The Problem with HBD, the Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction, Alt-Rightism, and All That Jazz
Courtesy super-commenter “misdreavus“, over at West Hunter:
let me point out that with notably few exceptions, so-called “HBD” (or “human biodiversity”) is a movement that exists largely within the confines of the internet. This, of course, has done absolutely no favors to its dispersal within society at large, because if technology has taught us anything, it is that the anonymity of the web tends to bring out the crazy and stupid in everyone, Surely there was a time when people actually tried to research certain topics before launching a slurry of half-baked and inchoate opinions with an audacious (and entirely unwarranted) degree of self-confidence — not so much because people were any better informed in yesteryear than they are today, but because certain structural barriers posed an impediment to the crazy and incompetent expressing their ideas in lofty places. Now that (most of) these have been safely dismantled, we’ve got nutters from Stormfront sparring tête–à–tête with anthropology professors over elementary facts that anybody can look up in a linguistics textbook. How splendid is that.
This is a most sudden and hilarious change of affairs. Thanks to the almighty web, we’ve got “white genocide” nutters, “red pillers”, devotees of Asatru, Sedevacantists, keyboard warriors, “neo-reactionaries”, social justice warriors, 4chan experts, and bedlamites of every stripe and fashion littering the comments section of every blog about human biodiversity. [JayMan: and we sure do!] They’re not only shockingly ill-mannered and coarse, but many of them have yet to absorb all of the facts about “HBD” that have been settled science for several decades — you try explaining to any of these “Dark Enlightenment” lunatics that single mothers are not responsible for adverse outcomes in bastard children, as is proven by a wealth of longitudinal adoption studies.
I can’t decide whether or not I like it at all, for the life of me — but it’s here to stay!
“not responsible” as in single parenting is not responsible for X, Y, etc.
Amen brother! But there’s more. He continues:
Also, regarding mass immigration, be careful where you draw your lines.
The whole point of Charles Murray’s Human Acccomplishment is not just that Europeans have accomplished a lot more than other races over the past five hundred years, but that certain subgroups within western Europe proper have proven themselves to be vastly more creative than the others. Just what exactly have the Portuguese contributed to physics recently? Average IQ varies considerably among white European populations, roughly 10-12 points from the highest to the lowest, from the highest to the lowest, as does a host of other psychological dimensions such as conscientiousness, social trust, empathy, etc.
They sure do:
Average IQ across Europe
From the World Values Survey
Corruption Perceptions Index 2013, Transparency International
He continues:
There is no such thing as a singular “white” race, and there never has been — selective pressures operate a lot faster than people often imagine, and so there goes Duchesne’s crackpot Indo-European theory. Yes, human races do exist, but selection pressures are different everywhere in the world, not just on opposite sides of a continental divide. The high accomplishments of Brunelleschi, Marconi, and da Vinci are hardly reflective of the creativity of the typical lazzarone in the mezzogiorno, any more than it is possible to extrapolate directly from sharpeis to lhasa apsos.
There are rational and sensible reasons to advocate for a strict moratorium on immigration to every developed nation (not just Europe and the Anglosphere), but if you seriously want to turn back the clock at this point, why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian, Irishman, or eastern Slav from the United States, considering the poorer intellectual achievement of these European populations. After all, who are they to sap the creative juices of the master race?
Thank you brother!
I don’t know if there’s just something in the air or what, but “misdreavus” managed to get out everything that has been really irking me all day long. (And believe me, I’m not the only one who felt that way, just today even!) We’ve seen “misdreavus” unload on the nutty garbage that percolates in this sphere before. One time recently was against health/obesity rubbish that is largely taken as gospel. Look, I understand that for the reasons stated above, we are going to have crazies and craziness in the HBD-sphere. And many of the more prominent individuals among these do offer quite a bit of insight, at times. Nevertheless, it often feels like I am doing double duty not just counteracting the standard PC dogma, but addressing the right-wing crazy that rails against it (who are emboldened by the wrongness of the PC liberals to believe that all of their fanciful musing is correct). This in addition to the detestable outright White supremacists in this space (or whatever you want to call yourselves – if you feel comfortable in KKK robes or wearing a Nazi uniform, you fit the mold), who, really, aren’t any more desirable to have around than, say Islamic radicals.
If the facts about heritable human differences are to be ever taken seriously, it needs to be extricated from such utter nonsense, as well as from the mean-spirited sentiment.
In any case, I feel much better now, having gotten that off my chest (it’s been bothering me for a while). Look forward to my usual fare, hitting nonsense coming from all directions, both here and on Twitter.
Also, I wanted to say thanks to all of you who have donated, it is greatly appreciated! But, I still need your help! If you’d like to donate, please do so. If you want to donate, and are having problems, please let me know, and I’ll try to make sure your donated dollars can find their way to me.
135 Comments
Leave a CommentTrackbacks
- Reaction Ruckus | Handle's Haus
- linkfest – 02/24/14 | hbd* chick
- Greg Cochran’s “Gay Germ” Hypothesis – An Exercise in the Power of Germs | JayMan's Blog
- Will no one save me from these meddlesome flamewars? Or, white guys harshing the mellow in three easy lessons | vulture of critique
- Outside in - Involvements with reality » Blog Archive » War of the Week
- 200 Blog Posts – Everything You Need to Know (To Start) | JayMan's Blog
- “Ethnic Genetic Interests” Do Not Exist (Neither Does Group Selection) | JayMan's Blog
JayMan's Blog 
“you try explaining to any of these “Dark Enlightenment” lunatics that single mothers are not responsible for adverse outcomes in bastard children, as is proven by a wealth of longitudinal adoption studies”
If I understand things correctly it’s the genes that are driving the triforce of single mommy, feral child and abandoning dad, right? I’ve assumed most D.E. types understood this too and were using “single mommy” as a short-hand for the larger complex. Or maybe I’m just ass-u-meing too much.
I don’t know about you, but Dennis Mangan still doesn’t get it. Neither does Roissy at Chateau Heartiste. Their commenters, naturally, are no more enlightened than they are.
@Puzzle Pirate:
Indeed it is.
Definitely assuming too much… 😉
Links to studies on the effect of single mothers? I’m open to evidence, but I have a hard time believing that halving the number of parents in a household would have no effect on a child.
@DPG:
Search for my posts on parenting. Fatherlessness has no effect because parenting in general has no effect.
“No effect” is different from “doesn’t actually cause kids to turn dumb and abandon their own children.” You’re also probably assuming that it’s better to have both parents there; speaking from my own childhood experience, sometimes life is more pleasant when violent people are out of the household. Unless you like watching your parents hurt each other. Would that have an effect on a kid? Mebbe.
@Bob:
No effect means no effect.
Enough with the “half-slatism” people.
Jay, no effect = no measurable changes in life outcomes like jobs, IQ, or chances of getting married. It doesn’t mean “You won’t resent your parents because you were stuck in a shitty daycare every day while other kids were having fun,” or “You won’t be terrified and hiding under the table all the time because your parents are screaming again.” Those are effects. They are just not long-term, measurable effects that are going to percolate down to people’s grandkids like people seem to think they are.
@Bob:
Judith Harris explained this in her book. Parental treatment affects the child’s behavior temporarily (so long as the parents are able to physically overbear in the child’s life), and it affects the relationship between parent and child. That’s one reason it’s wise to not be a dick to your kids: they will remember it.
You could call these effects, and it may be a useful clarification for some, but for others, it serves as a way to muddy the waters.
“That’s one reason it’s wise to not be a dick to your kids: they will remember it.”
JayMan: that’s the best single bit of parenting advice i’ve ever heard – i’m impressed (& heartened) that it came from such a new parent!
watch out, tho: it can be hard NOT to be a dick to them when they’re about 16-18! but, if it’s just for a little bit & not continual, they’ll get over it – mine are near 30 & happily live near me:) & seriously, i wish the only parenting advice i had received is that one line of yours, & nothing else.
Jay, I see people saying, “But how could that have no effect?” all the time, (okay, twice in the past two weeks,) so I think it’s a reasonable distinction to make in some conversations.
The weird thing to me is why people think the effect is going to be negative. My mother bought into the “a child needs a mother and a father” ideology HARD, despite just not being the right sort of person for it, and the results weren’t very pretty.
The whole argument is ridiculous. Does anyone who had a father growing up value that relationship simply because they believe it managed to increase their monthly income at age 35? It’s absurd. Relationships between parents and children, children and their friends, ARE WHAT HUMAN LIFE IS, for crying out loud. Genes are driving the triforce of single mommy, feral child and abandoning dad? Well shit, looks like getting dad to stick around and raise the kid is going to be a harder problem to solve than we might have liked. Even if dad does stick around the kid will have the same IQ and same income at 35 that he would otherwise? Well good thing not all of us went straight from God is Dead to men are but standing reserve for industrial use and actually want children to HAVE A GOOD LIFE.
And yet you yourself admitted to me, did you not, that you tend to favour positions contrary to environmental explanations? Like as kneejerk perhaps?
I said no such thing.
Aside from you, Jayman, are there any “HBD” bloggers that don’t post (or have comment sections full of) the “right-wing crazy” you criticize here? And it seems to me that extricating most discussions of HBD from the KKK/Neo-Nazi contingent is a task easier said than done. Not that it has any bearing on the truth of HBD one way or another, but I suspect you may, in this case, just be a lone voice crying out in the wilderness.
Quite a few, actually. Cochran & Harpending, of course; Peter Frost; James Thompson; HBD Chick; the guys over at Human Varieties. Also even they don’t identify with “HBD” per se, Razib Khan and Steve Hsu, and others.
Ah, I forgot about Razib, shame on me. Yes, he’s not too fond of the far-right, IIIRC. Didn’t he get into a lot of fights with the “Majority Rights” people a while back?
Luckily, I have never attracted such people.
yeah, i figured all that out when i read the words “dark enlightenment” for the first time. it manages to sound pretentious and pathetic at the same time
Yup.
Pretty much. Bruce Charlton hates the term, btw.
Speaking of longitudinal adoption studies, I guess I still owe you one. This time I do have a legitimate excuse. My laptop has gone kaput. 😦
@misdreavus:
That sucks man. No worries, I understand a thing or two about that…
🙂
See, this sort of world-weary disavowal just drives me nuts.
“Sigh. See, *some* of us in the DE, we know what we’re talking about. We know the science, man, and we know the history, and we’re the voices of wisdom speaking out against the self-satisfied, smug willfully blind. But then all these nutjobs come around, total ignoramuses, Nazis, fascists, and worse and that’s not what’s the worst, which is that they just don’t know what they’re fucking talking about. Man, they’re making us look bad!”
First, as far as the rest of the world goes, there’s no difference between Stormfront and you.
Second, I would cut off my fucking arm before I’d post anything like either misdreavus or Jay did.
Think it, fine. Say it, you look like a self-satisfied ass.
I am not a member of the “Dark Enlightenment”, and I doubt that jayman is, either.
You are a very confused person.
Oh, please. You know exactly what I mean, and I’m not confused.
@educationalrealist:
Well, I understand if making this type of criticism isn’t your cup of tea. It isn’t everyone’s, and that’s fine. But somebody has to say it, and I’ll take the task. It’s not it’s too far out of my M.O. 😉
I would certainly include you as one of the HBD bloggers (as gunlord500 asked) “that don’t post … the ‘right-wing crazy’ you criticize here?”, along with Cochran & Harpending, James Thompson, etc…
Maybe so. But I think it’s important that someone says this. It’s one thing for them to think we are all right-wing neo-Nazi racists or whatever (as they apparently do). It’s another thing for them to have any semblance of legitimacy when making that claim.
I wasn’t trying to get you to change your ways. I understand the difference of opinion we have on this topic. I nonetheless felt the need to say good lord, what smug.
Edrealist, go read some of the articles on majorityrights.com and you will see where I am coming from. My favorite:
http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/what_is_white_supremacism_why_is_it_bad/
These are precisely the kind of “Dark Enlightenment” rejects I am talking about here. Yes, our society smears just about everyone who even admits the existence of heritable racial differences in cognition as a neo-Nazi, racist, etc. But that’s no reason for me to remain silent when that charge happens to be true, which it so frequently is.
Hear hear, well said ER!
oh snap! ed. realist tellin’ it like it is
That’s a different Bob there. I would like to note that we Bobs are not necessarily the same person.
I always wonder what exactly happened to the Spaniards.
“There are rational and sensible reasons to advocate for a strict moratorium on immigration to every developed nation (not just Europe and the Anglosphere), but if you seriously want to turn back the clock at this point, why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian, Irishman, or eastern Slav from the United States, considering the poorer intellectual achievement of these European populations.”
thaaaaaank you! and i say that as a member of one of the peripheral european populations which haven’t contributed much of anything to the modern world — not science-wise anyway. more than the yanomamo, but, then, that’s not saying much. (~_^)
(don’t mistake me anybody! i love the yanomamo!)
@hbd chick & @misdreavus:
I think that they’re going to say, between hbd chick, misdreavus and I, that this is what happens when the women, the coloreds, and the gays take over HBD. It goes all to hell… 😉
Damn, Jayman, I’ve never heard of some of those subgroups. I’ll have to depend on you to keep me up to speed.
When it comes to the Internet, I think it’s had a tremendously liberating and positive influence, in spite of the many crazies out there. It’s given some people who really have something to say a way to say it with a chance that others will hear. Those surveys of “freedom of the press” in different countries mean nothing unless you take the Internet into account. For example, in the most recent explosion of anti-Americanism in Europe during the late 90’s and early 2000’s, you could find websites of major European news outlets where it was difficult to find any local news because of all the hate-mongering, anti-American bile. I follow the German media, and they were virtually all following the Amerika-bashing fashion, with their major news magazine, Der Spiegel, leading the pack. It amounted to what you might call quasi-racism – typical outgroup hatred, but directed against a country instead of a race. The reaction came, not from within the orthodox news media, but on the Internet. There have always been decent, thoughtful Germans, even in the darkest of times, and perhaps more so than in many other countries. They began pushing back, gaining major audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually Der Spiegel and the rest couldn’t keep up the hate-mongering, lucrative though it was, without jeopardizing all those spiffy international prizes for “objectivity.” Occasionally they still throw out some red meat to the fanatical Amerika haters, but the intensity of the hate is just a pale shadow of what it used to be.
Similar things could be said about the political scene in the U.S. There are credible points of view, both to the left of the mainstream media and to the right of Fox, that deserve to be heard, and now are heard because of the Internet.
@Helian:
I don’t routinely comb deep into the dark bowels of this movement, so I can’t keep you informed about all the details… 😉
Yes, I believe the internet is overwhelmingly a positive, and a lot of good information gets exchanged on it, even in the “dark enlightenment” circles. I certainly didn’t want to give the impression that I was anti-internet or even that nothing of value comes out of this movement. It’s just that, as with any democraticizing forced, the good stuff with come with the crazy. It’s just a fact of life, and occasionally setting things straight is just part of the routine maintenance we have to do.
“Nevertheless, it often feels like I am doing double duty not just counteracting the standard PC dogma, but addressing the right-wing crazy that rails against it (who are emboldened by the wrongness of the PC liberals to believe that all of their fanciful musing is correct).”
If you oppose PC liberals then you’re automatically in bed with the right-wing crazy – finally something they can both agree on : )
Personally I often call myself a social conservative (although economically a leftist) but in the bigger picture anyone who accepts an open and free society with basic human rights for all is some type of liberal. And I think that goes for most of the HBD sphere, at least the part I’ve been talking to. Maybe it’s that bigger picture we should focus on. If this has to be about politics.
@Staffan:
Oh, so that’s how it is huh? Dang… 😉
I don’t think this has to be about politics per se, and I try to minimize the political insertions into the discussion. However, it does come into play both as far as the facts support one set of views over another or contradict one (or both) sides cherished claims. Indeed, for a time, my tagline was “where sacred cows go to die”. Both sides have them, and I slaughter ’em all… 😉
A bit overwrought, but I grant the overall premise.
Any idea-community is going to have its crazy and ignorant hangers-on, and scaring biased-idiots away is a full-time-job. It’s hard to convince such people to believe true things that are inconvenient for their sociopolitical preferences – which everyone wants to pretend are objectively true and optimal instead of matters of taste that may have serious social trade-offs. It’s the world’s most common intellectual disease.
Still, look at what happened to hbdchick. Fair, balanced, disinterested, accurate, and deserved</i? Or the motivated reasoning of an unjust smear job?
The problem is that the anti-science blank-slate belief in human neurological uniformity is viewed as the mainstream and respectable position instead of the flat-earthism it is; indeed, it is for all intents and purposes the official position of the establishment and one for you can be seriously harassed for contradicting.
Now, who do you think is easier to convince to come around to the current state of scientific evidence? I think it’s an order of magnitude harder to convince a BS-HNU’er who believes all disparities originate in ‘oppression’ to come around to HBD, than to convince a DE member that the nurture aspect of single-motherhood is much less significant for future life prospects that the hereditary-complex of which it is a mere symptom, and I’ll use myself as a an example of someone who affiliates with the DE/NRx and who has changed their minds in response to the evidence, which was in no small part due to the what I’ve learned from the HBD-blogging community to include yourself Jayman.
Strategically – in terms of having accurate views become more prevalent (even viral, as hbdchick recently wondered about) – it’s also a question of punching up vs. punching down. Which is the bigger problem and impediment – the established and official BS-HNU position being able to harass hbd’ers, or the collection of eccentric and ostracized cranks, kooks, and nutcases that, alas, orbit around accurate hbd-sympathetic sites?
Getting rid of the haters, idiots, and crazies is an ok way to improve one’s reputation, credibility, and respectability – but it’s not enough. Punching down is insufficient, because those with more power are punching down at you, associating you with those below you, and you can’t ever convincingly disassociate yourself in their view, no matter what you do. Politically, you can look at the history of National Review or the Establishment Republican party and see how well (i.e. poorly) these efforts have worked for them.
I submit that the much greater obstacle to confront is the power of the PC-inquisition to suppress both reporting and research into HBD concepts. Do you think this problem is getting better or worse? It’s getting worse.
Two anecdotal examples: consider the following articles:
http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2014/2/18/academic-freedom-justice/?page=single#
I happen to like the term Dark Enlightenment, but sometimes alternative adjectives or verbs would make the point more clear. So you could have the ‘Lost Enlightenment’, or Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient’ or maybe ‘Hidden’ or ‘Buried’ or ‘Censored’ or ‘Suppressed’ or ‘Muzzled’.
These are the connotations that arise in my mind when I hear about DE – true things that the powers-that-be, out of various motivations, will not allow to be openly discussed lest they become generally accepted as true.
Yes, some people in the DEC/NRx believe false things. I believe most are intelligent and persuadable, and those that aren’t, who have biased, hateful and closed minds, then they should be encouraged to leave. If there’s a problem with DE/NRX, it’s that it doesn’t yet police itself in this respect to a sufficient degree. But I view that as a temporary ‘growing pain’ which will be managed successfully after getting to its first ‘critical mass’ stage.
But such policing shouldn’t be done out of perspective to the more pressing problem, which is definitely punching up, not down.
I don’t know whether the PC-inquisition problem is getting better or worse overall. However, on the bright side, the Blank Slate branch of the inquisition isn’t nearly as strong now as it was in, say, the 60’s or 70’s. In those days their PC-orthodoxy prevailed in academia and the behavioral sciences, and they controlled the message in large measure in the popular media as well. In those days it was unusual to run across a news article that took a favorable view of the possibility that there actually is such a thing as “human nature.” Now innate influences on behavior are spoken of so matter-of-factly that one might imagine the Blank Slate never happened. I think it demonstrates that if enough people stand up and insist that a manifest absurdity actually is manifestly absurd, it will eventually crack.
@Helian:
Yes, we’re getting there, slowly but surely. Who knows how much longer we have to go, but we’ve made progress.
@Helian:
Suffice it to say that I am far less sanguine about the situation than you are. People can sustain unreal absurdities indefinitely, even in the face of overwhelming experience and evidence to the contrary, and ideological/moral imperatives such as equality, social-justice, and anti-X-ism can suffocate the entire enterprise of making reality acceptable.
I will keep an open mind about it, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for the New York Times to criticize a dispare-impact case because it is based on the faulty assumption of human uniformity. In fact, no court in this country accepts into evidence any preliminary defense regarding human population group differences, and making such a defenense in any policy discussion immediately turns you into a pariah and persona non grata.
The enforcement of this view by respectable people of intelligence, wealth, influence, and power is thus the more important strategic problem that needs fighting on the left flank much more than shooting some pesky idiot fish in a barrel on your right flank.
Sensible points, but I think there’s a level of pure annoyance when dealing with people whom one considers to “not get it” or be really problematic in various ways. Nobody in any movement wants to deal with or be associated with annoying or nutty folks — I’m sure there are folks who’re considered annoyances over in social justice communities, folks who’re annoying at Star Wars conventions, folks whom the Stormfronters wish would stop hanging out in their forums, etc. On the grand scale, this might not really matter, but on the day to day, it sure damn can be annoying.
@Handle:
Beautifully said!
Well I’m glad to hear that my efforts are having some impact. 🙂
But it might not be easier to do this with the rightists than blank-slate leftists. People believe in what they believe in part for evolutionary reasons, not necessarily fact and evidence. Conservatives’ beliefs stem from this (cf. Johnathan Haidt), and no matter what you tell them, the belief in things like nurture or strong sexual mores aren’t likely to go away, despite commentators like me hammering in the message.
Well, you have a point there. But then, the biases of “ordinary mortals” inserts other problems.
Good question. I commented on those and have been pretty vocal about the nuttiness they represent (yes, I compared the Harvard article to Horgan’s foolishness; he didn’t like that, but hey, fuck him). The hopeful part of me wants to think that the censorship is ramping up because the damn is bursting. But then, as hbd chick noted, we may still have a long way to go.
Well, my primary motivation is to get at the truth. Indeed, the thing that pisses me off the most about PC is that it holds back the science, as this and other HBD blogs greatly evidence. As such, I like to do both – counteract nonsense coming from all sides. Sure, one can argue that our primary focus should be on the PC machine, but some occasional policing is very important, in fact necessary as you so excellently put it.
“Conservatives’ beliefs stem from this (cf. Johnathan Haidt), and no matter what you tell them…”
Those stupid crazy conservatives! Surely there is a pill that can fix their stupid brains…
Surely there was a time when people actually tried to research certain topics before launching a slurry of half-baked and inchoate opinions with an audacious (and entirely unwarranted) degree of self-confidence — not so much because people were any better informed in yesteryear than they are today, but because certain structural barriers posed an impediment to the crazy and incompetent expressing their ideas in lofty places.
Oh, I’m not so sure about that. Remember that time some guy was absolutely convinced that god told him that the American Indians were actually a lost tribe of Israel and convinced a bunch of people to go on a cross-country sojourn with him and let him marry their teenage daughters?
Or the time some nutters convinced themselves that pan-Indo-Europeanism was a real thing, and that, like, non-Indo-Europeans like Jews (despite them speaking Indo European languages, but whatevs,) all needed to be exterminated?
Or, hell, just the other day I found a book that was actually published in the 1800s that recommends that nursing mothers rub LEAD on cracked nipples to help them heal and make nursing easier.
And the time the Pope said, well, just about everything religious folks claim is pretty absurd, from transubstantiation to witch hunts to crusades…
It seems to me that people have managed to spout idiocy from high places for quite a while.
Yup. Read my addendum to that comment on Cochran’s page. 🙂
@Bob:
Yup.
The reason that people consider “white” a race is because the difference in IQ between a Brit and an Irish or a Scandinavian and a French isn’t that big. Both relatively to the split between a Brit and and black, and on an absolute basis (Irish people can function in a first world society and not create massive no go zones in cities that look like third world hellholes the way NAMs do).
In addition there are behavioral and social similarities between different white subgroups that aren’t shared by other races
Finally, there are also social, cultural, historical, and religious traditions that they share.
“why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian, Irishman, or eastern Slav from the United States”
Because these are people who are successful and contribute to our society. They pay their taxes, support themselves, don’t create negative externalities. This is very different from the case with blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, etc.
There is no comparison whatsoever between the differences of the main European subgroups in this country (basically, Irish and Italians) and the difference between those groups and NAMs.
—
I’m sorry, HBD does say we should stop immigration of NAMs. Along with all sorts of other necessary political changes. White subgroups that aren’t that different, don’t have the same negative effects, and also live in first world countries are just not an accurate comparison to NAMs.
I lived with a bunch of Russians for a year. It was not a good experience. Jayman, by contrast, seems like someone who would make a very decent housemate (he probably doesn’t even wash with vodka!)
I think it is a mistake to rule out everyone from group X just because of statistical averages. Societies just need functional systems to determine which potential newcomers will be good for the society, (and how many.)
“Because these are people who are successful and contribute to our society. They pay their taxes, support themselves, don’t create negative externalities. This is very different from the case with blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, etc.”
Averages, people. Statistical averages.
“The reason that people consider “white” a race is because the difference in IQ between a Brit and an Irish or a Scandinavian and a French isn’t that big. Both relatively to the split between a Brit and and black, and on an absolute basis (Irish people can function in a first world society and not create massive no go zones in cities that look like third world hellholes the way NAMs do).”
First off, those IQ points that differ seem to have severe consequences,
Secondly, look at Eastern Europeans. They have become richer – as has the rest of the world – largely thanks to Northwestern Europe. But the stuff they have to do themselves – democracy, human rights, fighting corruption etc – that’s not going so well. If you for instance look at the Corruptions Perceptions Index, you’ll find that many of these White countries are doing worse than several countries in Africa and the rest of the third world. So there is a big difference between White and White.
Immigration, affirmative action, etc are determined at the level of statistical averages. It does not matter if there are some smart black people at the far end of their races curve. Practically, your either going to exclude all of them or exclude none of them. Black people are a package deal. Political, social, cultural, and legal realities (disparate impact) ensure that black people are a package deal. individual IWSBs will never make up for the collective net effect of their racial co ethnics, and their children will always and inevitably revert to the mean.
I’m half Irish. Irish people are normal functioning whites. You would be just fine living in their neighborhoods. They are net good.
The same is not true for blacks. They are like a cancer.[JayMan: can we please not have any of that crap here? Thanks] People avoid going anywhere near them like the plague no matter what thier professed progressive beliefs.—
I don’t have a lot of experience with Russians, but even East Germans seem to be dealing with the after effects of communism despite their German genes. There is a lot more going on there then just genetics, and we know Russians have made some great contributions to the world.
Of course Russians are not a big immigrant group in America and I don’t see what bearing that all has. Nobody is afraid of a Russian demographic apocalypse the way they are with Mexicans.
@asdf:
I take it things didn’t work out too well with the Black girlfriend, then?
Now you see, this is what misdreavus and I are talking about. Nonsense based on HBD tinged with some serious racism.
Immigration and affirmative action are actually rather orthogonal to average IQ and personality characteristics of different racial groups. Misdreavus has noted that there are plenty of sensible policies that can be enacted, such as immigration restriction to the developed world.
See stuff like this is what gives the movement a bad name. Seriously man…
Regression to the mean is far less of a problem than you make out.
Define “function”. It’s worth noting (as was discussed extensively during the Ron Unz Hispanic IQ debacle) that Irish Americans aren’t exactly representative of Irish back home. As well, levels of corruption rose once the Irish came to America, and remains a problem is Irish-settled areas today. These are merely facts, how one weighs these are a matter of personal values and taste.
And here’s misdreavus’s point about poor grasp of the facts or accepting only those that seem convenient. Where do you think the problems that East Germans and Russians have come from? There are big regional differences in Germany and always have been (see here and here). As Richard noted there, East Germans were far more enthusiastic for the Nazis, for example, than West Germans were. As Staffan put it, we can’t adjust for these peoples’ entire histories. Whites are a hardly monolithic or homogeneous group.
Let 12 million Russians pour into America and we’ll see about that.
Now I put your comment on moderation for the obviously hateful stuff in it. Can we please cut that here?
I’m sorry, HBD does say we should stop immigration of NAMs. Along with all sorts of other necessary political changes.
No, no it doesn’t. Not any more than AGW says we should de-industrialize or switch over to nuclear power. HBD says “Because these people are not like those people, on average, letting a bunch of those people immigrate to these people’s country will cause these effects.”. What should be done depends also on what moral values one has. For example, an anti-black racist may support increased Mexican immigration because Mexican immigrants push blacks out of jobs and neighborhoods. A corporatist-capitalist may support it because it provides a supply of cheaper and more docile unskilled and semi-skilled labor. They will continue to support it even though they know what HBD says about the results. Both may continue to support it because of what HBD says about the results.
Yeah, yeah, HBD is just empirical observations, so it doesn’t technically make any policy prescriptions.
But let’s not kid ourselves. HBD tells us that British accomplishment is, to a significant degree, the result of British genes. Similarly, Nigerian, Pakistani and Polish accomplishments (or lack there of) are, to a significant degree, the result of their respective genes. (Not knocking the Poles here, just sayin’.)
So, if you want the kind of accomplishments that Britain produced in the past to keep occurring (and most people do), then the ongoing demographic replacement of the British population should strike you as a very, very bad thing.
So, assuming you like technological progress and stuff like that, HBD does basically say “There are rational and sensible reasons to advocate for a strict moratorium on immigration to every developed nation (not just Europe and the Anglosphere),” misdreavus said it, I believe it.
And if you support a strict moratorium on immigration, your political views on this topic are as extreme or more extreme than the National Front. And let’s not kid ourselves, this is the topic that people are going to judge you by, not your views on petty issues like social welfare or gay marriage.
So, people who believe what misdreavus believes about immigration are already plenty Nazi enough to get a beating from the antifa.
😦 Jay, I don’t know if you experience emotions in response to things people say and whatnot like that, (which is probably a really aspie thing to say), but I think asdf was really out of line there.
On a related note, I was thinking about the East Germans the other day, and some things you’ve noted about them, and your frontier (or was it pioneer?) hypothesis, and theorized that E. Germany might have been more recently settled than W. Germany, so that its people are probably more descended of your violent, hard-scrabble pioneer types than your urbane, outbred urbanized sorts, and then by random chance I happened to come across a map of German expansion in the Middle Ages, and it turns out that E. Germany actually was settled (by Germans, anyway,) more recently than W. Germany. I’m sure this is all Old News to someone familiar with European history, but it was a fun moment of “yay my theory was right!”
Honestly, there are certain folks in my own ancestral tree whom I think were pretty darn problematic.
“Misdreavus has noted that there are plenty of sensible policies that can be enacted, such as immigration restriction to the developed world.”
How many anti-racists are speaking out against immigration. Is the pro-immigration sphere not liberals (and corporatists of both parties)? Are the people most up in arms about anything that has a “disparate impact” not minorities? Your side is the one saying anti-immigration = racist = worst people in the world and should probably be punished (where your side are the political groups you support in practice and the racial group you belong to).
As long as HBD = racist, which is the policy of your people (politically and racially), people are going to have to be racists to believe in HBD.
There is no argument against immigration that can work without using HBD. Not with the demographics and political system we have today. Maybe a few decades ago before the NAMs and political correctness reached a tipping point, but its too late to stop without radicalization on white peoples part. Do you think Switzerland could pass their bill (by 0.3%) if they shared a border with Mexico and had a giant Hispanic population?
If you want to stop immigration you need overwhelming majorities of white people against it. Enough to overcome both the existing minority blocks in support and the monied interests that are always in favor of immigration. How do you get that without radicalizing whites? How do you make the argument without HBD? Rich Italian Swiss voting to restrict immigration of rich northern Italians isn’t the same thing as what we have going on with NAMs.
“See stuff like this is what gives the movement a bad name”
It’s just taking it seriously. 90% of blacks vote lock step for racial spoils and are doomed to be a permanent underclass. Are the 10% remaining really worth it? Is having a black minority a net good for the country.
The question to always ask yourself is: “if you could go back in time and stop the immigration of such people, would you?” The answer with black people (even leaving aside the institution of slavery) is no. Maybe that would also be the answer with the Irish, but given the fact that they were better long term investments and the manpower needs of the country at the time of immigration perhaps not.
What to do with the current group is a different question (treating any racial group differently in your own country raises massive political, social, cultural, and ethical problems) which is one of the reasons you never want to have them around in the first place. And why the simplest starting point is, “please, lets not bring any more over”. Mercy and charity are always easier when the size of the problem is more manageable.
“levels of corruption rose once the Irish came to America”
Yes, when Catholic immigration got too big they restricted it, which was a good thing. And you know how they did it. Racism! It worked. I guarantee they denigrated the Irish to make it happen.
But lets not kid ourselves about Irish and NAMs being the same thing. Irish people don’t live in ghettos. Commit massive crime. Survive solely off welfare. Or form monolithic and dogmatic political blocks. The Irish largely assimilated. If you go into a workplace or community you don’t see an Irish faction feuding with a British faction. You just see a bunch of white people who view all the other white people as fellow whites. However, amongst the different continental ethnic groups you do see factionalization, misunderstanding, and distrust. This happened because the differences between whites are relatively small. That’s not the same with NAMs. The differences are huge. They will never assimilate.
“There are big regional differences in Germany”
Are they the difference between IQ105 and IQ85?
“Let 12 million Russians pour into America and we’ll see about that.”
Except they aren’t. We do not share a border with them nor are they a large minority. Its not a practical concern.
“Can we please cut that here?”
It’s just the truth man. HBD does have real public policy implications. Most of them, at least in terms of outright racial spoils and social status, aren’t good for your racial group (amongst others).
I get why you don’t like it. It’s a bitter and unfair pill to swallow. I don’t exactly have master race genes in myself either, I would have been sent to the death camp under Hitler’s rules too.
But I don’t like this total opposite either. Being told everything that ever happened wrong in the world is my fault, being under constant surveillance to have my social and career lives ruined if I ever even mention the truth in public, and watching my country turn into Brazil. Not to mention that anti-racist have generally compromised the most evil people I’ve known in my life.
The stakes are too high to regard HBD as nothing but an academic curiosity. If it doesn’t lead to actual reform, especially on something like immigration, then I’d say the case for HBDers is worse then blank slaters. They can at least claim ignorance. We allowed it to happen knowing it would happen because of our own selfish ends. The stakes on this issue are just gigantic. I can ignore the latest retard thing congress is doing because it doesn’t matter in the long run. NAM takeover does matter, its a permanent Game Over.
Anthony,
I’m herein assuming that the perspective is from a white person that cares about the fate of his fellow white people enough that they are willing to make personal sacrifices to do what they believe is right. You could extend that from white to citizens (Steve Sailer) but you get the general idea. Obviously if you are concerned only with yourself, a small isolated group (elites immediately in your social circle), or you are part of a different group (your a minority, etc) the implications of HBD may be different for you. For instance, Jayman’s view on the matter will be wholeheartedly different because he has both a personal and racial reason to want certain outcomes. If Jayman had the choice of saving America but selling out his own people we would not expect him to do so. In fact I’d consider it a great moral failing on his part if he did. He should be looking out for his co-ethnics, even if it meant denying HBD. Who wants to endorse the view that not only are you a loser, but your genetically damned to be a loser (and your kids are too). As bloody shovel said, not a great selling point.
That is the conclusion most of his co-ethnics who are capable of understanding the matter came to. I think their view is correct, that if HBD were seriously adopted by the public it would have negative effects for many blacks, probably the largest negative effects being to people like Jayman (high IQ blacks). Right now Jayman can largely just be a part of white society (or an isolated group of IWSBs within white society). In a world that was aware and took HBD seriously that would be much more difficult. He would have to be closer to a wider swath of his fellow co-ethnics and he wouldn’t like it. Just like SWPLs don’t like hanging around white trash. However, SWPLs being snobby to white trash and advocating policies that destroy their lives are evil spiteful people. The same would be true of IWSBs who treat ghetto people the same way. Your fellow co-ethnics are an extended family, sometimes your just the person who has to put up with the annoying aunt for awhile so you should do it with grace.
In a lot of ways I view the practical effects of desegregation as smart black people leaving dumb black people to rot because they didn’t give a shit what happened to them (at least not enough to go back). A similar thing happened with white people when the “big sort” happened and rootless cosmopolitanism became the order of the day.
So I assume a moral outlook much like my own. That I feel a loyalty to my race and country strong enough that I don’t want it to become a shithole, even if that means being a racist.
SMERSH,
“And if you support a strict moratorium on immigration, your political views on this topic are as extreme or more extreme than the National Front. And let’s not kid ourselves, this is the topic that people are going to judge you by, not your views on petty issues like social welfare or gay marriage.
So, people who believe what misdreavus believes about immigration are already plenty Nazi enough to get a beating from the antifa.”
Indeed. So long as the left maintains that anything a minority might not like = racism = Nazi we are all racists.
Bob,
If I can take the actual shit liberals and blacks have dished out on me and my fellows in real life Jay can handle some words on the internet. Have liberals tried to shut down your school because not enough black kids could pass the entrance exam? Been a victim of black crime? Had other racial groups discriminate against you and then be told they are justified in doing it and you’ve just got to take it because of “privilege”? Been told that if you object to mandatory premium subsidies for sex change operations paid for by other people that your a bigot and it could effect your job? Had your career threatened by liberals because you stood up against professional corruption?
This blank slate stuff has real consequences. Liberalism has real consequences. People pay real prices every day that are a lot more important then feelings. HBD is meant to fix those problems, not be some ivory tower bullshit that we don’t do anything with and all this garbage above keeps going on and people keep getting hurt every day.
I get why Jay feels how he does. He has a real reason to worry about HBD awareness affecting him and people he cares about negatively, so he doesn’t want it to be taken too seriously and actually change things. He would like everything to pretty much go the way its going. Yeah, it would be nice if we slowed immigration, but not important enough to actually do anything to make it happen. Not anything risky. Not anything that might damage to spoils system or screw up social status.
But we aren’t all black. Most of us are white, and that means we have different loyalties. Jay can write off the negative effects his ideas have on white people, can even justify it based on whatever historical reason or different allegiance he has. But fellow white people selling out other white just to advance themselves or stay out of danger, that’s just cowardice and immorality. I’ve seen too much of it, and while cloaked in some universal ethics of bullshit that claims its all really being done for the benefit of random minority/foreigner that only an enlightened person like me can see Really Needs, its always just an excuse for personal moral and ethnical law breaking for selfish ends.
asdf, you make some decent points and I mostly agree, but I’m going to take issue with one bit:
“That is the conclusion most of his co-ethnics who are capable of understanding the matter came to. I think their view is correct, that if HBD were seriously adopted by the public it would have negative effects for many blacks, probably the largest negative effects being to people like Jayman (high IQ blacks). Right now Jayman can largely just be a part of white society (or an isolated group of IWSBs within white society). In a world that was aware and took HBD seriously that would be much more difficult. He would have to be closer to a wider swath of his fellow co-ethnics and he wouldn’t like it. Just like SWPLs don’t like hanging around white trash. However, SWPLs being snobby to white trash and advocating policies that destroy their lives are evil spiteful people. The same would be true of IWSBs who treat ghetto people the same way. Your fellow co-ethnics are an extended family, sometimes your just the person who has to put up with the annoying aunt for awhile so you should do it with grace.”
First, I think it’s important to keep in mind that ethnic group affinities don’t necessarily follow the one drop rule. JayMan has stated that his ancestry is a mix of black, white, and, I believe, Asian. African Americans aren’t necessarily any closer to him genetically than American whites. There probably aren’t even that many people in this country with his ethnic mix. Personally, I’d be quite happy to have JayMan in my community–maybe we could discuss HBD together.
Second, even being totally HBD-aware doesn’t mean that we can’t incorporate some amount of human capital-HBD (discussed by another commenter below). I think it’s a mistake to be exclusively oriented around either ethnic or human capital HBD. We may talk about the downsides of diversity here, but that doesn’t mean that 100% purity is the best option either.
Third, I think it’s not so unreasonable or immoral in theory for SWPLs to try to get away from prole whites, just as it’s not so unreasonable or immoral for IWSBs to try to get away from ghetto blacks (I agree that either is immoral if they’re advocating policies that destroy lives, but I don’t really think it matters that much whether we’re talking about the same ethnics or not). If they’re successful at separating themselves from the rest of their ethnic group, this can be a powerful source of positive evolution for their group–just look at what Jews managed to do to their IQs over the last 2000 years or so.
Admittedly, the political realities of modern America may mean that you’re correct about the necessity of racial/ethnic solidarity, but I don’t see it in the same kind of moral terms as you do.
asdf, kindness and politeness are also also virtues. The crimes of one side or another do not justify being unkind to other folks elsewhere. Such virtues allow large numbers of people–even unrelated ones–to live harmoniously with each other. It is the unkindness of the far left that has driven me from it. My commitment to various liberal principles does not justify harming others who have not attacked me, and unfortunately, too much of the left has gone down that road.
Kindness, dignity, and respect. Act with integrity regardless.
@Bob:
Absolutely!
anon,
Trying to find a community you can live in harmoniously is a normal part of life. Day in day out with rednecks probably wouldn’t be good for me or them. However, trying to isolate yourself and wall off from the greater social spheres you belong to (race, community, nation, etc) so that you can do harm to them for personal gain and not be affected by the results is different. You also have certain levels of obligation to people with different levels of connectedness to you, even if they aren’t a part of your immediate social circle or personal interests.
Liberals don’t believe this. Everyone outside of those useful to them gets a bit dehumanized. There is a lot of talk about how this is being enlightened at treating everyone equally, but in practice (and for obvious reasons when you think about it) this actually means equally not giving a shit about anyone when it counts. The universalist ideas simply become another philosophical trap to rationalize largely selfish actions and detachment.
As to moral fury, I think you’ve just got to go through the meat grinder to understand. Every single anti-racist policy and every single anti-racist person I’ve ever known has been evil and done great harm to people. I’ve seen too much shit over and over again and at too high a level to give these groups the benefit of the doubt any more.
Bob,
When someone is attacking you then you have to fight back. There is nothing polite or kind about what the PC groups are doing.
This seems pretty straightforward to me:
1) HBD shows that immigration, disparate impact, and political correctness are false and evil.
2) Therefore, a belief in HBD implies the political policy proposal that these things be stopped.
When Jayman says that there are no political implications to HBD belief he is either disputing #1 or #2.
#1 I think is empirically provable. I can look at #s on NAM IQ, hook that up to the 80/20 chart for disparate impact, and see that its literally impossible for people to comply with the law. This isn’t a matter of opinion, its a matter of fact.
#2 Is an obvious implication of #1.
So when Jayman says HBD doesn’t imply a political policy just what the hell is he saying. Because if he doesn’t mean #1 or #2 he is simply contradicting himself.
3) If people oppose #2, and given #1, this makes them evil or foolish..
4) Given the methods and fervor of people in #3 that we are all familiar with, how long can we go about, quite frankly, taking it every day. For someone like me that has taken and seen it given to his brothers quite a lot, that time is over. The white guilt card is maxed out.
Saying that there are no political implications to HBD is like saying that everything that is wrong in the system but justified by HBD denial should continue.
The original mistake for neoreactionaries was not moderating the comments at Unqualified Reservations. That blog probably has one of the lowest ratio of comment to post quality of any on the internet. Since it’s all basically a derivation of Moldbug that just allowed a proliferation of nut cases in the intellectual movement.
Any intellectual movement that significantly deviates from intellectual orthodoxy, be it HBD, neoreactionary history or Marxism, has to avoid the “Big Tent” model. Once you step so far outside the mainstream you’re naturally going to attract a lot of kooks. There’s a lot of temptation to bring them in to swell your groups’ tiny number, but they’ll ultimately ruin any chance of mainstream legitimacy just by association.
I’m firmly in favor of ruthlessly purging the HBD-sphere, neoreactionaries, etc. Anyone who’s not committed to highly grounded evidence based reasoning needs to be ostracized. Once you saw dark enlightenment writers start repeating Roissy truisms than you knew the movement jumped the shark.
Mencius Moldbug actually wants to reinstitute the monarchy and yearns wistfully for the old days of feudalism and the lash. What would be the point of moderating the comments at that fetid intellectual swamp that he calls a blog? You might as well issue police citations to mosquitoes for disturbing the peace.
I think you’re misreading Moldbug. First I’ve read the entire UR archive several times over and never once recall any advocacy for feudalism. Quite the opposite Moldbug credits the centralization of a strong state, and hence the decline of feudalism, as the primary historical advantage of the West. As for “the lash” I don’t know where you got that idea from?
Mencius himself has stated several times that the closest present-day state to his ideal government is Singapore. Now while you may intellectually disagree with the desirability of Singapore compared to Western democracy the position is certainly not indefensible. On many metrics Singapore ranks well above even the best run Western nations. All the more impressive considering the state it was in 50 years ago.
The anti-democracy position of UR is rooted in the Iron Law of Oligarchy. That is the thesis that all forms of government despite their nominal structure effectively act as an extension of a small elite. Unquestionably political science research has shown that this is true of American democracy. When upper and lower/middle class disagree on policy, the upper class virtually always wins (see link below). If you accept the basic evidence that America already acts in a very non-democratic way, then wanting to formalize that structure is not an indefensible position.
It’s unfair to characterize UR as a “intellectual swamp.” You may disagree with Moldbug, but he’s always been meticulous in providing documentation and evidence supporting his theses. And he rarely if ever resorts to hysterics, moral panic, broad generalizations, mood affiliation or appeals to gut feeling. Unlike 95% of the rest of the alt-right.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/why_is_democrac.html
@Doug – Marxism is “intellectual orthodoxy” in U.S. and European university social science, and other “humanities” departments. Also the NR will never have “mainstream legitimacy.”
It won’t need that to accomplish what it is setting out to do.
Single mothers are responsible for their bastard children having poor outcomes because they choose to have children with thugs and deadbeats, who pass on their undesirable genetic traits to their bastard spawn. Of course this is partly because they have a low IQ and have difficulty selecting a good father of their children, but I don’t see how this absolves them entirely of responsibility .
Charles Murray wants the deadbeats to be shamed. The problem is that we already do this, and it isn’t working, because deadbeats are in part acting on genetic characteristics. He also confuses failure to launch type guys, who take longer to start a career and get married, but these are not most of the guys having bastard children. The common manosphere explanation is that deadbeats have good genes for hunter-gatherer societies. Whatever the case, it seems to me that the problem is caused by single mothers being drawn to the worst sort of guy.
@Anonymous:
There’s a time when the word “responsibility” has meaning and a time when it does not. This is an example of the latter.
Unless you believe that we should sanction polygyny, where the highest IQ, most well behaved men have their choice of mates, what other guys are these single mothers going to go after?
responsibility: the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone.
Seems to fit the definition pretty well to me. Single mothers control who they have children with. It just happens that the problem is not being unmarried and raising a kid alone, but choosing a father with poor conscientiousness.
I doubt sanctioning polygyny would lead to high IQ men having all the women.
I think the best solution is to for society increasingly discourage single motherhood and encourage marriage like it did in the past. It will not solve the problem, but it does encourage more women to wait to have children until they find a guy who is more stable than they otherwise would. Encouraging marriage, while missing the true reason for the problem, does encourage women to seek more marriage minded guys, who are generally more conscientious. They will still have sex with sexy deadbeats, they will just be less likely to have kids with them.
People mate with people like themselves. Single mothers aren’t choosing bad mates, they simply mate with other people like themselves. Historically, in Western societies/places where it gets cold in the winter, these peoples’ children tended to starve/freeze because their parents didn’t have the skills, resources, and foresight to take care for them. In many cases these women simply abandoned their children or committed some form of infanticide.* In societies where winter wasn’t such a big deal, these children could have survived and therefore these behaviors may have been adaptive.
If single mothers are producing more children who live to adulthood in Western societies, it’s not because they’re making bad choices, it’s because we have changed the environment so that their behavior is now adaptive.
*See, eg, “Before the Industrial Revolution” by Cipolla, “…one finds in Venice, in the second half of the 18th century, foundlings represented 8-10% of all births… In Milan at the end of the seventeenth century the number of foundlings … represented more than 12% of births in the city.” However, “According to a Venitian estimate in the 16th century, 80-90% of the foundlings died in their first year…” Page 69. (The author notes that this is probably an over-estimate because people would come in from the countryside to abandon babies in the city, but that does not significantly change the conclusion that a lot of babies died.)
@Bob:
Good points.
Anon, LOL at your typical single mother being able to snag a higher-quality mate by waiting longer. Single-mothers are low quality women who do not attract high-quality mates, and they age much faster than high-quality women. High-quality men want to have children with high-quality women.
@Bob:
Precisely.
Different Anonymous here.
There are several million more single adult males below middle age in the United States than single adult females. That’s a basic, true fact, and the ratio probably goes up more when you consider childlessness. Manage to read like the US Census.
Making the claim that women can’t find male partners is essentially saying that a majority of black and Hispanic men are criminals, psychopaths, etc… Whether mere discussion of such a claim is a problem is not the question, because making that assertion WITHOUT any data and statistics is certainly no different from the racial supremacist types. Look up some actual information.
It’s understandable this false perception seems very common, because the PC media has picked it up to justify their own biases – the all women are perfect princesses idea. A typical smug, upper-class journalist holds to self-contradictory positions like:
Journalist: “It’s too bad there aren’t enough good men for women to marry among these minorities.”
Response: “So you’re saying the non-Asian minorities are bad men, or criminals?”
Journalist: “No, that’s so racist, we’re just saying they aren’t good men”
And the whole narrative is not accurate, because again, factually there are a lot more men and even if you do consider some cutoff like the bottom 10% the rest are not all deadbeats and criminals. Blindly spreading misinformation even if you oppose the position of PC media is equally supporting the conclusions of the racist types.
The reality is that we all know relatively good men up and down the bell curve that would make good husbands but that women aren’t choosing. The IT department in your company is the usual example, but even when you get down the tradesmen and other more blue collar stuff there are plenty of good men available. Why?
There are ok women who end up as single mothers. They aren’t all 70 IQ feral black women who scream loudly outside the walmart. You’ll find plenty of fairly normal women that could pull normal men. The fact that this doesn’t happen is pretty messed up. There are lots of men who just want a woman who will bear them a child, put out somewhat regularly, get dinner on the table at 6:00, and not create a lot of drama. If half of all women don’t qualify that can’t just be genetics, woman have been managing those things for a long time. One has to think some of those women could do those things if they wanted to. So if they don’t want to that’s a choice, and surely we can blame people for choices. That’s the whole point of moral agency (a useless discussion fundamentally with a determinist like Jayman).
In an environment where marrying an IT guy will result in raising the most children to adulthood, women will marry IT guys. In an environment where one night stands with bikers results in producing the most children who make it to adulthood, women will have one night stands with bikers.
The survival rates for different kinds of folks have changed drastically just in this century. My great-great grandmother lost six babies within their first weeks of life due to medical issues we’ve now eliminated. The poor and impulsive did even worse.
Culture is a real thing–seeing poor children starving in the streets was a powerful incentive not to produce them–but it does not exist in a vacuum. Nature is not kind, and if women *can* survive and raise just as many children without a husband as with, then they will, and culture will go along, remarking on what a wonderful thing it is that 45 yr old men are no longer considered perfectly good matches for 15 yr old girls.
PS: I’ve known intelligent, normal-seeming single mothers who, nonetheless, repeatedly made terrible life decisions. There are a few people who happen to have made a mistake or gotten unlucky in life, but in general, people who make enormous, life-altering mistakes tend to have really bad judgment, risk assessment, social skills, or to just be dumb.
This is not an equation of good women mysteriously choosing bad men. It is not an equation of good men choosing bad women. It is an equation of *both sides* foregoing commitment and stability in favor of reproduction now–a strategy that works in our society.
“It is an equation of *both sides* foregoing commitment and stability in favor of reproduction now–a strategy that works in our society.”
And that is a MORAL CHOICE. I’m coming at this from the standpoint that moral agency exists, that we are not deterministic sacks of meat that have zero control over our decisions. If you believe that then even talking about choices or morality or anything really is a completely useless exercise.
One should not mistake evolutionary tendencies for deterministic facts. Yes, in an environment of high survivability there is a strong incentive to make short term selfish decisions. There are all sorts of things in life that present incentive to do evil. Corruption, violence, etc are all in our genes too. It remains a choice of individuals whether or not to choose good or choose evil.
It’s my belief that raising a child in a stable two parent home is GOOD. Objectively morally good. Thus choosing other options is bad. Just as any bad act that seemed pleasurable or led to higher personal fertility is still BAD. If you disagree with the assertions of moral agency or that stable two parent families are objectively good then I agree we can’t have a discussion. Not because you view is legitimate, I believe such a view a sign of deep seated evil in yourself, but because you are so twisted and warped that understanding is impossible.
Telling immoral people to just be more moral without changing the environmental conditions that allow them to produce more children than moral folks simply doesn’t work. The immoral folks will just keep ignoring you. Bill Cosby has been trying this tactic for decades, and it hasn’t worked.
I highly doubt cultural condemnation was ever the driving force preventing large scale single motherhood; rather, the abysmal survival rates for unwanted and unplanned children and high death rates for the poor in general simply prevented these kids from existing and bad planning genes from getting passed on.
If you want to change that, then you have to change the environment in which homeless people feel more confident about bringing children into the world than Harvard grads, not yell at people about how they ought to get married. Even when single mothers do try to get married, they marry the men they find attractive, which doesn’t actually change the genetic situation. Even if you could force them to marry IT guys, or the deadbeats to marry fat women with nice personalities, these still wouldn’t be “stable two parent homes” because the dumb people in the equation are not capable of long-term stability.
I wrote more, but my computer ate it and now I just don’t feel motivated to re-type.
There is no “system” that removes the need for moral agency. The buck always stops with individual choices. All the carrots and sticks in the world don’t survive a people determined to find a way around them.
“these still wouldn’t be “stable two parent homes” because the dumb people in the equation are not capable of long-term stability.”
They were stable for a long time. So its not impossible. The current state should be viewed as the abnormal broken one.
You know this is an HBD blog, right? You have completely missed the point of everything.
I assume, based on your statements, that you purposefully and freely chose to misunderstand everything; therefore, there’s no point in explaining what you do not desire to understand.
@Bob: I highly doubt cultural condemnation was ever the driving force preventing large scale single motherhood; rather, the abysmal survival rates for unwanted and unplanned children and high death rates for the poor in general simply prevented these kids from existing and bad planning genes from getting passed on.
American society pretty much solved the problems of “abysmal survival rates for unwanted and unplanned children and high death rates for the poor in general” well before the explosion of single motherhood. By 1940, the infant mortality rate was under 1%, and other than childhood diseases (which were worse, but not spectacularly so, among the poor), most kids survived to adulthood. Higher death rates meant dying at 55 to 60 was as likely as dying after age 70 for the poor, not that the poor were dying off in droves in their 20s and 30s.
So there’s a problem. Things have changed among America’s poor too fast to be the result of selection. And they’ve changed too slowly to be biological responses to changing environment. Or, at the very least, the changed environment is the social and political environment, not the agricultural and medical environment. Policies towards supporting the poor changed a *lot* during the 1960s, and reproductive behavior among the poor changed a lot at about the same time. If policy drove the behavioral change, then policy can (somewhat) drive it back.
@Anthony:
Correct.
Why?
There is where you can start getting into trouble. Knowing that something is driven by an environmental change (that is, a grand-scale environmental change) is one thing. Making definitive statements about those changes is another. Those are very hard to prove, and while the answer at times may seem obvious, you leave yourself open to being spectacularly wrong.
Policy wasn’t the only thing that changed. Technology changed as well. The latter is a bit harder to undo. This is falling into the trap the “fat shamers” do. Knowing that a gross environmental change could alter something in principle is a different matter from saying it’s possible in practice.
Anthony, if you change the frequency of traits coding for mating behavior in a population of babies, you’re not going to see any changes in actual mating behavior until the babies grow up and start mating.
The children born in 1940, generally speaking, had children in the 60s and 70s. By this point, we were seeing big increases in the numbers of single mothers. You wouldn’t expect any change in the behavior of mothers in 1940, because those women were born around 1915, and therefore were largely the children of responsible people.
Changes in the welfare state, the number of women pursuing careers and higher education, etc., have only accelerated the trend, thus changing the distribution of traits in each succeeding generation. Culture may take a while to catch up.
I absolutely agree that we can change incentives to change behaviors.
And they’ve changed too slowly to be biological responses to changing environment.
JayMan asks Why?
Bob notes that children born in 1940 would be having children in the 60s and 70s. But even before that, starvation wasn’t really a problem in the U.S., and childhood disease didn’t affect the irresponsible much more than the responsible until vaccines became more widely available. Bob’s claim that the women born in 1915 were “largely the children of responsible people” isn’t terribly plausible – while those who were conscientious and smart may have had more children than average back then, even irresponsible people could, and did, have children who largely survived to adulthood. Even if the more responsible half in 1900-1920 had a zero child mortality rate and the less responsible half had a 20% child mortality rate, that’s small compared to the rates of 100 years earlier, which were 40% and up. And the split wasn’t nearly that extreme. So that seems that a woman born in 1915 who had a bastard child or three in the 1940s would probably see her children all survive to adulthood, and probably knew that. And, in fact, there were substantial numbers of women who had children, then had their husband die. Mostly, those children didn’t starve.
The negative incentive that women born in 1915 had to not have bastards wasn’t that their children would die – there was some risk, but that risk existed for women who had men around when they had their children, even if attenuated. The risk was social ostracism, even by their socioeconomic peers; it was being hungry, which is pretty unpleasant; it was living in a tar-paper shack downwind of the smokestacks while wearing extra rags for warmth, etc. Even during the Depression, there was very little starvation, and disease deaths declined.
If the change in rates of unmarried motherhood was a biological response to a changed agricultural and medical environment, it should have started in the 30s and 40s, not the 60s and 70s.
I agree that changing the social and political environment back to, say, that of 1960, wouldn’t push the behavior all the way back, even over a generation. We’re also really, really unlikely to see those changes, as there’s a pretty entrenched constituency for them. On the other hand, we also have Depo-Provera, which reduces the effect of irresponsibility on the contraceptive failure rate, and which seems to be decreasing the fertility of the feckless more so than contraception which requires conscientiousness.
How do so single mothers manage to hook up with reliable decent guys later in life despite having multiple children, being older, and often overweight, if they’re so low quality?
@Anonymous:
Do they?
can’t we just call it “the twin-studies enlightenment?” or the “g” enlightenment? empirical enlightenment?:)
i was a flaming egalitarian who eventually learned about “g” & research showing tests predict equally accurately for all groups (even if those groups have mean differences).
i hate the condescending reaction from cathedralists who say “i used to think like you, but then i learned…” b/c that’s what i say:) but my side involves evidence instead of belief.
similar to the commenter above who invoked mormonism – indeed, the LDS use feelings as “evidence” to determine truth. not an accurate method (!) but that’s what the “conventional wisdom” does against us!
them: egalitarianism/our noble feelings = truth!
us: evidence = truth.
sorry to make it such an us/them thing:) i’ll try to find the middle path & see the gray, etc.
Great post, Jayman. (and Misdreavus). This is the reason why I direct people to you and HBD Chick whenever I want to introduce someone to HBD. Your posts are a much better introduction than the usual “lol science says niggerz cant rede lolololozzl” shite you see in other corners in the web.
Thanks again for the good work. I promise I’ll donate at some point…
@Bayonet:
Thank you. Well I’m glad my stuff comes in handy. 🙂
I’m not really sure why some are calling for “ruthlessly purging the HBD-sphere” here. Each of us only speaks for ourselves, and there’s a diversity of opinion among people interested in these topics, just as there is diversity of opinion in any collection of people. It sounds like some have a desire for labels and group conformity, but deciding which people or what ideas exactly are in or out of the group just seems pointless to me, particularly when we’re talking about such a loosely defined group as the “Dark Enlightenment” (a term I think is fun, but I know many people object to it). JayMan speaks for JayMan, and he posts some interesting things about topics including HBD–I don’t really associate him at all with, say, moldbug or anyone else.
Somewhat more substantively, I think Handle has a good point above about the danger of the PC-inquisition. I’ve noticed a big change over the last 15 years as dissent with blank slate theories has become more suppressed. It seems much less acceptable to say this stuff publicly now than it was then, and concepts like “____ privilege” as an explanation for differential outcomes have spread like wildfire. The “social justice” people on the left pushing the “privilege” concept are sowing some dangerous seeds of resentment with little basis in fact. These are the people I worry about the most.
Our “Misdreavus“ reminds me of Chris Crawford. Remember him?
“I had a long conversation with a lady with a doctorate on related stuff. I can’t recall the label on her doctorate, but her research thesis involved DNA work. Anyway, she hadn’t heard of “HBD” so she spent a few hours looking it over, and came up with a characterization that rings true for me. She sees a spectrum starting with evolutionary psychology, going through HBD, and ending in outright racism…”
After a tedious discussion, it turned out that Chris simply opposed unPC-HBD, which is it say, in practice, interesting HBD. Now, “Misdreavus“ comes along and warns us about the “nutters from Stormfront and NRx” that are going to muck things up. After a tedious discussion, it will turn out that he simply opposes HBD-informed-policy-thinking of the non-egalitarian sort, which is to say, in practice, interesting HBD-informed-policy-thinking . But let’s hear it –what, specifically, are these horrible people — if we can call them that — saying? (Personally, I wish Stormfronters well in their ethnostate project and in their project to redesign, with the aid of synthetic biology, their race. I also wish neoreactionaries well in setting up their explicit neocameral state.)
@Chuck:
Oh yes, I remember Chris Crawford.
Misdreavus is no Chris Crawford. That couldn’t be any further from the truth, believe me. In fact, I think misdreavus is one of most sensible folks in this sphere. He routinely denounces a lot of the nonsense that pervades this space, and there is sure plenty of it. And as you know, I do quite a bit of that myself.
I agree with your comment, but I’d say that some interesting HBD is less un-PC than other interesting HBD. Discussing intra-European or intra-African variation is more PC than discussing European-African differences. Policy-wise, it might be both more effective and more PC to discuss policies oriented around, for example, intelligence or aggression levels or nature vs. nurture generally than around race.
I suppose that one of the objections of the original post is that some HBD-associated people are overemphasizing race over other possible categorizations.
Euro/African differences–chiefly intelligence–is simply the elephant in the HBD room. Even if you’re just discussing eye color, that elephant is still there, and love ’em or hate ’em, the racists and the anti-racists will always be focused on that damn elephant.
@Bob:
Always comes back to the Brothers, doesn’t it?
“After a tedious discussion, it turned out that Chris simply opposed unPC-HBD, which is it say, in practice, interesting HBD.”
Pay closer attention to what I believe, and maybe we’ll get somewhere. It’s the stupidity that offends me far more than the so-called “racism” — if you think HBD justifies the creation of a white-only ethnostate [sic] in America, all power to you. Just don’t sound like an idiot or broken record while defending that idea.
nutters from Stormfront sparring tête–à–tête with anthropology professors over elementary facts that anybody can look up in a linguistics textbook.
While there will always be nutters who believe that The Establishment Is Wrong, they will get a much better reception these days because as a matter of fact, The Establishment is wrong. The social sciences, in particular, have so fouled their nest with adherence to Blank Slatism, Freudianism, Marxism, and other anti-scientific concepts, that rejecting all the generally-accepted conclusions of the social “sciences” may bring one closer to the truth than accepting them all.
I take issue with one assertion. The glorious past was not better edited. Lots and lots of oogily-boogily was passed off as science, despite the barriers put up by the guild controlling the flow of information. It is an old gripe that was common when I was a young man running a BBS. It was probably common when the printing press put monks out of work. The truth is the ratio of truth to nonsense is constant. The only thing that changes is volume.
That said, the Victorians (I think) used to say “never speak of religion or politics around the servants.” It is why officers stay out of the enlisted bars. In the wrong hands, the truth is a lethal weapon.
The genes of high intelligence are present in all populations , this means that all peoples of the world have the potential to develop their skills through eugenic selection. However , intelligence is not without personality .
Another factor , not too worrisome but that seems to be real , is that the lower the average intelligence of a population , the slower the process of genetic improvement of cognitive skills . However , this could be solved through cultural separation of populations of different cognitive substrates .
What is still a mystery for me is to understand how the mechanism , regression to the mean works . I believe that this process is variable among populations and even between individuals . Recently I came across a study conducted in the Netherlands in which patients with high IQ schizophrenics were more likely to have relatives with the same disorder than patients with iq average. The price of intelligence , my dear Watson .
It seems that genius is a rare combination of disparate traits as outstanding intellect and predisposition to psychopathology ( if we can say this way) and results in high creativity . However , the idea that a high intelligence does not correlate with neurological idiosyncrasies , is completely wrong and maybe the predisposition to psychopathology is related to the extremely perfectionist tendencies , the creative geniuses . This could have many considerations about the future of society , where we seek to ( before the cultural Marxism ) the improvement of the same and human relations . The anguish , present in most of the most exceptional brains of the human species could be triggered by this autistic obsession with perfectionism .
Another idea that should be thought about is the modern concept of intelligence itself, which perfectly fits with the modern demands as acquisition of education and income . From the initial idea that human intelligence is a mix of contemplative skills with skills direct impact on individual survival and clan , I believe that one of the components of primitive and natural character, intelligence is precisely the instinctive ability of people to detect danger essentially of the two components in non- human populations. The danger could be represented in complex societies as a chaotic chain of events , rising crime , climate change etc.
The English girl who saved hundreds of lives on a Thai beach , during the 2004 tsunami . Income and education depends primarily on the type of personality combined with cognitive style rather than intelligence , quantitative or qualitative . What I see is , the higher or highest quality is the intelligence , the more the person will tend to outlier and be more repulsive will the subjective social contract in which it will be subjected a priori .
Therefore, someone who is characterized as enlightmen enlightgirl or dark, is one that exhibits a high capacity general intelligence, which is not limited to modern mechanical activities of society but which refers to the quintessence of life on Earth, instinct. The nonconformity is basically instinct.
It is expected that between sophisticated intellectuals hbd movement, appear equally instinctive other groups, such as white nationalists and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them regarding their will to survive.
After this testament, I would like to thank you for your patience. I’m putting myself out temporarily, I hope, because I know now that people are not forced to guess what I’m writing.
I will continue reading your blog, good luck dear Jay man!
misdreavus said:
“— if you think HBD justifies the creation of a white-only ethnostate [sic] in America”
I don’t understand why you think that HBD is needed to justify an ethnostate; to my mind, you merely need an ethnos and a willingness to affirm the principle of national self determination. I don’t recall the Southern Sudanese calling upon HBD to justify their succession; why would the situation be any different for e.g., White nationalists? That said, to some extent, one could draw upon HBD. For example, when arguing against race based immigration policies, you state: “why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian…”. Your reasoning: since selective immigration must be justified based on capacity, and since many of a given race are less capable than many of another, one can not justify an exclusively race based policy. But, of course, bioethnonationalists don’t draw upon human capital -HBD, for justification, they draw upon ethnic genetic interest –HBD; they, seeing a nation as an extended biological family, propose to discriminate on the basis of overall genetic relatedness. In doing so, when preferring a low capital Sicilian to a high capital Korean, they exhibit no inconsistency. Now, I don’t recall what the whole-genome pairwise relations were, but I suspect that Europeans tend to form a nested cluster within the Caucasoid race (which includes indigenous Europeans, many Central/South Asians, North Africans, and Middles Easterners) and that this region of genetic space forms the basis of the “white race”, biologically understood. That is, I suspect that one could carve out of multidimensional genetic space a natural population which loosely overlapped with geographically defined indigenous Europe while excluding many other caucasoid populations. Maybe not. To the extent not then either our bioethnonationalists would need to boot the less related European populations, include the more related non-European (Caucasoid) populations, or take into account other considerations such as culture relatedness. Generally, they do the last. Whatever the case, this is a marginal problem for them — like Israeli Jews deciding who precisely qualifies as a Jew. So, yes, Stormfronters and others can draw upon HBD to some extent when it comes to justifying their proposed ethnostate. Of course HBD can never justify the principle of national self determination. It can just be employed to construct a defense of the idea and ideal of a bioethnos. Now, while I stand in defense of their position, I don’t back it for various, largely selfish, reasons (e.g., I’m a miscegenator). The position is important to defend, though, because it represents a more or less coherent application of genetic interest-HBD, which, itself, represents, more or less, a logical extension of foundational HBD principles (e.g., Hamilton’s rule). Also, it’s worth defending because it is one of the core types of applied HBD for which anti-HBD was developed to undermine. Some here might see ethnic-genetic interest-HBD and applications thereof as too dangerous or too problematic — just as many elsewhere see IQ-HBD. If so, I think that’s a mistake. But we can discuss that point more later.
I think others have been hinting at it here, but this post does a great job of highlighting the tension between human capital-HBD and ethnic genetic interest-HBD. Preferring either of these overall seems reasonable to me, and I think there’s plenty of room for debate. Going too far in the direction of ethnic genetic interest legitimately scares people about the implications, so adding some human capital HBD to their strategy would probably make them less scary (after all, bringing in some advantageous genes from other populations can be very advantageous in the long-term). For example, Japan is one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries on the planet, but they allow a small number of gaijin in without significant problems.
All good points. What I would add is that strong emphasis on genetic relatedness will scare liberals more (especially as the United States continues to implode), while a strong emphasis on human capital may very well draw objection from conservatives.
“Playing God” and all that.
Interesting column.
http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2014/2/18/academic-freedom-justice/?page=single#
Jayman said: “Misdreavus is no Chris Crawford”
HBD largely exists outside of conventional moral horizons; and it has not rigorously developed norms. Misdreavus is correct that this situation represents, at very least, a marketing problem; the attempt to draw lines is appreciated — I could use some guidelines myself; the problem is the manner. HBD is politically neutral; the lines need to be politically neutral. Misdreavus seems to section of the Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction, and Alt-Rightism; yet these positions are not — at least from my perspective — categorically morally problematic, despite being anti-egalitarian; rather, they suffer from the same problem as HBD regarding morales and norms. Generally, lines should be drawn but drawn in the most politically and morally inclusive way palatable; caution should be taken when labeling “nutters”.
Chuck,
The morality of various movements that latch on to HBD (in the “Dark Enlightenment” sphere or whatever) is one issue touched on here, and an important one, I think. But the main issue that misdreavus was getting at, one that’s separate from the morality, and the primary reason I his quoted him, is that most of the people in those spheres or otherwise attached to HBD simply get their facts outrageously wrong. Cleaning up where folks in this sphere are wrong is something that keeps me quite busy. Although, to me, that’s not much different from the stuff the blank-slatist(-oid?)s get staggeringly wrong, at least in how I approach it.
As Razib says below, most people are morons. Or, at least, are incapable of thinking statistically. That last is true even of lots of otherwise not-morons, which is why there are people who come to HBD blogs and spout racist crap – because they are incapable of seeing the trees for the forest.
Isn’t HBD an extension of evolution?
I don’t see the controversy over HBD. Humans are very diverse. We’re diverse in skin color, bone structure, eye shape, etc…….so why can’t our diversity extend to average intelligence too?
@LLL:
That would be my thought, but, you know…
Very well said, by the way!
[formerly “Rome’s Creature”]
Proud as I am of my hierarchism and colorful bigotry, it is simply mind-numbing how demonstrably false many claims made by HBD-rightists tend to be. The only reason I come here regularly is because Jayman’s hypotheses seem much closer to the truth than what is proffered among my ilk.
I don’t attribute this to any illusions of unimpaired rationality, which I consider mythical anyway. Reason does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. The fact that Jayman’s ancestry differs from those of Cavalier and Appalachian proponents of HBD is likely what enables him to see inconvenient nuances in their data.
Nonetheless, in the end, I stand with Dixie and the Freemen of the Far West. Any material prosperity secured through “cooperation” (read: progressive eugenicists bossing the rest of us around) between the very outbred and less outbred nations of Euro-America would hardly compensate flyover country for aesthetic death.
A thorough scrutinizing of Anonymous Conservative’s claims is something I’d like to read.
I have found practical uses for his work. On purely scientific grounds, however, the odor of absurdity is fairly pungent.
So here’s the thing, in terms I suspect everyone here can understand:
Jayman and Misdreavus were POINTING and SPUTTERING.
Now, from everything I’ve seen, which isn’t much, there is no core to the Dark Enlightenment, or the world of HBD, or whatever else you call it. This conversation surely proves that, as much as anything. Time and again, you see a commenter here say “Well, we know this” and some other commenter says “No, that’s what we must fight against!”
In short, there is no “we”. With one exception, as I wrote in my last essay on this topic(http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/the-dark-enlightenment-and-duck-dynasty/) people who fall into this group despise The Cathedral.
Jayman and Misdreavus are just trying to create the Cathedral for HBD thinkers. You can wrap it up in judicious morality, you can make it about Us and Them, but at the heart of it, misdreavus was saying man, these people over here need to Shut Up, and Jayman was like, preach it, man! We need to clean things up around here! We can’t have people with the wrong opinions! We need *science*, man!
But to the extent *this* exists, this thing, whatever it’s called, whatever I have a node on, it is little other than a stand against the notion of the unspeakable. So once you violate that, there’s nothing left.
And now, a brief conversation with myself: Ed, why do you get caught up in this nonsense? (Because I got an MIS and online communities fascinate me, particularly when they’re doing it wrong! Plus, I’m on a node!) Well, shut up, dammit.
hm. well, i’ve been posting about various issues under my real name for 11 years, so spare me your righteousness, OK? i quite like the post. lots of people are motivated morons. it’s not smug to say that. most people are stupid. personally i’d rather not deal with retards from the HBDsphere ‘schooling me’ on lewontin’s fallacy. pretty sure that’s the same impulse driving jayman.
oh, and of course, to be clear, most humans are morons. that’s a truth that the ‘cathedral’ does not want to hear, and many people who criticize it too 😉 probably the thing that gets people most worked up on my blog is when i tell someone ‘you are not very smart, please don’t speak again.’
I hope I’m replying in the right place–I can’t click reply on Razib’s comment. Who says you can’t like the post, say most people are motivated morons, or not deal with retards from anyone at all? Go right ahead. And one of the great things about your blog is that you tell people they’re idiots. I take no position on the general percentage of morons on the web or in real life, and my ire had nothing to do with that. And why on earth should you feel insulted just because I don’t like the post, or feel you should be spared from my righteous wrath? It’s not personal.
“personally i’d rather not deal with retards from the HBDsphere ‘schooling me’ on lewontin’s fallacy.”
vs.
“If the facts about heritable human differences are to be ever taken seriously, it needs to be extricated from such utter nonsense, as well as from the mean-spirited sentiment.”
and
“This, of course, has done absolutely no favors to its dispersal within society at large, because if technology has taught us anything, it is that the anonymity of the web tends to bring out the crazy and stupid in everyone”
I have no issue with the first. I find the latter two offensive for the reasons explicated above.
My ire is not in any way intended to dissuade you, Jayman, misdreavus, or anyone else from posting similar preferences. It is, simply, ire.
(wanders away, muttering to self “you said you wouldn’t go back in there!”)
ER thank you for calling Jayman & misdreavus for a Point and Sputter. I don’t think iSteve has a trademark on that but it does mark one as conversant with the lowly stupid HBD rabble they protest so much against. I spent a few minutes searching for a source one day, but every use I could find was from around the Stevosphere. I am guessing that they count Steve and the unwashed from his commenters among such. Some of the reward of reading West Hunter or Razib is the spectacle of watching some popinjay get smacked down. The higher the intelligence of the git receiving the smack down the more we enjoy the show. It seems there is always plenty of stupid to go around on the right side of the bell curve as well as the left.
I’m of the view that a lot of the opinion that Misdreavus and JayMan revile is actually people so frustrated by PC and the Harrison Bergeron agenda of public schooling over the past 50 years (i.e., to cripple the higher IQ kids in the name of Mainstreaming the morons), that they choose a relatively safe place to vent. If they dare make certain observations, particularly in corporate mainstream media or higher education, no matter how accurately experienced or empirically demonstrated, they are called KKK or whatever. The penalties in higher ed are even worse.
So why not sew their own drag and strut it for all they’re worth? If nothing else, it will make the more moderate opinions sound that much more credible.
In general, anonymous internet writing/commentary is one way that people explore their ideas and thoughts in a social setting. Higher education used to serve that function. Then it turned into indoctrination camp. See the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the fire dot org
One other thing occurs to me:
In the decades I worked in “activist” PR, it was considered a standard tool of the trade to go online and pose as the opposition, even to create caricatures of them and make them say dumb things. It was the parent tactic of today’s “sock puppetry.”
I was asked to do this on several occasions, working at a couple of progressive NGOs, and I refused. The second time it cost me my job.
I once talked to a PR person whose job consisted of doing this for, among other organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a brilliant fundraising-scheme organization that creates racial enemies to save others from, and still raises tens of millions of dollars each year despite having been exposed in the ’90s by no less than /The Atlantic/ and /Harper’s/.
These days whenever I see a Tweet or comment that sounds too good to be true from a “gee, honey, look at the nazi yokel” perspective, I assume it is that PR lady, or others like her. This obviously doesn’t account for ALL extreme opinions from Planet Wingnut…but it surely accounts for some proportion.
You can be as hateful as you like – as other commenters have pointed out before me, just about every single opinion that contradicts the modern liberal zeotgeist is automatically condemned as “hateful”. Just TRY TO KNOW WHAT IT IS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.
I left my response to this postat HBDchick’s place.
I’m an historian, not a scientist. My scientific knowledge is rather poor.
My problem with a leftist- friendly HBD perspective is the same problem I have with a leftist understanding of Darwin in general. Sure, in the abstract selection isn’t going in a specific direction, and is selecting based on adaptation and without ” purpose.” Therefore it makes sense that ethnic groups are not ” better” or “worse” than one another objectively, just different. The problem is that while this makes sense in the abstract, like a lot of HBD (this could be said about scientific ideas in general) , it ignores the social, political, and economic contexts completely. While selection might not be going in a divinely- ordained direction, we definitely are living in a specific set of circumstances- compact enough for us to create standards and to form clear ideas about the success or failure of groups. Are groups more or less economically productive in our capitalist system? Do they consume more resources than they produce? Are they numerous enough to bolster or drain the system? The problem with third world immigration as opposed to the nineteenth century Irish is that the third-worlders are seen as ” parasitic,” consuming far more resources than they produce, shocking the system. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant. HBD or no ( I myself am skeptical of HBD, but don’t have the scientific background to argue it on this blog), there WILL be a huge system shock at some point in the future. Balkanization and a renewed white identity are distinct possibilities, whether positive or negative from our point of view ( negative from mine, but still). No one really cares how stupid the guy next to them is unless we’re spending money to educate him. Furthermore, civil rights emerged during an era of massive economic growth- really unprecedented prosperity. This made it more palatable for white America to share its largesse with minorities. In poorer regions there was more resistance to this, and in less prosperous times you had overt acts of violence, such as the burning of ” Black Wall Street.” If “black dysfunction” is truly hard wired (and when I say black dysfunctions i only mean the perception that it exists), then the rest of the population is going to demand an end to programs meant to mitigate it.
Regardless of what’s inheritable or not, people have conflict when resources are scarce. I myself feel terrible about the state of the American black male, but if he’s designed by nature for this state, no amount of compassion is valuable. People are going to demand Draconian measures or an ” out of sight, out of mind” approach. There’s going to be huge changes in the future after white America loses its power to fund the welfare state. Any resentment by minorities due to the loss of their livelihoods is only going to make matters worse.
The leftist resistance to HBD is different from my own criticisms. The leftists are terrified that they will set in motion pogroms if they become convinced of HBD. This is due to their puritanical need to cleanse the Earth. These ideas are very dangerous.
It will be hard convincing people to pay me to educate populations perceived as unreachable. Many of my students are enrolled to collect welfare benefits. All of this is done in the name of improvement and an attempt at equality. If it’s futile, God help us.
Single parenthood is indeed related to adverse outcomes in children. Not “the mother’s fault” as you seem to be saying, but that one-parent environment most certainly has negative impacts. Not just financially, either, but when the opposite sex parent is missing, that child is missing on an adult role model which negatively impacts them including in how to be a parent and also how to learn to love the opposite sex.
@Illustrious Fishy (@Weelittlefishy):
Related to ≠ cause. Indeed, the causation is genetic, which is what misdreavus was getting at.
@Illustrious Fishy (@Weelittlefishy):
For the record, that’s all bullshit. Read my most recent posts.
Complete and utter horse caca. Functional people are capable of learning from people who don’t live with them. Those single-parent kids would have to be homeschooled and completely cut off from the outside world in order to so constrict their ability to learn from others.
Also, I’m really glad I didn’t learn how to love the opposite sex from my parents, because ew, incest. That’s pretty disgusting.
“Nevertheless, it often feels like I am doing double duty not just counteracting the standard PC dogma, but addressing the right-wing crazy that rails against it (who are emboldened by the wrongness of the PC liberals to believe that all of their fanciful musing is correct).”
It’s an unfortunate position in which you find yourself. Nonetheless, this has been portended by Land already:
“Land is an elitist, more loyal to IQ than ethnicity, and with a marked contempt for the “inarticulate proles” of neoreaction’s white nationalist wing. But Land himself notes that it’s precisely these “proles” that make up most of the actual “reactosphere,” and that “if reaction ever became a popular movement, its few slender threads of bourgeois (or perhaps dreamily ‘aristocratic’) civility wouldn’t hold back the beast for long.””
I’m confused by this. Why is it evil to recognize that a single mother (esp. one with multiple kids from different men) is expressing a phenotype that often assorts with other behavioral phenotypes (of her kids) that significantly increase the odds of the kids being feral?
Your entire blog is committed to connecting characteristics, including behavior, to genotype. Do you find objections to Section 8 seeding genetically predisposed-to-violence people into close proximity with my children to be irrational or evil? Seriously, isn’t there likely to be a genetic explanation for people who have committed sex crimes on kids? I doubt you would be thrilled if one moved in next door, but isn’t that somewhat in line with the viewpoints misdreavus plastered with vitriol?
The only other reason I can imagine for all this is to excuse criminality. Let’s face it, if a person is born with a genetic predisposition to violent crime, how can society hold that person fully accountable for, say, committing the Knoxville Horror? Is this an argument for a new, genetically-based defense similar to “reduced capacity?”
I find the dark enlightenment quite explanatory. Epithet-saturated criticisms of it cause me to wonder what are the core beliefs of those making them.