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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30634 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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HBD allows for the possibility that it's nobody's fault.

Maybe there's a universe where that's true, but it's nowhere close to the one we live in. Even taking it as given that HBD is correct in a descriptive sense, that doesn't come with any set of policy prescriptions. Considering the historical track record a lot of people would be reasonably concerned that HBD conclusions would be used to justify oppression.

Some of the more insightful leftists actually understand this, and hate HBD precisely because it offers an alternative to their libelous villain-and-victim narratives.

Could you give a couple of example? This reeks of "our enemies hate us because they know we're right", which is basically never correct. Every leftist I've ever encountered or read who addresses HBD dislikes it because they see it as reheated 19th century pseudo-science employed by closeted white supremacists.

I've seen about a hundred people express concern over what other people would do if HBD became public knowledge, and about zero people express the idea that we should enshrine racial discrimination in law because of HBD. There's some selection bias here, of course—I don't really hang out in racist forums—but I do think that the idea of equality before the law is deeply enshrined in the modern American consciousness. Pushes for racial discrimination come almost exclusively from the environmentalist left. We do not, in general, endorse restrictions on the rights of people with low intelligence. There's a very strong knee-jerk reaction against the idea of, e.g., gating voting behind a test of civic literacy, or sterilizing institutionalized women with severe mental disabilities, who are at elevated risk of sexual abuse and clearly incapable of raising children.

Given that there's extremely strong resistance to any kind of limitations on the rights of individuals with even severe intellectual disabilities, the idea that the public would suddenly decide to restrict the rights of even highly intelligent individuals on the basis of membership in ethnic groups with low average intelligence strikes me as wildly implausible. Meanwhile, the insane overreaction to racial achievement gaps by heredity denialists is a very real problem that we're dealing with right now.

Could you give a couple of example? This reeks of "our enemies hate us because they know we're right", which is basically never correct.

Off the top of my head, I can give you one. The other two recent examples that come to mind would require self-doxxing. Here's Jamelle Bouie on Richard Hanania:

The question to ask here — the question that matters — is: Why does an otherwise obscure racist have the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve?

Look back to our history, and the answer is straightforward. Just as in the 1920s (and before), the idea of race hierarchy works to naturalize the broad spectrum of inequalities and capitalist inequality in particular.

If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.

If some groups — and really, if some individuals — are simply meant to be at the top, then there are no questions to ask about their wealth, status and power.

I'm not saying that Bouie has done a deep dive into the evidence, concluded that there is in fact a strong genetic basis for racial achievement gaps, and decided that he has to help cover it up. I'm not saying he hates us because he knows we're right. Frankly, I don't respect him enough to give him that much credit. What I'm saying is that I don't think he cares that much about the science, and that his true objection is that hereditarian explanations for achievement gaps undermine the idea that these gaps are the product of a deliberately rigged economy, and let those bastards off the hook. He's pretty explicit about this.

Well, the internet ate my homework, so now you're getting the abbreviated version.

Long story short, I think he is doing the same thing as you, just in reverse: explaining the traction of HBD by what it does for its adherents. Namely, rationalize their elevated position in society and absolve them of any social duty to people at the bottom. As for why he opposes HBD, I think I nailed it:

Hanania sees his claims as uncomfortable truths. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races,” he recently wrote. But his supposedly transgressive views are little more than the warmed-over dogmas of the long-dead ideologues who believed in the scientific truth of race hierarchy. Of course, those men, their peers and their followers lost their appetite for that talk in the wake of the Holocaust, when the world got a firsthand look at the catastrophic consequences of state-sponsored racism, eugenicism and antisemitism.

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I've seen about a hundred people express concern over what other people would do if HBD became public knowledge, and about zero people express the idea that we should enshrine racial discrimination in law because of HBD.

I've seen about zero people suggest the idea that the communist revolution should involve killing millions and yet for some reason it keeps happening. The eugenicists and race realists have a really, really bad track record. It's not much of a jump from "we should discourage low IQ people from reproducing" to "we should prevent low IQ people from reproducing".

But we don't want to discourage low IQ people from reproducing. We just don't want legally mandated racial discrimination via the disparate impact doctrine.

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