to those critical of the left.

I don't think OP was merely steelmaning though but was arguing in favor of a specific perspective and against a different view. But there was an entitlement to positive bias towards the left, and I don't think OP sufficiently demonstrated anti-dan's position being inaccurate and anti-dan's argument more accurately captures the reality of DEI than it being about market outcomes.

You can of course insist that the only reason your enemies do anything is that they are stupid and evil, and this may be a satisfying and self-gratifying thing to believe, but it's probably not accurate either.

But this is a strawman! You are framing my perspective too negatively and in a manner that I wouldn't present it while complaining about others supposedly doing the same.

I think some of the people who some include my "enemies" other people who I dislike what they are doing but not necessarily consider my enemies are immoral or insufficiently moral and sellouts who don't even care about what is the right and smart things to do from a broader perspective, or are blind ideologues, or some are neither but something not as bad but still bad enough from the perspective of what is the common good.

There are people who don't have the freedom to resist doing stupid things that enough people push as an agenda and are doing it to get along. Others are smart and malicious and support DEI because they think they will benefit or think it will harm a group that they ideologically or ethnically dislike. Some are not zealous ideologues but might follow a stupid and disastrous ideology

A lot of people can do evil and stupid things all the time, in all sorts of societies, sometimes even ideologically opponents of each other. The expectation of wise and ethical and correct conduct is much more presumptuous.

A very decent % of them can have stupid beliefs while in other facets not be stupid. One could call them misguided I guess and I am not after calling all people doing destructive things with the label idiots/stupid but using your terms. People acting in a self destructive irrational manner such as promoting incompetents at their own expense is an aspect of DEI.

Is the point to make it as if it is about calling people stupid, so you can dismiss the negative criticism that is about irrational ideology and promote the perspective that it is about market outcomes?

Misguided/Stupid/irrational and immoral ideologies and policies happen all the time. There are plenty of different people who support what is wrong for reasons that don't reflect positively upon them, for others to find legitimate things to criticize for lifetimes. Certainly the left is far from exempt from this. There is no legitimate basis to bias in favor of what reflects more positively but could be inaccurate, over what doesn't reflect as positively, and in this case is more accurate.

It can even be beneficial to some of the ideologues if enough influential types have rigged the system to benefit ideological conformism, even if what they support is bad in general. And while it wasn't my original language, but I defended it, yes there are people who support incompetent people who hate them to replace them for reasons of ideological blindspot, going along with zeltgeist, following a bad and irrational ideology, etc.

Have you considered that you might be biased against right wingers who are critical towards the left and are trying to frame such criticisms and negativity as irrational, illegitimate, hysterical, unfair, etc, etc?

You might not be as negative to the establishment neocon type to a degree, I guess, but I simply do not see any of intensity from you for people to steelman your right wing outgroup, but you are in fact the one who is constantly framing the anti feminist, white identitarians, HBDers, those critical of Jews, those critical of the left, etc, you name it, in very a negative light and not in the way they would like to represent their views. Yes you can always try to explain how they genuinely are that bad, and are terrible extremist evil irrational haters, but there is zero consistency here. You might even try to frame it again at how people want to get away with being uncharitable haters. But you are doing so while you are uncharitable and hating. So that would be again trying to frame people in a way that is too negative, incorrect and not how they like to present themselves. This can go ad nauseum with repetition.

It is more that you are using the "unfairness towards left" as a weapon to dismiss the other side, or in fact censor it.

Leftist cancel culture towards people being insufficiently politically correct/insufficiently conformist and positive over left wing visions which has in fact also had a more violent form in history, is actually a very serious deal. You don't seem to care whatsoever if in your extreme zeal to protest perceived unfairness toward the left you are unfair towards the people who you frame as these terrible irrational people, in my view very uncharitably and with distortions.

There are consequences of doing this both in censorship and in booing correct speech that leftists find offensive because it is politically incorrect *. Both in mistreating the naysayers and in not allowing bad ideologies, and bad harmful factions that comprise of people, to be treated accurately, as bad as they really are. And therefore to be allowed to continue to do harm. The rape gangs continuing in Britain after far righters sounded the alarm but they were dismissed, in addition of course to the victims who were also dismissed with some of the stories being especially horrific, is one example of the consequences of zealous pro left and associated groups political correctness which treats negative reality towards its in-groups as too unbelievable and offensive to be taken seriously.

  • Hell, there are even negative consequences of being overly dismissive and uncharitable towards both the argument and the people who are 80% correct in a negative criticism towards the left but have some element of exaggeration. Rather than trying to disentangle only the areas where they might be 20% wrong while accepting where they are 80% correct.

Do you think anyone carrying out DEI policies would agree "My job is to hire incompetent people who hate me?" I suppose a very cynical person who actually hates DEI but just does it because it's their job might. But surely you can imagine what an actual believer would say that would make sense from their perspective.

Well, if I look up what DEI enjoyers actually believe, they might no phrase it as "hire incompetent people who hate me", but if I'm working in some techie / shit-actually-needs-to-get-done field, and believe that:

  • Aspects of white culture include
  1. Emphasis on the scientific method
  2. Objective, rational, linear thinking
  3. Quantitative emphasis
  • White culture needs to be enhanced by diversity

Even if I believe that this combination will magically work out as an improvement over the status quo, how is it anything other than:

  • Me already hating myself, and believing I should hire people with similar attitudes?
  • Me believing I should hire people who are clearly incompetent for the job?

If I thought we should abolish medical licensing, would we be splitting hairs over whether or not I believe that incompetent people should be permitted to practice medicine?

Do you think anyone carrying out DEI policies would agree "My job is to hire incompetent people who hate me?" I suppose a very cynical person who actually hates DEI but just does it because it's their job might. But surely you can imagine what an actual believer would say that would make sense from their perspective.

The person carrying out the DEI policies is likely a DEI candidate themselves. The job is not to hire people that hate her (statistically) its to hire people who hate the core employees so they can, in the long run, execute a coup and take over the company.

More comments

"Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you" follows from the DEI-pushers stated reasoning, actions, and claims. The part about hate follows from the whole oppressor-oppressed thing; if white people are oppressors and the under-represented minorities are the oppressed, not only do the URMs hate the white, but the whites deserve the hate for being oppressors. The part about incompetence falls out from the fact that they insist on representation above competence; they will tend to switch between claiming the URMs really are competent but you're measuring it wrong and that competence doesn't actually matter depending on the situation. Generally you can get them to agree to various bits of this but if you put it together they'll claim it's false. That doesn't make putting it together boo-outgroup.

However, nonetheless, even when you think somebody's position implies something you shouldn't say that they believe that thing. I think that's in the rules? And humans don't really work that way to start with.

Such a rule merely provides cover for those engaged in doublespeak or doublethink.

More comments

Why not take less cash but give away a smaller amount of your start up?

There's an economics paper to be written about this.

Start up valuations are mostly a game until they're not. Signaling is a big part of it. If I'm raising at any stage (pre-seed, seed, series A, B, C etc.) I have to look around at the other companies who are raising at the same time, I have to figure out what VC firms are expecting over the next several years, I have to look at the IPO markets. That is how I create my own valuation, not my internal metrics (cashflow, margin, customer churn etc. etc.) The game of it is building a narrative that takes your internal metrics and creates a direct path to the du jour valuations.

If I don't do that and ask for less money, I am inadvertently signalling that I am not as high growth as the other companies I'm competing with. If I do that, no one will invest in me. Sure, you're going to say "but a real value investor---" No, that's not how big time VC works. Now, there are under the radar investors (I hesitate to call them VCs because they're too smart for that label) who purposefully try to find companies at good prices and don't care about the competitive pricing environment. But, the VC world being highly relationship and network driven, it's not like any company can flee to these "smart" investors. If you don't know them already, you don't knew they even exist.

So, most companies, especially those with first time founders, are playing the Big VC game. Investors will quite literally tell you "You have to take 5 million, even though you only asked for 3 million. If you don't, we're walking away. Also, make sure you spend all of that - we can't have a bunch of extra cash."

Why tho?

Because the VCs themselves have to make their fund performance metrics work; their IRR, their Multiples. A funny thing developed over the past two decades, however. This article is legendary for explaining it; deploying capital really fast creates its own outperformance even up to billions of dollars. So, if I am a VC with no particular investing talent but a lot of money (which is most of them) I want to find as many companies as I can (the later the stage the better, up to about Series C) and just cram huge amounts of money into their face. Because it works.

Even if it doesn't make any sense.

Often you're not getting just money from a VC fund. You're also getting their prestige, connections, and """mentorship""". Sometimes the legitimizing effects of those secondary things is worth more than the money you raise in the first place. Many prestigious and well connected funds have minimum check sizes that are quite large.

There are other incentives to raise more than you need. If you have a failed startup on your resume, people will use how much it raised as a proxy for how far it got. There's also some weird recursive perception things where raising money improves the perceived value of the company. This can frequently result in your stake rising in value more than it's diluted.

Most likely Keynesian beauty contest reasons - if you behave in an unusual way, especially in one that means you get less money out of the gate, that implies you believe you have less opportunity to make money than other prospects, which means investors will get less money if they invest in you, which compounds on itself to make you unattractive to any investor and so you end up with no money at all.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is that there was a little cottage industry in the academic literature that strained to try to prove that diversity initiatives were actually supported by a simple business case, that increasing diversity would increase performance and increase profits. There were plenty of lit spats about such claims. But some folks still believe genericized versions of it.

The kind of funny thing is that a lot of those same people are the ones who are now saying that these companies are cutting such programs now just to make more money. If one truly believes that DEI programs increase performance/profits, then they should believe that cutting DEI programs decreases performance/profits. Thus undercutting at least one of their two rationales.

One would think that some set of these large companies who adopted such programs ≅4yrs ago would have seen their performance indicators and profits taking off. They'd be saying, "We can't cut this; it would cost us too much money." Instead, I think the much more likely interpretation is the one that is supported by the current claims, not the former claims - lots of companies adopted these programs in the wake of George Floyd; some were just trying to play the PR game, others may have legitimately believed the predictions of increased performance/profits. ≅4yrs later, they've seen that the magical increased performance/profit simply hasn't materialized, the political pressure is decreased, and they now, indeed, want to save some money.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is that there was a little cottage industry in the academic literature that strained to try to prove that diversity initiatives were actually supported by a simple business case, that increasing diversity would increase performance and increase profits. There were plenty of lit spats about such claims. But some folks still believe genericized versions of it.

As goes the possibly apocryphal quote, "a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

The kind of funny thing is that a lot of those same people are the ones who are now saying that these companies are cutting such programs now just to make more money. If one truly believes that DEI programs increase performance/profits, then they should believe that cutting DEI programs decreases performance/profits.

Schrodinger's Profitability. Companies embrace DEI because having more women and non-Asian minorities obviously increases your company's human capital and thus will render it more profitable; companies cut DEI because they're filled with racist and misogynistic sociopaths who care only about the bottom-line.

I think a lot of these companies were being told by big consulting firms like McKinsey that these strategies would open new markets and bring them a lot of money, and the companies genuinely believed them. They started cooling off on DEI and the Modern Audience when the promised returns never materialized.

Usually this comes up in discussions of management consulting firms making a guest appearance to recommend layoffs—but stereotypically, management consulting firms like McKinsey/BCG/Bain ("MBB") are used by the managers of industry companies not for their novel insights nor research.

The stereotypical role of management consulting firms is to Read the Room and make suggestions for things company management already wanted to do, and to lend an air of credibility and serve as a scapegoat for the consequences of any decisions that are made. It's not like management consulting firms have any specialized knowledge or brilliant insight that would make industry management go "ohh... squeeze the costs and juice the revenue, why didn't I think of that?" drake_lil_yachty.gif

Sometimes young consultants will tell you this as well. After a few years (or even months) in management consulting their cynicism is sufficient that, regardless of the (lack of) inherent value-add of their research and analyses, they see it as a good career path for those with just Excel and PowerPoint monkeying skills and are broadly smart, with great compensation and exit opportunities (and investment banking was too hard to get into and/or too many hours). "It ain't much, but it's honest work." Well, mostly honest.

And even when not serving as water-carrier for industry management, the research of management consulting firms is usually basic and pandering as fuck. For example, "Return-to-office mandates: Women, minorities hardest hit".

Industry management typically have decades of experience (at least intermittently) interacting with management consulting firms, and many have oftentimes done a stint in MBB themselves, so they should be red-pilled as to the "thought leadership" of management consulting firms.

This is not to say that management consulting firms are worthless, so to speak. Being a lubricant for corporate decision-making can be value-add in and of itself, even if you're unable to deliver ground-breaking insights.

As these companies continue to move away from DEI, and if it becomes increasingly apparent to the general public that it didn't work, how will the vocal proponents, like Mark Cuban, attempt to shift the narrative to avoid admitting they were wrong? The most surprising outcome is someone like him admitting fault, or that he was mistaken. My guess is that it will be some combination of "It wasn't properly implemented." or "It works perfectly fine where I invested." or "People didn't give it the chance it deserved."

Whatever the case, I suspect the Mea Culpas will be few and far between, and the deflections will be many. These people are masters of self-preservation.

Look at what happened after COVID: influential people who get things wrong don't admit they were wrong. They instead avoid the whole subject, act confused when you bring it up, and pivot to the next serious person thing.

That is --- unless the law. I imagine that thousands of white male tech workers will have good cases for suing FAANG companies for a decade of bigotry.

Indeed, I suspect that this is the real reason for the pivot. A Harris appointed AG wouldn't allow such cases to go forward but a Trump appointec one...

There are a lot things (DEI programs among them) that are deeply unpopular and in some cases blantanly illegal based on a plain reading of the law that only persist because they are fashionable amongst the priestly class. The priestly class looks after its own, which is how Alvin Bragg is able to talk on national TV about how his office absolutely considers a potential defendants' political leanings and racial identity when deciding which cases to pursue without getting charged under title 18 section 241.

Indeed, one of the old Trump admin's final policies was to try to pursue discrimination complaints against anti-white discrimination.

That is --- unless the law. I imagine that thousands of white male tech workers will have good cases for suing FAANG companies for a decade of bigotry.

No. The rule is you don't have standing to sue unless you can demonstrate "but-for" discrimination. That is, you have to demonstrate that you, personally, would have been hired if it weren't for the discriminatory practice. This is a very high bar and the courts tend to require it before discovery. Both right-leaning and lefty courts apply this to discrimination against white males. Lefty courts are in effect far laxer when it comes to discrimination against minorities and women, and often the EEOC will help there as well.

"It wasn't working just because companies were doing it cynically for profit."

I wouldn't call Mark Cuban a true believer, but someone that panders to them. To the true believers their worldview implicitly or explicitly imagine capitalism as tainting ideals or progress as soon as it comes in contact with them, so it's easy to dismiss any negative result. It's not a proof through competition that their idea doesn't work, it's proof number 473935 that capitalism needs to go because it gets in the way of their ideas.

  1. Bunch of companies eliminate DEI

  2. Inevitably, some executive or employee will say or do something boneheaded, costing the company money

  3. Attribute that boneheadedness to the elimination of DEI

  4. Watch that anecdote spread like wildfire through media

I'm sure there will be infinite variations on "true communism DEI has never been tried".

Or, no one ever believed those claims. They were merely there as part of the toolkit to silence those opposed to the program.

It’s like my hobby horse of black people in Medieval England

Were you the one who had a planned effortpost on that at some point?

I, for one, hope you find the time to do a write-up and post or link it here.

Did he really have to, though? What would have happened to him if he had said no to DEI? This isn't a rhetorical question on my part, by the way.

Discrimination lawsuits against Meta? They could have been fought.

Loss of woke employees? Not that significant for a company that people in general want to work for as much as they want to work for Meta.

Government interference of some kind? Not sure about this one. I can imagine the government forcing companies to add surveillance or censorship, since we have seen both happen, but I don't know if the government would bother to enforce DEI programs.

Angry investors? Also not sure about this one. How many would have cared?

I haven't watched the quite lengthy Rogan Zuck interview, so maybe someone could fill me in.

An advertising boycott. It's no joke, I can't find the link, but I remember posting here that Elon lost 80% of advertising revenue on Twitter. He possibly made up for it by corresponding 80% emoyment cuts, and the shift to paid subscriptions, but the company's finances are now private, so we don't know.

This was also a very tangible threat for Zuckerberg, not a hypothetical. I remember seeing the "No Clicks For Hate" campaign, which was specifically targeted at Facebook, pop up in various places in the tech sector.

Interesting. I feel a bit silly for having missed that obvious factor.

That does bring up the question, though... why wouldn't an advertising boycott be a similar problem for Meta nowadays? Has culture really shifted that much in the last few years?

Boycotts require lots and lots of buy in from the rank and file, as both gun control and pro-life movements have discovered, so you can’t just deploy them Willy-nilly. You can use them effectively against companies that take major stands on current thing, you can use them against companies with easily available alternatives, and in both cases you need a big true believer base.

Calling the boycott bluff is economically rational and Zuckerberg is smart enough to know it. There just isn’t a good alternative to meta- TikTok is about to be banned, Twitter has an even stronger reputation for far-right, and it’s no longer the current thing. Advertisers have learned this- especially after the bud light boycott(which is a great example of the conditions for a successful boycott- there’s a big true believer base which thinks transgenders are mentally ill perverts, they drank bud light and there were lots of easy alternatives, and trans was a big current thing). Contrast with the boycotts of Starbucks or home depot.

Advertising boycotts are a bit different, you don't need to convince consumers, you need to convince marketing departments. Who are staffed entirely with people who already want to believe Facebook is being hateful, and who are profoundly inside filter bubbles making them believe everyone agrees with them (if they weren't advertising wouldn't look like it currently does).

Zuck can call the bluff now (and couldn't before) because of the election. Marketing departments that try pushing their companies into the "woke" side of the culture war will probably be overruled by CEOs who have now recieved a very strong signal as to where the population stands with regards to this.

Elon Musk already took a lot of the available heat. It's an even tougher sell now than it was a few years ago for an advertiser to burn their own revenues to deliberately antagonize both Facebook and the incoming President of the United States out of sheer ideological bloody-mindedness. Doing it now, when you've already seen that the last tech billionaire who faced a boycott like that did not cave in like he was supposed to and instead joined the other team whole-heartedly and is now poised to enact whatever revenge he has in mind using whatever influence he's curried over the last election, would not be a safe investment.

I can't say I understand what happened. I also don't think the actual culture could change so fast, but it feels like some rubber band snapped the moment Trump won.

It reminds me of one of the 1989 revolutions (am I thinking of Hungary?). The dictator was getting worried at the people's lack of enthusiasm and bleak countenance, so decided to hold a huge rally in the capital. The people got there, noticed that everyone else looked as miserable as they felt, and someone finally grumbled out loud. So it went from people cowed into submission to overthrowing the government fairly quickly and without coordination, because the culture had been quietly changing but everyone was so afraid to admit it that it took something big and public for everyone to realize it was safe to complain all at once.

It's kinda felt like it's been heading that way since 2014 or so. The Woke wave grew strong, scared people into compliance, but the more people got canceled, the more damage they did, and the more all that damage demonstrably failed in achieving their stated goals, the more people quietly slinked (slank?) off to the "I swear I'm liberal; it's just that the rest of the left went crazy!" hoarde. The media and SJWs' hold on the narrative™ grew increasingly obviously wispy, and then the election was everyone's signal that it was finally safe to breathe. Elon Musk's buying Twitter, the backfiring of the Hogwarts Legacy boycott, the utter destruction of culturual juggernauts like Star Wars and Marvel, and the Biden administration's utter failure to bring back even Obama era levels of seeming stability, probably all had a lot to do with it, but the election was the most public sign of all, with very straightforward numbers and everything. The Cancel mobs have always been a loud minority, but now everyone knows it to be so.

More comments

The advertiser boycott depended on threatening the advertisers, not Twitter. And running even one successful boycott is a high bar to clear.

At the end of the day it doesn’t take a very big shift in culture against woke for boycotts to stop being a credible threat.

The line of reasoning seemed to work on Boomercons.

"Diversity is just good business. After all, I read it in BusinessWeek."

Boomercons still place a lot of trust in the media and academia, having come of age in an era when those wells were less poisoned than today.

Notably, whites over 65 were the only sizeable demographic that shifted from (R)->(D) during the last election. The geriatrics who run much of our country can still be reached with the old hamfisted propaganda methods.

Older people often have assets. Assets did pretty great between 2021-2024. So maybe they weren’t as harmed as others by inflation etc.

Yeah. I also think the Democrats have a great bargain for older whites:

  1. You get: Comfort and prosperity until you die

  2. We get: Destruction of your culture

It's the same method that can be used to effectively defang a union. You grandfather in the older members who then lose any incentive to fight for the benefits of the younger members.

I don't think it was about silencing, more like a sales pitch to a clueless Boomer exec, that sounds just plausible enough they might buy it. Same thing as "this $mediaArtifact needs a more diverse cast, so we can appeal to a wider audience"

In related news, Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan where, among other things, he talked about the pressure the Biden Administration put on him / his employees.

I never expected to be this bitter at the turning of the tide, but I feel the need to bookmark this clip for future use. Oh well, I suppose that was the most likely way something approaching a win would pan out, so I can't complain too much, but boy, would I like to have a few words with some people.

Alternatively Zuck doesn't give a shit about either the left or the right or free speech or all that jazz, he's playing a different game: maximizing money. This isn't any less moral or worthy than serving the left/right, in fact I'd argue it's more moral than the self contradictory belief systems held by almost everyone on the left/right except for the most principled (probably a few percent of humans, definitely not more than 10%).

Ideologically, I think he's more like Musk shooting for Mars, but Zuck's goal is something more like automated super AI VR future tech. Previously, he thought that allying with Democrats was most conducive to that goal, but that relationship started to sour. His loyalty is with neither side.

I think the opposite is true. Zuckerburg's stance shows some courage and indicates a genuine belief in free speech and equality.

Is he a hero? No. Heroic would have been taking the same stance in 2021 and having his company taken from him by government pressure and angry shareholders.

But if he was a coward he would just have kept the DEI going, albeit at a lower profile. No one forced him to make this announcement. There are real risks. Even though Trump barely won the election, California is still a one-party Democratic state. Furthermore, Facebook's employees could fairly be classified as far-left. A corporate goon like Sundar (Google) or Satya (Microsoft) would never have taken such a bold stance.

I think this Scott article is relevant:

Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade

Mark is fighting the fight that can be won, not heroically dying on the battlefield to inspire later generations. I give him credit for standing up for what's right, even if it's not maximally brave.

Is he a hero? No. Heroic would have been taking the same stance in 2021 and having his company taken from him by government pressure and angry shareholders.

Unlike Musk or Bezos, who could conceivably have their company taken from them by investors, Zuck owns an ironclad majority of Facebook voting stock. He could be jailed, but he’d still control the company. Even if the SEC forced him to resign as CEO for some manufactured violation of securities law, he’s still be able to appoint his successor.

I don't even have a high opinion of the guy, but if you want an example of someone who was fighting the fight that can be won, than that would be Elon.

Mark can't even be called the guy that waited on the sidelines to see who wins. He was fighting for one side, and then turned his cloak when they started losing.

If you want an example of someone who's no hero, but can say he has principles and did what he could, that would be Jack Dorsey.

Elon strikes me more as the hero archetype. He fights the battle that can't be won but somehow wins it anyway.

He will eventually fail. You can't just keep doubling your bet forever. At some point, something will happen and he will lose. If Trump had lost the election, I believe Musk would have been subject to lawfare and then jailed. Normal people just don't take those kinds of risks.

One day he will die on the battlefield.

But... until that happens, I will take Peter Thiel's advice and never bet against Elon.

Elon has engaged in some bet hedging, like moving everything to Texas.

I’d argue moving everything to Texas is, if anything, doubling down on the chud wing of the right.

Yes, it’s siding with the right, but it’s bet hedging against retaliation from democrats.

Wow, this was a lightbulb post for me.

I've been critical of Elon in the past because something about the guy rubs me the wrong way. I've never doubted his intelligence or capability, but my spidey sense always goes off whenever I see him in long interviews and, definitely, when scrolling through his twitter posts. I've rooted against him, I've just been very suspicious.

And this is why - going all in on Elon may indeed be heroic / brave what have you, but it's going to lead to ruin. Sure, that could be "glorious" ruin or whatever but, still - you gon' die!

So, yes, let's be Thielists in this case - not on Elon's side all-in per se, but also definitely not betting against him.

Everyone dies. The goal is to die well.

Yeah, I don't think Elon ranks up there with William Wallace and Maximus Decimus Meridius in terms of being able to stir the hearts and souls of men. Plenty of folks have decided to give their whole mind and heart over to him, though.

More comments

Furthermore, Facebook's employees could fairly be classified as far-left.

Pissing them off maybe a feature rather than a bug. Why do more layoffs when you can get some of your most troublesome employees reason to quit in anger or do something that gives you cause to fire then?

This isn't any less moral or worthy than serving the left/right,

It is, if you're not honest about it.

Alternate headline "Meta renames its DEI program". No one will be fired, they will all be moved to new departments with boring names that continue to do the exact same thing. They'll be working hard to use technology, algorithms and AI to advantage/disadvantage whatever group their slack channel demands for the rest of their careers.

For a story where that's the case: Jamie Sarkonak: The University of Alberta said it was ending DEI. That's not true.

They simply renamed it to ACB, or Anti-Caucasian Bias "access, community and belonging".

And the euphemism treadmill rolls onward. DEI used to be called Affirmative Action.

Indeed, but in a rare instance where the euphemism treadmill leads to greater legibility: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is more immediately understandable than Affirmative Action, especially without contextual/historical knowledge.

I can translate "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" word for word to an acquaintance whose primary language is not English, and he or she could get the gist. Unlikely so for "Affirmative Action," which for he or she would just sound like two random (English) words paired together.

That's because it is just two random English words paired together. You don't need a non-English speaker (real or imaginary) in the picture to see that. You'd never guess its meaning from the words alone if you didn't know the history and context behind them.

ACB is also close to 'all cops are bastards' which was a popular slogan during BLM but they used the acronym ACAB.

The factcheckers and Californian moderators are getting fired. The former will be replaced by a Community Notes -like system and are freaking out because, from what I understand, Zuckerberg was more or less single-handedly supporting the entire industry, while the latter will be replaced by Texans.

I'm not one for early celebrations, but it looks like these are actual policy changes.

I’m skeptical about the replacement by Texans as a strong policy change rather than a cost saving measure. Doing business in California is ruinously expensive.

If that was the only change they announced, I might be more skeptical too, but it seems like a comprehensive shift.

Diverse slate hiring -- assuming this means insisting on interviewing at least N minorities for a given opening -- was legally perilous. One of my former employers was told by their lawyers that they couldn't do it directly but perhaps could through an intermediary providing the leads.

Huh really? It seems designed to ensure that no individual candidate would ever be disadvantaged.

Richard Hanania interviewed Jared Taylor.

Jared Taylor, founder of white nationalist publication American Renaissance, was recently reinstated on Twitter/X after a years-long (and, under the Elon Musk “free speech” era, increasingly controversial) ban. Many have hoped that, as Dissident Right and race realist ideas are beginning to break into semi-mainstream online discourse, some of the old-guard figures like Taylor may enjoy a long-overdue rehabilitation in the public eye. (Something like this has recently taken place for Steve Sailer, who, after decades of being the commentator whom all the serious thinkers read but never publicly acknowledged, recently undertook a lucrative book tour and has finally been published by several mainstream conservative publications.) While Taylor was once a semi-regular fixture on serious news programs, and his speeches at American Renaissance conference were even occasionally broadcast on C-SPAN, his banishment over the past decade has been comprehensive; if he is, at this late stage of his life, able to make some money and get his name out there, it would be a well-deserved culmination of an honorable life. Taylor’s work has been formative in my intellectual development, and I consider him a formidable thinker as well as a true gentleman.

That being said, I think his conversation with Hanania (who promoted the interview as a debate) unfortunately revealed how the world has, in some sense, passed Taylor by. Part of this is simply that he is old and has lost a step cognitively. In his prime, back when he was often asked to appear on mainstream news segments, Taylor was known as a sharp, charismatic, and erudite debater; at his advanced age, he can now be outmaneuvered by more agile thinkers — and, whatever you think about Richard Hanania (who, in his now-disavowed younger days as a white identitarian commentator, wrote several pieces for American Renaissance), he clearly has a keen mind. More importantly, though, Taylor’s model of the world does not appear to have adequately adapted to observed reality.

One of the central pillars of Taylor’s racial worldview is that human beings naturally seek to cluster among others to whom they are similar. For Taylor, the “white flight” of the 1960’s and 70’s, in which white families fled urban areas for the growing suburbs in response to the growing presence of blacks, is an archetypal example of humans naturally and subconsciously coordinating to segregate themselves into racial affinity groups. Writing and speaking in the 1990s and 2000s, when Mexican immigration to the U.S. (both legal and illegal) was at a tidal surge, Taylor predicted that this would set off a fresh white flight, in which white Americans would flee states with growing Hispanic populations. The looming confrontation between whites and Latinos, in which whites would be forced to put up a mighty fight to prevent themselves from being replaced and politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism, was a central theme of white nationalist discussion at this time. “Demographics are Destiny!”

However, as Hanania deftly points out, the intervening years have been… less than kind to these predictions. Though left-wing agitation by a certain section of the Latino population did have some impact on politics in the early part of this century — I distinctly remember a segment of the Mexican and Mexican-American segment of the student body at my high school staging a full-fledged walk-out in 2006 in protest of the failed “Sensenbrenner Bill” (H.R. 4437) which would have curtailed illegal immigration — the long-term political realignment among Latinos in this country has been a surprise to both political parties. Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.

Additionally, while white identitarians were correct to predict an exodus of conservative whites from racially-diverse liberal states, they probably did not anticipate that such whites would flee not to Whitopias such as Idaho and Montana, but rather to racially-diverse conservative states. The racial demographics of Florida and Texas are hardly more favorable to racially-conscious whites than California’s or New York’s! As Hanania points out, it seems like the revealed preference of many white Americans is to move to places with plenty of Hispanics (and a decent number of blacks, provided they’re well-policed) as long as the economic prospects and the political environment seem headed in a positive direction. White Americans seem to have no problem whatsoever living alongside Asian immigrants, who generally make excellent neighbors, friends, and classmates.

(Taylor’s stance on race relations between whites and Asians has never been coherent, which is particularly surprising since he was famously born and raised in Japan as the child of two American missionaries. He acknowledges the many great things about Asian culture and the various metric on which Asians are on par with, or even superior to, whites, yet when asked why it would be a bad thing for whites and Asians to intermarry and their countries become more integrated, he retreats to some wishy-washy petty nationalist “Well, I just think white people should stay white and Asians should stay Asian because I believe in real diversity.” This has never been persuasive, and Hanania rightly skewers him for it.) Ultimately, Taylor’s predictions of mass racial strife and whites fleeing to the hinterlands to form whites-only communities just have not panned out. As Hanania says: There are plenty of extremely white places in America, and almost nobody is moving to any of them.

This particular section of the interview (beginning around the 55-minute mark) has also produced controversy among Taylor’s ostensible allies. Hanania brings up West Virginia and asks why, if living among other whites is the highest instinctive concern for most white people, why are so few people moving there? And, furthermore, what sort of white person would want to move there, knowing how poor and dysfunctional the local whites are? Who would prefer living among fentanyl-addicted hillbilly whites rather than living among educated and productive Asians and Hispanics? Taylor expresses agreement with Hanania, and indulges in some accurate criticism of the white people he witnessed while visiting the capital city of West Virginia.

This has caused many on the online right to turn on Taylor, as discussed by Scott Greer. (Many of the responses to Greer’s tweet perfectly encapsulate the phenomenon pointed to in his article.) The criticism of Taylor’s remarks strikes me as identical to a phenomenon many have observed in black culture. When blacks congregate among themselves in places like churches, a frequent topic of discussions and sermons is frank self-criticism of the failings of the black community. “Black men, we need to do better! Work harder, be better fathers! There’s too many young black men out there acting a fool, killing each other over nothing, leaving our communities shattered.” All true, all healthy, all necessary, and maybe at some point the introspection will lead to material changes. However, when blacks (or, at least, black activists and “community leaders”) are talking to white people, suddenly they’re a united front: “All our problems are your fault.” Any criticism of even the worst aspects of underclass black culture is suddenly forbidden, as it might give succor to the enemies of black political advocacy. Black commentators who break this taboo (Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, etc.) are savaged as traitors and dancing monkeys by the very same blacks who, among their own, will acknowledge the truth behind that very same criticism.

Apparently we now have a vocal contingent of aspiring “white community leaders” who similarly cannot brook any public criticism of the worst elements of white trash culture, lest it empower “the enemies of our people.” This is pathetic, insecure, dishonest behavior. Whatever one might say about Jared Taylor, he has never been afraid to publicly air out the neuroses and failings of his own people; his brand of upstanding, intellectually honest discourse appears fundamentally unsuited for an increasingly propagandistic “siege mentality” discourse on the modern racially-aware right.

I have many problems with Richard Hanania, but seeing the army of pro-Taylor trolls spamming the comments section of the debate with petty insults about his appearance rather than even attempting to engage with the substance of his arguments, I have to concede that the new contours of the debate have squeezed out principled but overly-old-fashioned men like Jared Taylor, and will require the torch to be passed to high-character individuals who can thread the needle between the increasingly low-brow Chud Populism of right-wing Twitter, and the respectable but vacuous thought leaders of the dying Boomer right.

There is no reason to criticize West Virginia if you want white people to advocate for their group interest. Jared was rebuffed for doing so by people who understand how group dynamics work. Strategic “divide and conquer” is a well-known tactic used to prevent group cohesion; anything which draws a wedge between white people or highlights differences will ultimately reduce the strength and chance of group advocacy. If the primary problem at hand is an absence of group advocacy, then there are about 10,000 items on the checklist before we reach “discuss West Virginia’s IQ”. Progressives know this all too well, which is why they refuse to highlight that black people disproportionately target Asians in violence. This is why Jared corrected himself in a later tweet —

As @GraduateBen notes, they are warm-hearted people who look after not just neighbors but strangers. Working-class whites will be the backbone of any true national populism. We are all brothers and sisters.

Consider that the IQ difference between West Virginia and Massachusetts (the highest IQ state) is only 7.1, which is less than the IQ difference between Akita and Okinawa in Japan, at 11 points. If Japan were in conflict with another group, and their primary aim was victory, what do you think their leaders would discuss in the newspapers? “We are all Japanese, we are one nation, one group” etc. This is how things work, because most people are not giga-online debaters with dozens of cognitive nooks and crannies to compartmentalize different concerns. Most people can only hand a few simple takeaways from an entire category of information. You can call this pathetic, but what’s pathetic is failing to understand how things are actually effected in the real world, and then being destroyed because of hubris and ignorance. Do you want to be right on the internet or do you want to change the world? People have made their decision.

Anyway, I don’t find the criticism of Jared’s belief compelling, because you’re looking at states and not neighborhoods. That’s a category error. When white liberals move to a state with more Mexicans, their neighborhoods are likely to have a similar racial makeup as before, and same when they move to suburbs. So I bet they still prefer to live among other white people, per Jared’s claim. And their friend groups are often homogenous. But at the same time, I think Jared’s point is kind of immaterial: the question is what white people would prefer without the vast amount of propaganda about in-group / our-group preferences that they receive through education and media.

[edit] One more point. According to Cremieux,

the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is between 109 and 115 depending on the type of cognitive battery they’re tested with. Lynn also provides some data on the IQs of Mizrahim, Sephardim, and Ethiopian Jews. The IQs of the Mizrahi are indistinguishable from Arabs, centering around 87 when sampled together, Sephardim have IQs of around 100

So the difference between the Ashk IQ and the Sephardi is a whopping 12 points. Ashk and Mizrahi is 25(!). This is significantly greater than the difference between WV whites (~98 when you take black out of WV total) and the average white American IQ (100-103). How often do you hear advocates of the Jewish people talk about this? Almost never, and especially not since the war started — instead only songs about One People. This is very advantageous for a group, obviously.

Strategic “divide and conquer” is a well-known tactic used to prevent group cohesion; anything which draws a wedge between white people or highlights differences will ultimately reduce the strength and chance of group advocacy.

Now apply the same reasoning to 'white people' wrt 'black people'.

Yeah, if Black Americans were caught up in self-criticism and failed to promote their in-group then it would reduce their political power. What am I missing?

"White" and "Black" could be a divide encouraged by those who want to conquer America.

One man's Divide and Conquer is another man's Join and Prosper.

That's the very nature of political coalition formation.

Okinawans are not ethnically Japanese. Different people, history, culture, language, phenotypes. Conquered fairly recently.

You can talk about dubious IQ studies you read about in online articles all you want. As someone who has had to deal with them professionally for over 20 years at this point, everyone in West Virginia is fucking retarded. Okay, not everyone, but a high enough proportion that in order to accomplish anything you have to start from that assumption or else you're bound to be incredibly frustrated. My first encounter with this was when I was in college, and got a summer job delivering ice to convenience stores and the like. We were based out of Pittsburgh, but the college kids all got the shitty routes, drivine to far-flung rural areas and the 'hood. There was one week when they put me on service duty, which basically consisted of me taking a minivan around to our sites with an air compressor and blowing dust out of the mechanicals of the boxes and cleaning them up a bit. To avoid any confusion of why a guy in an ice uniform was there poking around the box and not delivering ice, I'd stop inside to tell the clerk what I was doing.

I started with the urban routes and worked my way outward. I never had any difficulty explaining that I was just there to clean the box out to anyone of any ethnicity. Some people would tell me they were low and ask if a delivery was forthcoming or if I could call someone to come out (I don't know and no), but no one was ever confused by my presence. Then, at the end of the week, I hit West Virginia.

"Just so you know, I'm not delivering any ice today. I'm just going to clean the box out with compressed air and make sure everything is working okay."

"Heh?"

"I'm not delivering ice, just cleaning the box."

"Heh?"

(repeat ad nauseum)

I understand that convenience store clerk isn't the most intellectually demanding position and that some places will hire people of limited cognitive capacity to do this work; if it happened once or twice I wouldn't have thought much of it. But it happened at every place I went to in West Virginia. One guy was confused why I was there because he'd already gotten a delivery earlier that day. It got to the point where I stopped telling anyone what I was doing because they were too dim to understand. Then I crossed the river into Ohio and went in as an experiment and everything was suddenly normal again.

After becoming a lawyer, I was told that if I got licensed in West Virginia it would increase my prospects, so I did. I assumed this was because, since Pittsburgh is close to West Virginia, companies in Northern WV or the Panhandle would use Pittsburgh firms. I soon came to realize that all West Virginia companies of a certain size, or foreign companies operating in the state, use Pittsburgh firms for their WV work. When these companies are sued it's common for hearings and the like to be held in Morgantown or Wheeling so the lawyers don't have to drive to Charleston or wherever. During the oil and gas boom most of the legal work was given to Pittsburgh firms. Even ones that opened satellite offices in West Virginia were almost exclusively staffed by people originally from Pittsburgh, excepting maybe one or two locals (usually higher-ups who got sick of having to drive to Pittsburgh).

Now that I have to depose a lot of people from West Virginia, but none of them know anything. I mean anything. Trying to get basic personal information is like pulling teeth. They remember their name, dob, address, wife's name, and maybe their kid's names and ages, if you're lucky. They'll know that their parents are dead, but won't be able to tell you when they died. And I mean that; it's pretty common that they can't even narrow it down to the decade. One guy said he thought his father died in the 1980s; I pulled the obituary and he died in 2016. "Well, I know it was a while ago" was his response. One guy was on disability but he didn't know what for. West Virginia judges are more or less forced to have lax evidentiary standards for the simple reason that if they didn't, no one could provide enough evidence to maintain any kind of lawsuit. I struggle to describe it properly, because it's literally ineffable how utterly moronic these people are compared to those of similar socioeconomic standing in Pennsylvania.

This sounds like someone should be checking their pipes for lead.

Also check for parasites; hookworm has been known to have adverse effects on cognition....

IIRC hookworm has been eradicated in the US for long enough that people interacting with lawyers under their own power shouldn’t have been affected, and West Virginia wasn’t the last holdout anyways.

I believe the last holdout of white IQ’s suppressed by poor environment was further south, along the gulf coast and Mississippi River, and that DDT suppressing malaria was the main improvement.

I’m not really sure how exaggerated the story is. I’ve been through WV a few times. It was fine. I wouldn’t want to live there but it wasn’t full of morons wherein nothing worked.

In my experience, economic and tourism centers are just fine. It seems to me like OP is interacting with a pretty low tier if it is literally everyone who can't function.

I mean, restaurants exist throughout WV. Some of what OP is saying would make operating a restaursnt just completely impossible.

Well, he is a lawyer. It's possible he's dealing with a low stratum of society, or that West Virginia whites are simply hostile to lawyers for cultural reasons- I've seen it before.

The poster also has posted some (unintentionally) facts about himself that make him come across as smug. I recall the story where he and his friends made fun of a girl (to this day) because she was horrified at the idea that OP routinely committed crime (he doesn’t but he was fucking with her because culturally she was from the wrong set of people in the Burgh).

Maybe people picked up on his smugness and fucked with him but he didn’t realize he was the being trolled and just thought “these guys are idiots.”

Yeah which leads me to believe the simplistic explanation is that OP is exaggerating. Not saying the clerks weren’t dumb but…I think he is exaggerating

If any of you has seen Winter's Bone, the all-white Missouri community it depicts gives off a definite vibe of hostility towards outsiders (whatever their race). I personally would be too intimidated to set foot there.

And this is besides the place having few or no jobs.

A friend of mine who is an accountant got sick of living in the Portland area and moved to rural Kentucky where he was able to buy a lot of land. He's been there for two years and can't find any clients in his new state. He's a good networker, but they do not trust outsiders (and, according to him, are largely too dumb to understand what he does). It's friendly but he's not one of them. He gets a majority of his new clients from our referrals in the purpler Portland suburbs and comes out twice a year for in-person meetings.

Have you considered that people with all their money in their checking account aren't going to generate work for accountants?

People who are dirt poor tend not to have any need for accountants. (Or if they do, they can't afford them and have to make do)

Having been to rural Kentucky, it is genuinely very dire. I’ve never seen that kind of visible poverty before. I’m talking little burnt-out shacks in the hills where people clearly live. The people I met there struck me as markedly stunted. I’m sure there are plenty of capable people interspersed throughout this population — and I’m sure there are plenty who were born in such circumstances but got the hell out because they were too good for that life — but overall there just doesn’t seem to be any significant amount of human capital left in the region.

You're telling me a fictional movie made by Hollywood elites made you think poor white communities hate you? Damn I wonder how that could have happened.

To be fair the book the movie is based upon is much the same in this regard and is written by a white ex Marine, high school dropout from the Ozarks in Missouri. Whether it is accurate or not I do not know but those elements don't come from Hollywood. It's similar to Vance's Hillbilly Elegy in that regard, in that it is written about a group by someone from the group. Though a fictional story in this case.

Yes, but that place was hostile towards its own members too. Maybe LESS hostile, but it's not as though young J.Law was treated nicely.

rather beside the point but does Hanania look particularly ghoulish in this video? Almost seems like he's wearing eyeshadow/liner

because he's not white. looking good on video typically requires fully European phenotype , although blacks pull it off too. Jews look the worst. that is what I have observed at least. whites tend to have a more angular or square face and solid lower jaw which looks better on video. But jews make up for it by being articulate, high verbal IQ.

Hanania has a relatively European phenotype, just a strange one. If you look up Palestinian Christians (ie. his people) they’re relatively phenotypically diverse but many could pass as Sicilians. Jews are also diverse, even discounting half-gentiles like Chalamet and Johansson, Paul Rudd is 100% ashkenazi and widely considered a handsome actor (for his age etc but also in general).

Paul Rudd is 100% ashkenazi

Press X to doubt. He's like at least 50% Italian by SOME kind of proxy.

In the sense that the most widely-accepted theory is that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Jewish-Roman intermarriage in the first few centuries CE, sure.

That's just what being an ashkenazi is: Some sort of combination between Levantine and Italian.

Paul Rudd is 100% ashkenazi and widely considered a handsome actor (for his age etc but also in general).

He's considered handsome for a comedic actor.

Hanania is white. He's an ugly effeminate white, but he is white. Nobody looks at him and thinks he's brown.

Generally speaking Levantine Christians like Hanania look relatively European. The oddities of Hanania’s appearance are related to just having a weird and slightly sinister face, which is something that can happen to anyone of any tribe.

Well yes. Some of my best friends are Maronite or Melkite, and they just look Greek. Levantine Christians have been considered white for ages and ages.

How do you square this with how many Hollywood celebrities (particularly actresses), whose job it is to look good on video, are Jewish? Some of the most attractive and telegenic women in the world are Ashkenazi.

I posit it's easier for jewish women . the difference is not as great between gentile vs. Jewish women

His skin also looks unusually smooth.

Presuming this is more how he looks normally: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YnvZto0do5o

I'd guess that he had particularly bad bags under his eyes that day and is either using a beauty filter to try to cover them up or he had a friend apply some studio makeup.

Couldn't Taylor have replied that Idaho is growing incredibly fast, and it was always considered one of the white bastion states?
If the DR have trouble criticizing white people degeneracy, I have to wonder if they've actually read the most general level foundational media. Even reading the Turner Diaries beyond the day of the rope memes would show what the real racists thought about white people using drugs, getting fat and watching TV.

Is there any of Taylor's work you'd point to as an introduction? I only ever saw the famous Japanese TV interview (subs > dubs), and I have to admit that excessive Moldbug exposure poisoned my attitude to amren more than I should have allowed it to.

The one thing he keeps bringing up that I think actually lands, and it's not surprising he started with it because of that, is the unilateral disarmament that is whites not having an affinity group despite every other racial group having one. I don't really know how that point could realistically be discharged though - It's too easy to compare to naziism. Considering the makeup of likely people who would first advocate for and join such a party the comparison would probably not even be unfair.

edit: I should say my preference would be to abolish all the affinity groups, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

This is just misunderstanding how and why these advocacy groups work. WN talk as if minorities are "stronger" than whites collectively due to this advocacy, and that current racial politics are caused by their "winning". This is not how things work outside Zimbabwe et al. Its pretty clear Blacks cant actually threaten the US government if you think about it for a bit. These organisations exist because liberalism thinks they should, and they are given concessions because it thinks they should """win""". A white organisation mirroring them is pointless, because its not the internal structure that makes them work. If you could convice mainstream whites that it would be ok to have one, you have already convinced them on the way there to stop this theater, and then it wouldnt be necessary anymore to have one.

I totally disagree. Affinity groups around tribes or causes is how electoral politics work. Labor organizes around unions, Christians organize around various advocacy organizations, AIPAC, various trade groups, environmental organizations, you name it, all of them are to one degree or another affinity groups. What doesn’t work is individual political actors or very small groups, because without a large bloc, and especially a large bloc with big bags of cash, it’s not really possible to get modern politicians to bother.

I find the opposition to such an idea to be one of the best propaganda wins in recent history. You almost can’t actually have the conversation with people who don’t already agree to the proposition. Everyone else stops up their ears at the mere mention of the idea of a white advocacy group. I’m not proposing that they push segregation or anything of the sort, I’m not looking to disenfranchise people. But even the suggestion that there be a white group with a seat at the table when the ideas of DEI and affirmative action and even other policies around affordability are discussed. It’s like a cognitive kill switch to bring up the idea that they are allowed to have ancestral pride, advocate for their interests, and promote their culture just like everyone else. They might on the margins be okay with Irish groups marching on St. Patty’s, or Germans forming cultural heritage groups to drink beer and eat sausages.

@hydroacetylene because I think your objection is similar.

Affinity groups around tribes or causes is how electoral politics work

Why do you think white people vote for the left? On the "tribal power" model, it would have to be something like "Theyre being freeriders in the common white cause, and prioritising their other interests". Does that seem true? It looks to me that they dont just accept minority demands, they way you would give your allies their due. No, they generally consider it a positive to support these demands even at their own expense - not necessarily if that expense gets very large, but still. Dem primary candidates outwoking each other is for whites, the black machine voters gave us Biden.

Politics is never just interest blocks smashing against each other, not until you collapse all the way, at which point its war and diplomacy, rather than politics. Without a shared Nomos there is no polity, but only something like Realist international relations, which US domestic politics is visibly not.

It’s like a cognitive kill switch to bring up the idea that they are allowed to have ancestral pride, advocate for their interests, and promote their culture just like everyone else.

I agree, and it can be valuable to talk about this - what I disagree with is your model of what happens when that changes. You seem to think that theres some stage where theres a politically viable white movement that competes with the other ethnic movements, and sometimes one wins and sometimes the other, and I think you actually win before it gets there. "Stop listening to the black movement" is an easier ask than "start listening to the white movement".

Why do you think white people vote for the left?

There is no such thing as ‘white people’ as a monophyletic group. In the US there’s a blue tribe, which voted for the left, and there’s several groups which vote for the right and are called ‘red tribe’ by the motte despite being different groups. The red and blue tribes hate each other more than either of them hate or are hated by minorities, Serb and Bosnian style. Our politics is just Balkans tribalism, like he says, but almost everyone is wrong about what the tribes are.

This would make sense if the "anti-white" policies of the left were actually only anti-red-tribe, and didnt harm blue tribers.

They’re on the left because they value other coalitions they are in. I’m not suggesting that a person can only be in one group, I can be in the NRA and the Labor bloc at the same time. I don’t think you aren’t doing coalition based politics just because a person might be part of several. It’s just that for a bock to win on an issue you have to get enough potential members of that bloc to make that their top issue.

If you are in the NRA and the Labor block and you vote Dem, I would expect that you at least dislike the Dem policies on guns. But white liberals dont dislike Dem policies on race. Why not?

If your point is just that the groups themselves are epiphenominal to the desire to help minorities and it's instead sympathy for minorities that causes open advocacy for racial discrimination in favor of them that also creates the groups that are purely symbolic then sure. I guess what I object to is whatever egregore allows open unidirectional advocacy against my and my family's interests on the basis of or skin color.

No, organized black advocacy is definitely a big part of liberalism's political strength. The black political machine is just a huge part of democrat's competitiveness in swing states and it's no accident that the african american wing of the party tends to get its way.

Right, one of Taylor’s main goals in creating American Renaissance was to try and be the focal point of a movement of racially-conscious whites with impeccable optics: erudite, genteel, conservative-coded. No Roman salutes, no street brawls, no white-trash dysfunction, no scary pagan LARPing, etc. Early American Renaissance conferences featured several Jewish speakers, and Taylor has never made the Jewish Question a topic of his advocacy. However, American Renaissance and its surrounding movement had a separate problem, which is that — due mainly to the proud Southern heritage and pro-Confederate sympathies of Taylor and its other early figures like Sam Dickson and Sam Francis — it struck many as having a distinct odor of that other epochal white identitarian movement, the Ku Klux Klan.

Now, to be clear, Taylor himself is squeaky-clean: Yale-educated, a successful businessman, multilingual, an unimpeachable family life, and not a whiff of violence or disreputable behavior. The immediate circle he cultivated was respectable, denouncing anything resembling racial terrorism. He believed he could create a genuine intellectual movement, like the early Progressives, winning people over to his cause through reasoned argumentation and leading by example. This didn’t save him from being labeled a white supremacist, a hate-monger, and all other manner of opprobrious terms by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The most genteel figure imaginable was still basically a Klansman and an evil cult leader in the eyes of those people.

Nowadays, many of the leading lights on the so-called Dissident Right — which is largely an outgrowth of the intellectual current Jared Taylor helped create and nurture — do indeed have more of the disreputable and optically-unfortunate tendencies which more strongly trigger respectable people’s Nazi Alarms. It’s unfortunate that honorable men such as Taylor couldn’t do more to mainstream their cause back when it still could have avoided these failure modes. It’s encouraging, though, to see that many of their most dire predictions appear not to have come true to the extent they feared.

He believed he could create a genuine intellectual movement, like the early Progressives, winning people over to his cause through reasoned argumentation and leading by example.

My initial reaction to this quokka-esque faith in reasoned discourse was “lol, lmao even”

But then I realized that Taylor is the product of a different time, a time when public intellectuals really did have some cachet and, even if they weren’t household names per se, they still had some power to set the conversation and shift people’s opinions through logos. The Mont Pellerin Society, for example, was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Reagan/Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s.

I wonder if Taylor will embrace the new meta, or if he will cling to the antiquated ideals of the Ivy League debating society to the bitter end.

Jared Taylor is 73; a man that old does not change his mind.

Old people don’t change their minds, with rare exception, they just die. Without death, there would not be change.

It is death that causes the lack of change. Will X lead to consequence Y or Z? Elon predicts Y. The years tick by. In twenty years time X will have caused either Y or Z. It is becoming easier to predict with each passing year. Eventually every-one will agree how it turned out.

When will Elon change his mind? If he is old enough to die before the twenty years are up, he won't bother. He isn't going to live to see it and will not be personally embarrassed.

If instead he gets wonder rejuvenation treatment, and fifty years more life, the future becomes more real. He starts to care about where trends are leading because he anticipates seeing the eventual outcome. If Y is starting to look like a bad bet, Elon will change his mind.

politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism

...

Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.

Well, there's a natural modus tollens to consider when looking at the modus ponens there. It was expected that Latin-American immigrants would not stop voting in Latin-American politics after they came to the US. Now they're voting for Trump. Did they actually stop? Or is Trump actually more similar to Latin-American socialism than we expected?

It's kind of a matter of internet dissident lore how leftists cling to their mythos of being the anti-elite underdog and champion of the small and oppressed, even as their creed becomes the faith of rich and noble Brahmins yearning to defend their privilege. Perhaps more attention is due to how this is reflected on the other side - are rightists clinging to a mythos of being the noble elites of word and deed seeking to protect their rightfully earned place at the helm, but actually becoming the ideology of bombastic People's Tribunes promising to bring down the enemy elite and distribute gibs to their socioethnic clients? With some squinting, is the promise of Trump (imagined and played up by fans), distributor of free tendies, rewarder of loyals, crystalizer of traitors, not quite similar to that of a Perón, Bolsonaro or even (with identification filed off) Evo Morales?

Latin America isn't all socialists, Milei is a latin american. Latin America is populist, clownish and doesn't have as much long term thinking.

As soon as Milei stops the bleeding a bit they'll go back to voting for socialists again.

That's what truly unfortunate about it all. Argentina had the world's best performing stock market (in USD terms) last year. However I still wouldn't think it safe to invest there on a longer time horizon than 2 years. In a way it's like a longer half life 3x leveraged ETF: excellent for making money in the short term if things go well but woe unto he who leaves his money in there over time.

(Aside: this is yet another example showing why it is better for humanity if the common man has his ability to influence the world restricted)

I mean, UPRO has outperformed SPY going on decades now...

That's only because SPX has been getting artificially juiced and prevented by the FED from falling since the financial crisis (note that UPRO was inaugurated in 2009 so all graphs for it start after then). Of course the leveraged strategy overperforms when there's a big force preventing the underlying from naturally correcting. I don't think the Argentinian market has a similarly strong backer for it, and anyways if the Argentinian equivalent of the fed tried to do something like this their economy would shit the bed and then interest rate you'd need to pay to afford 3x leverage would likely wipe out any gains (not to even factor in currency depreciation since presumably you care about USD performance rather than in pesos).

Sounds like a frustrated bear excuse, my guy. If the government’s holding the line, it’d be stupid not to leverage. It makes no difference whether it is naturally a good strategy, or if the government is artificially propping it up. It has been working for 16 years, so you can’t use it as an example of a strategy that’s likely to fail on a 2 year timeframe.

Latin America has a couple of really good leaders right now. I’m long on El Salvador and Argentina.

To be fair, political parties are clinging to images of themselves that are most likely to get themselves power. They don’t exactly have a loyalty to “the people” except in the sense that in a democratic system, the legitimacy of a government is supposedly conferred by plebiscite. But I don’t think any politician really spends so much as ten minutes a day worrying about the welfare of the people in his own country. They care about winning elections, they care about pushing agendas important to their bloc. But I don’t imagine either one of them care very much about what narrative wins them power. I expect the democrats to drop the blue collar thing pretty soon, not because they’re going to change their mind, but because it’s seen by the general public as false. Nobody sees the democrats as in the corner of the common man. The democrats represent the PMC and fashionable identity politics causes (the kind that the PMC likes, rather than things that make life better for minorities). They represent the manicured hand of the upper classes who only see plebeians through the lenses of Noblesse Obliges. The right represents the blue collar workers.

Trump as a caudillo is not a new comparison- it's just usually been democrats making it. Charismatic leader promising to set things right by rule through force of personality is kinda true.

As others mentioned in this sub-thread, racial identity is an important consideration but by no means is it the only factor supporting one’s quality of life. Economic prosperity counts for a lot as well. A rising economic tide is enough to cover a multitude of sins. But when that tide recedes, racial preferences remain.

For example, George Floyd wasn’t the only black man to have died in police custody. Nor was his death the only one recorded and sensationalized in the media. But the reaction to his death was so much larger—why? Because the COVID economy crushed people and they wanted a reason to vent their frustrations. The unemployment rate was something like 10 percent at the time, and people were locked in their homes and going stir crazy.

After reading (post-Floyd) about Arthur McDuffie, who was beaten to death by Miami police on December 16, 1979 despite having committed no crime, I would have expected that to spark nationwide rage. There were serious riots in Miami's black neighborhoods, but the cause failed to catch on nationwide.

I have to conclude this is because newspapers and TV stations outside Miami didn't cover it (but the black papers must have?!), so I guess social media made all the difference.

but the black papers must have?!

The OCR isn't great but yes, it was covered by multiple black and at least one "alternative anti-war" papers in North Carolina. Unclear if there was any rage associated or just reporting.

racial identity is an important consideration

Is it though? It seems to me that this is one of the key points of disagreement between the intellectual/journalist class and the wider MAGA coalition. If you watch Trump and Co. opposition to immigration is almost always framed in either economic terms (jobs) or security (criminals 'waltzing' across the border unchecked), the preoccupation with racial identity is pretty much exclusive to PMCs and the specific subset of minority grifters who prey upon them.

Jobs and border security are topics safely within the Overton Window, yet correlated to racial identity politics fairly well. Politicians are allowed to talk about them while maintaining plausible deniability about being white identitarians. That’s the upside to civic nationalism, if you subscribe to the idea that Americanism is closely associated with European/white heritage.

How many of those criminals waltzing across the border are ethnic Swedes, Poles, or Irish?

And yet we see Hispanics breaking for Trump (allegedly against thier interests) and white identitarians breaking for Harris (again allegedly against thier interests), the rationalist who is deeply invested in identity politics might have trouble understanding what is going on, but to anyone else the the simplest explanation is the ovious.

The Democrats claim that no one cares about crime or the economy, just race is further evidence that democrats do not care about crime or the economy, they only care about race.

Don’t believe every claim you read. A post-election survey by the Associated Press shows that Trump won 55% of the white vote in 2020 versus 56% in 2024. He improved with Latinos (35% in 2020 to 43% in 2024) and blacks (8% in 2020 to 16% in 2024), but these remain small segments of the voting population compared to whites. Do the numbers suggest a racial reckoning for Democrats? Hardly—they just failed to turn out the non-white vote. In 2020, whites were 74% of the voting population; in 2024 whites increased to 75%. This in a country where the white population is declining in both percentage and real terms.

Trump won in 2024 for the same reason he won in 2016: the Democrats picked a terrible candidate who failed to inspire non-white voter turnout. The Democrats have a long-term formula for electoral success, they just have to get their heads out of their asses and pick someone personally likable. I am amazed at how hard this has been for them.

He improved with Latinos (35% in 2020 to 43% in 2024) and blacks (8% in 2020 to 16% in 2024)

This more than "suggests" a reckoning this "is" the reckoning. The Democrats' electoral strategy for the last 30+ years has depended on keeping Blacks and Latinos on the Democrats plantation and this is why the people pushing Identity politic the hardest are all woke PMCs from Democrat controlled cities and/or Canada.

The nature of FPTP elections means that even a small shift in the effectiveness of a tactic can have big effects on the end result and these are not small shifts.

Do the numbers suggest a racial reckoning for Democrats? Hardly—they just failed to turn out the non-white vote.

This is a racial reckoning for Democrats. A racial reckoning isn't when the racial block converts in-majority to the other side, but when it can no longer be counted upon as a racial block.

Due to the structure of the Democratic coalition and its distribution across various electoral units, Democratic victory across the national electoral landscape requires not just a preponderance of 'minority' voters, but a consistently high preponderance. Those voters are what make 'favorable' gerrymanders favorable in the first place by having narrow coalition majorities in as many districts as possible. Due to how a First Past the Post system works, if a coalition goes from a hypothetical 52% to 49% output- a swing of just 1% protest voting and 1% switching sides- a coalition goes from winning the electoral contest 100% of the time to 0% of the time.

This is why Harris 'only' getting around 80% of the black vote, and Trump doubling from 8 to 16% of the black vote was such a disaster for the Democrats' nation-wide results. The Democratic coalition in the modern urban-based PMC-centered format is/was dependent on 90%-ish alignment to maintain the degree of reach they did have outside urban centers. Worse than a nearly 10% drop from African American support levels earlier in the century, the crossover of voters is double the impact in a binary first-past-the-pos setup. Every drop below that is a 1% equivalent needed from elsewhere, and every crossover is 2% equivalent needed from elsewhere to make up for not only the lost vote, but the additional vote to the other party.

Moreover, voter consistency of a block hinges on the block never voting otherwise. The biggest predictors of how someone will vote is how their parents and family vote, and the biggest predictor of how that someone votes is how many times they've crossed party lines before. The first cross-over is both the hardest and the most significant, as the voter who has crossed over even one time before is far more likely to do so again, and the voters who are known to cross over are among the biggest influencers to get their families to cross over as well, until you have a critical mass of people who are no longer 'reliable' voters for the party. This is how voting blocks / electoral walls crumble.

The issue for the Democrats, going back to the coalition structure, is that the urban-based PMC-core model was the development of the Obama-era party, and the party coalition expectations were based off of his coalition. Except Obama's black and minority support was the exception, being exceptionally high, not the norm, or the level of expected support to baseline from. And as the normalization of Black voters defecting continues, the future reliability of the ethnic blocks is going to decrease, not increase.

As long as the Democratic party coalition continues to baseline off the expectation of Obama-era levels of support- and dismiss failure to meet it as a failure of turn-out as opposed to a transition in the degree of party loyalty of the ethnic voting blocks- they are going to continue to face the racial reckoning as the racial groups they reckon will overwhelmingly support them, won't.

I think it’s less a racial reckoning and more about them being pretty much outed as caring mostly about the concerns of the laptop class and their pet causes than actually running the country.

They don’t care that crime and drug use in cities is horrible. They care that nobody mentions it, and that they don’t put too many minorities in prison. This hurts poor blacks quite a bit because they don’t have the wealth to leave and go to lower crime areas. Working class jobs are a bit harder to come by because we’re importing millions of working class Mexicans and Hispanics willing to work for McDonald’s wages doing construction and restaurants and trash pickup. If you’re in that class, especially for blacks who have less education and fewer opportunities, this is a bad thing. But saying that is racist. And when people can’t get legit jobs and earn their money, crime looks attractive, especially if the authorities have outright stated they don’t want to prosecute crimes.

Environmental stuff, in abstract, I think is okay. The problem is that it’s basically being done on the backs of poor people. Costs are higher because we refuse to dig up the oil and coal reserves we have. We put huge roadblocks to development and manufacturing, often in the form of regulations. This might be okay for the elites who don’t care how much anything costs, but if you’re counting pennies, yeah the fact that your gas costs $5 a gallon matters. Tge fact that regulations have doubled tge cost of food matters.

People know that pattern by now. They watch Americans suffer, especially poorer ones, knowing that help is not on the way. At least not for natives. And that’s what hurts democrats. If you’re not needing something that the elites see as important, or you’re in the wrong social class, you aren’t getting help. Poor people in North Carolina are still sleeping in tents hoping to not lose their land. Immigrants in New York get fully funded EBT cards and free housing. And it’s not super surprising that people are turning away from the party of neoliberalism and lazy identity politics is losing support.

the preoccupation with racial identity is pretty much exclusive to PMCs

You cannot honestly be attempting to claim that racial identity is not important to most black Americans of all socioeconomic classes.

I can.

More specifically I contest the words "most" and "all".

Oh boy.

I mean, this really is the central DR3tard article of faith. “Egghead white communists taught blacks to care about race. If it weren’t for them, black people would all be good old-fashioned American individualists.” It’s delusional. Sure, many middle-class blacks don’t go around screaming about race all the time. But I guarantee you most of them were raised, by their family members and not just by white liberal teachers, that their race and heritage are important. They’ve gotten “the talk” about how police can present a potential threat, and how they need to take extra care to put their best foot forward around white people, so as to not feed into stereotypes. When they see a news story about a black guy who got himself killed by police, there’s a little part of them that says, “That could have been me.”

You and guys like you are always smugly going on about how “PMC liberals” — your ever-present outgroup, whose machinations are directly responsible for every last bad thing in the world — don’t know what everyday, salt-of-the-earth black people are like, so they have to rely on the accounts of grifters pushing an agenda. (An agenda taught to them by, of course, PMC whites.)

But no, this is nonsense. We can see what black people are like and what they value not only by speaking directly to them — something which I’ve done thousands of times in my life — but also by observing their voting patterns, their choices of entertainment, the ways in which they choose to spend their private lives largely in the company of other black folks. They go to black churches, listen to black music (whether that’s hip-hop, or gospel, or Motown, or jazz), and watch black movies. They have a distinct culture, which tracks almost one-to-one with race, and they don’t see anything wrong with that. They’re not doing this for “identity politics”, or to get gibs from da white man, or because scheming communist white people are pulling their strings. It doesn’t mean they can’t productively interact with white people; many of them have white friends, or at least white coworkers. But they know who their people are, and their inner lives are directed primarily toward the betterment of their larger community. This is healthy and normal. It’s not a pathological behavior, and it’s not something “the PMC” taught them.

You and guys like you are always smugly going on about how “PMC liberals” — your ever-present outgroup, whose machinations are directly responsible for every last bad thing in the world — don’t know what everyday, salt-of-the-earth black people are like, so they have to rely on the accounts of grifters pushing an agenda. (An agenda taught to them by, of course, PMC whites.)

They aren’t responsible for literally everything that happens. But what they have is a set of objectively harmful luxury beliefs (for example identity politics), are insulated by their money from the consequences of those beliefs, and because they have much more time to be politically active, and have more money to throw to NGOs that say things they like to hear, they have an outsized influence on politics. It’s the “make middle class women clap” phenomenon that’s been going on for decades. Political leaders listen to them, artists listen to them, etc. because they have time and disposable income.

I don’t think they invented blacks or Hispanics caring about race. They’re minorities, and banding together to solve problems is simply how problems get solved when you don’t compromise the majority of your area. Hispanics do the same. The big difference is that until recently whites were a big enough majority in America and Western Europe that whites didn’t feel the need to do the same thing. Christians didn’t feel the need to band together before because they had a supermajority in elections and therefore their issues were dealt with. The reason so many here don’t like PMC liberals is that the issues that are brought up by whites and Christians are issues that PMCs oppose as backward and uncouth and so on, and they’re thus funding and working for groups that oppose white identity politics.

Political leaders listen to them, artists listen to them, etc. because they have time and disposable income.

Do they ever

MacKenzie Scott, Bezos ex wife, used the gigantic Amazon divorce money she got to spend 16 BILLION dollars on hundreds of NGOs

These billionaires divorces are worse than Soros

Well yeah. It’s how politics works for the most part. For rich people it’s a sport and they have tons of free time and money to spend bankrolling things that they can brag about at dinner parties. And for the most part that’s all they care about. Palestinians are a popular cause because the Israelis on TV mostly look like Europeans, and the Palestinians are brown. Besides, saying Islam has a violence problem makes them feel bad.

More comments

Oh boy.

I mean, this really is the central DR3tard article of faith

No matter how much you might sneer at it, DR3 (ie "Democrats are the real Racists") remains objectivly true.

Who is the real retard then?

What dr3 is saying is that paternalist racially conscious identity politics performed by the democrats is more racist than any republican, even the deep south caricature everyone imagines when you say racist. They dress it up in fancy language and performative compassion, but don't actually give a shit what happens to the community or what the people there think or want.

It is one hundred percent correct, but unlike its brother 'what if the positions were reversed' is a poor argument for right wingers because it assumes the progressive framing is correct.

More comments

Assuming they’re racist against nonwhites, yes.

You didn’t even refute anything I said. Do you have specific evidence — even if it’s just anecdotal! — to demonstrate that what I’m saying is untrue?

My evidence is that of my own eyes.

I live in a decent sized southern city, and as fantastical as this may sound to the average mottizen such as yourself, black people are out there, right now, wearing clothes, driving cars, and running buisinesses as if they were human beings. While the streets are clean, and reasonably well maintained, and homelessness is rare.

Who are you to tell me that they aren't?

More comments

Who is the real retard then?

"I'll see your DR3, and raise you a DR4".

(Dissident Right are...) - don't ban plz, it's a self-deprecating joke!

CA in the 50's.

Have you seen the newspaper advertisements for the post-war new build ranch style homes in the new / first suburbs?

It was short lived though, you can see the degeneracy and decay begin to set as depicted in Dragnet.

It was never possible to avoid them, there are large swaths of the country (eg the Rural south, Texas, portions of California) where the "minority" population has been there as long if not longer than the "white". Hanania is just another member of the PMC raging at his percieved loss of privilege.

Would you rather live in 1950's California as a white person or future California in a post-racial one where everyone is mixed and from all around the world and there is no unifying culture or set of values other than "diversity is our strength". Obviously that ship has sailed, but if I had a time machine I know which one I'm choosing.

Time machines aren’t real, and nobody has the option to return to 1950’s California. That ship sailed and is not coming back. All I can do is look toward the future, try and game out how different trend could possibly develop, and do my small part to try and make sure the better outcomes are realized rather than the worse ones.

Taylor’s stance on race relations between whites and Asians has never been coherent, which is particularly surprising since he was famously born and raised in Japan as the child of two American missionaries.

Assuming that Blacks are inferior to whites and whites are equal to Asiatics, still doesn't get you to supporting infinite Asiatic migration to white countries and infinite white immigration to Asiatic ones. When the next war errupts with an Asiatic country, the coethnics of that Asiatic country US will again face brutal persecution, which would be lacking if they were white.

And because Asiatics are perceived to be intellectual equals to whites, their future persecution is all the more likely: if Japanese-Americans were as smart as mere rats, like Americans depicted them as, they wouldn't credibly be considered a threat. But because the enemy is both weak and strong and Americans in their heart of hearts knew Japanese Americans were at least their intectual equal, Americans knew they posed a threat, if they weren't loyal.

Likewise supporting infinite white immigration into Asiatic countries makes you no better than open border types who consider all socities with functioning credit cards to be equal: immigration even of equal quality populations breeds distrust and disrupts the assabiyah. The few white Americans in Japan, despite your claims that their IQ is equal to that of natives, act in the same manner as immigrants to white countries do: refuse to learn the language, write smear pieces alleging persecution or spread deceits inteding to besmirch the reputation of the host country. See Debito Arudou, Jake Adelestein, David Atkinson, neither showing the amount of respect to the country which opened its doors to them, I assume you would demand from immigrants show to the US.

If white nationalists want to be seen as something to conservationists, who can care about pandas without hating snub nosed monkeys, they should refrain from promoting dissolution of non-white peoples. Admixing South Koreans to some subgroups of US whites could increase their average IQ, but it would decrease diversity, and a principled white nationalist who cares about diversity would oppose it, just as he would oppose any attempt to destroy as a nation any ethnicity, no matter how low its average IQ.

Afford Asiatic peoples the same rights you, Hoffmeister25, have in the past said Black people also deserve: the right to their own states and with their own immigration policies.

When the next war errupts with an Asiatic country, the coethnics of that Asiatic country US will again face brutal persecution, which would be lacking if they were white.

I see no reason to believe that this is true. (And, to be clear, the supposed “brutal persecution” of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 was actually nothing of the sort.)

Likewise supporting infinite white immigration into Asiatic countries makes you no better than open border types who consider all socities with functioning credit cards to be equal

I made it explicit in my post that I do not support “infinite immigration” of anyone to anywhere. Immigration numbers should be controlled and manageable, to limit cultural disruption and strains on education, the job market, and public accommodations.

If white nationalists want to be seen as something to conservationists, who can care about pandas without hating snub nosed monkeys, they should refrain from promoting dissolution of non-white peoples. Admixing South Koreans to some subgroups of US whites could increase their average IQ, but it would decrease diversity, and a principled white nationalist who cares about diversity would oppose it, just as he would oppose any attempt to destroy as a nation any ethnicity, no matter how low its average IQ.

I don’t care about diversity in that sense. I want the world to become more interconnected and culturally-homogenous over time; I just want the culture the world converges on to be advanced, Eurasian in character rather than some oppositional Third World miasma, and to value the things I value. I’d be perfectly happy if in 300 years nobody speaks Korean any longer, as long as that means that people with Korean ancestry have been successfully amalgamated into a thriving, technologically-advanced, proud world culture. This will mean a flattening and merging of white cultures as well; I don’t care if anyone is still speaking Dutch in 300 years either. This process of cultural blending between the peoples of Eurasia and the Americas needs to take place gradually and not by force or coercion, but I do believe it will take place.

I don’t care about diversity in that sense

At the risk of drawing booing, hissing and throwing of rocks I will confess that I'm super woke in this regard, and actually do care about diversity. Humanity transformed into stirred gruel of averaged out geno, pheno and culture types sounds very unappealing to my sensibilities, even if despite the numerical supermajority of Indians and Africans they somehow fail to dominate this gestalt.
Let the hundred flowers bloom, I say. The only realistic obstacle to what modern left winger would perceive as consummate planetary diversity is ironically the rejection of diversity on the local scale through self segregation and political borders - unfashionable as it is today. Interesting how through seemingly subtle tweaking of what diversity means we can arrive at dramatically different policies.
I'm aware that, to an extent, homogenization is natural in a world made smaller through technological means. With any luck, space colonization will prove a lasting obstacle to this.

I’d be perfectly happy if in 300 years nobody speaks Korean any longer

Idle curiosity: how many languages do you speak fluently?

Idle curiosity: how many languages do you speak fluently?

Just English. I used to be conversational in Spanish, albeit at nowhere near a high enough level to discourse intellectually in it; my Spanish has atrophied significantly from disuse, though.

I do expect that English will probably be the global lingua franca if the homogenization I’m expecting becomes a reality; while I love the English language very much (duh, I speak it, it feels like home to me, of course I think it’s the best) I also welcome language reforms (especially spelling reforms) in order to make it a truly suitable global (and later interstellar) human language.

I wrote a top level post earlier this week about- well, I don’t know that it was about this, but it was adjacent- white people not minding Mexican neighbors. People are fine with it.

Race issues, intractable ones, in the US seem specific to blacks, and perhaps specific to AADOS blacks, vs everyone else. Yes subcontinentals are widely disliked elsewhere in the Anglosphere but we don’t have enough of them for it to be a big issue here.

I suspect that if we imported unselected Arabs or whatever, then there would be serious race issues between them and everyone else. But we don’t have those either. American ‘race issues’ are code for ‘blacks and non-blacks not getting along’.

I’m not sure it’s strictly a race issue. Arabs are mostly Muslims and Islam has a whole host of really bad ideas embedded in the religion. Even if we don’t allow random Arabs in, conversion is a problem as well because the religion is predicated upon Islam supremacy and imposition of Islamic laws and social structures on any society it encounters. They wouldn’t just impose a Mosque of England and you could live perfectly comfortably practicing your own religion without fear or having to follow the rules. Islam simply cannot accept other beliefs as equal to their own.

Mexicans are okay people, and generally seem to be taking up labor jobs, which I think is why Trump did so well among black men who might be competing for those labor jobs. Whites don’t care so much unless they’re in the trades because they aren’t around them as much.

It seems like Sunni Shiite and Christian Arabs are three different ethnic groups; Christian Arabs make good immigrants and the other two don't. To what extent this is driven by ethnicity/culture vs religion is an open question. I certainly think religion plays a role.

Considering that the main difference between Sunni and Shiites one one hand and Christians on the other is religion, I’m not seeing much of an open question here.

Almost none of these people are converts, and their parents weren’t either. A significant plurality of Arab Christians don’t have grandparents who speak Arabic(they spoke Aramaic instead), the consanguinity rates are much lower, these populations are basically different castes in the same country.

Centracos and Haitians?

There will not be mass deportations. I’m pretty confident in that. And I’m also pretty confident that if all the illegals had been Mexicans(most aren’t these days), immigration would not be a top political issue.

Who do you think those people were understood by everyone to be?

Central Americans? Asians? Mexicans are no longer the majority of illegal immigrants.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/

It's the most common in the sense that it's the single biggest, but it accounts for about a third of illegal immigrants. The lion's share are not Mexicans.

Additionally, while white identitarians were correct to predict an exodus of conservative whites from racially-diverse liberal states, they probably did not anticipate that such whites would flee not to Whitopias such as Idaho and Montana, bu

Assuming that you've accurately represented Hanania's viewpoint here, he doesn't appear to fully understand the situation. On a county level, people move towards whiteness and away from blackness.

Sure, South Carolina has a lot of black people. But conservatives moving from California to South Carolina aren't going to be anywhere near them. They will be in a nice safe street somewhere else.

But even on a state level, Idaho is the second fastest growing state since 2010 after Mormon (and lily white) Utah.

At the same time, Taylor is still wrong. Because it's not about "being near your own people". It's about being near white people. Black and Hispanic people also migrate towards white areas. High trust societies rock.

I think it's not so much about being near white people, it's about being near people who create thriving economies and do little violent crime or property crime. Few people of any race want to live around methed-out white gangsters in a backwater town. And then the secondary consideration is being around your own race. So, for example, a white person will probably on average prefer to live around affluent peaceful white people than around affluent peaceful Asian people, (of course there are many exceptions - some people of every race enjoy living around people of a foreign culture and so on. I just mean on average), but would rather live around affluent peaceful Asian people than around violent white people in a place with a really bad economy.

At the same time, Taylor is still wrong. Because it's not about "being near your own people". It's about being near white people. Black and Hispanic people also migrate towards white areas. High trust societies rock.

Conservative Muslims in Europe, for example, prove Hanania's point that people move for economic reasons and not just purely identarian ones,sure.

But do these groups mainly move to live amongst white people or do they live amongst their own? You can have all of the benefits of a Western society while making it more like yours if you can have your own neighborhood/community embedded in a high development country.

It's about being near white people.

I don’t think this is true. It is about getting away from blacks, but most whites appear to have few if any qualms about moving to places like the Bay Area which have heavily Latino and Asian populations, but few blacks.

But there are massive economic reasons to go there, so they will deal with the diversity even if they don't like it.

Exactly. Here's a great blog article on the subject: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/fleeing-opportunity

Diversity has killed growth because talented people are leaving the most productive areas. Throughout most of history, the opposite was true, with young dreamers coming to Rome, Paris, London, or New York to make their fortune. They still do, of course, but in much smaller numbers.

How bad is it? California has lost millions of citizens to domestic migration despite having by far the best climate and great economic opportunities. Imagine how bad things would be if they didn't have beaches, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley.

It's not all bad news though. Cities are IQ shedders, so in the long run, it's probably better if our best people leave the cities. Bad for economic growth, but good for demographics.

Diversity has killed growth because talented people are leaving the most productive areas.

Racial diversity is not even close to the primary reason why most people flee California. The extremely high cost of living, the massive homeless problem, the crumbling infrastructure, the punishing taxation, the piss-poor governance — all of these are far more salient than the number of Mexicans. (And California has a far lower black percentage than nearly any of the states — Texas, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina — to which Californians are mostly fleeing.)

Again, people are not moving to the black areas of those states.

Most blacks in Texas live in the same major cities everyone else does, and these are the ones people are moving to.

You’re aware that black people can move around outside “their neighborhoods”, right? The neighborhood where I live isn’t heavily black in terms of the people who occupy houses here, but there are plenty of black people when I go to the grocery store, or to various public places. If a school district practices busing or has magnet schools, my children can have black students in their classes, even if we don’t live in a “black area”. Thus, the black percentage of the population is still relevant even if you feel like you can just move to “a white area”.

Yes, of course. People living in majority black neighborhoods move out a lot. It's a good idea for them to do so.

But majority black areas still exist, even if they bleed residents every year. Also, new majority black areas are constantly created as other groups leave.

More comments

The extremely high cost of living

Cost of living increases are directly related to more migrants and illegal immigrants providing competition for many of the individual costs that go into living (food, energy, housing).

the massive homeless problem

Directly related to the above as well. If the cost of living and competition/pressure on wages wasn't artificially pumped up by immigration, the homeless situation wouldn't be so bad.

the crumbling infrastructure,

i.e. infrastructure that can't support the inflated number of people it is expected to support - once again you can blame migration.

the punishing taxation,

And a lot of that is due to illegal immigration as well.

the piss-poor governance

Directly enabled by immigration. There's no viable right wing path to victory, so there's nothing that cleans out dead weight on the left side of politics. When you don't even have to try to win elections, the selection pressures for leadership consist entirely of pleasing donors and party insiders - as opposed to solving the problems your citizens are facing.

You're right when you say that racial diversity isn't the cause - but you're not really giving a complete picture, either. The costs of massive immigration, which is one of the manifestations of the drive for racial diversity, are all directly related to the list of reasons you gave for people fleeing. You're looking at people fleeing from a burning house and saying "They're not running from the fire, they're running from the heat and the smoke! Look, they're even taking shelter in a building with a fireplace, so it clearly isn't the fire that's making them run."

Texas has very similar demographics and high immigration inflows, with at the very least fewer of these problems than California does. Poor governance is the main reason.

They move to the whitest POSSIBLE areas though like Pleasanton or Livermore or Palo Alto

Not really. Palo Alto gained almost no residents from 2010 to 2020 and is 48% non Hispanic white. Dublin is one of the fastest growing cities in the state and is 28 percent non Hispanic white.

they move to the whitest city possible, not that they move to a white majority city

They don't. That's what I'm telling you. Palo Alto, comparatively white, is practically not growing. Almost nobody is moving there. Dublin, comparatively nonwhite, is among the fastest growing cities in the state.

I honestly don’t even know what you are trying to say with your comment.

My argument is that your claim has no correspondence to reality and contradicts the data. Do you have any evidence for your claim?

Your claim:

On a county level, people move towards whiteness

This is a claim about where people move to. The cities growing fastest (i.e. the cities that have the most people moving into them) are rather nonwhite. How does this not, at least to a first approximation, disprove your claim? Perhaps you can argue that all the growth seen in e.g. Dublin and Emeryville is Asians, but you haven't shown that.

So again, do you have any evidence that white people tend to move to white towns? Or is your argument not actually supported by evidence of where people are moving?

You can look at maps of cities in the Bay Area and the percentage of white people and they clearly try to congregate and cluster in certain areas.

https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/bayarea_whites_2017_0-0.png

Doesn't really look like that to me. Looks to me that white people avoid the very shittiest parts of the bay, which makes sense since white people have the resources to do this more often than Hispanics or blacks. White people also more frequently live in old money towns like Atherton, but that's clearly not due to whites overwhelmingly moving there, for the simple reason that nobody is overwhelmingly moving to Atherton. And finally white people are more likely to live in rural areas, but again, hardly anyone is moving there.

More comments

It is very low non-white Hispanic and black through, which is probably what he means. (10% and 3% respectively iirc! There goes 47% of all the murders!)

More comments

53% Asian in Dublin? That's crazy, I don't remember it being anything like that much.
It's even 42-42 white-Asian in Pleasanton too. Guess I was in a bit of a racial bubble.

When was the last time you visited Dublin? There's been a lot of Asians in the tri valley area for some time, and the trends have continued.

Ultimately, Taylor’s predictions of mass racial strife and whites fleeing to the hinterlands to form whites-only communities just have not panned out. As Hanania says: There are plenty of extremely white places in America, and almost nobody is moving to any of them.

I haven't followed Taylor's work too closely, but it's wrong to characterize the entire Dissident Right as predicting that whites will flee to rural white communities. I don't want to live in a rural white commune in Idaho, I want to live in a world-class city! The fact that non-whites migrate to the most desirable places to live is not really a rebuttal to "demographics are destiny." And white flight to the suburbs is evidence of that fact- it's a compromise: they want access to a world class city but they don't want to live around blacks.

And if you don't call the past 10 years racial strife, I'm not sure exactly what it would take for you to admit this has happened. Take something like white representation in Ivy League 25 years ago compared to today. That is a reckoning. If Taylor predicted White people would flee all the cities to form rural communes (I can't verify that, I'll take your word for it), then you can register that as a false prediction, but the "White Nationalist" prediction I've heard is it will cause civilizational decline and urban decay. If White Nationalists predicted urban decay would you say their prediction was correct?

I have many problems with Richard Hanania, but seeing the army of pro-Taylor trolls

Richard Hanania's entire schtick is trolling with insults about how low-status it is to be a white identarian, including ample insults about appearance. Turnabout is fair play.

And if you don't call the past 10 years racial strife, I'm not sure exactly what it would take for you to admit this has happened.

Hanania’s stance, which I basically agree with, is that the real strife isn’t “everyone against white people”, but rather “blacks against everyone else”. If the oppositional culture of black was taken out of the equation, whether by crushing Indian Schools style cultural reprogramming, eugenics, or geographic/political separation, white people would have almost no difficulty living with a substantial number of immigrants from other races. Latinos certainly took time and significant effort to integrate, and obviously the country needs to get a handle on the number of Latinos to make sure they don’t become a majority population too quickly, but having lived in a heavily Latino city my entire life, I can honestly say that they have not been a significant source of any strife or discomfort to me. Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here. (Again, proportions matter — I wouldn’t want America to accept 4 million Chinese immigrants next year — but pretending like Asians are a significant contributor to racial division in this country is simply dishonest.) The problem, overwhelmingly, is blacks and the fallout from the eternal question of how to deal with them. Applying a model of race relations designed for black-white conflict to other races is simply missing the point. It’s a distraction.

There are places in the world from which developed countries should want a very small number of immigrants. The United States has, thus far, managed to do a spectacular job of avoiding receiving very many immigrants from those places. Europe has done a much worse job of this, and has suffered the consequences. As I’ve said before, if Europe had let in a million Vietnamese instead of a million Syrians, the continent simply would not be facing any serious problems with multiculturalism. Jared Taylor’s model is, like yours, over-focused on whites vs. non-whites, while it should instead be trying as hard as possible to muster Asians and Latinos in a coalition against blacks and Arabs.

Minor point- the Hispanics that do well in the US seem to be mostly Mexicans, Cubans and certain other carribean groups, and the upper crust and upper middle classes from elsewhere in Latin America. Centracos(most of the people coming to the border now) do much worse, possibly as badly as blacks.

Oh for sure, that’s what I meant when I said America has so far done a good job of keeping out masses of people from populations which will be way harder to integrate. Centracos and Venezuelans will be a very different breed (literally) of Latinos.

Yeah, it's frustrating that people, including Hoffmeister who I feel ought to know better, don't property account for European admixture in Latinos when they get defensive of Latino immigration to America and treat it as a monolith.

Kind of like how Hollywood makes Ana de Armas the character who is the stand-in for Hispanic migration to the United States in the film Knives Out. Not this Guatemalan guy.

Yeah, it's frustrating that people, including Hoffmeister who I feel ought to know better, don't property account for European admixture in Latinos when they get defensive of Latino immigration to America and treat it as a monolith.

I don’t know why you think I see all Latin American peoples as a monolith. I live in San Diego, which is very heavily Mexican, but we have communities of other nationalities and I have interacted with them. I’m well aware that Mexican mestizos and brown Dominicans are very different sorts of people on average. The difference is that thus far, America simply has not had to deal with very large numbers of non-Mexican Latinos. I’m as hawkish as you are about keeping it that way.

You're still thinking in terms of racial coalitions, and Hanania does not or at least he pretends he does not.

You think racial coalitions only matter when it comes to the Black Question, but they can be tossed aside when it comes to every single other political and cultural question? Nonsense. You can say you want them to be your ally against the blacks until the cows come home, but they are going to act in their own interests. Racial coalitions are everywhere.

Blacks are not even the most threatening minority because they don't really have the agency to achieve political and cultural power like, say, Indians coming and replacing the highest levels of our most important institutions. You don't think that would be a problem?

Again, proportions matter — I wouldn’t want America to accept 4 million Chinese immigrants next year

But why not? You just say "proportions matter." But can you explain why accepting 4 million Chinese immigrants next year would be a problem, but at the same time "Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here". Would you be OK with American demographics becoming vast majority Chinese if it were just spread out over 80 years and associated with economic growth?

Arab Americans also have a higher median income and level of education compared to Latinos. They do well in America. Why not let the Arabs in?

Nigerians also do well in America. I've never had a bad interaction with a Nigerian, only good ones. Why not let them all in?

You haven't sufficiently explained why Latinos are good in America but Arabs are bad in America. If you are measuring "do well" by economic output then you're just in Bryan Caplan Open Borders land like Hanania. Or is your position "Open borders for everyone except Africans"?

Overall, you seem stuck in evaluating immigration impact based on crime and terrorism. If a group doesn't commit a ton of crime then it's OK to mass migrate to Europe and the United States? Feel free to dispute that if I'm not fairly characterizing your argument.

But can you explain why accepting 4 million Chinese immigrants next year would be a problem, but at the same time "Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here".

I'm going to take a different tack than @Hoffmeister25, and say "modern Mainland Chinese are a considerably-bigger threat than other East Asians and to some extent even legacy Chinese". Specifically, the PRC actually does maintain a degree of control over its diaspora, particularly those educated there (its internal propaganda is far more effective than its external) and those with hostages close family members there, which poses an obvious NatSec risk in the not-so-unlikely event of crisis; "don't import a large, organised enemy force" is like Rule 1 of immigration policy.

But why not? You just say "proportions matter." But can you explain why accepting 4 million Chinese immigrants next year would be a problem, but at the same time "Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here".

This is one of my least favorite tactics of yours, wherein you pretend not to understand that it’s more difficult to culturally integrate a large number of people than it is to integrate a small number of people. If 4 million Chinese people arrived in the U.S. over the course of one year, this would introduce very serious logistical issues for the places accepting them. Masses of children entering the school system without any English proficiency. The likelihood of insular ethnic enclaves, of the type that still exist today in parts of New York City. (I’ve been to the Chinatown in Flushing myself, and it really is like stepping into some random street market in China.) Whereas a smaller number, spread out over a longer period of time, would introduce considerably smaller issues.

Arab Americans also have a higher median economic, level of education, and national average income compared to Latinos. They do well in America. Why not let the Arabs in?

Because that’s an extremely small selection of the total Arab population. Ditto for the Nigerians who have immigrated to the U.S. thus far. The story of Arab and African immigration to Europe shows what happens when you accept a totally un-selected mass of random citizens from these places. I have no problem living among intelligent English-speaking Igbo Nigerians, provided they are not provided with an outlet to politically prosecute grievances against white civilization. (And, to be clear, most do not appear to wish to do so.)

his is one of my least favorite tactics of yours, wherein you pretend not to understand that it’s more difficult to culturally integrate a large number of people than it is to integrate a small number of people.

I never made that assertion, I was asking you to elaborate on how you reconciled that statement with "there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here." You say cultural integration, but you acknowledge the reality of racial coalitions, you just seem to think they are only meaningful for the Black Question and not other cultural or political questions.

Jared Taylor's position is that racial coalitions would be impactful in many other ways and would compete with whites politically and culturally. I can say his prediction on that front has 100% come true. It's still early for Indians, but Taylor's point about all the wealthiest Indian philanthropists donating predominately to Indian causes would be a meaningful leading indicator that the racial coalitions won't respect your desire to only acknowledge them for the Black Question. There is also a huge amount of anecdotal evidence of nepotism from Indians in Silicon Valley culture. You just seem fixated on black crime without regard for how racial coalitions express themselves in all of our other cultural institutions.

Equally or more important than the question of racial coalitions is the question of ethnogenesis. You claim that eugenics is the most important question of the day, but you don't see the risk in haphazardly introducing admixture from all over the world into European society? You are certain that a mixture of everyone is going to be better than a European?

Jared Taylor's position is that racial coalitions would be impactful in many other ways and would compete with whites politically and culturally. I can say his prediction on that front has 100% come true.

I agree with you that the issue of integrating Indians is presenting some interesting difficulties. You and I probably agree that in many ways this issue is isomorphic to the integration of Jews into gentile countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, I see the story of Jewish integration as basically a qualified success story, whereas you clearly see it as a disaster and as an ill portent for how the Indian situation will pan out. Probably the biggest difference between the two scenarios is that there is just such an incredibly large number of Indians waiting to emigrate, and the prospect of successfully assimilating the kinds of numbers we’re potentially talking about is dire. We simply cannot let the nascent Indian lobby succeed at forcing our countries to let in an endless number of them. If the stream can be cut to a trickle, though, I think the story of Indian immigration to the West will be seen as a success in sixty years.

You claim that eugenics is the most important question of the day, but you don't see the risk in haphazardly introducing admixture from all over the world into European society? You are certain that a mixture of everyone is going to be better than a European?

I don’t know how many more ways I can make it clear that I do not want haphazard immigration from all over the world. No, I do not want billions of Sub-Saharans, or Gulf Arabs, or Venezuelans, or Melanesians. I do believe that the optimal genetic admixture of people in the future will be some combination of European, East Asian, Jewish, and a small but non-negligible amount of Amerindian. You might think this would be a mystery-meat catastrophe, but I think it would be a healthy and vital blending of the best each of these elements would offer.

What's your take on the Hapa ethnogenesis? Early results don't seem great. They seem to have a lot of issues, it's not clear human admixture works in the "best of both worlds" way like me all may wish.

I look at Hapas, imagine a little bit of Jewish admixture (very little, not enough to go around, more likely Jews are subsumed as well) plus Amerindian admixture, plus Indian admixture, imagine them replacing Europeans in America and Europe. I don't know man, seems like a pretty bad ending to the European race to me and I don't think Civilization would be better for it.

What's your take on the Hapa ethnogenesis?

I'll give my two cents, as I am a product of it. Those of us above a certain age are disproportionately likely to be from broken families (relative to non-mixed families of the same social class) and to have parents who are deeply weird in some way e.g. dad is autistic, a sexpat, or an abusive soldier, mom is a former sex worker or couldn't find a husband in her home country and snagged a white guy to have kids with at age 40, etc. This is not a good recipe for creating successful and well-adjusted individuals, but doesn't necessarily reflect what the results would be if you randomly paired off the populations of say Germany and South Korea.

The younger couples I see around me seem more normal, as most met at school or through some tech job in California, and the gender ratios are less skewed i.e. more pairings of Asian men and White women. It's too soon to tell for sure, but I imagine a nation of their descendants would look like a cross between Finland and Japan: a clean, orderly place capable of making substantial contributions to science, technology, and literature, but with a smaller fraction of truly brilliant, one-of-a-kind individuals. There's a certain type of genius I've seen in a few individuals of European, Jewish, or Indian descent that I have never seen in East Asians.

Hapas seem fine if they assimilate to a consistent culture. Getting stuck between two is bad for them.

What's your take on the Hapa ethnogenesis? Early results don't seem great. They seem to have a lot of issues, it's not clear human admixture works in the "best of both worlds" way like me all may wish.

What specific issues do you have in mind? Certainly some seem to deal with an angst about being torn between two different cultures; that’s to be understood, as currently European and East Asian cultures are still sufficiently divergent enough that I can imagine it being quite difficult to seamlessly navigate between both worlds. However, those cultural gaps are already on their way to closing, as Asian countries continue to Westernize. (And as Western countries increasingly integrate aspects of Asian culture.) I see the cultural difficulties hapas face as basically temporary and contingent. Are you pointing to more material genetic issues?

More comments

Very few Jewish-Chinese Hapas exist beyond the first gen; I personally know quite a few and they’re all first generation. You would need at least 2-3 generations to be able to discern what wasn’t just an identity crisis in my opinion.

More comments

spamming the comments section of the debate with petty insults about his appearance

Hanania did help bring it on himself by intentionally riling up the Chuds during the H1B visa kerfuffle.

The comments on that reddit post are not as one-sided as I expected, looks like this issue splits redditors differently than the other wedge issues.

The more I read of Hanania over time, the more respect I lose.

His opinions are all over the map and impossible to pin down. He's right about the gribblers and maga conservatives being and embracing stupidity, of course. But pinning himself in the neoliberal camp as a kind of anti-maga race realist zionist(?) is getting old fast.

More specifically, it's the smug eternal dunking that's been getting insufferable

When someone namefags they declare themselves a traitor to anons everywhere. If they were formerly one of them then they have betrayed their philosophy, their community and themselves. It is natural for those who remain in that community to attack them with everything they have. Calling it crab bucket behaviour inspired by envy is misunderstanding the game board.

As you mention, Hanania trolls all the time, and he especially trolls white nationalists. I don't see how turnabout isn't fair play.

I actually changed my mind about the crab bucket bit and edited that out before I saw your response to it. I wrote it before I spent some more time reading Hanania's timeline and losing the will to disapprove of the people attacking him.

I forgive him for namefagging because he didn't start doing it until he was outed by a journalist and made unemployable. Namefagging is his only way to make a living now, he has no choice. He could have been a right wing youtuber if he wanted, but instead he decided to picks fights with his former comrades for twitter-clout.

JD Vance did the same thing in 2016 and he was forgiven. So it's never too late to repent, I guess.

Ah it's all good, I just wanted to emphasise the trolling aspect - Hanania has fun with it, and while I'm sure there are a couple of trolls just losing their shit I think most of his responders are also having fun with it - they're playing the game from the opposite angle.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats