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The basic idea is that black players that had not taken the Wonderlic when joining the league had their post-career Wonderlic score compared to a lower default/baseline than white players that had not taken the Wonderlic prior to joining the league. The reason for this being that the median black Wonderlic score is lower than the median white Wonderlic score. There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race, it was applying a baseline for players that hadn't taken the test before.
Hlynka's characterization of the incident is... uncharitable to say the least.
That sounds like the facts on the ground, but maybe the argumentation was particularly bad. If this was seriously a turning point moment for @hlynka I'd be interested in seeing the actual comments.
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That's where you are wrong. A major part of the scandal was that it was revealed in discovery that the NFL had attempted to use the lower "race-normalized" scores to justify reduced payouts even in cases where the initial score for an individual player were available. Only problem being they got caught by a player who'd saved a copy of their initial scores and subsequently challenged the ruling.
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
Edited to be less antagonistic.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
You said that "There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race" but "no manipulation" because it was caught early and NFL officials were actively prevented from following through on their intentions carries vastly different implications from "no manipulation" because there was never an attempt to manipulate the scores in the first place.
The strategic equivocation between those two cases as well as between anonymized average group scores, and individual scores, is a good chunk of what I found so "illuminating".
As for the rest, my reply is basically "what @FCfromSSC said." As I've argued in previous threads, the fact that Sunni Fundamentalists and Shia Fundamentalists often come into violent conflict with each other does not invalidate "Islamic Fundamentalism" as a meaningful category or descriptor.
From where I'm sitting it seems patently obvious that the battle between the woke/intersectional left and the dissident/identitarian right is chiefly a intra-tribal conflict between different subgroups of "secular progressive-leaning academics who mostly live in coastal cities and vote Democrat" and this along with the fact that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of meaningful differences between the beliefs and policy preferences of the intersectional left and identitarian right is why I view them as being "of a kind".
Edit: Yes I'm linking that Ryan Long video again.
Does thinking that races are different on average, but not being an identitarian fall into the "dissident/identitarian right"?
I at least have been reading you as asserting that it does, to which many here disagree.
(Also, I don't think the identitarian right would vote Democrat)
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Violent disagreement does not preclude fundamental commonality. Gambino soldiers and Luciano soldiers kill each other, and yet are both members of a single well-defined set. Stalin murdered Trotsky, yet I do not think any fundamental ideological difference existed between the two.
The proper way to draw ideological borders is a non-trivial question.
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity, in the same way that Gambino and Luciano soldiers believe in "their thing", and Stalin and Trotsky believed in revolutionary socialism. That their understanding of the realities of racial identity and what it means are opposed doesn't make any more difference than it does with the mafioso or the revolutionary communists.
Stalin and Trotsky doubtless had many finely crafted ideological differences, but their ideology was largely bullshit, and none of those differences actually cashed out into differences in action: both men believed that they were the champions of an unstoppable progressive force that justified a practically-unlimited amount of murder and destruction in pursuit of "the greater good". As it happens, one beat the other in the power struggle, and the loser got exiled and then killed. The fine ideological distinctions appear to me to be meaningless trivia, because they never cashed out in actual differences in action. I am not persuaded that the details of Trotskyism as an ideology actually explain why he lost, or indicate that he would have been any better if he had won.
how do the differences between the progressive left and the white-identity right actually cash out in action and policy? The progressive left demands discrimination against whites and Asians as racial groups, the white-identity right demands discrimination against blacks and hispanics as racial groups. How is this not Gambino and Luciano, Stalin and Trotsky?
I do not believe that racial identity is necessarily important or inescapable. I believe that it is at least possible in principle for people of different races to live together in peace without either top-down race-based tyranny or bottom-up racial predation. This is a distinct difference between my ideology and that of both the progressive and white-identity types.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
I don't think you're a white identitarian.
No, there isn't, at least at the raw, verified facts level of "there are significant, persistent, well-verified differences in population-level IQ between demographic clusters that map pretty well onto the normal understanding of races."
And yet, I see people who I'm quite confident would not self-ID as white identitarian, people who I would not argue are white identitarian, people who have been democrat-voting progressives most of their lives but who now have grown progressive-sceptical, lamenting that Red Tribers have "wasted" political capital preventing poor black women from aborting their babies, because HBD. I don't believe that perspective is coming out of what people commonly understand as "the Right", and I certainly don't believe it's coming from the zeitgeist of Red Tribe. It's a fundamentally Blue Tribe perspective, a progressive perspective, an Enlightenment perspective. And it's pretty trivial to see how integrating HBD into their worldview got them from a normie-progressive viewpoint to what most normie progressives would consider an abomination without ever leaving the general Progressive worldview-space.
Likewise, "IQ is of paramount importance" isn't part of raw-facts-HBD, but it is an assumption that most of the HBD proponents I've talked to and seen have held, and I, like Hlynka, am pretty confident that it's disastrously wrong. Again, this is distinct from white identitarian ideology, but it's likewise not coming from Red Tribe, and is pretty clearly the product of a fundamentally Blue/Prog/Enlightened perspective.
I am pretty sure raw-facts-HBD is true, and I am certainly not committed to white identitarianism. But neither am I on board with HBD-as-a-worldview, which I think ranges from highly questionable to disastrously wrong, depending on how far people take it.
I am not interested in putting words in your mouth. I am interested in critiquing HBD-as-a-worldview, among other things. I am entirely willing to take you at your word that your aim is race blindness. I think this is true for a lot of people who believe raw-facts-HBD. It is noticeably less true for the HBD-as-worldview set.
I disagree quite strongly that it is useful for counter-arguing against disparate outcomes as proof of discrimination, but laying out the argument isn't something I'm going to start at this late hour.
I'm tempted to go point by point but am on mobile today so I'll be brief. There needs to be a way to describe the truth value of HBD without the baggage of the vile hateful racists and you describing the vile worldview with a portmanteau containing the word is not helpful. We cannot be this afraid of the truth. It's beneath us.
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A major component of FC's point is that while they may not be synonyms they are of a kind.
I recognize that to a Marxist Revolutionary the subtle nuances that differentiate Stalinism from Trotskyism will feel critically important, and that Stalinists will be offended by being lumped in with the Trots and vice versa. But to someone who is opposed to Marxism in general these are distinctions without a difference.
Likewise, whether you're a race essentialist who believes in HBD or you're a race essentialist who believes in intersectionality makes little difference to someone who genuinely believes in a colorblind meritocracy because you're an enemy either way.
and some HBD people believe we should edit genes to uplift future children's intelligence far above than we have any differences in existing populations now. Where do they fit?
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Ironically, your inability to separate the truth of HBD from the motives and preferences of its adherents is emblematic of the very "postmodernism" that you have so frequently decried on this forum.
"HBD" as the word is used here is just the belief that different races, at the level of group averages, exhibit different psychological traits due in part to biological factors. It carries no inherent policy prescriptions. Do you just not believe that? Do you not think that's possible? (Because if you don't think that's possible, well, that's kinda what postmodernism is all about...)
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Do you think it's not possible to believe in HBD and not be a race essentialist? True or false HBD is an empirical observation. Race essentialism is a political orientation.
To bring in your Marxist example HBD isn't the belief in the proletariat siezing the means of production. It's the recognizition that compound interest causes capital to accumulate. A brute fact about the world recognized by anyone interested in the truth that can be put towards propaganda about the virtues of building businesses and endowments for your children or propaganda about how you need to kill the capitalists while you still can before they own everything.
You're like someone who has seen the Marxist propaganda and has decided to react by disbelieving in compound interest and refuse to differentiate between the Marxists and your allies on those grounds.
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Literally none of the arguments that you have made applied to the positions that I assume aquota espouses.
You are saying:
I hope you can see that that's a terrible argument.
Most here are trying to say that they aren't racial identitarians, that they aren't like progressives on those matters, that they are pro-meritocracy, and so forth.
Your response is to go back and say that we can lump them in as the same thing, and that protests are vain.
Okay, let's assume that reasoning is legitimate.
Then,
You may try to argue that you're not like those people, but really, you're in the same camp: those who post on the motte, and self-identify as on the right. We should dismiss any such protests.
I of course do not endorse such reasoning, but I hope you can see the parallels.
But please, characterize people's positions fairly, and listen when everyone's telling you that you don't understand, that we're not (most of us) like what you are saying. A claim does not escape being a strawman of someone's position just because there exists someone else in the world who might agree with that claim.
Edit: spelling
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Broadly speaking, they differ in their policy positions on and attitudes towards:
Abortion
Gun ownership
Social status of women in general (white identity right would prefer to see them railroaded much more strongly into traditional homemaker roles)
Homosexuality
Pornography and all other types of social "degeneracy"
Transsexuality and access to trans medical care
Even their views on race are not simple mirror images of each other - progressives believe in the possibility of a multiracial society and consequently support much higher rates of immigration, white identity right believes in monoethnic enclaves with restricted immigration.
White identitarians are, on average, extremely socially conservative, and they consequently take socially conservative views on these issues.
Economically it's a mixed bag, certainly you have some self-styled "national socialists" on the far right who support expansive government intervention in the free market and a strong social safety net, but you also see plenty of free market libertarianism, of the variety that no progressive would support.
It's harder to try and think of things that the two camps actually agree on.
You might say that all the non-racial issues don't actually matter, and that the two groups are actually defined by their views on race so that's the only thing we should be looking at, but that just reduces your claim to a tautology. Obviously if you consider X-believers and not-X-believers in the abstract and refuse to entertain any other property, then the only thing we'll be able to say about them is that one believes in X and one believes in not-X. So in order for the claim to have substance we have to look at progressivism and white identitarianism as concrete social phenomena, along with all their attendant "contingent" properties.
It is routine for me to see HBD proponents decry the reversal of Roe v Wade explicitly on the grounds that black women will no longer be aborting their babies at their previous disproportionately-high rates. Has your experience been different?
Plausible, but I'd appreciate some examples. I do not see any HBD supporters or white-identitarians in leading the charge in the gun culture, and given how many of them vote Democrat and have all their lives, I'm skeptical they're staunch 2A advocates. Do you have specific people in mind here?
Again, do you have specific examples here? Is Jared Taylor outspoken on womens' role being in the home? For that matter, I'm curious how you understand Red Tribe's attitude toward social status of women, given that committed Christians holding conservative views such issues are disproportionately female. Like, there are a lot of women in my Church, and I'm pretty sure most of them wouldn't agree with your framing. Certainly my wife would not, or her sister, or her mother, or my mother or sister.
Did we ever figure out whether BAP was actually gay or not?
BAP again, and in general this is not the vibe I get from my interactions and observations. God Shaped Hole would be the strongest support for this argument that I'm aware of. I didn't finish the piece, but while it struck me as porn-critical, its objection seemed much more political and centered on porn-as-it-currently-functions, not porn-in-general. Perhaps I'm wrong, or you have other examples in mind?
I expect the people most concerned with Trans issues to be the sincerely religious, and those most concerned with white identitarianism to be atheist and to view Trans issues as a distraction from what really matters, which is race. Certainly that's the pattern I believe I've observed here. I'm open to being corrected, though.
I don't think either one has much chance of securing the future they purport to desire, so I'm not sure why this should be more relevant than the similarities in the ways they engage with race here and now.
Trans issues are important to many on the social right - religious or not, white identitarian or not.
There's concern for the healthy people who are performing irreversible unnecessary medical procedures on their bodies due to what is essentially a social contagion, many of whom are impressionable young teens, and there's also the natural bristling at the Orwellian "you must say that this man is actually a woman and let him participate in women's sports" dictates. Neither of these justifications are religious in nature.
From the National Justice Party platform statement (the NJP is a recently-defunct white identitarian party spearheaded by Mike Enoch of therightstuff.biz. Although the party recently disbanded due to internal conflicts, their website nationaljusticeparty.com is still available on the wayback machine):
From Patriotic Alternative (largest active white identitarian party in the UK):
From Counter Currents:
It's primarily a general attitude that I've picked up on from comments sections and podcasts. I don't have a ton of specific examples offhand to link to. But we do have:
From Patriotic Alternative:
From the NJP platform statement:
Surely these statements would set off alarm bells for progressives.
Your original post was about the "progressive left" and the "white-identity right", so those are the groups I'm comparing.
It's important that we not conflate "white-identity right", "HBD supporters", and "red tribe". These are all separate things, even though there is overlap.
If your wife, sister, and mother are not white identitarians, then I don't think their views are relevant for this comparison.
Is BAP actually a white identitarian? As in does he advocate for a race-based criteria for citizenship and immigration? I'm not familiar with his work.
Regardless, see the NJP platform statement above about banning homosexual propaganda.
From Counter Currents:
Girls on Film: The Predominance of Pornography. The money quote is right at the end: "Readers of this website are aware that there is more to our ideas than just biological “whiteness,” and porn is an excellent example of this."
Why Porn Makes You Pathetic
From The Occidental Observer:
Legalized Pornography and Demographic Genocide - "I think the implications of these findings to White Advocates should be loud and clear: The use of pornography by Whites should be fought tooth and nail, and the banning of pornography in White majority countries and states should be set as a central long-term goal."
Research on Pornography and the Sexualization of Culture
There's a pretty wide variety of perspectives on abortion within white identitarianism, but in general most people will be opposed to white women aborting healthy white babies, which is already a marked difference from the standard progressive platform of (relatively) unrestricted access to abortion for all women.
Greg Johnson's take.
It's not a flagship issue for white identitarians but see here.
You asked how the progressive left and the white-identity right are different. I pointed out a policy question that they differ on. How is that not relevant?
The progressive left hates white identitarians, deeply, and has done a lot of concrete harm to individual white identitarians by doxing and canceling people. We can explain this hatred by pointing to the numerous deeply-held ideological differences between them. And yet somehow, despite all that, both groups are still really the same because... the white-identity right isn't powerful enough to actually implement the policies they want? That's bordering on a non-sequitur.
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...
It's funny, I was about to go on a whole rant that would have probably gotten me banned and you probably saved my ass.
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I can't find anything about a specific player like you're talking about it (all the top search results are about how the NFL is racist but unsurprisingly light on specifics). Do you recall which player this was?
As I recall it was Kevin Henry (Steelers), Clarence Vaughn (Redskins), and LaDainian Tomlinson (Chargers) who were taking point, but now I wonder if I'm experiencing the Mandela effect because searching for their names and the case on google and Wikipedia is turning up nothing.
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