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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Spending a few hours compiling a long and detailed post debunking HBD is particularly uninteresting to this forum and would be like trying to teach a pig to roller-skate, a waste of time and annoying to the pig; however, on the other hand spending a few hours proving how strong the genetic effect is on the population would be wonderfully received. I invite you to spend the time and that post-doc giving all the people here what they want to see, they will love you for it. Go on, I would love to see some actual evidence for this phenomenon.

RenOS lives in Germany. I'm not 100% on the laws there, but my understanding is that doing such a postdoc might actually get him thrown in jail.

HBD certainly isn’t illegal in Germany. Germany has relatively liberal speech laws on anything except things related to 1933-1945, which tend to fit into two categories (the Holocaust/antisemitism and ‘advocating the overthrow of democracy/the constitution’). For garden variety un-PC speak Germany is probably better than anywhere in the Anglosphere except the United States, admittedly a low bar. Germany actually has very strong protections against being fired for political speech for example, Höcke was legally declared a fascist, called the Holocaust memorial a disgrace etc but is still technically a registered high school teacher (he doesn’t teach on account of his political election). All the SPD could do was declare that if he returned to teaching they would try their best to have him fired, but it’s unclear they could do so.

Germany has relatively liberal speech laws on anything except things related to 1933-1945, which tend to fit into two categories

If by "relatively liberal" you mean you'll get fined rather than sent to prison (probably), then yes.

What German speech law does HBD violate? As far as I’m aware there are in fact German evolutionary psychologists who openly argue in favor of HBD, and they haven’t been fined or even fired.

I'm not a lawyer, let alone a German one, but there was a pretty big story during the refugee crisis, where a German couple got fine for a pretty milquetoast Facebook post. It doesn't surprise me German HBDers remain more or less unmolested because the way laws are applied tends to be pretty arbitrary, but that also means they can suddenly decide to change their mind, and persecute them.