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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27825 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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HBD therefore socialism argument.

To be fair, I have long been uncertain whether widespread acceptance of HBD (to which I claim no strong opinion) isn't the right-wing slam dunk that I see it occasionally presented as. In particular, a very extreme left view of it is pretty terrifying too: "comrade, we've discovered a way to measure ability. You know, from each according to his (or her, or their) ability, and we've deemed you to have lots."

There's a reason I like to bring up HBD blogger "Jayman" on these discussions, because he was rather forthright about his support for HBD, and hard line hereditarianism (for one, he liked to argue that poor outcomes for children of single mothers are entirely due to genetic differences between the kind of women who end up single mothers and the kind who end up married mothers [and between the kind of men who knock up the former and the kind of men who marry the latter], and have nothing to do with the actual single-parent environment at all), being about justifying racial spoils in perpetuity. He'd argue that the infamous crime stat differentials are entirely due to blacks being genetically predisposed to criminality… and therefore they can't help it, and thus society owes it to them to punish them less harshly and less often than whites to compensate for this genetic disprivilege; and that black-on-white (and black-on-Asian, and black-on-Jewish) crime — which he once characterized in HBDChick's comments section as "a one-way race war" — is simply something that the less criminally-inclined races are obligated to tolerate, even indulge. That the reality of HBD means that the "genetic have" races are morally obligated to redistribute as much of their wealth to the "genetic have-not" races — particularly blacks — as is necessary to "close the gaps" and produce "racial equity" in perpetuity.

Georgism for IQ would be hilarious to suggest just for making that sort of person think about the consequences.
"If you have the IQ to post about Rick and Morty on Reddit all day, you could easily afford your tax payments by working as an investment banker instead. Hurry up: Cleetus's UBI won't pay for itself"

Reminds me a bit of Mankiw's Optimal Taxation of Height parody paper. IQ is observable, inelastic, and correlated with income, and so the government should collect IQ measurements and tax those with high IQ more.

I hadn't thought of that one in years, thanks for reminding me!

Thanks for pointing to the Mankiw, that's a pretty funny idea.

Georgism for virtue, by contrast, is already widespread. The idiom is "ruining it for everyone".

"If you have enough self-control, intelligence, and/or temperance that restricting your freedom is an injury, you're obviously wise enough to find a way to be able to pay the taxes on the licenses and permission slips we deem necessary before you may exercise those freedoms. If it saves just one life taken by the most selfish, nasty person in society, it's worth it."

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