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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   25776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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I'm pretty sure Hlynka's ideas are broadly similar; the low station of AADOS is mostly due to their own poor behavior, yes, but that poor behavior has mostly non-genetic causes.

I am reminded of this thread from a little over a year ago.

I watch the advocates of "innate cognitive differences" stack epicycles upon epicycles trying to explain why teaching methods don't matter, why classroom discipline does not matter, why nutrition, poverty, a tradition of literacy, a stable home-life/two-parent household, and any number of other things don't matter while arbitrarily dismissing any arguments, claims, and evidence to the contrary as "blank-slatism" and can't help but find it just as (if not even more) ridiculous.

I mean the answer is that these things do matter(I'm not thinking you disagree here). Catholic schools and no-excuse charters meaningfully improve black performance! And black neighborhoods where the majority of households are two parent families produce upwardly mobile children, not only by black standards but by national standards! The military also massively improves black life outcomes. Wokes don't want to talk about these things, but they have pre-existing biases against things like Catholic schools, the US military, and nuclear families, and they don't want to have to talk about why systemic racism doesn't apply to those blacks. "Hard" HBDers don't like to talk about these things either, with the partial exception of the military because they can point to selection effects as the driving force, because they have no explanation for why black children who receive scholarships to Catholic schools perform so much better than their public school peers, or whose neighbors are stable two parent families are highly upwardly mobile. As I guess you could call me a "soft HBDer"- HBD is a great explanation for why Ben Carson is literally the only black medical pioneer, and it's a decent explanation for why Africa is the poorest continent on average, but it doesn't explain why blacks show such little upwards mobility into the lower middle class, or account for Russia's dysfunction compared to other former communist states- there's a perfectly obvious explanation. To an anti-HBD conservative there's a perfectly obvious explanation.

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