"People all over the world flee third world countries and flood into first world nations, abandoning their cultures and ways of life, because they want a higher standard of living."
This is not an accurate description of reality. I don't know how it is in the US, but certainly in Europe, the people from third world countries in large part do not "abandon their cultures and ways of life" when they come here. They actively preserve these (and are encouraged to do so by the prevailing narrative and policies of "multiculturalism"), in part alongside- but often also in opposition to the prevailing host culture. This is the whole point of multiculturalism. As a result there are immense problems with integration, especially with people from Muslim countries and particular third world countries like Eritrea. There are basically parallel societies, there is very little intermarrying (again, especially between Muslim immigrant populations and non-Muslim native populations) and little shared cultural life. There is a lot of direct influence on immigrant populations from the nations of origin as well (for example, Turkish mosques in my country are directly coordinated by the Turkish ministry of religion, Diyanet). In addition, tribal conflicts are imported to European streets, as was exemplified by a mass riot between two groups of Eritreans in The Hague a few days ago. And let's not forget the mass "pro-Palestine" (or pro-Hamas, if you will) demonstrations in major Western cities.
The only large group this is arguably true for is Muslims. Some maintain their culture like Sikhs and it's harmlesss, or even Muslims in US. The fact that right wingers see this as a problem with all immigrants shows their bias.
For Europe, that is not much of a relief because Muslims are a large part of immigrants from outside Europe and the part that causes controversies about immigration.
In the US, Muslims are mostly fine. It depends on the circumstances. Most countries are 90%+ closed borders, keeping out most who would come, so it doesn’t seem to me that it’s a good use of time to think much about exceptions given the current state of the world. Anti-immigration people act like we’re living in societies with open borders already.
At what point would it become a good use of time? Isn't it almost trivially true that this point would be after it was already too late to fix it without mass deportations? Doesn't prudence dictate that you would think about it before the fact?
There is a country that already tried importing huge numbers of people from very poor countries so that they could have an incredibly high standard of living based on cheap labour. People in South Africa benefitted, instead still benefit, from cheap labour to a degree that seems to us almost incredible. It is not uncommon there for *servants to have their own servants*. But White South Africans all know this was a big mistake. Again, isn't the time to start thinking about this kind of stuff before you actually do it?
Well the debate happens all the time. Like presidential administrations debate who to kick out, they usually prioritize criminals which makes sense. When there’s a bill to massively expand immigration we can talk about the rules then. It’s not some complicated question that requires decades of theoretical development or something.
The debate about deporting millions of Muslims from Europe does not happen all the time. It never happens at all because it would be very horrible for everyone involved. Again, the time to think carefully about the population of your country, literally the most important thing that there is, is before you make big changes to it. Not after.
I think you are being deliberately obtuse. There is no country that has tried importing lots of Muslims and is better off for it. There are obvious reasons why this is so (Islam). All of the benefits of Open Borders could be equally achieved with Open Borders Except for Muslims, with far fewer downsides. It is obvious that you could make Open Borders infinitely more attractive to reasonable people with this one simple trick, but your response basically amounts to Don't Think About it Bro.
The most obvious explanation for this is because you intuit that Open Borders Except for Muslims would quickly expand to Open Borders Except for Muslims and Bantus, gradually picking up exceptions until eventually it became Open Borders for People with a Three Figure IQ Except for Muslims. But you should unironically advocate this because it is the what liberalism tempered by accurate knowledge of the universe demands.
"Anti-immigration people act like we’re living in societies with open borders already."
A majority of children born today in the USA are non-white. That happened in basically a generation. Millions of illegals cross a year. That seems like functionally close to Open Borders to me.
You noted the other day that Ronald Reagan was pro-immigrant, and that only losers would care how people vote in 40 years down the line. But Reagan Republican California was literally 40 years ago, and its become Newsome California because of Hispanic immigrants. Romney got 53% of the California white vote in 2012, but it doesn't matter because whites are a minority now.
All of these supposedly brilliant keyhole solutions, like Prop 187, failed. We aren't going to have some Gulf States Dictatorship Jim Crow slave caste for immigrants.
You've got to reckon with the pattern that everyplace Hispanic immigrants go, once they become a large enough part of the population, it becomes a one party leftist state that ends up dysfunctional.
The obvious reason is that Hispanics like leftism. They want Obamacare. They want government services they don't pay enough to taxes to pay for. Why shouldn't they? All people at the average IQ level of Hispanics want that, all the more if you can get any kind of special racial set aside for yourself.
Where the GOP has had any success with Hispanics its because:
1) The underlying white culture is further to the right (the south)
2) The Hispanics immigrants themselves are whiter (Cubans, etc)
3) The GOP has become a more Hispanic Friendly (Trumpified, more leftist) party
4) The GOP has become anti-immigrant (immigrants hate other immigrants).
The kind of Reagan-ist GOP you want could only survive in a majority white country. Romney ran on that platform, got the same white % of the vote as Reagan when he won a landslide, and lost hard. Open Borders just can't be squared with freedom and liberty.
Point 4 above also deserves some discussion. For years we were told the reason the GOP did bad with Hispanics was that it wasn't pro-amnesty and Open Borders. This assumption has been eviscerated the last eight years. Yesterdays immigrants hate todays immigrants, perhaps more than natives (they have to deal with them more).
Whether by Californification (one party Dem rule) or GOP Hispanification (the GOP becoming more leftist - which Murray warned was a likely outcome in The Bell Curve) the impact of Hispanic immigration on the USA is obvious for all to see and will only accelerate.
Luckily, there is no tradeoff between harsh immigration restriction and Hispanic vote share, it may even be a virtuos relationship.
Current immigration has about an 80% disapproval rate and is widely unpopular with all races and ideologies. Even progressives have thrown in the towel.
I've read your and Bryan's arguments for immigration. They are bad. If you weren't aesthetically committed to them you would recognize how bad they are, but as you say, people choose aesthetics first and ignore the truth when it conflicts. In the end your preferred policy will destroy freedom and liberty.
It seems to me that HBD ends up being one of the few ways to talk about immigration. When push comes to shove you just need to prove that it's really dumb to let the dumbs in. Even half dumbs, like Hispanics, quantity has a quality all its own.
If you could end immigration there would be less reason to discuss HBD. Even our periodic racial panics, as long as the country remained white majority, could be handled. But once you go California, you never go back, and the entire federal government going California is going to be a disaster.
"The kind of Reagan-ist GOP you want could only survive in a majority white country"
Bingo. But, to be fair, RH has addressed this point. His arguments include 'la la I can't hear you', 'you can't predict anything about anything' and 'maybe social breakdown is good'.
1) Only elite opinion matters and the opinions of everyone else are completely irrelevant and if we had democracy we would all be communists, so its OK that we are browning as long as we convince the elites to set up some kind of mega Jim Crow state so that we can facilitate more immigration
and
2) Countries like China/Russia/etc where elites have all the power are shitholes where they could use some democracy to control elite power
We can't just like have a high IQ Republic. You know that one thing that created all off the prosperity in all of human history.
“The obvious reason is that Hispanics like leftism. They want Obamacare”— yeah, Cuban immigrants love communism. I think you just proved Richard’s point
I agree (see below), but if you had to pick one group to exclude it's still Muslims.
There is an interesting story currently playing out in the UK in which a well-known neo-traditionalist school run by Katherine Birbalsingh that managed to make multiethnic Britain (yes, including blacks!) work on a small scale through tough-love liberalism is being torn apart by Islam. In the grand scheme of things it might not matter because the solutions employed in this school are not scalable to society at large, but it still shows that even when everyone is trying their absolute best to make a multicultural society work under the most propitious conditions, Muslims still screw everything up. https://unherd.com/newsroom/britains-strictest-head-teacher-my-case-to-ban-prayer-in-school/
"The bombing of Air India Flight 182 is the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history, the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Air India and was the world's deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001."
On a more general note, western Sikhs seem particularly obsessed with directing the resources and influence they acquire here in the west towards creating needless friction with India through their support of Sikh separatism.
One thing I find strange about white nationalists is their willingness to use the worst people as representatives of every other culture, but only the best people to represent their own. Would you say Jeffrey Epstein shows white culture to be full of pedophiles? Or Jeffrey Dahmer shows them to be serial killers? Or the Christchurch shooter shows they are deranged neo-nazis?
Why do terrorists and criminals represent every culture but your own?
They don't need to be representatives, just overrepresented in a foreign group as opposed to one's own.
"Would you say Jeffrey Epstein shows white culture to be full of pedophiles?" - Show me evidence of a higher rate of child molestation among whites compared to I don't know the Japanese then yes. And then maybe the Japanese might consider that if a whole bunch of whites wanted to immigrate to Japan. The Japanese should probably consider that white Americans overall are far more likely to commit violent crime and have a 5 points lower average IQ.
The question is whether existing residents benefit from immigration from a region. We have a collective property right in our country, and no duty to open it to others.
Precisely. The only “humanitarian” obligation that exists is to our own, not violent ethnoreligious-nepotists who see our nations as a pie from which they can gorge themselves until they’re senseless. And they’ll justify it a million different ways from Wednesday. “They deserve it, because of colonialism”, meanwhile North Africans, Arabs, and Turks have been raiding, slaving, pillaging, colonizing, and murdering long before any inbound colonial powers arrived.
Goes to show you how narcissistic they are in their complete and utter lack of self-reflection, and unwillingness to learn their own histories, yet simultaneously hoisting a wholly undeserved collective guilt upon us.
Funny, considering that Jeffery Epstein is an Ashkenazi Jew.
What else is funny is that in the Netherlands, while “Yugoslavs” -as a group- are an economic net negative, they pale in comparison to Africans and Arabs, as demographic blocs.
I don’t need to cherry pick examples of people in order to fuel an unjustified racial prejudice when these people are statistically likely to be such an incredible drain on public resources that their complete expulsion would result in a far wider budgetary surplus, and a sharp decline in violent crime.
My “prejudice” is a survival mechanism based firstly on lived experience, then further reinforced through government statistics. Although I’m sure that this is inconvenient to ignorant cosmopolitans such as yourself who hide behind safe communities, who can pick up and leave whenever you please, and thus entirely avoid being faced with uncomfortable physical realities.
Islamist terrorists are quite a bit more ecumenical in their sponsorship of criminal enterprises and terrorist groups than you'd think they'd be, and vice versa. Hence why Hizballah and the PDVSA are so simpático, as well Hamas and the ANC, among many other bits of sordidery I could list.
Sadly, we in the West often get quite messy ourselves. We are far too tolerant of the antics of Islamabad, as well as to such sinister groups as the MEK and the Gülenists. Evil sadly has many ways to penetrate societies.
There are, and ever shall be, countless domestics who will be happy to take up the torch for our foreign adversaries. Look at how much the MEK has wormed it's way in with Free Worlders for evidence of that.
...I don't think 'right wingers' do see that at all Richard. The problem in the US and Europe is very large scale illegal (i.e. uncontrolled) migration. And relative to the EU, Muslims in the US are only harmless there because of their minority number at the moment. And everywhere in the developed countries, policies to ensure integration and assimilation, have been abandoned. Hence the stagnation and chaos in so many places.
Fly into Detroit and look at miles of burned down/ruined neighborhoods into the horizon. Drive around Dearborn and see 19th/early 20th century buildings preserved, no graffiti, and women able to walk the streets in peace (albeit wearing headscarves). Islamic culture is a much better preservative of Western civilization than American "Black culture". It's funny that Richard cites South Africa as an example where Whites do have a legitimate fear; actually not the whole truth. All non-Blacks, even the so-called Coloureds (their term for mixed-race South Africans), face violence from Blacks, and in fact at worse rates than Whites. There was a significant skirmish between SA Indians and SA Blacks just a few years ago. Scott Greer gets this wrong for similar reasons as Richard, fearing a non-White majority oppressing Whitey, the difference being that Scott fetishizes Whiteness while Richard fetishizes Israel.
I used to teach German as a second language in Germany and I can't attest to any of this. Major cities have one or two streets that are totally dominated by immigrant culture (Keupstraße in Cologne for example) and the rest mostly lives in apartments that native Germans would dare to live in, doing jobs native Germans couldn't be bothered to do, like working an ice cream parlor in 35 degree heat or delivering packages.
The fact that a US-American has heard about a riot in The Hague only goes to show how incredibly out of the ordinary such an event is, because when was the last time you heard about anything that happened in the Netherlands. This sort of news is a trigger point and hilariously easy to identify as such.
I'm not saying that riot was not out of the ordinary, but the simmering tribal conflict between these two Eritrean factions is, and it was well known to the authorities too.
I have no idea what your point is about streets "being dominated by immigrant culture" is. I never said anything about that. I'm saying that for the most part these immigrants do not "abandon their culture" when they go someplace else. They assimilate on a superficial level only but otherwise actively culturally segregate themselves, which is encouraged by the prevailing concept of multiculturalism. I'm sure I do not need to make you aware of the widespread cultural issues among Muslim communities with the equality of women, acceptance of homosexuality etc. They did not abandon this culture, they take it with them wherever they go.
Another example, in the UK last year there were 450 acid attacks. I'm sure you can guess which culture imported this practice (and the cultural norms which lead to such attacks) when they immigrated. Not one or two, or a dozen. 450.
But I'm glad all these immigrants "abandon their culture" when they go in search for a higher living standard.
A 2017 BBC article seems to say that anywhere from a third to half of attackers are white:
“In reality, just 6% of all suspects in London over the last 15 years were Asian.
For the same period (2002-16), 'White Europeans' comprised 32% of suspects, and African Caribbeans 38% of suspects. About one in five suspects remain unknown – either because they can’t be identified, or because the victim has refused to identify them.”
That doesn't go away. Back in 1900 when poor Sicilians emigrated to the US, they basically left behind any future relationship with their family and friends abroad. It all changed radically with satellite television in the 80s, when people could keep watching the same programs abroad as at home. Also, travelling long distance became much easier, so almost all legal immigrants go back to their home country at least once every couple of years, instead of never again or maybe once in a lifetime as was the rule before 1970 or so.
The Irish continue to be a blight on Massachusetts to this day, and have never caught up to the income/success levels of Anglos, Germans, Scandinavians, etc. And of course, the leftism of Scandis was a foundation element to Wisconsin and Minnesota being hotbeds of early American socialism. Anyone treating any national culture as monolithic is being absurd when we can demonstrably see that Western cultures across the world are always changing. I can understand a nihilistic argument which says "And because culture is always changing, all the more reason to just let a free and open marketplace of people and ideas dictate everything", but to claim it is always consumed by the mainstream monoculture is laughable.
Can you elaborate on the Irish being a "blight on Massachusetts to this day"? Irish-Americans seem to compare fairly well to most other US ethnic demographics in terms of per-capita earnings and education and so on.
What I've seen indicates the average Irish-American is something like 10k/yr under the average White American broadly, but that's the least of my concerns. Massachusetts was among the first of states to suffer demographic erasure and takeover by leftist migrants, going strong over 100 years at this point. Irish leftism was America's founding ghetto bloc (see: Tammany Hall) and a vehicle with which much social leftism and refugee-immigration began to erode the WASP-Right and inevitably foment identity politics. The Kennedys, Martin H Kennelly, Biden and Obama, Al Smith, Tip O'Neill, many of the big names of race hustling and were urbanized Irish. There were just as many Irish involved in the IWW and other far-left unionist efforts as there were Jews (albeit maybe not per capita as is usual) with James Connolly and Mother Jones among their ranks.
None of that is to try and argue against the Whiteness of the Irish or anything along those lines, but merely to say that when you let poor people into your country by the millions, don't be surprised when they tend to stay poorer, ethnically insulated, and manipulated by loud political frauds.
Oh yes, Barack Hussein Obama is *so* Irish. (He is half white, and his mother's maiden name is Dunham, an English place name and family. His father is entirely African.)
I take your point about Irish-American involvement in the early formation of the Democrats' political machinery and part of the slippery mythology regarding the huddled masses, but in my experience contemporary Irish-Americans are noticeably to the right of their native-Irish cousins. (According to wikipedia IA household income is actually a little higher than the white average, although per-capita income is slightly lower.)
So true. My family still sings table grace in Norwegian. We shall never integrate with you disgusting English people! Hopefully no one starts deporting us because of that.
Yes, but the indigenous Europeans usually express their contrariness against Israeli war crimes just yelling on facebook how Netanyahu is a nazi while drinking apperol martini on friday afternoon with their pals, whereas muslims usually express their contrariness throwing out of the windows old jewish ladies survived to the Holocaust. That's not the same thing...
Officially, your post-getting-humiliated-all-over-the-internet-by-Russia-being-losers position is that elite human capital wants globalist liberalism and a bit of woke craziness is just an unfortunate but tolerable byproduct you have to deal with to get that, preferable to the costs of any right-wing alternative.
But the Israel-Gaza war gives us an interesting test case where elite human capital and left-wing human detritus don't see eye to eye. Elite human capital supports Israel in destroying Hamas (even if they don't approve of settlements or whatever) because this is what liberal opinion within Israel itself supports and, let's be blunt, because Ashkenazi Jews are elite human capital. On top of this, we have a fascinating case where all the absolute worst and stupidest Rightoids (Jackson Hinkle, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate) all line up with the Woke against Elite Human Capital. Antivax twitter is now basically Palestine twitter.
And yet given what should be an obvious choice for your new ideology, you decide that Elite human Capital is actually 'Zionist billionaires' and moralfag for anarchist weirdos setting themselves on fire while basically doing fan fiction for Putin's third worldist anti-zionist simping. Joke.
I think Anatoly will come around on this issue. What's hilarious is he tweeted that if Israel were the 51st US state that the US would be more humane in dealing with Palestinians. Evacuating whole civilian neighborhoods before operations? Humanitarian pauses to ensure polio vaccines? Ceasefire and hostage deals with bin Laden within a year after 9/11? I think the opposite. The US would be far more brutal and would never respond to an attack on US soil with protests in the streets about negotiating a hostage deal with bin Laden, certainly not if bin Laden as on our border.
Anatoly did also say that Israel is far more justified in fighting Hezbollah than Hamas, as the Lebanese have somewhere to go, and Iran is an imperialist Death to America theocracy. Anatoly also praised Israel's IVF and embryo selection and is talking to Israelis on twitter.
Anatoly is mostly just annoyed that Israel has a right-wing nationalist government. He will be more friendly when they elect a more liberal government. His current stance is just some reverse polarization from his rightoid stance. I think he'll come around.
It's not ultra-easy, but not quite true, there is a 100,000 strong French diaspora in Morocco (mostly retirees), and Tanzania is experimenting with free economic zones in Zanzabar.
Rejecting Third World nationalism and xenophobia these two countries are both relatively successful by non-Gulf Arab and East African standards, respectively.
However, you are correct that much more work remains to be done, and I agree that just as the developed world needs to open up its labor markets to Third World workers, so the Third World needs to open up its property markets to foreign investors and expats.
" It's not ultra-easy, but not quite true, there is a 100,000 strong French diaspora in Morocco (mostly retirees), and Tanzania is experimenting with free economic zones in Zanzabar."
How French are these French exactly? Somehow I don't think they look like Britons in Spain.
Morocco is relatively successful because it is a centuries-old hereditary monarchy whose French-speaking royal family hate gutter Arabs and ruthlessly suppress them when they kick off. Enlightened centrists have this odd tic where they praise foreign countries for doing things that they relentlessly condemn white governments for doing even 1% of. It's almost like you are just insincere.
"It's not ultra-easy, but not quite true, there is a 100,000 strong French diaspora in Morocco (mostly retirees)"
That "french diaspora" is majority french of morrocan background. White retirees are a small minority actually. You don't know what you're talking about
You say "I don't know how it is in the US", and I think that's a significant part of it. I've seen it written that immigrants to the US have a different mindset from immigrants to Europe, especially Muslims. That is, the ones that come to the US don't expect to go back, and are prepared to become e.g. Muslims-in-the-US. And since their preceding co-nationals came with the same idea, they meet people who help them learn how to do that. This is pushed along by a couple of distinct factors in the US. One is that (though I'm sure the US invented the term) the US isn't very tolerant of actual multiculturalism -- you're allowed to be different in a lot of ways, but holding yourself as *distinct* is frowned upon in the mass culture. The other is that being dedicatedly religious isn't so unusual, so if you're zealous, getting society to accommodate your quirks is easier. (I grew up in a town of 10,000 that had 20 churches, all of them distinct denominations. In a situation like that, setting up a mosque isn't a weird intrusion.)
Yes, some Europeans are mistaken in promoting "multiculturalism" instead of integration. Paradoxically, it is often those who are opposed to immigration that are the least interested in promoting integration..
A lot of immigration is caused by push and not pull factors, namely some kind of disruptive disaster in the sending country. Often this is a war and sometimes an economic displacement caused by globalization (eg NAFTAs effect on Mexican farming). That doesn’t fit Richards model so well and it’s not driven by a desire to assimilate with the receiving country
imagine thinking "culture" consists entirely of food and festivals and things like that, and not major cultural and sometimes even economic considerations
I dispute that "HBD is just white nationalism", but let's leave that to one side. When leftists attribute racial disparities to "systemic racism", and then argue for policies like affirmative action and racial reparations, how do you respond other than by invoking HBD?
How would invoking "HBD" counter the leftists' claims? The leftist could easily accept "HBD," and cite the resultant population-level disparities as further evidence that state intervention is needed to mitigate gaps in performance between races. In other words, the leftist could accept the invocation of HBD and not deviate at all from their pre-existing preferences for state intervention to promote egalitarianism.
You think the leftist will say this group here isn't as smart on average, so the government should get them more jobs as doctors and lawyers? That wouldn't make much sense. If they think the group could improve by certain environmental variables, then it would make sense.
It would counter the claim about "systemic racism", though you're right that a leftist could still support affirmative action and racial reparations while accepting HBD (if they were a luck egalitarian, for example). In any case, I was asking Richard how he responds.
Many on the less-religious right support state intervention to fix the Black problems of mass crime, STD's, unemployability, illegitimacy, etc. Listen to the Watergate tape between Richard Nixon and Patrick Moynihan, for example, where they candidly discuss the failures of Blacks in American society, and the failures of school integration to improve test scores of Blacks relative to Whites.
You have said the actual truth. Hanania won't quit his dorky "Pwning the libs with forensics" trip, vital to his self-conceit, not because it ever "works." Would you believe people twist whatever Facts And Logic they hear toward their existing prejudices-- Oh no... Defeatism, etc.... "White trash:" lack of faith in sperg substacking is disturbing, etc.
Correct. Racial set asides are buy offs for constituent groups. Affirmative Action will increase as the population of sub-performing groups increases.
Blaming whites helps to neutralize white backlash (it's our fault, we shouldn't fight back against this injustice), but if non-whites are a majority then it doesn't matter anymore what whites think.
They could indeed still advocate for the forced engineering of social outcomes, but (1) there would be no more moral justification for group-level equality than individual-level equality, and if you endorse the latter you're just a communist, and (2) in practice trying to engineer group-level equality results in South-Africa like conditions where you literally can't keep the lights on, probably followed by civil war.
If leftists wants to come out and say "we are prepared to wreck civilisation pursuing a goal that is as futile as it is hypocritical and destructive", let them come out and say it.
It depends on what kind of state intervention and what kind of performance gaps we're talking about. You could accept HBD still argue for spending on early childhood education, because it still helps to a degree. But the argument that black people are not generally less qualified to be doctors than other groups, and instead merely appear to be less qualified because of cultural bias, becomes less believable if you even acknowledge HBD as a possibility.
You can attribute disparities to culture, which is both true and more palatable. Crime rates respond strongly to environmental incentives! IQ is not destiny, and is only weakly correlated with income.
Telling a large group of people that they're dumb and need to accept their fate as a genetic underclass is both wrong and a losing message.
Thank you for delivering some sense in the midst of all this madness.
I find it difficult to believe anyone who says that they genuinely do not see the moral problem with genetic determinism. I also think the white nationalists on twitter are lying because they would never accept such a statement about their own people. (Look how they respond to the numbers on Ashkenazi Jewish IQs)
How is this a 'moral problem'? If genetics genuinely determines particular traits and life outcomes, then it's like debating the moral valence of gravity. We don't have a particular opinion about the justice of the orbit of Mars, and even if we did, Mars wouldn't care.
Of course we don't get to choose the facts, but we do get to choose how we react to them, as moral beings. (I am making the bare minimum assumption here that we want to be moral beings).
If a wignat says treat other races poorly because they are genetically inferior, but wants to treat low IQ members or genetically diseased members of their own race with respect; that person to me is even more disgusting than a pure social darwinist. Because such a person clearly has the capacity for empathy, but only wishes to extend it to members of their own tribe, while being indifferent or delighting in the suffering of outsiders.
In so many words, I am advocating for a color blind approach to morality, first and foremost. The question of moral value of IQ is one that should be handled separately.
On this question, my answer is to treat it the same as difference in beauty, or any other quality -- which is to say that we treat all humans with respect (or to use the Christian phrase, "as if they are made in the image of God"). My reasoning is twofold -- first, it empirically produces the best societies, and second, it is the one in line with my own preferences as per the golden rule (i.e. how I would like to be treated).
Also wanted to make a couple of points which seem very pertinent to this topic, but wanted to separate them from my previous answer:
Heredity isn't absolute:
IQ is believed to be about 60% heritable, 40% environment right now. I personally believe the environmental component is going to be even larger, once we account for pre-natal and early childhood care.
Many stereotypes that were created in the past have since been corrected or even reversed. For example Thomas Sowell has talked about a great example of Scotland: in the 1600s, Scots were far behind the English and were therefore regarded as genetically inferior; but two centuries later they were outperforming the English and the stereotype now became one of superiority. (An excellent hour-long Thomas Sowell video about group differences in intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx6TkC45y-A&t=1s).
Also we should remember that just a century ago, women were thought to be incapable of all sorts of jobs they are now excelling at.
The interpretation of IQ is also up for debate - does it impose an absolute limit on what you can understand, or only a limit on how fast you can learn? I posed this question to the most proficient IQ experts on twitter, and it seems to be an unresolved question.
The future isn't sad:
I'm not actually concerned about the future in the slightest. What I see in our future is extensive gene editing, integrating with machines (cyborgification), perhaps transitioning altogether to a different from of consciousness. My concern is mostly with the present and how WN rhetoric can hurt us in the short-term. Especially when we need all our focus to navigate the AI-transition.
"IQ is believed to be about 60% heritable, 40% environment right now. I personally believe the environmental component is going to be even larger, once we account for pre-natal and early childhood care."
Any and all shared environmental factors (including prenatal environment) would show up in twin studies, especially when comparing fraternal with identical twins. They're not zero, but they're not large, and not an unknown quantity. (The heritability of IQ in adults is also closer to 70-80%- see the Wilson Effect)
You actually have the correct take on racial differences. That it leads to substantial differences at the extremes.
I should clarify that what I'm opposing are incorrect takes spewed by WNs, such as "black society will forever be poor and dysfunctional due to low IQs". Or "black people commit crimes at higher rates due to genetic differences". These claims are obviously false, and they have been demonstrated false in many different groups in many timespans around the world.
And yet, many people buy into these claims. Because these are claims about the future (e.g. trying to educate black folks is useless) they cannot be objectively disproven in the same way scientific facts can. And so they tend to take on a life of their own.
One easy way to detect lies in the mutterings of WNs is through hypocrisy: most of them favor improving the lives of poor white folks, even though many of these folks have lower IQ than the average black person. They don't advocate for the same "give up and let them die" attitude they have for other races. (Hanania correctly loves to point this out). This is the crux of my argument.
PS: I personally wouldn't call myself a mongrel for being mixed-race, but you do you.
PPS: Did you know mix-raced people have been shown to be more attractive? Also from an evolutionary point of view more mixing is good.
That's an interesting dilemma you find yourself in. May I ask what predictions you find are correct? I seem to find the same number of predictions in the opposite direction.
Remember that if I make a prediction that is too obvious, like an earthquake in the ocean will lead to a tsunami, that prediction can be correct even if your model is quite weak.
This is the conclusion people accepted in the Bell Curve era, but it's very hard to keep a lid on racial agitation and following blank statism to its natural endpoint. On immigration in particular, and via immigration eventually everything else, soft realism just hasn't been strong enough.
It's not blank slatist to say that the environment has a strong effect on crime rates or single parenthood rates. Do you think genes changed in June 2020?
We can admit that there are genetic differences without throwing in the towel.
Admitting genetic differences makes it easier to be tough on crime. When black people end up disproportionately effected you just point out its what you would expect.
Without HBD, you are left with all this bullcrap about racist cops and bad schools and whatnot. Maybe for the first 5-10 years after a crime wave people will tolerate the cognitive dissonance necessary to try and control it, but as soon as crime comes down they are back to saying its all "root causes" and we need to be soft on crime again.
And where immigration has made it possible to be perpetually ignorant and still win elections there is no breaking mechanism at all.
I think RH was trying to argue in the post that the better counter to these policy prescriptions is to point out that they don't work and that this kind of large-scale state interference in the markets makes everyone less well-off over time. This argument does not require identifying the cause of disparities.
Yes, leftists do claim that "systemic racism" is the primary (or even exclusive) cause of observed disparities. HBD argue that biological factors are a substantial (or even primary) cause.
Policies will either help or they won't and the underlying cause may not matter much.
Personally, I don't really agree with this "national interest over truth" position. I would say that the truth is the national interest. (I'm plagiarizing a South Korean journalist). That's not to say I think HBD is the truth. I don't know. I do think researchers should follow the evidence without fear of the conclusions. It seems obvious to me that understanding the genetic basis of intelligence is an important direction for research.
How is that "legacy of racism" transmitted from one generation to the next? Or is it imposed anew and forevermore due to ubiquitous and debilitating "systemic racism"? What effects do well-documented heritable traits have on the ability of blacks to improve their lot, individually and as a significant and highly cohesive American minority? Tough questions to which, as you point out, "culture" continues to fail to provide answers or guidance.
1) Only elite opinion matters, if elites (who apparently are a uniform block) agree on something it becomes reality regardless of popular opinion.
2) Elites choose the opinions based on aesthetic values that are pre-rational and don't let reason get in the way of them.
These are questionable presumptions, even if they have some truth to them. But they are necessary to get to Richard's preferred outcome. If they don't hold then things like demographics and facts matter.
How do you respond when people attribute Jewish overrepresentation to a Jewish conspiracy and then argue for quotas? Do you respond by invoking HBD? Are people who believe in HBD more or less likely to support affirmative action against Jews?
A century of psychological research shows that *individuals* are smart or stupid almost entirely because of genetic endowment. Once nutrition and basic schooling is ensured there is not a huge amount that environment or schooling can do to this.
Yet *all public debates everywhere* about education completely ignore this fact! This goes for all sorts of countries with all sorts of social beliefs. Public policy states that education is an unalloyed good, with no ceiling or even diminishing returns to more education.
I’m in the tiny minority of people who would give a lot less public subsidy to education than at present. I don’t even know how niche my position is, I have never come across an NGO or politician who holds it. Suffice to say it’s really fringe. All my friends, colleagues and family are 115-135 IQ types. When I gently troll them by mentioning their “IQ privilege” they really cannot even conceive of the term, never mind deal with the implications.
My views aren’t really part of another bundle of radical beliefs, my own analysis is that public money spent on education would be better spent on welfare payments or wage subsidies. This is kind of socialist!
My point is that some claims in social science are (a) unambiguously true; (b) very costly if people believe the precise opposite; (c) relevant for any debate about the huge share of private resources that government confiscates and redistributes.
Perhaps not less money on education per se but spent on a more useful alignment of education with capabilities. What we call the trades are nothing but a different type of education which is gone entirely unfashionable. Not everyone needs, wants or can really utilize and education that explores the differences between Greek tragedies and the modern musical form. Those with the 'IQ Privilege' as you wrote completely miss this point and are fixated on the need for everyone to have a deep STEM or deep liberal arts education as the only way to success.
The Bell Curve mentions that twin and adopted kids studies show outcomes before 11-13 year old are very environment based and genetics manifest themselves at 13-18. So it seems to me that there is a great benefit to providing a safe environment to kids to study before 13.
Welfare destroys lives and traps people into "learned helplessness" and creates bad bureaucratic incentives.
If anything, it makes a strong case that we force children to spend waaaaay too much time on school early in life. John von Neumann didn't even enter school until he was eleven, by which point he was already a frighteningly skilled mathematician, literate and conversant in seven languages.
So much of what we do to children is both cruel and pointless, and most of it still has extremely broad societal support.
There are better ways to take care of children than forcing them to waste years of their lives on pointless bullshit that will be of no relevance to their lives by the time their pituitary glands activate. Especially seeing as how the primary reason parents subject their children to such is as a combination of societal signaling and the sake if avoiding legal sanction from the state.
It's child abuse on an industrial scale, and this was the case --before-- we decided to start brainwashing gays and autists into castrating themselves en masse.
They should be castrated to a degree (case by case), not just for general well-being, but also their own. Both have pretty bad genetic outcomes on the whole.
In fact, you could actually make a solid case for other net negative effect outcomes. You can either use upfront eugenics and be honest about the issues, or we can continue for several more decades sweeping the issues under the rug and debating when a good time to shoot a lame horse is.
I believe this line of thinking, which I have seen popping up frequently, is completely untethered from reality. Do you genuinely and truthfully believe that education does not help individuals? Would you tell your own kids or advise your friend's kids to forego higher education?
If you think the answer to the above is YES, then I would like you to explain why the richest and highest IQ people in the country prefer their children to have as much education as possible. My own suspicion is that "smartness" as you define it, while it may be unaffected by schooling, is hardly the only factor important in life and not the key benefit conferred by education. When there is a disconnect between rational arguments and empirical evidence, I am more inclined to trust the latter because it is much more robust.
Greg Cochran really believes that school doesn't make a difference, so he sent his kids to the crummy local public school. They became National Merit Scholars (the only ones in that school in their years). Go on and tell him how untethered from reality he is.
“Would you tell your own kids or advise your friend's kids to forego higher education?”
For of my kids, yes. He has niche interests and is self motivated and would benefit more from a ground-level job in a large organisation at 18 and has never much enjoyed being in a classroom .
Much of education is signalling, see Caplan on this.
If you do practice what you preach, I can respect that.
But I'm going to sit this one out until I see a decent-sized country abandon the current model of education and replace it with a better one. If you say education is purely signaling, I would challenge you on why no company has discarded it and come up with a better testing mechanism, which should allow it to gain a significant edge in the market. Having theories about how the world is stupid can be fun, but they are all pie-in-the-sky until they actually, demonstrably work.
Btw, I want to clarify what I'm *not* saying here; I'm not saying homeschooling cannot be better than public schooling. In fact I think it almost always is, provided the parents have the time and energy to fully invest into their child's education (most parents do not). I think AI is the key that will allow us to personalize education at scale, and the resulting gains will be higher than most people expect.
Agreed on all points. Perhaps our difference is with respect to how much education is essential, and if we dive deeper into the subject, we will end up agreeing on a lot.
My point with homeschooling was that the harm/benefit analysis of the education system largely depends on what you replace it with. At present, I don't think we have any system which can do a better job of replacing schooling while also allowing both parents to lead flourishing lives devoted to their respective careers.
Lastly, I do think our education system is highly suboptimal in many ways, but it is so by necessity, not by design. It is often poorly adapted to the individual student, being either too fast, too slow, too specialized, or too general. Competent AI tutors and individualized curriculum design (also using AI) can be the solution here.
Because education does not only signal intelligence, it also signals conscientiousness and conformity. It's not clear how a business could even conceivably (let alone logistically) design a better test of the latter 2 than making people spend years doing obviously pointless stuff they don't enjoy for future payoff.
As a father of an autistic (moderately) child (home schooled, because public education is failure particularly for those on the spectrum) I can tell, you're literally forced to do this anyways.
You cannot right the wrongs of biology without a biological answer. 99% of education and likely as not 100% of that in public school is not only ill equipped to educate, can't make a dent in outcomes. By age 12, children go right back to their new equilibrium state.
And outcome differentials at the ends of the success curve are more or less fixed.
Upward mobility as demonstrated in several studies is simply the shuffling large scale social change eg. war, huge leaps in technology so forth.
the only thing that changes relative buoyancy in an individual is direct biological change. eg. sympathetic/parasympathetic change, physical neural functionality and very hard-core drugs like Ritalin will create temporary effects in exchange for bodily harm.
This is essentially Freddie deBoers argument in Cult of Smart (genetic determination implying socialist policies because people can’t control most of their outcomes); I would check it out if you’re not already familiar
If you don't understand group differences in cognitive and behavioural traits (not just intelligence) then the world is significantly harder to understand. You can understand these things and still be a conservative, or a libertarian or a socialist, an Azerbaijani irredentist or a Moonie, but you will significantly better at applying that ideology to the real world without disastrous consequences.
Imagine if large proportions of otherwise intelligent and informed people knew literally nothing about economics, as in you could say the words 'supply and demand' and it wouldn't ring a bell. Imagine that talking about supply and demand could get you fired from your job, kicked off Facebook, and, if you lived in many European countries, arrested. Imagine, then, that an edgy liberaltarian told you it didn't really matter because a lot of smart people already know about supply and demand and are just too savvy to go on about it, whereas all the people talking about supply and demand are internet weirdos.
*
"Imagine a leftist coming along and saying that all you have to do is show Sailer that Latinos don’t litter all that much, and then he’ll support immigration! "
Well that would be hard for a fairly obvious reason, but Steve Sailer actually writes a lot about how Hispanic behaviour is a lot more amenable than Black behaviour to top-down intervention.
*
"I’ve noticed that on the right, the more individuals accept group differences between races, the more they want society organized to satisfy the preferences of the worst whites and make excuses for their behavior."
Altho I think a case can be made that 3. happens because HBD isn't in the mainstream talking points, which means that only the bottom of the barrel conspiracy tinfoil nuts picks it up as their default worldview
Right. It's not a strong argument because basically all niche movements are subject to such dynamics. RH must surely be aware of how libertarians are well known for their bizarre obsessions like legalizing sex with minors. (My favourite example of Libertarian madness is Rothbard's belief that it shouldn't be illegal to deny milk to a baby and let it die as long as you don't infringe on anyone's rights, and you can even prevent people entering your house to feed the baby. Conversely, if when your baby learns to walk, he wants to run away you have to let him, because that is his right. At least 20% of Libertarians in my experience are willing to defend this belief).
Interesting. Say you are 6''5, Armenian bodybuilder, and you see small man assaulting a woman. You
a) help
b) keep walking your libertarian way
Ive never met an libertarian extremist before, so curious what ur moral impulse is here (also for the sake of the hypothetical, assume the scenario ends with "help" and no extended benefits section will be awarded)
If I were someone else, my actions would be determined by whatever they would do. I'm a determinist, I don't believe some Cartesian soul distinct from my current body is the source of my free-willed decisions. I also consider impossible hypotheticals to be the domain of far mode.
Umm okay fine. Say you walk by woman assaulted by midget. Would your moral inclinations pull you towards helping her, or to each their own? Btw, if this question sounds like a frame up, it's not, just genuinely interested in the libertarian position (I am surrounded by Marxists by neighbourhood) regarding how far ones moral responsibility extends outside the individual sphere
Non-depraved people don't advocate for the right of parents to starve their own children to death. That's not "veer[ing] off the road fron time to time". Especially given that such depravity was entirely normal behavior for him, hence why he aligned not only with the slavery of the Confederacy, but the even more gruesome slave state of Ho Chi Minh in his anti-American polemics. Nor was any of this an inconsistency, given his regular and enthusiastic support of child slavery, up to and including sexual slavery.
Apartheid was a lot like this in that it ended up as "capitalism for the English, communism for the Afrikaner, and fascism for the Bantu." The Bantu were, due to their apartness, either totally segregated or a mere helot class. For example they would live in military-style barracks when they worked in mines or food processing plants, and they'd be allowed beer only on Fridays, because, well, they were the lower orders and needed lives of discipline. Of course these camps would be rampant with homosexual activity, camp-follower prostitutes and so on, and when the men would return to their villages to see their own families they would bring STDs and dysfunction with them. The system was set up to fail, effectively.
If you were a dumb Afrikaner, however, you could have a pretty similar job in the mines, maybe as an underboss, but you'd have a wife and kids and a nice house and a car, because that's what solidarity towards one's people is, it's ensuring the lowest have a chance at a decent life.
This system arose in an environment that just took HBD for granted. They were "not even wrong" - as a group, South African Bantu simply *are* less intelligent than either Afrikaners or English. But the system was hardly more just for that reality. It was just a pretext for racial politics of favoring whites in general and Afrikaners in particular, and poor Afrikaners in particular's particular.
Was there an alternative organizational model which would have produced a similarly first-world economy with the productive benefits thereof more widely distributed and with RSA's racial castes more equitably treated?
There was a small group, exemplified by Albert Herzog, that argued "real apartheid has never been tried" and called for an end to Bantu labor in the name of Afrikaner profits. In other words his ideal scenario would almost certainly have resulted in a much less effective economy, since South Africa relied so heavily on a cheap and plentiful workforce. But for Herzog that separateness was more important than money.
Despite its rampant corruption and crisis of competence - most notably with Eskom, the electricity parastatal that literally can't keep the lights on - the economy of the RSA continues to grow under parliamentary democracy.
More than it would have without the best and brightest Zimbabwe expats flooding in just to survive as Mugabe's experiment in black rule crashed and burned?
Mugabe really should never have been allowed to come to power. He only won his prime-ministership by threatening perpetual war on the Rhodesio-Zimbabweans until ZANU-PF won the elections. By all rights he should've been disqualified from running for office, especially since Z-R already had a democratically-elected black PM who wasn't a terrorist. Those snakes Carter and Callaghan just decided to stab Salisbury in the back anyway, for the sake of "détente", for which they were rewarded with nothing but the further global expansion of Marxist-Leninism. Thank fuck they both lost power, but the people of Zimbabwe would spend the next half century paying the price for their snakery, and pay it to this day.
It's a good question, actually. If you read the Daily Maverick you'll "learn" that basically everything ever good to happen post-1994 was done by illegals from the north, and opposing Nigerian drug gangs is un-South African; if you read the Daily Sun, your impression will be very different.
RSA economy did well in the first years after apartheid but they have stagnated and are really in trouble now.
Apartheid and ANC rule are both bad. I wonder what would have happened if the United Party won the '48 elections and done the Fagan Commission thing. Maybe then South Africa would have been more prosperous.
It's MUCH MORE IMPORTANT to understand basic economics than to understand HBD though. A capitalist country with racial quotas is MUCH better than a socialist country where there is no affirmative action or quotas.
You sure? Anyway, by "socialism" I don't mean social democracy but rather the world you describe, where posting about supply and demand is illegal or shunned.
The taboo on HBD is harmful and Hanania explicitly says you should be allowed to talk about it when it's relevant. But your hypothetical taboo on talking about markets is way worse.
You have to make the parallel exact. In current America, you are allowed to do things that are implicitly race-realist. You can search out 'good schools', you can 'not see colour', you can 'focus on improving everyone's outcomes without listening to radical activists'. Yes, there is constant pressure not to do these things, but mostly you still can. What you can't do is explicitly use HBD arguments to improve policy.
The hypothetical taboo on S&D would be the same. People would still trade, and there would be a free market, but you just can't use economic reasoning to improve policy without getting cancelled. It wouldn't be a communist country.
“People who get really into group differences and put it at the center of their politics don’t actually care all that much about the science. I think for the most part they just think foreigners and other races are icky.”
People are routinely brutalized by blacks and other low iq races. Then they see them lavished by every institution, and themselves blamed for every ill. I think you are belittling the indignities that many whites face, and will face to a greater extent as the demographics of the country change.
You also dont engage with zach goldberg’s research on in group preferences (ie: all groups love themselves and hate whites the most).
On the open borders front: youve never outlined a viable strategy by which politicians can play different groups off against each other indefinitely to prevent the forming of coalitions for racial chavism. Weve seen with left wing politics in america that hating and expropriating whites is a viable shelling point, able to unite both gays and muslims in one coalition.
Most likely outcome is we get more leftism, more resources expended on babysitting low iq populations, harder to get things done (like starting business) due to lower social trust and increased regulations/ethnic patronage, and inexorably declining living standards.
Despite being a realist in other respects, you dont incorporate into your worldview the reality that some portion of the population will inevitably be xenophobic and resistant to demographic transformation.
If the requirement for right wing pro market political success in a diverse america is the total absence of any right wing xenophobia (so as not to offend immigrant sensibilities—which seems to be your theory as to why more latinos and asians dont vote republican) then that is very bleak
On the contrary, those race realists and Identitarians I know ( and have convened with) heavily rely on the science. Science ( facts, statistics, studies) = Truth.
Also, though many are wary of all immigrants ( esp. illegals), the bona fide intellectuals in the above cohort welcome truly talented ( Asians, Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews) who can improve and contribute to American society.
Positive attitudes toward Asians and Jews are a good sign that the HBD enthusiastic is more motivated by facts that pre-existing ideological preferences.
Look, its one thing to say: guys lets be realistic, mass immigration is just going to be a part of life in 21c, lets try to make the best of our situation despite inevitably declining living standards.
Its another thing to actively claim that the presence of subsaharans in your country is a positive good. That is just mendacity
Theres an extraordinary amount of evidence showing that poor immigrants benefit the economy of the places they move to. And if that weren't true it would be very difficult to explain American dominance in the modern world.
>People are routinely brutalized by blacks and other low iq races. Then they see them lavished by every institution, and themselves blamed for every ill. I think you are belittling the indignities that many whites face, and will face to a greater extent as the demographics of the country change.
I agree that at this point 'every month is black history month' and in pop culture and far-left institutions, race plays a big role in who gets boosted. That aside statistically whites do fine and most companies function as a meritocracy in the abstract.
Take open AI for example, I can't find it now but there was a tweet where a black lady was mad that in a picture of the employees, basically everyone was indian, east-asian, or white. In general people respect historical markers of success and the worshiping of racial constructs is only something that happens in rare cases in places that are pure concentrated leftism - that has very little bearing on what happens in the real world.
White Americans are doing terribly with higher and higher drug overdoses, suicides, etc, and non-legacy White Gentiles are extremely under-represented at Ivy Leagues. When Blacks commit open acts of anti-White hate crimes/terrorism, it is common practice to first refuse to report on race, and if the story is really spicy, to claim that it's a White Supremacist conspiracy theory to claim it was racially motivated. There is of course a minority of White strivers/Euromutts who do well, and I personally don't feel inclined to pity the Whites that have given up, but to deny the wilful attack on White culture and identity is to deny reality.
btw, IBM was caught openly admitting to discriminating against Whites (and Asians) in hiring, and I can tell you that until Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, my own tech-giant company did it as well (they've stopped admitting it since then though I'm doubtful they stopped it in practice).
sure during the 2020 cultural revolution, we had a backslide and companies hired for dei like crazy. then the second the average person looked away for two seconds and tech fired all of the dei people and slowed diversity investment.
and acts of hate crimes are statistically rare. come on. this is what i mean when i say rightists sound just like leftists.
The FAA actually did adopt a program of hiring people whose worst school subject was science, as a way of hiring more blacks. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview As Greg Cochran likes to point out, the DC Metro had a policy of preferentially hiring people who'd been incarcerated. Lots of elites live in DC and would benefit from having a subway like Moscow's, but they don't.
the faa is a great example of dei gone off the deep end, but that test was abandoned when lawsuits started. dc is an example of a place so ideologically homogeneous that their justice system doesn't work. your average city still has police officers and judges that mostly function.
real world still undefeated. most people are grillers that support the police.
My concerns are not superficial anti wokism as autism. They are based on conrete material realities.
The FAA sort of ethnic patronage issue will only get worse as nonwhites (subsaharans) comprise a greater % of the voting population, entrenching political support for these DEI patronage networks. Again, neither richard nor anybody else has outlined a viable way to prevent this from happening.
Moreover, due to both white lib self hatred and black ethnocentrism, blacks are increasingly able to commit violent crime with impunity or slaps on the wrist. This is the moral offense issue I alluded to (people being brutalized physically by blacks, then having to listen to cultural messaging about how, in fact, they are really at fault for black misbehavior). Again, this will only get worse with changing demographics and generational churn, as woke ideas become more ingrained and unquestionable with younger gens
Most of the decrease in the white % of the US population has not been because of the growth of sub-saharans. Instead hispanics & asians have been growing the most.
In short, "Yadda yadda I'm not racist Black people are just inferior." Ahem. You know that's not very convincing? Plus your rant about the necessity of not "babysitting low iq population" sounds a lot like good ol' Nazi eugenics, you know.
Says the one who speaks like some parody of a KKK racist in a blaxploitation movie. Alas, if you hadn't such an despicable ideology (and an utter lack of shame over that) it would be really funny. Much pleased in advance never to know you.
You say "(ie: all groups love themselves and hate whites the most)". Uh, what? Don't whites count as a group? Or do you have evidence that whites hate whites the most?
Look up zach goldberg research on group affinity and outgroup feeling. He divides whites into two groups (liberals and conservatives) white liberals are a sui generis bizarre group who express net dislike for their own rave, whereas white cons relatively neutral on whites.
For other groups, they express the most warmth for their own, and express the most animosity towards whites (even asians—-who are routinely beaten by blacks—, hate whitey the most
This puts the point more clearly than i did, with extra sapir whorf points for a new term. Thanks
Im curious though: given your agreement with me here on this narrow point—and assuming we share roughly equivalent political goals (free markets, tech progress, meritocracy, improvement of generic stock, or at least a society that doesnt waste resources vainly trying to close ineliminable gaps) but just disagree on the things which will constitute barriers to these goals—how is richard’s political program viable with mass third world migration?
This is very misguided. The people most impacted by immigrant dumping in nyc now (native blacks) will not change their voting patterns in any significant way.
Smarter white populations dont feel the impact in the same way yet. And there are ingrained cultural and psychological barriers (including media propaganda) that will prevent them from connecting the problems to immigration. Many people wont learn until its too late
Should be mentioned that there is a multicultural country where racial differences are openly accepted. Here is Lee Kuan Yew:
“The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more … the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. Ths are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.
… Supposing we had hidden the truth and taken the American approach and said, all men are equal. Then they (The less able or well-off) will demand equal results. And when the results are not equal, they will demand more equal treatment.“
> Steve Sailer is insightful on many things, but if you assign him an article on housing, littering, or any issue really, it will just turn into a tirade against immigration. I searched Steve’s blog for “littering” and practically every result on the first page was somehow connected to Latinos or immigrants.
> Imagine a leftist coming along and saying that all you have to do is show Sailer that Latinos don’t litter all that much, and then he’ll support immigration! Obviously the whole littering obsession is a pretense, just like his solutions for housing and global warming
It's difficult to see how you could come to this conclusion on Steve Sailer's views on littering after reading any of his several posts on the subject of Latino littering. They have a very consistent theme and recommendation, as follows:
1. American whites used to litter all the time, which was bad.
2. Public awareness campaigns successfully shamed them into not doing that, which was good.
3. Latinos currently litter all the time, which is bad.
4. We should shame them until they stop doing that.
The recommendation is always to pressure them into not littering and never to stop them from being wherever they are. The tirade is against the taboo on mentioning that littering is a problem specific to them, because that prevents the shaming campaign from working or, really, beginning.
2023, "White Americans were socially constructed to not litter a half century ago due to a large campaign of racial shaming.
It would seem likely that Latinos could be socially constructed to stop littering so much, too, but it's now considered genocidal to even notice their littering"
2013, "How about: If you want amnesty, you've got to stop littering first? Maybe if somebody ever dared to ask Latinos to stop littering so much, they'd feel embarrassed and knock it off. Who knows? Nobody has tried.
Race pretty much overrules everything else these days on who? whom? grounds, even petty nonsense like trashing a natural wonder."
Richard, I think you have the chain of causation backwards. Many people become White Identitarians AFTER finding out the truth about HBD and witnessing the real pain and suffering caused by denying reality. The lie has to end.
Honestly, I've observed the opppsite. People who don't know the IQ gap is biologically based are significantly more likely to blame the outcomes of the bell curves as a deliberate moral failing on part of the people on the left side. Or, in the other direction (and significantly more widely accepted in Anglo thought), to see the successes of the people on the right side as part of some elaborate conspiracy which must be dismantled at all costs, up to and including final solutions.
Not that recognition of hereditarianism is guaranteed to lead to positive outcomes. There's many ways it can, and has, turned hideous. But it at least has the benefit of being right, and therefore whatever politics one wants to make can at least be debated along the axis of reality. Whereas the culturalists, even the ones with eminently sensible politics, like Sowell, are perpetually handicapped by not being able to account for one of the most important forces driving humanity.
Just imagine how much better off we'd be if the American civil rights movement actually accepted and fought along hereditarian lines rather than rejecting it completely. It's almost incalculable how much needless death and suffering could've been avoided. Not just in America, but worldwide.
>Liberalism naturally appeals to many fewer people than conservatism or leftism, but it stays in the game because, of the three great ideologies, it’s easily the one most likely to be vindicated by real world events, since it is correct.
You could call it the "Efficient Ideology Hypothesis."
Obviously in a multi-ideology split, pure Liberalism will have the least adherents. This is usually used as an argument against Liberalism, framing the GOP as 'markets aren't moral' meaning markets that Jesus approves of, and leftists as being "markets don't have heart" meaning that you're supposed to care about effects of the poor and downtrodden first and foremost.
Which are attacks that one can make by the way. It's true that markets frequently trigger cons, and markets do in fact increase inequality. But Liberalism still features in the center, center-right, and center-left because over time its track record makes it so. Rational-minded people can't deny either the pure logic of Liberalism or its track record (combined, these two features make Liberalism irrefutable as an idea.)
People ask 'why isn't the US a pure social democracy' which is an interesting historical question, but a question that is more interesting is "why aren't European countries entirely communist at this point?" It's that in the 21st century, rationally-minded people are compelled to accept the logic of Liberalism and therefore even in Europe they don't stray too far away and if anything are back-sliding towards more Liberalism.
"Efficient ideology hypothesis," I like this. If liberalism can also be made compelling to it'll crush everything else. Maybe we have to think more about how.
On the right I think the best way to make liberalism popular is through founding father worship. The founding fathers wanted a liberal society and we have a strong Tradition of liberalism in this country. On the left I think you just have to scare them about what happens to minorities in an illiberal society.
Ideology actually doesn't matter much at all as long as it is permissive of technological/industrial/infrastructural growth, which are the only things that truly matter in society. Ideology doesn't exist and doesn't really do anything. Liberalism is of course an ideology capable of permitting such growth, but America was liberal in 1844 (Enlightenment + slavery and tariffs), 1884 (hardcore laissez-faire with loads of immigrants and still tariffs), 1924 (proggy laissez-faire with few immigrants and freer trade), 1964 (union social democracy with early racial egalitarianism European regrowth), and now 2024 (neoliberal multicultural runaway-debt mega-corp markets). In all of those periods we enjoyed very nice growth despite being sometimes intensely different in both message and application.
Arabs aren't particularly high IQ by most metrics, and their immigrants (albeit usually transient/not enjoying full rights of citizenship) are likely even lower IQ, but they still manage to do pretty alright for the most part. As long as low IQ immigrants don't hinder the top ~0.1% of society from making important technological advancements, they don't matter that much.
Communism only ever took off in non-white* countries that were backward and torn apart by war.
Social Insurance is pretty popular among the Nordics, but it also ain't the end of the world. When the Nordics got too socialist they corrected. Even if it's not your ideal, its a pretty well functioning society. They handled COVID better than the entire rest of the world.
What we call the Welfare State, which is different than Social Insurance, is most popular with non-whites. They are the ones on Welfare.
If your goal is to replace Social Insurance (responsible middle class people paying taxes to themselves in a well functioning government) with a Welfare State (permanent transfers from the middle class to the underclass run by an incompetent government) then non-white immigration will do the trick.
*Russia is borderline white and many of the biggest early communists were non-white.
by that point which ideology is best was still an open question. it took time for nations to industrialize so that they could put their ideas to the test. if you are a fukuyama-enjoyer, then you think liberalism won and now it's a question of what type of liberalism is best.
i certainly am not positive that liberalism was always the best in all times and places and it's implementation is *always* so good that it's worth destroying what came before it. these are just abstractions after all. but at present it's difficult to argue that it isn't in relative terms, 'the best.'
Fertility and marriage rates have fallen mostly everywhere for hundreds of years even in extremely religious societies. That has less to do with liberalism and more to do with various secular trends which at present no one at any point on the political spectrum has a path towards slowing or reversing
If immigration threatened western institutions, the blob would have stopped it long ago. Immigration destabilizes western societies (assimilation is no longer the norm), which increases the reliance on western institutions.
The thing is, people have already shut up about race and IQ. It's literally taboo to even bring up the idea in most polite company, including among mainstream conservatives. It's also banned from discussion on most major platforms. Do you see Jared Taylor on YouTube? If it's just relegated to a few guys and anons on X, why the big screed? You're acting like HBD talking points are becoming mainstream and I just don't see it.
Also how do you square this with the way you talk about Palestinians? Demographics aren't destiny you know, Israel can absorb all of Gaza and just win them over with ideas, right?
I think Richard is saying this because IQ is becoming a more and more popular topic on the right, obviously he knows the way polite society views the subject. He's just trying to convince conservatives to stop being off-putting weirdos.
I don't ever avoid it, it's the centrifuge to the whole ball of political wax, no matter which subject you discuss. the difference is no one wants to talk about it because they want light/fluffy conversation, they are dark details avoidant. Those that discard the issue over 'taboo' couldn't hold a conversation on the subject anyways, that's a innate biological survival mechanism, not a 'rational choice.'
Either way I don't blame them, but reality is what reality is. You either face it or should sit down and shut up, but that's not how humans function. Always there is vying for position, they either submit over time or fight irrationally.
I really do believe wider awareness of the importance of hereditarianism would make people a lot less racist. Especially among the Ummah, seeing as how even though they're not as pozloaded by woke race nonsense as the Anglosphere, the current preferred means of explaining the decline of the East relative to the West is blood-libel mafia conspiracy, whether by Euros generally, or Jews particularly.
“Countries that adopt libertarian ideas become like Dubai or Singapore”
Although open borders is not really libertarian, these countries do not have open borders, so they are not fully “libertarian” (in the sense that you mean); nor do they have full private property. If they did have open borders, they would likely be swamped with low IQ poor people and their countries would be irrevocably changed (and probably for the worse). But maybe the continued absence of democracy would keep the problems under wraps. The US does not have open borders either, so we (thankfully) have not yet experienced swamping.
The US & West achieved incredible prosperity as racially homogeneous nations (its the reason we are a magnet for immigrants). That doesn’t mean we can’t continue to grow economically as a multi-racial nation but your argument against whites maintaining their homeland is primarily built on PC arguments that their preferences are somehow “wrong” because they’re “collectivist” (a borderline tautology)—as if de jure ownership of streets, roads, etc. is somehow inferior to state ownership. Support for mass non-white immigration is an elite project akin to the other faddish elite projects that you rightly ridicule in your article. Ironically, you take the stupid excusers of J6 to task but support anti-democratic views when your views align with the elites.
Whites have been relentlessly browbeaten against racism by state schools, Hollywood, tv, etc., so, yes, many would be comfortable with a multi-racial (upscale!) neighborhood after these Soviet-style propaganda efforts, but if the propaganda ceased and the anti-discrimination laws were ended, it’s hard to say what an actual libertarian society would look like in terms of non-white immigration if all roads, streets, etc. were privatized. You say white nationalists are afraid to find out but everything the anti-racists have achieved has been done through statism and relentless PC propaganda. The anti-racists are the ones who would be afraid if statist PC propaganda had never been so relentlessly pushed, anti-discrimination laws never passed (due to anti-racist propaganda), and more privatization achieved. There is irony in a “based” libertarian pushing a PC view on race long promoted by statist schools and loony PC progressives.
MacDonald has already rebutted the particular arguments you made against his views. If you were familiar with them, you likely would have included them in your criticisms. Yes, Jews marry out in significant numbers but that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant numbers of ethnocentric Jews. It’s truly absurd to look at Zionists, Israel, Orthodox communities, etc. and not see Jews who pursue a their group interest. How did they survive for thousands of years? Do you think they have taken no proactive measures as a group to ensure their safety? But if you did acknowledge their ethnocentrism, you would appear to be blatantly hypocritical in denouncing white nationalism while providing de facto support for Jewish nationalism. But I do appreciate the fact that if whites created a religion around being white, you would wish them well as long as they didn’t resist the transformation of the US into a multiracial libertarian paradise.
You say "The US & West achieved incredible prosperity as racially homogeneous nations (its the reason we are a magnet for immigrants)." but that's not true about the US. For a large chunk of its early history, a large fraction of the population was enslaved Africans (purchased from Africans) (augmented by enslaved Natives (purchased from Natives)). In the 1800s, when the US got really rich, we were importing many nationalities from Europe, many of them considered the scum of the Earth (particularly from the poor Catholic parts). It was only once immigration was severely constricted in the 1920s and a few decades of deliberate Americanization applied did all those European types consider themselves to be simply "white".
Illustrative personal anecdote: A great-great-uncle of mine wrote "The Spoilers" in 1903. It was very popular in its day. It casually mentions that Swedish immigrants aren't "white" (and thus will inevitably have their mining claim stolen). On the other side of my family, I have a great-great grandparent who is Swedish.
Since 1960, immigration has increased and much of it has been non-white (as we currently define "white"). Nonetheless, the US has remained incredibly powerful and the richest of all large countries.
This is a very Haidtian analysis (think of the elephant and the rider) that is probably broadly correct. However, I would just add a couple of points to provide some nuance.
First is that most academics are monomaniacal obsessives about one particular topic. This is what academia selects for and rewards. (People who know about a lot of different topics become essayists and op-ed writers). Academia should have a home for people who are obsessed about any topic -- so long as it is true -- and even sometimes when it is not. The fact that academia doesn't provide a home for these scholars is itself an example of institutional failure.
Second, the treatment that these scholars have had from mainstream academia may have influenced their political views. If they had not been run out of scholarly institutions, and were able to receive stable salaries commensurate with their academic skill, their political views might be vastly different. (Remember, you are writing from the point of view of an entrepreneur and writer who has the luxury of a stable income and can see the benefit of free markets, because you are the beneficiary of them. Not everyone has this privilege.)
I agree with the first point that this is what academia is for. On the second point, I'm not sure. Does getting a stable job in academia make you appreciate markets? It doesn't seem to work on most professors! I just think there's an inherent relationship between zero sum thinking and having an obsession with group differences.
It might not make one appreciate markets in the abstract, but it may soften the tendency towards zero-sum thinking. (This is purely speculation, I have no data to support it).
If you look carefully at the people who signed the pro- and anti-free speech manifestos at Yale, you have a lot more people in marketable fields like law, business, engineering, and medicine on the pro-free speech side. (However, there are plenty of doctors on the anti-free speech side as well).
There's also a significant generation gap (pro-free speech older, unfortunately).
Singapore and Dubai are intensely conservative places. The rambling screed is a shambles intellectually. I'll respond substantively to two points in the essay, IQ and groups in social order.
1. Best science today says IQ is 50% heritable, 50% nurture. Recent science has shown massive impacts of infant environment and experience with parents as crucial, and may lead to more than 50% being nurture and epigenetics. A simple example is the number of words a child hears spoken to them in the first 5 years of their lives seems very correlated with IQ, and there seems to be a developmental phase early on that is impacted by being spoken too. Eye contact and physical contact are equally as important. I saw a great Ted talk by a scientist focused on this a couple of years ago, we may yet make real progress on understanding how to optimize cognitive development. It was early days but it made so much sense.
2. Groups - While reading this I wanted to scream, "read E. O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth for God's sake!". Intergroup competition is THE engine of human success as a species. Dawkins is wrong, kin selection theory does not explain human dominance as a species well at all, nor our evolution. Group selection theory does. Human's are by orders of magnitude the most sophisticated social creatures to ever exist. Once one understands the centrality of human's forming 'ingroups' and developing 'traditions' and culture and how they evolve in a competitive intergroup setting, it can't be forgotten.
The suspicious tone about 'ingroups' is just silly. They are important due to the high trust that exists between members of these groups, and the concomitant private social environment they have in that ingroup. In say one's Church, it's expected to help each other out in reasonable ways. Borrow the lawnmower, cuz mine broke, check in on an older parent while the rest of the family is away. Family membership involves more trust and more privacy. Ingroups allow us to deal with many aspects of life in better ways due to shared resources and trust. We need to be part of ingroups to flourish in a free society. Thankfully, in the West we have the liberty to move in and out of certain ingroups (job, neighborhoods, schools, etc,), which results in the ability to re-invent oneself even. It certainly provides many 'ladders' for people to climb.
Conservatives are about social order, not mere 'nationalism' and 'religion'. Ordered liberty is what works for a society to thrive, and order must precede liberty. It's a necessary, but insufficient, condition for liberty. The banal and trite ways these and other hefty ideas are bandied about in this essay is quite disappointing. Is the author reaching beyond his grasp? Or does this essay just need a strong edit?
> Recent science has shown massive impacts of infant environment and experience with parents as crucial, and may lead to more than 50% being nurture and epigenetics.
Nope. I don't see you citing anything, because we've looked into it and there's little scope for "nurture" (much more for "non-shared environment" aka random noise). And citing "epigenetics" is a big red flag that you don't know what you're talking about.
The math of group selection doesn't work for genetics. The differences within groups are too large relative to differences between groups. It does work for culture, which is why it's unfortunate Richard mocks culture as any explanation.
In fact, this subject is still not settled. I use the term epigenetics to connote the environmental aspects that effect gene expression, but probably should have just said environment as there is more than genetics going on (although if you speak with a biologist even this simple explanation isn't quite right). Here's a video that summarizes our current understanding, showing about 60% of IQ is heritable. https://youtu.be/tbSgU41FIac?si=mxGbitHvS2ScUcTX Here's a Ted talk by a leading academic on how we can improve child development by talking to them. https://youtu.be/y8qc8Aa3weE?si=nlUxWdl_FL9VL_is
You make some excellent points, but then undercut your position by dismissing Richard in a way that is both crude and unsupported by your arguments. Dubai and Singapore are conservative places, yes; but they are not racially or even culturally homogenous; in fact they are quite secular. And neither place can be called anti-immigrant by a sober person.
Preserving social order is important, I agree; and Singapore and Dubai do this through extremely strict laws, which are actually enforced (unlike liberal places in the US). So while Richard's essay does overvalue freedom and undervalue social order, as you stated; none of your points go against the central thesis that HBD movement is a net detriment to society, and that HBD discussions are agitprop for something darker.
So I'm correct, but you don't like it, lol. And I didn't comment on the idiotic, mentally masturbatory "HBD movement". Me? If I was setting up an ideal society for me to live in, I would exclude at least half the white people I meet.
I don't know why you engage in childish strawmen like "I agree with you but don't like what you have to say". Just to confirm, I went through all your points again, and they all seem correct and well-written to me. So I reiterate, I don't disagree with your points.
I disagree with your scathing criticism of the original article ("the rambling screed is a shambles intellectually"). I don't see how any of your points contradict with the article. To my knowledge, Hanania is extremely pro tough-on-crime policies, so he would probably in favor of the social conservatism of Singapore and Dubai. (Only social conservative position he doesn't support is pro-life which is reasonable).
Ultimately it seems you are annoyed that he hasn't addressed ingroup-outgroup preferences in the game-theoretic context. While this is an important topic, I don't think that was the point of this article, so I'm not sure why you are upset.
But it is a shambles intellectually. He hops from major subject to major subject, flinging poorly constructed thoughts around. It's not impressive. Hanania comes off as an arrogant mid-wit who thinks he's smarter than he is. And I'm aware who "he is". I don't care. This essay is garbage. And I'm not 'upset', rather, I'm just pointing out the facile nature of his 'arguments' if one can even call them that.
Ok, fair points. The article does jump into many different topics without diving deeply into any of them. I think it is written more from a political and strategic perspective (i.e. what we should and shouldn't talk about) than from a scientific standpoint. So I can understand being dissatisfied if you are looking for a more serious analysis.
It's not just that, his positions on each issue are flimsy and not well thought through. Also, reducing E. O. Wilson's work to 'ingroup preferences' is to announce you don't understand his work. Go read The Social Conquest of Earth, it changed how I see humanity and the world. It's one of those books...
Interesting. EO Wilson has been on my reading list, very digestible prose for a science guy (they don't make 'em like this anymore 😔). AFAIK, biologists still adhere to the kin selection model and group selection seems to be a dark horse. What has convinced you otherwise?
Overwhelming data. E. O. Wilson's book is a thesis with mountains of data. He mostly talks about ants and termites...But he makes it so accessible to an amateur like me. The reason for the mainstream science community hanging on Dawkins are the implications. Fyi, from here on out is my speculation.
What Wilson notes is that humans are 'eusocial', along with other species like ants etc. This means that individual members of a species are willing to sacrifice their genetic reproduction and eating for the wellbeing of others in the group or the group itself. In a sense, Dawkins is trying to prove that genetic relatedness was the only motivator for group behavior but in fact the genetic signal is weak. Eusociality occurs by role in social order, not genetic proximity.
Another way of saying it in human civilian parlance is that we are altruistic. And altruism is like evolutionary jet fuel. It generally confers massive advantages upon species over others that do not. Now one must be very careful to not anthropomorphize this behavior too much and make a case for religion etc. What it mostly points to is the crucial nature of social order.
It's more complex than this of course, Wilson does a great job with it. But you can see why the atheist set hate it. Dawkins reduces us to having no elevated sense of self than an amoeba, at our core. But in fact, classical liberalism celebrates an elevated state of humanity, as many other human civilizations have. This elevation beyond our base instincts, being aware of the collective and our part in it is truly important. And, okay, to the degree that one can draw a line to Hebraic and Christian ideas about the individual and virtue, religion can be connected. But to focus on that too much would be to lose what's important.
Wilson's work shows clearly how group selection favors species with altruistic tendencies. From communes to tribes and everything in between. It's amazing. We should celebrate who and what we are so much more than we do.
Irrefutable? Let me guess: You are evangelical, yes? I'm just some depraved Catholic, but we were taught that God is 'unknowable'. That 'faith is a mystery'. Faith is not reason. Faith is belief without regard to reason, yes? Which is what makes it divine. I don't think that the existence of God can be proved and I don't care. I believe anyway. That's faith. Of course God can be refuted intellectually.
"What Wilson notes is that humans are 'eusocial', along with other species like ants etc. This means that individual members of a species are willing to sacrifice their genetic reproduction and eating for the wellbeing of others in the group or the group itself. In a sense, Dawkins is trying to prove that genetic relatedness was the only motivator for group behavior but in fact the genetic signal is weak. Eusociality occurs by role in social order, not genetic proximity."
This makes sense, and doesn't throw any flags for contradiction.
"Now one must be very careful to not anthropomorphize this behavior too much and make a case for religion etc. What it mostly points to is the crucial nature of social order."
What I am saying is that the case for religion is comparably unassailable from a religious/not religious standpoint.
And you can base this on:
# associative wars
# associative large-scale catastrophe, including intention.
association of functional outcome
correlated behavior, including but not limited to prayer, suicides, general well-being behavior etc.
association to advancement
association to ending slavery, establishing a higher standard for treatment of women and children, likely profitable language
association to longevity (including the Japanese, which highly religious tradition, faith in a heaven)
And while a lot of this correlates to technology, which is particularly a net negative on the whole in the last couple of a hundred years, there has still been arguably healthy discoveries that have only been made possible due almost entirely to a religious foundation.
In fact had we not assassinated the family with technocratic values we would still be doing very well, but that's the flaw in technological advancement. You can't create/advancement' without suffering.
You can refute 'God' of say the Bible, of Buddha. But arguing religion has been anything less than a massive boon across every thinkable scale is just not understanding history or human behavior.
Now, we may be roughly suggesting the same thing, but where I take issue is that arguing religion 'need not be inferred' I think is in serious err.
Wilson has some decent writing, but he's just not smart enough to compete with Dawkins. He's fine for the "stamp collecting" aspect of science, but he's not capable of adjudicating things like kin vs group selection.
Ah, now I get why your ox is gored. I'm certain you haven't read The Social Conquest of Earth, as it TOWERS over much of Dawkins bafflegarb on kin selection. The book is essentially a refutation of kin selection, showing with mountains of data how it's a very weak signal in the data to begin with, and doesn't explain human evolution as well as group selection. Dawkins is a raving atheist, fyi, hence his emotional need to see us as no different from amoebas...
Those are correlational studies, which just show smarter parents have smarter kids. If those parents hire third world nannies or their kids, it makes no difference.
HBD is such a taboo subject that reasonable people who believe it have a large incentive to remain quiet. This means that we've ceded a monopoly on the subject to unhinged racialists. Your experiences aren't wrong and mirror my own, but you are casting a very wide net here. White nationalists are on average dumber and less effective than liberals who deny HBD, so the fear that by being honest about group differences we will empower white nationalist arguments seems like paranoia.
"Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something.
I think you need to substantiate this point. The problem with white nationalists is that most of what they say is incorrect. Even when they are right, they engage in innumeracy and exaggerate the social costs of low IQ people. Trying to hide from the topic just gives more legitimacy to the racialists, because IQ is in fact real.
"People all over the world flee third world countries and flood into first world nations, abandoning their cultures and ways of life, because they want a higher standard of living."
This is not an accurate description of reality. I don't know how it is in the US, but certainly in Europe, the people from third world countries in large part do not "abandon their cultures and ways of life" when they come here. They actively preserve these (and are encouraged to do so by the prevailing narrative and policies of "multiculturalism"), in part alongside- but often also in opposition to the prevailing host culture. This is the whole point of multiculturalism. As a result there are immense problems with integration, especially with people from Muslim countries and particular third world countries like Eritrea. There are basically parallel societies, there is very little intermarrying (again, especially between Muslim immigrant populations and non-Muslim native populations) and little shared cultural life. There is a lot of direct influence on immigrant populations from the nations of origin as well (for example, Turkish mosques in my country are directly coordinated by the Turkish ministry of religion, Diyanet). In addition, tribal conflicts are imported to European streets, as was exemplified by a mass riot between two groups of Eritreans in The Hague a few days ago. And let's not forget the mass "pro-Palestine" (or pro-Hamas, if you will) demonstrations in major Western cities.
The only large group this is arguably true for is Muslims. Some maintain their culture like Sikhs and it's harmlesss, or even Muslims in US. The fact that right wingers see this as a problem with all immigrants shows their bias.
For Europe, that is not much of a relief because Muslims are a large part of immigrants from outside Europe and the part that causes controversies about immigration.
So why don't you advocate Open Borders Except for Muslims? They are 1/6 of the world's population. You can't just put it in the small print.
In the US, Muslims are mostly fine. It depends on the circumstances. Most countries are 90%+ closed borders, keeping out most who would come, so it doesn’t seem to me that it’s a good use of time to think much about exceptions given the current state of the world. Anti-immigration people act like we’re living in societies with open borders already.
At what point would it become a good use of time? Isn't it almost trivially true that this point would be after it was already too late to fix it without mass deportations? Doesn't prudence dictate that you would think about it before the fact?
There is a country that already tried importing huge numbers of people from very poor countries so that they could have an incredibly high standard of living based on cheap labour. People in South Africa benefitted, instead still benefit, from cheap labour to a degree that seems to us almost incredible. It is not uncommon there for *servants to have their own servants*. But White South Africans all know this was a big mistake. Again, isn't the time to start thinking about this kind of stuff before you actually do it?
Well the debate happens all the time. Like presidential administrations debate who to kick out, they usually prioritize criminals which makes sense. When there’s a bill to massively expand immigration we can talk about the rules then. It’s not some complicated question that requires decades of theoretical development or something.
The debate about deporting millions of Muslims from Europe does not happen all the time. It never happens at all because it would be very horrible for everyone involved. Again, the time to think carefully about the population of your country, literally the most important thing that there is, is before you make big changes to it. Not after.
I think you are being deliberately obtuse. There is no country that has tried importing lots of Muslims and is better off for it. There are obvious reasons why this is so (Islam). All of the benefits of Open Borders could be equally achieved with Open Borders Except for Muslims, with far fewer downsides. It is obvious that you could make Open Borders infinitely more attractive to reasonable people with this one simple trick, but your response basically amounts to Don't Think About it Bro.
The most obvious explanation for this is because you intuit that Open Borders Except for Muslims would quickly expand to Open Borders Except for Muslims and Bantus, gradually picking up exceptions until eventually it became Open Borders for People with a Three Figure IQ Except for Muslims. But you should unironically advocate this because it is the what liberalism tempered by accurate knowledge of the universe demands.
"Anti-immigration people act like we’re living in societies with open borders already."
A majority of children born today in the USA are non-white. That happened in basically a generation. Millions of illegals cross a year. That seems like functionally close to Open Borders to me.
You noted the other day that Ronald Reagan was pro-immigrant, and that only losers would care how people vote in 40 years down the line. But Reagan Republican California was literally 40 years ago, and its become Newsome California because of Hispanic immigrants. Romney got 53% of the California white vote in 2012, but it doesn't matter because whites are a minority now.
All of these supposedly brilliant keyhole solutions, like Prop 187, failed. We aren't going to have some Gulf States Dictatorship Jim Crow slave caste for immigrants.
You've got to reckon with the pattern that everyplace Hispanic immigrants go, once they become a large enough part of the population, it becomes a one party leftist state that ends up dysfunctional.
The obvious reason is that Hispanics like leftism. They want Obamacare. They want government services they don't pay enough to taxes to pay for. Why shouldn't they? All people at the average IQ level of Hispanics want that, all the more if you can get any kind of special racial set aside for yourself.
Where the GOP has had any success with Hispanics its because:
1) The underlying white culture is further to the right (the south)
2) The Hispanics immigrants themselves are whiter (Cubans, etc)
3) The GOP has become a more Hispanic Friendly (Trumpified, more leftist) party
4) The GOP has become anti-immigrant (immigrants hate other immigrants).
The kind of Reagan-ist GOP you want could only survive in a majority white country. Romney ran on that platform, got the same white % of the vote as Reagan when he won a landslide, and lost hard. Open Borders just can't be squared with freedom and liberty.
Point 4 above also deserves some discussion. For years we were told the reason the GOP did bad with Hispanics was that it wasn't pro-amnesty and Open Borders. This assumption has been eviscerated the last eight years. Yesterdays immigrants hate todays immigrants, perhaps more than natives (they have to deal with them more).
Whether by Californification (one party Dem rule) or GOP Hispanification (the GOP becoming more leftist - which Murray warned was a likely outcome in The Bell Curve) the impact of Hispanic immigration on the USA is obvious for all to see and will only accelerate.
Luckily, there is no tradeoff between harsh immigration restriction and Hispanic vote share, it may even be a virtuos relationship.
Current immigration has about an 80% disapproval rate and is widely unpopular with all races and ideologies. Even progressives have thrown in the towel.
I've read your and Bryan's arguments for immigration. They are bad. If you weren't aesthetically committed to them you would recognize how bad they are, but as you say, people choose aesthetics first and ignore the truth when it conflicts. In the end your preferred policy will destroy freedom and liberty.
It seems to me that HBD ends up being one of the few ways to talk about immigration. When push comes to shove you just need to prove that it's really dumb to let the dumbs in. Even half dumbs, like Hispanics, quantity has a quality all its own.
If you could end immigration there would be less reason to discuss HBD. Even our periodic racial panics, as long as the country remained white majority, could be handled. But once you go California, you never go back, and the entire federal government going California is going to be a disaster.
"The kind of Reagan-ist GOP you want could only survive in a majority white country"
Bingo. But, to be fair, RH has addressed this point. His arguments include 'la la I can't hear you', 'you can't predict anything about anything' and 'maybe social breakdown is good'.
+1
Also:
1) Only elite opinion matters and the opinions of everyone else are completely irrelevant and if we had democracy we would all be communists, so its OK that we are browning as long as we convince the elites to set up some kind of mega Jim Crow state so that we can facilitate more immigration
and
2) Countries like China/Russia/etc where elites have all the power are shitholes where they could use some democracy to control elite power
We can't just like have a high IQ Republic. You know that one thing that created all off the prosperity in all of human history.
“The obvious reason is that Hispanics like leftism. They want Obamacare”— yeah, Cuban immigrants love communism. I think you just proved Richard’s point
In the US, Muslims are heavily selected.
Lol, how do forget the essential "and Blacks' part of the sentence. 'Muslims and Blacks'.
I agree (see below), but if you had to pick one group to exclude it's still Muslims.
There is an interesting story currently playing out in the UK in which a well-known neo-traditionalist school run by Katherine Birbalsingh that managed to make multiethnic Britain (yes, including blacks!) work on a small scale through tough-love liberalism is being torn apart by Islam. In the grand scheme of things it might not matter because the solutions employed in this school are not scalable to society at large, but it still shows that even when everyone is trying their absolute best to make a multicultural society work under the most propitious conditions, Muslims still screw everything up. https://unherd.com/newsroom/britains-strictest-head-teacher-my-case-to-ban-prayer-in-school/
About those harmless sikhs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182
"The bombing of Air India Flight 182 is the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history, the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Air India and was the world's deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001."
On a more general note, western Sikhs seem particularly obsessed with directing the resources and influence they acquire here in the west towards creating needless friction with India through their support of Sikh separatism.
One thing I find strange about white nationalists is their willingness to use the worst people as representatives of every other culture, but only the best people to represent their own. Would you say Jeffrey Epstein shows white culture to be full of pedophiles? Or Jeffrey Dahmer shows them to be serial killers? Or the Christchurch shooter shows they are deranged neo-nazis?
Why do terrorists and criminals represent every culture but your own?
They don't need to be representatives, just overrepresented in a foreign group as opposed to one's own.
"Would you say Jeffrey Epstein shows white culture to be full of pedophiles?" - Show me evidence of a higher rate of child molestation among whites compared to I don't know the Japanese then yes. And then maybe the Japanese might consider that if a whole bunch of whites wanted to immigrate to Japan. The Japanese should probably consider that white Americans overall are far more likely to commit violent crime and have a 5 points lower average IQ.
The question is whether existing residents benefit from immigration from a region. We have a collective property right in our country, and no duty to open it to others.
>and no duty to open it to others.
Precisely. The only “humanitarian” obligation that exists is to our own, not violent ethnoreligious-nepotists who see our nations as a pie from which they can gorge themselves until they’re senseless. And they’ll justify it a million different ways from Wednesday. “They deserve it, because of colonialism”, meanwhile North Africans, Arabs, and Turks have been raiding, slaving, pillaging, colonizing, and murdering long before any inbound colonial powers arrived.
Goes to show you how narcissistic they are in their complete and utter lack of self-reflection, and unwillingness to learn their own histories, yet simultaneously hoisting a wholly undeserved collective guilt upon us.
Why should individuals favor their own ingroups, and how do we determine the extent of those ingroups?
Funny, considering that Jeffery Epstein is an Ashkenazi Jew.
What else is funny is that in the Netherlands, while “Yugoslavs” -as a group- are an economic net negative, they pale in comparison to Africans and Arabs, as demographic blocs.
I don’t need to cherry pick examples of people in order to fuel an unjustified racial prejudice when these people are statistically likely to be such an incredible drain on public resources that their complete expulsion would result in a far wider budgetary surplus, and a sharp decline in violent crime.
My “prejudice” is a survival mechanism based firstly on lived experience, then further reinforced through government statistics. Although I’m sure that this is inconvenient to ignorant cosmopolitans such as yourself who hide behind safe communities, who can pick up and leave whenever you please, and thus entirely avoid being faced with uncomfortable physical realities.
Edited for grammar.
The thing is, the Khalistan movement is intimately tied to the Pakistani deep state. They would be a non-entity without Islamabad's support.
https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/pakistan-s-destabilization-playbook-khalistan-separatist-activism-within-the-us
Islamist terrorists are quite a bit more ecumenical in their sponsorship of criminal enterprises and terrorist groups than you'd think they'd be, and vice versa. Hence why Hizballah and the PDVSA are so simpático, as well Hamas and the ANC, among many other bits of sordidery I could list.
Sadly, we in the West often get quite messy ourselves. We are far too tolerant of the antics of Islamabad, as well as to such sinister groups as the MEK and the Gülenists. Evil sadly has many ways to penetrate societies.
Sounds like an easier way to prevent the influence of foreign governments is to simply not import people that would be beholden to them.
There are, and ever shall be, countless domestics who will be happy to take up the torch for our foreign adversaries. Look at how much the MEK has wormed it's way in with Free Worlders for evidence of that.
...I don't think 'right wingers' do see that at all Richard. The problem in the US and Europe is very large scale illegal (i.e. uncontrolled) migration. And relative to the EU, Muslims in the US are only harmless there because of their minority number at the moment. And everywhere in the developed countries, policies to ensure integration and assimilation, have been abandoned. Hence the stagnation and chaos in so many places.
"because of their minority number at the moment"
except in places like Dearborn and Minnesota
Fly into Detroit and look at miles of burned down/ruined neighborhoods into the horizon. Drive around Dearborn and see 19th/early 20th century buildings preserved, no graffiti, and women able to walk the streets in peace (albeit wearing headscarves). Islamic culture is a much better preservative of Western civilization than American "Black culture". It's funny that Richard cites South Africa as an example where Whites do have a legitimate fear; actually not the whole truth. All non-Blacks, even the so-called Coloureds (their term for mixed-race South Africans), face violence from Blacks, and in fact at worse rates than Whites. There was a significant skirmish between SA Indians and SA Blacks just a few years ago. Scott Greer gets this wrong for similar reasons as Richard, fearing a non-White majority oppressing Whitey, the difference being that Scott fetishizes Whiteness while Richard fetishizes Israel.
Not just the quantity of Muslims in the US, also their quality. Fewer refugees, more skilled workers.
As the old French saying goes: "we thought they would eat cassoulet. Instead we eat couscous."
I used to teach German as a second language in Germany and I can't attest to any of this. Major cities have one or two streets that are totally dominated by immigrant culture (Keupstraße in Cologne for example) and the rest mostly lives in apartments that native Germans would dare to live in, doing jobs native Germans couldn't be bothered to do, like working an ice cream parlor in 35 degree heat or delivering packages.
The fact that a US-American has heard about a riot in The Hague only goes to show how incredibly out of the ordinary such an event is, because when was the last time you heard about anything that happened in the Netherlands. This sort of news is a trigger point and hilariously easy to identify as such.
I'm not a US American, I'm Dutch.
I'm not saying that riot was not out of the ordinary, but the simmering tribal conflict between these two Eritrean factions is, and it was well known to the authorities too.
I have no idea what your point is about streets "being dominated by immigrant culture" is. I never said anything about that. I'm saying that for the most part these immigrants do not "abandon their culture" when they go someplace else. They assimilate on a superficial level only but otherwise actively culturally segregate themselves, which is encouraged by the prevailing concept of multiculturalism. I'm sure I do not need to make you aware of the widespread cultural issues among Muslim communities with the equality of women, acceptance of homosexuality etc. They did not abandon this culture, they take it with them wherever they go.
Another example, in the UK last year there were 450 acid attacks. I'm sure you can guess which culture imported this practice (and the cultural norms which lead to such attacks) when they immigrated. Not one or two, or a dozen. 450.
But I'm glad all these immigrants "abandon their culture" when they go in search for a higher living standard.
A 2017 BBC article seems to say that anywhere from a third to half of attackers are white:
“In reality, just 6% of all suspects in London over the last 15 years were Asian.
For the same period (2002-16), 'White Europeans' comprised 32% of suspects, and African Caribbeans 38% of suspects. About one in five suspects remain unknown – either because they can’t be identified, or because the victim has refused to identify them.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5d38c003-c54a-4513-a369-f9eae0d52f91
....I wouldn't rely anything the modern BBC has to say about race and crime.
Right. In the old days (the last Great Wave) they used to assimilate. Now they get preferences if they don't.
Knock down affirmative action (which Richard has contributed to more than most other people, you have to admit) and that goes away.
That doesn't go away. Back in 1900 when poor Sicilians emigrated to the US, they basically left behind any future relationship with their family and friends abroad. It all changed radically with satellite television in the 80s, when people could keep watching the same programs abroad as at home. Also, travelling long distance became much easier, so almost all legal immigrants go back to their home country at least once every couple of years, instead of never again or maybe once in a lifetime as was the rule before 1970 or so.
The Irish continue to be a blight on Massachusetts to this day, and have never caught up to the income/success levels of Anglos, Germans, Scandinavians, etc. And of course, the leftism of Scandis was a foundation element to Wisconsin and Minnesota being hotbeds of early American socialism. Anyone treating any national culture as monolithic is being absurd when we can demonstrably see that Western cultures across the world are always changing. I can understand a nihilistic argument which says "And because culture is always changing, all the more reason to just let a free and open marketplace of people and ideas dictate everything", but to claim it is always consumed by the mainstream monoculture is laughable.
Can you elaborate on the Irish being a "blight on Massachusetts to this day"? Irish-Americans seem to compare fairly well to most other US ethnic demographics in terms of per-capita earnings and education and so on.
What I've seen indicates the average Irish-American is something like 10k/yr under the average White American broadly, but that's the least of my concerns. Massachusetts was among the first of states to suffer demographic erasure and takeover by leftist migrants, going strong over 100 years at this point. Irish leftism was America's founding ghetto bloc (see: Tammany Hall) and a vehicle with which much social leftism and refugee-immigration began to erode the WASP-Right and inevitably foment identity politics. The Kennedys, Martin H Kennelly, Biden and Obama, Al Smith, Tip O'Neill, many of the big names of race hustling and were urbanized Irish. There were just as many Irish involved in the IWW and other far-left unionist efforts as there were Jews (albeit maybe not per capita as is usual) with James Connolly and Mother Jones among their ranks.
None of that is to try and argue against the Whiteness of the Irish or anything along those lines, but merely to say that when you let poor people into your country by the millions, don't be surprised when they tend to stay poorer, ethnically insulated, and manipulated by loud political frauds.
Oh yes, Barack Hussein Obama is *so* Irish. (He is half white, and his mother's maiden name is Dunham, an English place name and family. His father is entirely African.)
I take your point about Irish-American involvement in the early formation of the Democrats' political machinery and part of the slippery mythology regarding the huddled masses, but in my experience contemporary Irish-Americans are noticeably to the right of their native-Irish cousins. (According to wikipedia IA household income is actually a little higher than the white average, although per-capita income is slightly lower.)
Indeed, Garett Jones calls it "spaghetti assimilation".
So true. My family still sings table grace in Norwegian. We shall never integrate with you disgusting English people! Hopefully no one starts deporting us because of that.
Many "indigenous" Europeans have issues with Israeli war crimes as well. It's the near default position of normal decent people.
If you don't like Muslims "invading" "your" "country" what is stopping you from invading back and moving to Morocco or Tanzania?
Yes, but the indigenous Europeans usually express their contrariness against Israeli war crimes just yelling on facebook how Netanyahu is a nazi while drinking apperol martini on friday afternoon with their pals, whereas muslims usually express their contrariness throwing out of the windows old jewish ladies survived to the Holocaust. That's not the same thing...
Officially, your post-getting-humiliated-all-over-the-internet-by-Russia-being-losers position is that elite human capital wants globalist liberalism and a bit of woke craziness is just an unfortunate but tolerable byproduct you have to deal with to get that, preferable to the costs of any right-wing alternative.
But the Israel-Gaza war gives us an interesting test case where elite human capital and left-wing human detritus don't see eye to eye. Elite human capital supports Israel in destroying Hamas (even if they don't approve of settlements or whatever) because this is what liberal opinion within Israel itself supports and, let's be blunt, because Ashkenazi Jews are elite human capital. On top of this, we have a fascinating case where all the absolute worst and stupidest Rightoids (Jackson Hinkle, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate) all line up with the Woke against Elite Human Capital. Antivax twitter is now basically Palestine twitter.
And yet given what should be an obvious choice for your new ideology, you decide that Elite human Capital is actually 'Zionist billionaires' and moralfag for anarchist weirdos setting themselves on fire while basically doing fan fiction for Putin's third worldist anti-zionist simping. Joke.
I think Anatoly will come around on this issue. What's hilarious is he tweeted that if Israel were the 51st US state that the US would be more humane in dealing with Palestinians. Evacuating whole civilian neighborhoods before operations? Humanitarian pauses to ensure polio vaccines? Ceasefire and hostage deals with bin Laden within a year after 9/11? I think the opposite. The US would be far more brutal and would never respond to an attack on US soil with protests in the streets about negotiating a hostage deal with bin Laden, certainly not if bin Laden as on our border.
Anatoly did also say that Israel is far more justified in fighting Hezbollah than Hamas, as the Lebanese have somewhere to go, and Iran is an imperialist Death to America theocracy. Anatoly also praised Israel's IVF and embryo selection and is talking to Israelis on twitter.
Anatoly is mostly just annoyed that Israel has a right-wing nationalist government. He will be more friendly when they elect a more liberal government. His current stance is just some reverse polarization from his rightoid stance. I think he'll come around.
...countries like Morocco and Tanzania won't let you emigrate there Anatoly !!
It's not ultra-easy, but not quite true, there is a 100,000 strong French diaspora in Morocco (mostly retirees), and Tanzania is experimenting with free economic zones in Zanzabar.
Rejecting Third World nationalism and xenophobia these two countries are both relatively successful by non-Gulf Arab and East African standards, respectively.
However, you are correct that much more work remains to be done, and I agree that just as the developed world needs to open up its labor markets to Third World workers, so the Third World needs to open up its property markets to foreign investors and expats.
Those regional standards are too low for First Worlders.
" It's not ultra-easy, but not quite true, there is a 100,000 strong French diaspora in Morocco (mostly retirees), and Tanzania is experimenting with free economic zones in Zanzabar."
How French are these French exactly? Somehow I don't think they look like Britons in Spain.
Morocco is relatively successful because it is a centuries-old hereditary monarchy whose French-speaking royal family hate gutter Arabs and ruthlessly suppress them when they kick off. Enlightened centrists have this odd tic where they praise foreign countries for doing things that they relentlessly condemn white governments for doing even 1% of. It's almost like you are just insincere.
"It's not ultra-easy, but not quite true, there is a 100,000 strong French diaspora in Morocco (mostly retirees)"
That "french diaspora" is majority french of morrocan background. White retirees are a small minority actually. You don't know what you're talking about
You say "I don't know how it is in the US", and I think that's a significant part of it. I've seen it written that immigrants to the US have a different mindset from immigrants to Europe, especially Muslims. That is, the ones that come to the US don't expect to go back, and are prepared to become e.g. Muslims-in-the-US. And since their preceding co-nationals came with the same idea, they meet people who help them learn how to do that. This is pushed along by a couple of distinct factors in the US. One is that (though I'm sure the US invented the term) the US isn't very tolerant of actual multiculturalism -- you're allowed to be different in a lot of ways, but holding yourself as *distinct* is frowned upon in the mass culture. The other is that being dedicatedly religious isn't so unusual, so if you're zealous, getting society to accommodate your quirks is easier. (I grew up in a town of 10,000 that had 20 churches, all of them distinct denominations. In a situation like that, setting up a mosque isn't a weird intrusion.)
Yes, some Europeans are mistaken in promoting "multiculturalism" instead of integration. Paradoxically, it is often those who are opposed to immigration that are the least interested in promoting integration..
A lot of immigration is caused by push and not pull factors, namely some kind of disruptive disaster in the sending country. Often this is a war and sometimes an economic displacement caused by globalization (eg NAFTAs effect on Mexican farming). That doesn’t fit Richards model so well and it’s not driven by a desire to assimilate with the receiving country
imagine thinking "culture" consists entirely of food and festivals and things like that, and not major cultural and sometimes even economic considerations
I dispute that "HBD is just white nationalism", but let's leave that to one side. When leftists attribute racial disparities to "systemic racism", and then argue for policies like affirmative action and racial reparations, how do you respond other than by invoking HBD?
How would invoking "HBD" counter the leftists' claims? The leftist could easily accept "HBD," and cite the resultant population-level disparities as further evidence that state intervention is needed to mitigate gaps in performance between races. In other words, the leftist could accept the invocation of HBD and not deviate at all from their pre-existing preferences for state intervention to promote egalitarianism.
You think the leftist will say this group here isn't as smart on average, so the government should get them more jobs as doctors and lawyers? That wouldn't make much sense. If they think the group could improve by certain environmental variables, then it would make sense.
It would counter the claim about "systemic racism", though you're right that a leftist could still support affirmative action and racial reparations while accepting HBD (if they were a luck egalitarian, for example). In any case, I was asking Richard how he responds.
Many on the less-religious right support state intervention to fix the Black problems of mass crime, STD's, unemployability, illegitimacy, etc. Listen to the Watergate tape between Richard Nixon and Patrick Moynihan, for example, where they candidly discuss the failures of Blacks in American society, and the failures of school integration to improve test scores of Blacks relative to Whites.
You have said the actual truth. Hanania won't quit his dorky "Pwning the libs with forensics" trip, vital to his self-conceit, not because it ever "works." Would you believe people twist whatever Facts And Logic they hear toward their existing prejudices-- Oh no... Defeatism, etc.... "White trash:" lack of faith in sperg substacking is disturbing, etc.
Agreed. Black families have only 10% of the wealth of white families. Thats a hell of a lot bigger than the difference in IQ.
Correct. Racial set asides are buy offs for constituent groups. Affirmative Action will increase as the population of sub-performing groups increases.
Blaming whites helps to neutralize white backlash (it's our fault, we shouldn't fight back against this injustice), but if non-whites are a majority then it doesn't matter anymore what whites think.
They could indeed still advocate for the forced engineering of social outcomes, but (1) there would be no more moral justification for group-level equality than individual-level equality, and if you endorse the latter you're just a communist, and (2) in practice trying to engineer group-level equality results in South-Africa like conditions where you literally can't keep the lights on, probably followed by civil war.
If leftists wants to come out and say "we are prepared to wreck civilisation pursuing a goal that is as futile as it is hypocritical and destructive", let them come out and say it.
It depends on what kind of state intervention and what kind of performance gaps we're talking about. You could accept HBD still argue for spending on early childhood education, because it still helps to a degree. But the argument that black people are not generally less qualified to be doctors than other groups, and instead merely appear to be less qualified because of cultural bias, becomes less believable if you even acknowledge HBD as a possibility.
You can attribute disparities to culture, which is both true and more palatable. Crime rates respond strongly to environmental incentives! IQ is not destiny, and is only weakly correlated with income.
Telling a large group of people that they're dumb and need to accept their fate as a genetic underclass is both wrong and a losing message.
Thank you for delivering some sense in the midst of all this madness.
I find it difficult to believe anyone who says that they genuinely do not see the moral problem with genetic determinism. I also think the white nationalists on twitter are lying because they would never accept such a statement about their own people. (Look how they respond to the numbers on Ashkenazi Jewish IQs)
How is this a 'moral problem'? If genetics genuinely determines particular traits and life outcomes, then it's like debating the moral valence of gravity. We don't have a particular opinion about the justice of the orbit of Mars, and even if we did, Mars wouldn't care.
Of course we don't get to choose the facts, but we do get to choose how we react to them, as moral beings. (I am making the bare minimum assumption here that we want to be moral beings).
If a wignat says treat other races poorly because they are genetically inferior, but wants to treat low IQ members or genetically diseased members of their own race with respect; that person to me is even more disgusting than a pure social darwinist. Because such a person clearly has the capacity for empathy, but only wishes to extend it to members of their own tribe, while being indifferent or delighting in the suffering of outsiders.
In so many words, I am advocating for a color blind approach to morality, first and foremost. The question of moral value of IQ is one that should be handled separately.
On this question, my answer is to treat it the same as difference in beauty, or any other quality -- which is to say that we treat all humans with respect (or to use the Christian phrase, "as if they are made in the image of God"). My reasoning is twofold -- first, it empirically produces the best societies, and second, it is the one in line with my own preferences as per the golden rule (i.e. how I would like to be treated).
Also wanted to make a couple of points which seem very pertinent to this topic, but wanted to separate them from my previous answer:
Heredity isn't absolute:
IQ is believed to be about 60% heritable, 40% environment right now. I personally believe the environmental component is going to be even larger, once we account for pre-natal and early childhood care.
Many stereotypes that were created in the past have since been corrected or even reversed. For example Thomas Sowell has talked about a great example of Scotland: in the 1600s, Scots were far behind the English and were therefore regarded as genetically inferior; but two centuries later they were outperforming the English and the stereotype now became one of superiority. (An excellent hour-long Thomas Sowell video about group differences in intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx6TkC45y-A&t=1s).
Also we should remember that just a century ago, women were thought to be incapable of all sorts of jobs they are now excelling at.
The interpretation of IQ is also up for debate - does it impose an absolute limit on what you can understand, or only a limit on how fast you can learn? I posed this question to the most proficient IQ experts on twitter, and it seems to be an unresolved question.
The future isn't sad:
I'm not actually concerned about the future in the slightest. What I see in our future is extensive gene editing, integrating with machines (cyborgification), perhaps transitioning altogether to a different from of consciousness. My concern is mostly with the present and how WN rhetoric can hurt us in the short-term. Especially when we need all our focus to navigate the AI-transition.
"IQ is believed to be about 60% heritable, 40% environment right now. I personally believe the environmental component is going to be even larger, once we account for pre-natal and early childhood care."
Any and all shared environmental factors (including prenatal environment) would show up in twin studies, especially when comparing fraternal with identical twins. They're not zero, but they're not large, and not an unknown quantity. (The heritability of IQ in adults is also closer to 70-80%- see the Wilson Effect)
You actually have the correct take on racial differences. That it leads to substantial differences at the extremes.
I should clarify that what I'm opposing are incorrect takes spewed by WNs, such as "black society will forever be poor and dysfunctional due to low IQs". Or "black people commit crimes at higher rates due to genetic differences". These claims are obviously false, and they have been demonstrated false in many different groups in many timespans around the world.
And yet, many people buy into these claims. Because these are claims about the future (e.g. trying to educate black folks is useless) they cannot be objectively disproven in the same way scientific facts can. And so they tend to take on a life of their own.
One easy way to detect lies in the mutterings of WNs is through hypocrisy: most of them favor improving the lives of poor white folks, even though many of these folks have lower IQ than the average black person. They don't advocate for the same "give up and let them die" attitude they have for other races. (Hanania correctly loves to point this out). This is the crux of my argument.
PS: I personally wouldn't call myself a mongrel for being mixed-race, but you do you.
PPS: Did you know mix-raced people have been shown to be more attractive? Also from an evolutionary point of view more mixing is good.
That's an interesting dilemma you find yourself in. May I ask what predictions you find are correct? I seem to find the same number of predictions in the opposite direction.
Remember that if I make a prediction that is too obvious, like an earthquake in the ocean will lead to a tsunami, that prediction can be correct even if your model is quite weak.
This is the conclusion people accepted in the Bell Curve era, but it's very hard to keep a lid on racial agitation and following blank statism to its natural endpoint. On immigration in particular, and via immigration eventually everything else, soft realism just hasn't been strong enough.
It's not blank slatist to say that the environment has a strong effect on crime rates or single parenthood rates. Do you think genes changed in June 2020?
We can admit that there are genetic differences without throwing in the towel.
Admitting genetic differences makes it easier to be tough on crime. When black people end up disproportionately effected you just point out its what you would expect.
Without HBD, you are left with all this bullcrap about racist cops and bad schools and whatnot. Maybe for the first 5-10 years after a crime wave people will tolerate the cognitive dissonance necessary to try and control it, but as soon as crime comes down they are back to saying its all "root causes" and we need to be soft on crime again.
And where immigration has made it possible to be perpetually ignorant and still win elections there is no breaking mechanism at all.
I think RH was trying to argue in the post that the better counter to these policy prescriptions is to point out that they don't work and that this kind of large-scale state interference in the markets makes everyone less well-off over time. This argument does not require identifying the cause of disparities.
Yes, leftists do claim that "systemic racism" is the primary (or even exclusive) cause of observed disparities. HBD argue that biological factors are a substantial (or even primary) cause.
Policies will either help or they won't and the underlying cause may not matter much.
Personally, I don't really agree with this "national interest over truth" position. I would say that the truth is the national interest. (I'm plagiarizing a South Korean journalist). That's not to say I think HBD is the truth. I don't know. I do think researchers should follow the evidence without fear of the conclusions. It seems obvious to me that understanding the genetic basis of intelligence is an important direction for research.
Systemic racism does not explain the CDC (Atlanta) report that 50% of Black Women ( age 15-50) are infected with the Herpes II virus.
Nor does it account for the 70% illegitimacy rate of Black births.
BEHAVIOUR is the cause of much dysfunction in the Black population.
Non-forced errors ( as they say in Baseball).
HBD at one extreme, discrimination at the other. "Culture" is in the middle.
And I find it bizarre that our host dumps on culture as an explanation. He really should read Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success".
How is that "legacy of racism" transmitted from one generation to the next? Or is it imposed anew and forevermore due to ubiquitous and debilitating "systemic racism"? What effects do well-documented heritable traits have on the ability of blacks to improve their lot, individually and as a significant and highly cohesive American minority? Tough questions to which, as you point out, "culture" continues to fail to provide answers or guidance.
Richard believe two things:
1) Only elite opinion matters, if elites (who apparently are a uniform block) agree on something it becomes reality regardless of popular opinion.
2) Elites choose the opinions based on aesthetic values that are pre-rational and don't let reason get in the way of them.
These are questionable presumptions, even if they have some truth to them. But they are necessary to get to Richard's preferred outcome. If they don't hold then things like demographics and facts matter.
How do you respond when people attribute Jewish overrepresentation to a Jewish conspiracy and then argue for quotas? Do you respond by invoking HBD? Are people who believe in HBD more or less likely to support affirmative action against Jews?
That's what I want to know. I think Hanania is arguing that you don't respond at all, because those peoples' minds will not be changed.
A century of psychological research shows that *individuals* are smart or stupid almost entirely because of genetic endowment. Once nutrition and basic schooling is ensured there is not a huge amount that environment or schooling can do to this.
Yet *all public debates everywhere* about education completely ignore this fact! This goes for all sorts of countries with all sorts of social beliefs. Public policy states that education is an unalloyed good, with no ceiling or even diminishing returns to more education.
I’m in the tiny minority of people who would give a lot less public subsidy to education than at present. I don’t even know how niche my position is, I have never come across an NGO or politician who holds it. Suffice to say it’s really fringe. All my friends, colleagues and family are 115-135 IQ types. When I gently troll them by mentioning their “IQ privilege” they really cannot even conceive of the term, never mind deal with the implications.
My views aren’t really part of another bundle of radical beliefs, my own analysis is that public money spent on education would be better spent on welfare payments or wage subsidies. This is kind of socialist!
My point is that some claims in social science are (a) unambiguously true; (b) very costly if people believe the precise opposite; (c) relevant for any debate about the huge share of private resources that government confiscates and redistributes.
Perhaps not less money on education per se but spent on a more useful alignment of education with capabilities. What we call the trades are nothing but a different type of education which is gone entirely unfashionable. Not everyone needs, wants or can really utilize and education that explores the differences between Greek tragedies and the modern musical form. Those with the 'IQ Privilege' as you wrote completely miss this point and are fixated on the need for everyone to have a deep STEM or deep liberal arts education as the only way to success.
The Bell Curve mentions that twin and adopted kids studies show outcomes before 11-13 year old are very environment based and genetics manifest themselves at 13-18. So it seems to me that there is a great benefit to providing a safe environment to kids to study before 13.
Welfare destroys lives and traps people into "learned helplessness" and creates bad bureaucratic incentives.
That doesnt mean that interventions before age 13 persist afterwards
If anything, it makes a strong case that we force children to spend waaaaay too much time on school early in life. John von Neumann didn't even enter school until he was eleven, by which point he was already a frighteningly skilled mathematician, literate and conversant in seven languages.
So much of what we do to children is both cruel and pointless, and most of it still has extremely broad societal support.
It’s useful childcare, it just doesn’t make a huge difference to how much you know in adulthood.
There are better ways to take care of children than forcing them to waste years of their lives on pointless bullshit that will be of no relevance to their lives by the time their pituitary glands activate. Especially seeing as how the primary reason parents subject their children to such is as a combination of societal signaling and the sake if avoiding legal sanction from the state.
It's child abuse on an industrial scale, and this was the case --before-- we decided to start brainwashing gays and autists into castrating themselves en masse.
They should be castrated to a degree (case by case), not just for general well-being, but also their own. Both have pretty bad genetic outcomes on the whole.
In fact, you could actually make a solid case for other net negative effect outcomes. You can either use upfront eugenics and be honest about the issues, or we can continue for several more decades sweeping the issues under the rug and debating when a good time to shoot a lame horse is.
I believe this line of thinking, which I have seen popping up frequently, is completely untethered from reality. Do you genuinely and truthfully believe that education does not help individuals? Would you tell your own kids or advise your friend's kids to forego higher education?
If you think the answer to the above is YES, then I would like you to explain why the richest and highest IQ people in the country prefer their children to have as much education as possible. My own suspicion is that "smartness" as you define it, while it may be unaffected by schooling, is hardly the only factor important in life and not the key benefit conferred by education. When there is a disconnect between rational arguments and empirical evidence, I am more inclined to trust the latter because it is much more robust.
Greg Cochran really believes that school doesn't make a difference, so he sent his kids to the crummy local public school. They became National Merit Scholars (the only ones in that school in their years). Go on and tell him how untethered from reality he is.
“Would you tell your own kids or advise your friend's kids to forego higher education?”
For of my kids, yes. He has niche interests and is self motivated and would benefit more from a ground-level job in a large organisation at 18 and has never much enjoyed being in a classroom .
Much of education is signalling, see Caplan on this.
If you do practice what you preach, I can respect that.
But I'm going to sit this one out until I see a decent-sized country abandon the current model of education and replace it with a better one. If you say education is purely signaling, I would challenge you on why no company has discarded it and come up with a better testing mechanism, which should allow it to gain a significant edge in the market. Having theories about how the world is stupid can be fun, but they are all pie-in-the-sky until they actually, demonstrably work.
Btw, I want to clarify what I'm *not* saying here; I'm not saying homeschooling cannot be better than public schooling. In fact I think it almost always is, provided the parents have the time and energy to fully invest into their child's education (most parents do not). I think AI is the key that will allow us to personalize education at scale, and the resulting gains will be higher than most people expect.
Basic literacy and numeracy are absolutely critical for human flourishing.
We are long past this in most societies and are paying for people to get 19 instead of 18 years of education.
I think that - given that cognitive ability at individual level is largely heritable - we’d be better off spending the money otherwise.
ps: I think homeschooling is fine but not remotely scalable.
Agreed on all points. Perhaps our difference is with respect to how much education is essential, and if we dive deeper into the subject, we will end up agreeing on a lot.
My point with homeschooling was that the harm/benefit analysis of the education system largely depends on what you replace it with. At present, I don't think we have any system which can do a better job of replacing schooling while also allowing both parents to lead flourishing lives devoted to their respective careers.
Lastly, I do think our education system is highly suboptimal in many ways, but it is so by necessity, not by design. It is often poorly adapted to the individual student, being either too fast, too slow, too specialized, or too general. Competent AI tutors and individualized curriculum design (also using AI) can be the solution here.
Because education does not only signal intelligence, it also signals conscientiousness and conformity. It's not clear how a business could even conceivably (let alone logistically) design a better test of the latter 2 than making people spend years doing obviously pointless stuff they don't enjoy for future payoff.
As a father of an autistic (moderately) child (home schooled, because public education is failure particularly for those on the spectrum) I can tell, you're literally forced to do this anyways.
You cannot right the wrongs of biology without a biological answer. 99% of education and likely as not 100% of that in public school is not only ill equipped to educate, can't make a dent in outcomes. By age 12, children go right back to their new equilibrium state.
And outcome differentials at the ends of the success curve are more or less fixed.
Upward mobility as demonstrated in several studies is simply the shuffling large scale social change eg. war, huge leaps in technology so forth.
the only thing that changes relative buoyancy in an individual is direct biological change. eg. sympathetic/parasympathetic change, physical neural functionality and very hard-core drugs like Ritalin will create temporary effects in exchange for bodily harm.
Most of the world is not subject to SCOTUS jurisprudence and still uses schooling-based approaches to hiring.
Do you send your kids to 40k a year private school? Did you advise them to load up on six figures of student loans to attend college?
Have you ever said they could play outside on a nice day rather then to worksheets?
It seems to me everyone understands that education has diminishing returns.
This is essentially Freddie deBoers argument in Cult of Smart (genetic determination implying socialist policies because people can’t control most of their outcomes); I would check it out if you’re not already familiar
If you don't understand group differences in cognitive and behavioural traits (not just intelligence) then the world is significantly harder to understand. You can understand these things and still be a conservative, or a libertarian or a socialist, an Azerbaijani irredentist or a Moonie, but you will significantly better at applying that ideology to the real world without disastrous consequences.
Imagine if large proportions of otherwise intelligent and informed people knew literally nothing about economics, as in you could say the words 'supply and demand' and it wouldn't ring a bell. Imagine that talking about supply and demand could get you fired from your job, kicked off Facebook, and, if you lived in many European countries, arrested. Imagine, then, that an edgy liberaltarian told you it didn't really matter because a lot of smart people already know about supply and demand and are just too savvy to go on about it, whereas all the people talking about supply and demand are internet weirdos.
*
"Imagine a leftist coming along and saying that all you have to do is show Sailer that Latinos don’t litter all that much, and then he’ll support immigration! "
Well that would be hard for a fairly obvious reason, but Steve Sailer actually writes a lot about how Hispanic behaviour is a lot more amenable than Black behaviour to top-down intervention.
*
"I’ve noticed that on the right, the more individuals accept group differences between races, the more they want society organized to satisfy the preferences of the worst whites and make excuses for their behavior."
This is a legitimate criticism.
Altho I think a case can be made that 3. happens because HBD isn't in the mainstream talking points, which means that only the bottom of the barrel conspiracy tinfoil nuts picks it up as their default worldview
Right. It's not a strong argument because basically all niche movements are subject to such dynamics. RH must surely be aware of how libertarians are well known for their bizarre obsessions like legalizing sex with minors. (My favourite example of Libertarian madness is Rothbard's belief that it shouldn't be illegal to deny milk to a baby and let it die as long as you don't infringe on anyone's rights, and you can even prevent people entering your house to feed the baby. Conversely, if when your baby learns to walk, he wants to run away you have to let him, because that is his right. At least 20% of Libertarians in my experience are willing to defend this belief).
I no longer consider myself a libertarian... because I got MORE EXTREME THAN ROTHBARD! https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/rhymes-with-shmashmortion/
Interesting. Say you are 6''5, Armenian bodybuilder, and you see small man assaulting a woman. You
a) help
b) keep walking your libertarian way
Ive never met an libertarian extremist before, so curious what ur moral impulse is here (also for the sake of the hypothetical, assume the scenario ends with "help" and no extended benefits section will be awarded)
If I were someone else, my actions would be determined by whatever they would do. I'm a determinist, I don't believe some Cartesian soul distinct from my current body is the source of my free-willed decisions. I also consider impossible hypotheticals to be the domain of far mode.
Umm okay fine. Say you walk by woman assaulted by midget. Would your moral inclinations pull you towards helping her, or to each their own? Btw, if this question sounds like a frame up, it's not, just genuinely interested in the libertarian position (I am surrounded by Marxists by neighbourhood) regarding how far ones moral responsibility extends outside the individual sphere
Rothbard was an extremely depraved man. There's a reason he's never had more than fringe popularity, and it's sad he had even that.
Non-depraved people don't advocate for the right of parents to starve their own children to death. That's not "veer[ing] off the road fron time to time". Especially given that such depravity was entirely normal behavior for him, hence why he aligned not only with the slavery of the Confederacy, but the even more gruesome slave state of Ho Chi Minh in his anti-American polemics. Nor was any of this an inconsistency, given his regular and enthusiastic support of child slavery, up to and including sexual slavery.
Apartheid was a lot like this in that it ended up as "capitalism for the English, communism for the Afrikaner, and fascism for the Bantu." The Bantu were, due to their apartness, either totally segregated or a mere helot class. For example they would live in military-style barracks when they worked in mines or food processing plants, and they'd be allowed beer only on Fridays, because, well, they were the lower orders and needed lives of discipline. Of course these camps would be rampant with homosexual activity, camp-follower prostitutes and so on, and when the men would return to their villages to see their own families they would bring STDs and dysfunction with them. The system was set up to fail, effectively.
If you were a dumb Afrikaner, however, you could have a pretty similar job in the mines, maybe as an underboss, but you'd have a wife and kids and a nice house and a car, because that's what solidarity towards one's people is, it's ensuring the lowest have a chance at a decent life.
This system arose in an environment that just took HBD for granted. They were "not even wrong" - as a group, South African Bantu simply *are* less intelligent than either Afrikaners or English. But the system was hardly more just for that reality. It was just a pretext for racial politics of favoring whites in general and Afrikaners in particular, and poor Afrikaners in particular's particular.
Was there an alternative organizational model which would have produced a similarly first-world economy with the productive benefits thereof more widely distributed and with RSA's racial castes more equitably treated?
There was a small group, exemplified by Albert Herzog, that argued "real apartheid has never been tried" and called for an end to Bantu labor in the name of Afrikaner profits. In other words his ideal scenario would almost certainly have resulted in a much less effective economy, since South Africa relied so heavily on a cheap and plentiful workforce. But for Herzog that separateness was more important than money.
Despite its rampant corruption and crisis of competence - most notably with Eskom, the electricity parastatal that literally can't keep the lights on - the economy of the RSA continues to grow under parliamentary democracy.
More than it would have without the best and brightest Zimbabwe expats flooding in just to survive as Mugabe's experiment in black rule crashed and burned?
Mugabe really should never have been allowed to come to power. He only won his prime-ministership by threatening perpetual war on the Rhodesio-Zimbabweans until ZANU-PF won the elections. By all rights he should've been disqualified from running for office, especially since Z-R already had a democratically-elected black PM who wasn't a terrorist. Those snakes Carter and Callaghan just decided to stab Salisbury in the back anyway, for the sake of "détente", for which they were rewarded with nothing but the further global expansion of Marxist-Leninism. Thank fuck they both lost power, but the people of Zimbabwe would spend the next half century paying the price for their snakery, and pay it to this day.
Which Callaghan was this?
It's a good question, actually. If you read the Daily Maverick you'll "learn" that basically everything ever good to happen post-1994 was done by illegals from the north, and opposing Nigerian drug gangs is un-South African; if you read the Daily Sun, your impression will be very different.
I read both and agree with your assessment. Good to see you posting again.
RSA economy did well in the first years after apartheid but they have stagnated and are really in trouble now.
Apartheid and ANC rule are both bad. I wonder what would have happened if the United Party won the '48 elections and done the Fagan Commission thing. Maybe then South Africa would have been more prosperous.
It's MUCH MORE IMPORTANT to understand basic economics than to understand HBD though. A capitalist country with racial quotas is MUCH better than a socialist country where there is no affirmative action or quotas.
Depends on what you mean by socialism. Northern European social democracies are better than America.
You sure? Anyway, by "socialism" I don't mean social democracy but rather the world you describe, where posting about supply and demand is illegal or shunned.
The taboo on HBD is harmful and Hanania explicitly says you should be allowed to talk about it when it's relevant. But your hypothetical taboo on talking about markets is way worse.
You have to make the parallel exact. In current America, you are allowed to do things that are implicitly race-realist. You can search out 'good schools', you can 'not see colour', you can 'focus on improving everyone's outcomes without listening to radical activists'. Yes, there is constant pressure not to do these things, but mostly you still can. What you can't do is explicitly use HBD arguments to improve policy.
The hypothetical taboo on S&D would be the same. People would still trade, and there would be a free market, but you just can't use economic reasoning to improve policy without getting cancelled. It wouldn't be a communist country.
It's a legitimate criticism of the people who actually do make such excuses, but as I blogged, I don't recall seeing Sailer do that.
I also agree that what you quoted was one of, if not the only, fair criticism.
“People who get really into group differences and put it at the center of their politics don’t actually care all that much about the science. I think for the most part they just think foreigners and other races are icky.”
People are routinely brutalized by blacks and other low iq races. Then they see them lavished by every institution, and themselves blamed for every ill. I think you are belittling the indignities that many whites face, and will face to a greater extent as the demographics of the country change.
You also dont engage with zach goldberg’s research on in group preferences (ie: all groups love themselves and hate whites the most).
On the open borders front: youve never outlined a viable strategy by which politicians can play different groups off against each other indefinitely to prevent the forming of coalitions for racial chavism. Weve seen with left wing politics in america that hating and expropriating whites is a viable shelling point, able to unite both gays and muslims in one coalition.
Most likely outcome is we get more leftism, more resources expended on babysitting low iq populations, harder to get things done (like starting business) due to lower social trust and increased regulations/ethnic patronage, and inexorably declining living standards.
Despite being a realist in other respects, you dont incorporate into your worldview the reality that some portion of the population will inevitably be xenophobic and resistant to demographic transformation.
If the requirement for right wing pro market political success in a diverse america is the total absence of any right wing xenophobia (so as not to offend immigrant sensibilities—which seems to be your theory as to why more latinos and asians dont vote republican) then that is very bleak
On the contrary, those race realists and Identitarians I know ( and have convened with) heavily rely on the science. Science ( facts, statistics, studies) = Truth.
Also, though many are wary of all immigrants ( esp. illegals), the bona fide intellectuals in the above cohort welcome truly talented ( Asians, Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews) who can improve and contribute to American society.
Positive attitudes toward Asians and Jews are a good sign that the HBD enthusiastic is more motivated by facts that pre-existing ideological preferences.
Look, its one thing to say: guys lets be realistic, mass immigration is just going to be a part of life in 21c, lets try to make the best of our situation despite inevitably declining living standards.
Its another thing to actively claim that the presence of subsaharans in your country is a positive good. That is just mendacity
Theres an extraordinary amount of evidence showing that poor immigrants benefit the economy of the places they move to. And if that weren't true it would be very difficult to explain American dominance in the modern world.
No there isnt. Not for africans. Maybe high skill immigrants, but even there there is cultural costs.
The european settlers and immigrants who made this country were a different breed. You are a schmaltzy dope if you argue otherwise
>People are routinely brutalized by blacks and other low iq races. Then they see them lavished by every institution, and themselves blamed for every ill. I think you are belittling the indignities that many whites face, and will face to a greater extent as the demographics of the country change.
This is falling for the 'anti-woke as autism' pattern here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/anti-woke-as-autism
I agree that at this point 'every month is black history month' and in pop culture and far-left institutions, race plays a big role in who gets boosted. That aside statistically whites do fine and most companies function as a meritocracy in the abstract.
Take open AI for example, I can't find it now but there was a tweet where a black lady was mad that in a picture of the employees, basically everyone was indian, east-asian, or white. In general people respect historical markers of success and the worshiping of racial constructs is only something that happens in rare cases in places that are pure concentrated leftism - that has very little bearing on what happens in the real world.
White Americans are doing terribly with higher and higher drug overdoses, suicides, etc, and non-legacy White Gentiles are extremely under-represented at Ivy Leagues. When Blacks commit open acts of anti-White hate crimes/terrorism, it is common practice to first refuse to report on race, and if the story is really spicy, to claim that it's a White Supremacist conspiracy theory to claim it was racially motivated. There is of course a minority of White strivers/Euromutts who do well, and I personally don't feel inclined to pity the Whites that have given up, but to deny the wilful attack on White culture and identity is to deny reality.
btw, IBM was caught openly admitting to discriminating against Whites (and Asians) in hiring, and I can tell you that until Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, my own tech-giant company did it as well (they've stopped admitting it since then though I'm doubtful they stopped it in practice).
sure during the 2020 cultural revolution, we had a backslide and companies hired for dei like crazy. then the second the average person looked away for two seconds and tech fired all of the dei people and slowed diversity investment.
and acts of hate crimes are statistically rare. come on. this is what i mean when i say rightists sound just like leftists.
The FAA actually did adopt a program of hiring people whose worst school subject was science, as a way of hiring more blacks. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview As Greg Cochran likes to point out, the DC Metro had a policy of preferentially hiring people who'd been incarcerated. Lots of elites live in DC and would benefit from having a subway like Moscow's, but they don't.
the faa is a great example of dei gone off the deep end, but that test was abandoned when lawsuits started. dc is an example of a place so ideologically homogeneous that their justice system doesn't work. your average city still has police officers and judges that mostly function.
real world still undefeated. most people are grillers that support the police.
My concerns are not superficial anti wokism as autism. They are based on conrete material realities.
The FAA sort of ethnic patronage issue will only get worse as nonwhites (subsaharans) comprise a greater % of the voting population, entrenching political support for these DEI patronage networks. Again, neither richard nor anybody else has outlined a viable way to prevent this from happening.
Moreover, due to both white lib self hatred and black ethnocentrism, blacks are increasingly able to commit violent crime with impunity or slaps on the wrist. This is the moral offense issue I alluded to (people being brutalized physically by blacks, then having to listen to cultural messaging about how, in fact, they are really at fault for black misbehavior). Again, this will only get worse with changing demographics and generational churn, as woke ideas become more ingrained and unquestionable with younger gens
Most of the decrease in the white % of the US population has not been because of the growth of sub-saharans. Instead hispanics & asians have been growing the most.
That will soon no longer be the case, please look at UN world population projections…
In short, "Yadda yadda I'm not racist Black people are just inferior." Ahem. You know that's not very convincing? Plus your rant about the necessity of not "babysitting low iq population" sounds a lot like good ol' Nazi eugenics, you know.
You are a parody
Says the one who speaks like some parody of a KKK racist in a blaxploitation movie. Alas, if you hadn't such an despicable ideology (and an utter lack of shame over that) it would be really funny. Much pleased in advance never to know you.
You say "(ie: all groups love themselves and hate whites the most)". Uh, what? Don't whites count as a group? Or do you have evidence that whites hate whites the most?
Look up zach goldberg research on group affinity and outgroup feeling. He divides whites into two groups (liberals and conservatives) white liberals are a sui generis bizarre group who express net dislike for their own rave, whereas white cons relatively neutral on whites.
For other groups, they express the most warmth for their own, and express the most animosity towards whites (even asians—-who are routinely beaten by blacks—, hate whitey the most
This puts the point more clearly than i did, with extra sapir whorf points for a new term. Thanks
Im curious though: given your agreement with me here on this narrow point—and assuming we share roughly equivalent political goals (free markets, tech progress, meritocracy, improvement of generic stock, or at least a society that doesnt waste resources vainly trying to close ineliminable gaps) but just disagree on the things which will constitute barriers to these goals—how is richard’s political program viable with mass third world migration?
This is very misguided. The people most impacted by immigrant dumping in nyc now (native blacks) will not change their voting patterns in any significant way.
Smarter white populations dont feel the impact in the same way yet. And there are ingrained cultural and psychological barriers (including media propaganda) that will prevent them from connecting the problems to immigration. Many people wont learn until its too late
Should be mentioned that there is a multicultural country where racial differences are openly accepted. Here is Lee Kuan Yew:
“The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more … the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. Ths are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.
… Supposing we had hidden the truth and taken the American approach and said, all men are equal. Then they (The less able or well-off) will demand equal results. And when the results are not equal, they will demand more equal treatment.“
There is much to be gained in perusing Lee Kuan Yew's takes on any number of issues during and after his stewardship of modern Singapore.
In the West, we have Lee Kuan Jew: Leftism + mass non-white immigration. (Couldn’t resist the joke.)
> Steve Sailer is insightful on many things, but if you assign him an article on housing, littering, or any issue really, it will just turn into a tirade against immigration. I searched Steve’s blog for “littering” and practically every result on the first page was somehow connected to Latinos or immigrants.
> Imagine a leftist coming along and saying that all you have to do is show Sailer that Latinos don’t litter all that much, and then he’ll support immigration! Obviously the whole littering obsession is a pretense, just like his solutions for housing and global warming
It's difficult to see how you could come to this conclusion on Steve Sailer's views on littering after reading any of his several posts on the subject of Latino littering. They have a very consistent theme and recommendation, as follows:
1. American whites used to litter all the time, which was bad.
2. Public awareness campaigns successfully shamed them into not doing that, which was good.
3. Latinos currently litter all the time, which is bad.
4. We should shame them until they stop doing that.
The recommendation is always to pressure them into not littering and never to stop them from being wherever they are. The tirade is against the taboo on mentioning that littering is a problem specific to them, because that prevents the shaming campaign from working or, really, beginning.
This post should be highlighted; I took Richard at his word on this subject but he's clearly lying about Steve Sailer's position here:
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1655344666089512960
2023, "White Americans were socially constructed to not litter a half century ago due to a large campaign of racial shaming.
It would seem likely that Latinos could be socially constructed to stop littering so much, too, but it's now considered genocidal to even notice their littering"
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/04/1971-crying-indian-anti-littering-psa.html
2013, "How about: If you want amnesty, you've got to stop littering first? Maybe if somebody ever dared to ask Latinos to stop littering so much, they'd feel embarrassed and knock it off. Who knows? Nobody has tried.
Race pretty much overrules everything else these days on who? whom? grounds, even petty nonsense like trashing a natural wonder."
Richard, I think you have the chain of causation backwards. Many people become White Identitarians AFTER finding out the truth about HBD and witnessing the real pain and suffering caused by denying reality. The lie has to end.
Honestly, I've observed the opppsite. People who don't know the IQ gap is biologically based are significantly more likely to blame the outcomes of the bell curves as a deliberate moral failing on part of the people on the left side. Or, in the other direction (and significantly more widely accepted in Anglo thought), to see the successes of the people on the right side as part of some elaborate conspiracy which must be dismantled at all costs, up to and including final solutions.
Not that recognition of hereditarianism is guaranteed to lead to positive outcomes. There's many ways it can, and has, turned hideous. But it at least has the benefit of being right, and therefore whatever politics one wants to make can at least be debated along the axis of reality. Whereas the culturalists, even the ones with eminently sensible politics, like Sowell, are perpetually handicapped by not being able to account for one of the most important forces driving humanity.
Just imagine how much better off we'd be if the American civil rights movement actually accepted and fought along hereditarian lines rather than rejecting it completely. It's almost incalculable how much needless death and suffering could've been avoided. Not just in America, but worldwide.
"shut up about race and iq"
writes article about race and iq
In rehabilitation one finds grace. I hope this effort serves Richard well.
>Liberalism naturally appeals to many fewer people than conservatism or leftism, but it stays in the game because, of the three great ideologies, it’s easily the one most likely to be vindicated by real world events, since it is correct.
You could call it the "Efficient Ideology Hypothesis."
Obviously in a multi-ideology split, pure Liberalism will have the least adherents. This is usually used as an argument against Liberalism, framing the GOP as 'markets aren't moral' meaning markets that Jesus approves of, and leftists as being "markets don't have heart" meaning that you're supposed to care about effects of the poor and downtrodden first and foremost.
Which are attacks that one can make by the way. It's true that markets frequently trigger cons, and markets do in fact increase inequality. But Liberalism still features in the center, center-right, and center-left because over time its track record makes it so. Rational-minded people can't deny either the pure logic of Liberalism or its track record (combined, these two features make Liberalism irrefutable as an idea.)
People ask 'why isn't the US a pure social democracy' which is an interesting historical question, but a question that is more interesting is "why aren't European countries entirely communist at this point?" It's that in the 21st century, rationally-minded people are compelled to accept the logic of Liberalism and therefore even in Europe they don't stray too far away and if anything are back-sliding towards more Liberalism.
"Efficient ideology hypothesis," I like this. If liberalism can also be made compelling to it'll crush everything else. Maybe we have to think more about how.
On the right I think the best way to make liberalism popular is through founding father worship. The founding fathers wanted a liberal society and we have a strong Tradition of liberalism in this country. On the left I think you just have to scare them about what happens to minorities in an illiberal society.
Ideology actually doesn't matter much at all as long as it is permissive of technological/industrial/infrastructural growth, which are the only things that truly matter in society. Ideology doesn't exist and doesn't really do anything. Liberalism is of course an ideology capable of permitting such growth, but America was liberal in 1844 (Enlightenment + slavery and tariffs), 1884 (hardcore laissez-faire with loads of immigrants and still tariffs), 1924 (proggy laissez-faire with few immigrants and freer trade), 1964 (union social democracy with early racial egalitarianism European regrowth), and now 2024 (neoliberal multicultural runaway-debt mega-corp markets). In all of those periods we enjoyed very nice growth despite being sometimes intensely different in both message and application.
Political stability, high IQ, and some semblance of markets it all you need.
Low IQ immigration threatens all of those things with very little upside.
Arabs aren't particularly high IQ by most metrics, and their immigrants (albeit usually transient/not enjoying full rights of citizenship) are likely even lower IQ, but they still manage to do pretty alright for the most part. As long as low IQ immigrants don't hinder the top ~0.1% of society from making important technological advancements, they don't matter that much.
Communism only ever took off in non-white* countries that were backward and torn apart by war.
Social Insurance is pretty popular among the Nordics, but it also ain't the end of the world. When the Nordics got too socialist they corrected. Even if it's not your ideal, its a pretty well functioning society. They handled COVID better than the entire rest of the world.
What we call the Welfare State, which is different than Social Insurance, is most popular with non-whites. They are the ones on Welfare.
If your goal is to replace Social Insurance (responsible middle class people paying taxes to themselves in a well functioning government) with a Welfare State (permanent transfers from the middle class to the underclass run by an incompetent government) then non-white immigration will do the trick.
*Russia is borderline white and many of the biggest early communists were non-white.
by that point which ideology is best was still an open question. it took time for nations to industrialize so that they could put their ideas to the test. if you are a fukuyama-enjoyer, then you think liberalism won and now it's a question of what type of liberalism is best.
i certainly am not positive that liberalism was always the best in all times and places and it's implementation is *always* so good that it's worth destroying what came before it. these are just abstractions after all. but at present it's difficult to argue that it isn't in relative terms, 'the best.'
Fertility and marriage rates have fallen mostly everywhere for hundreds of years even in extremely religious societies. That has less to do with liberalism and more to do with various secular trends which at present no one at any point on the political spectrum has a path towards slowing or reversing
It has to do with the rise of women as self-aware workers, citizens, hedonists, and thus reluctant breeders and homemakers—all stated liberal values.
If immigration threatened western institutions, the blob would have stopped it long ago. Immigration destabilizes western societies (assimilation is no longer the norm), which increases the reliance on western institutions.
Come on man, keep up.
The thing is, people have already shut up about race and IQ. It's literally taboo to even bring up the idea in most polite company, including among mainstream conservatives. It's also banned from discussion on most major platforms. Do you see Jared Taylor on YouTube? If it's just relegated to a few guys and anons on X, why the big screed? You're acting like HBD talking points are becoming mainstream and I just don't see it.
Also how do you square this with the way you talk about Palestinians? Demographics aren't destiny you know, Israel can absorb all of Gaza and just win them over with ideas, right?
If something can't be discussed by 99% of people without losing their job, then it isn't really being debated seriously society.
I think Richard is saying this because IQ is becoming a more and more popular topic on the right, obviously he knows the way polite society views the subject. He's just trying to convince conservatives to stop being off-putting weirdos.
I don't ever avoid it, it's the centrifuge to the whole ball of political wax, no matter which subject you discuss. the difference is no one wants to talk about it because they want light/fluffy conversation, they are dark details avoidant. Those that discard the issue over 'taboo' couldn't hold a conversation on the subject anyways, that's a innate biological survival mechanism, not a 'rational choice.'
Either way I don't blame them, but reality is what reality is. You either face it or should sit down and shut up, but that's not how humans function. Always there is vying for position, they either submit over time or fight irrationally.
I really do believe wider awareness of the importance of hereditarianism would make people a lot less racist. Especially among the Ummah, seeing as how even though they're not as pozloaded by woke race nonsense as the Anglosphere, the current preferred means of explaining the decline of the East relative to the West is blood-libel mafia conspiracy, whether by Euros generally, or Jews particularly.
“Countries that adopt libertarian ideas become like Dubai or Singapore”
Although open borders is not really libertarian, these countries do not have open borders, so they are not fully “libertarian” (in the sense that you mean); nor do they have full private property. If they did have open borders, they would likely be swamped with low IQ poor people and their countries would be irrevocably changed (and probably for the worse). But maybe the continued absence of democracy would keep the problems under wraps. The US does not have open borders either, so we (thankfully) have not yet experienced swamping.
The US & West achieved incredible prosperity as racially homogeneous nations (its the reason we are a magnet for immigrants). That doesn’t mean we can’t continue to grow economically as a multi-racial nation but your argument against whites maintaining their homeland is primarily built on PC arguments that their preferences are somehow “wrong” because they’re “collectivist” (a borderline tautology)—as if de jure ownership of streets, roads, etc. is somehow inferior to state ownership. Support for mass non-white immigration is an elite project akin to the other faddish elite projects that you rightly ridicule in your article. Ironically, you take the stupid excusers of J6 to task but support anti-democratic views when your views align with the elites.
Whites have been relentlessly browbeaten against racism by state schools, Hollywood, tv, etc., so, yes, many would be comfortable with a multi-racial (upscale!) neighborhood after these Soviet-style propaganda efforts, but if the propaganda ceased and the anti-discrimination laws were ended, it’s hard to say what an actual libertarian society would look like in terms of non-white immigration if all roads, streets, etc. were privatized. You say white nationalists are afraid to find out but everything the anti-racists have achieved has been done through statism and relentless PC propaganda. The anti-racists are the ones who would be afraid if statist PC propaganda had never been so relentlessly pushed, anti-discrimination laws never passed (due to anti-racist propaganda), and more privatization achieved. There is irony in a “based” libertarian pushing a PC view on race long promoted by statist schools and loony PC progressives.
MacDonald has already rebutted the particular arguments you made against his views. If you were familiar with them, you likely would have included them in your criticisms. Yes, Jews marry out in significant numbers but that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant numbers of ethnocentric Jews. It’s truly absurd to look at Zionists, Israel, Orthodox communities, etc. and not see Jews who pursue a their group interest. How did they survive for thousands of years? Do you think they have taken no proactive measures as a group to ensure their safety? But if you did acknowledge their ethnocentrism, you would appear to be blatantly hypocritical in denouncing white nationalism while providing de facto support for Jewish nationalism. But I do appreciate the fact that if whites created a religion around being white, you would wish them well as long as they didn’t resist the transformation of the US into a multiracial libertarian paradise.
You say "The US & West achieved incredible prosperity as racially homogeneous nations (its the reason we are a magnet for immigrants)." but that's not true about the US. For a large chunk of its early history, a large fraction of the population was enslaved Africans (purchased from Africans) (augmented by enslaved Natives (purchased from Natives)). In the 1800s, when the US got really rich, we were importing many nationalities from Europe, many of them considered the scum of the Earth (particularly from the poor Catholic parts). It was only once immigration was severely constricted in the 1920s and a few decades of deliberate Americanization applied did all those European types consider themselves to be simply "white".
Illustrative personal anecdote: A great-great-uncle of mine wrote "The Spoilers" in 1903. It was very popular in its day. It casually mentions that Swedish immigrants aren't "white" (and thus will inevitably have their mining claim stolen). On the other side of my family, I have a great-great grandparent who is Swedish.
Since 1960, immigration has increased and much of it has been non-white (as we currently define "white"). Nonetheless, the US has remained incredibly powerful and the richest of all large countries.
It’s true that the US was never 100% racially homogeneous; it was 80-90% white for most of its history. I made no claims about prosperity under a multi-racial nation, only about a (mostly) white U.S. Also, as the linked article argues, all people regarded as white today were seen as white in the past. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/
The "propaganda" is MUCH more decentralized than your Soviet comparison. It's not going to "cease" like the Soviet Union did.
How have Parsis survived for more than a thousand years?
I was only making the point that anti-racist propaganda has been pervasive and of long duration.
This is a very Haidtian analysis (think of the elephant and the rider) that is probably broadly correct. However, I would just add a couple of points to provide some nuance.
First is that most academics are monomaniacal obsessives about one particular topic. This is what academia selects for and rewards. (People who know about a lot of different topics become essayists and op-ed writers). Academia should have a home for people who are obsessed about any topic -- so long as it is true -- and even sometimes when it is not. The fact that academia doesn't provide a home for these scholars is itself an example of institutional failure.
Second, the treatment that these scholars have had from mainstream academia may have influenced their political views. If they had not been run out of scholarly institutions, and were able to receive stable salaries commensurate with their academic skill, their political views might be vastly different. (Remember, you are writing from the point of view of an entrepreneur and writer who has the luxury of a stable income and can see the benefit of free markets, because you are the beneficiary of them. Not everyone has this privilege.)
I agree with the first point that this is what academia is for. On the second point, I'm not sure. Does getting a stable job in academia make you appreciate markets? It doesn't seem to work on most professors! I just think there's an inherent relationship between zero sum thinking and having an obsession with group differences.
It might not make one appreciate markets in the abstract, but it may soften the tendency towards zero-sum thinking. (This is purely speculation, I have no data to support it).
If you look carefully at the people who signed the pro- and anti-free speech manifestos at Yale, you have a lot more people in marketable fields like law, business, engineering, and medicine on the pro-free speech side. (However, there are plenty of doctors on the anti-free speech side as well).
There's also a significant generation gap (pro-free speech older, unfortunately).
Singapore and Dubai are intensely conservative places. The rambling screed is a shambles intellectually. I'll respond substantively to two points in the essay, IQ and groups in social order.
1. Best science today says IQ is 50% heritable, 50% nurture. Recent science has shown massive impacts of infant environment and experience with parents as crucial, and may lead to more than 50% being nurture and epigenetics. A simple example is the number of words a child hears spoken to them in the first 5 years of their lives seems very correlated with IQ, and there seems to be a developmental phase early on that is impacted by being spoken too. Eye contact and physical contact are equally as important. I saw a great Ted talk by a scientist focused on this a couple of years ago, we may yet make real progress on understanding how to optimize cognitive development. It was early days but it made so much sense.
2. Groups - While reading this I wanted to scream, "read E. O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth for God's sake!". Intergroup competition is THE engine of human success as a species. Dawkins is wrong, kin selection theory does not explain human dominance as a species well at all, nor our evolution. Group selection theory does. Human's are by orders of magnitude the most sophisticated social creatures to ever exist. Once one understands the centrality of human's forming 'ingroups' and developing 'traditions' and culture and how they evolve in a competitive intergroup setting, it can't be forgotten.
The suspicious tone about 'ingroups' is just silly. They are important due to the high trust that exists between members of these groups, and the concomitant private social environment they have in that ingroup. In say one's Church, it's expected to help each other out in reasonable ways. Borrow the lawnmower, cuz mine broke, check in on an older parent while the rest of the family is away. Family membership involves more trust and more privacy. Ingroups allow us to deal with many aspects of life in better ways due to shared resources and trust. We need to be part of ingroups to flourish in a free society. Thankfully, in the West we have the liberty to move in and out of certain ingroups (job, neighborhoods, schools, etc,), which results in the ability to re-invent oneself even. It certainly provides many 'ladders' for people to climb.
Conservatives are about social order, not mere 'nationalism' and 'religion'. Ordered liberty is what works for a society to thrive, and order must precede liberty. It's a necessary, but insufficient, condition for liberty. The banal and trite ways these and other hefty ideas are bandied about in this essay is quite disappointing. Is the author reaching beyond his grasp? Or does this essay just need a strong edit?
> Recent science has shown massive impacts of infant environment and experience with parents as crucial, and may lead to more than 50% being nurture and epigenetics.
Nope. I don't see you citing anything, because we've looked into it and there's little scope for "nurture" (much more for "non-shared environment" aka random noise). And citing "epigenetics" is a big red flag that you don't know what you're talking about.
The math of group selection doesn't work for genetics. The differences within groups are too large relative to differences between groups. It does work for culture, which is why it's unfortunate Richard mocks culture as any explanation.
In fact, this subject is still not settled. I use the term epigenetics to connote the environmental aspects that effect gene expression, but probably should have just said environment as there is more than genetics going on (although if you speak with a biologist even this simple explanation isn't quite right). Here's a video that summarizes our current understanding, showing about 60% of IQ is heritable. https://youtu.be/tbSgU41FIac?si=mxGbitHvS2ScUcTX Here's a Ted talk by a leading academic on how we can improve child development by talking to them. https://youtu.be/y8qc8Aa3weE?si=nlUxWdl_FL9VL_is
It's not just nature vs nurture. Non-genetic effects appear to be mostly "non-shared environment". In short, noise. http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2009/06/nature-nurture-and-noise.html
My guess is Hanania would agree with Proudhon : ‘Liberty: not the daughter but the mother of order ‘ .
You make some excellent points, but then undercut your position by dismissing Richard in a way that is both crude and unsupported by your arguments. Dubai and Singapore are conservative places, yes; but they are not racially or even culturally homogenous; in fact they are quite secular. And neither place can be called anti-immigrant by a sober person.
Preserving social order is important, I agree; and Singapore and Dubai do this through extremely strict laws, which are actually enforced (unlike liberal places in the US). So while Richard's essay does overvalue freedom and undervalue social order, as you stated; none of your points go against the central thesis that HBD movement is a net detriment to society, and that HBD discussions are agitprop for something darker.
So I'm correct, but you don't like it, lol. And I didn't comment on the idiotic, mentally masturbatory "HBD movement". Me? If I was setting up an ideal society for me to live in, I would exclude at least half the white people I meet.
I don't know why you engage in childish strawmen like "I agree with you but don't like what you have to say". Just to confirm, I went through all your points again, and they all seem correct and well-written to me. So I reiterate, I don't disagree with your points.
I disagree with your scathing criticism of the original article ("the rambling screed is a shambles intellectually"). I don't see how any of your points contradict with the article. To my knowledge, Hanania is extremely pro tough-on-crime policies, so he would probably in favor of the social conservatism of Singapore and Dubai. (Only social conservative position he doesn't support is pro-life which is reasonable).
Ultimately it seems you are annoyed that he hasn't addressed ingroup-outgroup preferences in the game-theoretic context. While this is an important topic, I don't think that was the point of this article, so I'm not sure why you are upset.
But it is a shambles intellectually. He hops from major subject to major subject, flinging poorly constructed thoughts around. It's not impressive. Hanania comes off as an arrogant mid-wit who thinks he's smarter than he is. And I'm aware who "he is". I don't care. This essay is garbage. And I'm not 'upset', rather, I'm just pointing out the facile nature of his 'arguments' if one can even call them that.
Ok, fair points. The article does jump into many different topics without diving deeply into any of them. I think it is written more from a political and strategic perspective (i.e. what we should and shouldn't talk about) than from a scientific standpoint. So I can understand being dissatisfied if you are looking for a more serious analysis.
It's not just that, his positions on each issue are flimsy and not well thought through. Also, reducing E. O. Wilson's work to 'ingroup preferences' is to announce you don't understand his work. Go read The Social Conquest of Earth, it changed how I see humanity and the world. It's one of those books...
Interesting. EO Wilson has been on my reading list, very digestible prose for a science guy (they don't make 'em like this anymore 😔). AFAIK, biologists still adhere to the kin selection model and group selection seems to be a dark horse. What has convinced you otherwise?
Overwhelming data. E. O. Wilson's book is a thesis with mountains of data. He mostly talks about ants and termites...But he makes it so accessible to an amateur like me. The reason for the mainstream science community hanging on Dawkins are the implications. Fyi, from here on out is my speculation.
What Wilson notes is that humans are 'eusocial', along with other species like ants etc. This means that individual members of a species are willing to sacrifice their genetic reproduction and eating for the wellbeing of others in the group or the group itself. In a sense, Dawkins is trying to prove that genetic relatedness was the only motivator for group behavior but in fact the genetic signal is weak. Eusociality occurs by role in social order, not genetic proximity.
Another way of saying it in human civilian parlance is that we are altruistic. And altruism is like evolutionary jet fuel. It generally confers massive advantages upon species over others that do not. Now one must be very careful to not anthropomorphize this behavior too much and make a case for religion etc. What it mostly points to is the crucial nature of social order.
It's more complex than this of course, Wilson does a great job with it. But you can see why the atheist set hate it. Dawkins reduces us to having no elevated sense of self than an amoeba, at our core. But in fact, classical liberalism celebrates an elevated state of humanity, as many other human civilizations have. This elevation beyond our base instincts, being aware of the collective and our part in it is truly important. And, okay, to the degree that one can draw a line to Hebraic and Christian ideas about the individual and virtue, religion can be connected. But to focus on that too much would be to lose what's important.
Wilson's work shows clearly how group selection favors species with altruistic tendencies. From communes to tribes and everything in between. It's amazing. We should celebrate who and what we are so much more than we do.
The case for religion is irrefutable, no clue as to why you balk at it.
Irrefutable? Let me guess: You are evangelical, yes? I'm just some depraved Catholic, but we were taught that God is 'unknowable'. That 'faith is a mystery'. Faith is not reason. Faith is belief without regard to reason, yes? Which is what makes it divine. I don't think that the existence of God can be proved and I don't care. I believe anyway. That's faith. Of course God can be refuted intellectually.
"What Wilson notes is that humans are 'eusocial', along with other species like ants etc. This means that individual members of a species are willing to sacrifice their genetic reproduction and eating for the wellbeing of others in the group or the group itself. In a sense, Dawkins is trying to prove that genetic relatedness was the only motivator for group behavior but in fact the genetic signal is weak. Eusociality occurs by role in social order, not genetic proximity."
This makes sense, and doesn't throw any flags for contradiction.
"Now one must be very careful to not anthropomorphize this behavior too much and make a case for religion etc. What it mostly points to is the crucial nature of social order."
What I am saying is that the case for religion is comparably unassailable from a religious/not religious standpoint.
And you can base this on:
# associative wars
# associative large-scale catastrophe, including intention.
association of functional outcome
correlated behavior, including but not limited to prayer, suicides, general well-being behavior etc.
association to advancement
association to ending slavery, establishing a higher standard for treatment of women and children, likely profitable language
association to longevity (including the Japanese, which highly religious tradition, faith in a heaven)
And while a lot of this correlates to technology, which is particularly a net negative on the whole in the last couple of a hundred years, there has still been arguably healthy discoveries that have only been made possible due almost entirely to a religious foundation.
In fact had we not assassinated the family with technocratic values we would still be doing very well, but that's the flaw in technological advancement. You can't create/advancement' without suffering.
You can refute 'God' of say the Bible, of Buddha. But arguing religion has been anything less than a massive boon across every thinkable scale is just not understanding history or human behavior.
Now, we may be roughly suggesting the same thing, but where I take issue is that arguing religion 'need not be inferred' I think is in serious err.
Wilson has some decent writing, but he's just not smart enough to compete with Dawkins. He's fine for the "stamp collecting" aspect of science, but he's not capable of adjudicating things like kin vs group selection.
Ah, now I get why your ox is gored. I'm certain you haven't read The Social Conquest of Earth, as it TOWERS over much of Dawkins bafflegarb on kin selection. The book is essentially a refutation of kin selection, showing with mountains of data how it's a very weak signal in the data to begin with, and doesn't explain human evolution as well as group selection. Dawkins is a raving atheist, fyi, hence his emotional need to see us as no different from amoebas...
Anyone who's observed what mothers (of all sorts of species) do for their children would know that "a refutation of kin selection" is self-refuting.
Wilson decimated Dawkins in this interview. https://youtu.be/9ya_9-06MIQ?si=VTw_A1O1R81z_1aa
Spoken like someone who hasn't read E.O. Wilson, lol. Stop refuting things you don't understand, son.
Those are correlational studies, which just show smarter parents have smarter kids. If those parents hire third world nannies or their kids, it makes no difference.
The science goes much deeper than that.
HBD is such a taboo subject that reasonable people who believe it have a large incentive to remain quiet. This means that we've ceded a monopoly on the subject to unhinged racialists. Your experiences aren't wrong and mirror my own, but you are casting a very wide net here. White nationalists are on average dumber and less effective than liberals who deny HBD, so the fear that by being honest about group differences we will empower white nationalist arguments seems like paranoia.
"Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something.
I think you need to substantiate this point. The problem with white nationalists is that most of what they say is incorrect. Even when they are right, they engage in innumeracy and exaggerate the social costs of low IQ people. Trying to hide from the topic just gives more legitimacy to the racialists, because IQ is in fact real.