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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.

I think ignorance is the opposite of bliss in this case. If you naively hold that all races are equal in terms of cognitive potential (as almost all "respectable" sources have stridently proclaimed since, idk, the 1960s), then you are absolutely setting yourself up to be furious about the glaring disparity in outcomes.

The end result is the carcinous growth of ideologies like CRT which are on the desperate hunt for racism-of-the-gaps (as I prefer to call systemic racism) in order to explain why despite the enormous effort put into mitigating said disparities, they still persist.

They're searching under the lamp post of their ideology, because it puts blinders on their ability to even conceive that group differences exist, and this lack of conception prevents them from even looking at the glaring evidence all around, and motivates them to attack those who'd shine a scientific torch on it.

The only actual answer to the question of why Whites typically do better than Blacks is the YesChad.jpg reply that it's because they're better in all the ways that matter outside of sports and entertainment. You can further assuage accusations of White Supremacy by pointing out that Asians beat them too.

Recognizing that HBD is even an option immediately dissolves the puzzle, even if it's outside the window of polite conversation. Unfortunately, that's not where society as a whole is at, outside primarily pseudonymous spaces or hushed conversations with people who think much the same but are unable to speak up.

For a long time though we just mostly ignored the differences in differences. The things you mentioned didn’t become a problem until the BLM and CRT people showed up. Things just functioned for a long time.

Look, you can argue that blacks are stupid, especially when compared to whites, but they aren't blind. They can look around and tell that they're worse off than whites and an explanation of "well, that's just how it is, umm, can we talk about something else" has very little appeal to them. Someone was going to fill the niche of blaming it all on racism and pretending there is no difference in outcomes is ignoring reality hard enough that you can't keep it up.

What I find hard about this is that there are lots of groups that aren't blind. There is something else, historical or visual or whatever, that causes the specific groupings and specific arguments that we see become prevalent.

But it doesn’t seem like blacks created this current environment. It seems like this was mostly white on white crime.

If that isn’t stable then what is stable - teach differences in elementary school, noble lie, whatever we got now, or complete separation seem to be the only options.

Well yes, everything about this current environment is white people’s fault, or at least the fault of some subset of whites, if you go far enough back. Importing hundreds of thousands of black slaves was a decision made by white people. Deciding that equality in outcomes for their descendants is a policy goal was a decision made by white people. Etc, etc. And yes, the current racial mania is mostly a white thing- have you heard the actually-originating-in-the-black community versions of these things? It’s 85 IQ conspiracist schizoposting. I don’t think there is an easy solution to black underperformance, but encouraging assimilation seems obvious and necessary. And we can expect that to be important for lots of reasons- to start with, while lower black IQ’s might be the main reason for their poor outcomes, it really, really doesn’t help that they have a ridiculously broken and dysfunctional ghetto culture. Making blacks less distinctive compared to whites also means you have less of a racial consciousness issue.

Jim Crow worked and lasted for a long time. So did slavery. Those are sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass that is much less intelligent, much more impulsive, and much more violent than average.

From "The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State" by Freed Reed:

That intelligence is genetic should be obvious regardless of technical knowledge. Any dog breeder will tell you that Border Collies are brighter than beagles, that if you mate smarter dogs to smarter dogs, within a few generations you will have a strain of smarter dogs. If intelligence were cultural as we are obliged to say, almost on pain of death, all the children who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses. Were they?

A dread question: Is it not now obvious, has it not been obvious for a very long time, that blacks cannot function in a technological society? A few, yes. Most, no. This is the case worldwide. Low intelligence, perhaps accompanied by poor impulse control, explains well the urban chaos, the crime, the poverty.

We are accustomed now to the intractable gap between blacks and whites. The gap appears on all tests of cognitive capacity and academic achievement: all of the IQ tests, the SATs, GREs, MCATs, LSATs, ACT, National Merit, AFQT, and others. This is so predictable as to make the value of pi seem capricious. The politically correct attribute the disparity to racism, institutional racism, unconscious racism, structural racism, poor self-esteem, white privilege, slavery, colonialism, culture, environment, and different learning styles. Do we really believe this?

...

A question no one asks, at least not out loud: To what extent are blacks dependent on the charity of whites? What would happen if all public assistance, all programs specifically or de facto for blacks were withdrawn?

Without affirmative action, racial quotas formal and informal, blacks would almost disappear from universities and the white-collar world. I think we all know this, but most recoil from the implications. I don’t blame them.

I am not sure that we all understand the extent of the affirmative programs and the distortions they cause for society. For example, on exams for promotion in police departments, by a large margin the top scorers are white so that, if departments advanced the most qualified, blacks would almost disappear. The same pattern exists for any job requiring intelligence. This can easily be confirmed.

What would happen if Section Eight housing were abandoned, Head Start, AFDC, free lunch and breakfasts in inner-city schools, food stamps, and all the rest? I do not recommend doing this–the consequences would be hideous–but do suggest thinking about it. The conclusion will probably be that blacks are in custodial care. If this is not true, tell me why it is not.

...

What is to be done? The policies usual in countries of the First World do not work. As a white man my inclination is to favor color-blindness, equality of opportunity, and advancement by merit. If East Asian kids outperform white kids academically by a wide margin, which they do, then they should get into Harvard and the white kids should not. Neurosurgeons should be chosen by competence and nothing else. Affirmative action lowers standards for society as a whole, sometimes dangerously.

All true, but… Realistically, meritocracy works well only in a monochrome population. If I, white, fail to get into CalTech in astrophysics, I will be disappointed but will not complain of unfair discrimination. I just wasn’t smart enough. But it is very different when a race in its entirety fails to gain entrance. It creates a de facto partitioning of society. In today’s America, merit isn’t going to work.

...

What do we do if –when–genetics makes the obvious undeniable? What then?

From "What If HBD Is True?" by AntiDem:

But now let us turn to solutions. If HBD is true, what do we do? What happens next? First, we must be realistic about what will not happen. First, blacks are not going to disappear from American life, nor should they be required to. By right of history, it is their country as much as it is anyone else’s whose ancestry is not American Indian, and the idea that that many people are going to go… where, exactly?… is sheer fantasy. What else will not happen is that the current welfare state will not continue at anything close to its current level for all that much longer. The economic writing has been on the wall in terms of that for a long time now.

...

Economically, if HBD is true, a Buchananite protectionism seems to be wise. Immigration and outsourcing should, in that case, be severely restricted by law, and tariffs raised sharply to protect American-made products. Some limit to the degree of mechanization of jobs might also be worth considering. This would do much to return to America – and to Americans, black and otherwise – the sort of working-class jobs that do not require exceptional academic or technical abilities.

Socially, it seems as if some degree of voluntary separation may be advisable. Despite centuries together, right next to each other, blacks and whites remain vastly different from one another in innumerable ways. Perhaps an acknowledgement of that reality, instead of further attempts to erase it when all previous attempts have failed, is the better course. The worst possible way to make some people genuinely like others is to try to force them to do so, and the sad reality of human nature is that good fences often really do make good neighbors. Perhaps some more space, with each group able to live more in accordance with its unique culture, attitudes, and worldview, yet still free to voluntarily associate (or not associate) with each other as they please, would do something to reduce tensions between the races. It seems to be at least worth trying – certainly nothing else that has been tried so far has proven to work very well.

In terms of criminal justice, too many blacks are imprisoned now. Certainly some – those who prey on the person or property of others – should be imprisoned, and few blacks would disagree. But many more are imprisoned for victimless drug offenses, and this should end. The War on Drugs has been a dismal failure, and should be discontinued, with drugs decriminalized. The problems associated with drug use among blacks should be handled by the black community itself.

...

These are my suggestions, and I believe them at least worth considering.

From "Radish defends slavery" by the Dreaded Jim:

You favor abolishing welfare: What do propose to do with all the able bodied people that are too lazy or too violent or have too short a time preferance to hold down a job?

Once upon a time, such people were put on the chain gang. Progressives did not like private individuals owning slaves, but they just love governments owning slaves. Look how they loved communist china, and look how bitterly outraged and indignant they became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees, rather than slaves.

And from "Economic efficiency of slavery" by the same:

For tasks requiring intelligence and independent judgement, for the kind of job where one would ordinarily employ a contractor or high level free employee, slave owners generally gave one of their best slaves an incentive environment approximating that of a high level free employee, where the slave had a future career path, the opportunity to save and invest, to own money and buy assets, including buying other slaves, indicating that slavery does not work to get such tasks done – hence the failure of the Soviet Union.

However for many tasks, tasks suitable to stupid people, tasks for bad people, tasks where you want people to reliably do as they are told rather than make good decisions, the sort of tasks that most black people are suitable for, slavery was markedly more productive and efficient than free labor, with the slave producing more value for himself and his owner with less labor, than he did when freed.

When the slaves were freed, they became for the most part, considerably worse off economically, having to work harder and getting less to eat.

...

Economists find this outcome most strange, but there is no mystery to it. When stupid people, prone to short time horizons, get to make their own decisions for themselves, they are apt to make stupid decisions.

A slave maid could not steal the silverware, because she could not own anything. An employed maid could steal the silverware, and probably would, and would be the worse off for it. An employed maid might well beat the baby with stick as thick as her arm because her mistress spoke sharply to her. A slave maid would not, because her mistress could do worse.

If masters and slaves were better off than employers and employees, an economist would ask, why could they not just cut a deal to do what they previously did, only without chains and beatings, do the same tasks in the same way, only as employees?

The answer to that question is: that the former slaves, once freed, could not credibly commit to stick to such a deal, and generally did not stick to such a deal, thus economically worse off. Stupid people, prone to violence, with short time horizons, needed masters.

Well, if you think that slavery is "sane" and you are consistent, then if hyper-intelligent aliens ever came to Earth and tried to enslave humanity to work in the unobtanium mines in similar conditions as what blacks experienced in the American South, you would justify it and side with the aliens. And that would be your choice, but I would still shoot you the first chance I got.

I'm not fresh on the status of the value of propagating existence around here. I feel like there is a contingent of folks who would argue that it is the primary, if not only, value underlying nearly everything else. So, I'm left wondering about this scenario. If morality is purely relative/subjective, such that the aliens just have the morality they have and there is nothing objective separate from that, is it better to mine unobtanium in slavery (for a while, at least; not sure how to discount future probabilities) or to just be exterminated?

I’d just like to register my repugnance with your axioms and your conclusions. Statistics are not people, and people who believe in eugenics and dysgenics believe (in my experience) in genetic destiny far more than statistics does.

I think that eugenics should be practiced in order to eliminate as many genetic disorders and conditions as are reasonably possible. Cystic fibrosis is absolutely a genetic destiny with a sharp and severe impact on quality of life and I don't see why we should just accept that some people are going to be born with horrible conditions when it is within our power to fix it totally within one or two generations.

The Motte: “I’d like to eliminate genetic disease from the human genome.”

The Bailey: “Only the genetically fit should be allowed to direct civilization.”

I am a distributist who does not believe that anyone should be "directing civilization" beyond the collective will and actions of the people, because I don't think "genetically fit" is really properly definable. The subtler personality traits required to be a good leader depend on the circumstances of each present moment - a nation stuck in a bunch of permanent wars and a nation who just discovered a brand new deposit of a critical economic resource need very different personalities in charge to get the best outcome. The strength of my eugenic position gets solely to wiping out the egregiously bad (genetic disorders) and then just not subsidising and encouraging dysgenic breeding like we do now.

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I find it hard to believe that an employed maid could beat a baby because of low time preference but a slave maid wouldn't. Are you claiming that a slave maid would be punished as soon as her deed was discovered, but for an employed maid, the employer would wait a while before punishing the maid? That seems unlikely.

I think the point is that the employed maid could merely be fired while the slave maid would be beaten or killed herself. But as with most Dreaded Jim material I suspect it was written to optimize for provocativeness rather than sense.

There is no stability; we're in a death spiral, where those in charge will keep claiming group differences don't exist and keep increasing measures to eliminate or cover up differences in outcome, until something completely breaks.

It was a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground. Sooner or later some ambitious young activist was going to pick it up and ride to power on the back of racial grievances.

It took a while because all the people who originally enacted the noble lie in the 60s knew the truth. But they made it so that you could not speak the truth, and eventually a new crop of children grew up never learning the truth while hearing the lie repeated again and again in their televisions and classrooms. They did not get the joke.

Anything which is common knowledge but which cannot be said out loud becomes lost knowledge a generation later. Unprincipled exceptions always yield to superior holiness. Hence generational loss of hypocrisy.

From "The Goal Is Soft Genocide. Unless Stopped, the Outcome Will Be Hard Genocide." by The Dreaded Jim:

But in holiness competition, we get the phenomenon that neoreactionaries call “not getting the joke”. If you are going to be selected for loyalty to progressive memes, best take those memes absolutely literally and seriously, since only the truest believers get into the best universities and get the plum jobs. So the next generation of progressives takes the most ridiculous things as holy writ, the more ridiculous the better, since precisely the most stupid, ridiculous and outrageous things will differentiate you from the other applicant to Harvard.

And from the comments of "Putin Successfully Stabilizing Syria" by the same:

The Dark Enlightenment calls this “Not getting the joke”, and “ending the unprincipled exception”. The trouble with Jewish progressives is that they don’t get the joke, they drink the koolaide, they attack unprincipled exceptions.

Thus, for example, “equal but separate”. Suppose fifty percent of the city is black, and the government has separate black and white water fountains and public toilets. Suppose the government applies the same amount of money to installing and mantaining black and white water fountains and public toilets. That is equal but separate.

But, strangely, one hundred percent of the black water fountains will be out of order to due to casual vandalism, and one hundred percent of the black toilets have their floors covered three inches deep in human shit. The Converso denounces this as white racism and “separate and unequal”

In Australia, the Australian government has discovered it is just not practical to attempt to provided full blooded aboriginals with human type housing. Somehow Jews have failed to notice this, perhaps because all such housing is provided far away from regular humans, but when they do discover it, their reaction will be predictable.

See also "Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" by Phil Goetz.

What is that website greaterwrong? I liked that post

It's a mirror of LessWrong for people who don't like the way LessWrong 2.0 looks and prefer something closer to the original.

If you don't know what LessWrong is and how it relates to The Motte, here's a quick rundown:

The Rationalist community was born during the 2 years in which Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, blogged daily, first on Robin Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, then later on his own blog called LessWrong. These blog posts are known as The Sequences, and form the foundation of modern rationality discourse. For more on Eliezer's backstory, please see my earlier comment on /r/CultureWarRoundup.

A few years after Eliezer stopped blogging, LessWrong declined to the point of irrelevance and the community moved on to various other websites, an event known as the Rationalist diaspora. Scott Alexander (author of Unsong), who had made a name for himself on LessWrong under the pseudonym Yvain, started a blog called Slate Star Codex, which became the major website of the diaspora. So popular was this website that it spawned it's own subreddit, /r/slatestarcodex.

Like in a lot of other forums, political discussion started taking over the sub; the solution was to corral all political talk to a single recurring thread called the Culture War Thread, which quickly became the single most popular thread on the subreddit, accruing thousands of comments each week. Eventually, under pressure from critics (most notably /r/SneerClub), Scott decided to evict the thread from the sub. Those who wanted to continue the thread created a new subreddit, /r/TheMotte, where the thread continues to this day. You can think of it as the rationalist politics subreddit, much like this is the rationalist fiction subreddit.

And you didn't ask about this one, but since it will probably come up, /r/CultureWarRoundup is a competing alternative to /r/TheMotte created by users who were dissatisfied with the latter's moderation policies.

I prefer using it to not feed cookie data to the Lesswrong cabal directly.

It's an alternative front-end for LessWrong.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder

The situation wasn't stable. Most people might have ignored the differences, but advocates didn't and black people didn't. And they kept pushing. They can't find a solution because

  1. The difference aren't due to anything that can be solved by social engineering.

  2. The US makes it really hard to get away with just plain rigging everything with explicit quotas. And it does have to be pretty much everything, or you just push the problem around.

Diana Moon Glampers hasn’t been tried yet.

I'm pretty sure that billions to a trillion dollars have been spent on the specific issue of black underperformance since the Civil Rights days. The reason that CRT took off is that it turns out that trying to stack hundred dollar bills beneath the underperformers didn't help them peer over the fence.

The root cause has always been willful ignorance of reality, and outcomes like CRT are almost guaranteed when activists notice that their efforts lead nowhere.

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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!

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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."

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