hbd
I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds.
Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive." Despite the hate facts that racist neo-Nazis like to spread (such as the PISA score graph with US broken out by race), everyone knows childhood deprivation can explain those outcomes. That's why anyone who's walked around the US and Vietnam can tell you how thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are, and why US blacks and whites of the same SES background perform similarly on standardized tests.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis, and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatist hypothesis. Bonus: A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates.
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
Seconding @thrownaway24e89172's response below. I see this kind of disclaimer for HBD-based arguments all the time (e.g. "there are no inferior or superior races, but...") even though the conclusion they dismiss is usually an obvious extrapolation from the forwarded premises. You might justify the "unequal but equal" mindset by pointing to the special role of women in childbearing, but nevertheless men are still universally regarded as the primary sex, with woman defined in relation to him; Eve was made of Adam, after all. I hate that it's the case and wish it weren't so, but women are definitely seen as intrinsically lesser (in the "great chain of being" sense) compared to men.
With that said, what's your justification for the equal worth/dignity of the sexes despite their unequal ability?
aardvark2
4d ago
TPO? TrannyPorno was one of most prolific posters, who posted about HBD and often in insensitive manner. Do you want me to find TPO's remarks about Abos? If such thing like JarJarJedis was posted about other groups, the poster would be modded. I guess I have just accept that most people here consider themselves being in war against Russia and it's ok to raise spirit by telling snarky imaginary details about Russia.
Eetan
5d ago
I find it weird people don't have those qualms about PTSD. But then again we refused to believe it was a thing for a long time.
There are still holdouts who refuse to believe. Not only cranks, but as esteemed HBDIQ rationalist adjacent people as Greg Cochran (his argument: "There was no PTSD in ancient Rome").
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6d ago
In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories
Is this an accurate description? I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke. But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here...
Teenage girls being prone to anorexia in the 90s, or teenage girls being prone to cutting, were not biologically determined in the sense that there was a specific "I want to cut" gene that was being triggered, exactly, and cutting was those girls "true self". BUT it was almost certainly the case that many of the girls prone to cutting, or to anorexia, did have some other, background biological traits that made them more likely like to be susceptible to those manifestations of whatever else was going on with them on a deeper level. They had their own hardware, but the social ways it manifest were absolutely a kind of social software, and broader culture played a deeply important role in making those behaviors manifest the way they did... and different broader cultures could absolutely dampen or accentuate harmful behaviors.
Likewise, it is very likely that most school shooters have some biological things going on internally that worked against them. But it was obviously the massive coverage of Columbine that put a giant spotlight on "school shooting" as the cultural pattern that that kind of biology got channeled through subsequently.
I am no expert on HBD and black people, so I'm going to just sort of shrug on this topic. But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S. Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things, in general, but also, at least historically, Southern blacks were much less successfully targeted by radical activists with immigrant backgrounds from continental Europe that spread a radical culture of violent rioting as a way to force social change and try to spark revolution. Whatever is organically, biologically wrong black people (I will be rhetorically agnostic here, as it's not my point), clearly certain cultural strands can serve to make it far, far worse.
I could do this all day, of course. I don't think most anti-woke types would disagree with me too sharply, or maybe that's just a guess. This is a way of saying "it's nature AND nurture!", I suppose, but I don't think that quite gets at the deeper orientation, which is more something like, "nature is real, a lot of nature is pretty bad, healthy cultures cut with the grain of nature and try to steer it towards better, more pro-civilizational ends, there are absolutely limits about how far this can be taken because of the reality of nature, and certain ideologies work as arsonists in the face of these facts and are anti-civilizational to the core". And even accepting these tenants in broad strokes, different people could come down on different sides about how much culture can actually achieve, versus how much nature cannot be evaded.
So, putting these analogies down, I have to imagine that there a lot of people who put a lot of LGBT pretty firmly in something like the above framework - it's no more real than cutting or being a Quaker (which is to say, it exists culturally, it's very important to some people, but it doesn't exist the way that helium does), it probably is a manifestation of something deeper biologically (like whatever it is that gets manifested in cutting or rioting), the fact that it has even those natural roots doesn't mean it's in any sense good (which is just the naturalism fallacy anyway), and the rise of Queer identification (or even the rise of "identity" as a conceptual orienting principle in the first place) is obviously cultural, political, and activist driven. And just like you can accept that some people choose to live as Orthodox Jews and can accept giving them space to do so (and giving them space to believe things about you that you wouldn't appreciate) while balking at having their belief system aggressively pushed by the state, media, and shared educational bodies, so likewise with the LGBTQ+ movement. In this view, the science and liberal tolerance might've supported something like decriminalization on normal liberal grounds (liberal society tolerates all sorts of things that aren't clearly good or bad that subgroups care about), but active promotion?
It seems to me, anyway, that the current pop progressive stance goes, much, much further than all of this. It's something like, Science shows that gayness is exactly like having brown eyes or being left handed, and it's totally natural, and Science also somehow proves the normative claims that it's entirely morally neutral or even good, and it has existed in exactly the form we now recognize throughout all of human history, but we've finally become enlightened enough, and made enough progress, to recognize this and encourage people be who they truly are, and all of this applies to all humans who have ever lived universally, past, present, and future - and all traditions or religions that have ever been wary about this were always emphatically both incorrect and immoral. And there are no possibilities, now that we have it all figured out, that there will ever be any negative consequences at all to our new progress. And anyone who dissents from this framing is a bigot and should be hounded out of polite society as an example. I'm being a hyperbolic, but to be honest, this does capture roughly how it often seems to me (although I suspect some people might admit a bit more nuance if really pressed on an individual level).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that. In that light, mind control does not work at all. I
Do you disagree with the theory that Elon Musk buying Twitter was a pivotal moment for Trump's second run?
I don't think HBD or lab leak theory or grooming gangs or trans scepticism or any other dangerous idea has been successfully suppressed by information control
I'll refer you to one of my previous comments:
Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on.
I don't believe that, but I also think that the art of sausage-making involves a lot more than most people (including me) have stomach for.
Tree
7d ago
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that. In that light, mind control does not work at all. I don't think HBD or lab leak theory or grooming gangs or trans scepticism or any other dangerous idea has been successfully suppressed by information control.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on. So when they win, as they often do because it’s a popular message/beloved fiction trope, they have a dog caught the car moment. In reality they were always more powerful than they thought they were.
Holocaust denial is not about maintaining the moral righteousness of nazism, but its essential myth of the all-powerful jew. 'it didn't happen, but it should have'. Or 'according to my ideology: it should have, and it couldn't have.'
OliveTapenade
7d ago
(To boil down my disagreements with those premises, I think Jews are pretty assimilable if you make an effort, I think any form of HBD on Jews is much, much more suspect than HBD on Africans/Austronesians/Everyone Else due to shorter timescales, and given that of the Jews and part-Jews I've notably interacted with (and I am part-Jew myself, though it's a small part) most of them seemed fine (and the one major exception was probably just a case of misplaced righteousness meeting overconfidence in a risky plan) I'm not really feeling the whole "Jews are evil" thing.)
The latter matches my experiences as well. I don't think I knew any Jews growing up, but I ran into a couple at university, and eventually got to know more as an adult, including spending some time at a synagogue and engaging in adult Torah study with them, and the main thing I took away from that experience was, to put it bluntly, how boring and unremarkable they are. Synagogue really is very similar to church, and a very similar culture prevailed - though there were some different holy symbols, a bit more Hebrew instead of the occasional Greek or Latin, obviously no New Testament or Church Fathers or the like but the Talmud and rabbinic writings instead, but the animating spirit felt basically the same.
The mundanity of both Jewish religious ritual and just Jews in general was probably a very powerful inoculation for me against conspiracism. Part of that meant, in contrast to the way certain groups get very bothered about Jewish IQ, noticing that in practice, in everyday life, Jews certainly did not appear noticeably more intelligent than Gentiles. Torah study was interesting but not more insightful than Bible study. There were plenty of Jewish idiots and Jewish midwits, as well as their share of bright people, and I wouldn't say they compared particularly favourably or unfavourably to people in comparable groups in churches, mosques, or temples.
Jews are just - and no offense intended to any Jewish mottizens - not very interesting. Probably the best thing that came out of that engagement was that I made friends with a couple of Jews who are really into theology and we sometimes meet up for chats, but, again, they're not noticeably smarter or for that matter more sinister than the Catholics or Muslims or Buddhists with whom I do the same thing. It's all just quite normal. I understand why I do this, because I'm fascinated by religions of all types, but for people who aren't like me? These people just aren't that special.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
Well, I apologise for mischaracterising you on the neo-Nazi point. Guess this must have been on Reddit, and you just haven't bothered to restate it since.
You're also mischaracterising me, though. I'm somewhat anti-Zionist myself, and there are plenty of others on this site that do not draw the accusations you do. The reason you get accusations of wanting to gas the Jews is because you AIUI combine anti-Zionism with having little faith in ability to assimilate Jews and believing Jewish-exploitativity and Ashkenazi-Jewish-intelligence HBD. At that point, there aren't really a lot of options left for solving the problem; I will grudgingly grant that assuming gas chambers is somewhat uncharitable, but the least-horrifying solution I can see with those premises would literally be ghettos. And, well, you're not an idiot and you clearly think about the Jewish Question a great deal, so it would be very strange if you hadn't reasoned that through.
(To boil down my disagreements with those premises, I think Jews are pretty assimilable if you make an effort, I think any form of HBD on Jews is much, much more suspect than HBD on Africans/Austronesians/Everyone Else due to shorter timescales, and given that of the Jews and part-Jews I've notably interacted with (and I am part-Jew myself, though it's a small part) most of them seemed fine (and the one major exception was probably just a case of misplaced righteousness meeting overconfidence in a risky plan) I'm not really feeling the whole "Jews are evil" thing.)
I mean, I suppose I do have to grant that it's possible to hold a bunch of premises that imply a conclusion and then just go "but I refuse to accept this conclusion, fuck logic". Have to, because there are two issues on which I've basically done that and laid down an unprincipled exception for the sake of my sanity. Is this you?
jkf
12d ago
You really can't think of any logical reason for somebody to oppose high levels of immigration? It's not a particularly important issue to me, and I can easily throw few lines of argument in the ring:
-
<insert country> is overcrowded already -- bringing in more people is creating an inferior experience for the existing people in terms of overcrowding, cost of living, increased crime, etc. -- and is therefore undesirable to the current populace.
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If we are talking about immigration from less developed countries to richer western ones (which we usually are), and the pro-immigration interlocutor believes that AGW is a significant threat to the global environment (which he usually does), then bringing large numbers of people from a poorer, less carbon-intensive lifestyle to a more consumptive place where they produce more GHGs seems like an obviously bad idea.
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More spicily, if one considers the existing culture of one's country to be generally superior to that of other countries, then importing people from other cultures would dilute the existing culture, which would be undesirable. If this one is not logical enough for you, you will have no trouble at all finding somebody around here to make a similar argument based on extensively cited research around HBD -- it's not an argument I care to make, but seems to meet your criteria. (other than containing ideas that you undoubtedly disagree with of course)
CrispyFriedBarnacles
13d ago
I don't think this gets at the mainstream conservative position, or least the more religious inflected one. I would say most religious conservatives I know, at least, would say 1) single women absolutely shouldn't be having premarital sex, and 2) no one should be killing unborn babies, and so once a young woman is pregnant while single, the locus of moral concern and protection is on the blameless unborn child... and if helping and encouraging the single mother out (who often are vulnerable women themselves, even if they've made terrible choices) helps the baby, then so be it.
Same with Medicaid for the kids of single moms; to most religious conservatives, anyway, the kids didn't do anything wrong, even if their parents did.
I think this is a different position from a lot of progressives, who might well want to destigmatize sexual liberation and single motherhood and leave it as one coequal choice that women might make, who might think that the stigmatization is responsible for a lot of the difficulty of the position in the first place, and who think government really has an obligation to make the coequal choices more available to women if they choose them. And it's a different position, too, from a lot of more libertarian / non-religious conservatives, who might well see single mothers AND their children as primarily a context where incentives matter - if you make it too easy to be the child of a single mom, the system will produce more of them. And besides, a lot of those behaviors are downstream from HBD anyway, and in those cases, the kids are probably tainted by a kind of biological original sin anyway, given the evidence of their parents.
That's my sense, anyway; for the religious conservatives I know (and I think they are typical of a lot of conservatives), a lot of the issues around single parenthood amount to something like a kind of triage, trying to figure out how not to hurt the morally blameless while maintaining high standards and ideals and valuable stigma that keep bad behavior in check. It's genuinely tough to balance.
I think you see something very similar, but more so, play out about black abortion. I would say the prolife white religious people I know, even southern ones andd very conservative ones, legitimately rejoice in young black mothers not aborting their children and putting them up for adoption instead (while still thinking they should be taught better values, get religion, and stop engaging in low sexual behavior). Libertarians and certain wings of the emerging non-religious right, on the other hand, seem to... well, believe others things about black abortion. That's my impression.
Throwaway05
18d ago
Admittedly handling this well requires some flexibility of thinking that is going to be challenging for the general population, but just like how HBD claims doesn't mean we have to treat *ethnic group * like ass, just because free will is limited doesn't mean that we can't punish people for misbehavior, arrange society in various desirable ways, and so on.
Let's start with the free will statement. The strongest form of the argument is something like this: we have good data on things like efficacy of treatments, causes of various things, outcomes given various adverse childhood experiences and so on.*
We can cobble together some genetic data and presentations, certain kinds of childhood experiences like gross sexual exploitation, family history of other mental illness, family history of substance abuse, etc and say "this kind of person is enormously unlikely to ever overcome their circumstance." Can we do this for most people? Well not right now anyway, but for certain kinds absolutely yes.
Should we allow them the chance to make their own mistakes instead of doing something first? Different question. Should we let them run roughshod over things? No, but different question.
This definitely applies to certain patterns of child abuse.
A better example is probably opioid abuse. Medication assisted treatment (this is not safe injection sites) originally started as highly stigmatized and disliked but has grown to be approved by most in medicine because what we've found is that once addicted (rarer then you might think) most people just don't recover.
Free will need not apply. The thing is too dangerous.
Look for other options.
We know that external locus of control and efforts at getting people to help themselves work for those who can, so we should try, but thought leaders should be aware that some populations and situations just aren't going to get fixed without outside intervention.
*Simplest place to start if you want to examine the research base is ACE studies.
quiet_NaN
24d ago
Drive through certain areas there and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single sign in English. You’ll see Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean
In 1910, there were 2.7M German speakers and 544 German-language newspapers in the US. As we all know, the result was a Germanization and Nazification of the US as seen in the documentary series "the Man in the High Castle". Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society. As are the immigrants which came from Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, and so on one hundred years ago.
In 2011, the US had 1.1M people who spoke Korean at home. I don't know how many newspapers they have in the US, Wikipedia has a grand total of two Korean-language newspapers with articles. In time, most of their descendants will certainly be fluent in English. (Given the cliches about East Asians, I would not be surprised if it turned out that most of them are fluent and have actually read more Shakespeare than the median White American.)
The US has been integrating (not assimilating in the borg sense) people of various origins for about as long as it has been a thing. What you observed is part of that process.
Also, my gut feeling is that either for cultural or HBD reasons, East Asians are severely underrepresented in gang criminality, religious motivated violence and the like.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
27d ago
I find it ironic that you would pick HBD as your example because to me it HBD reads as this precise dynamic only in reverse.
That is to say i think that a lot of people who are culturally progressive but who otherwise find themselves on the wrong end of the intersectional stack, end up fixating on racial differences and other structural "-isms" to avoid the more uncomfortable implications of thier beliefs regarding individual responcibilty/agency. Or acknowledging that the old John Wayne, Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan-type "Stern Fathers" may have been Right all along.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27d ago
It's funny that you say HBD, because, uh, what exactly do you figure is the group of people that should have been marginalized and contained to prevent these outcomes?
I continue being a big fan of the theory that almost all the stereotypical "SJW" behaviours we are seeing are the result of (at least partially heritable) conservative temperaments grown on a liberal cultural substrate that was made by and for people who are disposed quite differently. "Lana" coming from a committed evangelical background clicks with this theory just as well as Puritan Harvard of all places being considered the main cathedral of the capital-c Cathedral, and I can't help but notice the overrepresentation of various priestly castes and theocratic cultures (Brahmins, Ethiopians, ...) in SJ activism. Leftism seems to simply have choked on its own success - much like England would probably have been spared Rotherham if their ancestors had been a little worse at subjugating Pakistan, the Left probably could have avoided getting taken over by people building a sacred hierarchy full of arcane behavioural rules around their ideology of toppling sacred hierarchies and arcane behavioural rules if they (we?) had resisted the urge to assume suzerainty of places full of people thus inclined.
(Are people like naraburns the rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?)
Tanista
27d ago
I reject this premise. What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
As with HBD the question is what happens if you can't do that (at least at scale) and it's easier to do other things?
In this case "destigmatize" whatever their condition is, which seems to have somehow flowed directly into "publicize" and even "encourage".
You can see why. It's simply much more convenient, and less mean, if society has the problem and it can be made to disappear in a puff by encouraging the "marginalized".
If you take punitive/mean options off the table it's an excruciating problem to find some way of containing bad memes without containing carriers. And, frankly, it cedes power to a certain sort of person I'm not sure it's wise to trust.
WhiningCoil
27d ago
A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
And much like HBD, an obvious truth gets dismissed because to believe it leads to only a single brutal conclusion. A group of people that you want to enjoy full human rights and political autonomy because that's what we've decided is the bedrock of being a good person, must be marginalized and contained at worst, eliminated at best. Or vice versa? Because it's impossible to share a Republic or a Democracy with a power faction that are literal raving lunatics and/or pants on head retarded.
I have so much whiplash from the 90's. The promises implicitly made to me by the culture (in the absence of parental guidance), the beliefs I took on by osmosis, and the horrifying hellscape of a nation I now live in 30 years later which seems the ultimate fruit of those promises.
Like, as a trivial example. There was a humor site called Pointless Waste of Time, that eventually got rolled into Cracked.com and had all it's best articles memory holed, even from archive.org. There was an article where this guy was trying to catch up with his highschool friends maybe 10 years later. I viewed this author as my peer, just a few years ahead of me. He liked video games, shock humor, and was a sneering atheist who never wanted kids. Over the course of catching up with a bunch of his friends, they'd all changed. He alone remained basically as he had been in highschool. I don't recall the precise score, but something like 2 of his friends overdosed and 5 had gotten married, had kids and found Jesus. He joked that he "lost" more friends to God than to drugs. I laughed. What fucking losers deciding to go to church with your family if you'd made it through your childhood not doing so.
So anyways, I got married, had kids, and now we go to church as a family. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I'd be had I bitterly clung to some version of myself I thought was "cool" in 1998. What sort of neuroses I'd develop to cope with the objectively lack of meaning, stability or community I'd be adrift in. The idea that "being a father cost me my identity" sounds literally insane to me, any more than not being a sneering 90's teenage atheist anymore "cost me my identity". Maybe 90's teenage me wouldn't understand the life 2020's middle age me lives. I don't care.
yofuckreddit
1mo ago
What, your wheels were in the crosswalk zone while you were in the road? On what fucking planet is that a justification for someone kicking you off your bike?
A lot of discussion about who wins in racial fights downthread. I've probably seen more interracial fights than most. Numbers and viciousness are the biggest factors in who wins. Honestly man, this has very little to do with HBD and more to do with black people hating you. You're in a city where racial animus is a way of life. Many of your fellow Baltimoreans want an excuse to hurt you (especially if they have numbers on their side), so act accordingly.
Tree
1mo ago
Sounds like you need someone to give you permission to believe in HBD. Permission granted. It‘s not that big of a deal. Just stop assuming any random black person is as smart and friendly as you.
On the plus side, now you can tell these stories you‘ve been ruminating on. They eat some well-meaning people up from the inside.
Sloot
1mo ago
but because he was black (and I'm white) I was seething with racial animosity on the rest of my ride home. On one level I recognize that this is obviously irrational (and racist)
That's the most problematic part about a black man impulsively assaulting you with zero consequences: you becoming slightly more racist. Hopefully he enjoyed the assault more than you were upset by it, thus increasing the net happiness in the world.
Noticing which demographic is disproportionately responsible for acts of animosity and negative interactions—and updating your priors accordingly—is the opposite of irrational. Your feelings are valid.
I have had so many negative interactions with black people in this city (Baltimore) that I'm starting to wonder if there maybe is some truth in the HBD/race realist positions.
Just starting? Living in Baltimore is like nightmare difficulty setting for trying to remain an un-Noticer. In years past, an amusing example would be the topic of "squeegee boys" on /r/Baltimore. There occurred a sporadic but recurring three-way civil war between those who Noticed and found them all so tiresome, those who found them all so tiresome but refused to Notice, and those who insisted they were good boys just having some fun and helping their families make a living (you should be a Decent Human Being and tip extra to show gratitude for the mostly consensual squeegeeing experience).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I just had my bike kicked out from under me by a pedestrian while I was stopped in a cross walk. I shouldn't have been in the cross walk (and I won't in the future, at least for the next week), but I also would have happily moved if he asked, or he could have, you know, walked one foot to the right and went around me. My bike weighs about 10 pounds so I was fine, but because he was black (and I'm white) I was seething with racial animosity on the rest of my ride home. On one level I recognize that this is obviously irrational (and racist), but at the same time I have had so many negative interactions with black people in this city (Baltimore) that I'm starting to wonder if there maybe is some truth in the HBD/race realist positions.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Children benefit from stay-at-home moms; I did, anyway.
I believe you, but I would still argue that there are opportunity costs. A one-year-old requires a caretaker 24x7, and presumably might benefit from that caretaker being their mother. A ten-year-old requires much less adult supervision. Someone to cook dinner and make sure that they either attend or have called by then is certainly helpful, but 24x7 supervision would be actively harmful.
Now, if your model stay-at-home mom starts having kids age 18 and then has a child every other year for as long as nature will allow, I will grant you that she will have her hands full taking care of her kids for a significant fraction of her work life. But in most Western marriages, it is not like that. Instead, she will have two or three children, which will keep her occupied for a decade, but once her smallest child goes to school, she will have a lot of time on her hands for the better part of her work life.
I am not arguing that working 40h a week is the only valid model of how to spend your life, and if someone is happy playing video games or join some club or have an OnlyFans career or dedicate their life to gardening, who am I to tell them that they are wrong? Still, having opted not to have earned a degree seems somewhat likely to limit your options at self-actualization, and earning a degree remotely at age 40 is likely going to be harder.
And if your values differ from those of the broader culture, daycare is likely to drag your kids at least part way to that culture.
I think that this is unavoidable in general. I would advise to raise kids in a culture you are at least halfway comfortable with. Even with homeschooling and everything, you can not completely shield your child from the local culture. Sure, there are some who try, like some Muslim families trying to raise their daughters according to Sharia law in the middle of Western cities, but I think that their success is mixed at best.
Personally, I would not fret overly much about it. I was raised (mildly) Roman Catholic, and it did not stop me from seeing the light of Igtheism at 15 or so. While I am sure that there are some horror stories about some overachieving kindergarten teacher telling white kids to hate themselves, I think the median version of the SJ creed taught to kids is much less harmful. Like Santa Claus, blank-slatism is the sort of lie which is unlikely to harm the development of a kid much. They can still learn about the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis and HBD later.
What ancient Internet history can tell us about the rise of the Woke Right
A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of the Woke Right! We've discussed it before ourselves, opinion range from "it's an op" to "there might be something to it", but one way or the other, a decent chunk of the anti-woke coalition it's an issue that needs to be addressed.
Recently Douglas Murray went on Joe Rogan and had a conversation with Dave Smith about, among other things, the responsibility of influencers with huge platforms to the public. Smith and Rogan took the familiar position of "muh marketplace of ideas", while Murray believes that people with so much influence should be a bit more selective, because exposing the public to bad ideas will lead to some part of the audience uncritically adopting them.
The conversation made huge waves and sparked a massive discussion, articles by Konstantin Kisin, tweet storms by James Lindsay, follow up conversation between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, between Peterson and Lindsay, and more recently between Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. In short, though not all of them might put it in the same terms, some on the anti-woke side fear that following Trump's victory the right "got it's mojo back" and now some of it's more extreme ideas are entering the mainstream discourse, so the centrist liberals want to prevent the "pendulum swinging back"...
...and all I can think is "I've seen it all before"...
First as a farce...
Let me take you back to the year of our lord 2017. It wasn't that long ago, and yet the vibe of the time was so different it almost feels like it was all a dream. Back then the way to make money on big SocMeds was to clown on Social Justice, so everybody and their dog had to have a cartoon character Youtube channel deboonking Buzzfeed. The situation was so dire for SJs that any video trying to put their position forward would yield and endless stream of critical responses which, to add insult to injury, would end up filling the recommended feed of the original pro-SJ video. Trump has also just entered office for the first time, so in that atmosphere it felt like anti-woke liberalism is unstoppable. And then a few things happened:
- The Killroy Conference
With so much online hype in the air, a person going by the name "BasedMama" decided to take the anti-SJW phenomenon to the next level, and host an IRL event. I still unironically think this was a great idea, even now the Dissident Right regularly talks about the importance of real-world organising, and with a guest list consisting of massive influencers from Tim Pool to Sargon of Akkad, the event had the potential to be a huge success. I can't point to anything specific now, but I distinctly remember the SJWs genuinely unnerved by the prospect of it taking place...
...but luckily for them it crashed and burned at an astonishing pace. First, the invited guests started complaining about demands to sign NDA's and non-compete contracts. The smaller ones went along with it, but the bigger ones, many no strangers to the conference circuit, said they're having none of it. Tim Pool publically dropped out with a video to his fans, explaining why he's not going to be at the event. The organizers' attempts at damage control only exasperated the backlash, causing even more guests to drop out. It even turned out that the guest list announced during the crowdfunding campaign was a "fake it 'till you make it" thing and some of the big names never actually signed on.
More relevant to what I want to discuss here: the whole event was marketed as a "free speech" conference, so naturally it attracted the attention of "witches": HBDers, Alt-Righters, and others with ideas rejected by polite society, and as it turned out, by the organizers themselves, who were on record expressing sympathy for the ideas of Social Justice, just thought that their current iteration went too far. That's all perfectly valid as far as I'm concerned, no one is entitled to a slot at a conference, but the usual way to handle this sort of issue is to say "you're welcome to come, but golly gee, we ran out of time/space to host any more speakers/panels", but BasedMama et. al. decided to handle it in the worst possible way: announce the witches will have their panels to get the crowdfunding / ticket money of their audiences, and only then say "oopsie, we ran out of slots". What's worse, people quickly joined the dots and realized that it's only people with a specific kind of views that there seems to be no time for. The "free speech" event was quickly seen for a sham, and all except for the most diehard supporters dropped out. An event that could have plausibly attracted thousands ended up get 20-40 attendants, from what I recall.
- KrautAndTea's crusade against the Alt-Right
Back in the online world the youtuber KrautAndTea decided it's time to balance out his usual dunking on feminists and Muslim-immigration-enjoyers with dunking on the more extreme elements on the right. He started accusing various B-List youtubers of being cryptonazis, of trying to lure people in with relatively inoffensive critiques of society, and then radicalizing them into the Alt-Right. Also, with videos like "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics (and Maths)" and "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics and Physiology", he decided to take on the Big Kahuna - HBD, or what was then going by as Race Realism.
What he did not take into account, however, was the possibility that the academic establishment sold him a bill of goods, and the actual science is much more on the HBDers' side than he expected... Various Alt-Right youtubers like Alt-Hype and JF Gariepy proceeded to take turns taking the piss out of him, and pointing out each and every way he was wrong. The familiar dynamic of critical responses appearing, and becoming more popular than the original "deboonking" video was now unleashed on Kraut. It did not go well for him. He ended up crashing out, got caught red-handed coordinating to flag Alt-Right videos, and coming up with some convoluted Discord schemes to humiliate his opponents. Long story short, he ended up having to take a hiatus from the internet, and to rebrand upon comeback.
- The Candid Saga
Back before anyone really heard of influencer marketing, an amazing new app took the internet by storm - Candid, an online forum promising to host uncensored anonymous conversations. All your favorite youtubers were shilling it. It was the Raid, Shadow Legends of online forums... until it was all taken down by a single autistic NEET...
A youtuber going by HarmfulOpinions decided to take a deeper look at the app, and quickly found out that rather than being uncensored, Candid's moderation was powered by a woke AI. What is now accepted as a fact of life was enough to spark a massive controversy back then, not only against the company, but against the influencers that failed to do their due diligence before shilling a product. The CEO's attempts at damage control were hilariously inept, and only resulted in the hole being dug deeper, but more to the point, starved for cash in the wake of the Adpocalypse, the anti-SJW influencers decided to circle the wagons around Candid. Some realized they backed the wrong horse, and exited gracefully, but others tried using their superior numbers (both in terms of videos and their reach) to discredit HarmfulOpinions and paint him as a conspiracy theorist.
This too did not go well. Candid collapsed as a company, and the influencers involved in shilling it to the bitter end took a massive hit to their credibility.
If you want a glimpse into the past as I saw it, you can watch Mister Metokur's Tales of Trout, and the archive of Harmful Opinions' Candid series. I don't know if I actually recommend them unless you really have nothing better to do. I used to find them hilarious, but they just don't land the same way anymore. I will say they are interesting as a time capsule, and Harmful's videos in particular feels like a sign of things to come - scammy Indian CEO's, AI training to surveil and censor dissidents, conspiracy theories that are, in hindsight, naive to not believe in - that series has it all!
There was more to the story than these 3 events, of course, but those are the broad strokes of what I remember. The end result was pretty much a total collapse of the Youtube anti-SJW sphere, and gave rise to another trend called "Internet Bloodsports", aiming to center authenticity and direct confrontations over fake politeness and highschool Mean Girls games, but ended in whoring yourself out for superchats and brandishing firearms on the streets of Florida, while singing what might as well have been Kanye's latest hit.
More importantly, it was followed by the rise of BreadTube and nearly a decade of darkness, as far as internet discourse is concerned.
...then as a tragedy?
Now, it may seem like I'm putting all the blame on the left-liberal faction of the anti-woke / anti-SJW sphere, and as much as I have issues with them, I want to give them their due. Kraut was right about cryptonazis luring people in with more inoffensive stuff. We regularly see it happen right here on the Motte, with that dude that keeps nuking his accounts, so Douglas' Murray's "be careful what you're watering" argument is not wrong.
I’ve also seen enough crowds being manipulated that I can even understand his sudden turn towards trusting the experts, especially if you keep the previous argument in mind. The antidote to bad speech might be more speech, and sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but if there are crypto-authoritarians on the loose, who have no qualms about presenting themselves dishonestly, they might be able to win the crowd over long enough to take political control, and shut off all opposition. This is essentially what the woke left did, and it’s what some are afraid the woke right might pull off as well.
The problem is that the entire legitimacy of liberalism rests on the free exchange of ideas. This is especially true for the anti-woke ones, as they spent the last 8 years fending off accusation of Nazism themselves, and begging for a seat at the table. If they want to shut off the secretive and the dishonest that’s fair enough (though I will have question about Murray's quiet mumbling when his support for a new war in Iran was brought up), but they have an obligation to directly confront the open and the honest, even if they find their views disgusting.
I don’t mind being called “woke right”, if you can actually address my ideas head-on. I’ve said it before - it’s perfectly natural for liberals to attack me with all their vigor, because I oppose their fundamental values. It would be sad and disappointing if this didn’t illicit the kind of visceral reaction they are showing. However, I do mind being called “woke right” if it’s just a way to shut me out of a conversation, by slapping a scary label on me.
Actually, forget about me minding anything, the argument I’m trying to make here is that it will be a disaster for the liberals, if they keep trying to win by gatekeeping. It will be like training an AI on it's own output. A reasonable concern about about the pendulum swinging too far back, will end in declaring that wanting the economy to serve the people is fascist, finding racism in ham sandwitches, and deranged theories about angel summoners. And if you position yourself as an expert and spend all this time complaining about all these clowns hiding behind comedy when confronted on their takes about serious issues, maybe come up with a better argument then "people love talking about Paul Wolfowitz because his name starts with a nasty animal, and he's Jewish".
I reversed Marx' famous quip, because it's all fun and games when the story involves cartoon avatars, and characters with names like BasedMama and KrautAndTea, but when I see Conservative Inc. playing the same "you are wrong, and dumb for believing this" game that Kraut did, the same "we're for free speech, but you shouldn't be given such a big platform" game that Killroy did, and the same whisper networks that would try to psy-op you into believing someone's an insane conspiracy theorist now coordinating to make "Woke Right" a thing, I don't really feel like laughing. I've seen how the story involving a bunch of online autists ends, so when I see these dynamics play out on the scale of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, I get a bit nervous.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.
We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.
Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.
That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."
To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...
A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor
A + B ⇒ C
So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)
Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.
I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:
But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.
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