Listen now | This conversation is too good to paywall, so I’m sharing it with the world. My last conversation with Amy Wax, which focused a lot on immigration, went viral (see podcast and video and transcript), and since she recently reviewed my book for The American Conservative
This conversation seems to be driven by the strong priors of the two participants. It seems to ignore history and the role public policy has played in many of these differences. For example, the black out of wedlock birth rate climbed in response to several changes: first, the change in the welfare rules increased black dependency on the state; second, the expanded welfare encouraged young black women to form families without being married, furthermore, the rules discouraged male participation in the family; finally, these public policy changes were accompanied by cultural changes which reduced or even eliminated the stigma associated with having children out of wedlock--think the Murphy Brown effect. Blacks were the subject of a massive social experiment pioneered by white liberals that if not intended led to lower rates of marriage, decreasing participation of fathers in the lives of their children. Misguided liberal public policy is implicated in many of the group differences between blacks and other groups. The same kinds of combination of liberal experimentation and cultural changes is implicated in the higher levels of criminality among blacks compared to whites. However, looking at all blacks and all whites or all Asians as if they represent homogeneous groups is itself incorrect and leads to inaccurate conclusions. Interestingly, many elite colleges fill their diversity quotas not by recruiting black Americans but by bringing blacks in from Africa and the Caribbean where the so-called intellectual disparities between blacks and whites doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent.
1. Talking about needing a theory to fight a theory, couldn't Thomas Sowell's "Black rednecks" theory work well as an alternative to wokism that isn't hereditarian? It place emphasis on culture rather than genes, and honestly it seems just as plausible to me as hereditarian theories.
2. Near the end, when discussing school, Wax makes a common error conservatives make when discussing school LGBT organizations, which is to treat LGBT issues as somehow inherently sexual. This obviously isn't true. A gay couple who have both pledged to stay virgins until they are married is still a gay couple. Reading a story to kids where one character has moms or dads isn't any more sexual than a story where a character has a mom and a dad.
Even if a school avoided all discussion of sex, LGBT issues would still come up occasionally. Some young kids will realize they are gay and might want to go on dates or to a dance, even if their relationship is chaste. The conservatives who are acting like exposing kids to LGBT issues is the same as exposing them to sex at young age are either idiots or lying demagogues.
Very thought provoking! Our society has become feminized. Particularly in academia & sciences. The end result is that safety and perceived fairness trumps truth. In a very general way, good or bad, this is a feminine trait. We see it in scientific journals. White males are characterized as the mean, authoritarian who should be railed against for the sake of innocent, helpless groups. Ironically, it's actually infantilizing the groups it claims to defend & protect. A trade-off for increased power and preference.
“she sees the only potential salvation as coming from conservatives, while I see the theocratic right as another radical egalitarian monster that needs to be dealt with, and is in many ways worse.”
The Wokels have already introduced a theocracy of sorts. Amy Wax is correct that the delusional egalitarianism of Wokeism is rooted in Christianity, so the Left & Right are spiritually connected in that regard. We liberals truly are between a rock and a hard place.
Wax is right when she says true meritocracy would hollow out the black elite, but the scope of the problem is much broader than that. There’s a chart that circulates pretty often in certain corners of Twitter showing that the wealthiest black children achieve SAT scores — a solid proxy for IQ — that are about equal to those achieved by dirt-poor white kids, while middle-class black kids are outscored by the poor whites. The numbers are maybe about 20 years old (I don’t remember because I haven’t seen them in a while), but there’s no reason to believe scores have changed since then.
So if we get rid of all official and unofficial racial preferences, there will be a complete hollowing out of the black middle class, which has been artificially propped up by our affirmative-action culture for 60 years. Even in the current context, the obvious fact of racial inequality already leads to deadly riots every generation or so — not to mention constant racial anxiety as reflected in entertainment and news media — so this level of stratification would be untenable.
Where does that leave us? I don’t know. If meritocracy returned it would probably need to be accompanied by a heavy-handed approach to any dissent that remotely approaches violence. It would be worth it, but it would be ugly. As they say, things would have to get worse before they get better.
I wonder if "soft realism" is really the ideal answer. On one hand, just talking about things like IQs and crime rates already strongly goes against the taboo as I understand it. On the other hand, the consequence of "soft realism" without attempts to make genetic explanations acceptable would probably be, in the case of "success" a strong desire to change the culture/environment in order to finally "close the gap" and end the disparities. One obvious problem is that, apart from some changes that would probably be useful, it would probably inspire lots of doomed, wasteful efforts. One could still argue that such a detour is necessary until people get at better answers, but I don't think that this is the most likely outcome. People will question whether such large disparities can be explained by cultural group differences, and a negative answer will lead to people reembracing the racism/discrimination hypothesis.
I think ultimately, it will be important that genetics are accepted. As long as this happens, there will be many wrong-headed, wasteful, and damaging policy initiatives, e.g. people will conclude that the social/income class of parents and their children correlate to some degree as evidence that children of rich parents have an unfair advantage - even in cases where race and ethnic differences are irrelevant. This could be advanced by further progress with genetics - even though it is now very difficult to conduct genetic research relating to group differences, progress about individual genetics (e.g. twin studies) can also help getting the idea that genetics is irrelevant for group differences seem implausible.
Apart from that, I think it would be better if people just stopped caring about disparities than if they further saw it as something to fix, but now not in the area of racism/discrimination, but the culture of these groups (except that there might be some things that could and should really be improved). Maybe it isn't as unrealistic as it seems at first sight. Other countries don't care about such disparities (e.g. French people about the representation of people of North African descent, it is not even allowed to have official data of the kind that could show disparities), in many cases there is no affirmative action and not necessarily a strong expectation that the representation in certain powerful positions must correspond exactly to the percentages in the population. Also the US itself does not care that much about the representation of groups according to different plausible subdivisions of the population. This kind of idea is consequence of white Americans feeling guilty about slavery and Jim Crow, but maybe people of all races could come to the conclusion that it was an understandable, but unhealthy and unhelpful reaction.
"And what I find, and I can’t explain it entirely, is that these kids almost immunize themselves from even looking at this stuff on the internet. There’s almost a kind of anti-inquisitive, anti-curiosity ethos that you just don’t go there. I call it this kind of PC zapper." >> THIS is the problem that top minds need to be working on. Facts & logic & reason only work for a small population of (heavily male) autists. Genuine progress in sociology of knowledge depends on finding a way to get the large & influential population of midwit single childless college-educated white women to embrace ideas that are less crazy and destructive than their current preferences.
For someone who recognizes the importance of heredity, Richard is incredibly blase about the effect of being raised by your biological mother vs. a random unrelated woman who purchased you from a catalog. You "know" from an early age that there is a existential gap between yourself (as shaped by your DNA & 'blood') and the nice 'parents' whose house you live in. At a minimum, one should follow Katy Faust (@Advo_Katy on Twitter) and read some of the perspectives of kids who were raised by their purchasers rather than their actual mom and dad who gave them their very physical selves:
"So how are we going to sell that to the public.".. How are you going to sell that to minorities? Why are there no black oncology professors or whatever, cardiology professors or people in prestigious tech positions? Why are there so few blacks at Google, etc? What’s our explanation for that?" >> Key point (as both discussants are aware) is that it's not "the public" at large that cares about these things, but the college-educated, opinion-forming classes (think 'college grads' / NYT readers) that care about these things. The average voter cares about gas prices, housing prices, etc, and has no idea who is or isn't a cardiologist. But the college grads who drive politics absolutely do.
John McWhorter's respectful 2010 review of Race Wrongs and Remedies in THE NEW REPUBLIC is an index of how far the derangement has progressed:
Fascinating conversation. I'm glad that these issues can be discussed here and it's sad that having them at an elite university is so challenging.
I find it strange though that both of you seem to agree that IQ is the most important thing you can measure to determine a person's potential for human achievement, but then you take the group with the highest average IQ (white liberal academics) and completely discount almost every single thing they believe. If Richard got his way and DeSantis became president and started going after colleges I'm sure we would end up with affirmative action for conservatives, there would be no other way to really achieve this. You would be choosing to expel high IQ people to make room for lower IQ people that believe more in free-speech (at least as it relates to conservative ideas. If your preferred speech is about CRT then not so much). IQ is the most important thing until...it isn't.
I suspect that if you measured the IQ of Asians vs Europeans in the 19th century you would probably end up with some extremely low scores in the Asian population, yet today's Asian Americans outperform whites. I have a hard time believing that white Europeans would score higher than Arabs during the Islamic Golden Age either. The idea that IQ scores and differences between populations is rigid in this way doesn't make a whole lot of sense, particularly to anyone who is aware of the Flynn effect. And assumptions about the future of an entire group of people based on their status in a single snapshot in time will eventually look very silly, given enough time.
One of the best nuclear power plant operators I ever worked with couldn't pass a written test to save his life. On paper he looked like an eight year old. Knew another guy who aced all the tests but they wouldn't even let him near the control room. Egalitarianism doesn't mean we actually think that all humans have equal abilities. It's an acknowledgement that humans are very bad at measuring and predicting human potential. Beliefs about the potential of different groups always tend to lead to rules about who is or is not allowed to do what. You can't hold on to libertarian beliefs without a certain level of egalitarian beliefs. Undermine them at your peril.
Now that jews have used DEI to force white men out of positions of power, they want "meritocracy" so they can maintain their own positions of power based on the unsubstantiated claims that they have higher IQs.
To what extent do these places really depend on federal money? Don't they all have massive endowments that yield a good ROI?
The usual problem surfaces in this discussion, of "the right" being a useless term that conflates totally different things. I wish we could bin it. You have conservatives whose philosophy is just "in the good old days everything was better". They just want to live in the world they grew up in, preserved in amber. Amy Wax is a pure example of that and even uses the phrase good old days towards the end when asked how she'd improve things, because her answer is literally "make everything like it was when I was young". OK, fine, but not a political philosophy. It doesn't actually mean anything. Conservatives in the USSR wanted to preserve Leninism, conservatives in Iran want to preserve Islamic theology, conservatives in the USA want to preserve the Puritan small-Federal-state America of 1900. These social visions are all totally different but they are all conservatives in the local reference frame.
Then you have the left, and you have libertarians (or "classical liberals" in some parts of the world). Unlike conservatism, these are genuinely specific visions of how the world should be.
This problem is especially confusing in the context of America because of the "Christian right". Christian morality is essentially just left wing morality. Jesus was big into class warfare and hating on the rich, or spun differently, protecting the meek and the mild. Not much different to the ideology of Karl Marx. But because Christianity is old, conservatives want to conserve it or bring it back. This puts them in a terrible state of confusion where their conservative instincts makes them desire what is basically just an older and differently presenting form of leftism, but society tells them that they're the opposite of leftists. Hence the observation in the discussion that the American right seem to so readily adopt the tactics of the American left. Sure, because they're actually BOTH left wing.
Once you recognize that wokeness is just "Christianity 2000", a software upgrade that refreshes the skin without changing the underlying engine, most stuff that seems confusing starts making sense.
For the free market libertarians then, is there good news or bad news? I think in the long arc of history they are actually winning. It may not appear that way because society is still very far from their preferred ideal, it's still very much dominated by left wing thinking. So as times change, leftism changes and remains powerful, and that can be easily interpreted as things getting worse. It becomes easier to be hopeful when taking the long view.
For example, 150 years ago it was common for companies to be called "Smith & Sons". Not much meritocracy there. Nowadays the family dynasty as a concept has mostly died out, and the few that remain hide themselves in shame (see the behaviour of the New York Times which doesn't like to talk about how it has been a family business). Certainly, nobody is advertising it in the name of the company anymore.
150 years ago hating on the rich was pretty much the default state of society, as it had been since the time of Jesus, so much so that many countries would go through violent Marxist revolutions over the next century. Nowadays Marxism has died out completely. The fall of the USSR crushed the credibility of overtly "soak the rich" socialism, so the left pivoted and abandoned their destructive economics. That's a win! They also accepted the need to pay lip service to the basic logic of meritocracy even as they undermined it along racial and gender lines, often stating that their motivation for doing so was because diverse teams function better (have more merit), and not the explicit "meek and the mild" protectionism of earlier eras.
Oppression olympics has dominated humanity for millenia so there's no reason to think it will go away within our lifetimes, but society is slowly getting better at diverting it into less and less destructive cul-de-sacs. Diversity casting and preachy Hollywood movies are annoying but don't threaten the food supply, for example. Argentina of all places just elected a libertarian president. So things slowly inch forward.
Finally getting around to reading this after having the tab open for three weeks, and I'm glad I did. This comment from Amy sums up one of my biggest frustrations - that discussion of IQ so often devolves into a race-ranking fight - better than I can do myself:
"I am more concerned about the fact that high IQ is so beneficial in our society that ordinary people, average people can’t create a decent life for themselves, that we don’t honor ordinary people in ordinary roles doing ordinary jobs, and that’s somehow considered to be a sort of failure. I think that is really a moral problem in our society."
Parenthood in the U.S. is responsibility without power; the parents have to pay all the bills, but the State makes the pivotal decisions (esp. with the non-negotiable mandate of 12 years of schooling). Being a parent looks like being a sucker and a sap.
I loved this talk because from a very young age, this is the way I've always thought about race differences. Now, I'm not on the level of the 130+ iq, but I'm not on the lower levels, so I wonder if this is just recognizable by some people. I will say this: I do not believe most white people (especially) believe everyone is equal. My wine mom friends and I don't, but we will NEVER say that aloud because we have no one in a power position saying it. What I chose to do was have kids and raise them. I got lucky and had males. I picked a smart husband. So, I spent my life raising an intelligent family and focusing on the males. I pushed and I coached and I moved and I saved. It has worked well for me. Women don't want to own this power anymore. They think it is beneath them. I think you'd both be very surprised at the amount of support your ideas have.
Great stuff. You should have Amy on more often, she has a brilliant mind!
This conversation seems to be driven by the strong priors of the two participants. It seems to ignore history and the role public policy has played in many of these differences. For example, the black out of wedlock birth rate climbed in response to several changes: first, the change in the welfare rules increased black dependency on the state; second, the expanded welfare encouraged young black women to form families without being married, furthermore, the rules discouraged male participation in the family; finally, these public policy changes were accompanied by cultural changes which reduced or even eliminated the stigma associated with having children out of wedlock--think the Murphy Brown effect. Blacks were the subject of a massive social experiment pioneered by white liberals that if not intended led to lower rates of marriage, decreasing participation of fathers in the lives of their children. Misguided liberal public policy is implicated in many of the group differences between blacks and other groups. The same kinds of combination of liberal experimentation and cultural changes is implicated in the higher levels of criminality among blacks compared to whites. However, looking at all blacks and all whites or all Asians as if they represent homogeneous groups is itself incorrect and leads to inaccurate conclusions. Interestingly, many elite colleges fill their diversity quotas not by recruiting black Americans but by bringing blacks in from Africa and the Caribbean where the so-called intellectual disparities between blacks and whites doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent.
1. Talking about needing a theory to fight a theory, couldn't Thomas Sowell's "Black rednecks" theory work well as an alternative to wokism that isn't hereditarian? It place emphasis on culture rather than genes, and honestly it seems just as plausible to me as hereditarian theories.
2. Near the end, when discussing school, Wax makes a common error conservatives make when discussing school LGBT organizations, which is to treat LGBT issues as somehow inherently sexual. This obviously isn't true. A gay couple who have both pledged to stay virgins until they are married is still a gay couple. Reading a story to kids where one character has moms or dads isn't any more sexual than a story where a character has a mom and a dad.
Even if a school avoided all discussion of sex, LGBT issues would still come up occasionally. Some young kids will realize they are gay and might want to go on dates or to a dance, even if their relationship is chaste. The conservatives who are acting like exposing kids to LGBT issues is the same as exposing them to sex at young age are either idiots or lying demagogues.
Very thought provoking! Our society has become feminized. Particularly in academia & sciences. The end result is that safety and perceived fairness trumps truth. In a very general way, good or bad, this is a feminine trait. We see it in scientific journals. White males are characterized as the mean, authoritarian who should be railed against for the sake of innocent, helpless groups. Ironically, it's actually infantilizing the groups it claims to defend & protect. A trade-off for increased power and preference.
“she sees the only potential salvation as coming from conservatives, while I see the theocratic right as another radical egalitarian monster that needs to be dealt with, and is in many ways worse.”
The Wokels have already introduced a theocracy of sorts. Amy Wax is correct that the delusional egalitarianism of Wokeism is rooted in Christianity, so the Left & Right are spiritually connected in that regard. We liberals truly are between a rock and a hard place.
Wax is right when she says true meritocracy would hollow out the black elite, but the scope of the problem is much broader than that. There’s a chart that circulates pretty often in certain corners of Twitter showing that the wealthiest black children achieve SAT scores — a solid proxy for IQ — that are about equal to those achieved by dirt-poor white kids, while middle-class black kids are outscored by the poor whites. The numbers are maybe about 20 years old (I don’t remember because I haven’t seen them in a while), but there’s no reason to believe scores have changed since then.
So if we get rid of all official and unofficial racial preferences, there will be a complete hollowing out of the black middle class, which has been artificially propped up by our affirmative-action culture for 60 years. Even in the current context, the obvious fact of racial inequality already leads to deadly riots every generation or so — not to mention constant racial anxiety as reflected in entertainment and news media — so this level of stratification would be untenable.
Where does that leave us? I don’t know. If meritocracy returned it would probably need to be accompanied by a heavy-handed approach to any dissent that remotely approaches violence. It would be worth it, but it would be ugly. As they say, things would have to get worse before they get better.
I wonder if "soft realism" is really the ideal answer. On one hand, just talking about things like IQs and crime rates already strongly goes against the taboo as I understand it. On the other hand, the consequence of "soft realism" without attempts to make genetic explanations acceptable would probably be, in the case of "success" a strong desire to change the culture/environment in order to finally "close the gap" and end the disparities. One obvious problem is that, apart from some changes that would probably be useful, it would probably inspire lots of doomed, wasteful efforts. One could still argue that such a detour is necessary until people get at better answers, but I don't think that this is the most likely outcome. People will question whether such large disparities can be explained by cultural group differences, and a negative answer will lead to people reembracing the racism/discrimination hypothesis.
I think ultimately, it will be important that genetics are accepted. As long as this happens, there will be many wrong-headed, wasteful, and damaging policy initiatives, e.g. people will conclude that the social/income class of parents and their children correlate to some degree as evidence that children of rich parents have an unfair advantage - even in cases where race and ethnic differences are irrelevant. This could be advanced by further progress with genetics - even though it is now very difficult to conduct genetic research relating to group differences, progress about individual genetics (e.g. twin studies) can also help getting the idea that genetics is irrelevant for group differences seem implausible.
Apart from that, I think it would be better if people just stopped caring about disparities than if they further saw it as something to fix, but now not in the area of racism/discrimination, but the culture of these groups (except that there might be some things that could and should really be improved). Maybe it isn't as unrealistic as it seems at first sight. Other countries don't care about such disparities (e.g. French people about the representation of people of North African descent, it is not even allowed to have official data of the kind that could show disparities), in many cases there is no affirmative action and not necessarily a strong expectation that the representation in certain powerful positions must correspond exactly to the percentages in the population. Also the US itself does not care that much about the representation of groups according to different plausible subdivisions of the population. This kind of idea is consequence of white Americans feeling guilty about slavery and Jim Crow, but maybe people of all races could come to the conclusion that it was an understandable, but unhealthy and unhelpful reaction.
"And what I find, and I can’t explain it entirely, is that these kids almost immunize themselves from even looking at this stuff on the internet. There’s almost a kind of anti-inquisitive, anti-curiosity ethos that you just don’t go there. I call it this kind of PC zapper." >> THIS is the problem that top minds need to be working on. Facts & logic & reason only work for a small population of (heavily male) autists. Genuine progress in sociology of knowledge depends on finding a way to get the large & influential population of midwit single childless college-educated white women to embrace ideas that are less crazy and destructive than their current preferences.
For someone who recognizes the importance of heredity, Richard is incredibly blase about the effect of being raised by your biological mother vs. a random unrelated woman who purchased you from a catalog. You "know" from an early age that there is a existential gap between yourself (as shaped by your DNA & 'blood') and the nice 'parents' whose house you live in. At a minimum, one should follow Katy Faust (@Advo_Katy on Twitter) and read some of the perspectives of kids who were raised by their purchasers rather than their actual mom and dad who gave them their very physical selves:
https://twitter.com/Advo_Katy/status/1256052166818594817
https://thembeforeus.com/yes-surrogacy-is-wrong-even-when-straight-couples-do-it/
And why not read *The Primal Wound* about what it is really like to be adopted: https://www.amazon.com/Primal-Wound-Understanding-Adopted-Child/dp/0963648004
Not sure if the link was in there but Amy's Gofundme is here:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/amy-wax-legal-defense-fund
donate today!
"So how are we going to sell that to the public.".. How are you going to sell that to minorities? Why are there no black oncology professors or whatever, cardiology professors or people in prestigious tech positions? Why are there so few blacks at Google, etc? What’s our explanation for that?" >> Key point (as both discussants are aware) is that it's not "the public" at large that cares about these things, but the college-educated, opinion-forming classes (think 'college grads' / NYT readers) that care about these things. The average voter cares about gas prices, housing prices, etc, and has no idea who is or isn't a cardiologist. But the college grads who drive politics absolutely do.
John McWhorter's respectful 2010 review of Race Wrongs and Remedies in THE NEW REPUBLIC is an index of how far the derangement has progressed:
https://newrepublic.com/article/76403/what-hope
More recently, McWhorter has embraced denialism:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/4/four-reasons-why-heterodox-academy-failed#_ftnref34
Fascinating conversation. I'm glad that these issues can be discussed here and it's sad that having them at an elite university is so challenging.
I find it strange though that both of you seem to agree that IQ is the most important thing you can measure to determine a person's potential for human achievement, but then you take the group with the highest average IQ (white liberal academics) and completely discount almost every single thing they believe. If Richard got his way and DeSantis became president and started going after colleges I'm sure we would end up with affirmative action for conservatives, there would be no other way to really achieve this. You would be choosing to expel high IQ people to make room for lower IQ people that believe more in free-speech (at least as it relates to conservative ideas. If your preferred speech is about CRT then not so much). IQ is the most important thing until...it isn't.
I suspect that if you measured the IQ of Asians vs Europeans in the 19th century you would probably end up with some extremely low scores in the Asian population, yet today's Asian Americans outperform whites. I have a hard time believing that white Europeans would score higher than Arabs during the Islamic Golden Age either. The idea that IQ scores and differences between populations is rigid in this way doesn't make a whole lot of sense, particularly to anyone who is aware of the Flynn effect. And assumptions about the future of an entire group of people based on their status in a single snapshot in time will eventually look very silly, given enough time.
One of the best nuclear power plant operators I ever worked with couldn't pass a written test to save his life. On paper he looked like an eight year old. Knew another guy who aced all the tests but they wouldn't even let him near the control room. Egalitarianism doesn't mean we actually think that all humans have equal abilities. It's an acknowledgement that humans are very bad at measuring and predicting human potential. Beliefs about the potential of different groups always tend to lead to rules about who is or is not allowed to do what. You can't hold on to libertarian beliefs without a certain level of egalitarian beliefs. Undermine them at your peril.
Now that jews have used DEI to force white men out of positions of power, they want "meritocracy" so they can maintain their own positions of power based on the unsubstantiated claims that they have higher IQs.
To what extent do these places really depend on federal money? Don't they all have massive endowments that yield a good ROI?
The usual problem surfaces in this discussion, of "the right" being a useless term that conflates totally different things. I wish we could bin it. You have conservatives whose philosophy is just "in the good old days everything was better". They just want to live in the world they grew up in, preserved in amber. Amy Wax is a pure example of that and even uses the phrase good old days towards the end when asked how she'd improve things, because her answer is literally "make everything like it was when I was young". OK, fine, but not a political philosophy. It doesn't actually mean anything. Conservatives in the USSR wanted to preserve Leninism, conservatives in Iran want to preserve Islamic theology, conservatives in the USA want to preserve the Puritan small-Federal-state America of 1900. These social visions are all totally different but they are all conservatives in the local reference frame.
Then you have the left, and you have libertarians (or "classical liberals" in some parts of the world). Unlike conservatism, these are genuinely specific visions of how the world should be.
This problem is especially confusing in the context of America because of the "Christian right". Christian morality is essentially just left wing morality. Jesus was big into class warfare and hating on the rich, or spun differently, protecting the meek and the mild. Not much different to the ideology of Karl Marx. But because Christianity is old, conservatives want to conserve it or bring it back. This puts them in a terrible state of confusion where their conservative instincts makes them desire what is basically just an older and differently presenting form of leftism, but society tells them that they're the opposite of leftists. Hence the observation in the discussion that the American right seem to so readily adopt the tactics of the American left. Sure, because they're actually BOTH left wing.
Once you recognize that wokeness is just "Christianity 2000", a software upgrade that refreshes the skin without changing the underlying engine, most stuff that seems confusing starts making sense.
For the free market libertarians then, is there good news or bad news? I think in the long arc of history they are actually winning. It may not appear that way because society is still very far from their preferred ideal, it's still very much dominated by left wing thinking. So as times change, leftism changes and remains powerful, and that can be easily interpreted as things getting worse. It becomes easier to be hopeful when taking the long view.
For example, 150 years ago it was common for companies to be called "Smith & Sons". Not much meritocracy there. Nowadays the family dynasty as a concept has mostly died out, and the few that remain hide themselves in shame (see the behaviour of the New York Times which doesn't like to talk about how it has been a family business). Certainly, nobody is advertising it in the name of the company anymore.
150 years ago hating on the rich was pretty much the default state of society, as it had been since the time of Jesus, so much so that many countries would go through violent Marxist revolutions over the next century. Nowadays Marxism has died out completely. The fall of the USSR crushed the credibility of overtly "soak the rich" socialism, so the left pivoted and abandoned their destructive economics. That's a win! They also accepted the need to pay lip service to the basic logic of meritocracy even as they undermined it along racial and gender lines, often stating that their motivation for doing so was because diverse teams function better (have more merit), and not the explicit "meek and the mild" protectionism of earlier eras.
Oppression olympics has dominated humanity for millenia so there's no reason to think it will go away within our lifetimes, but society is slowly getting better at diverting it into less and less destructive cul-de-sacs. Diversity casting and preachy Hollywood movies are annoying but don't threaten the food supply, for example. Argentina of all places just elected a libertarian president. So things slowly inch forward.
Finally getting around to reading this after having the tab open for three weeks, and I'm glad I did. This comment from Amy sums up one of my biggest frustrations - that discussion of IQ so often devolves into a race-ranking fight - better than I can do myself:
"I am more concerned about the fact that high IQ is so beneficial in our society that ordinary people, average people can’t create a decent life for themselves, that we don’t honor ordinary people in ordinary roles doing ordinary jobs, and that’s somehow considered to be a sort of failure. I think that is really a moral problem in our society."
Parenthood in the U.S. is responsibility without power; the parents have to pay all the bills, but the State makes the pivotal decisions (esp. with the non-negotiable mandate of 12 years of schooling). Being a parent looks like being a sucker and a sap.
I loved this talk because from a very young age, this is the way I've always thought about race differences. Now, I'm not on the level of the 130+ iq, but I'm not on the lower levels, so I wonder if this is just recognizable by some people. I will say this: I do not believe most white people (especially) believe everyone is equal. My wine mom friends and I don't, but we will NEVER say that aloud because we have no one in a power position saying it. What I chose to do was have kids and raise them. I got lucky and had males. I picked a smart husband. So, I spent my life raising an intelligent family and focusing on the males. I pushed and I coached and I moved and I saved. It has worked well for me. Women don't want to own this power anymore. They think it is beneath them. I think you'd both be very surprised at the amount of support your ideas have.
I don't know whether or not you're really an anti-Semite. But you are way too obsessed with Jews.