hbd
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
No, they probably are not.
What is your position on HBD in general, and the genetic basis of IQ in particular?
From the study that was linked in the article you linked:
In aggregate, all tested genetic variants accounted for 8 to 25% of variation in male and female same-sex sexual behavior [...] Same-sex sexual behavior is influenced by not one or a few genes but many.
We can get into the weeds over what exactly "8 to 25% of variation" means -- how many recalcitrant homosexuals should we expect to find in a given population, how easy is it to change one's sexual orientation or set someone on a different path of development via environmental factors -- but nonetheless, the paper states plainly that there is a genetic component. (The introduction to the paper also makes no mention of epigenetic factors or the pre-natal uterine environment, both of which could conceivably contribute to someone being "born that way" despite not being part of the genome proper.)
The article you directly linked states:
The scientists behind the study do not mince words regarding this conclusion. The study’s first author, Andrea Ganna, stated to the New York Times, “it will be basically impossible to predict one’s sexual activity or orientation just from genetics.”
but this is just a caricature of the hereditarian position. There's a genetic component to IQ too, but no one thinks that you can predict someone's IQ just from genetics either (environmental factors can easily lower it).
I'm always surprised at the number of people who take a staunchly "realist" position on the biological reality of sex and race differences, but who stubbornly refuse to believe that homosexuality is anything but a matter of political propaganda and personal choice. I think there's a clear ideological motivation at work, stemming from the hope that we could eradicate homosexuality if we simply got the LGBT propaganda out of schools (much like how leftists think we could close the black-white achievement gap if we simply devised the proper education program; both projects are futile).
Look at it this way: there's a stunningly diverse range of maladies that the human body and brain can be afflicted with. People can be born without eyes and limbs, they can be born sterile, they can be born with profound mental retardation; is it that much of a stretch to think that a male could be born liking other males too? A healthy, properly functioning human is heterosexual; but there's always a possibility that an organism can simply go wrong and start functioning improperly.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
3d ago
Yes, that was long before I was a mod. Even then, it was a temporary ban because the HBD threads had become exhausting. I personally think it was a mistake, but if one single topic is taking all the air out of the room it's tempting to be fed up with it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so
Why should HBD tell you that? India's been pretty civilised for ages, and Indians have the same basic subspecies makeup as whites AIUI (and there was plenty of geneflow even after OoA2; Persia wasn't a hard barrier, which is why Indians look more like whites than they do Chinese). I would expect the average Indian IQ to have been lower in the 20th century due to the Flynn effect, but I don't see a reason to suspect a large genetic difference. If you have something I'm not aware of, I'm all ears.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so
This is from 1 month ago:
“Bannon calls Musk 'evil' and 'racist' as MAGA civil war boils over”
“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon said. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”
Bannon hates Musk. In a wider sense, it’s a conflict between two large groups on the ‘new right’.
-
A largely Christian, largely evangelical, largely middle aged, largely middle-American wing, descended from ‘classic’ Fox, Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax. Pro-Israel, pro-troops, sometimes isolationist, not-necessarily pro-NATO, shades of Buchanan at times minus the historical conspiracies, but also within the mainstream of US conservative opinion. This is where Bannon and his ‘permanent coalition’ of 60% of whites, 40% of Hispanics, 20% of blacks is. Opposed to mass immigration, but especially including H1B immigration. Especially distrustful of big tech. Want to preserve existing US demographics and may stereotype but have no overt or intellectual racial animus towards black Americans.
_
-
Tech right, ultra online, ambivalent toward H1Bs, pro in Elon’s case, disproportionately non-white, Silicon Valley, e/acc, government waste, very pro free speech, largely parrot’s Musk’s views but also associated closely with Thiel and some other VCs. Like /pol/ often performatively racist, especially toward black people, but actually quite diverse themselves. Blue tribe, lives in big cities, probably works in tech, DOGE staffer, likely not religious except in a possibly tradcath or orthodox aesthetic-only sense, redscarepod listener or subreddit user, new right press involvement in some cases. HBD believer, read Moldbug and Land in 2010 (if they’re older, read their views rephrased in online infographics in 2017 if they’re younger).
_
In addition to these you have combinations of more esoteric racists, third-worldists like Fuentes, extreme antisemites, ultra culture war obsessives still cataloguing video game wokery like it’s 2015, people who primarily have contempt for women and the wider Tate-sphere, zoomer Muslims who’ve adopted a hybrid of Islamist and western dissident right ideologies, Russophiles and nazbols like Hinkle, BAP’s gay bodybuilders and so on, and overt feds like Carlson, but they’re relatively less relevant to this current dispute.
That perspective has nothing to do with Hitler's political objectives or animosity towards the Soviet Union. Hitler acknowledged racial inequality even within the German people has well. I also think even many HBD-aware Russians would be sympathetic to the suggestion that the Russians seem to have less capacity for constructive politics... certainly the evidence is stacked against them on that question, with the eternal dysfunction of Russian politics and the bright spots being disproportionately associated with leaders of German ancestry...
Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union is not based on the Slavs it's based on Bolshevism. It's a dishonest reading of Mein Kampf to pretend otherwise. He could not possibly be more clear that he regarded Bolshevism as the ultimate enemy, but you somehow manage to entirely elide Hitler's self-stated reason for his animosity towards the Soviet Union in his own work, which is the traditional approach taken from the mainstream perspective. That animosity was not derived from his plausible claim that the Russians have less capacity for constructive statecraft, or some claim that the Slavs were not Aryan even though they were explicitly considered Aryan in German racial law.
The organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacy of the German element in an inferior race. [emphasis added]
It's worth pointing out that Hitler's theory he applies to the Russians here he applies to the Germans as well:
The German people came into being no differently than almost every truly creative civilized nation we know of in the world. A numerically small, talented race, capable of organizing and creating civilization, established itself over other peoples in the course of many centuries. It in part absorbed them, in part adapted to them. All members of our people have of course contributed their special talents to this union. It was, however, created by a nation-and-state forming elite alone. This race imposed its language, naturally not without borrowing from those it subjugated. And all shared a common fate for so long, that the life of the people directing the affairs of state became inseparably bound to the life of the gradually assimilating other members. All the while, conqueror and conquered had long become a community. This is our German people of today ... Our only wish is that all members contribute their best to the prosperity of our national life. As long as every element gives what it has to give, this element in so doing will help benefit all lives.
Hitler's theory on this front is also not related to his hostility towards the Soviet Union, it's Bolshevism which he makes abundantly clear.
Edit: i.e., from Mein Kampf:
Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that they are the scum of humanity which, favoured by circumstances, overran a great state in a tragic hour, slaughtered out thousands of her leading intelligentsia in wild bloodlust, and now for almost ten years have been carrying on the most cruel and tyrannical regime of all time.
Furthermore, do not forget that these rulers belong to a race which combines, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying, and which today more than ever is conscious of a mission to impose its bloody oppression on the whole world. Do not forget that the international Jew who completely dominates Russia today regards Germany not as an ally, but as a state destined to the same fate.
The danger to which Russia succumbed is always present for Germany. Only a bourgeois simpleton is capable of imagining that Bolshevism has been exorcised. With his superficial thinking he has no idea that this is an instinctive process; that is, the striving of the Jewish people for world domination, a process which is just as natural as the urge of the Anglo-Saxon to seize domination of the earth. And just as the Anglo-Saxon pursues this course in his own way and carries on the fight with his own weapons, likewise the Jew. He goes his way, the way of sneaking in among the nations and boring from within, and he fights with his weapons, with lies and slander, poison and corruption, intensifying the struggle to the point of bloodily exterminating his hated foes.
In Russian Bolshevism, we must see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the 20th century to achieve world domination. Just as in other epochs they strove to reach the same goal by other, though inwardly related processes. Their endeavor lies profoundly rooted in their essential nature.
Germany is today the next great war aim of Bolshevism. It requires all the force of a young missionary idea to raise our people up again, to free them from the snares of this international serpent, and to stop the inner contamination of our blood, in order that the forces of the nation thus set free can be thrown in to safeguard our nationality, and thus can prevent a repetition of the recent catastrophes down to the most distant future.
If we pursue this aim, it is sheer lunacy to ally ourselves with a power whose master is the mortal enemy of our future. How can we expect to free our own people from the fetters of this poisonous embrace if we walk right into it? How shall we explain Bolshevism to the German worker as an accursed crime against humanity if we ally ourselves with the organizations of this spawn of hell, thus recognising it in the larger sense?
But somehow, without fail, the mainstream seems to interpret Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union as being related to Aryan racial theory relegating Slavs as subhuman. It's an intentional lie to hide the actual reason he was hostile to Russia.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15d ago
the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.
Well, one of the better-argued answers I see to this (even if I disagree with it) is that it is indeed about delaying the problem — turning the clock back thirty years buys you a few more decades — until tech comes to the rescue. There's the position that we just need to keep up 90s liberalism and fight the return of woke until AGI and the Singularity arrives and ends all human politics forever. Or then there's @mitigatedchaos's position that we need to return to "colorblind" 90s liberalism to contain racial conflict (and white identitarianism) another decade or so, at which point gene splicing technology will be safe and cheap enough to broadly use to fix all the HBD issues. (Personally, I find all these sorts overly-optimistic about the rates of technological progress.)
The next-best answer is the same one classical reactionaries often give: the second time around, we'll see the woke coming, and be better prepared to fight them off.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
Fair, I'll state my claim more clearly.
Jobs force people to agglomerate around cities. Sprawl forces low density, which then forces low supply (high prices) or longer commutes.
Space, time & disposable income affect fertility. Leaving cities comes with a high cost on time and disposable income. Building larger apartments is the answer. IE. large towers, densely packed within the city, but not within the building itself. We don't want to have a canned tuna situation.)
Here are some attainable upper-middle class apartment complexes that I have personally visited. Hongkong, NYC, Zurich, India, Paris, Geneva and Boston. (generally, ignore the ugliness of some of them. They were built during a tasteless modernist era. But they're quite pleasant once you're there)
Examples above. It allows people to be near their work, school and amenities Taller apartments allows for larger apartments on the same footprint/number of families. Staying in the city means disposable income isn't at risk.
We can do both. Sprawl horizontally and vertically. But both groups always find each other on opposite sides of arguments. I've conceded that this phenomena is inevitable. Therefore, I find myself opposing your proposal of horizontal sprawl in favor of my desire for vertical sprawl.
Yeah. Around the world people buy apartments and own them. I personally know friends in Mumbai, Delhi, Geneva, Singapore*, Zurich & Paris who own apartments. The apartments are as liquid as any other type of housing. Because the apartment complexes have large shared facilities, it promotes a natural sense of belonging and community. Makes it great for families.
Here are some attainable upper-middle class apartment complexes that I have personally visited. Hongkong, NYC, Zurich, India, Paris, Geneva and Boston. (generally, ignore the ugliness of some of them. They were built during a tasteless modernist era. But they're quite pleasant once you're there)
These are all fairly dense family oriented complexes. Here, people do not own cars or have a single hatchback for out-of-town trips. You'll notice how the density doesn't mean compromising on green space. Instead, consolidating people into vertical spaces means that the remaining flat land can be used for green space, community gardens and playgrounds. Also, the condos are distant from arterial roads, so quiet and safety, that's associated with suburbs, aren't compromised. The gated nature of many pseudo-public spaces facilities as communal sense of child supervision. You can leave your kids alone, but they're never alone or vulnerable.
Admittedly, I didn't grow up in the US. I grew up in a less fancy version of my above examples, back in India. I don't have the same visceral dislike for apartments like some Americans. I know that American apartments are usually sad motel-esque setups, premium millionaire homes or yuppie share homes. Not a lot of normal 30-40 something families in cities.
That being said, suburbs don't seem all that great either. From my experience living in American suburbs, every house I around me was cookie cutter. Yards were empty. Kids were always supervised. No one walked. I frequently visit French and Swiss cities. Here, people live in apartments, but I see a lot more kids outdoors. Parks are well used. From my anecdotal experiences, European city life is superior to American suburban life in every way.
stability was not within their control
How is that different from an HOA or interest payments on a loan ? Maintenance costs are constant. Once enough has been collected, condo associations spend from their budget. Random one-off bills are unheard of.
Remember that something like 1-in-4 American households live paycheque-to-paycheck. If you're in that position, unexpectedly having to move can financially ruin you.
Wouldn't missing your loan payments put you at the same risk ?
hanikrummihundursvin
16d ago
If anything Trump is doing now is giving you pause, what kind of America do you envision where you do not feel similarly towards whatever person it is that could push forth some kind of HBD driven policy? How would anything going on now not pale in comparison to that?
One of the reasons I assume centrists are not dealing with reality is because they never formulate their viewpoint into a political movement. Even if it's just an online larp on X. It never goes further than personal opinions and browbeating their left and right sides within the Overton Window.
I don't think it's a coincidence that when they actually do go into real politics, like Carl Benjamin did a few years ago, that they end up moving towards firmer ground, be that on the left, or in this case the right. Same thing happens all the time in countries with multi-party systems. The big 'left and right' parties scoop new 'not on a side' political parties up into government coalitions, they serve that sides interest and then implode next election. Or, like happened recently with my local Pirate Party, they refuse coalitions and instead slowly drift towards the left until there's no point in having them, and then they implode.
I can go on 'lefty twitter' and see what the various factions on the left are up to, same for the right. Both groups have animating theories for how the world works and what is best to do based on that. They can have fundamental differences with each other about what the world around them actually is. They stake their claims, dig their heels in and stand for something. I can't go on 'centrist twitter' and see what the propositions are from their side. What is their view on the fundamental problems and what answers do they hold? Moderate re-education camps? Racism 0.5?
At the heart of the left-right divide is a fundamental difference in how people see reality. There is also a shared understanding of the inherent necessitated logic that drives both theories. Both parties recognize this. 'Centrists', for the most part, do not. Which is why they seem endlessly bewildered why the two sides are so hostile to them.
Goodguy
16d ago
I'm in favor of a brand of classical liberalism that is pragmatic and acknowledges things like HBD, that is anti-woke because it values judging people as individuals rather than based on the average characteristics of the groups they belong to, to the extent that this is feasible. Classical liberalism has a pragmatic approach to issues like population group gaps. The fact that this approach has not been followed for the most part is no reason for me to switch my actual politics, although it may be a good reason for me to switch my strategies of messaging and optics.
I question your assumption that centrists do not have to deal with reality. Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me that us centrists are dealing more actually with reality than either left or right vanguards are. The left and right vanguards, to me, seem like they are existing in airy clouds of their own imagined worlds, driven ahead by self-reinforcing echo chambers and the thrill of owning their enemies.
I just assume that if the deep state actually set up a shooting to assassinate Trump, they would probably succeed at killing him. It's hard for me to believe that they would manage to get a shooter within fairly easy range of him, yet the shooter would miss. The lone wolf theory seems way more plausible to me. In any case, if the deep state has had 10 years in which to kill Trump and they haven't done it, then they are fairly irrelevant as a political force, which is part of my original point.
As for the progressive status quo, I don't know where you are getting that from. I disagree with progressives on a range of issues, including HBD, policing, and the economic consequences of socialism. The average progressive would certainly not classify me as a fellow progressive if exposed to my unfiltered political ideas.
And? Doesn't change what I said or the fact you're objectively wrong. The goal is to help people grow stronger.
Obviously "Communists" are not childish idiots with a terminally naive utopian pacifism. Almost by definition they are self selected from the more hardcore and roughneck of the greater socialist umbrella. They are willing to do what must be done to survive and thrive. But if everyone woke up tomorrow willing to work in peace and be a "Communist," or at least friendly, there would be no need for fighting nor an iota of desire for it - and the overwhelming majority would soon become richer and more prosperous with net utilitarian gains. It's a very prosocial ideology. It's generally right-wing ideologies that are characterized by a desire to mass murder the different.
Like, those 1918 quotes are from a period of straight up revolution and civil war, which they did not start nor desire. The initial Russian coup was fairly bloodless, but certain people weren't having it and were willing to kill and drag the country, if not world, into war and chaos to make sure it didn't happen. Do you oppose law & order, or the right to defend yourself? Do you think people shouldn't commit to war?
The idea that identifiable classes of humans were evil by nature and would need to be exterminated
Again, and? Do you think there or no evil people in society? Or is this just rank hypocrisy where those you perceive to be evil of course deserve to be suppressed if not eliminated, but when other people do it... And you're wrong, the thing about class is you specifically don't need to exterminate anyone nor is it by inborn nature. This isn't HBD. You can simply cast off the clothes of a class and you'll be fine. The nature of Communism guarantees dignified proper livelihood regardless of your personage, even if you're no longer a 1% elite.
See the case of former emperor Puyi and that one movie The Last Emperor, as a visual example.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
I think most of us who considered the original metaphor have realized that, whatever label we might prefer to apply to ourselves, we are in fact witches by the lights of the other side of the culture war; that is, we are not at risk of being targeted because of a mistake or a misunderstanding, but because those doing the targeting wish to target people with our actual views. We are not temporarily embarrassed members of "polite society". We left "polite society" behind a long, long time ago.
I've argued at length against the HBDrs and race-essentialists and white-identitarians here. All the same, here at least, I've long ago bothered arguing over the label "racist"; the people using it know what they mean, and I know what they mean. We both agree the Progressive definition of Racist applies to me, and there's no amount of MLK quotes that will change their mind.
hydroacetylene
18d ago
In the original metaphor, libertarians or principled free speech advocates were explicitly distinguished from witches. The witches are posting here because they can post things that are banned for ideological reasons elsewhere- HBD advocates, the pedo guy, securesignals, etc.
2rafa
18d ago
I urge all of you anti-anti-semites to consider if the fact that every drive-by post like this spawns a chorus of affronted Jews yelling "Shut it down!" helps your case.
Very few of those people are Jewish at all. The majority of Jews on this board just don’t engage with those posts except occasionally.
which is met by maybe two or three other posters forum-wide
Not a bad writer but ridiculous suggest only two are three are on his level (many more are better).
that is not really a problem for him
That is kind of the point, the argument is so poorly made that it doesn’t exist, it’s noooticing with no backing, it says very little. If the argument is some KMac group evolutionary strategy, Hermer has clearly acted against Jewish group interests by using his extremely prominent position in what is still a major nuclear power to relentlessly and publicly bash the only Jewish homeland. If it’s that there some progressive and powerful Jews (for relatively dull HBD reasons especially overrepresented in wordcel careers like law) who fully buy into anti-colonialist ideology, then sure, although there is absolutely no shortage of those among the native population. But it’s not really clear what he’s saying, beyond saying nothing except that he can look someone up on Wikipedia, then click early life.
gattsuru
20d ago
If you find a conservative-leaning individual that actually believes the Republican Party and broader right wing is low on people who were likable but turned out to act as though "sinecures are more important than ideology, the country, the debt, everything", please point them to me. I can come up with a pretty wide list of once-loved (among soccons) conservative politicians and speakers that turned out quite willing to sell their movement up a creek, sometimes for embarrassingly few pieces of silver light grift.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
22d ago
But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!"
Sure, but you could imagine a vindictive, manipulative wife who says, "Oh, so you hate the homeless and what them to die??" and then spreads that exaggeration around their shared friend circle so that everyone thinks the husband is a jerk and shuns him. The analogy breaks down a bit because marital and small-scale social dynamics are different than those between citizens of a nation, but you can see why the husband might obscure his true thoughts to avoid opening himself up to an attack that would ruin his social standing.
It's a lot like calling someone cowardly for not openly stating their thoughts on HBD, or UBI, or Marxist economics. In a society where, for normies at least , "free market" and "tolerance" and rounded up to "good," and "communism" and "racism" are rounded down to "pure evil," inviting your opponents to be frank about these beliefs is really just a disingenuous invitation to step into a trap.
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
(I meant to do a bigger post about this but never got around to it) Sure, Hegseth is a "warfighter". He's still not qualified, though. I'm not talking about cheating on his wife, and cheating on his second wife, both of which blatantly violate the UCMJ, and although that's already very selectively enforced, this really can't help. Nor am I talking about his reported alcoholism (also a UCMJ issue), which many sources had claimed led to him being forced out of leading a veterans organization. Nor am I talking about allegations he abused his wife, nor allegations of sexual assault (which I don't think had enough evidence to be worth considering here anyway). All of those are modifiers - things that might make you not hire someone who you'd otherwise hire. It's just, directly, his lack of experience. Any given 'warfighter' wouldn't make a good secdef, you need to manage an incredibly large bureaucracy, which is a distinct skill, and also just make good decisions. There's just no strong reason to pick him instead of many other very qualified candidates. Fox news host?
I agree with criticisms of Biden's Lloyd Austin pick - he's obviously a diversity hire. When you pick the best black person, instead of the best person, you'll get a worse person, and in critical leadership positions that matters! It'd matter even without HBD, with which the best black person will usually be significantly worse than the best person. But, if you believe that, that it's very important to pick the best person, how do you get Hegseth? Austin was at least qualified:
Shortly after brigade command, he served as Chief, Joint Operations Division, J-3, on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. His next assignment, in 2001, was as Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver (ADC-M), 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Georgia. As the ADC-M, he helped lead the division's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.[9] Leading the fight from the front, Austin traveled the 500 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad in his command and control vehicle. The division reached Baghdad and secured the city.[14][15] Austin was awarded a Silver Star, the nation's third highest award for valor, for his actions as commander during the invasion.
On December 8, 2006, Austin was promoted to lieutenant general and assumed command of XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.[17] In February 2008, Austin became the second highest ranking commander in Iraq, taking command of the Multi-National Corps – Iraq (MNC-I). As commander of MNC-I, he directed the operations of approximately 152,000 joint and coalition forces across all sectors of Iraq.[18] He was the first African American general officer to lead a corps-sized element in combat.[15] Austin assumed the mission during the period when the Surge forces were drawing down. He expertly oversaw the responsible transition of forces out of the country while ensuring that progress continued on the ground.
Austin became the commander of CENTCOM on March 22, 2013, after being nominated by President Obama in late 2012.[37][38][39] Austin was preceded as CENTCOM commander by General James Mattis, whom Austin would later succeed as secretary of defense. In his capacity as CENTCOM Commander, General Austin oversaw all U.S. troops deployed and major U.S. military operations around the area of Middle-East and Central and South Asia. The area consisted of 20 countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt and Lebanon.[40]
Whereas Hegseth 'served first as an infantry platoon leader and later as civil-military operations officer' and then 'returned to active duty in 2012 as a captain' in Afghanistan. And then went into politics, and then became a Fox News host. All that should be respected, but qualify you to be secdef?
SerialStateLineXer
25d ago
I'm 100% on team HBD, because that's where the evidence strongly points, and I'm sick of midwits trying to smear those of us who can actually follow the science as racists, but "normalize Indian hate" sounds an awful lot like actual racism to me.
Goodguy
25d ago
Maybe, but that isn't because there is something essentially definitional about liberalism that makes it so. 100 years ago the average liberal probably would have taken HBD for granted.
hydroacetylene
25d ago
Israel's HBD advantage during its three existential wars is overstated- 100 IQ Arab Christians made up a proportionately much larger part of Jordanian and Syrian society at the time and Israel's HBD isn't that impressive because Ashkenazim aren't a majority of the population.
At one point we were reduced to talking about "muggle realism" and "Horrible Banned Discourse" in the Slate Star Codex comment section when Scott banned the string "HBD" (the former was a play on an earlier euphemism of "Death Eaters" for Neoreactionaries, because Scott, hypocrite that he is, also banned that word after he wrote his posts on Neoreaction).
I take it as evident that IQ is pretty clearly heritable. I strongly disagree with what I understand of the rest of the HBD complex, starting with the idea that human value clearly scales with intelligence.
Let's leave homosexuality aside, and look at something else. Let's try alcoholism.
It's pretty clear to me that alcoholism is at least partially genetic: there seem to be people who are predisposed to addictive behavior in general, and to alcoholism in particular. I'm given to understand that the body's reaction to alcohol consumption likewise varies widely, and it seems logical that on a purely physiological level, alcohol would hit some people harder than others, and that this variance in the experience would lead to variance in the formation of addiction.
Do people choose to be alcoholic? In some sense, yes; if you don't ever drink you'll never get addicted, and in most cases some other person is not tying them down and pouring vodka down their neck against their will. The one alcoholic I've known personally told me straight-up when they started drinking that they were looking for a new addiction. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that many, probably most, maybe all, understand on some level that the alcohol is bad for them and wish they could escape it, and likewise it seems probable that if they really understood the visceral reality of where it would lead, they would not have started drinking.
Can people choose not to be alcoholic? Again, in some sense, yes: each subsequent drink is chosen, and they can choose not to. Can we "treat" them such that they are cured of alcoholism? Yet again, in some sense yes: we can strap them down until they detox, and then keep them strapped down until the low levels of habit are broken. We could even keep them confined away from alcohol forever. We can give them drugs that make them violently ill if they imbibe, and so on, and so on. But the deeper reality is that no, we can't cure alcoholism the way we cure bacterial infections, because the defect is in the person's own will. "Choosing" not to be alcoholic appears to be very, very hard, and "cures" for alcoholism appear to be limited in efficacy, and stand or fall on the subsequent choices and circumstances of the alcoholic themselves.
It would probably not be good for alcoholics if we created and enforced a broad social meme-plex that alcoholism was a valid identity, generated large amounts of propaganda about how drunk driving was cool and totally safe, and about how being drunk all the time was a totally valid lifestyle, and anyone who disagreed was just a bigot, and any harmful behaviors by the drunks were really the fault of the people who refused to love and accept and support their true drunken nature, or of society for not accommodating them sufficiently.
I don't like alcohol. I've personally watched it destroy someone I loved very deeply. I don't drink. I don't encourage others to drink, and while I tolerate others drinking around me in moderation, I would not participate in serious alcohol culture in any form. I don't campaign for prohibition because we've tried it and there seem to have been significant downsides, and despite some skepticism over the nature and accuracy of the assessment of those downsides, I generally come down on "it isn't worth it." And yet if prohibition were on the ballot tomorrow, I would probably vote for it, because I think our current system is far too tolerant of a serious danger.
Does this seem to be an unreasonable position to take toward alcohol? If prohibition were on the ballot, would you say that I am "hoping to eradicate drunkenness", as though an act of congress could undo the laws of chemistry governing fermentation and the features of human nature that cause us to be naturally drawn to getting fucked up on giggle-water? I don't know how to fix drunkenness. I do know that it is, in and of itself, a problem, and that its problematic nature is part of reality, not simply a perspective that can be mediated away by sufficient social engineering.
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