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Now, here's a mod action I don't feel remotely bad about enforcing.
So far, you have been a pretty terrible denizen of this forum, and this comment, submitted to an expired thread, takes the cake.
The Motte doesn't forbid the discussion of racial differences, be it HBD, disapproval of ghetto culture or anything else. Hell, look at me, I'm on record as endorsing HBD, and I'm a mod, though my policy proposals are rather different from the usual garden-variety racist.
What it doesn't allow, is a top-level comment in the CW thread that can be boiled down to:
At this point, it would be easier for me to list all the rules you didn't violate than what you did. At the very least, this is booing the outgroup and sneering as hard as possible, with only a minor figleaf in that you're merely relaying the observations and commentary of an Uber driver.
You could have made a much better comment covering the same territory, racism or racist-ideologies (dictionary definition) are tolerated and often popular on the Motte, but we still have standards. If a regular made such a shitty comment, they'd be lucky to get away with a warning. You haven't earned that much forbearance.
While I'm here, we might as well discuss the overall pattern of your comments-
Self-promotion is tolerated, as you have done several times in the past for your Substack, but being a regular with AAQCs like Kulak makes it far more palatable.
Anyway, enjoy being banned for a week. It'll only get worse if you don't get better.
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Is this supposed to be a top-level post? If so, I would advise against it, if you're going to make one of those we do expect more effort put into it.
If this was meant to be a comment to the discussion below, then it's fine, but in that case you should delete and repost it.
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I can sort of see the argument in the sense of 'it is more likely that the Asian diaspora will take over in the next few decades than it is that African descendants will cause an issue'. However, most people are concerned more about the stability of their day-to-day existence. BAME immigration might not imperil the 'macro' as much, but has more everyday living consequences in terms of violent crime and people subsisting on handouts.
Since I can't respond to that, I'll respond to the top reply as of now.
We had a strange rash of extra-spicy top level posts being deleted last year. But it died down recently. I hope this isn't it coming back.
@thenether appears to delete their comments regularly... looking at their profile I can't see any comments at all...?
With the help of archive.is, this is the original top-level post of @thenether:
Building off the HBD post below, Bronze Age Pervert has another recent tweet on these matters. In his opinion, focusing on black "dysfunction" is misguided because the focus should be on Asians and Indians:
I'm not really seeing the argument here. The US has experienced a lot of Asian immigration and it doesn't seem like it's approaching anything that could be described as "civilization-ending". And are Eastern and Southern Europeans any less "corrupt" than Asians and Indians? Whenever I see this kind of thing I'm reminded of what was said about the Irish:
or the Italians or any other group that came to the US and is now completely assimilated. The least BAP could do is provide some evidence, but I've seen that's not very common in his writing. It's more about vibes and feelings.
Kudos to you for combatting the deleter menace. If people are actually discussing the post and it's not a misplaced comment, then it shouldn't be deleted. Often when I'm 5 or 6 replies deep I look back at OP to see what we were talking about originally.
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Are you baiting to have it be cited here, to make BAP look better? Okay, you win. That «recent tweet» is half a year old. The actual argument he makes is this one.
For what it's worth, I (as a person inclined to be somewhat positive with regard to East Asians and utterly pessimistic about any political proposal of BAPsphere) think this is his strongest thesis in ages. He actually enumerates plausible (and I think true, but of course one can protest and demand statistics to back up the inflammatory etc. etc.) factual premises and delivers his conclusion, he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish, and he mostly speaks like a real person with a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy, rather than a flamboyant auto-caricature.
And of course you would not see «civilization-ending» outcomes. China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired. It is not absurd that the Irish have destroyed a certain America (as @2rafa often argues) – but now that the Irish are Americans too, they get to weigh in whether it was a good or a bad thing, and they're not going anywhere anyway.
You see, culture is fragile, human practices are fragile, valuable conventions are easy to ruin and hard to restore. Consider the following bizarre analogy. Add a random homeless person off the street to your household, have him eat and sleep together with your family (assuming you have one) – it will probably be ruined (some idealistic people have tested this approach). Add a random well-behaved stranger – nothing outwardly catastrophic will happen, you might become friends even! And splitting domestic chores, and paying rent – think of it! But your family will change, will become something pretty nonsensical. Maybe Bryan Caplan would argue that your household income will increase, that your children will be more likely to prosper, thus it is moral and proper to make this choice? The philosophy that BAP subscribes to detests and rejects this sort of crude economic reasoning, deems it subhumanly utilitarian. I suppose a real American must call BAP a sentimental fool then.
There is an argument to be made that many of the scientific achievements and breakthroughs were low-hanging fruits that were inevitable to be discovered. It's just that the Enlightenment took place in Europe and thus most of the low-hanging fruits of scientific knowledge were thus discovered and produced in western nations. (Not to disparage the works of these great scientists and inventors, but if someone is making the argument of why another population is not producing great works, well there is a reason for how these great works were created, and as @you-get-an-upvote make's in a comment down stream "here aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century." Scott Alexander made a similar argument last year on why there aren't any more Einsteins which I largely agree with his reasoning here.
Whatever your thoughts on modern technology may be, many tech companies that provide entertainment or convenience to us today were founded or cofounded by Asian Americans. YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Yahoo, Snapchat, Nvidia and many more exist thanks to the vision and hardwork of Asians. Maybe these tech companies are the low-hanging groups of the Internet era, but that just illustrates my point further.
I will acknowledge BAP's argument is specifically mostly about Chinese people and not Asians in general... but I doubt that's a distinction that matters in enrollment into Universities. Racial breakdown in admissions only goes to the level of Asian, after all, and many Chinese surnames are the same/similar to surnames from other countries near China. The only way to know for sure is if they are a foreign student enrolling directly from China, but foreign students are always a small percentage of people admitted and foreign students are usually not eligible for many scholarships/financial aid, meaning they pay the full tuition. So the universities are making money off foreign Asian students through tuition. Regarding donations "in 2022, more than 80 percent of the donations came from 1 percent of the donors", so it really shouldn't matter whether the other 99% of people that attended these universities donated. Besides, given the clear anti-Asian bias against admissions in a university such as Harvard, I imagine that would have an impact on an Asian's decision to donate to Harvard.
Also, I don't buy his argument that discrimination against Asian Americans leads to dropping the idea of meritocracy. If I'm straw-manning his argument here then please let me know, but he's essentially saying
There are better explanations that better explain the affirmative actions of Universities, such as social justice, equity, cultural Marxism, etc and I don't think the fact that Asians were being discriminated against played a big role in the creation and propagation of these ideas. At best a minor justiciation but I seriously doubt anyone in university admission made a train of thought the way BAP did for his hypothetical University admissison officer.
I can't believe it. So much of BAP's argument is built on shoddy premises, the only one that I can't rebut or hasn't been addressed by someone else already is his observations regarding the behavior of Asians when he was going to school since those are his observations and I didn't attend the school he went to, so maybe what he observed is true, but that's just a minor piece of the overall argument.
I think the lack of geniuses comes more from systemic issues in education. Asians aren’t producing geniuses, but neither are whites or Hispanics or blacks. But our system is not only not set up to produce geniuses, but to stymie the development of any who happen to come along.
From age 5 to finishing your BS degree, success is based on your ability to sit still, follow directions, and produce reams of worksheets and essays on topics you don’t care about. Any actual genius would be bored stupid. The removal of gifted classes means that you move at the speed of the stupid kids in the class who don’t understand anything or care that much. The system is poorly suited to teaching independent thought, as it needs to teach to the tests and hit all of the objectives. Having open ended discussions doesn’t produce measurable results so teach kids to regurgitate the correct answers.
The grant and publication system also locks in mediocrity. If you need to get grants to have a job, and you need to show that your experiment will work to get the grant, you pretty much have to stick close to what is known. Adding the publish or perish mandate makes it more difficult to peruse big projects because they take too long. So where could these breakthrough ideas come from? Nobody has the money an$ freedom to think big.
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good find. the extended thread was omitted
I never bought into this trope that east asians lack creativity to counterbalance high Iq. I don't see it. for the math paper I'm working on, most of my sources are from Chinese authors.
Do they not donates as much? I dunno. The evidence suggests Asians are big donors:
Same for foreign gifts: Interests based in China contributed over $168 million to 46 American colleges and universities during a six-month period in 2021 https://www.thecollegefix.com/nearly-170m-in-contracts-and-gifts-flowed-to-u-s-universities-from-china-in-2021/
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Maybe if you're used to his non-standard spellings and such. He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me (albeit a very clever one, though not as much so as he seems to think).
Misspellings are allegedly a mechanism to invoke algorithmic suppression and not have your content revealed to the general audience. I do ignore them.
People generally do not become any smarter with age so that is okay. If one can make an argument at all, it can be made at 15 and with a teenager's mentality. Except when an argument depends on accumulated experience, like his time in academia.
You say this like arguments that depend on accumulated experience are some weird niche issue that barely ever comes up in real life.
If I were to negatively compare someone to a 15-year-old, what I would typically mean is along the lines of "You're making the same mistakes that most of us grew out of when we were early teenagers, but somehow you haven't learned from them yet". For example, talking like a sesquipedalian thesaurus and thinking it makes you sound intelligent (it does - but not to intelligent people), failing to clearly distinguish between the real world and one's own feelings, being unable to model other people as independent agents with their own desires and fears, and so on.
So, which of those defects are present in his thread?
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That’s a lot of words to basically say “merit wasn’t being properly measured and when properly measured for it Asians don’t measure up.”
Now whether it is true is a different matter.
I think the confusion is between merit vs potential. Merit would seem to measure how qualified someone is based on the usual objective things like GPA. potential is what happens after graduating.
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That's a few words to express a fairly unjustified level of disrespect.
No, Asians really are meritorious as far as potential for educational and professional attainment goes. They get high scores, and those scores translate into life outcomes. A 99.9th percentile SAT taker comes in, a 99.9th percentile employee comes out and waves a diploma proving his or her value to the employer. This is a perfectly reasonable meritocratic system, as meritocracy has been defined for a very long time.
BAP is a romantic who believes that merely excellent outcomes are not what elite education is about; that the objective of such institutions is finding and riding the coattails of geniuses and heroes. Glory isn't just a better-ascertained «merit».
His whole point seemed to be “sure they come out and do perfectly respectable nice upper middle class jobs but they arent doing something great or amazing”
He is saying greatness is the goal which means merit is how great could you become
This would be fine if he had anything to back it up, but his only "evidence" is complaining that there are no Chinese Feynmans... but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century.
Incidentally, by my count 7 of the last 50 Nobel laureates in Physics and 3 out of 16 Fields Medal winners were Asian.
It's worth noting that this is roughly inline with Asian representation at Harvard today (14%) and most Nobel laureates were born before 1950 -- research labs weren't really accessible to a billion Asians then. So not sure how meaningful those numbers are in either direction.
(Side note: interestingly, Fields Medal winners cannot be older than 40).
This is cope, of course. Our Feynmans are called names like «Ilya Sutskever» and «Noam Shazeer», or if you want a Gentile, «Alec Radford». The focus of frontier research has shifted from bits to bytes and from public institutions to for-profit companies, while professional celebs have picked up the slack of mental representation for heroic figures. But sci-fi valorization of flashy fundamental physics results, partially driven by military agendas of the XX century and purely aesthetic raygun gothic midwittery, persists; and so people try to explain the non-real phenomenon of our era lacking Feynmans.
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I noted that there is the question of whether he is right.
I guess the question so what is the right denominator for determine over or under representation.
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"Skrewl"??
BAP insists on talking like Borat swallowed a 1932 encyclopedia Britanica for some reason.
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School, it’s one of those babyspeak things.
I think Rush Limbaugh coined that one.
The Limbaugh bit was specifically "Screw-ells" based on the claim that big-name schools were screwing over their customers/students by encouraging them to take on increasingly unrecoverable amounts of debt. He also coined the "you'll own nothing, and you'll like it" line years before software as a service became a thing.
Do you have a link? "You'll own nothing and be happy" is from a 2016 WEF video based on an essay by Danish politician Ida Auken (which went viral in part because it did not make clear that the future depicted wasn't nessesarily supposed to be desirable). If Limbaugh had a similar line before, that implies that either the video creator got it from him (directly or indirectly) or that they coincidentally used a very similar phrase.
Not on hand, but I'll see if I can dig something up as I distinctly remember it being a thing within the right wing/tea party blog/talk-radio sphere during the whole "Life of Julia" kerfuffle circa 2012 or so.
That said, and not knowing otherwise, I strongly suspect Auken's statement is a case of either coincidental infection or convergent evolution. IE different people describing the same thing similarly.
I'm sure I remember a sentiment like it in one of the utopian satires I read as a teen. Erewhon maybe? Also it's a natural extension of communist expectations.
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It's a sane reason to dislike the Anglo-American tradition of clinging to rheumatoid institutions that turn A into B when what you need is something that turns A into C. But look, they say, enough of the C's you get are B's as well, or there's a second institution that turns B into C as a side effect, or B and C are interchangeable in current conditions.
But then something changes, and everyone starts to cry about how inefficient the institution is, we need 10 of C, but it's producing only 8 of them, we need to fix it to make more B. Fuck no, you don't need it to make B, you need a different institution to make C!
It's not a revelation that the Ivies dislike Asian students because they are not donating as alumni. But you know what they should do? Use projected total donations as the admission criterion. Hire some actuaries and build a table that estimates how much every applicant is likely to earn and how big of a share of their total lifetime earning they are likely to donate to Harvard and admit the most profitable applicants. Oh, a future high earner claims to be unfairly judged to be stingy? No problem, they can sign a contract with the university and get a donation-sized price of admission.
What about the prestige of the institution? Well, come up with a figure of how much money you are willing to sacrifice and make your admission essays about the ways in which the student will glorify the existence of your university.
Oh no, such primitive, mercantile approach is ruining the vibes-based reputation of your institution? Tough fucking luck. Oh no, other colleges that promise the best education for the least amount of money are stealing the brightest applicants? Mission fucking accomplished.
That would be telling; it would be common knowledge that they were just a self-licking ice-cream cone at that point and they would lose their prestige. They have to pretend to be something else.
I feel like this complaint is aptly addressed in the closing paragraph.
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There are a lot of (I assume) illegal contract types that could make this easier. I wonder how admissions would change if Harvard demanded 5% of lifetime earnings of all its students, maybe with a billionaire heir waiver in exchange for a one-time $50m donation.
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I’m not sure if he’s talking about native born American Chinese or simply students from China here. If he’s talking about Chinese students coming to American universities, it’s hardly surprising that they don’t donate — they aren’t Americans and have no reason to invest in American universities. They’re coming to get the name-brand diploma and afterward a good number of them go back to China. If American kids were graduating from Mexican universities, it’s unlikely they’d donate to their schools either.
I don't think there exists the distinction that you think exists.
What distinction? Americans with Chinese ancestry vs. people from the PRC?
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this describes Twitter, overall. Everyone does this to some degree, hardly limited to him though. Something sounds plausible so you run with it as being true.
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I was going to say: I see him making lots of assertions, but not backing them up with external sources. Something like a table of donations by race could have helped.
I idly wondered if he was just making up this whole explanation. Thanks for fact checking.
But did he check? What, in those sources, proves BAP wrong? Why did you believe him that he did check? The first paper is some inconclusive exploratory study. But it has interesting sections:
There's some hope about 2nd+ generations:
I'll also note that the paper was authored by one Kozue Tsunoda, who, being obviously Japanese, is very much not a modal example of an Asian alumni in the current year, and who with characteristic Japanese tact avoids sharp angles of facts, such as «how much less do Han Chinese alumni donate». Ime this is typical for Japanese sociology (mealy-mouthed garbage even by Western standards).
I allow that with the rising proportion of 2nd gen Asian Americans and some other changes like greater motivation of the Chinese HNWI to show loyalty to the US, the situation must be changing to the better (for schools). However, in no way can this disprove BAP's argument about the schools' already baked-in, historical reason to engage in anti-meritocratic discrimination against Asians and also Whites.
Actually, were TheMotte in a better shape to try and impose new standards, I'd have petitioned to make «disingenuous citations that don't prove your point» a bannable offense. It's such a disgusting redditbrain intimidation tactic. And this user is generally acting with an agenda.
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Is this some weird meta-fakeout? Pulling up the paper, it seems to be a qualitative report on philanthropic officers' attempts to improve Asian donation rates. Some quotes from it:
Notably, the paper, as far as I can tell, includes no statistics on rates of Asian American giving, focusing on strategies development offices are using to try to improve giving rates.
Exactly. Are the universities capitalist firms selling a product, or charitable organizations living off begging?
Pick one. If the thing they are sellling is valuable, they should openly name a price. When you buy burger, you pay and it is finished, McDonalds will not pester you for rest of your life into "donating".
Universities are hedge funds that market themselves by running resorts for young adults and that pay out distributions in status.
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Nothing irks me more than when someone lists a bunch of references claiming they support a point while in reality they say the exact opposite. I am triggered.
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I don't think he's wrong entirely, but he's wrong to attribute it to prejudice from having a bad experience with blacks. He's doing the same sort of psychoanalyzing that the left loves to do (if you dislike X it means you are secretly X).
Because he's fundamentally a leftist at heart. If the pen-name, affected Borat-speak, and preoccupation with IdPol weren't clues enough, you can just look at how he behaves.
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BAP is nonsensical. I don’t even care that he’s a racist; his general ranting doesn’t even make sense. Everything from the gay softcore porn to the obviously-fake ruritanian accent to the justifications for his racism is just nonsense he uses as an aesthetic shield. I don’t think he cares about HBD except occasionally using it for rhetorical points. And as far as his opinion on ‘the Han’ and ‘the bantoids’ goes, well, there are examples of majority Chinese judiciaries that generally function well(China, Taiwan, Singapore), and the main issues with the US legal systems stem from negrolatry, not nepotism.
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In order to establish whether there are ethnic category differences in civilizational potential, we would need to measure the propensity to feel guilt rather than shame, the extent to which different groups instinctively feel the sharp pain of empathy when considering another’s suffering, the extent to which there is a natural domesticated interest in making others’ happy, and perhaps the extent to which emotions and trustfulness can be read on their face. No amount of checks and balances can actually stop a society filled with the sociopathic/“gunners” from corrupting institutions (we see them do this today as is (I am from New Jersey)), so BAP’s hypothesis is not invalid, just unevidenced.
The interplay between racial genes and morality has actually been studied recently, but I haven’t taken the time to delve in:
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-7
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-8
I don’t find it impossible or even improbable that different groups would have different levels of prosocial tendency (obedience, guilt, interest in the feelings of others). I’ve seen the role of genetics at play in my dogs who have vastly different characters despite only diverging 1000-2000 years ago. And frankly I also think this discussion is pretty important. Which doctor would I rather have, the intelligent one who uses all their cognitive energy for self-gain, or the less intelligent one who has a permanent cognitive reserve dedicated to checking his own moral behavior? The former is going to prescribe me unnecessary pills, not actually be interested in healing me, and may scam my insurance by sending me off to cousin doctors when it’s not necessary. The latter will take a little bit longer, but more efficiently arrive at the actual purpose of his social role.
I think mapping personality/behavior to race/ethnicity is iffy . This is entering into 'big 5' levels of vagueness here.
Blacks being more extroverted than other races is an elephant you're trying not to notice.
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I don't. I think it's obvious on the face of it. Genes and culture co-evolve. The question isn't if there are differences, the question is how significant they are on average.
Traits like aggression, impulse control, parental investment, fidelity, industriousness, cleanliness, and aesthetic preferences are all present in animal species, vary among subspecies, and are clearly genetic in origin -- especially in species without culture to speak of. Can branches of humanity, having been split off for hundreds if not thousands of generations, which evolved in very different environments (and very different cultures), possibly not have some substantial drift here?
A common sentiment around here is how silly those are who imagine that evolution stopped at the neck. Sure, (specific subspecies of) black people can run faster or have more fast-twitch muscle fibers, and that's because of genetic divergence, but no way could they be less intelligent!
But one of the weirdest things to me about many of the people on this board is that they will then go on to do the exact same thing with neural architecture. Sure, different populations have vastly disparate levels of intelligence, but no way could the same factors which cause that have substantial differences upon personality!
Let a collie be raised by cats, and it will try to herd things.
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Francis Fukuyama has some interesting political philosophy that tries to do big picture, Jared Diamond style analysis of why some regions have a less stable history in terms of whether a central ruler governing the local areas of its domain was able to assert power over long periods.
In this analysis, India is noted as being unstable in terms of central government, instead suffering waves of conquest by foreign powers from the North, I forget the historical elements. This led to, or exists alongside, to cultural tendencies towards nepotism, with family being more important than society broadly speaking. This is pretty awful paraphrase probably but the idea of different peoples having different cultural tendencies is not unusual.
But I think the power of culture is that, people, especially second-generation often grow up adopting the customs, and culture, of the country they live in. Such is cultural development for everybody. I think America still has a culture of meritocracy that should maintain, I mean presumably cultures are constantly at risk of change due to other, but often don't change. In any case, cultures are increasingly merged.
That wasn't because of foreign invasions. The extreme caste endogamy started during the Gupta empire, an empire of local origin, and during the middle of a long pause in foreign invasions.
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“Meritocracy” in a ruthlessly capitalist country can easily incentivize sociopathy (or at least an efficiency of mind that discounts actual moral feelings to a degree reminiscent of sociopathy). Let’s say I want a job at Google. Any evolved instinct to care for others or to experience guilt about moral choices (getting answers from a previous student; is working at Google even moral?) takes up cognitive space that could be allotted to my repetitive studies and task-list completion. It’s trivially easy for a sociopath-ish student to understand that he needs to pretend to have moral feelings and to do the requisite extra-curricular to signal this; these are small barriers in the pursuit of self-gain. Once he is a manager or CEO and running our nation’s search engine and algorithms, he’s not going to magically experience moral compunction about the consequences of what he’s doing. He was never trained in that, he was selected for having the least of that, and he may not even have it in him. Anyway: Google job secured, mates secured.
This is different than the selection in effect within a devoutly Christian society, as was common in European history (back when everyone genuinely believed the religion). Acting Christlike and having Christ-ian moral feelings were genuine sexual section factors on their own, and were also factors in being selected for high positions. (You also had interesting things like the practical wisdom of the society being clothed in Christian language, easily accessed to those who believe but less accessible to sociopaths). Obviously it was far from perfect as a social technology, but I think that this likely led to an increase in prosocial gene proliferation. People weren’t chiefly judged on their widget production but on their faith (capacity for moral and social feelings) and their imitation of the singular moral paragon.
What I mean by all this is that it’s entirely possible Europeans have higher prosocial genes due to 1400 years of evolutionary selection, that this is pro-civilizational, but that our current “widget meritocracy” is ultimately anti-civilizational because it rewards self gain through widget production which (because cognition is zero sum) necessarily punishes those with substantive moral feelings.
I'm not sure on selection of prosocial genes, will think on this - Fukuyama puts it culturally with regard to practises of Roman Catholic church disrupting familial inheritance etc
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The regions of Europe that became Christian later tend to due better than those that became Christian sooner. I.E. Northern vs Southern Europe. Saint Paul was converting Greeks in the 1st century, and Albanians were ruling and converting the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries; yet, these countries are basket cases compared to Finland or Lithuania. The last bastions of Paganism in Europe.
The regions of Europe that became Christian later were also much, much flatter, had more interior waterways, and in many cases had easier access to the Atlantic Ocean. I.e. factors that support large, contiguous empires, industrialization, and overseas colonization/trade vis-a-vis the Roman Empire's mediterranean core which was functionally centered around coastal enclaves largely isolated from eachother by rough (and expensive to economically develop) terrain. The southern European and Levant states didn't even have a non-Gibralter route to the world's oceans until the world-spanning empires who did have Atlantic ocean access were already established.
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If Christianity helped to spread "prosocial genes" in population, we would observe that people who were Christian the longest - Greeks, Sicilians, Southern Italians, Spanish and other Mediterrannean peoples - would be the most "prosocial" and people who were Christian only for short time - Nordic and Baltic peoples - would be wild raging two legged beasts.
Do we observe it?
The people who were Christian the longest would be various tiny middle eastern ethnicities. I think the largest and best continuity are the Maronites, who’ve been an endogamous Christian group since well before the Islamic conquests and who are doing quite well by the standards of ‘minority group living in a shithole country ruled by terrorists’. Ditto for Palestinian Christians(Arab Christians actually outcompete Jews in the Israeli education system) and copts.
The longest continually Christian ruled territory is probably northern Italy, although plausibly some other part of the carolingian empire(maybe the Ile de Paris) has it beat. And northern Italy, unlike the south, has outcomes similar to germany.
‘Christianity is mildly eugenic, but not enough to overcome most confounders’ fits the data we have. There’s plausible explanations; monogamy, reduction of cousin marriage, monasteries as a dumping ground for autists. I wouldn’t say there’s strong evidence but it seems to lean in that direction.
And these people are typical Middle Easterners, not "pro-social" at all outside their family and clan.
Why you exclude Central (with Rome) and Southern Italy? Excepting small and short lived emirate of Bari it was in solid Christian hands since Constantine.
Your picture of Christian history seems too rosy. Autists and other mentally ill were seen as possessed by devil and treated accordingly. Monasteries were, for most of Christian history exclusive institutions, serving as dumping ground for excess unmarried sons and daughters of aristocracy (mostly daughters), and were tiny, not enough to influence general genetic composition of population.
So what caused European specific high IQ genetic development? More plausible is theory of Peter Frost it was work from home.
More technically, cottage industry and distributed manufacturing.
In other civilizations, succesful craftsmen (presumably with high IQ and conscientiousness scores) moved to cities where they thrived and prospered until they died of disease. In Europe, guild system specific in European civilization prevented it, and distributed manufacturing evolved as workaround.
Under this system, craftsmen stayed in their villages, worked with material brought to them by merchant and sold him the finished goods. It was miserable existence combining drawbacks of city and country, life at complete mercy of the trader.
Still, succesful craftsmen had large families, who, unlike children born in plague pits that were premodern cities, survived. This way, by series of historical accidents, high IQ and conscientiousness genes spread in the population. Until end of guild system and development of capitalism put end to this process.
Yes, at least on this issue, Elon Musk is full of shit.
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You would need to account for the infusion of genes into eg Sicilians (8%+) due to the Muslim conquests, and then also account for whatever the Northern Europeans were doing with their own religion prior to Christianity. Always found it interesting that Odin is also a figure who sacrifices himself on a tree to benefit the world: “I know that I hung on that windy Tree nine whole days and nights, stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to my own self given, high on that Tree of which none have heard from what roots it rises to heaven. None refreshed me ever with food or drink, I peered right down in the deep; crying aloud I lifted the Runes, then back I fell from there.”
No, Odin sacrificed to learn secret of the runes for himself.
Anyway, you just disproved your previous assertion that Christianity was necessary to evolve "prosocial genes" in population. If old Germanic religion was as good, the Northern Europeans could stick to Odin and Thor and would be just fine.
It’s only disproven if you discount all the complexity of the question. Southern Europe had an influx of conquering Muslim genes and Jewish genes, whereas Northern Europe did not. And while we don’t know a ton about Norse Paganism, the figure of Odin shows interesting overlap in emphasizing the idea of self-sacrifice for social benefit, which is actually not common to all religions (as an example it’s absent in the figure of Muhammad). Rather than seeing Christianity as wholly distinct from every other religion, we should just consider the underlying social technologies of the religion and how they influence sexual selection — couldn’t Odinism have some but not all of the benefit of Christianity? I also wouldn’t deny that there are independent variables from geography (cold winter theory).
Except, in the myth, the benefit was learning secret of runes, the myth says nothing about how it was useful to anyone else than Odin.
??? Mo was happily married and living well, and sacrificed it all to preach his message to unfriendly audience, faced hatred, persecution, and finally had to flee his hometown to save his life.
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Replying to myself, but a tangential topic to look at would be whether the religion in a given civilization promoted prosociality the most or whether it promoted memory the most. There are religions where collecting information guaranteed greater chance of resources, mates, and offspring (Islam (the Hafiz), Judaism (The Rab)). In Christian Europe, the religiously informed priesthood generally did not have children, being celibate.
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The level of wanton illegal immigration in the last three years, and the last four months in particular, are so incredibly unprecedented that you simply cannot look to the past for comparison.
This is civilization-ending, but the civilization doesn't end overnight, and by the time you would agree with the seriousness it will be too late to do anything about it. It might already be too late.
Do you have a source for numbers on the amount of illegal immigration? All the numbers I can find are at least a few years old so don't tell me anything about the last three years. e.g., Wikipedia has charts that only go up to 2016.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/border-numbers-fy2023
2.5 million encounters in a year sure seems like a lot. Presumably some were encountered, sent back and came again, others were never encountered at all.
It's also significant that over half were non-Mexican, Guatamelan, Honduran but from other countries.
Recall the scare about a PLA 5th column entering the US? I don't know about that but it looks like the US borders are so open they're sucking in people from other continents.
I believe the actual process is: the illegals seek out border patrol to report to and then are released into the US with a court date.
And as you said: then there are the others who don't bother with that and don't show up in encounters statistics.
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That is more recent than any chart I could find. The Wikipedia page I linked has that data going up to 2021 and I had also found it on Statista going up to 2022. Statista does mention a methodology change in March 2020, although it doesn't sound like it should affect that number.
But that's counting encounters at the southern border, which is very different from the count of illegal immigrants (which, admittedly, is a hard thing to count). Is the idea that you expect that number to be proportional to the number who make it across that border unnoticed? I'd worry about changes in enforcement over time adding a lot of noise there, especially if there's any policy changes encouraging repeat encounters for the same person. Also, this is ignoring illegal immigrants that enter through other methods; are you particularly more worried about the ones crossing the border illegally as opposed to overstaying visas?
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Whats the actual deal with the Chinese illegal immigrants? Are the numbers actually high? If so are we to interpret this as the situation in China being much worse than we thought, or is it some clandestine operation? The latter seems super implausible. If the numbers of captured people are really that high I can’t imagine nobody would be caught with a suspicious gadget or spill the beans on interrogation.
There's lots of illegal Chinese immigrants. The trick is most of them come in legally for a brief stay and then just never leave. Their immigrant relatives help them get set up in America and they live relatively prosperous lives here compared to their lives in China.
And more recently many people of nationalities spanning the globe are pouring over the southern border. And a few of them are also Chinese. But presumably some other sort of Chinese people who can't easily scam the American visa system.
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According to NBC, it's primarily political refugees. People who aren't feeling safe in China looking for somewhere rich and unwilling to extradite. Though it makes sense to sneak in some sleeper agents too - it's not like it's hard to procure guns or explosives in the US.
You can definitely be persecuted for speaking out, and everyone knows this. It’s also very hard to verify that you’ve been persecuted, so a whole lot of people claim refugee status who haven’t actually been persecuted.
We had a guy join my church for a few weeks, and he reported that he’d also attended Baptist, Mormon, and a whole bunch more. According to my Chinese wife accumulating a big list of churches you’ve attended is a strategy for claiming religious refugee status.
You can just list off different churches you've attended and pattern-match to somebody else's semi-recent claim of repression?
It didn’t make much sense to me. My best guess is trying to accumulate people that can confirm that you attended church services.
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IIRC religious refugees are resettled with their coreligionists by preference.
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Is that true? I don’t really have a head for the numbers here. How does it compare to the more regulated immigration in the gilded age, or the Cold War levels?
Currently more illegal immigrants are entering the US (over 300k) than children are born each month… that is unprecedented in US history. If it continues we will add an additional 40 million immigrants every decade i.e. a population equivalent in size to the existing African-American population.
A quick search turned up this:
And it's backed up with additional coverage:
Notice that these numbers are not the same as a lasting immigrant population. Last time I looked at this, most encounters ended in detention or expulsion. Sometimes one followed by the other. They also weren't unique; some number of border crossings are repeat visitors who've been thrown out each time.
Take a look at the October and November numbers here. I'm seeing about 46,000 "Notice to Appear" admissions for each. Even assuming every one of those disappears, immediately, into the general population, it's a far cry from the 300,000 that's getting reported.
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You linked an older thread, this is his thread from yesterday and yes I think he's on the mark. IQ nationalism is a failure mode of HBD awareness.
This doesn’t address OP’s primary complaint, which is lack of evidence.
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I think the similarity is less with the Irish and more with the historical German immigration, didn't cause problems for the English but was changing the culture until the English forcibly eradicated their culture at the time of WWI. BAP probably doesn't expect the dominant US culture to be able to pull off something similar with a larger Chinese population.
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Can I just take a moment to say:
Racists do not describe themselves as racists. They always have beliefs that re perfectly reasonable and normal from their own perspective, and generally have either sources of evidence they consider authoritative or arguments they consider persuasive to validate those beliefs.
That being said: are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
And if not, who in the world could we call a racist, then?
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
But in many cases, it's pretty easy to tell when that stuff is all happening above someone's bottom line. This also relates to epistemic learned helplessness, with people being rightly skeptical of arguments and citations that seem persuasive but are highly optimized to seem that way by lots of distributed effort in some cases, but being more amenable to those types of arguments when they come from certain people/groups or support certain things they're disposed towards.
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
Racism is simply not well-defined. Let's say for example that a person usually genuinely tries to judge black people as individuals rather than making assumptions about their behavior based on the fact that they are black. But this same person, being aware of racial crime statistics, also crosses the street when he sees groups of young black men hanging out outside stores. Not out of any hate toward black people, but just because to him his personal safety is more important than trying to always judge people as individuals.
Is this person racist or not? I would say no, but there are others who would say yes.
Do I think that BAP usually genuinely tries to judge black people as individuals rather than making assumptions about their behavior based on the fact that they are black? No, I do not. I have not read much of BAP's stuff, but based on what I have read he pattern-matches, to me, to people who generally tend to be racists even by my definition. So yeah, I am ok with saying that he is probably a racist, by my definition of the word.
I think that probably everyone or almost everyone at least to some degree stereotypes others based on what ethnic groups they belong to. To me one of the main things that makes someone a racist by my definition of the word is that rather than seeing this stereotyping as an unfortunate but inevitable result of the fact that we all have limited knowledge of other people and limited cognitive resources to devote to evaluating other people, he valorizes the stereotyping as a good thing.
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I really don’t think people in this space grapple with this question, and questions like it, nearly enough.
Many of my complaints about how this “IDW-ish slice” of the Internet discusses racism would be addressed if, after reading someone’s comments about how leftists have used the word “racism” into meaninglessness, I got the impression that they had proactively, introspectively, honestly asked themselves the following questions:
I agree that a lot of left-wing people abuse the term “racism”! But that’s, like, step negative one of an actually introspective conversation. I don’t see many people here actually grapple with “what do I think racism is?”, instead only arguing the negative.
For example, imagine if I did this with something that was more of a sacred cow of these parts — imagine if I argued “right-wing people have abused the term free speech into complete meaninglessness because almost all of them invoke the first amendment in response to private actors criticizing them or banning them from a forum etc”. You can’t really deny that a large number of people actually do this all the time, but this is a terrible comment, right? What I need to do is actually engage with the idea — “what do these people mean when they say free speech? What restrictions do I think should be put on private platforms to honor free speech? What social norms should surround censorship of unpopular statements by private actors?” and so on.
So responding to a right-wing person complaining about free speech with “right-wing people have used this term so loosely I genuinely have no idea what they mean anymore” would be unbelievably lazy. It’s fundamentally my job to understand what they mean, and all my comment shows is that I’ve blatantly refused to do that, and chosen to believe that they mean nothing.
And in terms of my actual statements, this makes me completely indistinguishable from someone who actually doesn’t believe in free speech at all, and would have no objections to the government passing a law to ban spoken racism, doesn’t it?
In the same way, imagine the perspective of someone like me, a person with the opposite view to the prevailing zeitgeist around these parts when it comes to racism. Try to remember that if all you do is make this negative argument (“leftists have abused the term racism so much it’s meaningless now”), I have absolutely no idea if you are someone whose beliefs are closer to “the thing that most young Americans in 1995 would have called racism is in fact bad, but it barely exists and leftists exaggerate it” or whose beliefs are closer to “the thing that most young Americans would have called racism in 1995 is in fact good and more people should do it”, and those are completely different arguments to have. And the process of trying to get to the point where I know which of these you’re actually saying is exhausting and 90% of the time I fail. Many of you I uncharitably suspect of switching between the two whenever it’s convenient for you to do so.
TL;DR: What I really want is for you to be proactive in telling me which you mean, rather than just talking about what you don’t consider to be racism. If this is not racism, what would I consider racism? Did the majority of people who supported segregation do so for racist reasons, or not? And so on.
You look at what they say and do, and build an argument that regardless of whether they're willing to admit it, they're biased.
Applying negative or positive modifiers to your interactions or judgements of people based not on their individual actions, but on their stated or perceived racial identity.
The statements you listed seem like obvious examples of racism, so your definition seems like a poor one. Why personal animus? Why not impersonal animus? Why rely on animus at all; how you treat people is relative, and if you treat some people better because of their race, that's racism, just as if you treated other people worse because of their race.
Do you honestly think most of the regulars here would disagree with the above in principle? Of the ones who would disagree, do you honestly think they'd claim not to be racist? There's varying degrees of actual WNs here, and seeing them explicitly argue that racism is good, actually is hardly an unknown occurrence.
I don't see why that is supposed to be a bad argument. I can see I disagree with it, since "free speech" was commonly understood to be about much more than the strict text of the First Amendment, but the First Amendment does not, in fact, constrain censorship by private actors in general, right wingers do, in fact, sometimes get sloppy with their arguments and imply it does, and this does, in fact, muddy the waters of the conversation. It is not unreasonable to conclude that a term has been so misused as to no longer be useful, in which case the proper thing to do is to taboo the term and agree on another that better communicates ones' ideas.
And in fact, arguments more or less identical to the one you've presented as clearly bad have been a common part of the debate here since the community's formation. I've engaged in a large number of productive discussions that started with a comment very similar to "the right-wing conception of free speech is incoherent", and those discussions have shaped my thinking on the nature of rights and government.
Questions like these are the obvious next-step in the discussion, but registering disagreement is still the first step. Ideally, one does more than one step per comment, but life is often less than ideal, and it seems to me that a clear statement of disagreement is often a good first step.
Sure. Then one can attempt to discuss free speech with you, ideally more than once and from a variety of different angles, and build a model over time of the nature of your worldview and values. One can ask questions and contemplate the answers, note which arguments you make and which positions you commit to over time, and note whether these appear to be motivated by principle or convenience. One can note how you engage with those who disagree, whether you argue in good faith, and so on. In this way we come to know each other over time, and when we find a sharp mind, much can be learned even if agreement is never achieved.
I offered some definitions above; would those satisfy your request? If, as I believe, the large majority of regulars here share approximately that same definition, as evidenced by their previous comments, why would stating it each time be necessary? If you were a newcomer and were unfamiliar, why not just start asking questions?
...But then, of course, we get to the flipside.
It's always nice to see common ground. But the question is, what follows? Where does this apparent agreement lead? If the term has been abused, what consequences result, and how should we think about them? If the common way of talking about race is in fact fraught, how do we talk about it instead?
Here's a recent conversation I engaged in with someone who seemed to be, at least by my definition above, a racist. Your argument is that people here have something of a blind-spot toward actual racism, that we've just handwaved the question away rather than taking it seriously. Do you think that critique applies to my arguments in that exchange? If so, how? I'm up for continuing the conversation if you are.
You say:
I would not endorse either of those statements, though I'm much closer to the former than the later. I do not think young people in 1995 had a good understanding of the problem of racism, because they failed to anticipate the results of their actions and the consensus they rallied behind. I do think most of the things they considered racist were in fact racist, but some of them were not, and some of those were intentional lies sold to them. It seems to me that the opposition to racism typical of the 90s simply failed on its own terms, and any serious conversation on the subject needs to engage with that fact front and center. If you'd like a more in-depth elaboration of this idea, you can find one starting here, with the meat being the arguments from exhaustion, blindness, dementia, sociopathy, and senescence laid out here. If you have thoughts or disagreements with the arguments outlined there, I'm again up for it if you are. More generally, I'd be interested to know if you think that discussion grapples sufficiently with the question of racism and race relations, and if not, what you think it missed.
In any case, I think I am a pretty good example of someone who rejects Progressive discourse on and definitions of racism, while still considering actual racism to be a problem that needs to be addressed, in one's own reasoning most of all. I hardly think I'm alone in this position, and I think there would be even more joining me if there remained any real hope for positive-sum solutions in the near-term.
More generally, I think you severely underestimate the credibility problem inherent to this subject from the perspective of many of the people commonly posting here. There's a reply to you from @Nybbler, below, that basically amounts to "the term 'racism' is actively counterproductive". If you disagree, why not outline your view of how the term and the discourse employing it has delivered net-positive outcomes for our society or subsets thereof? If you are disinclined to engage with Nybbler, I'd be happy to take up his side of the argument; I certainly do not believe that either the term or the general discourse have been positive-sum across our society in recent years. For an example, see the discussion some years back of Progressive attempts to address racial gaps in discipline in the public school system. Stuff like that is where a lot of the pitch-black cynicism over the discourse surrounding "racism" comes from, and that was before BLM and the riots and the murder wave, and hard data about the intentional social interventions that brought those things about.
Does any of the above shift your priors that the question of racism isn't seeing thoughtful engagement here? If not, I'm interested in your further critique, either of the above or of other specifics you find relevant.
That … was my point, yes? The point was that “clearly and consistently stated personal animus” is trivially a bad definition for “racism” in that it fits basically none of the actual examples that nearly everyone agrees to be racist, and yet many here consider the idea that racism can include unconscious bias to be some recent redefinition of the term that makes it meaningless.
Again, that’s precisely my point! The discussions start there, not finish! Almost everyone here who wants to argue “leftists have abused the term ‘racism’ into meaninglessness” are specifically saying that because they do not want to have a conversation about what racism is; they are trying to end the discussion there. The equivalent for free speech would be, if a right-wing person started talking about any more nuanced idea of what free-speech is than some ridiculous strawman, and I responded with “this entire discussion is a trap and I refuse to engage”. The moment a right-wing person says “free speech”, I get to assert that they can only mean the dumbest and most incoherent version of that concept, and when they try to explain that they don’t, I plug my ears and say that what’s coming is a deliberate trap.
As I’ve said, there’s something very honest about the open white nationalists, as much as I disagree with everything they stand for. Frankly I don't consider them reachable; I'll be cordial enough but I don't think there's realistically any chance I could change their minds or they mine; the worlds we see and our values are just too far apart. What frustrates me more are the Classical Liberals who will tell me that racism has been abused into meaninglessness by the Left and so what does it even mean anymore, who can possibly know, I guess we’ll just have to ditch this entire memeplex completely because it’s corrupted, when they’re surrounded by white nationalists.
(Seriously, guys, your “like, what even is racism anyway, man? Is it even, like, a thing?” comment does not feel very genuine to me when you have to have scrolled past the white nationalists responding to me to make it in the first place. Imagine being a libertarian in a left-wing space where your responses were three-fourths "Conservatives and neolibs will call absolutely anything Communism these days, they've turned that word into complete meaninglessness, like are there even any actual communists left? Whenever a right-winger says something is Communist I just ignore them" and one-fourth "Stalin did nothing wrong and we must immediately enact a worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat and seize the means of production". I know it's cringe but the only word that I can think of to describe the effect of this is "gaslighting".)
What frustrates me more is suspecting that the Classical Liberal in question is not that classically liberal at all.
I do think that most of the regulars here, excluding the white nationalists, will resolutely refuse to engage the question of whether “racism-as-unconscious-bias” is a meaningful concept or not in that it points to an actually existing thing in the world that is useful to point out, yes, doing their absolute best to derail that conversation at every stage. I think that they will argue that because the Left has abused that term into meaninglessness, we can’t have any discussion at all about this, and so I guess if a leftist wants to call them racist, then it just do be like that sometimes. I think they will temporarily adopt definitions of racism that require conscious and explicit bias without noting that this trivially doesn’t work for almost all of the standard cases. I think that they will talk about how Ibram X Kendi is dumb, or liken anti-racism to a religion, or talk about superweapons and cancel culture and free speech and thoughtcrime, and generally do anything possible to avoid the question I’m trying to drive towards.
That’s just … been my experience, at least, as I remember it.
You asked for peoples' definitions of racism, and I offered: "Applying negative or positive modifiers to your interactions or judgements of people based not on their individual actions, but on their stated or perceived racial identity." Do you recognize a difference between that definition and "clearly and consistently stated personal animus"? I think my definition covers all of the examples you gave for racism the local norms miss. If so, would you agree that I at least am not exhibiting the tendency your critique is aimed at? If not, what is my definition missing?
In that first link I offered, would you say that the guy I was arguing against was displaying "clearly and consistently stated personal animus"? His claims seem pretty similar to several of the ones you claim are missed by the local understanding, and yet I recognize his arguments as clearly racist, and argued against them. Would this be more evidence against your thesis? If not, again, what am I missing?
At this point, I've offered a definition, per your request, and an example of that definition being applied. Does this seem useful to you?
I think you are mistaken in two ways. First, I think while there are some people who are not interested in the conversation, there are more who will take it if offered. I am certainly one of them. Second, I think you are misunderstanding how conversation works here. I straightforwardly believe that "leftists have abused the term "racism" into meaninglessness". That is my best understanding of reality, and so it is my starting position if you wish to discuss the term with me. I have what seems to me to be a fairly clear model of how and when the term was eroded, which I've already taken the liberty of offering up, and which I'm more than happy to elaborate further on if you'd like. And of course, if you disagree, I'd greatly enjoy hearing your best arguments and evidence of how the term is meaningful, together with examples of how it has been usefully employed in recent years, and which positive outcomes resulted, and how those positive outcomes outweigh the negative outcomes associated with those uses. Would you agree that I, at least, don't appear to be trying to end a conversation by that statement? And if conversation is what you're looking for, by all means, let's commence!
In fact, you and @guesswho have gotten a fair number of replies in this thread, and in addition to being willing to argue my own position, I'd be happy to defend those of others that I do not myself consider racist. You argue that the white supremacy contingent is at least honest, but it's the "classical liberals" equivocating that you really object to. Well, can you point to that sort of equivocation in this thread? Arguments that aren't obvious WN talking points, but are playing with ambiguities? You seem to have called out @The_Nybbler for exactly this based on his tar-baby comment. I'd be happy to argue the other side of that one, if you like, since I think "racism" is, in the current era at least, a tar-baby.
...None of this happens, though, if you demand that people agree with you from the start as a precondition to conversation. I argue a number of controversial positions here on a fairly regular basis, and I always go in assuming that most people here are going to not only strongly disagree, but start from the position that my argument is straightforwardly stupid. That's half the fun of it, and I can't think of a time when it prevented me from finding good discussion. But if you aren't willing to actually make an argument, I can't very well make you, can I? All I can do in that case would be to point out that you complain that people aren't looking for conversations, and then refused the conversation when it was offered in good faith. And in fact, that has been my experience of how these conversations generally go, much to my displeasure.
It seems to me the response there is to argue that it is not a trap, perhaps by giving some examples of how and why the question genuinely matters. Alternatively, ask them why they believe it is a trap, and ask them what evidence could change their mind. This can't stop a person from stonewalling you, but it also can't stop you from making it very obvious that they are stonewalling and acting in bad faith, which is frowned on quite strongly here.
I straightforwardly believe the above, and yet I continue to argue vociferously with WNs. Since I think the term racism is useless, I don't bother accusing them of doing a racism, I just straightforwardly argue that their positions are obviously wrong on the merits, based on easily-available evidence. This has the added benefit that when they say something that would usually be judged racism but is in fact accurate, like citing Black crime statistics, I don't have to pretend they've committed a mortal sin by saying true things. Nor am I required to recognize solidarity or fraternity with them; they aren't on my side, and if by some miracle they were to achieve significant power in the future, well, Second Amendment Solutions work on WNs too.
The arguments you describe have frequently been present on the previous incarnations of this space, and are ubiquitous most other places, so I don't have to imagine anything. It never stopped me from making my case. Don't let it stop you from making yours.
Is it "derailing the conversation" to offer evidence of how the term and the people employing it have caused repeated, large-scale disaster far out of proportion to any concrete benefit they've delivered, especially in recent years?
Put another way, if someone genuinely disagrees with you about the usefulness of the term "racism", how should they go about making their case to you?
Well, I can easily promise not to make any of those arguments. And while I am pretty sure I disagree strongly with the point you're driving toward, I do want you to make it as clearly and cleanly as possible. How am I doing so far?
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This complaint only makes sense if you think of words as having intrinsic or "correct" meanings. If you instead treat words as just vehicles for conveying ideas, then you could just answer "who in the world could we call a racist, then?" with "nobody, using it to describe people is pointless because it doesn't mean anything". And I think that's a reasonable answer if you're not going around calling people racist. If the word "racist" doesn't have to mean anything, then you can just not use it if you think it wouldn't help people understand the idea you're trying to convey.
No it isn't. It's the speaker's job to convey their idea in an easy-to-understand fashion. If there was an argument on this site where people were conflating the philosophical concept of free speech with the first amendment, then when I make a post in next week's thread about the philosophical concept it's my responsibility to clearly indicate that I'm not talking about the first amendment. If there were posts saying that the concept of "free speech" is incoherent and meaningless, then it's contingent on me to specify what exactly I mean by free speech. If enough people are confused, then it's probably better for me to not use the phrase "free speech" at all, and replace it with something like "the right to not be punished for conveying my opinion about the election".
So to answer your object-level question, you could (and should) directly say that you think "BAP has an unconscious bias against black people, regardless of their individual intelligence or behavior". If you want to know how a poster compares with the average 1995 American, you could ask "Do you think the average American in 1995 would agree with that statement? Do you agree with that statement?". You don't have to specifically use the word "racist", especially when you know it won't help people understand your point.
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Why would that be absurd? Why do you believe the term is useful at all? Why do you believe that “racism” indicates a real and important phenomenon worth caring about? What if the word was never anything other than a boo light, intentionally devised as a way to pathologize what is actually a totally normal and healthy outlook?
There is nobody on earth who, upon honest reflection, would agree that “Yes, I just hate minorities because they’re ugly and stinky and it’s bad to look different from the way I look.” That is a caricature which exists only in the heads of racial egalitarians and “anti-racists”. In reality, even the least introspective, most unreflective “bigot” has actual specific reasons - even if it’s at the level of anecdotal examples and life experience - to believe that there are important differences between the traits and the history of various groups, and/or that limiting the interpersonal interaction of those groups is optimal. I don’t care if they wouldn’t put it in those high-falutin’ terms. Even if you gave them truth serum and ample opportunity to freely articulate the contents of their own minds, they wouldn’t commit to “just don’t like ‘em, simple as” as an honest reflection of their internal mental state.
Racism isn’t real. Believing in important racial differences is certainly real; I believe it, as do probably a plurality of commenters here. Believing that an optimal society ought to achieve some level of separation/segregation between groups is also real, and is a far more controversial position even in this community; I advocate for the managed and non-coercive separation of black Americans from non-blacks over time, but it’s not because “I just hate the darkies and want them to die”. I have (what I think are) sophisticated reasons for believing what I do; I reasoned myself into this position over time, and did not start from a simple visceral aversion to people who look different from me.
A small number of people today even still believe that some races ought to rule over others, or even that some racial and ethnic groups should be exterminated! I don’t believe that, and I’ve never interacted with anyone who does (I suspect that the vast majority of people who do say these things are simply LARPing or doing a bit) but I don’t deny that such people are real. However, they are still not “racist”. They have actual reasons for believing that the conditions of the world are such that extreme measures genuinely are necessary for the preservation and improvement of mankind.
I could turn this around on you and ask: “Do you own pets? You do? Oh, so you irrationally hate animals? You want them enslaved in your home, rather than free to rule themselves?” And you would rightly respond, “No, I just don’t think humans and animals are precisely equal, and that the natural order of things is for humans to domesticate certain animals and to use them for our benefit, as long as we’re not overly cruel to those animals. I love my cat, but I wouldn’t let him drive a car, or vote in a presidential election.” But if I was absolutely committed to the proposition that speciesism is a useful and important concept, it would be easy for me to distort your beliefs to make them fit into a model that pathologizes them.
This is essentially what I believe that you’re doing with the term “racism”. Let the term go. It was never valuable to begin with. Nobody here cares if you think we’re racist or not. The term has become fully disenchanted. You might as well call us all heretics. Or “enemies of the Emperor of Assyria”. Engage with our ideas on the object level, and stop worrying about whether or not they fall afoul of your made-up boo word.
Well, it would certainly be convenient for you if we'd stop using a "made-up boo word" to describe the beliefs of racists, and I am (to a limited degree) sympathetic to your argument (put forward with more good faith than @The_Nybbler does) that "Racism has become so weaponized as to get my hackles up as soon as I hear it."
However, it looks to me like you basically want to argue for policies and an ideology that would, under any reasonable definition, be considered "racist" - you would just prefer we not use that word, because it now has a negative connotation, and you believe that your policies and ideologies are actually good and reasonable and therefore should not be besmirched with negative connotations. It reminds me of David Duke, back in the day, who did the same dance you and nybbler do, but less elaborately (and less convincingly, because you could practically see the wink and the smirk when he did it): "I'm not a racist, I'm a racialist. I don't hate black people, I just love white people!"
Yes, of course you're correct that hardly anyone hates other races because "they're ugly and stinky" or "just because." The most unreflective might simply hate them because they've always been taught to hate them, or because they have had mostly negative interactions with them. The more reflective will advance more sophisticated arguments like you do about IQ and HBD and how we should agree to an amicable separation so they can peacefully flourish in their own ethnostate and reach their full potential yadda yadda.
But I think insisting that "We should accept the reality that black people are dumber and more criminal and we should bring back segregation, but don't call that racism, because that's made up" is a nonsense argument and you're engaging in it for purely rhetorical reasons. Racism clearly does exist; we're just disagreeing over whether or not it's a bad thing. Would you argue that the many black people who hate white people are not racists? Are @BurdensomeCount's triumphalist screeds about how white people deserve to be made to lick the boots of his folk not racist?
This is precisely what I am disputing! I have to believe that you are not actually this dim and mendacious. My entire point is that it is not in fact reasonable to consider my ideas “racist”. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s reasonable! You’re simply appealing nakedly to consensus and pretending like you’ve made an argument.
No, it doesn’t!
Yes! Obviously, yes! I am explicitly saying that these people are not racist. I have never said anything otherwise. Have you ever once seen me complain about “anti-white racism” or “reverse racism” or anything like that? No! They are anti-white, and I dislike them for that reason. Their beliefs are bad for my people, which is why I oppose them. But in many cases they are based on completely sensible, well-reasoned motivations. I don’t oppose them because they’re “racist” in some abstract sense of “it’s bad to prefer one group over another and to advocate in favor of that group, even when such advocacy negatively impacts another group” or “it’s bad not to like people because of their group identity”. It’s perfectly fine to do either! I just don’t want it done against my group, because that would be bad for my group. What about this is difficult for you to understand? Why do you keep acting like you’ve exposed some secret ulterior motive of mine?
Again, as both I and @SecureSignals noted, your argument here is structurally identical to an accusation of heresy. “Well, clearly you recognize that God is real, and the Bible is true - you just hate them!” And we are responding with “No, actually we reject your whole frame.” Again, just because a lot of people believe something does not mean it’s reasonable, or that people who reject it are doing so dishonestly.
What do you think I mean when I use the word racist? What do you think most people mean?
So your argument is "Racism is completely sensible and well-reasoned, so please don't use that word because it's a boo-word."
Exactly. This is the point you are missing. I understand that you are arguing that beliefs that are conventionally called "racist" are actually perfectly fine and reasonable beliefs. Go ahead and argue that.
I reject your objection to the word itself, not because I disagree with your ideology, but because I refuse to stop using a word just because you would prefer it not be used because it has negative associations. If I say your beliefs are racist, and you feel like that's a boo-word and I'm saying you're just like the KKK (which I am not btw), you are entitled to point out how your beliefs are different from the KKK's.But you are not entitled to tell me "Yes, I believe in racial discrimination and segregation, but don't call that racism because racism doesn't exist." You would like us to use some more politic, less pejorative word, but "racist," whether you like it or not, is an actual word that describes actual beliefs. The dispute is not over whether those beliefs exist, but what we should think about them.
Absolutely not. It's more akin to you saying "I do not believe in God and I think religion is fake and gay - but don't call me an atheist, that's a boo-word."
Let’s take a step back and check the extent to which you and I actually disagree.
Do you believe that there is such a thing as a slur? By this, I mean a word which is inherently designed to contain within it the implication that the thing being indicated is bad? And such that there would be no way to use the word in a value-neutral way?
Take the word “faggot”, for example. If I call a gay man - let’s call him Travis - a faggot and he protests by asking me to stop using that word, I can defend my usage of it in two ways. One of those ways - riffing, perhaps, off of the famous Chris Rock bit, is, “I’m not calling you a faggot because you fuck guys. I’m calling you a faggot because you’re mincing all over the place, acting all effeminate, and a man shouldn’t act like that. A straight guy can be a faggot too, if he acts faggy. Nothing specifically gay about it.” But of course, Travis is well aware of the history of this word, and that it was always designed and intended to target gay men, and simultaneously to conglomerate a number of behaviors commonly associated with specifically gay men and to anathematize those behaviors. So Travis understands that I am either mistaken or (more probably) lying.
The second way I can defend my usage of the word is to say, “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be a faggot! Being faggy is a totally normal and reasonable thing for a person to be.” Travis would likely respond, entirely reasonably, “Then why didn’t you use a word that doesn’t carry an insulting connotation? Why not call me, I don’t know, a queen? It’s not something everyone likes to be called, but at least it’s not a word that someone has only ever used to insult me.” If I were to reply, “No, I’m going to continue to say faggot. Everyone knows what it means, and yes, the vast majority of people who use it and/or have ever used it meant it insultingly. But I don’t think it is, so I’ll keep using it.” Do you think Travis would believe that I am being fully up-front with him?
By tabooing the word “faggot” and forcing me to describe him in a more value-neutral way, or at least to disaggregate the various assumptions contained within the word, Travis can at least get me to try and explicitly demonstrate that the various aspects of a supposed “faggot” are, independently, things worth caring about or drawing attention to. I would also need to demonstrate that such aspects do, in fact, typically come together in a particular package, and that the person whom I’m currently calling a faggot possesses all of those aspects.
What I’m saying is that “racist” has always been a slur. That it was coined by someone who intended it to refer to a cluster of things he thought were bad, and that it was popularized exclusively by people who all agreed that being racist was a bad thing. And that it is impossible to use in a value-neutral way due to its history. With which parts of this do you disagree?
Doesn't all of this apply to words like "wrong", "selfish", or "boring" as well? Sometimes people create words to refer to things that they think other people shouldn't do. Not all of those are slurs.
I continue to believe that the word "racist" is perhaps the best one-word description for the policies you've said you'd like to pursue. You see racial divisions between people as extremely important and would like to completely restructure society along its lines; I consider the extent to which you care about this, the extent to which you think racial division is important, to be extremely irrational - so irrational that the only way I can really try to understand it, though I would keep this to myself normally, is to start postulating things like trauma, depression, a ridiculously sheltered upbringing, and so on, to explain to myself how someone can get to where it seems like you are. I don't say those things as insults, I'm just trying to really make it clear that "that is racist" to me is not "you hate black people", it's kind of a statement in the epistemic universe of "you are depressed"; it's my own observation that you probably have a certain bias.
Setting the prescriptive stuff aside, at least descriptively, basically every American, including almost every attendee in the crowd at CPAC, would agree that the policies you're calling for can be accurately called "racist". The crowd at CPAC would immediately, reflexively jump to your defence once they saw that I was a left-wing person calling someone racist, but if you honestly explained your beliefs in front of the crowd in the way that you did above, there would be much clearing of throats, embarrassed murmurs, and rapid changing of subjects coming from the crowd.
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I agree that racist has inherently negative connotations for historical reasons. ("Racists" in the past wouldn't have used the word to describe themselves because it was essentially a universal belief. Segregationists in the 50s did not call themselves "racists" but they probably would not have shied away from the label either.) I do not agree it is a "slur." You compared it to calling someone a "faggot," but I think it would be more comparable to calling someone a "homosexual." A term that is both descriptive and at one time had very strong negative connotations, and still does with some people. If I call someone a homosexual because he's mincing around acting effeminate, it would still reasonably be understood as an insult. But if I describe people who engage in same-sex relations as "homosexuals" and am told that I shouldn't use that word because it's a slur, I'm going to ask them who decided that.
You advocate racial discrimination and segregation as reasonable and desirable, and you would like to taboo the word "racist" because to most people, "racist" has very negative connotations. I can understand why you would like to persuade people to use words without that baggage to describe your beliefs, but that does not mean anyone should feel obligated to accommodate you. Even here on the Motte, if someone just dismissed you with "Wow, you are such a racist," they would likely get modded, but describing your beliefs as "racist" is accurate. You may object to it, just as there are in fact gay people who now object to "homosexuals." Maybe you will be as successful as the "queer" community is at pushing for linguistic shifts. Or maybe you can rehabilitate the word "racist." But you are not the sole determiner of what a word means and how it is used, and just because it would suit your agenda to taboo the word or claim it "isn't a real thing" doesn't mean it does not, in fact, describe a real thing.
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I think a good comparison is the word heretic. Imagine you are an atheist and a puritan accuses you of being a heretic. Do you say "yes, you are right I am indeed a heretic." Only if you are trying to be provocative, but really you would just dismiss the entire frame of that question. No, I'm not going to admit to you that I am a heretic, I'm not going to accept your frame of the world by embracing that label, I dismiss the label altogether.
I don't have to imagine I'm an atheist, I am, and I'd happily confirm that I'm a heretic relative to any particular religion's dogma that defines me as such. I know that I meet that definition and don't have any problem with the word because it is has no moral worth to me.
The way that example is different from the one we're talking about here is that the people who meet a standard definition of racism don't want to be called racists. You imagine an atheist wouldn't want to be called a heretic, but why should we care? We've actively rejected that frame, so we're not embarrassed about being accurately labeled.
Whereas most racists have not actually rejected the social frame that gives rise to definitions and accusations of racism. They still want to be an upstanding member of that society, and they still want to think of themselves as morally correct within that society. So they want that society to drop it's own labels and definitions in order to accommodate them.
But could you be so blasé about labels like heretic or infidel if they carried with it serious social repression? If you couldn’t get a job, or lost all your friends or contact with your children if people knew you were an infidel, would you still happily accept the label? Racist is a label that still carries those kinds of consequences for those so labeled. Heretic and infidel really don’t outside of heavily religious communities.
Right, that was the point of my last paragraph.
People who meet society's current definition of racist just want society to change its beliefs or norms so that they're not punished. The idea that 'racist' is an incoherent or meaningless category is primarily a rationalization to justify that effort.
Saying that the social sanctions for being racist are too extreme and should be mollified is a real position that can be argued.
Saying that people are using 'the worst argument in the world' or 'labels as superweapons' to apply those sanctions to people who don't actually deserve them under the original purpose and intent of those sanctions is a real position that can be argued.
I don't think 'that word doesn't mean anything because I don't want it to' is a real argument, here. I think it's mostly a rationalization to try to dodge the issue, and society won't accept it.
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That's very brave of you, you could write "I am le heretic!" all day long and get updoots on Reddit.
If someone though is sincerely accusing you of being an infidel or heretic and you confirm their accusation you are accepting their frame of reference.
When you say you will "happily confirm you are a heretic" it's a "what are you going to do about it?" play. But if you actually lived in a society where that accusation had weight and social consequences, and you opposed the conventional wisdom for what entailed heresy, you would not accept that label for yourself or use it to describe your beliefs.
As a factual statement, a non-believer is an infidel. That's what infidel means. As a factual statement, someone who believes in racial discrimination and segregation is a racist.
You can reject the religion that labels nonbelievers infidels, and you can reject a society that abhors racism, but the words still have meanings that accurately describe a set of beliefs or lack thereof.
Yes, there are social consequences for being a racist, as there were at one time harsher social consequences for being an infidel. I understand why you would like to remove the social consequences for being a racist. That does not, however, change the factual meaning of the word or your beliefs. You and @hoffmeister are trying to argue that "racism doesn't exist," when what you're actually claiming is "racism is good and shouldn't be stigmatized." Those are not the same arguments, and the objection to the word "racist" is one of tactical semantics, because of the negative weight "racism" has today. You would prefer a less freighted term - like, say, "racialist" - but that doesn't mean "racist" is not an accurate label. You might not like someone calling you a racist. I would not like someone flinging "infidel" at me as an insult, especially if it potentially carried more serious consequences. But I cannot honestly say I'm not an "infidel."
Yes, this is my exact point. If I reject a religion that labels me an infidel or heretic, I am not going to accept that label to describe myself or my own beliefs. This is really basic stuff, nobody does this, except for farming upvotes on /r/atheism which falls under the "intentionally provocative" mode of embracing that label only as a power flex.
I reject the religion that frames the entire concept of racism which, by the way, relative to world history is a brand new concept tightly coupled with our own post-WWII civic religion which is exactly what we reject. "Words have meaning", exactly, which is why it is stupid for you to demand that I accept the framing of a religion that I reject by embracing that word to describe myself. Words have meaning, so I refuse to play along with that garbage and humor a religious fanaticism that I oppose.
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Yeah, that's how communication works.
Words have meaning, and have meaning in context. Just because you disagree with an opponent's worldview doesn't mean that words within the context of that worldview stop having discrete and coherent meanings.
There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be a heretic to Christians even if I don't believe in Christianity, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question. There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be (for example) a racist under the utilitarian definition of racism, even if you reject the empirical racism as a politically meaningful concept, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question.
It makes sense that you would want to 'reject the frame' if you think you can evade social sanctions thereby. That's a pretty normal thing to do, especially if you think the social sanctions are unjust.
But my point is,. just acknowledge the fact that by doing so, you are running from the truth and trying to muddy the waters. There's a true matter of fact that you're denying because you think people will react to hearing it badly/unjustly.
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In a society where it’s illegal to be a heretic, one has to hide one’s atheism to avoid prosecution and the points here about wordplay are irrelevant.
If I’m an atheist in say Iran, then the label is not the problem, it’s that my deconversion from Islam is a tad illegal.
Even in the US the label of apostate or heretic doesn’t matter in terms of “accepting their frame of reference”; what mattered is how my family/friends/society responded to my deconversion. It’s the object level, not the label.
Similarly, if say one has clear racial animosity, many people can find that abhorrent without ever needing to invoke the word “racism.” That term has been abused, but the 1995 version was much less so.
The hard bit is that certain facts about reality do seem to be “racist” or “sexist” and the toxicity of these labels keeps polite society from understanding reality in certain policy areas, inconveniently. That doesn’t make it better for those who really just dislike a given race or sex and/or want to discriminate against them and want those labels to disappear.
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An atheist is specifically not a heretic, and in puritan society atheism would in fact be a valid defense against charges of heresy.
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Isn't a heretic 'a believer who practices some heresy' -- which lets atheists specifically off the hook on that charge? (and puts Puritans in jeopardy, incidentally)
So the right response would be something about glass houses I suppose.
“Apostate” is what we atheists get.
Still no go:
The term apostasy comes from the Greek word apostasia ("ἀποστασία") meaning "rebellion", "state of apostasy", "abandonment", or "defection". It has been described as "a willful falling away from, or rebellion against, Christianity. Apostasy is the rejection of Christ by one who has been a Christian.
So long as you never did believe, you are in the clear on that one. Although the Papists do feel that fallen Rationalists merit a shout-out, amusingly:
Apostasy a fide, or perfidiæ: Perfidiæ is the complete and voluntary abandonment of the Christian religion, whether the apostate embraces another religion such as Paganism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, etc., or merely makes profession of Naturalism, Rationalism, etc.
Rationalism has a specific technical meaning along the line of "denying the role of faith in holding beliefs".
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As long as you cop to the fact that your beef is not fundamentally with some recent progressive redefinition of the word “racism”, but with the entire idea that racism, including old-school “I don’t trust the blacks” racism, is actually bad, which it seems to me like you have, then I respect your honesty but will do everything I can to prevent people who think like you from ever (re-)gaining political power.
Basically, I’m specifically annoyed by people who masquerade as your classic anti-woke Classical Liberals but who actually have white-nationalist sympathies, or who are mindkilled enough about politics that they don’t even know or care themselves what their beliefs are as long as they’re on the other side as the wokes, and I don’t think you’re masquerading or hiding anything.
I think many of your beliefs are wrong on the object level about human societies and psychology, I think your beliefs are still unbelievably unpopular in normie right-wing circles, and I hope to God they don’t gain traction there.
Edit:
I completely agree with you here, except that I actually think many left-wing anti-racists understand well that this is not how racism works. To me, it’s precisely the right-wing anti-woke contingent who don’t understand that people who actually supported segregation had a more complex internal narrative than “minorities are bad and I don’t like them”. To me, I’m the last person on this forum who needs to be told this (in fact, I just said it myself over the course of many more words, but in service of an argument whose conclusion was in the opposite political direction).
My impression is that the dance seems to be: right-wing Classical Liberals and I think that old-school pro-segregation racism is wrong, and you don’t. You and I think that old-school racism (though you wouldn’t call it that) was always more complex than people who deep-down believed “I just don’t like the minorities”, and right-wing classical liberals think “no, the idea of racism actually was that simple, and described most supporters of this ideology, until the progressives changed the definition and now it’s meaningless”. You and right-wing classical liberals oppose describing those “more complex reasons”, if indeed they do exist, as “racism”, while I think that the reasons are at once more complex than “I don’t like the blacks”, but will also call them “racist” (though I’m not a fan of the one-word description and will explain over and over again with many many words that the way I am using the word “racism” allows for more complex reasons - it’s not the conscious reasons that word is pointing at when I say it).
I have no evidence to support me, but I don't think that's constrained to right-wing anti-woke—I think that's pretty conventionally usual. (Consider how much people are taught that it was due to prejudice?)
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It's a tar baby. Grappling with it at all is a fool's game. If I won't consider calling someone "racist" a superweapon, why is it so important to know who deserves the label and who doesn't?
There are weapons below superweapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're a murderer isn't a superweapon, it's a normal weapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're gotten an abortion is a superweapon.
Similarly, if people are racist, calling them racist isn't a superweapon. It's a superweapon when you try to apply it to non-racists, but that doesn't mean the original term doesn't have a true and important context.
Calling someone "racist" is a superweapon; it's a superweapon even if it would have happened to be justified under some previous reasonable definition of "racist". As soon as someone who is not aligned with current progressive thought accepts the validity of "racist" being a super-evil thing, it will be used against them; they will find themselves in interminable arguments trying and failing to defend themselves against accusations of "racism" for doing such things as using the term "tar baby". Part of the reason it's a superweapon is that trying to defend yourself against such accusations is in itself considered proof of them.
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This seems like a masked way of saying “that thing you call racism, I don’t consider bad”, but with some strawmanning and the pointless jargon of “super weapon” thrown in.
I didn’t say you must consider racism a “super weapon”. I said I’d like you to tell me whether you think racism in any form exists and whether you think it’s bad.
I think you’ve just said you either think it doesn’t exist or it isn’t bad, but again, I absolutely do not know for sure, and it’s exhausting to try to tease this shit out from people who really seem like they’re trying as hard to conceal it as they can.
If you start posting in a form, you should learn some of the forum's jargon. If you don't, and you encounter some, you should at least not criticize someone else's forum for using jargon that you, a newbie, don't understand, especially when you go on to ignore the point made with the jargon. A superweapon is an accusation which automatically makes the targets out to be in the wrong because of generalizations about a group.
You didn't say he should call it one. He figured out it was one all on his own!
That's a trick question, because the next question will be a gotcha which takes his answer but substitutes racism as you define it for racism as he defines it. If he says that racism is bad, you can then act as though he agrees that some progressive bugaboo that's commonly called racist is bad.
Can you describe some examples of this abuse?
And assuming you do describe them, can you then understand that Nybbler might necome vulnerable to this abuse if he said "sure, racism exists and is bad"?
Guy, I know exactly what the term is being used to mean; that’s precisely why I said it’s pointless jargon. I appreciate the gatekeeping, though. Extremely normal behaviour to unofficially require everyone posting be familiar with the collected works of one specific blogger, even to the point of constantly referencing some of the stuff from a decade ago that he’d probably rather you forgot about. (This last bit is a reference to the “paranoid rant” from way back when, by the way, in case it wasn’t clear.)
Highly good-faith argumentation on display here. Do I get to write fanfic about the various dishonest and hypocritical things you’re going to say to me and then assert my fanfic as indisputable fact, or do only you and nyb get to do that for me?
It makes sense to guard against this sort of tactic even if it's just a possibility. Nobody actually needs to be able to read your mind in order to realize "maybe I shouldn't say something that's vulnerable to tricks". If you personally weren't going to use any such tricks, blame the left-wing abusers you describe, for messing things up for honest people like you.
If you don’t care at all about speaking in good faith, then yes, it does make perfect sense.
So your rules appear to be “many left-wing people are bad because they argue in bad faith, but when I do that, it’s actually still the left’s fault because they made me do it”.
For the millionth time, I have to argue - why don’t they get this excuse? Why isn’t their bad-faith argumentation justified by yours?
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You're about a decade too late for this sort of thing to work.
What it means is that the term "racist" is used to indicate "ultra-bad-person-you-should-hate", that the criteria for "racist" are loose and variable, and that any attempt to pin it down is fruitless; no matter what criteria you can come up with to separate "the real racists who deserve the ultra-bad treatment" from those who don't will immediately be widened by those using the term in bad faith to cover people who shouldn't be.
I’ve been round these parts long enough to know that you wouldn’t have accepted it eight or so years ago either, and were saying much the same thing then.
To put you both on the same page rather than anonymously calling Nybbler out for things he said 8 years ago, you are reddit.com/user/895158, yes?
Incorrect. I am some other wrongthinker who must be rooted out and destroyed as quickly as possible. (Not nearly as notorious as that one; I only ever posted very occasionally.)
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I have no idea if @papardus is /u/895158, but this sort of call-out serves no purpose but antagonism. There is no requirement that Motte users announce their other Internet identities. Yes, that means even a known troll and troublemaker from reddit would be allowed to post anew here under a new name and be given a fresh slate. (As has, in fact, happened, and in many cases, such people unsurprisingly immediately revert to their previous behavior and get banned.) There are circumstances where you could politely ask someone directly if they are someone you think you recognize from elsewhere, but "I just want to put you on the same page" ain't it.
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Eight years is less than a decade, indeed.
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The term "racist" has been elevated to some enormous sin. Actual convicted murderers are treated with greater empathy and care than vile "racists". And so of course the term is frequently used as a weapon with little regard for the actual situation in question. So many people instinctively defensively resist that often lazy sneer.
It really is overused as an all-purpose dismissal of anyone insufficiently progressive. And also yes, BAP is actually a racist for real and not in some lazy weaponized sense. Words also have meaning separate from their use as weapons, and BAP is indeed a racist.
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I have no idea what the word racist means anymore. The definition has expanded to include, in theory, everyone, making it a useless descriptor.
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Is BAP a racist? I say he obviously is, and I can defend this with quotes from him.
You also think he is. Fair enough.
He even thinks he's a racist.
However:
No, because that's attempting to build a consensus. "We" aren't "OK" with things here. I think BAP is a racist. You think BAP is a racist. If someone else wants to argue to the contrary, it is the spirit of The Motte to hear him out.
This isn't the girl's middle school lunchroom. If you want to play consensus forming and shaming games, you have the entire rest of the internet to do so. Why you come back here, ban after ban, dogpile after dogpile, to a place where you are unwilling to abide by the rules and culture, is beyond me.
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I'd probably be fine calling him a racist but this really is hinging on what your definition for racism is. It doesn't appear that he has a deep seated hatred or irrationality based on race and some people might reasonably require that. It's one of many reasons we should probably taboo our words more often. If we're determining whether to call him a racist because when we apply that label it means we'll engage with his ideas differently(or not at all) that seems like it's removing and not adding to our objectivity. If we're doing it because we want to have a neat taxology of who the racists are then I question the purpose.
I'm honestly really fine dismissing what he says because it's an anecdote and he seems like the kind of edgy person to exaggerate, hell I'm engaged and deeply in love with a "Hanoid" or whatever he called them. But I don't need to do this based on some weird label technically.
As I said in my comment above ( https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176997 ), I respect that this is a consistent definition of “racism”, but I think that it is miles away from how people actually use the word, because it implies that large swathes of the most aggressive supporters of eg segregation and slavery did so for non-racist reasons. If you’re deeming the Cornerstone speech non-racist because it doesn’t specifically have “I do not like black people” in it, for example… I don’t think the definition’s very useful.
It’d be like having a definition of “totalitarianism” so strict that the fact that it calls itself the democratic people’s republic of north korea, and didn’t explicitly say “we do not respect democracy or individual rights here” on the tin, was enough to muddy the waters for me.
Sure, it's not quite the definition I use, but I'll point out all definitions have problems like this because people genuinely differ on how wide of a scope they want "racism" to cover. I frankly just try not to use the word because it's heat strength outpaces any useful light application. Of course people have always sought to weild heat where ever it can be found.
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I just think racism as a moral failing is just not that important. I think there are probably a lot of truly shitty people that aren’t racists and some nice people who are racists.
Generally, I’d care more about whether someone is generally nice to other people, are they hospitable, do they actively create harm for others, are they a narcissist, etc compared to racism.
Well, famously, racism has led to a lot of “actively create[d] harm for others”, so stances like this seem poorly thought out when latent racism at an individual level can and does turn into actual discrimination and much worse at a societal level.
To invoke Godwin, there were so many “generally nice” Germans in 1936. They just were specifically not as nice to a certain minority, widely persecuted for some centuries such that it was considered normal in polite society (and still today on certain college campuses).
Why is discrimination an issue?
Making decisions on what kind of people you are interested in associating with is an everyday thing.
Do you immediately give your banking details to the 'IRS agent' with an Indian accent who randomly calls you?
That's discrimination right here. You used available information to you to make a snap judgment that you would not interact with a certain individual, and you are selectively deciding not to let them accomplish their goals.
There is no civilization without discrimination. Trust is only possible on a local level where you are not interacting with strangers but with people with a known history and known ties to your community, skin-in-the-game.
You’re employing a sense of the word “discrimination” not particularly relevant to the sense of “X race need not apply” or “separate but equal” and other race-based discrimination that was done at scale and often enshrined in law.
It is completely relevant since "disparate impact" considers discrimination in that sense discrimination in the sense you are referring to.
I don’t consider “disparate impact” to be a well-developed concept that is actually relevant to distinguishing between “discrimination” of an individual vs. “discrimination at scale” because intentionality matters for the types of discrimination I’m trying to discriminate between, and disparate impact is indiscriminate about intent, or any actual causal chain really.
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I'm simply making the case that discrimination is essential.
In situations where you need to urgently determine whether somebody is trustworthy or not, you will use all available information for this decision, physical markers of age, sex, race, class, employment, attitude, smell...
If your child disappeared suddenly and you were told a female cashier saw somebody take them away, do you go ask the bearded cashier to give you more information?
What's wrong with having rules? Nobody is entitled to interaction with anybody else.
Just because you think your kids would do better surrounded by Brahmins than by inner-city Irish kids, doesn't mean you can just force Brahmin families to sign up to your schools. If Brahmins decided that within their own school inner-city Irish 'need not apply', who are you to change that?
It would suck if all the businesses around me suddenly decided that they no longer wanted my business for whatever reason, but that is unlikely.
And perhaps if they did, it would have something to do with my behavior.
You are right that Freedom of Association is tricky because it goes both ways and resolving such tensions is difficult.
You’re still wrong about conflating different senses of “discrimination”.
I have no argument against “noticing patterns” or “stereotype accuracy” or simply having any given preference, in a way that many in today’s society consider to be racism (in my view overextending the concept).
But that is distinct from say Jim Crow or the Final Solution.
Your last line is exactly the issue: blunt discrimination at scale gets away from treating individuals as individuals. In a free society, there will always be tension about the state needing to intervene in any given case.
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At the corporate society/government level? Moral hazard. The people making the rules and the people bearing the costs of those rules are almost never the same people (the universal example being "child" vs. "adult").
You yourself buried the lede: "something to do with my behavior", yet... it obviously doesn't, should you be an above-average member of that group we're judging by. By keeping formal groupings like this out of law, we ensure that said above-average members have the opportunity to keep more of what their surplus of virtue/intelligence/time preference inherently provides them; the fact that this isn't having the eugenic effect we're hoping (above-average examples of a below-average group prosper -> should reproduce more, and vice versa) is due to a different societal failure mode that has yet to be addressed.
And sure, most of that is only on paper, but those words being there gives some social cover to defectors should they choose to skip the tax (i.e. a restaurant that seats blacks with the other customers in a cultural milieu where society at large doesn't like that- having to sit in the back is effectively a tax, since you'll have to spend more money just to get the same experience that whites get just by walking in the front door).
One solution to this problem is to say that there isn't enough discrimination, and reach for intersectionality- where the amount of tax you should be charged is proportional to the inherent costs of your immutable characteristics (and thus the sum of tax you owe or are owed). One look at how the gynosupremacists (and the PMC in Covid times) use this should tell you all you need to know about the success of this approach- they always exempt themselves from the taxes. It's very hard to guarantee fairness when you're trying to levy taxes this way; that's why the compromise for the last 60 years has been "well then, don't", and why attempts to change this, universally have all been/are all in bad faith.
By contrast, the ability to "have rules" (in the sense that you mean it there) means that now you not only have a dysgenic effect on the people you'd want to elevate, but a eugenic effect on people that you don't- in this case, below-average Brahmins who otherwise lost the genetic lottery that shouldn't be in that school anyway. So you'll get better results by being able to exclude them, and if you're going to exclude them for the same reasons you'd exclude the Irish... why the extra rule?
Of course, the inability to have rules directly leads to two problems. The first is concern trolls being rewarded for taking "is it because I'm black?" seriously- charitably, they don't fully appreciate/understand that eliminating the tax also has the side-effect that most people who get caught by the more objective standards of behavior are going to be members of a group with below-average ability to follow it.
This is why the justification for the tax eliminations is "immutable characteristics"- we're lying about the fact that behavior isn't actually fully mutable downstream of group membership. The side effects of that lie mean that the compromise is now vulnerable to a society taking concern trolls/"is it because I'm black?" seriously- and can back it up by saying "well, it's mostly group X in the statistics" with nobody else having the context or ability to say "that's exactly what we should expect given purely behavior-based standards are statistically rarer to meet for people of group X".
It also breaks down when you run into biological specialization between groups- specifically, between men and women- because each have a different set of anti-social behaviors, are done with the same evil intent, and have the exact same results as far as community finances and stability are concerned. (In a society where the words of women have equal power to the fists of men, misuse of the former should obviously be taken as seriously as the latter.)
The second is deadweight loss caused by levels of indirect signalling. Take the example of "good schools"- the deadweight loss, in this case the difference between how much it actually costs and how much it has to cost to exclude the people who would break the school, is instead captured by a bunch of different actors (the ability to afford a home in the suburbs, the ability to get your kid there and back, the ability to afford the school in the first place). Sure, these things are in and of themselves desirable, but the ability to signal that you can afford it is baked into everything you buy to do that and adds up- if you simply had a "no IQ under 110" policy, or (less efficiently) a "no group whose membership predicts lower intelligence", that loss wouldn't have to be as large.
That's a good thing if you've ever talked to a child, you would understand why you don't want to put them in charge.
That's only a problem for a minority of a minority. By definition, not the concern of the majority of the majority (that is the people who make laws).
I'm not hoping for eugenic effects. Perhaps if we're hoping for eugenic effects for a minority group, we would hope that excluding them would incentive the above-average members to break away and lead their group to success... somewhere else.
I don't see the issue with that. If they are above-average, then paying that tax shouldn't be a problem to them. They should also be able to understand that the experience they're coveting is a product of the work of a group they do not belong to, that they may not be able to obtain from their own group, and value that accordingly. If they can obtain the same experience from their own group, then what a great bargain for them!
A very simple question of logistics. If you're looking for 10 workers who can lift 50 lbs and you can hire somebody to test 50 candidates for the job, do you have them test 25 women and 25 men, or instead test 30-40 men until you get 9-10 workers and perhaps spend the remaining time looking at a few abnormally large women?
Nothing prevents you from excluding both the Irish and the lower-achieving Brahmins. If the Irish are significantly under-performing and also causing additional problems (disorder, violence, social inadequacy) then you're just saving money in admissions, discipline, remedial programs...
Answer: yes - instead of having a whole ChatGPT-like paragraph of non-committed denial hoping not to get sued.
It seems that we do already agree as you point out that the Western society we live in already has discrimination, just not the 'right' type of discrimination.
The compromise has been 'don't discriminate against groups that the post-WW2 globalist consensus has deemed to be special', not really 'don't discriminate' in general. Is there really somebody living who with a straight-face can say that they do not support one form of discrimination or another?
Any progressive not supporting 'safespaces' for queers, POC or women, 'my body my choice' for aborting mothers not antivaxxers?
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Sure. It can. But so can people who believe in the government control of the means of production or people who believe in say Islam.
And right-thinking people/societies should also frown upon those things. We can even agree that racism (even the 1995 version) is overrated as a terrible thing, compared to say Marxism, in Western culture.
I’m just pointing out you can’t defend “individual cases of racism aren’t so bad really” very well without ignoring the piles of skulls, ancient and modern.
Many people in this thread are proving the point that the Left torturing and drastically overextending “racism” as a term wielded as The Worst Argument in the World has largely backfired as far as improving racial issues. Some in this thread go so far as to say Classic Racism is/was fine actually, and some of us are pushing back on that.
I’m not saying it “was fine actually.” I’m saying if someone is classically racist, they are pushed out of polite society in a way that wouldn’t be the case if they had larger moral failings. See for example Michal Richards v. Mike Tyson. One said “nigger” and was pushed out of polite society. The other is celebrated whilst being a rapist. I think we have our priorities mixed up.
Fair.
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A while back Costin Alamariu/BAP got heat from other far rightists for not using the term "ZOG" (Zionist Occupied Government) and by extension for being a Jewish immigrant from Romania. He tried quite unsuccessfully to publicly promote "Global N*gger Communism" as an alternative term instead. Also constantly uses the word "n*gro". It's not a Eastern European cultural lost in translation deal, as he was raised in one of the richest parts of New England and went to no less than three Ivy league colleges, so the connotations in US culture of how he uses those terms would be quite well understood. He's as racist as water is wet.
Generally depends on the type and how they gauge their audience at the time.
Are those asterisks yours or his?
Mine.
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is he actually Jewish? maybe quarter . i dunno .
According to a DNA test he posted he's ethnically half Askhenazi, half Greek & Balkan, and has a child baptism certificate from some orthodox Christian denomination. https://twitter.com/costin_eats/status/1701431178199261642
Presumably religiously mixed parents.
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Denounced as Jew with the standard recitation of anti-Jewish tropes.
So he's Jewish enough for the local self-described white nationalists to name him.
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Sure, but I don't actually give a shit. By some standards, I'm a racist, whether I self-identify that way or not. Some people are deeply invested in the position that Democrats are the real racist. Some insist that even saying, "I have black friends" is racist in and of itself, while others counter that genuinely having black friends is dispositive of the opposite.
The only reason any of that matters at all is the power of calling things racist. I reject the premise, I don't buy the idea that some idea being "racist" has any relevance to its accuracy. I think BAP is wrong about this, I wrote as much below, but it has nothing to do with whether he's a racist.
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This has not been my experience. I have several family members, friends, and coworkers who will unabashedly admit to being racist, or to hating blacks, Jews, and sometimes Hispanics and Asians. They usually have their reasons (and the reasons are usually not wholly irrational), but they don’t shy away from the racist label. Now, these are all red tribe individuals (using Scott’s definition—they include Democrats, Republicans, and the politically indifferent) and are mostly blue collar. I’m guessing blue and grey tribe racists would be less willing to self-identify as such, which might explain your perception.
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This statement is odd. When racism had a socially dominant position, racists did in fact openly call themselves racist, and made lots of statements that very explicitly endorsed racism. And in fact, the majority rejected this state of affairs, and took concrete steps to minimize their influence on society
Why not try it, and see if anyone disagrees? Here, I'll do it myself. Ahem:
It seems obvious to me that Bronze Age Pervert is a racist, and I would be quite surprised if either he himself or any of his supporters or admirers would disagree. Further, I think it unlikely that anyone here disagrees, and I think the likelihood of disagreement would be negatively correlated with level of participation.
Is it fair to say that your general thesis here is that either this community or society generally err on the side of avoiding false accusations of racism, with the result that actual racism goes unaddressed? If so, were it to be demonstrated that your chosen example openly identifies and is commonly recognized as a racist, and suffers the attendant consequences of being so identified, wouldn't this rather undermine your thesis?
If you want to argue that racism is "cloaked", it would help to provide an example of actually cloaked racism. The problem here, obviously, is that unambiguous racism isn't cloaked, and sufficiently cloaked racism appears indistinguishable from non-racism. Especially in the modern context, where we have purported "white supremacists" of Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American extraction, and the argument is that their fellow "white supremacists" are just refraining from discrimination on the basis of race to better hide their single-minded devotion to racial discrimination.
Is this actually true? I'd agree that many people openly stated beliefs that we'd label as racist, but I am curious if there are examples of "mainstream racists" (e.g. Wilson, segregation-era Southern elected politicians) openly describing themselves as racist.
Looking into the term, it seems to have originated in 1902 by Richard Henry Pratt, who said:
It doesn't seem to be something originating as a positive self-descriptor.
Ironically, he is better known for this quote:
Contemporary times would give him a certain label.
Why not say it then?
The irony of course is that as a sentiment "Kill the Indian, save the man" is positively enlightened, representing a shining beacon of Liberalism and Western Civilization in comparison to the to the typical rhetoric of the [current year] "woke left" and "dissident right".
I think you're doing a huge disservice to Liberalism and Western Civilization here.
Those are real things with real, important accomplishments.
However, those accomplishments have become so universally accepted and adopted that they're now just common sense, and what we still argue about in relation to those things are the controversial parts, the parts that many people either reject or have moved past onto new projects.
Because those are the only parts of Liberalism and Western Civilization that we still talk about, you're pretending like those parts are what those movements were about, entirely.
You're correct that this sentiment is a shining beacon for those small parts we still fight about today, and a nice rallying phrase for the people who still want to die on the hill of those parts alone.
But that's not fair to those movements, which were about a lot more than that, and had real acomplishments.
I agree, and the assumption that it is even possible to "save the man" in contrast to the admonishments of "bio-determinists" on both the left and right is exactly what I'm honing in on.
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Do you genuinely believe that, or are you being edgy or hyperbolic?
The "shining beacon" bit may be a tad hyperbolic but yes, I genuinely believe that.
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I'm ok with calling both you and BAP racists. After all, isn't everyone?
A note of advice, when I write comments like this I say 'I'm fine with calling him, you, and myself that; after all, isn't everyone?'
It gives a bit more plausible deniability.
Not me, I'm the exception that proves the rule. I have better things to hate people over than race.
Are those better things 'things that correlate with race so closely that my actual effects on the world are indistinguishable from a racist', by any chance?
Nope.
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Thanks for commenting, Ibram X Kendi.
Edit: meant as a positive acknowledgement of posting I like, not some sort of spiteful barb.
I don't think that this was a particularly-well-aimed barb; JTarrou is not someone who frequently Body-Snatchers-screams at people claiming them to be racists. I'm not 100% sure whether his comment is mocking "everyone is racist" or at least semi-seriously saying that "everyone is racist and that's fine", but TTBOMK neither of those are positions in common with Ibram Rogers.
I don't mean it as a barb. I support pointing out that of course almost everyone is a racist according to prominent commentators. So let's correctly (?) call almost everyone a racist all the time.
To the degree this word is a weapon, it loses effectiveness when the broad Kendi-style definition is repeated.
I see.
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Forget it jake it's China Town.
That's been my position for a while now, but I thought I'd test the waters and see if anything had changed. I'm actually slightly heartened by the replies so far, people seem less touchy about specific labels and more interested in discussing object-level stuff than they were during the 'cancel culture' craze a few years ago.
Now, if you can just keep up and admit when progressives are racist...
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What you are trying to do here is to use “racist” as a thought-terminating cliche, which eradicates the need to address the arguments being made on their merits. It is not surprising that you do it, as this strategy has worked amazingly well for last 60 years. The problem is that this only works if all sides of conversation share the same assumptions, that being racist is the worst thing ever, and it automatically entails you are wrong. Overusing this strategy has led to many people rejecting this assumption, and being much less impressed by the “racist” card.
Yes, BAP is racist, but the real question is, is he right or wrong?
What if, hypothetically, the consensus position - and I do want to stress consensus, this is not some far-left opinion, this is an opinion that the vast majority of Americans would agree with - that there do exist at least a certain number of people who have a certain kind of bias that makes them dislike certain racial groups, and who either hide that or are not aware of it themselves, is just true as a matter of empirical fact?
You seem to be saying “even if it’s true, you’re not allowed to Notice the Racism”. If I were talking to someone who openly admits to being disgusted by interracial marriage and wants to outlaw it, you want me to engage with their abstract arguments as to why it should be banned, and you want me to not acknowledge at all the hypothesis that their opinion might have something to do with the fact that it disgusts them.
I would hope you don’t this tack when it comes to other cognitive biases. If there were a left-wing poster who always defended the Democratic Party at every single juncture, like they clearly compromised their own stated principles over and over to desperately defend the Party’s actions no matter how much of a hypocrite that made them, would you really argue that pointing this out should be completely haram? I agree that engaging with their object-level arguments also is good and necessary, but do you really think that pointing out this pattern of behaviour over time is not acceptable?
It’s not “what if”, as this is clearly true. The question is, rather, so what?
No, feel free to acknowledge it, but so what? People are free to form their opinions based on disgust, and this is not considered to be any sort of demerit to their position, except in a couple of progressive hobby horses. For example, most gun control advocates are disgusted by guns. Should we discount their opinions based on that?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make in this paragraph.
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Yes he's wrong
...and yet @hydroacetylene lays out the case. While "What that other guy said" may arguably be a low effort response, I don't think that it is a necessarily antagonistic or inappropriate one.
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The reason you ask is not because of definitions or qualifications, but because it's an epithet you want to use against someone you find contemptible. So I say no, I'm not comfortable using that word for BAP, because it's an anti-white cudgel which will never be used neutrally.
Of course Alamariu is racist, but you want to call him that because you think it is a moral failure, a sin, and you'd like to build consensus around that perspective.
I would counter that objectively blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the US are all more racist as a group than whites, but that the concerns over racism are always, always pointed against whites in defense of the tawny races. It is for this reason that I reject your unstated premise.
One simple change and you arrive at the so-called racist conclusion. Once again Stormfromt-or-SJW shows that we're not so different, you and I. The difference is that you hate your own race and I love my own race. The way in which you hate whites is the way in which BAP hates Indians. And if you protest that you don't hate whites, I will refer back to your own argument that is obvious, and by your fruits you shall be known. That no amount of nuance can distract from the anti-white results.
You in this case might as well be you, plural, because I've heard this argument before and rejected it years ago. Twenty years past and I might have agreed with you, but in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty four, I simply don't care about racism, and neither should you, and neither should anyone. It's usefulness has expired, unless you want to shit on whites.
I think you replied one level too deep
Yes, sorry about the mistake. Not sure how that happened.
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BAP’s openly a racist, so obviously he is one, sure. I’m sure he’d agree with your description.
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I feel so seen, so known, so recognised! 🤣
Many English criticisms of Ireland are/were factually accurate, but incomplete and lacking context.
There's no question that 19th century Irishmen and women generally lowered the tone of the US, though.
If you follow this line of thinking further, though, isn’t the North of England, all of Scotland, all of Wales, and northern Ireland from roughly infinity BC until 1650 also extremely well-described by this, and isn’t this exactly the population that made up most of what would become the United States as it existed in 1776? It wasn’t the Norman-descended Roger Fitzwilliam doing most of the fighting at Bunker Hill, but rather the descendants of Scottish peasants and Yorkshiremen who had spent the previous thousand years continuously assassinating all of their earldormen. And it’s not like the Normans and Anglo-Saxons weren’t continuously killing each other in blood feuds as well; the latter invented the weregild, after all. And the former, well, is it an improvement over clannism if instead of just killing those outside your clan, you kill those inside it too? And I haven’t even gotten to the Vikings, whose genetic and cultural contributions to the North are huge and unmistakeable!
(I’ve clearly talked myself into the position that the above quote, meant to refer to Ireland, is in fact a universal description of all pre-modern societies without a consistently-enforced-over-time-and-space rule of law - and for most of our ancestors this is a very recent development.)
Yes, this is exactly the sort of "context" I was gesturing at (but failed to actually write) in my comment.
Strictly speaking, in the 1840s, the median Irishman was undoubtedly at a lower "civilisational level" than the median Anglo - but there are truer explanations for this than "the Irish are eternal untermenschen".
For example, you mentioned the Border people of the Scottish lowlands, and the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, who played an important role in US history - go back a thousand years for the second half of the first millenium though and you'll see that these peoples are descendants of Irish colonists in western Britain, which is at odds with the eternal untermenschen hypothesis.
For that matter, the median Irishman today is a little bit higher in a material/human capital sense than the median Englishman (though this is only a development of the past 20 years or so)
Are you saying that the group that was essentially sent by the English to colonise Ireland during the Plantation was actually in large part the descendants of earlier Irish colonists who had migrated to western Scotland? And are you referring to Irish colonisation by the Viking kingdom based in Dublin in the late first millennium, or are you referring to an Irish colonization that happened much earlier?
The latter. There were Gaelic polities that preceded the big Viking one - this is how Scotland came to speak Gaelic, and how the Picts were pushed east prior to Viking invasion
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Image taken from life of my phizzog on the right 😂
I didn’t expect to think “Florence Nightingale: WOULD” today. Yet, here I am.
The idealised version might be different from the real Florence, but if your alternative to that is Bridget, I can understand your choice 😁
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I was not expecting a @FarNearEverywhere self-doxx/face reveal today, but I’m here for it.
That's me on a good day! 😂
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Seems pretty stupid. It wasn't Asian empowerment that put someone like Ketanji Brown-Jackson on the Supreme Court - it was good old-fashioned American racial patronage. The idea that black Americans are so incompetent that they can't partake in political patronage is just wildly uninformed and ignores the masterful play of figures like Jim Clyburn, who is likely responsible for Biden's promise to pick a black woman for the court, regardless of merit.
To be clear, these groups ran organized crime networks that caused a ton of trouble. I don't really understand the perspective that people thought the Irish and Italians were corrupt, and boy-howdy were they wrong. Irish and Italian immigrants really did cause a lot of problems.
It would seem like different races do different crimes, which has been my argument for a while . If your bitcoin gets stolen, bank records stolen, nft rug-pull, or crypto exchange goes bust, it was not African Americans who done it. Japan and south korea has a kid porn problem. Italians have a mafia problem. South America has a political corruption problem. Russia has a cybercrime problem. Every country, race ,ethnicity has problems. just focusing on blacks ignores other crime and groups.
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I mostly agree with you.
Part of the occasional optimism on the dissident right seems to be the idea that because European colonialists found subjugating large parts of the world pretty easy in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, these people are actually naturally subservient, supposedly lack white cunning or warrior spirit and so on, and are generally less competent, and therefore as soon as the West is shaken from the slumber of white guilt it will actually be pretty easy to re-establish maintain control over everyone else, just like South Africa pre-94 for example. This is pretty specific but I’ve seen it many times, including from BAP.
I recall a post here that cited some extremely high homicide rates for young Italian American men at some point in the 20th century, likely similar to those for young black men today.
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Right, but the point is that anyone at the time who made an HBD argument using that as evidence was laughably wrong. And maybe we should notice a pattern.
Let's talk about pattern recognition. According to the progressive viewpoint, we're supposed to believe that the correlation between IQ scores and life outcomes is some sort of coincidence. We're supposed to believe that IQ tests are somehow biased against blacks and in favor of whites, and just sort of ignore how people from India and China score.
We're supposed to believe that tech companies are thick with a form of white racism that loves those Indians and Chinese but hates blacks and Hispanics. We're supposed to believe that the differences in development between Asia and Africa are total historical happenstance.
We're supposed to look at the great black uplift project that has spent fifty or sixty years accomplishing practically nothing concrete, and just nod along with those progressives when they assure us that this failure has absolutely nothing to do with those pesky IQ scores. We're supposed to avoid noticing that "structural racism" only really seems to keep those low-IQ races down.
There's an entire litany of convoluted unfalsifiable pseudo-religious argumentation that's required to explain why the world we live in just happens to look and function exactly like an HBD/IQ world but totally isn't really.
But we're the ones not recognizing patterns. Right.
I'm not sure what to say besides 'you have spectacularly failed the Ideological Turing Test at every turn, maybe spend 5 minutes pretending your opponents were human beings and then consider what they would say about each of these topics'.
I think that you're right, and that a progressive would never talk about things like this, but I do think he makes some points, and I'd really appreciate it if you could explain how you interpret them, or think that someone on the left might interpret them, instead of merely saying that if we spent five minutes it would be plain. Because, to me, it's not plain.
Here's what I see:
You're right, this is a strawman. Most people recognize that IQ tests are to some extent valid. Progressives would say something more that variation between IQ scores and life outcomes between groups are both due to the differences in how they are treated. (E.g. structural racism.)
I'm pretty sure this is a thing that is not infrequently believed. Look at all the talk of racist tests. Do I think everyone believes this? Certainly not, Asians have a reputation for being smart in the general population, I think. But I'm pretty sure that this is true of some people, and it is not uncommon to think that there is no IQ difference between groups.
I don't know that I've actually seen any explicit account of why Indians and Chinese do well, but it certainly does seem like if you want to stick solely to a "systemic racism" explanation (which, to be fair, it is by no means certain that a progressive will do), it would seem like you have to do something like this to explain the disparity: if disparities are always and everywhere due to racism, well, here is a disparity. In actuality, I expect most would think something like what I said before—that people think that Asians are smart, or have tiger moms driving them to success, which is, of course, far more accurate than that it's due to racism.
I don't think most progressives think about this much. I'm sure some think it's related to the extent to which they were subjugated by colonial powers and fallout from that.
I think that you're right that progressives would never talk like this, insofar as they would never mention that latter point, but his point stands: eliminating disparities has been a failure, and so it seems silly not to at least consider that the disparities might not be entirely environmental.
Yeah, this does seem like a mis-modeling of how the left think it happens, and you are right that this was a failure for him to model the other side. The left would see both failure and lower IQ scores as a consequence of racism, not as some great unknown.
But I think the overall picture is fairly clear. If you want to deny differences between groups, saying that they are due to racial dynamics in culture, I think something not too far from what @somedude is portraying his opponents as thinking seems like it needs to be believed. Yes, I don't think it's very plausible. But I think a lot of the reason that this sort of thing doesn't come up, but is implicitly believed, is because it's prevented from being considered, and a great many people have an aversion to addressing things like this, because they implicitly think it is a bad (as in, morally) thing to have these sorts of views.
Frankly, I long had the same impulse, and am certainly not convinced that every HBD poster here is a paragon of virtue.
But I don't actually know what you yourself think, @guesswho, and I will have a far better time understanding what your view of all these matters is if you tell me, instead of asking us all to imagine our own version of your views (or that of the typical person on the other side). I would rather learn than fight strawmen. This place is a little of an echo chamber, sadly; a breaking of the monotony would be lovely.
In more detail:
The correlation between IQ and income is real, but IQ and wealth are pretty much uncorrelated. Meritocracy-enjoyers like to focus on income alone, but wealth is generally the better indicator of quality of life and economic influence and political power and etc.
The correlation between IQ and income is strong; according to first google result, IQ explains 21% of the variance in income. That is actually a big correlation for a social science paper, but it still leaves 79% of the variance to be explained by other things. Structural racism being one of the hundreds of those things. (probably someone can find a paper with a higher correlation than that, but it's not going to be 1. There's huge variance over other factors).
Yes, IQ scores are an outcome of a system that involves both heredity and environment.
So the charge here is an attempt to conflate different arguments in order to muddy the waters.
The first argument, where people say the tests themselves are biased, is often a reference to a historical argument. A bunch of the figures Murray cites to show blacks being dumb are from older studies that were very definitely biased against blacks in a bunch of ways, including subject selection and other basic methodological stuff; people can look up those debunkings if they want details.
The second argument, where people say that IQ tests are not neutrally measuring innate potential with 100% accuracy and this is probably affecting blacks more than other groups, is not necessarily based on current testing instruments having the same documented problems with language and cultural context and etc. that old ones have. It doesn't rule that out as a factor, but it's not all the claim is based on; lots of other factors, from worries about childhood lead exposure in black neighborhoods to an intergenerational history of being excluded from academia plus underfunded or just bad schools plus etc leading to poor test-taking skills or low enthusiasm/effort for testing to questions about methodology and subject selection to etc. etc.
There are lots of reasons a social science measure may get confounded by other variables, conservatives agree with that point so hard that they want to throw out social science altogether half the time, except the HBD narrative requires this one single measure is 100% accurate and measures only the one specific thing they want it to measure and no other factors. Basically, no to that, there's still the normal room for confounds and plenty of reason to think black people would be uniquely confounded on this measure for environmental and cultural reasons.
'Believing there's no IQ difference between groups' is an uncharitable framing. The real belief is more like 'Does not believe current levels of evidence are sufficient to confidently conclude there is an innate genetic difference in IQ between groups', plus the assumption that until that is proven the utilitarian-optimal policy is to assume the null and look for other factors behind unequal outcomes.
Gotta go make breakfast, I'll see if there's time to do more later
What makes you think structural racism is more important than other thousands things? If hundred of things explain 79%, and they are equally important, this leaves 0.79% to structural racism.
USA Blacks speak same language as Whites and worship same religion amongst many branches of Christianity. That is unlike South Africa where native languages were different. This alone removes largest environmental factors.
There are none. Blacks seem less intelligent everywhere. In tropical countries. In temperate countries. In landlocked mountainous countries. On ocean shores. In market economy countries. In planned economy countries. In dictatorships. In democracies. In Muslim countries. In Christian countries. Everywhere since we have written history. You're making extraordinary claim, which requires evidence.
you're simply unrolling it to make more verbose. John got email from person who calls themselves a prince and asks John's help to retrieve large sum of money. John says that until there's enough evidence, it's utilitarian to consider email author as a scammer. Would it be uncharitable to say John believes he got email from scammer? (oh bad analogy, lol).
And I think you're liar. Your real belief is "if there are anything which proves significant differences in IQ between races beyond doubt, it should be hidden and denied". Your side (Eric Turkheimer) has said it. https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-ed5850b028d1 You're trying to hide it with many words.
If you were trying to make a serious refinement on helping others to understand your position, you could say which kinds of evidence could make you reconsider subject.
I warned guesswho for getting antagonistic, earlier, and the same goes for you.
Please refrain from accusing other users of lying. If you simply must do so, bring more evidence than academics on “their side.”
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On the whole, point taken. I read that "variance explained" can be misleading, in a way that underestimates the importance. Now, I don't actually know whether that applies here, as I don't know enough statistics, but from my epistemic status, it's entirely possible that it does.
While this may be true, (I don't know myself, but I assume you have some idea what you're talking about), people also often say this of modern tests where such a bias would be significantly less plausible.
I assume many of these could be tested. (e.g. see here). I would think a broader answer to some of these questions would be to look beyond America. National IQs do some of that, but not entirely (as subsaharan Africa is not exactly known for being the most functional).
I don't think this is true. There are a great many people who think there is no IQ difference between racial groups. But after explaining, you are right that it would be flawed when applied to your views.
I think the assumption there might be questionable. Racial pressures have clearly had fairly substantial effects on our society, including putting people where they are not qualified to be, even in relatively essential positions. At the same time, this makes it harder to hire for merit in general, as there's some level of explicit racial preferences that's legally dangerous to have, requiring it be laundered through lower standards and more subjective evaluations.
To be fair though, you do only say that it should be that there is no "innate genetic difference," which means you could recognize group differences in merit in practice, and think that the de facto racial quotas are bad.
But more broadly, if differences in groups are due to societally-caused unfairness, vs. that that's just the way things are, that might affect what we want to do with society, so it does have practical implications that we should care about. (Of course, a mix of causes is entirely possible.)
Going back to the "ideological turing test" point, I do think your views are more nuanced than many others who would take a no innate IQ gap stance, so I don't think that he failed as badly as you seemed to be saying. (You didn't contest otherwise in the last post, but just to reiterate.)
I would hope that anyone on this board has more nuanced views than 'many others' on their side.
Not just because we're supposed to be smart and thoughtful, but because 'many others' is such an inane standard in the modern world. It could refer to a collection of a few dozen tweets from anonymous posters, it could refer to some clickbait article writer being provocative for pageviews, it could refer to some idiot politician with no knowledge of the subject repeating slogans for votes, etc.
I think if we accept those weakman versions of our opponent's arguments as the correct thing to engage with and argue against, or especially as in this case if we assign those weakman views to the entire other 'side', we're both committing an intellectual sin, and making any possibility of discussion and learning impossible and pointless.
Also, more to the point: OP wasn't just saying 'some people in the world exist who believe this', they were using that as a framing to make an empirical argument that their beliefs were correct and the other side's were wrong.
If you just want to sneer at the other side or describe why you hate them, pointing at their weakmen and how annoying/dangerous they are is fine.
If you want to argue that your beliefs are right and theirs are wrong, then you absolutely have to engage with the strongest possible arguments in favor of their beliefs, or else you've demonstrated nothing at all.
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Linked article is hilarious in that it says blood lead levels haven't been higher for black people in the last ten years... so throughout the infancy and childhood of the black people currently taking IQ tests.
The fact that they take this as refuting the lead example is a pretty on-the-nose example of how competent/honest I expect the HBD side to be in citing statistics, no offense.
At any rate, yes, lead exposure in poor blacks has been falling for decades, and the IQ gap has been dropping for decades. We'll see what it looks like in another decade or two when the tested population mostly consists of people he's claiming have no differential in childhood lead exposure (though again, that's just one of many possible factors, chosen as a random example).
Yes, but note that it was international tests that had the biggest defects in teh original Murray citations. Note how we said that China was way ahead of us on education for decades, because they tested their smartest kids and we tested everyone. Note how doing these tests in Apartheid Africa or something would have given a big white/black IQ gap, but again with pretty obvious environmental confounds. Every country has a unique history of confounds and a unique testing environment, Africa has been a target of colonialism from all sides for a long time, anyone who's not a real expert in local matters is going to have a hard time interpreting results.
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I do not accede to this consensus.
This is the conclusion pushed by a decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push, the opposite side of an equal decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push proclaiming the strength of diversity and so forth. Neither of the simple stories told by either side is even nuanced and complex enough to be 'true' in an empirical sense.
Has a black woman ever been promoted into a job she's incompetent at? Sure.
Has a white man ever been promoted into a job he's incompetent at? Oh FUCK yes.
We can start that list with 'every person I've ever worked for, and most presidents' and expand it from there.
Like evolution, capitalism is powerful force towards progress in the aggregate, but incredibly dumb and random at the individual level. Meritocracy is a nice idea, but it doesn't actually explain how the economy works beyond a small macro-scale correlation. The rhetorical picture painted that every hiring decision is 100% meritocratic and optimal, such that applying any new pressure on the selection process is necessarily a step away from optimality, is a pipe dream.
Has a black woman ever gotten a diversity nod when they weren't the strongest candidate on paper? Sure.
Would they have actually hired the best candidate on paper, or would they have hired someone that goes to the same yacht club as the CEO, or is tall with a firm handshake? Networking and presentation are very real things in this arena.
And I do actually believe the 'if two runners have the same speed but one has bad form, recruit the one with bad form' argument, and the 'diversity in backgrounds leads to broader problem solving across the team' argument. I expect a properly-calibrated push for diversity to lead to stronger teams.
That may certainly be countered by improperly-calibrated pushes for diversity driving things down, but I'm not convinced the hiring process in general is well-calibrated enough for that to matter, and certainly no one ever offers statistical data showing a national downward trend (or w/e) when making this argument.
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There are plenty of progressives who will insist that IQ is just a number with no significant meaning. Reddit is full of them. (There are also plenty of people with high IQ who don't consider themselves progressive who will say the same thing)
Who/whom, as always.
For the Reddit set, IQ is The ScienceTM in select situations such as where antivaxxers are found to have lower IQs*, but racist pseudoscience otherwise.
* And in the anti-vaxx example, they are generally displeased if someone asks whether race was controlled for.
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I wonder how many people who say that believe that and how many just say that because they don't want to get canceled?
For those who don't believe IQ holds any meaning, I bet if you told them that they were smart, or a certain group was smart, they'd lap that up with no problem. But be more precise in your language and suddenly it's a problem (because it can reveal inconvenient truths, such as IQ averages across populations).
These same people will then push EQ as a valid concept even though it's nowhere close in terms of being defined as an actual statistically and scientifically valid concept like IQ. Or will say something like "High IQ people have low EQ."
Just world fallacy, believing that everyone is born with an equal number of skill points but just allocated differently.
If IQ is real and some people have more of it, then there must be another totally real domain, such as EQ, in which those people are deficient.
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"Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow". Force them to hear it without openly disagreeing, force them to say it, and they'll come to believe it. And if they don't the next generation will, and we're there already.
And yes, their beliefs are inconsistent. That doesn't mean they don't hold them. And if you can get them to confront the contradiction, they'll drop the part that isn't socially relevant.
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Less antagonism, please. You can make the argument without casting aspersions.
I kind of feel like if someone says 'these are the stupid and absurd things you believe', 'No I don't' should be an acceptable answer, even if it's low effort.
But yes, I could have just said 'Wrong' simply instead of using more words and getting more heated. So, sorry about that.
It is an acceptable answer, and I don’t mean to imply that you’ve acted with low effort or in bad faith.
The only problem with using more words was that you started to make it personal. Stick to your opponent’s claims and I’ve got no complaints.
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Strong disagree. What happened here, I think, is that there were several decades of brutal selection in an environment with a much weaker social safety net. Some substantial portion of the 'worst' Irish (etc.) simply failed to reproduce, and the ones left over are, naturally, closer to the Hajnali average. Plus intermarriage.
As for Italians, 'Italian' is not a race and Italy as a nation is a pretty new idea. Northern Italians are white. Southern Italians are something else. And to this day you'll see huge disparities between the two, modulo the same process as befell the Irish above. C.f. the Hajnal Line.
See also, http://www.anechoicmedia.org/blog/european_politics/
European races were and are different from each other in important ways, as breeds of dog or any other animal subspecies differ. This extends to all areas of life.
And yes, we can bring in large numbers of high-IQ non-Hajnalis and they will be perfectly capable of keeping their noses clean and contributing productively to society. But do they want to live in the same sort of society we do?
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Actually no, average IQs among underclass/working-class Irish immigrants were substantially lower than WASP IQs - to say nothing of the rampant problems with predisposition to alcoholism prevalent among the Irish at the time - and these problems were substantially more pronounced among Southern Italian and especially Sicilian immigrants. The idea that the Irish and the Italians were every bit as capable and hard-working and freedom-loving as the native WASPs is a total fiction, only possible to believe given the intervening centuries during which the long and painful process of assimilating those populations into American society took place. The fact that many Irish and Italians intermarried into WASP families, thus reducing the genetic distinctiveness of those populations over time, does not mean that the populations were not originally genetically distinct, nor that they did not originally have significant hereditary differences which contributed to differential life outcomes between those groups.
Ok, so modern immigrants from Italy or Ireland will not have those mixed genes, and should be subjected to the same expectations of criminality and incompetence?
Keep in mind that in the cases of both Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, and Italian immigration around the turn of the century, the people coming to America were not a totally representative sample of the native populations of the source countries. The waves of Irish who flooded into America after the Potato Famine were destitute peasants. Subsistence farmers. “Shanty Irish”. The Sicilians who came over to America were coming from arguably an even more backward and violent society than that. Selection effects are very real.
And yes, there is in fact a substantial native Irish criminal class today, involved in drug trafficking and petty crime. An Irish person from that stratum of their society would indeed be expected to be a highly suboptimal addition to American society. Ditto for an unemployed Sicilian goombah. There are very substantial cultural and genetic/ancestral differences between people from different parts of Italy; a fair-haired descendant of Milanese Lombards is, on average, going to display reliably different traits than a heavily Mediterranean-descended Neapolitan or Sicilian. (And both will be different from a Sardinian.)
Underclass Europeans usually don’t get to immigrate to America; even Albanian refugees and Moldovan brides are somewhat selected for being a cut above average compared to their social stratum(granted that stratum may well be Albania). So modern Irish and Italian immigrants are probably highly successful for the same reason Nigerian immigrants are.
Modern immigrants, yes. But OP’s question was implying that there was no important dissimilarity between 19th-century European immigration and 21st-century European immigration. The modern American immigration regime for non-border-jumping legal immigrants is indeed very selective and expensive, and for that reason I would expect an Irish or Italian immigrant in 2023 to be highly dissimilar to an impoverished Ellis Island immigrant.
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Yeah, BAP just seems to be crying about more effecient and higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy. It's literally no different to the usual complaints black people have about whites. BAPs laments come from the same place as those ones (namely envy) and should be discarded. The only difference is that unlike whites who for some reason listen to the unfounded complaints of blacks, we're not going to listen to the ones of whites. You set up this system, and now we're beating you at your own game!
Also this Indian Bronson dude (first time I am hearing of him) has a profile picture of a dude holding up a gun with no trigger discipline. That on its own makes me negatively predisposed to him, people have died because others couldn't keep their index fingers straight. It's something which needs to be shamed and removed from society.
I feel I should at least devil's advocate on this since while I think @SecureSignals believes this (please correct me if I'm wrong), he didn't actually spit it out and an argument unspoken cannot be debated.
HBDers aren't only interested in intelligence differences among races, although that's what they're most (in)famous for. Many of them also consider personality traits to plausibly differ substantially among the races. If true, this is relevant to policy because the proportion of a population with certain personality traits can greatly affect its ability to thrive, potentially even more so than raw intelligence. The most commonly-cited as relevant would probably be %sociopaths and %WEIRD, although I'm not especially-well-versed in HBD so people may have made other claims.
In particular, there is a claim by some white supremacists (including, from what I recall of that post, BAP) that East Asians have high relative intelligence but low %WEIRD (and thus high propensity to corruption). The conjectured scenario is that allowing East Asians to float to the top of Western society will result in institutional decay because they are statistically more likely to be corrupt.
I am not especially convinced of this; I have a low prior on cognitive differences between various groups of non-Africans due to the smaller timescales involved, and while shame cultures are currently quite common in East Asia and rare in white countries, I'm not convinced that that's more than a cultural coincidence. This is also, shall we say, a very convenient hypothesis for white supremacists, which increases the likelihood of it being floated even if false.
One case where I absolutely am sold on this, though, is thinking that eugenics on personality traits has a large potential to explode societies that practice it. I may doubt differential evolution for 40,000 years is capable of producing large gaps in these kinds of statistics, but artificial selection probably is and gene editing certainly is. And of course, if your designer babies are all geniuses in addition to being 10% sociopaths, that makes it worse, not better.
What is religion and culture, if not a mechanism for coordinating the breeding behavior of the masses? Culture itself is eugenics on personality traits. So when we talk about European culture throughout the ages, including the innumerable pressures on those populations (Kingdoms and Empires, Black Death, European feudal system, etc.) that is synonymous with discussion of eugenic selection for a European type. In the Roman era that culture looked different in some ways, but similar in other ways, to Christianized Europe.
Another, more explicit instance of this, is Judaism as a eugenic program for the selection of a Jewish type. The myths, the rituals, the symbols held dearly by the flock, actually lead to the formation of a type of person. One of the myths in Genesis is the patriarch of the Jewish people, Jacob, using media and "culture" to direct the breeding behavior of a flock of sheep, which he inherits by making them all speckled. Of course, in the bible flocks of sheep are symbolic for people. This is ancient and esoteric knowledge.
So given your own premises, accepting this fact, you should have an extremely high prior probability that people who were selected throughout the millennia in Asian culture are not the same as people who were selected in European culture, because culture is nothing except a program of eugenics or dysgenics depending on the frame of reference.
In the same way, my chief concern is dysgenics, not on maintaining a stasis that has never really existed. What would a eugenic culture look like in the 21st century? That is the question that concerns me, not maintaining homogeneity or something for its own sake, and certainly not a myopic obsession with IQ nationalism like you see in the rationalist sphere. At the same time, I am extremely concerned with a culture that accelerates dysgenic behavior and dysgenic changes in population.
The distinction I'm making is selection power. Culture does have selection effects, but they're noisy and very weak compared to "generate 10,000 embryos via IVF, the one with the highest genetic score for trait X is selected, rest are destroyed". And I'm not even sure that the cultural traits we're concerned with go back that full 40,000 years; Confucianism doesn't exactly predate Confucius.
Selection is a thing, yes, obviously, but honestly at this point I don't think it's currently worth worrying about. High-power eugenics techniques are coming to fruition, nuclear war's pretty likely in the near future, and we could all be killed by AI or whatever in the next couple of centuries. It's like worrying about rain acidification eroding a limestone cave when the cave also has an armed nuclear bomb in it; the current direction of the trendline is of no consequence because there is essentially no chance that it will have enough time to go anywhere before getting scrambled.
You sorely underestimate how quickly evolution happens. It only took a few very silly ideas to become memetically enshrined in our collective consciousness to radically alter the genetic trajectory of the United States. And that's only within our own lifetime.
Evolution does not take hundreds of thousands of years. Events like the Black Death, Feudal Law which likely led to a genetic pacification of European people due to persistent executions of something like 2% of the most criminal population annually, will change a population within several generations. The feudal system likewise brought higher TFR for the upper classes which functionally led to the genetic replacement of the lower classes and the emergence of a Middle Class. You cannot ignore the millennia of evolution in Europe and assume that they are selecting for the same type of personality as in Indonesia, or that these differences are not radical enough to lead to powerful selection effects. They absolutely are.
And I've already presented a very clear example of memes becoming genes in the form of the Jewish religion, although I don't mean to single Jews out because we are all products of the same forces, it's just one of the clearest cases out there of myths and symbols leading to the selection of types of people, and not over tends of thousands of years, either- much faster than that.
Embryonic selection is not high-power, it is extremely low power. High-power eugenics is filming a Movie that convinces people they should be really concerned about demographic change and organize to mass deport illegal immigrants to keep the country majority white. Or making a movie that convinces them they are an evil person if they care about racial demographics (high-power dysgenics!).
Embryonic selection cannot hold a candle to the high-power eugenic technique of planting an idea into the heads of the collective consciousness. And the rationalists most eager to pretend that something like embryonic selection is a substitute for the harder task of memetically challenging the Culture are just proving they are still slaves to it just the same.
Ah, perhaps I should specify more fully. Widely-deployed embryo selection is far higher-power than culture. This is because, if you kill/sterilise the most offensive 2% of the population every generation, you're only cutting off a bit of the tail - and a tail imperfectly correlated with the genes, because penetrance is not 100%. Embryo selection is powerful because you can cut off 90%+ of the distribution, and you can select on genes directly.
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I don't expect a response since you're on Mandatory Vacation, but I have a mildly funny anecdote from the Olden Days, before we moved off-Reddit.
I had someone DM me asking if I was Indian Bronson, and not knowing about the Twitter personality, I interpreted that as an accusation of being Julius Bronson, or an Indian equivalent. I reacted with quite a bit of annoyance, since I certainly didn't think I was within 6 degrees of separation from JB, but he later clarified he meant this dude.
After looking him over, I can sorta see why someone might suspect we're the same person, but you can take my word for it that we're not.
(The dude in his profile picture is Amitabh Bachchan, and given that you've always been vague about which South Asian shithole you hail from, I'll take that as clear evidence it's Pakistan, since even the most sheltered upper-class Muslim from India would have at least recognized the most famous Bollywood actor alive)
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This post is pretty clearly bait, and it's bait of a sort that you have racked up seven warnings and four tempbans for. When this post came through the filter, my initial reaction was to let it be, given that you didn't start this thread, and your comment seems primarily aimed at BAP, mirroring his own zero-sum ethnic hostility back at him. The problem with bait, though, is what that it attracts, and the escalating vitriol this post inspires is exactly the sort of thing we do not want here. If it were an isolated incident I'd argue strenuously for a warning, but this is pretty clearly your thing, and we have been giving passes to similar borderline comments from you all week. You were last warned just over a week ago, and your response seems to be an increasing commitment to ride the line.
Given the givens, a 20-day ban seems appropriate here. When you return, kindly desist from this sort of behavior.
In addition to the below, congrats and perhaps condolences on becoming a mod. Wishing you the best. Sincerely.
Thanks, sir. It means a lot.
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"trigger confidence" is an emerging meme in the gun culture. People turned "trigger discipline" into dogma, and then into cliche, and the fact is that if you are comfortable around guns, having your finger inside the trigger carries no significant risk of an accidental discharge.
Oh man, that’s almost parody. Like something a conspiracy theorist would attribute to Feds. “We need to cull the gun population!”
I like having some cliches on which to fall back. The laws of gun safety are pretty good ones, and they make it way easier to impress the overall strategy on a new shooter. If that’s cringe…then I don’t want to be based.
There's a steelman where establishing 'vital' rules that must necessarily broken on a regular occurrence is counterproductive for all but the dimmest bulbs. Mike Rowe's Safety Third talk is a more generalized version.
Saying that you can't get hurt if you follow these simple rules in every circumstance isn't even strictly true -- ricochet matter! -- but even were it true, it's not very useful, when you have to break those rules on the range, dry-firing, tearing down some guns for cleaning, doing common drills. It's 'okay', because you're only breaking one rule at a time! But while Trigger Discipline ends up being the thing people focus most on because it's so visible in every photo, it's also one that -- as Sig has proven at length -- is particularly awkward for how consistently you have to break it for a variety of situations.
I don't agree with it, myself, still: Cooper's Four Rules are about producing habits, not behaviors. But it's less obviously crazy.
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This is first I'm hearing of it and yours was essentially my reaction as well.
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True under normal circumstances, but in exactly the sort of stressful situation where self-defense might become necessary (e.g. in a building where there's a shooter) I'd expect having your finger inside the trigger guard to indeed risk accidental discharge.
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It's very low cost to have trigger discipline, and very high cost if something does go wrong because you don't. It might be an insignificant risk, but why take the risk at all? If nothing else, the competent people using trigger discipline so the incompetent people follow along too is a good idea. Because I guarantee you if there was a policy of "You're only allowed to have your finger inside the trigger if you're comfortable with guns", you'd see a ton of people who aren't comfortable but want to pretend they are putting their finger inside.
If I were to argue the other side, I think I would start with "because life is irreducibly risky, and it is better to consciously accept that fact than to chase increasingly marginal safety measures. At some point, you need to draw the line and say 'this far and no further'".
Mainly, though, I'm just interested in the evident social dynamics. Status games are really good at eroding norms.
I agree with that to a degree but I think it's all about costs. If I was told that to increase gun safety I should wear a piece of plastic on my finger that may slightly increased safety but caused me significant annoyance(as a made up example), I wouldn't want to, because it wouldn't be worth it. I agree there are lots of things like that where our culture is insisting in ever more costly measures for ever more marginal gains. But keeping fingers out of the trigger feels very low cost with a benefit that's more than marginal.
Interesting comparison: trigger guard safeties. I bought a Garand recently, and putting it on safe entails pulling a metal tab in with your trigger finger. Since this tab is on the front of the trigger guard, taking it off requires the user to put his finger on the trigger, then push out. It’s not something I expect to actually be dangerous, but I can see why it has been unpopular compared to thumb safeties.
I'm actually more surprised that more bones aren't made about the safety on the SKS (or to a lesser extent, the SVT-40, though those aren't exactly common in the US)- you have to sweep the lever down towards and behind the trigger to disengage it and if you do it BAD-(lever)ly enough you could probably fire it with the same finger stroke. Maybe the people who fire their guns accidentally this way probably successfully cover it up since this type of gun can slam fire if you fail to clean a part that takes effort to remove.
I think the second biggest reason thumb safeties aren't popular is just because modular trigger assemblies don't lend themselves to it (the Garand is basically just a purpose-built bolt-action rifle conversion anyway, and with the trigger where it is there's very little room in the action itself for it). Safeties that directly block the hammer from moving are better than those that just disable the trigger, too, so if you can get away with it, why not? (For that matter, the AR-15 can't be put on Safe when the hammer is down, which would probably prevent people from seeing not being able to do that as "unsafe" by itself simply due to being a gun everyone and their dog owns.)
Also, competitive shooting with the meta gun(s) in Production requires you to pull the trigger when you don't intend to shoot to lower the hammer down, all the way, on a live round, on a gun that has no firing pin block- so it'll go bang if you drop it in the right place just like SIG P320s did. It's true that nobody's downrange when you do it, but it's still the most common gun handling thing apart from actually shooting it. The preferred 1911s can also do this, but you're starting those with the safety on so it's much less of an issue.
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I did a bit of small bore shooting during my time at university and we had an hour long lecture when I started about how we MUST MUST not put our finger around the trigger before they would even let us get into a sling. There were plenty of examples in the lecture of things going wrong and the aftermath of these accidents and while I personally don't mind guns (in the hands of the right people of course, I absolutely mind them in the hands of the wrong people) I would not be comfortable around someone holding a loaded gun like that. To me proper trigger discipline is an act of basic courtesy to your fellow shooters signifying you value their safety.
I don't particularly disagree, just pointing out an interesting social pattern. People who do disagree often point to the numerous examples within the firearms pantheon who evidently did not follow the rule rigorously.
What is actually happening, I think, is that it became a low-effort callout, and thus grew associated with people who were evidently in it for social points rather than actual gun safety, and normal social dynamics are doing their thing from there, helped along by the mutual disdain between what one might uncharitably call old-timer "fudds" and the younger Cawladooty crowd. It's interesting to watch the norms shift in real-time.
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The complaint he has about Asians at Harvard seems somewhat valid. If there's a large tendency among them to just go for a comfy upper-middle class professional lifestyle, than these people have no business being at an elite school, if 'elite' is to have any meaning. Harvard should probably select people in a different way. 100% there are way you can figure out who has leader potential and who hasn't.
It means they should be at 2nd tier schools which can adequately prepare them for their careers, and leave places for the real elite - intelligent, ambitious, ruthless people for others who are a better fit.
Indian Bronson is a known bad actor, associated with J.Arthur Bloom who is some sort of fed baby and who Thought to be involved in some BS 'deradicalisation' meaning channelling all politics that may change the status quo into fruitless directions.
Might I just note that taking people with a known absence of morals and putting them in charge of your society falls under the heading of Bad Ideas?
I'm not a totalitarian. No one should be 'in charge' of society.
Is there a plan for putting that wish into reality that you're not sharing? If not, I fail to see the use of stating the 'should's in this case. The question was if you really think putting elites that are ruthless in charge of society is good for us.
Who is 'us' here?
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Isn't BAP's point that he thinks Han people are relentlessly ruthless in their pursuit of sociopathic ambition to the point where it degrades culture? He says:
I don't mean this as a gotcha, but the biggest frustration I have around "race discourse" is that people seem to just ladle on negative adjectives to the race under discussion instead of being precise. Are they smart-but-passive rule followers, or smart-but-sociopathic rule breakers?
No, he says too man Asians who graduate from Harvard just become highly paid upper-middle class professionals instead of actual elites- business, media, political leaders etc.
As any population, mix of both. Consider e.g. the illegal taxi thing.. It's rule-breaking of a useful but only mercantile kind. Doesn't impress him in the same way, e.g. Chinese seizure of Vancouver would.
He's right though that the Chinese with their ideas are going to wreck a system that evolved to work for a population much more prone to guilt and ideas about morality.
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I believe the synthesis would be, “They assiduously follow rules when the local context has a rigid and actively-vigilant authority structure which can be reliably expected to hold them accountable for transgressions. They break the rules when in a context where the authority is lax, or when the rules can be easily gamed. In both cases, their attitude toward the rules is not motivated by an intrinsic sense of guilt (conscience), but rather by a keen social awareness of what it’s possible to get away with at any given time and in any given context.”
Coherent, thanks.
I guess my response would be an addendum: "And that's a good thing." People are universally selfish, and I'd attribute better success at recognizing when to follow rules and when to break them as just a natural outcome of intelligence instead of a lack of character. (I also recognize that many would see that just as a defect in my own character.)
I think there is an additional distinction to be made here though. Towards what end was the rule broken?
Rule-breaking to achieve the true honest to god objective more effectively? Good.
Rule-breaking to accomplish apparent/personal objectives (that are often orthogonal or antithetical to the true objective). Understandable, but bad. Think of fluffing up meaningless KPI's and other forms of underhanded rent seeking.
In my observation, non-westerners (including the elites) don't have a strong cultural taboo towards the second kind of objective. (And what's the problem as long as you and your family is richer off in the end?). Westerners don't either, but a higher enough proportion of them do, for it to be worth something.
Ofcourse if you are observing a system with a birds eye view, it's obvious why the second system is worse.
It's hard to quantify this but it just feels to me that placing an utmost devotion to the honest to god objective even at the cost of one's own status and wealth is a very.... Christian/Western notion. Other cultures do that as means to an end towards personal status/wealth, not vice versa.
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Whether it's good or bad, while a fascinating discussion, is not germane.
It is at odds with how Western civilization works. We expect the individual to police himself and society with an internally consistent ethic and guilt. God is always watching you in particular.
And the people who are educated to form the elite of Western society should understand and hold to Western values. In principle.
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Well congratulations, you’ve just described all humans in every historical context, with compulsive rule-followers being the rare exception.
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Just winging an answer here, but I think the idea is that when it comes to personal gain they don't feel guilt and will ruthlessly defect against norms to get what they want. If caught, they will feel shame, which is distinct. C.f. the staggering rates of academic misconduct right down to cheating in university, which afaict is much more a Han problem than anyone else's.
OTOH, when it comes to official dogma, they don't seem interested in questioning it much at all. Much more conformist. This is a difference on average and there will be exceptions. But, they're two different things. Conflating both with 'rule following' is the problem here.
Scandinavians seem the same way re: conformity. It's interesting to wonder why and how. Again, the off-the-cuff supposition would be that Scandis are that way because they evolved in high-trust societies with low corruption and could generally benefit from believing the authorities, who were generally correct and benevolent. Whereas the Han evolved in a low-trust environment where people questioning authority tended to have their families exterminated to several degrees. Point deer make horse. Not questioning authority is beneficial either way, but for very different reasons, and so will play out differently.
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Actually, the system was set up explicitly to keep you all out, you can be the top of the hierarchy in your own nation and see how that works out. Only very recently did that change. But it certainly was not how the system was set up, and not the system under which western civilization was actually created such that there are uncountable numbers of people like you begging to join it.
This whole thread is not great. You guys are winding each other up, and I think it likely you all know you're winding each other up. You've got several AAQCs, a couple warnings, and three tempbans. This time, you did the best job riding the line so congrats on that, I guess, but you're still getting a warning for your contribution to the general melee. This is a warning: adjust course, please.
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This isn't the sort of discourse we expect here. Direct personal attacks aren't allowed. You have two AAQCs, a warning and a tempban awhile back, but you are very clearly defying the rules here, and that can't be allowed. Take a week off, and please refrain from such behavior in the future.
It's a shame too. After this you guys seemed to rein it in, and actually converge on a real discussion. Still, rules are rules.
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Who says I'm not trying to adapt? I can be accused of a lot of things, but not trying to adapt isn't one of them.
Exactly, which is why the system itself is so important. Let's not pretend this system isn't a brand new upheaval and that it was always set up to be this way. It wasn't, they are only now allowed to join in on this Western hierarchy at this point, this is a grand experiment with a lot at stake.
I know he's being tongue-in-cheek provocative when he says "higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy", and I greatly prefer that banter to 2rafa's "the real British are the people who drink tea and attend Wimbledon". But I'll respond in kind: the Western hierarchy was built and was at its long best before this suicidal sociological experiment that has graciously allowed him to pretend he is one of us.
I'm sorry, do you realize how recent the mass immigration of cognitive elite in University, tech. etc. actually is? Absolutely none of what you mentioned can be attributed to the impending demographic replacement of the cognitive elite. So they have no "rightful place", it's just an experiment to see what happens when we replace the cognitive elite that built Western civilization with a cognitive elite that built worse civilizations in other parts of the world.
It turns out, there was a measurable genetic change due to non-European migration to Imperial Rome immediately before its decline and collapse (which was later completely erased by the barbarian invasions). I'm not saying that is going to happen in the United States, I'm saying BurdensomeCount is the Arab merchant who shows up in Rome in 300 CE and claims he is taking his rightful place in the Roman hierarchy.
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It’s best to understand this as a completely irrelevant internecine feud between minor dissident right personalities, in this case between Indian Bronson and BAP. These two racial minorities are committed to litigating which of their respective groups is ‘worse’, classics include IB telling a white interlocutor to ‘get replaced’ after a racially charged remark about Indians was made. Apparently they have met each other in real life too. With regards to the Chinese, BAP has decided that Tibetans are noble Bronze Age pagans oppressed by the CCP, and so has a sworn hatred of the Han. It’s all childish nonsense, but so is much of the DR.
That said, it’s obvious to me that large scale Irish and Italian immigration did have a deleterious effect on corruption and graft in American politics, sure, especially in big cities on the East Coast, even if things worked out ‘fine’ in the end.
Twitter feuds like high school, but add 30 iq points
The DR ironically despite being putatively anti-diversity , is very diverse . if it were just limited to WaSPs there would be close to no one.
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I'm going to save this thread for the next time someone gives me guff for pointing out that the DR are just disaffected members of the woke left using a slightly different version of the intersectional stack.
One could run a simple search/replace to turn this whole thing into queer theater kids arguing about what exactly gets included under the '+' sign in LGBTQ+ and it would, if anything, make more sense.
While BAP’s postings are largely affected nonsense(the fake ruritanian syntax is a dead giveaway), I think you’re significantly underestimating how retarded queer theater kids arguing over who gets to be counted as gay without being gay is. I mean in theory whether it’s better to import 10 million Brahmins or 10 million Hutus is an important question at least(I would rather import neither).
A fair point.
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I definitely took issue with BAP's last post, but I do agree with this one. Why would it be childish nonsense to identify the replacement of the cognitive elite of a civilization with racial foreigners (in 1 or 2 generations no less) as anything other than extremely significant? Can you think of similar events in human history where this happened that were not the result of conquest or colonization?
It's more childish, although more socially acceptable, to pretend like this doesn't matter or mean anything significant because of "meritocracy" or something.
Italians and Irish are European, and they completely assimilated. Identifying the assimilation of European immigrants to bank on the assimilation of non-European immigrants seems childish to me all right... the DR says that there's a racial component to the ability to assimilate. The DR also says that Irish and Italian are European. You say that DR is wrong because the Irish and Italians assimilated, that does not follow.
Blacks did not assimilate. Neither did Jews, their retention of their ethnic particularity continues to be highly significant in American politics, and very arguably detrimental to non-Jewish white people, unlike Italian and Irish identity.
Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?
From what I've seen, the Chinese are quite likely to assimilate into the white population as soon as the flow of new immigrants is cut off by the motherland's catastrophically falling birthrates, and tend to be quite politically apathetic relative to their population size outside of issues like college admissions. Even in the event of a war with China I wouldn't expect any sort of large-scale treachery, although if the government tries the whole internment camp thing again and rounds up some Koreans by mistake there will be federal casualties.
Indians on the other hand are both more politically astute (compare Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy to Andrew Yang as presidential candidates) and have multiple overlapping factors holding back complete assimilation i.e. stronger religious traditions (especially for Muslims that demand conversion upon marriage), a tradition of arranged marriages that seems to be making a resurgence among sexually frustrated zoomers, and a larger population reservoir to draw new immigrants from. In that sense Indians are much more like Jews and will likely persist as a distinct and politically salient population for far longer than any East Asian group.
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Im not saying that declaring the replacement of much of America’s cognitive elite with Indians significant is wrong (I recall writing a long top-level post that made the argument that it would be significant several years ago). I’m saying that the catfight between IB and BAP is childish, which it absolutely is, along with the babyspeak and many other things.
So you really think the US doesn’t look any different if large scale immigration from Ireland and Italy never happened? That seems ridiculously unlikely. And there is still evidence that different white gentile demographics vote differently, and Irish and Italians are still overrepresented by some margin at the top of the Democratic Party compared to other gentile white groups.
As for Jews, non-Orthodox (and the orthodox have less political influence and are more Republican) Jewish American intermarriage rates today substantially exceed those of Irish and Italian Americans in the middle of the last century. You just don’t agree that it’s assimilation because Jewish intermarriage is predominantly with progressive white gentile elites (many indeed of Irish or Italian descent), who obviously don’t share your politics.
Asian Americans have intermarriage rates of about 30%. So maybe? The question is more about the kind of society they’ll assimilate into, since as with the Irish and Italians you can’t replace the people and not replace the country.
As you know, intermarriage is the only true means by which assimilation occurs, and that was banned with great social and legal penalties for the vast majority of American history.
I largely agree with you here, but at the same time I feel like the degree that Blacks have, or have not, assimilated varies greatly by region.
Edit to Elaborate:
I grew up in the Rustbelt not far from the Mason Dixon Line, and have since lived on the Gulf Coast, in the Deep South, and California, with some short stints (1 - 2 years a piece) in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Horn of Africa sprinkled in between.
Anecdotally, for all the stereotypes of the racist redneck, "Pennsyltucky" and "the Deep South" strike me as far more integrated, and their black populations far more "assimilated", than they are elsewhere. This isn't to say that there isn't casual racism, IME people in plsces like Harrisburg, Biloxi, Gulfport, and New Orleans will drop a "Hard R" into a casual conversation like it's nothing. But at the same time, I don't remember seeing or experiencing proper racial animosity, that is we're going to hurt/screw this person over specifically because of their skin color, until I moved to the ostensibly "progressive" and "anti-racist" California.
I have no data to support this theory, and frankly I would be deeply skeptical of any data provided one way or the other because I assume that any study even remotely adjacent to academia is going to be fruit of the poison tree, but my suspicion is that segregation actually helped in way. Specifically, in that for all the shit-talk and status jockeying, most of the black kids I grew up/worked with had moms, dads, aunties, uncles, grandparents, pastors, etc... who were all present and active in the community. There was an existing tradition/community memory of black-run businesses, black-run schools, black doctors, black lawyers, and so on.
This is in stark contrast to my experience is in California where there seemed to be this default assumption that black = underclass/criminal that no amount of "Hey, he/she is with me" could overcome. The only card to play was seemingly the military one.
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I do think the US looks different without large scale immigration from Europe but that's not the question... I would mark "assimilation" not as there are no longer any demographic correlations but as their identity not being salient in culture or politics. Some families identify on a surface-level as Italian or Irish as family lore or aesthetic, but it's not a salient part of the American political struggles. This is in sharp contrast with Jewish identity which continues to be an extremely salient component of political and cultural life.
I think my definition of assimilation as the identity no longer has saliency in political or cultural struggles works here. Look at the CW thread, issues of Jewish identity and advocacy come up all the time (and it's not entirely my fault for that either). They are politically, culturally, geopolitically extremely significant. Do we get to look forward to Asians and Indians behaving the same as Jews, retaining an intense identification with their actual (and not even fake) homelands and ethnicities?
I won't pretend to be able to predict the outcomes of the impending Hapa ethnogenesis, but early results do not at all look promising. What I will say is that this is monumentally more significant than the integration of European groups which are all much more similar to each other than any of them is to Asian populations.
It's almost comical because all of this shows how correct the DR's model of the world is.
European groups come to America. They retain demographic differences but assimilate into the White identity of the nation.
How can any reasonable person possibly compare that to the impending Hapa ethnogenesis? We aren't even talking about assimilation, we're talking about ethnogenesis. It's also fair to relate the assimilation of European groups as a white ethnogenesis.
That's why this is all more significant than childish loyalties to a non-existent "meritocracy." The real question is the question of ethnogenesis and its civilizational implications, and it's only the DR that actually appreciates that.
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It's about neither evidence nor vibes, it's about provoking a reaction in his audience. Nothing he says is serious. The man says his idols, and his model for the future, are pirates. The guy is a comedian.
In this case, his audience is fellow DR types, he wants to tell them to go fuck themselves, to get them to examine their beliefs, but in a way that they will have trouble countering.
Anybody on DR twitter has a pretty strong immune response built up against being called a racist for hating Black people, for thinking Black people are inferior. They've heard it all before and will spit out a knee jerk response before they even get all the way through reading BAP's tweet. If BAP wants to gadfly those people, hold a mirror to them to make them examine their beliefs, he can't criticize their racism for being hateful.
So instead, he criticizes their racism for being lame, for being off-target, for being stupid, for being insufficiently clannish and exclusionary. He uses their racism to question their values, but using values that they profess to care about: their manhood, their robust self-confidence, their ethnic particularism.
He gets a lot of media converge. that alone makes me sus. Why is the media promoting this guy so much? Reminds me of Richard Spencer, and that ended well.
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I think this is in part true, but it's also true that both he and his audience genuinely believe that Chinese, Indians, etc genuinely have spiritual racial qualities that make them deleterious to civilization. And it's possible to troll to make people think, but his trolling has - in practice - had the effect of creating a culture that vibes their way into genuine belief in nonsense. The idea of racial differences in psychology itself isn't implausible - we had a discussion about the racial characteristics of the Chinese a while back, and I found the arguments to the effect of few significant differences other intelligence to be much more persuasive than the ones claiming more significant differences. But the 'vibe' surrounding BAP isn't one that even engages in such arguments in ways that might lead to changing one's mind, in favor of an aestheticized sense of intellectualism and 'old books'
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What is his goal in doing that? Just to troll?
That's basically all he does. Trolls to cause people to examine their assumptions. His homoeroticism and his offensiveness are (at their best) to shake loose people's assumptions.
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