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I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question that has been bubbling whenever (racial) HBD comes up as a topic on this forum: do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?
Studies of the correlation between education levels that are clear indicators of IQ (ie, a Bachelor's or above) are scarce, possibly because it is almost impossible to actually study because the number of college graduates who actually commit crimes is so tiny as to be nonexistent. Lochner and Morretti found a 30% decrease in murder and assault rates for each additional year of schooling, and that increases in schooling after high school graduation had no discernable impact because the rate of incarceration had already bottomed out. I couldn't find actual data on the topic, but working backward prisoners appear to have less than 4% of the odds of having a Bachelor's compared to the general population.
HBD advocates like Charles Murray and Lee Kuan Yew have both talked about the effects of the Great Sort, that once meritocratic policies are implemented and a majority of working class students have the opportunity to advance through education, the remaining working class becomes increasingly composed of the less intelligent or less conscientious. LKY talks about how labor union leaders in Singapore were initially drawn directly from workers, but this became less practical in recent years because there was no one smart enough to take on a leadership role, so they brought in college educated labor professionals to lead. Murray discusses this as a central thesis of Coming Apart, where he discusses the decline in IQ among working class whites. My own father talks frequently about how when he was young, a lot of white contractors were smart guys who never thought about going to college or just took over the family business, where today young white contractors are dumber and lazier because any white kid who wanted to work and had half a brain got into college.
So if I want to avoid crime, why would I advocate for racial discrimination, and not for economic discrimination? Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race? Which is rather...what we have in our current Capitalist Hellscape, n'est pas? If you want to escape crime, have money. If you want to have money, have good genetics for intelligence and conscientiousness, work hard, and you'll get a job that will pay you enough to move into a restrictively zoned neighborhood where the criminally inclined will be kept out by high housing prices and lack of public transport.
Why do wignats who trumpet HBD findings convenient for them rail against "elites," elites who clearly have the better gene pool?
The political problem with true HBD, in the long run, is that very few people are located at its apex. If I accept its moral bases, I see no reason to help out people below me on its ladder, whether by skin color or by education. And most people are below someone.
HBD is not a moral claim, but even so what you have described has nothing to do with morality. You are not automatically a good person because you got the smart genes that let you think abstractly and match patterns. You are not automatically a bad person because you got the dumb genes and are in a demographic group that does lots of crime. Your line of thinking is in a sense an inversion of what morality is, now something that you are born with rather than a product of your choices.
I dont think people actually identify as "wignats", I have only seen it used as a pejorative for people who make unsophisticated arguments about why black people are bad. Or something similar. Maybe your experience with the term is different but asking why wignats do wignat things is circular.
The principled argument is becauase the elites for whatever reason are running our institutions on blank slate theory when it is pretty clear that people are not blank slates. And this is causing bad outcomes. Not every HBDer is Andrew Anglin, there are plenty of Charles Murrays.
I just use it as a shorthand for "white nationalist," which many on this board do self-identify with, because white nationalist is long to type, infelicitous, and kind of vague (a nationalist can be white without being a white nationalist). Wignat is a fun word, and clearly delineates the group I'm speaking about.
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I don't view blacks of vermin either and I wish people would stop putting this liable on me. Whether you hate those less blessed than you is your own prerogative. HBD is mainly talked about skincolor because it's used as weapon against racial spoils and the blood liable of systemic racism. If you want me to explain why the whites in trailer parks are there, I'll be more than happy to do so.
This is not what HBD says. You can't short cut it, you must say the whole thing out, yes every time. Blacks in americans on average perform worse than white americans on average. There are Black americans smarter than nearly all white americans, they are just rarer white americans who are.
Why not indeed? I can think of no reason and thus don't.
There is no moral basis. It is a theory, not an ideology, not prescription, not a behavior. You believe it or you don't. I will never understand, besides uncharitable status signaling reasons, why people who obviously believe in HBD refuse to admit to it.
These sorts of people remind me of the Patrick ID card meme, like they admit all the premises to derive HBD are true, they agree that the argument from the premises implying HBD is valid but then when you go "Therefore HBD!", they say no....
And yes, I happily consider people equally "low value" regardless of their skin color if the factors that lead to their "low value" are the same (and skin color/race by itself is not one of those factors).
I want to see a colorblind meritocracy. HBD is just the argument for why the inevitable racial disparities in this colorblind meritocracy aren't a problem.
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Younger brothers, who need understanding and guidance. Try not to be patronising while you're at it.
Ultimately if our world wasn't ending we could notionally preserve all the bloodlines and get rid of low-function alleles through embryo selection, but that's basically all academic.
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Count me as one of these; but then, I'm the "go back to explicitly acknowledging the hereditary nature of ruling elites" guy. Bring back terms like "good breeding."
Actually a popular position in some of my IRL circles.
No, we don't. Not since Griggs and "disparate impact," anyway.
Is there any evidence that using IQ tests generated media blackslashes when using IQ tests was legal?
I would consider court case itself as an evidence that media backslashes would not have been enough (or team Left consider media backslashes too weak to effectively discourage employers from using thing with disparate impact).
deter other employers from using IQ tests for hiring. If there was only individual harmed, probably helping the individual w/money or other would be easier to do.
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Thanks. Also, Griggs vs. Duke has much wider scope that IQ tests.
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https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differences-in-homicide-rates-are-poorly-explained-by-economics/
Blacks are significantly worse than poor whites in terms of crime. See table 6: Whites in the 10th percentile by income compare favourably with blacks in the 90th percentile. You absolutely should be advocating for racial discrimination and not economic discrimination if you want to be safe. There are countries with many poor whites in Europe - they don't have US murder rates, US urban dysfunction. Only Russia is on par with the US when it comes to homicide. Apparently it takes centuries of tyrannical rule, 70 years of Marxism-Leninism, massive alcoholism and a decade of anarchy and complete social collapse to approximate the social dysfunction of the world's richest country + blacks.
In my experience, working class whites actually show up and work, whereas diversity is more likely to no-show or 're-schedule' into the ether, never to be seen again.
Finally, there is no reason to subordinate nationalism to HBD. Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn't mean they'll help you. Intelligent people are more capable and have more potential. They can also be much more dangerous, insidious and effective. A stupid man robs a drug store for a few hundred dollars, shoots a low-life for dissing his girl. A clever man steals millions from welfare and creates highly profitable, addictive painkillers that kill tens of thousands. Why does a certain kind of HBD-acknowledger worship smart people who clearly don't care about anyone else's interests?
Stratifying by wealth creates a cut-throat, highly materialistic society with ruthless politics of looting. Better to target national identity and social cohesion instead, enjoy the advantages of homogeneity. You want to live in a country full of people who won't play these negative-sum games, who won't steal from their countrymen, who won't profit from their misfortune, who are unified against external threats.
Or Muslims. Russia has a large historically-Muslim population with much lower average IQ's.
I don't know about that. IME the best workers from among the poor are hispanic, and working class whites are usually more capable of learning more advanced aspects of their jobs than working class blacks but aren't necessarily better workers.
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The fact that there are members of my ingroup who are better than me is only a problem if they don't see me as a part of their ingroup. That's one of the fundamental reasons why many white identitarians invoke implicit and explicit pleas for racial loyalty and lament acts of racial disloyalty, as is the case with past critiques of 'the middle class' or the now white liberal 'elites'.
If you are asking why you should ingroup one group over another it's a simple matter of making friends with people who don't hate you. It would certainly be much harder to specifically ingroup whites over someone else were it not for the high amount of animosity directed towards whites by the other relevant racial groups.
All in all I find your skepticism very odd. Almost like it assumes that HBD came before ingroup bias in whites could even exist. When in reality whites who like themselves and other whites gravitated to the facts found as demonstrable proof of the thing they already knew. Or that HBD became a beacon of truth for many whites who otherwise would not have felt the need to group up with other whites were it not for the relentless blood libel and verbalized hatred directed against them.
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YMMV, but HBD emphasis on the dissident right is absolutely correlated with study of intra-racial HBD. This most prevalently takes the form of Indo-European studies, where there is a lot of interest on understanding the intra-European cline of Proto-Indo-European steppe admixture. That heatmap was made by such a DR/HBD hobbyist, they obviously do not shy away from this.
It is of course accepted there are HBD implications in all of this, but the scientific basis for identifying intra-ethnic racial differences also points to a common ancestral ethnogenesis of European people. The differences are real, but they still point to a larger whole which is being (re)discovered.
And there is Gregory Clark, who isn't himself DR as far as I know but his work is very well-received in those circles, and intra-racial HBD is the premise of his work which demonstrates intra-racial correlations in class status.
Thanks for the reading material! That's a lot to dive into.
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You seem to be under the impression that you’ve identified some previously-unexamined hypocrisy or blind spot within the DR, when actually this is a conversation topic that is discussed constantly and with great acrimony on both sides by different factions within the HBD-accepting right wing.
On the one side you have the populists. These people engage with HBD primarily as a defensive tool; if white people are being slandered as “privileged” and “systemically racist” because there are X number of white successful people and X> number of nonwhite successful people, being able to deploy scientifically-supported arguments to counter those accusations is invaluable. “No, these disparities are not because white people are doing anything wrong. They are a result of immutable realities which will not be ameliorated by your proposed corrective/redistributive measures. Therefore, it is illegitimate to discriminate against white people, to attack our civic institutions, to clamor for our replacement, etc.”
I think it might be fair to call these guys “soft HBD advocates” or “population-level HBD advocates”. It is not that they, as a rule, reject any intra-racial hierarchy of intelligence/competence. Most of them are happy to talk about “normies” and to discuss what rhetorical/political strategies are likely to appeal to the vast majority of people who are not members of the cognitive elite. However, they believe that the correct attitude for the white cognitive elite is essentially a form of noblesse oblige or paternal care. A 140-IQ white person should love and care for the white working class, and advocate for their interests, because they are basically family. Much as you wouldn’t abandon your family members and join a new family because the new family is smarter and better-looking and has a nicer house, you shouldn’t abandon your less-cognitively-gifted people to curry favor with a rootless cosmopolitan multinational elite. Consequently, these people also tend to be ethnic nationalists/particularists. “I love the Polish nation not because it has the smartest or most athletically gifted or most scientifically-accomplished people on earth, but rather because it is mine. This land is the home of my forefathers, whose blood courses through my veins.” A Polish nationalist would rather all of the doctors and engineers and politicians in Poland be ethnic/native Poles, even if that means Poland isn’t getting the tippy-top cream-of-the-crop most awesome candidates in the world; otherwise, what’s the point of having a Poland at all, as anything other than an economic zone?
On the other side of this debate, you have the “hard HBD advocates” or “elitists”. (The populists would use the derogatory term “IQ supremacists” or “IQ nationalists”.) These are guys like Hanania and Crémieux. For them, they really have internalized HBD - not only on an interracial level, but at the level of hereditary variation producing hierarchies of human individuals at any level of population granularity imaginable - as the key to understanding humanity. To these people, at the extremes, the way to maximize human flourishing is to unlock the full potential of the world’s elite human capital and basically let them remake the world in their own image. In practice, this means flattening and annihilating any and all regional particularities and communal attachments, such that a rootless high-IQ elite individual can set up shop anywhere and have maximum flexibility without needing to fear the interference of the ignorant and envious commoners who also happen to occupy that same location. Lest it sound like I’m being uncharitable, in this recent piece by Richard Hanania he says the quiet part at nearly deafening volume and makes this vision painfully explicit.
In this piece Hanania literally argues that the ideal society is one in which the common people - and by extension their elected officials - are so polarized and distracted by culture-war trivialities and general anomie that they are unable to coalesce around any shared goals or self-protective measures, allowing high-IQ cosmopolitan elites to essentially act unimpeded and not have to pretend to be responsive to the pig-headed superstitions and irrational communal attachments of the cattle-souled commoners. (Really makes you think…)
Personally, I, like most reasonable people, believe that there’s a middle path between these two extremes. I do agree that populism is doomed to fail because it demands that intelligent people cultivate an ultimately synthetic and unsustainable level of compassion and indulgence toward the great mass of people who are, by and large, not fully worthy of it. However, the hardcore elitists also fail because their ghoulish disregard for the basic non-chosen irrational attachments which make life worth living for the vast majority of human beings requires them to adopt a callousness and a siege mentality which puts them eternally at war against a population which massively outnumbers them and who could become awakened to that fact at any time. From the DR’s current acrimonious polarization is likely to emerge a healthier, more balanced synthesis that finds a way to help rootless cosmopolitans rediscover a natural and unforced love for the people over whom they rule, while also demanding in return that those people improve themselves and thereby make themselves worthy of love. (This will probably involve genetic engineering alongside a massive culling of the most dysgenic and unworthy elements of the population, both locally and on a global level.)
Excellent reply, but once again "well actually, we've talked about this" is being conflated with "well actually, you're entirely wrong." What you seem to be outlining is, HBDers can be split between people who answer the "Why do you want to stop at race?" with "Well actually, the whole thing was just a thin excuse for racial nationalism to begin with" and people who reply "Why would I want to stop at race?" Correct me if I'm missing some nuance here.
I admire, as ever, your effort at synthesis.
What you're missing is that society requires cooperation between classes of people. Neither flooding the country with masses of low-IQ foreigners or flooding the country with high-IQ foreigners who have no attachment or regard for the average person accomplishes that. Accepting intra-racial HBD doesn't change that fact.
Hanania is perfectly fine with a cognitive elite that has no attachment to and despises the average person, or even who views the average person as an ethnic rival. The DR recognizes that is not the formula for a healthy civilization.
What happens if you have a cognitive elite that hates the civilization it is part of and has a racialized antipathy towards it? Hanania doesn't care, as long as they have the highest IQ in the room.
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I don't entirely disagree with your point, but:
Regression to the mean is a major issue here. The children of elites frequently do not have great genes, as the elites who spawned them was simply a statistical anomaly. They get to keep their elite status, however.
What we lack for the meritocracy you describe is downward social mobility. I want every high-class idiot out of their positions, but at the moment the upper class is far too secure.
If we had that then I'd be mostly fine with the system yes.
It's typically here regression towards the mean, rather than to. I've known many children of CEOs or eminent researchers who were mediocrities, Hunter aside (who I don't have the misfortune to have met personally) I've known only one who went from PhD parents to petty criminality. The layabout "poet" son of a hedge fund manager moving in next to me may be annoying, but it is unlikely to result in a crime wave in the neighborhood.
That's perfectly reasonable from an individual perspective. I suppose my concern is more with the "layabout poet son of a hedge fund manager" who ends up being handed a sinecure sort of job, or worse, one of actual importance. If that person gets paid $200,000 a year to be worthless, they have already had a worse impact on society than almost any petty criminal. The impact is double if their lineage somehow gets them into a position they're less-than-capable in.
I am much more okay with garbage humans living garbage lives than with mediocre ones rising above their deserved station unfairly, if only because I believe that "who sits at the top" has immense downstream effects on basically everything.
Another relatively common issue is that they actually are competent but still chooses the sinecure because it's comfortable, not contributing anything of value at best.
Exactly. It's bad any way you slice it.
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Individually, sure. But in aggregate, petty criminals have a worse impact than sinecures.
I flatly disagree with this, though I'm sure data is hard to find.
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I see your point, and certainly the idea of idiots at the top is infuriating. But, this is to class-HBD as "what about this one Black guy who is real smart and stuff" is to Race-HBD, right? We're talking averages, so the hypothetical to include bloodline as a valid basis for discrimination goes something like: do you think that on average the children of hedge fund managers are more intelligent than the children of truck drivers? IQ gap among children for SES runs between 6 and 20 depending on which study you like.
That means that anywhere from 5% to 30% of children born to completely average parents are equal to a member of the upper class. Given the massive population difference, it won't take long in any system with significant upward mobility and low downward mobility for the upper class to be heavily comprised of underperforming children-of-statistical-anomolies.
Bloodlines are great ways to discriminate, but only after multiple generations succeeding in a row. High social downward mobility is a must.
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No, this is just another gotcha. "Poor people" are not a race. We could imagine a world where assortative mating was such that there were distinct (if not perfectly so) populations separated by income level; perhaps it would look something like a society with non-interbreeding castes. The US, at least, is not such a place (though it may be moving in that direction)
If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as infrequent as intermarriage between races, that marriage throughout the class was common (that is, that the "class" was not made up of much smaller groups which only bred internally), that there was little social mobility, and that this had been going on for many generations, then we would be in the situation of having genetic castes, which HBD could look at. We are not in that situation. Some aspects of that situation exist -- for instance, there's generational welfare recipients. But though there are black and non-Hispanic white generational welfare recipients, they're largely separate groups.
The whole paper is here. But even if I was convinced by the tower of assumptions made there, I don't live in England; the US has long been reputed to have a much weaker class system.
So he's got direct measures of social mobility, but rejects that in favor of a surrogate measure based on correlations of surnames?
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I don't understand your argument here. Human Bio-Diversity, on its face, says nothing about race. Only about humans. If humans are of different ability levels, and it is correct to discriminate based on them, I don't see why I should only choose to discriminate based on race and not on other useful parameters, like education level and income.
I think you do. Your argument is just a dressed-up version of "You HBD proponents are just a bunch of racists, if you really believed in HBD rather than just hating the blacks, you'd apply your lens to poor people as well."
No, if that was all human bio-diversity said, only the most radical tabula rasa leftists would disagree. HBD as it is normally espoused also says that distinct populations of humans have different average levels of ability, which are genetically determined.
I'm really not seeing what your point is here, you've just restated a weaker version of the point I'm making. Who the cap fit let them wear it. You haven't provided any counter evidence. Just because you view it as a gotcha doesn't mean it didn't get ya.
Yes, and it generally settles on identifiable racial categories as everyday shorthand for those genetic traits. But I fail to see how or why that observation would be limited to one, messy, shorthand when society provides us with an excellent, individually tested shorthand: income and education level. Fine argue that one or the other is better or worse; if I accept HBD's moral bases why wouldn't I want to apply both to benefit myself, my family, my nation? Without a strong racist or wignat element introduced, focusing purely on the IQ supremacy and criminality planks that typically define HBD discourse, what justification is there to not discriminate against poor whites? They've demonstrated all the outcomes you decry as evidence of genetic inferiority.
How many generations of stupidity do I need evidence of before I can write it off as genetics? The stupid children of stupid parents? Stupid children with 3/4 stupid grandparents? We can find many millions of those in America.
I gave you the main reason it's not true. I don't need to go through a lot of effort to refute a cheap gotcha with an obvious flaw, I merely need point to the flaw.
The people who are really into it have various sorts of categories. HBD Chick is well known for talking about groups which originate on one side or the other of the Hajnal line. As I mentioned, castes in India fit the bill too. But race pretty much works in the US (at least as long as you split "Asian" up somewhat), and is the most relevant politically.
More than one, which is why "poor people" doesn't work as a relevant group.
This seems silly? What exactly is lost by treating "poor people" as a relevant group? I guess I don't see the relevant differences.
It would be quite surprising if they were the same along all traits as elites, because of factors like those originally pointed out by @FiveHourMarathon: there is obviously selection going on as people find their positions in society, and assortative mating will help those clusters to be distinct. I see no reason not to look at additional, smaller, clusters beyond race.
Our default assumption should be that it is partially genetic, since that seems true of a great many things about human differences.
It's fine to compare groups even if they interbreed, as long as it's not an even mixing between them—statistical differences should be preserved (for how long depends on how strong the selection and interbreeding is).
They're not a separate population; all they have in common is being poor. Same reason it makes sense to consider Ashkenazi Jews as a population (in the sense of HBD) but not people born on the Fourth of July.
I literally argued that we can treat them as a separate population in a useful manner. Are you going to address that, instead of merely asserting it?
Or is your complaint that there's no clear lines, and only a spectrum? I see no reason why that should change our ability to talk about it.
Nor is there any reason why only having one feature in common should mean that we can't look at things with respect to that feature. (and, of course, it's not quite the one feature in common—everything that correlates with poverty will be something they are statistically more likely to have as well, and vice versa)
It's obvious why people born on the Fourth of July is useless: it has no correlation with genetics, and it causes no persistent groups. Socioeconomic class is not like that. Yes, there is class mobility, and intermarriage, but statistically, people are more likely to stay somewhere around where they started, relatively speaking. Of course, this varies from individual to individual, but there's no reason for it not to be useful on a population level.
There's no reason to require millenia-old groups to be able to talk about human genetics. All that matters are group differences derived in part from genotypes.
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HBD is used as a defense: racial disparities are caused by HBD, not by discrimination.
I'm unaware of anyone claiming that poor whites' problems are caused by discrimination.
https://www.emorybusiness.com/2021/07/08/why-working-class-americans-struggle-to-make-it-and-why-it-matters/
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/may/why-white-working-class-decline
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/10/ban-povertyism-same-way-racism-and-sexism-un-expert
Moreover, it is all over the implied policies of wignats that the working class will and should benefit from instituting racist policies.
Those articles are noticing disparate impact on poor whites, but they specifically are not claiming the same kind of discrimination that's claimed for minorities.
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