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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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What sort of political options on the ground do radicalized youth like Mr Vawda have?

The almost openly genocidal EFF?

Let the record show that DA has a higher vote share than EFF, and their policies are likely to be considered reasonable by people here than the ANC or EFF. DA has 84 seats in the National Assembly, EFF has 44. (ANC has 230).

And I believe the ruling party, the ANC is also closer to that now than is good?

Closer, yes, but they seem to understand that actually oppressing the whites will be detrimental to their Swiss bank accounts and Vancouver apartments.

I don't know honestly how they're on genocidal rhetoric. Probably far less than Malema, otherwise he'd not be the radical.

All I gathered from the news is ANC is okay with massive corruption, has an almost seamless connection with organised crime and has a policy of moving squatters into voting precincts where they'd like more votes.

It's been losing support gradually though.

They've been losing support but they are seen as too conciliatory towards whites. The guy who leads ANC is one of the richest black elites in the country. EFF will turbocharge South Africa's descent into Zimbabwe. However, I ultimately think it won't be allowed to happen since even Western countries put pressure on ANC to tamp down the flirtation with overt black racism.

Pompeo even publicly warned SA over "appropriation without compensation" of white wealth that was making the rounds within ANC circles. The Biden admin doesn't seem to mollycoddle them either. SA has an important position for the world's mineral markets, which is why I suspect there will be far greater pressure to maintain the status quo compared to what we saw in Zimbabwe.

“I cannot guarantee the future. I am not a prophet. I said that if things don’t change, there will be a revolution affecting all of us – and that will include me and black people in suburbs. Those rising up from townships will accuse us of abandoning them in squalor and in poverty. We will all be in serious trouble.”

“It may not be me [calling for the slaughter of white people]. But it could be me. What will necessitate such a thing? I can’t guarantee I can’t or won’t call for the slaughter of white people. But why would I make a pledge to say I definitely won’t call for that? I won’t do it.”

Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, even more intense ethnic conflict.' I suppose this goes to show the power of nationalist feeling - it can override all other considerations.

I think this also highlights the importance of HBD. Some people on this forum have disputed its value, saying 'so what do we gain in the real world from this knowledge'? We'd gain useful information about the destiny of states that go from white rule (indigenous fighter jet programs, first heart transplant, nuclear program) to black rule (mass unemployment, constant power outages, ludicrously high crime/murder rate). We'd know it was unlikely that South Africa, along with Brazil, would be a meaningful part of BRICS, the source of future world economic growth. Useful investing information! And we'd know that since the situation in South Africa was very unlikely to markedly improve, future racial conflict is likely as the economic gap between black and white remains.

I mean, South Africa was once capable of big projects, but it has never been a nice place to live for the black majority, and it had serious crime and unemployment issues even under apartheid.

Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, even more intense ethnic conflict.' I suppose this goes to show the power of nationalist feeling - it can override all other considerations.

It's more of a "setting your house on fire to warm yourself", which is an obviously bad idea unless you are very, very cold right now.

It would be better if hbd didn’t need to be taught. It was just vaguely understood enough. But with the left saying every outcome difference it makes talking about hbd more important to prevent policy mistakes. S Africa would be better if for the most part they just let whites rule. Now you have the globalist saying everything is racism which makes their lower class believe the reason they are not getting ahead is oppression which then leads to ethnic conflict.

The thing is once you start thinking about hbd you start seeing it everywhere.

If I went to some Harvard economists policy symposium on Africa they would have all these fancy theories on what should be done. But non of them would incorporate hbd into it.

I think this also highlights the importance of HBD.

If anything, I'd say it demonstrates the exact opposite.

Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, and even more intense ethnic conflict.'

It just goes to show that culture matters.

How convenient, it's just the culture. Will you also argue that culture can make a chihuahua into a hunting dog? Will an improved culture of running put Europeans at the top of the 100m sprints? Will changes to black culture mean they start getting many Fields Medallists or STEM Nobel Prizes?

Genetics is real. Evolution is real. These things will remain real regardless of what you think about them, that's the beauty of material reality.

Will you also argue that culture can make a chihuahua into a hunting dog?

It takes culture to even determine that there should be "hunting dogs" at all, and to start the project of breeding them. We are the product of the cultures of yesterday - who they decided to reward, what traits they regarded as high-status, etc.

Who would have thought in 100 AD that at some point the world's top scientists would be from Britain and Germany?

The Germans often inflicted crushing defeats on the Roman Empire (most famously at Teutoburg but in many other battles), persuading Rome that they shouldn't try to conquer that territory. If the armies of sub-Saharan Africa obliterated two entire American or British divisions that would be very strong evidence that they were peers of British or American civilization.

Furthermore, there has been considerable demographic change in Britain since 100 AD. Anglo-Saxons weren't even there yet.

The German victories over the Romans happened back when despite huge differences between the two sides, they were not very different in military technology. So the German victories over the Romans cannot be directly compared to modern clashes between European and African armies. An African army of the ancient Roman time period would probably have defeated a Roman army in some cases too, especially with the advantage of terrain such as the Germans had at Teutoburg.

The Romans respected German bravery and military prowess, but I think that very few Romans of that time period would have thought it anything but extremely unlikely that the backwoods savages east of the Rhine would eventually lead the world in science and technology.

To me it seems that the Koreans genes have sharply diverged around the mid 1950-s. So is with the German genes in the mid 1940s

North Korea has excuses. Being cut off from world markets and having your trading ships stolen by the US does causes problems with energy production, as does 70 years of Stalinism. Maintaining an extremely large military with a nuclear missile program does distort their economy.

What excuse does South Africa have?

What excuse does South Africa have?

The same that Moldova, Serbia, Albania and Bosnia have despite being lily white? Corruption and incompetence sometime in tandem with the case of south africa a bad case of revanche desire that couldn't be either ignored or satisfied.

People that win power and people that best use power is two different sets. Especially if the formerly oppressed majority don't have the administrative capacity to run the country. So everyone in power started stealing - the same happened in every slavic country in the eastern block. We couldn't fall as far as south africa not because we were smarter but because EU invested quite a lot in us and they just didn't want too much chaos on the borders.

I don't think that the majority of SA problems are because of the IQ gap between the populations. There are enough black people there to produce equally smart as number and IQ people as the indian and white minorities

Human populations don't (only) cluster genetically based on skin color. Race is a bad, lossy, over used heuristic. Grab a group of 130+ IQ Serbs, or Arabs, or Nigerians, and you'd have a much performance along most metrics we value. Indians in the US e.g.

Is there urban cholera in Moldova? Have there been semi-regular power outages for over a decade in Albania? Serbian unemployment rate is about 10%, a third of South Africa's. And then there are the crime figures, which speak for themselves.

Russia is doing far better than South Africa, despite the ire of the international community and a lack of EU funding.

There's dysfunction and then there's DYSFUNCTION.

The same that Moldova, Serbia, Albania and Bosnia have despite being lily white?

They're swarthy, though.

But in any case corruption is as explicable by HBD as IQ.

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I can see you're being facetious. I'm pretty sure that outside of some HBD strawmen, nobody claims that only genetics matters for group outcomes. Unlike the mainstream narrative, we simply claim that it's important and claim trying to analyze and predict outcomes without even considering genetics is a doomed endeavor. It certainly leads to stupidity like the endless hunt for ever more subtle systemic racism (racism of the gaps, as I prefer to call it), when genes-blind attempts to mitigate the disparity fail.

Am I? In history we have couple of unwilling experiments when a nation is split in half by culture. But we also have the formation of ethno states of Europe with massive population swaps after wwI and the fall of ottoman empire (and even before that - 1860-s/70-s). And until communism came the slavic ethnostates were chugging along somewhat nicely and in pack and catching up to the western european societies. Something that we couldn't reproduce after the fall of the iron curtain. Of course big part of the old elites were slaughtered, but they were also slaughtered during ottoman times.

I believe in HBD as in your genes influence your IQ, but when I look around the world to me it seems that the culture matters quite more on a state level.

I can see how lower average IQ can easily cripple a state if you don't produce enough talented people to run the place, but from mine first hand experience - it is corruption that matters much more.

I believe in HBD as in your genes influence your IQ, but when I look around the world to me it seems that the culture matters quite more on a state level.

I can see how lower average IQ can easily cripple a state if you don't produce enough talented people to run the place, but from mine first hand experience - it is corruption that matters much more.

I have some bad news for you - the culture is also a product of genetics. Culture does have a role to play, but I highly doubt you were talking about rates of cousin marriage and the prevalence of manorialism several centuries prior. You can actually get a pretty accurate idea of the levels of corruption in European countries by determining whether they fall inside or outside the Hajnal line, which also correlates with a bunch of other features. If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out the following article: https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/

Yes it's the culture. The same country, comprised of the same people, and subject to the same material and economic constraints can be a dynamo under one regime's leadership and a complete basket-case under another's.

Ironically your dog example only reinforces my point, you really should have chosen a Pomeranian or a Yorkie because chihuahuas are hunting dogs. The material reality is that the difference between Paris Hilton's Purse Puppy and a Mexican Rat-Catcher is in the upbringing rather than the breed.

Chihuahuas are not meaningfully hunting dogs - they're tiny! A quick search will show this. They lack the physical qualities needed for hunting, it's not what they're for, not where their comparative advantage lies. That's why they're not routinely listed as hunting dogs. Catching rats is not what people mean by hunting.

South Africa worked relatively well when it was run by whites and works poorly now that it is run by blacks. That's not a cultural change, it's a change of who is in control. If it was a cultural change, what was the cultural change? If the cultural change that caused the deterioration is 'a popularization of the idea of letting blacks run the country' then what use is the concept?

Dachshunds are also tiny, and yet the name means "badger hound" and they were explicitly bred that way in order to get down in badger warrens and drag those ferocious pests out by the entrails.

Great - but chihuahuas were not bred for hunting, they were bred to be companion animals (or food). Everyone classifies it as a toy dog, or companion dog.

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Chihuahuas are not meaningfully hunting dogs - they're tiny!

And yet they hunt.

Ah Hlynka, the next time a hunter advertises that they're looking for a hunting dog, you're welcome to show up and sell them on a chihuahua. After all, they hunt! What is a deer but a very large rat after all?

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And yet they're not hunting dogs.

I'm still eager to hear what you think the culture change was in South Africa. Come on, be specific!

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Control doesn’t imply culture. Just because the right decisions were made previously doesn’t mean culture engendered those decisions.

It sorta does. Will to power is a cultural variable.

No doubt they intersect somewhat but will to power is not the same as culture. I guess what I’m getting at is that you have two populations (A and B). Both populations could have similar cultures today and yesteryear but which culture is in charge can change leading to a different out come. So it wasn’t so much a change in culture but whose culture mattered.

Granted, changing whose culture matters probably affects each populations’s culture somewhat. But I still think who decides is more important than simply saying culture.

Can you please elaborate on your reasoning here? We have a situation that looks to be a total confirmation of HBD premises - the predictions that HBD theories would make on this topic have been proved correct, and you view this as evidence that HBD is wrong? I'm not trying to be glib here, I really cannot understand your reasoning. It also looks like you forgot to include the > for the second quote as well.

Can you please elaborate on your reasoning here?

I will try.

HBD as typically expressed here on theMotte is a strong normative belief in biological determinism. This believe is in turn used to justify opposition any cultural or social intervention that isn't explicitly configured along racial and intersectional lines.

"it's all genetics" they'll say, "teacher quality has pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes" they'll say, and these claims will be used to explain why teaching black kids to read is a waste of time, and why rationalists need to make dysgenics a priority. [To be clear this isn't a straw man, it's the baseline] (https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/63701)

HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes, they blame the melanin content of the other guys skin rather than a result of the defect-defect equilibrium that they've been actively rooting for.

What we are seeing in South Africa now is a failure of basic civic structures and trust, this has fuck all to do with skin color but it does have a great deal to do with social cohesion.

The skin color of the leadership seems pretty important to SA.

There are some caveats to full HBD. North Korea, East Germany, etc. These show that poor government can hold good populations back. SA is an example of a good minority government even benefiting a probably less talented country as a whole. But also demonstrates a soft-HBD possibility that there exists certain populations that are incapable, or at least less capable of good governance in a democracy of democracy adjacent regime.

The skin color of the leadership seems pretty important to SA.

And yet somehow less important than whether the leadership are a bunch of Marxists.

Necessary but not guaranteed

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Unclear. Is it because the leadership are Marxists that they don't have the state capacity to prevent rampant pillaging of powerlines? There have been Marxist societies - Stalinist Russia, or Mao's China, or Kim's Korea - that were capable of protecting state infrastructure and harshly punishing those who, without approval from the relevant political authorities, harmed it.

Is it because the leadership of SA are Marxists that they have a turbo-charged affirmative action system (called "Black Economic Empowerment") which crippled many major businesses and state enterprises? It's more LBJ "Great Society" than "all power to the proletariat."

Is the SA leadership's Marxism the reason that they appear to be functionally innumerate?

I don't know, and I have a hard time believing it's not a larger issue, of which culture/ideology is one aspect.

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HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes

HBD recalibrates what we ought to consider pro-social behavior. The mainstream "we should all mix until we are all a shade of brown so we can focus on our Constitution and Conservative values and put all this race stuff behind us" perspective is the anti-social perspective. Just because it gets you more praise from an adversarial elite does not mean it is pro-social behavior. "White people have no racial identity in a meaningful sense, and whites have had no ethnically-particular influence on America" is not pro-social, it's anti-social.

Someone who understands HBD also understand pro-social behavior to be just that: behavior that improves the quality of society. Tripling down on race denial and ignoring the elephant in the room of dysgenic spiral is anti-social behavior even if it's expected in polite society.

HBD as typically expressed here on theMotte is a strong normative belief in biological determinism.

These aren't strawmen, but they are weak men. Biological determinism obviously falls to North/South Korea. And yes, there are better and worse ways to teach kids to read and teachers prefer the worse ones. None of that means there aren't genetically dumb and genetically smart kids, and that this matters a lot. Nor that some populations are on average a lot smarter, and this matters too. Even if Communism (or totalitarianism in general, but Communism has certainly been the most successful form) is a debilitating disease that neither the high nor low IQ can always resist.

HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes, they blame the melanin content of the other guys skin

This, on the other hand, is a strawman.

Biological determinism obviously falls to North/South Korea.

"Biological determinism" does not mean "nothing else except biology has any effect". By your reasoning nothing whatsoever is biologically determined. "The difference between an oak tree and a cow is not biologically determined since you can burn them both and the piles of ashes look pretty much identical."

Perhaps the terms are wrong, but there seem to be a few weakmen around who believe something close to that. That if you have a society of one ethnicity, it will be a certain way, and if you have a society of another ethnicity it will be a different way.

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these claims will be used to explain why teaching black kids to read is a waste of time

Teaching black kids is clearly NOT a waste of time. Trying to teach black kids as we currently do in many if not most majority black schools IS CLEARLY a waste of time

I find this very surprising, because I consider myself a fairly strong HBD believer and none of this matches to what I actually believe.

This believe is in turn used to justify opposition any cultural or social intervention that isn't explicitly configured along racial and intersectional lines.

I've found that the HBD "position" on issues like this is more that as g is unevenly distributed among population groups, that it will naturally manifest as a difference in outcomes even in the absence of explicit racial discrimination. It isn't that teaching black kids to read is a waste of time, but more that recognising that as a group they're going to need different environments, teaching styles and expectations to thrive - and that any plausible interventions that are designed to bring them up to the same standards as another population with a different g distribution curve are going to fail. This can definitely lend support to the argument that black people and white people should have separate education systems, but not that "teaching black kids to read is a waste of time". The closest I can come to seeing that argument in HBD is to use it as a justification, i.e. "It's going to be expensive to educate a separate, low-performing population with differing requirements and aptitudes, so why not just not have that separate population instead and save money?" - but that's not really the fault of HBD itself.

HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes,

This one really mystifies me - unless you think that pro-social behavior consists of affirmative action, diversity officer sinecures and well-meaning but fatally flawed rectification efforts. HBD doesn't really have anything to say on pro-social behaviour, and the closest I can come to understanding your position here is "HBD says that certain interventions are useless, but I don't think they're useless, ergo HBD is bad".

What we are seeing in South Africa now is a failure of basic civic structures and trust, this has fuck all to do with skin color but it does have a great deal to do with social cohesion.

I don't think that's actually the case. To the best of my knowledge, the HBD position on South Africa would be something along the lines of "Many of the economic and governmental mechanisms, frameworks and bodies set up to manage and organise SA society require a certain baseline level of g in the population, alongside certain heritable qualities in temperament (differing levels of MAOA-L alleles etc). When the administration of society was handed over to a population which did not meet what are effectively the human capital prerequisites, the result was a slow disintegration of the prosperity and social capital accumulated by the prior administration." That matches incredibly well to the outcomes we're seeing, and it isn't a particularly novel view either.

You're right when you say that there's a failure of basic civic structures and trust, and this does technically have fuck-all to do with skin-colour, but that's because skin-colour isn't actually what HBD cares about. In fact your position there fits very neatly into the HBD framework - I feel very confident saying that if you gave the entire black population of South Africa the Michael Jackson skin-colour treatment, the outcome would be identical in all the ways that matter.

Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, and even more intense ethnic conflict.'

How does believing in HBD equate to wanting any of that? HBD is a descriptive theory; understanding that the differential in human capital between the white minority and the black majority does not suggest any particular course of action or policy recommendation for the country. In fact, the knowledge that the current precipitous decline in material and cultural standards is a direct result of the dispossession and disenfranchisement of whites can easily lead to a belief that the country needs more international investment and intervention by foreigners, given that it’s blindingly obvious that the native blacks are not ever going to be able to maintain anything close to the first-world standards that prevailed in the country during apartheid.

It's not descriptive at all. HBD as it is espoused by yourself, @RandomRanger, @Folamh3, @self_made_human @SecureSignals Et Al is not about describing a position it's about justifying a position. It is normative through and through.

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I don't recall ever endorsing HBD, except if you're referring to my belief that IQ is mostly genetic rather than environmental (i.e. a descriptive stance).

I'm pretty sure that I've never claimed that HBD itself is normative. I consider it both true and useful for the purposes of further policy choices, in the same manner that 1+1=2 being true has downstream consequences in the field of economics.

Obviously, HBD is relevant because it can justify or refute a position. I think what you mean is that our "post-modern racism" came first, and we just cling to HBD to justify something we already wanted to believe, and that was partially true at the beginning although probably not in the way that you think...

My politics pre-HBD were probably closest to yours among anyone else in this community, of a broadly libertarian-conservative persuasion. Believe me when I say I understand where you're coming from because I used to think exactly like you in many ways (I know that's insulting, sorry, but I mean it).

My interest in HBD was initially, admittedly, because I saw it as bolstering some pervasive criticisms of Free Market idealism:

  • HBD sinks the theories that persistent wealth inequality and inequality in various social outcomes is driven by market failure, or aftershock effects of racism.
  • HBD provides a strong anti-welfare argument in the presence of open borders (yes, my initial interpretation of HBD pegged it as an argument against Welfare rather than an argument against immigration/open borders).

Given that the chorus of Systematic Racism was in a massive crescendo post-2016, HBD sparked my interest because it seemed plausible and to provide the best libertarian-compatible (or so I thought) explanation for those patterns of social behavior.

Of course, though, that didn't last long as @DaseindustriesLtd recently described, accepting HBD as true and taking a few steps beyond questions of economic efficiency quickly led to a broad, systematic collapse of my previously held beliefs (again, which were basically aligned with yours).

On Dissident Right Telegram I recently saw an informal poll with a decent sample size indicating that about 50% of the respondents previously identified as libertarian, so my experience is likely common among those in that sphere.

On one level, you're right that interest in HBD was motivated by an attempt to bolster a political viewpoint, but at the time it was as a defense of moderate system values against the Systematic Racism rhetoric which exploded post-2016, rather than motivated by an a priori desire to be a political dissident, which was unimaginable at the time. I know you don't want to believe that our political beliefs followed our acceptance of HBD rather than the other way around, but that was certainly my personal experience.

Thank you. I despise the subtle consensus-building here about the Imperatives of the Implications of Noticing, but I didn’t have the words to say it.

Absolutely, HBD is simply a fact, what policy you wish to enact about it depends on your ideology.

A white supremacist might crow at the evidence showing their superiority and demand extradition of underperforming minorities.

A woke person (who miraculously comes to accept it), might still want AA or desire that the topic be suppressed so as to prevent the former from winning in the court of public opinion (this might already be the case, at least for some of the smarter HBD deniers).

Me? I see it as a glaring reason we need to work on somatic or germline cognitive enhancement, so that skin color and other phenotypical features become utterly uncorrelated with performance, in the same manner that the paintjob of a F1 car doesn't really change its performance. (Barring brand liveries of course, I'm sure some teams have better cars and drivers)

Me? I see it as a glaring reason we need to work on somatic or germline cognitive enhancement, so that skin color and other phenotypical features become utterly uncorrelated with performance, in the same manner that the paintjob of a F1 car doesn't really change its performance. (Barring brand liveries of course, I'm sure some teams have better cars and drivers)

I have some unfortunate news for you: the face predicts the brain. The appearance of one's face is derived to a significant degree from the neural crest, and differences between brains actually do lead to differences in faces in such a way as to make it possible to accurately determine a wide variety of mental and personal qualities about people from their face. Just looking at someone's face gives you enough information to make fairly reliable predictions about their political affiliation, levels of dominance, kindness, sexuality, trustworthiness etc. While skin-colour might be something you can arbitrarily adjust (and albinos do make the case that this is possible), facial features do actually reflect the brain behind them in significant ways. So while you might be able to change skin-colour with no particularly long-lasting consequences, those other phenotypic features are going to be an issue.

I hardly see this as an insurmountable problem, especially when more advanced plastic surgery makes aesthetics entirely a matter of choice. It all seems tractable to me, but then again I'm not overly beholden to the human form, if the cost of raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible requires sacrificing some facial diversity, I couldn't care less!

raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible

You don't want that anyway.

Someone's got to clean the toilets, and it would be better if that person weren't an 150 IQ would-be rocket surgeon who only isn't a rocket surgeon because he lost a politics game. After all, only so many people can be rocket surgeons, and if everyone is smart then the losers will have to lose for a different reason.

It wouldn't even be a good reason. Then you have a mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top. You think it's bad now, you just wait.

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if the cost of raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible requires sacrificing some facial diversity, I couldn't care less!

Sufficiently advanced plastic surgery is a good response, and I don't think it is necessarily MORE magical than perfect germline editing for intelligence anyway - we're already in science fiction territory here anyway.

That said, I do find the idea of raising everyone as close to "maximum intelligence possible" to have a few other issues... what levels of autism/aspergers/other disorders are you willing to tolerate in exchange? There've been a lot of discussions on here and in other HBD spaces about how IQ isn't actually an unalloyed good, and I think the "maximum" intelligence reachable is more a matter of making certain trade-offs rather than just assembling every single high-IQ allele. There's even a specific mutation which boosts IQ but also causes blindness - if you're going for the maximum IQ, do you have that mutation?

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The EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters), a party founded by Julius Malema, who was expelled from the ANC for being far to radical.

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