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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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My position is that it's silly to say "the underclass back then wasn't really biologically inferior, but now they are."

Why? So we have one argument from the past about one group of people that you say was wrong (was it though?)

Why does that necessitate that a similar argument about a different group of people is wrong as well?

So we have one argument from the past about one group of people that you say was wrong

I didn't say it was wrong, assman did, more or less:

What makes his thesis “Bio”leninism is that in the 19th-20th century, society was less egalitarian and there were people being oppressed who would have otherwise been successful without these barriers which made socialism/communism attractive to a wider group of people than In current year, when all de jure discrimination is gone.

It would be surprising if previous claims of the biological inferiority of underclass groups turned out to be false but this time they were correct.

If you want to say, "the underclass was inferior back then, and they still are" that is a more consistent position.

I think they were back then and they are now. The idea is that in the absence of any discrimination at all, and the incredible living standards for even the most poor people, you need to search even lower on the totem pole to find the same kind of resentful people to form the most loyal members of the party.

I don't think it's an inconsistent position to claim that the upwards mobility of somebody hailing from the underclass but with good biological dispositions has improved in the meantime, meaning that the people who are still in it have been selected for NOT having those traits. I am not sure this argument is true, but it is not inconsistent.

It just seems like your position was trying to imply that "Bio"Leninism as a theory was wrong both then and now, and you try to demonstrate it's wrong by just associating it with far-right thinking.

But you do point out an inconsistency in the part of the post you quoted, but FWIW the original article on BioLeninism is consistent in the "both then and now position", and yes it is similar Stoddard's idea and the general thinking of ye-olde-racists... but that doesn't mean it's wrong:

Socialism works not only because it promises higher status to a lot of people. Socialism is catnip because it promises status to people who, deep down, know they shouldn't have it. There is such a thing as natural law, the natural state of any normally functioning human society. Basic biology tells us people are different. Some are more intelligent, more attractive, more crafty and popular. Everybody knows, deep in their lizard brains, how human mating works: women are attracted to the top dogs. Being generous, all human societies default to a Pareto distribution where 20% of people are high-status, and everyone else just has to put up with their inferiority for life. That's just how it works.

Socialism though promised to change that, and Marx showed they had a good plan. Lenin then put that plan to work in practice. What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party with little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union promoted minorities, women, sexual deviants, atheists, cultists and every kind of weirdo. Everybody but intelligent, conservative Russians of good families. The same happened in China, where e.g. the 5 provinces which formed the southern Mongolian steppe were joined up into "Inner Mongolia autonomous region", what Sailer calls "consolidate and surrender".

In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn't get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That's why they can't be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they'd rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dregs of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

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