Brilliant work, I agree with all of your points. A survey so simple does not measure such.
Here are two issues with "Race Realism doesn't damage social cohesion":
1) "Races differ in intelligence" doesn't mean that much if you do not also know the implications of an entire standard deviation in IQ difference, and do not know the genetic origin of this difference. White people already sort of know intuitively, and have known since elementary school, that Black people are more likely to be unintelligent.
The more you get into HBD, the more you realize how insidious environmentalism is. There are just so many things which make it clear that a "race-blind" society is a cargo cult. Black people benefit from environmentalism for 2 reasons: First, it justifies all of their racial inadequacies by reflecting it onto White people and suggesting it is actually White inadequacy which is responsible for Black suffering. This is why we spend around 600 Billion unrequited tax dollars on Black people every year. Secondly, it discourages "segregation", which ought to simply be called freedom of association. White people already sort of implicitly know that living around Black people sucks, but if this implicitly was made explicit it would rapidly increase and normalize White self-organization. Segregation under HBD acceptance is simply a wise approach based on simple probability and not an exacerbation of historical social injustices. This sucks for Black people because living around Black people is undesirable even if you yourself are Black. I would actually consider this the hardest part of any remigration program. I feel bad for the more intellectual and well-tempered black people, some of whom I would consider among my friends, who would be condemned to the ill collective qualities of their countrymen.
I'm also not really sure what Cremieux's ideology is, which is probably a good thing. He is very data-oriented and doesn't try to promote a particular belief system. He could be a fascist for all I know.
It would be interesting if the study asked before hand, "are there racial differences in academic performance?" to get a baseline outside of "IQ" and "genetics," which are sort of mystical concepts for the average person.
Can you link to the 600 billion number? Is that a Ryan Faulk or Steve Sailer number? I'm doing my own calculations for a future article and want to cross reference the methodology to see if I got anything wrong.
I would agree that a remigration program of black people to Africa would not only be hard, but the cost would be so high that it is better off sticking to the 600 billion (if that's the real number), at least in the short term. This isn't because plane tickets are expensive, but because you also have to factor in the fact that overcoming academia and liberalism would be very expensive. You need to calculate the costs of ideological change, which are immense.
One of the things I try to demonstrate in this article is that Civil Rights was a very expensive process, not just in the potential downstream consequences (lowered school standards, grade inflation, wealth transfer, crime, etc), but in the immediate military occupation required and the political destabilization incurred. Those costs seem invisible to us now that they are "over with" (George Wallace couldn't run today, military occupation is no longer required to enforce segregation), but reversing course would actually be more costly.
You wouldn't just be beating white teenagers over the head with batons, you would be fighting elite academics, bureaucrats, and billionaires like Bill Gates. Cremieux makes the argument that these factions *should* support race realism, without understanding why they *don't*. I disagree with him that they don't support it because they are "misinformed." I gave him the opportunity to give another theory if that is a strawman of his explanation, and he declined. I assume I am correct in my interpretation, "elites are just misinformed!," because that is generally the theory. "We have to redpill Bill Gates!"
It’s 600 billion per year, actually, so over the course of every black persons lifetime it would be well worth the cost. But it’s probably cheaper and still effective to just reinstate segregation and concentrate Black people in some sort of… Uhh, not camps. Neighborhoods. Heh, dodged a bullet there.
I was hoping it would be a written essay with sources where I could click on links and scrutinize the data -- it seems to just be a video from what I could google.
Concentrating black people in ghettos increases their crime rate. I see no effort from Faulk or anyone else to calculate the cost of destroying America's civil religion. I see no effort from anyone other than outright Hitler-worshippers to replace it with something else. Even then, I see no plan to actually effect this change, so I remain unconvinced.
For example: "Taxation is inefficient and we should eliminate taxation." I agree that taxation is inefficient, but without a plan to replace taxation with something else, and an explanation of how we get from point A to point B, I'm not sold.
If you wanted to reduce spending, you could cut social security and achieve better effects more quickly. If you wanted to reduce crime, you could simply not release criminals onto the streets and achieve better effects more quickly (most crime is recidivism). None of that would require Hitler chungus posting. But even that would be extremely difficult, considering the Boomer lobby and the ideological opposition to punishing criminals. I think a form of colorblind Caesarism is more likely than anything directly anti-black, if you're interested in achieving results within your lifetime.
I think you're obviously right that overturning the myth of racial equality would be disruptive. People who claim that nothing would change are refusing to be honest. The real discussion would be to compare acceptance of HBD with possible alternatives, including an attempt to just maintain the status quo and uphold the myth for as long as possible. That latter approach will surely have costs associated with it as well. I imagine HBD advocates would make a couple of observations:
1. The social fabric is already coming apart and has been for a long time. I imagine some would even try to say this is a direct result of the Civil Rights religion, and I would partially agree with them. If these great wonderful civilizational goods such as trust and institutions and all the rest of it were destroyed by a project dedicated to upholding lies (i.e. the lie that all races are the same), then it seems pretty plausible to suggest that undoing that damage will, at some point, require that the lying stops.
2. What's the serious alternative? Once people become so dissatisfied with the status quo that they are determined to change it, simply telling them "no because if you do things will happen" isn't likely to stay their hand. Things are going to happen if they don't, too. You need to give people who are dissatisfied something else to aim their dissatisfaction at.
For me, I think HBD is true, so I will never lie about it. At the same time, I'm not super interested in talking about it nonstop. I don't think I've written any posts that were primarily about race. But I don't blame people who are obsessed with it, honestly. If you suppress an obvious truth super duper hard, it's understandable that people who uncover that truth will then become equally upset about being lied to. That's one of the costs you pay when your worldview is reliant on lying.
I also think that whether or not "HBD goes mainstream" won't be determined by people having arguments about the downstream social consequences of that possibility. I don't think ideas can be contained by people who are "in the know" making some sort of pact to willfully bite their tongues so that the normies won't find out, not in today's media environment. With the Internet and Elon's Twitter around, some amount of people will always defect from that and just say what is true, downstream consequences be damned. The info is out there now and it's going to do whatever it's going to do.
Yes, I think we should have a serious conversation about these things. Once we admit that there will be consequences, we can weigh these consequences and make a determination. Unfortunately I think that pretending the consequences don't exist (of both HBD and of Civil Rights) is very unproductive and often tragic.
I think you are missing the point re. Clinton and cutting Black crime. Yes, you can cut it without race realism, but then once it gets low enough that people feel less scared they 'stop taking their meds' and revert to feeling guilty about too many black people being in prison, being shot by police etc.
Clinton cut black crime to about 4 or 5 times its pre-Civil Rights level and managed to lock that in for two decades. To cut back black crime on a long-term basis you need to be able to say 'so what?' in response to people complaining about Blacks and the justice system. It's hard to see how you can do that without public acceptance of HBD.
I am not entirely sure why crime rose precipitously after Bush. We can blame Obama, maybe, and even Trump to an extent. My personal theory is that it's a real estate scheme -- that is going to take some evidence, and I'm working on the article.
The simple explanation is that the policies that were need to cut crime (stop and frisk, three strikes and you're out, long sentences, broken windows policing etc) were increasingly seen as unjustified once crime was no longer high enough to panic people, and they were rolled back, first slowly under Obama and then very fast after BLM. The Trayvon Martin affair is roughly where it started.
Yeah, it seems like a pretty inefficient cycle of democratic politics. I think one solution would be to give cops/military their own electoral vote, aside from the popular vote.
I think you went a little overboard here in terms of length, but the argument checks out to me: that race realism may cause people to think differently about morality/politics but that it only shows up as a long-term/aggregate effect. I would recommend slimming down the article (particularly the introduction) and changing the title .
The length is excessive, tragic, embarrassing. I thought to myself, "a serious man with time on his hands would edit this down by at least 50%." I chose to be a silly man who was tired and wanted to sleep, and hit post with no regard for the consequences. What title would you suggest?
Then become a Sikh or a Unitarian Universalist? I think, as someone highly sympathetic to Hinduism and Buddhism, that both of these religions are bad, but they're kind of exactly what you're asking for.
Well, now I feel bad and should get back to work because I did read it all.
Your substack has a confusing name. This analysis is deep, but not obviously Left except in the parts where you agree with the subtly different definition of "founding" that the American left like to use. I figured there might be an explanation in your About section but it's only about Patreon vs Substack fees.
It seems odd that this discussion is so race focused. Most of the world doesn't have the same obsession with race as the USA, but all the arguments seem to apply also to feminism. A white man and woman differ far more from each other than a white/black man do. If "race realism" is bad and corrosive, then what about "gender realism"? Fear of social unravelling doesn't seem to be holding back the TERFs (or whatever name should be used for them), as they argue that women are fundamentally biologically different to men and can't ever be expected to compete against men in sports. That goes directly against the core teaching of civil rights feminism, so how does it fit into your analysis?
Great post but kind of pointless, there posts showing the GWAS and a bunch of other things pretty much disproved the twin studies. First figure out whether something is true, then whether it is dangerous, and so far it does not look true at all.
I agree this post is slightly pointless. It is a little bit sad that it got many more views than I typically get, but that's how audiences work I suppose. Put e-celeb name in title, "debonking," etc etc.
Sorry for dead posting. This is basically what molecular geneticists like David Reich are arguing, right? I have seen some posts by Sasha Gusev where he argues a more extreme version of this (twin studies where bloated and thus wrong, plus what even is IQ anyways?) but he seems very biased against IQ and a lot of intelligence researchers consider him bad faith, Stuart Richie for example. I don't know what to make of him, really, since I am not well versed (yet) in advanced statistics, so I don't know who is more right. Eric Turkeimer on the other hand sides with him, but Turk is also notoriously motivated (even though he is not a "pure" environmentalist by any means of course).
I was listening a podcast with Reich recently and he actually seems to have kind of backtracked (?) on his positions ("we are going to find genetic differences in cognitive traits that have been selected between ethnic groups") in that notorious 2018 article.
Thanks so much for responding. I'm a young guy and I am still trying to get the hang of this, so to speak. I have only been taught basic social science stats so far and it's hard to understand whats BS and what's not when it comes to genetic studies.
Reich wrote a controversial article in 2018 (here:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html) where he basically argued that the idea that there aren't any selected genetic differences between human ethnic groups (he believes race is a social construct), especially when it comes to cognitive traits, is going to be debunked by the coming waves of genetic research due to us now knowing that the Jay Gould "evolution stopped in Homo Sapiens after some years" argument is BS, and that well-meaning people need to get ready. However, that new paper he did came out recently, (Gusev has a new article about it) and it appears not much has actually come out (yet).
I'm glad you find Gusev and Turkheimer good on this. I enjoy Turkheimer a lot but unfortunately he has lost lots of cred in IQ research circles because he is seen as a struggling leftist. Gusev is seen as too opinionated on IQ (he is tbf) and people dismiss him as bad faith. But so far everything that I have read seems to point that Plomin-style behavioral genetics is in trouble, lol. I have hope in Kathryn Paige Harden, she seems more open minded.
Powerful assisted reproductive technology will soon be harnessed by a wealthy fraction, whether or not the binding dogma of society denounces or outlaws such eugenics. They will find a way of getting there hands on it. The worry is that a large power imbalance could form between the rich and poor. For example, as Johnathan Anomaly has mentioned, organisations currently provide its employees with polygenic screening, but outwardly signal wokism. Seperately, stability is ensured by a large number of competing entities of a similar level of power. It therefore appears necessary for an individualistic form of hereditarianism (i.e. importance of genes for my child's iq, beauty...) even if it inadvertantly leads widespread race realism, to ensure that at worst, balanced arms race exists between many ethnic groups rather than elites outshadowing the rest.
I agree before you say "it inadvertantly leads widespread race realism." I think that "reproductive technology" will skip race realism and go straight to species realism.
I assume by species you mean future human groups that cannot interbreed. Do you think it would be better to have species realism than race (sub-species) realism then? Do you not think that the associated power imbalance would be even greater for species realism than sub-species realism?
I understand that's what you predict, rather than think is moral. I was just also wondering your moral stance on race realism vs species realism. But it is a rather speculative question, so I don't mind if you think its not worth discussing right now.
Long article but really useful,highlights stong dangers with libertarian techno-optimism that i admitedly have a favorable view of.On the counter balance there are dangers with keeping race realist views outside of mainstream longer than it is possible in free speach US,gender blank slatism of academia gavepopularity to manosphere types and andrew tate.
I think you can be a libertarian techno-optimist, just don't discount the possibility of aggregate-level effects of hereditarianism on moral, social, and political attitudes over time. Then we can have a serious discussion of the pros and cons.
Your argument, that the literal truth should be concealed from the public as it leads to unwanted outcomes, is a perversion in itself. What is true should be known, despite the consequences.
That isn't my argument. My argument is that defying the most popular religious dogma of our time is dangerous. That doesn't contradict your ethic that "true should be known, despite the consequences." You're inferring something I'm not saying.
So you agree with him on that it is true, and should be known that there is a racial IQ gap, and yet you attack him on his point that there is no danger in letting it be known? Doesn't that strike you as sophistry at best?
You’re correct it would be socially corrosive, but that doesn’t really matter, it’s inevitable. America’s demographics guarantee that. Possible to maintain these kinds of socially-binding lies with an 80%+ majoritarian population. It’s not possible at 50% or 35%, which is where we’re headed. Especially because it’s really only whites who are expected to abide by this scheme’s tenets.
Difficult for me to predict when the dam will burst on this or what the eventual consequences might be, but I have very high confidence it will happen, likely within the next decade.
Do you think race realism is inevitable in South Africa? If not, why? "Blacks control everything!" Ok, was race realism inevitable in South Africa in 1990? 1980? How do you explain the loss of Apartheid and race realism in South Africa, if demographic are destiny?
1) the evidence then was a lot less convincing. Genetic research was in its very infancy. You could not do an FsT scatter of human populations, for instance. And even though it was even then stretching it a bit, a reasonable person might still have said “well, it’s only been 25 years since the CRA / decolonialism / whatever, they need more time”. 30 years later, no one now seriously believes the gaps will ever disappear.
2) the internet allows the spread of verboten thought in a way previously impossible. It starts as greentexts on the chans, then leaks into edgy substacks and twitters, and before you know it Steve Sailer is being interviewed on Tucker
3) maybe most importantly: the US makes the weather for the West. Apartheid ended because the US pulled the plug. The Cold War was won and the Right in the US was ascendant, it could afford to be magnanimous. Now it’s on the backfoot, probably permanently, and the days of pleasant luxuries are over.
You think that Apartheid ended because they were like, "huh, the Bell Curve is kind of convincing, but not totally. It's 99% of the way there, but I think we should hand power to the communists, just in case they are right. If we turn out to be wrong, we can always use 'takesies backsies' and I'm sure they'll respect that." I doubt you have ever met or spoken with a normal South African -- your exposure is the 10% of the far right that are on Twitter.
Your third point is partially correct. It has nothing to do with demographics.
No, I think apartheid ended because reasonable people believed the blank slate might be largely true and apartheid’s external protector - US popular opinion - desired it to be true.
Now the evidence has changed and, faced with a dire demographic picture, US conservatives (i.e. whites) will be forced to choose between race realism or accepting forever the guilts and redistributions entailed in ‘systemic racism’.
My first point is that modeling political decisions as if they are a result of new scientific research is wrong. Apartheid didn't end because of "insufficient evidence" as you claim.
My second point is that demographics have very little to do with politics. Elites determine political outcomes. There is no counter-example. Apartheid was ended by elites, not by demographics.
When someone says that your article is poorly written in the context of responding to criticism it's usually just a deflection. I saw Chatterton do it in response to criticism from Hanania. Cremieux is better than that. It's a cheap snobby put down that's not even true. Very sad!
It seems beyond obvious that widespread acceptance of HBD will have negative consequences and some positive consequences. Clearly the current equilibrium is not without social instability either. But it seems like the contemporary information environment is such that this knowledge cannot be suppressed, and a wiser use of elite time would be bracing for impact to mitigate damage rather than attempting to deny or refute facts that will inevitably become common knowledge. I also think even without HBD cascading through the consciousnesses of elites, the “civil rights founding” mythology can’t endure forever anyway, or perhaps not even for very much longer.
I think that if the strategy is to "brace for impact," part of that bracing must be an honest discussion about the negative consequences, rather than pretending there are no negative consequences. But we seem to agree on that point.
My apologies for misgendering her -- I thought her profile picture was a male, and since she is anonymous and I've never seen her face or heard her voice, I had no clue.
I sort of detest the term "luxury belief," because I think the correlation between wealth and ideology is generally very weak at the granular level. Sure maybe libertarians tend to be more rich, so in that case "luxury causes libertarianism," but are gay rights a "luxury belief?" That's typically how the right-wing uses the term, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I avoid it.
People are more influenced by the death of God than by a surplus of wealth. I don't actually think that wealth caused the death of God... "good times make weak men" is just bit too simplistic for me.
I googled it to see if anyone had already written an article already debunking luxury beliefs (before I write it myself), and I'm surprised that Rob Henderson supposedly came up with the phrase. I thought it was like 10 years old.
Here's a thought experiment. What if, just as with the sickle cell gene, many people of African heritage have a gene which predisposes them to engage in violence in situations where those of other heritages would not. Would it have been advantageous for Western societies now admitting large numbers of African heritage people to have known about it, and done something different?
This article isn't a defense of mass immigration. I'm not suggesting that race realism couldn't have political advantages with regards to reducing immigration. I mention in the article that it could have benefits. My argument is specifically that it has consequences, and ignoring these is wrong.
The study I address is flawed from the start because it does not account for the aggregate-level effects of hereditarian beliefs on moral and ideological shifts over time. That's my argument. I am not in favor of mass African immigration. I am an environmentalist and I think we should we working to reduce the global population, and mass migration runs contrary to this goal.
Brilliant work, I agree with all of your points. A survey so simple does not measure such.
Here are two issues with "Race Realism doesn't damage social cohesion":
1) "Races differ in intelligence" doesn't mean that much if you do not also know the implications of an entire standard deviation in IQ difference, and do not know the genetic origin of this difference. White people already sort of know intuitively, and have known since elementary school, that Black people are more likely to be unintelligent.
2) If HBD isn't socially corrosive, it's not working. The Futurist Right has a good post on this: https://futuristright.substack.com/p/hbd-demands-racism-towards-blacks
The more you get into HBD, the more you realize how insidious environmentalism is. There are just so many things which make it clear that a "race-blind" society is a cargo cult. Black people benefit from environmentalism for 2 reasons: First, it justifies all of their racial inadequacies by reflecting it onto White people and suggesting it is actually White inadequacy which is responsible for Black suffering. This is why we spend around 600 Billion unrequited tax dollars on Black people every year. Secondly, it discourages "segregation", which ought to simply be called freedom of association. White people already sort of implicitly know that living around Black people sucks, but if this implicitly was made explicit it would rapidly increase and normalize White self-organization. Segregation under HBD acceptance is simply a wise approach based on simple probability and not an exacerbation of historical social injustices. This sucks for Black people because living around Black people is undesirable even if you yourself are Black. I would actually consider this the hardest part of any remigration program. I feel bad for the more intellectual and well-tempered black people, some of whom I would consider among my friends, who would be condemned to the ill collective qualities of their countrymen.
I'm also not really sure what Cremieux's ideology is, which is probably a good thing. He is very data-oriented and doesn't try to promote a particular belief system. He could be a fascist for all I know.
It would be interesting if the study asked before hand, "are there racial differences in academic performance?" to get a baseline outside of "IQ" and "genetics," which are sort of mystical concepts for the average person.
Can you link to the 600 billion number? Is that a Ryan Faulk or Steve Sailer number? I'm doing my own calculations for a future article and want to cross reference the methodology to see if I got anything wrong.
I would agree that a remigration program of black people to Africa would not only be hard, but the cost would be so high that it is better off sticking to the 600 billion (if that's the real number), at least in the short term. This isn't because plane tickets are expensive, but because you also have to factor in the fact that overcoming academia and liberalism would be very expensive. You need to calculate the costs of ideological change, which are immense.
One of the things I try to demonstrate in this article is that Civil Rights was a very expensive process, not just in the potential downstream consequences (lowered school standards, grade inflation, wealth transfer, crime, etc), but in the immediate military occupation required and the political destabilization incurred. Those costs seem invisible to us now that they are "over with" (George Wallace couldn't run today, military occupation is no longer required to enforce segregation), but reversing course would actually be more costly.
You wouldn't just be beating white teenagers over the head with batons, you would be fighting elite academics, bureaucrats, and billionaires like Bill Gates. Cremieux makes the argument that these factions *should* support race realism, without understanding why they *don't*. I disagree with him that they don't support it because they are "misinformed." I gave him the opportunity to give another theory if that is a strawman of his explanation, and he declined. I assume I am correct in my interpretation, "elites are just misinformed!," because that is generally the theory. "We have to redpill Bill Gates!"
Ryan Faulk, “Cost of Brown Town”
It’s 600 billion per year, actually, so over the course of every black persons lifetime it would be well worth the cost. But it’s probably cheaper and still effective to just reinstate segregation and concentrate Black people in some sort of… Uhh, not camps. Neighborhoods. Heh, dodged a bullet there.
I was hoping it would be a written essay with sources where I could click on links and scrutinize the data -- it seems to just be a video from what I could google.
Concentrating black people in ghettos increases their crime rate. I see no effort from Faulk or anyone else to calculate the cost of destroying America's civil religion. I see no effort from anyone other than outright Hitler-worshippers to replace it with something else. Even then, I see no plan to actually effect this change, so I remain unconvinced.
For example: "Taxation is inefficient and we should eliminate taxation." I agree that taxation is inefficient, but without a plan to replace taxation with something else, and an explanation of how we get from point A to point B, I'm not sold.
If you wanted to reduce spending, you could cut social security and achieve better effects more quickly. If you wanted to reduce crime, you could simply not release criminals onto the streets and achieve better effects more quickly (most crime is recidivism). None of that would require Hitler chungus posting. But even that would be extremely difficult, considering the Boomer lobby and the ideological opposition to punishing criminals. I think a form of colorblind Caesarism is more likely than anything directly anti-black, if you're interested in achieving results within your lifetime.
I think you're obviously right that overturning the myth of racial equality would be disruptive. People who claim that nothing would change are refusing to be honest. The real discussion would be to compare acceptance of HBD with possible alternatives, including an attempt to just maintain the status quo and uphold the myth for as long as possible. That latter approach will surely have costs associated with it as well. I imagine HBD advocates would make a couple of observations:
1. The social fabric is already coming apart and has been for a long time. I imagine some would even try to say this is a direct result of the Civil Rights religion, and I would partially agree with them. If these great wonderful civilizational goods such as trust and institutions and all the rest of it were destroyed by a project dedicated to upholding lies (i.e. the lie that all races are the same), then it seems pretty plausible to suggest that undoing that damage will, at some point, require that the lying stops.
2. What's the serious alternative? Once people become so dissatisfied with the status quo that they are determined to change it, simply telling them "no because if you do things will happen" isn't likely to stay their hand. Things are going to happen if they don't, too. You need to give people who are dissatisfied something else to aim their dissatisfaction at.
For me, I think HBD is true, so I will never lie about it. At the same time, I'm not super interested in talking about it nonstop. I don't think I've written any posts that were primarily about race. But I don't blame people who are obsessed with it, honestly. If you suppress an obvious truth super duper hard, it's understandable that people who uncover that truth will then become equally upset about being lied to. That's one of the costs you pay when your worldview is reliant on lying.
I also think that whether or not "HBD goes mainstream" won't be determined by people having arguments about the downstream social consequences of that possibility. I don't think ideas can be contained by people who are "in the know" making some sort of pact to willfully bite their tongues so that the normies won't find out, not in today's media environment. With the Internet and Elon's Twitter around, some amount of people will always defect from that and just say what is true, downstream consequences be damned. The info is out there now and it's going to do whatever it's going to do.
Yes, I think we should have a serious conversation about these things. Once we admit that there will be consequences, we can weigh these consequences and make a determination. Unfortunately I think that pretending the consequences don't exist (of both HBD and of Civil Rights) is very unproductive and often tragic.
I think you are missing the point re. Clinton and cutting Black crime. Yes, you can cut it without race realism, but then once it gets low enough that people feel less scared they 'stop taking their meds' and revert to feeling guilty about too many black people being in prison, being shot by police etc.
Clinton cut black crime to about 4 or 5 times its pre-Civil Rights level and managed to lock that in for two decades. To cut back black crime on a long-term basis you need to be able to say 'so what?' in response to people complaining about Blacks and the justice system. It's hard to see how you can do that without public acceptance of HBD.
I agree with your overall thesis.
I am not entirely sure why crime rose precipitously after Bush. We can blame Obama, maybe, and even Trump to an extent. My personal theory is that it's a real estate scheme -- that is going to take some evidence, and I'm working on the article.
The simple explanation is that the policies that were need to cut crime (stop and frisk, three strikes and you're out, long sentences, broken windows policing etc) were increasingly seen as unjustified once crime was no longer high enough to panic people, and they were rolled back, first slowly under Obama and then very fast after BLM. The Trayvon Martin affair is roughly where it started.
Yeah, it seems like a pretty inefficient cycle of democratic politics. I think one solution would be to give cops/military their own electoral vote, aside from the popular vote.
I think you went a little overboard here in terms of length, but the argument checks out to me: that race realism may cause people to think differently about morality/politics but that it only shows up as a long-term/aggregate effect. I would recommend slimming down the article (particularly the introduction) and changing the title .
The length is excessive, tragic, embarrassing. I thought to myself, "a serious man with time on his hands would edit this down by at least 50%." I chose to be a silly man who was tired and wanted to sleep, and hit post with no regard for the consequences. What title would you suggest?
Double downing on dangerous race realism, or something along those lines.
> Hindu-Judeo-Christian
Yes, yes, yes, I like this development 😈🤙🏾
Then become a Sikh or a Unitarian Universalist? I think, as someone highly sympathetic to Hinduism and Buddhism, that both of these religions are bad, but they're kind of exactly what you're asking for.
> Then become a Sikh
That might inadvertently be happening, though maybe not in name (yet).
> Seriously: no one has time for all that.
Well, now I feel bad and should get back to work because I did read it all.
Your substack has a confusing name. This analysis is deep, but not obviously Left except in the parts where you agree with the subtly different definition of "founding" that the American left like to use. I figured there might be an explanation in your About section but it's only about Patreon vs Substack fees.
It seems odd that this discussion is so race focused. Most of the world doesn't have the same obsession with race as the USA, but all the arguments seem to apply also to feminism. A white man and woman differ far more from each other than a white/black man do. If "race realism" is bad and corrosive, then what about "gender realism"? Fear of social unravelling doesn't seem to be holding back the TERFs (or whatever name should be used for them), as they argue that women are fundamentally biologically different to men and can't ever be expected to compete against men in sports. That goes directly against the core teaching of civil rights feminism, so how does it fit into your analysis?
Edit: removed the big secret
Shh, do not give away my secrets! You will unfairly reward the lazy readers who do not comb through everything...
I am a leftist, and you can read about my political positions here: https://deepleft.substack.com/p/who-am-i
America is the center of the world, and race is the center of America, sorry, "rest of the world!"
The "gender realism" argument is interesting. Will DM you as I think this could be an interesting conversation.
Great post but kind of pointless, there posts showing the GWAS and a bunch of other things pretty much disproved the twin studies. First figure out whether something is true, then whether it is dangerous, and so far it does not look true at all.
I agree this post is slightly pointless. It is a little bit sad that it got many more views than I typically get, but that's how audiences work I suppose. Put e-celeb name in title, "debonking," etc etc.
i have no clue what you just said
Sorry for dead posting. This is basically what molecular geneticists like David Reich are arguing, right? I have seen some posts by Sasha Gusev where he argues a more extreme version of this (twin studies where bloated and thus wrong, plus what even is IQ anyways?) but he seems very biased against IQ and a lot of intelligence researchers consider him bad faith, Stuart Richie for example. I don't know what to make of him, really, since I am not well versed (yet) in advanced statistics, so I don't know who is more right. Eric Turkeimer on the other hand sides with him, but Turk is also notoriously motivated (even though he is not a "pure" environmentalist by any means of course).
I was listening a podcast with Reich recently and he actually seems to have kind of backtracked (?) on his positions ("we are going to find genetic differences in cognitive traits that have been selected between ethnic groups") in that notorious 2018 article.
Thanks so much for responding. I'm a young guy and I am still trying to get the hang of this, so to speak. I have only been taught basic social science stats so far and it's hard to understand whats BS and what's not when it comes to genetic studies.
Reich wrote a controversial article in 2018 (here:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html) where he basically argued that the idea that there aren't any selected genetic differences between human ethnic groups (he believes race is a social construct), especially when it comes to cognitive traits, is going to be debunked by the coming waves of genetic research due to us now knowing that the Jay Gould "evolution stopped in Homo Sapiens after some years" argument is BS, and that well-meaning people need to get ready. However, that new paper he did came out recently, (Gusev has a new article about it) and it appears not much has actually come out (yet).
I'm glad you find Gusev and Turkheimer good on this. I enjoy Turkheimer a lot but unfortunately he has lost lots of cred in IQ research circles because he is seen as a struggling leftist. Gusev is seen as too opinionated on IQ (he is tbf) and people dismiss him as bad faith. But so far everything that I have read seems to point that Plomin-style behavioral genetics is in trouble, lol. I have hope in Kathryn Paige Harden, she seems more open minded.
Powerful assisted reproductive technology will soon be harnessed by a wealthy fraction, whether or not the binding dogma of society denounces or outlaws such eugenics. They will find a way of getting there hands on it. The worry is that a large power imbalance could form between the rich and poor. For example, as Johnathan Anomaly has mentioned, organisations currently provide its employees with polygenic screening, but outwardly signal wokism. Seperately, stability is ensured by a large number of competing entities of a similar level of power. It therefore appears necessary for an individualistic form of hereditarianism (i.e. importance of genes for my child's iq, beauty...) even if it inadvertantly leads widespread race realism, to ensure that at worst, balanced arms race exists between many ethnic groups rather than elites outshadowing the rest.
I agree before you say "it inadvertantly leads widespread race realism." I think that "reproductive technology" will skip race realism and go straight to species realism.
edit: spelling
I assume by species you mean future human groups that cannot interbreed. Do you think it would be better to have species realism than race (sub-species) realism then? Do you not think that the associated power imbalance would be even greater for species realism than sub-species realism?
I'm not making a moral judgment, just speaking to what I predict for the future and believe is inevitable. I prefer realism over wishful thinking.
I understand that's what you predict, rather than think is moral. I was just also wondering your moral stance on race realism vs species realism. But it is a rather speculative question, so I don't mind if you think its not worth discussing right now.
Long article but really useful,highlights stong dangers with libertarian techno-optimism that i admitedly have a favorable view of.On the counter balance there are dangers with keeping race realist views outside of mainstream longer than it is possible in free speach US,gender blank slatism of academia gavepopularity to manosphere types and andrew tate.
I think you can be a libertarian techno-optimist, just don't discount the possibility of aggregate-level effects of hereditarianism on moral, social, and political attitudes over time. Then we can have a serious discussion of the pros and cons.
Your argument, that the literal truth should be concealed from the public as it leads to unwanted outcomes, is a perversion in itself. What is true should be known, despite the consequences.
That isn't my argument. My argument is that defying the most popular religious dogma of our time is dangerous. That doesn't contradict your ethic that "true should be known, despite the consequences." You're inferring something I'm not saying.
So you agree with him on that it is true, and should be known that there is a racial IQ gap, and yet you attack him on his point that there is no danger in letting it be known? Doesn't that strike you as sophistry at best?
You’re correct it would be socially corrosive, but that doesn’t really matter, it’s inevitable. America’s demographics guarantee that. Possible to maintain these kinds of socially-binding lies with an 80%+ majoritarian population. It’s not possible at 50% or 35%, which is where we’re headed. Especially because it’s really only whites who are expected to abide by this scheme’s tenets.
Difficult for me to predict when the dam will burst on this or what the eventual consequences might be, but I have very high confidence it will happen, likely within the next decade.
Do you think race realism is inevitable in South Africa? If not, why? "Blacks control everything!" Ok, was race realism inevitable in South Africa in 1990? 1980? How do you explain the loss of Apartheid and race realism in South Africa, if demographic are destiny?
Three reasons:
1) the evidence then was a lot less convincing. Genetic research was in its very infancy. You could not do an FsT scatter of human populations, for instance. And even though it was even then stretching it a bit, a reasonable person might still have said “well, it’s only been 25 years since the CRA / decolonialism / whatever, they need more time”. 30 years later, no one now seriously believes the gaps will ever disappear.
2) the internet allows the spread of verboten thought in a way previously impossible. It starts as greentexts on the chans, then leaks into edgy substacks and twitters, and before you know it Steve Sailer is being interviewed on Tucker
3) maybe most importantly: the US makes the weather for the West. Apartheid ended because the US pulled the plug. The Cold War was won and the Right in the US was ascendant, it could afford to be magnanimous. Now it’s on the backfoot, probably permanently, and the days of pleasant luxuries are over.
You think that Apartheid ended because they were like, "huh, the Bell Curve is kind of convincing, but not totally. It's 99% of the way there, but I think we should hand power to the communists, just in case they are right. If we turn out to be wrong, we can always use 'takesies backsies' and I'm sure they'll respect that." I doubt you have ever met or spoken with a normal South African -- your exposure is the 10% of the far right that are on Twitter.
Your third point is partially correct. It has nothing to do with demographics.
No, I think apartheid ended because reasonable people believed the blank slate might be largely true and apartheid’s external protector - US popular opinion - desired it to be true.
Now the evidence has changed and, faced with a dire demographic picture, US conservatives (i.e. whites) will be forced to choose between race realism or accepting forever the guilts and redistributions entailed in ‘systemic racism’.
My first point is that modeling political decisions as if they are a result of new scientific research is wrong. Apartheid didn't end because of "insufficient evidence" as you claim.
My second point is that demographics have very little to do with politics. Elites determine political outcomes. There is no counter-example. Apartheid was ended by elites, not by demographics.
When someone says that your article is poorly written in the context of responding to criticism it's usually just a deflection. I saw Chatterton do it in response to criticism from Hanania. Cremieux is better than that. It's a cheap snobby put down that's not even true. Very sad!
Well, I want to be such a supremely superior writer that no one can ever suggest such a thing! Such criticism is only motivation for me to improve! :)
It seems beyond obvious that widespread acceptance of HBD will have negative consequences and some positive consequences. Clearly the current equilibrium is not without social instability either. But it seems like the contemporary information environment is such that this knowledge cannot be suppressed, and a wiser use of elite time would be bracing for impact to mitigate damage rather than attempting to deny or refute facts that will inevitably become common knowledge. I also think even without HBD cascading through the consciousnesses of elites, the “civil rights founding” mythology can’t endure forever anyway, or perhaps not even for very much longer.
I think that if the strategy is to "brace for impact," part of that bracing must be an honest discussion about the negative consequences, rather than pretending there are no negative consequences. But we seem to agree on that point.
Crem is a chic btw
My apologies for misgendering her -- I thought her profile picture was a male, and since she is anonymous and I've never seen her face or heard her voice, I had no clue.
https://youtu.be/pmlpggdmeE8?si=0Ef6xXikwlHxyFyf here you go
bruh you completely pranked me. "a man" Yeah of course it's a voice changer lol
TLDR: Race realism not causing racial conflict and libertarian atheism are luxury beliefs
I sort of detest the term "luxury belief," because I think the correlation between wealth and ideology is generally very weak at the granular level. Sure maybe libertarians tend to be more rich, so in that case "luxury causes libertarianism," but are gay rights a "luxury belief?" That's typically how the right-wing uses the term, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I avoid it.
People are more influenced by the death of God than by a surplus of wealth. I don't actually think that wealth caused the death of God... "good times make weak men" is just bit too simplistic for me.
Luxury beliefs are a meme. Hansonian self-deception explains people's discontinuity between their actions and beliefs much better.
I googled it to see if anyone had already written an article already debunking luxury beliefs (before I write it myself), and I'm surprised that Rob Henderson supposedly came up with the phrase. I thought it was like 10 years old.
Here's a thought experiment. What if, just as with the sickle cell gene, many people of African heritage have a gene which predisposes them to engage in violence in situations where those of other heritages would not. Would it have been advantageous for Western societies now admitting large numbers of African heritage people to have known about it, and done something different?
This article isn't a defense of mass immigration. I'm not suggesting that race realism couldn't have political advantages with regards to reducing immigration. I mention in the article that it could have benefits. My argument is specifically that it has consequences, and ignoring these is wrong.
The study I address is flawed from the start because it does not account for the aggregate-level effects of hereditarian beliefs on moral and ideological shifts over time. That's my argument. I am not in favor of mass African immigration. I am an environmentalist and I think we should we working to reduce the global population, and mass migration runs contrary to this goal.