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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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This isn't how ideological groups work. They do not hold power by being all fanatics who would support the same policies regardless of their factual beliefs about the world. Nor do they have unlimited ability to hold onto power if public opinion turns strongly against them. There are some people like that, but they rely on support from the much larger numbers of people who buy into mainstream "anti-racist" arguments premised on factually incorrect beliefs. Most supporters of any ideology are aligned with it by some mixture of traits like factual beliefs, trusted information sources, formal principles, and informal biases. Many of them can be persuaded by chipping away at their factual beliefs and their trust in their current sources of information. If mainstreaming HBD failed it would be because the vast majority continued denying it, not because people accepted it and then just shrugged. Affirmative action doesn't have majority support already, it hangs on through disproportionate elite support, but that doesn't mean it can continue to do so even if you persuade a large chunk of public/elite supporters.

There’s a hidden, well, not so hidden, extra factor that keeps people in line. Open questioning of the narrative is a career limiting move. In fact if you want to get fired, probably the easiest way to do it is to be openly racist. Even if people quietly accept that some versions of HBD are true, they’re by and large isolated from each other and prevented from speaking by the knowledge that fighting the narrative is only going to mean poverty and shame. Even the outspoken critics of the blank slate are pretty careful about their identity unless they are in a position to get money exclusively from HBD adjacent communities. Persuasion doesn’t matter if open beliefs are going to ruin your career.

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