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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
And yet somehow less important than whether the leadership are a bunch of Marxists.
Necessary but not guaranteed
Nothing outside death gravity and taxes is ever guaranteed, and even taxes leave a fair bit of wiggle room.
Human society being complex is hardly a novel idea, nor something with any real explanatory power.
Above you said:
This statement makes little sense. No on is in favor of that for them (although, I think full evacuation of the white population is probably best for them long term). It is that the majority is ungovernable without large amounts of repression by a population that is distinct from the majority in many ways. I don't think these rulers and managers and train runners have to be white, simply I don't think there are enough people in the native black population to staff all those roles competently and with the disposition to do so with enough of an iron fist to run the country.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
So there was this one time I was at work, and a friend of mine arrives extremely late. No biggie, we're all IT dudes, and there was nothing urgent, but it was unlike him, so we ask him what happened, and he says: "well, here I was, sitting on the bench at the station, waiting for my usual train when I hear the announcement 'due to theft of the overhead power lines, all trains in the direction of <<city>> are cancelled'". It was already after communism though, so maybe it's beside your point.
That's the same "Cultural Marxism does not exist / isn't Marxism" cope all the Marxists always use. The answer here is yes. Marxist oppressor-opressed analysis is what's responsible for affirmative action.
That one might come down to post-modernism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
This, on the other hand, is a strawman.
"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.
People who believe things like that seem to believe it in the sense that ethnicity determines how good the society can get--not how bad it can get. You can make anything bad with enough destruction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
I find this very surprising, because I consider myself a fairly strong HBD believer and none of this matches to what I actually believe.
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.
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".
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link