The brief bios of the jurists who ruled on desegregation are very interesting. It certainly runs counter to many of the conspiratorial ideas often proposed. I wish the Right would spend more time reflecting on why the American ideological perspective on race has come to be. They seem to be laser focused on disproving it rather than understanding its development. Great article.
The conclusion of such reflection (often encouraged by moldbug) is that the entire American project was criminally flawed from the start and founded by perverts masquerading as learned men. May contain truth but also unpopular and provides no proactive action to take
I embrace Hamilton's perversions and Franklin's debauchery; I also endorse Prince Arjuna, Prince Bhima, and the founding of states by inter-species impregnations and polyandry; and Romulus killing his brother and drinking wolf's milk; and the mentorship of Chiron, the shape shifting of Odin and Zeus... Perversion is not the "mistake at the heart of the American founders," this is a stuffy conservative take. I don't even think Moldbug would agree with that.
Perversion among famous figures is common, but I would argue it is a big liability when drafting a nation state so dependent on legal norms. The American system the founders envisioned broke down almost completely following their deaths for utterly predictable reasons.
If the founders were all Jesuit monks (or whatever stuffy form of monogamous sexlessness you prefer), I don't think that would have made America a superpower any sooner. Maybe you think imperialism is a sin too.
Because white people (either as distinct ethnic groups, or more broadly as an ethnic category) have lost touch with the embodied spirits that animate them, they are trying to fall back on to either scientific race or doctrinal religion as a re-animating factor to generate life within and between them once more.
This is is what underlies many of the pagan versus Christian fights that I see on Twitter and Substack.
However, the problem is that, for the most part, these fights remain conceptual/intellectual, and barely do anything to impact the actual bodies of people that organize and carry out their lives. Everyone who participates in these brawls treats belief as a mental exercise, not a type of existential contact that puts one back into touch with genuine identity, mythology, communion, etc.
The idea that these roots can be manufactured through reason is a testament to how much liberalism guides collective Western mores and decision-making, even of those on the farthest ends of the right.
I might add that one of the reasons this project is such a struggle is that the West has completely stamped out the role of women (and the feminine) of acting as guardians and promoters of culture; not through any external or political position, but through their natural discernment and wile that selects for good, archetypal men.
"Racist Americans, like most Americans throughout history, have an isolationist streak,"
The Southern US was actually the most pro-intervention part of the US in regards to WWII before Pearl Harbor. Maybe they cared more about foreign intervention when it was *white* people who were being brutalized.
I would love to see some data on isolationism if you have any. From the sources I have seen, only the Germanic west (especially the Dakotas) which were strongly anti-interventionist stand out. The rest of the country was still generally against intervention in WWII until Pearl Harbor.
By 1960, there was definitely a sentiment among racists in the south that foreign intervention was dumb when the communists were already taking over the American government (in their opinion). Wallace appealed directly to that with his commitment to withdraw from Vietnam. Would be interested in some evidence to the contrary. I agree that in 1940 things were different. Two different time periods.
I appreciate the sources (although you may wanna clean up those links). The very clear facts are this: The most isolationist states were the Germanic midwest (Ohio to Minnesota) who were 15% in favor of war. The least isolationist were Arizona and Florida, at most 35%. Between 85% and 65% of Americans were opposed to war, including racist southerners in the south. That was my point. Wallace was trying to make gains specifically in Ohio, by the way, which was one of the most isolationist states.
Hitler: Germans good, maybe English, everyone else bad. Unless I need them then I guess Italians OK. Jews bad despite smart. Asians strangely effective yellow monkeys. Doesn't really understand IQ or genetics at all. Wants to send best genes in Germany to die in the Urals forever to preserve their Wagnerian romanticism.
Stalin: Genetics total nonsense and everyone genetically equal. People so equal that anything unequal must mean kulak saboteurs, PURGE!
Even fucking grain should not be hierarchal or evolutionary. All are equal. All will starve equal.
Churchill: All the brown people of the world should be our colonies because we are fucking better than them. Never give up India. The Anglo shall triumph over the Teuton!
Everyones favorite hero of WWII. Figured out not to trust Stalin but betrayed by FDR.
FDR: My legs don't work. I guess I can trust this Stalin guy because he thinks people are equal. I'm going to bankrupt England and give ridiculous amounts of lend lease right up until the end of the communists can conquer half of Europe.
Do you really believe Stalin on a personal level rejected genetics and believed in literal biological human equality? I know what the ideological line was on that question which he paid lip service to but have my doubts he believed that on a personal level.
I think that it is possible that he was a Lamarckian, but I am not well-versed in Lamarckianism enough to understand it in detail. It is possible that Lamarckianism, at the time, seemed like a good system that smart people could reasonably believe in (with a bit of motivated reasoning), even if this is no longer the case. It's also possible that Stalin just never gave too much thought to the question and had no strong opinions either way.
Denying genetics entirely is fairly dogmatic, but also, genetics weren't really a thing until 1953. It's not entirely true Stalin "denied the science" when the science didn't actually exist to the extent that it does today. Stalin was a pragmatic man, and I think if the question of genetics ever hit him on a pragmatic level, he might soften his stance. However, genetics and issues of heredity are inherently intergenerational, and he wasn't around long enough for his views to have practical effects.
Stalin was pragmatic about his own power (to an extent). On everything else not so much. There was nothing pragmatic about the Holomdor or the purges. Just sheer ideological stupidity.
The point is that all the communists end up doing the same things over and over in different places and times. The ideology leads to it inevitably. They have no explanation for inequality, so they are constantly trying to “fix” it.
Without genetics there is no model of the world that accurately explains inequality.
Yes, it’s obvious that he believed in the equality of all people. Races, classes, individuals.
He really was a communist! That’s my take on him, but the specifics of Stalin aren’t important. Communism believes in this and that’s why all the different communists in all the different places all ended up doing the same things (killing people when they couldn’t make them equal, which was what was supposed to happen because they are equal).
People who believe in HBD have an explanation for persistent inequality. Some people are just better than others. There is nothing to fix, it just is what it is.
People who reject that explanation have to view the world as inherently unjust, and to the extent they care about injustice will do things to try to fix the “problem” and will inevitably create real problems trying to solve the fake problem, which can’t be solved.
It’s not at all ‘obvious he believed in the equality of all people.’ In reality, few communists believe in actual biological equality of groups or individuals. Stalin treated certain groups and individuals very differently than others.
Marx and Engels held views on race that would be considered racist by contemporary standards.
As far as killing large numbers of people, finance capitalism is up there with Marxism in body count.
In no ‘communist’ society such as the USSR, East Germany, North Korea, was there any insistence that ditch diggers could be interchangeable with physicists or that they should be paid the same.
People can treat different groups and individuals differently for all sorts of reasons. Stalin never said "the Ukrainians are biologically inferior and deserve it." But he has all sorts of reason to prefer Ukrainian peasants starved rather than city dwellers in Russia once it became obvious there wasn't enough grain.
"finance capitalism is up there with Marxism in body count"
I would strongly disagree. It's such a far fetched statement I'm tempted to give you basically no credibility.
Great piece. Beyond any moral arguments - which are usually ineffective at swaying true believers anyway - HBD is based on spurious science and should be resisted on those grounds alone. It's a political program with scientistic veneer.
For example, genetics is a hard science that carries prestige as a source of truth, but population genetic research by serious researchers doesn't support a HBD political program. It doesn't necessarily conflict with one either, it's just too vague and complex to function as an endorsement of any particular political course. However, it can be interpreted disingenuously to make it appear as though it does, and then passed off to the layperson as science, when it is political pamphleteering sprinkled with a patina of scientific methodology.
HBD proponents do overstate how confident we can be about the extent to which the IQ/academic achievement gap is genetic. I do think that a softer HBD stance—one that holds that group differences do exist, are persistent, and that our best efforts to close these differences have failed—still carries political implications.
Anyone who will stand up for their beliefs, consequences be damned, has my respect. Real beliefs do have real consequences, and therein lies the danger. Working on a follow up article to clarify.
How does one know that any other genetic science isn’t being interpreted disingenuously to prove misleading points to layman grant people, or if other such studies were even correct to begin with? Hbd does not seem uniquely guilty of these practices
I actually addressed this topic in a recent piece, which I'll gladly paraphrase. Yes, the academy is probably cucked to some extent- there's obviously political influence when it comes to scientific research - but it's dubious to say the least to argue that HBD is uniquely not politically motivated, or that research that affirms it somehow isn't cucked despite also emerging from the ostensibly discredited academy. The fact that we can even speak of science as being based or cucked is probably a sign we're not talking about science at all.
Science is not sacred and findings can be interpreted and debated in a variety of ways. Whatever flaws exist in HBD the foundational premise( unequal distribution of intelligence and traits among and between population groups) is a reality. The debate exists around causes and origins, genetics, environmental factors, a combination of both, etc.
Can you describe an elite without a PhD? When I think of an elite without a PhD, I'm thinking of a stock broker, a self-made millionaire, and entrepreneur. Do you think these people are dumber than people with PhDs?
Those aren't elites. Elites are high-profile people in major media companies, (e.g. reporters for NBC or columnists for the NYT), everyone at the Ivy League, Everyone who works for the major Foundations, e.g. the Ford Foundation.
I disagree that a millionaire is less influential than a reporter. Reporters are selected by elites -- they live and die according to elite preferences. Reporters are middle management, at best. Your theory that reporters are elites is like calling Brad Pitt an elite. You're confusing actors and producers.
Putting aside reporters for a moment -- are you arguing that "everyone at the Ivy League" is less intelligent than the average PhD? People who work at the Ford Foundation are less intelligent than the average PhD?
Here's how I come at this from the black side of things:
I'll admit that when I got "redpilled" (more blackpilled in my case) I went through a catastrophizing spell where I would think stuff like "oh my god! they're gonna reinstate Jim Crow!" but after pondering it a bit more, I've come to conclusion while the return of exclusionary and discriminatory policies toward black ppl is certainly possible, the nature of our political system makes this extremely unlikely. It also, as you described, probably wouldn't alter the moral inclinations of liberal elites enough to really move the needle.
I think if race realism ever does become widely known and accepted by society, the biggest casuality for black people will be our own sense of self.
If I were to try and define what the ultimate project and aim of pro-black movements over the past century or so has been, in a holistic sense, I would say it's to provide black people with a positive racial identity in order to combat the self-hatred and inferiority complexes engendered by centuries of slavery and colonialism. This is what black existentialist writers like Frantz Fanon were talking about, and the "Black Power" movement that people like him inspired was, in addition to being a revolt against "oppressive" political systems, a kind a re-invention of how black people thought of themselves.
Things like wearing your hair "natural", changing our "slave names", celebrating black and African history, all came into vogue in the 60s and 70s as ways to tell everyone that we weren't going to be ashamed of who we were anymore and we weren't going to submit and be slaves ever again
HBD knowledge probably won't lead to anti-black genocide, but I think it will ultimately create a sense of nihilism among black ppl.
I disagree that black power movements were generally positively motivated. I think they were mostly fueled by political and ideological resentment from a leadership class of non-black or mixed race people.
There are a number of depressed white dudes who seem to think "white men are inferior athletically and sexually." I generally think that depressed people racialize (rationalize) their depression with large conspiracy theories. Normal healthy people don't get depressed because their "race" is dumb, weak, or has small peepee. But there are a lot of mentally ill Asians, whites, and blacks who will project their mental illness onto "racial circumstance," as if black people were the only race on earth, that their "inferiority complex" would disappear. Nope: mentally ill people just rationalize their depression rather than confront the fact that it is the product of irrational forces (either beliefs resulting from trauma or defective brain chemistry). Some of the dumbest people I know are also happy, narcissistic, and confident. They don't have an inferiority complex. They don't give a fuck.
Most of the early black power leaders were mixed race (NAACP): Douglas, Dubois, and Huey Newton were all racially mixed. Furthermore, black power was inspired, encouraged, and unleashed by ideological communists (usually white or Jewish). You can look into the early funding of "black power" newspapers if you're interested in an empirical look at this question. My argument is that black people didn't have a "crisis of confidence" in the 1960s. Instead, they were emboldened by white and Jewish elites, and lead into cultural agitation by a mixed race class of leaders. Not sure what your ethnic background is, if you have identifiable non-black ancestry, and I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you personally. But basically believe that black nationalism is a total fabrication, entirely astroturfed, with no basis in "natural racial blood loyalty." I feel similarly about white nationalism, and I would say that same thing about Hispanic or Asian nationalism (although the Spanish language + Catholicism is more significant in forming group distinction).
My contention is that nationalism is a religious phenomenon, and it rises and falls due to minoritarian pressures from ruling classes. It is not a natural biological "normal" that humans just gravitate toward forming racial blocs. Maybe in highly violent and unstable conditions, like prison gangs in the 1990s, but even that isn't strict:
The Texas Syndicate allows whites to join; Nazi Lowriders allow Hispanics to join; Dead Man Incorporated was allied with the Black Guerrilla Family and opposed the Aryan Brotherhood; Pale Kings has repudiated white supremacy (lol); Folk Nation used a star of David as their symbol and united gangs across racial lines. Even if society collapsed and "luxury beliefs" like anti-racism ceased to have elite support, most people don't "organically" identify with their race. Black people have been successfully psy-oped, initially by Black-and-Tan Republicans, and later by Truman-Democrats, to think and vote as "black nationalists." This was intensified by internally tortured mixed race people, who often allied with white and Jewish communists to foment the concept of "black identity." It is a hoax.
The same thing happened to Jews around the time of Jesus, where intense Hellenization resulted in ethnically mixed people, who created the "body of Christ" in response. I don't view races as eternal, immutable categories that people are stuck in. People can leave races, create races, and change races. I have spoken with a lot of angry or depressed black people who feel discriminated against, fetishized, or pigeonholed because of their blackness. I've also talked to white and Asian people who feel the exact same way, for different reasons.
Anecdotally, I find that a lot of black people who feel that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is causing their depression and frustration also have a complicated relationship with whites. It is a meme now that many "woke" women of color have white boyfriends, like AOC with her ginger partner. It seems to me that hatred of white supremacy is a fetishization of white sexuality, as evidenced by these anecdotes. I have also had black guys tell me that all whites are secretly racist, because his white girlfriend called him the n-word when she got angry. People are complicated, and often resentment is fueled by a sense of being "spurned." That is, many blacks wish they could be white, and their frustration at not being white transmutes into hatred of whites. By the same token, I believe Irish Catholics and Jews have also felt "spurned" in this way by Anglos, and I also believe there's a percentage of white racists who secretly are jealous of black male sexual success. (which I think is marginal, but that's a statistical question)
I'm not arguing that people can't, or won't, have some sort of affinity or ethnocentrism surrounding their ancestry or heritage. I'm just saying that racial nationalist movements, whether black or white, tend to be based on more than just genetic affinity, but have more to do with mythological or religious narratives that are constructed. I have done an article on interracial dating, and found that upper class liberals are the most "ethnocentric" in their dating preferences:
I am not sure about blacks, but if I had to guess, I would say that the poorest blacks tend to be the most "ethnocentric." But if we account for socio-economic "class" as a form of in-group, then some of this "ethnocentrism" decreases. Among whites, Christians also tended to be less ethno-centric with regard to blacks, but more ethno-centric toward Asians. This is because more blacks are nominally Christian, whereas most Asians are not.
I think anyone who is dumb, black or white, is capable of using their lack of intelligence as an excuse to feel bad about themselves. Or, they can use their lack of athleticism, sexual success, or wealth. If individual black people feel anxious about their self esteem, I think political projects are a "surrogate activity" for self-work. White people with mental illnesses also construct grand narratives about how "the white race is under attack," and they choose "white nationalism" as their surrogate activity. My individualist focus on personal responsibility isn't going to convince most black activists, who will simply deflect that "personal responsibility" is a white supremacist concept. I don't know how much you feel like I am "white-splaining" to you, but just being honest.
I do believe that people need a collective sense of identity, and it is the job of religion or secular political ideologies to provide this. With the decline of Christianity, people are scrambling for a replacement. You could make the counter-argument that a "crisis of Christianity" among black intellectuals (Fanon) contributed more to the rise of black nationalism than the reasons I've cited. But I disagree that knowledge of IQ gaps (which are real whether or not they are biological) needs to inherently make people feel nihilistic. Shudra and Dalit in India feel they are inferior, but don't feel nihilistic. I hate to say this because it sounds mean, but black slaves didn't feel nihilistic. Nihilism is not merely "I'm oppressed!" but "I'm oppressed, and it's my fault." Nihilism is actually a form of internalized guilt/shame for not doing enough. I'm using the word nihilism different from how it is usually used, but I think you are too.
I think you do not understand what modern politics is even about. It is about how much *respect* whom gets, both individually and as a group. I mean like every debate about something useful like how much should be the minimum wage, devolves into one side disrespecting the poor for being lazy and the other side disrespecting the rich for being greedy.
Yes, people do have compassion for people with Down's. But it is a very condescending compassion. The older medical term for that was "retarded", people started using it as an insult, so it got removed from the medical vocab.
So now people try to argue that disability is a social construct because we do not want to disrespect whole groups of people by telling them that they are somehow inferior or defective.
And there is no way RR would not count as that kin of disrespect, insult.
Recognition means "equal dignity" i.e. respect. Modern politics is a sort of a group therapy telling everybody they are just as worthy as everybody else so that they can feel a bit better about themselves.
"Modern politics is a sort of a group therapy telling everybody they are just as worthy as everybody else so that they can feel a bit better about themselves." Would you argue that politics is like astrology for incels?
BTW another interesting outcome of this everybody feeling they are powerless subconsciously is precisely these social justice wars. Basically people belonging to some disadvantaged group feel like "Aha! That is why I am powerless!". Then they proceed to say whitedudes are powerful, which sometimes enrages them because they know they, too, are not. Predictably, it enrages the young white men the most, because they are the most powerless. The age cohort differentials in power, money, and generally life outcomes are enormous right now.
LOL, that's taking it a little too far. Basically very few people have power or have any chance to influence someone who has. But everybody can talk. So people feeling their powerlessness subconsciously in a nominal democracy (note that each individual would still be very powerless in a real one) tend to shift political discussion to whatever they like discussing, so under the guise of politics there is some kind of an enjoyable social dynamic. And then it turns out most people enjoy the "who should be dissed" kind of social dynamic the most. Or to put it a little differently: basically the most power most people will ever have will be pissing someone off, so it will be done a lot.
There is a more fundamental issue with making something like race realism popular, in the western world specifically. People in the west have significantly higher brain hemisphere imbalance and are usually quite prone to the kind of disembodied context-less thinking that can make any sufficiently powerful idea extremely dangerous.
The banner of “Race Realism” could mean racial differences in IQ and other abilities in the here and now and in the precise ways that we have been able to measure(with the caveat that every now and then someone runs into a major gap or mistake made in the studies and then everyone has to readjust all their notions about each racial category); or it could mean that certain phenotypes and religious categories are superior because they seem to come attached with higher abilities to a disproportionate degree.
As far as I am aware, to the average non-western person outside of the urban monoculture in their country, the former view of it is self-evidently true and the latter is laughably naive. This is why you can have a widespread understanding and acknowledgement of group differences without it turning into some racial agitation. It is just the nature of things as they are and people are sufficiently seeped into that nature to just observe and accept reality on its own terms. To the average westerner, however, the latter seems self-evidently true- we’ve extensively studied and proven it haven’t we?!! There is a tendency in the west to see the here and now as a temporally collapsed “end of history” style reality in itself- in its *whole* self. And it is coupled with a confusion of the measurement of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. This is what makes a brush with something like Race Realism dangerous- it is a sufficiently juicy piece of reality to sacrifice to whichever ideological construct one is currently being hypnotized by.
I dispute the idea that westerners are uniquely prone to "disembodied context-less thinking." That sounds like ritualized cargo cults, mindless traditionalism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge to me. You could argue that communism is a "western mind virus" that took over Asian brains and infected them with western-style thinking, but I'm not sure if you would go that far.
I disagree that in non-white countries there is some kind of "Kumbaya" attitude toward ethnic or religious differences. The non-white world is full of ethnic hatred, conflict, resentment, enslavement, caste systems, and genocide. I offer you a platform to defend these views on an interview platform if you wish.
I’ve never been that impressed with race realism because the people there brag and obsess with all their data gathering to tell us something our primitive ancestors knew right away, that foreigners who look and act different are untrustworthy.
That being said, I don’t get your conclusion. Hbd as another idea might cause elite chaos even though every other right wing idea has been fed into the populist machine achieving nothing? And how would hbd elite chaos be worse than the garbage the progressives are already floating on us?
I'm pushing back against a very specific claim, that race realism is not dangerous. I'm not arguing that race realism is the only dangerous idea in the world.
Don't quite agree with the "elite" framing you provide. Elites are determinative in those movements, but I have a more distal theory that elites would have always ended up where we are regardless.
I think egalitarianism is a natural/atavistic impulse. When I read anthropologists; they generally describe hunter-gatherer groups as fairly egalitarian and kinda democratic. Robin Hanson has this farmer/forager theory that farming culture inculcated certain norms and structures that are in ways unnatural and that we are returning to our forager ways: you see this in the general culture with paleo diet, crossfit, seedoils, returning to natural pathways.
Of course, most conservative instincts are prevalent in people as well. Primates that evolved on the savannah had to be risk-averse, status quo inclined, outgroup hatreds, etc. Most groups and ideologies just optimize and hit on various categories of these impulses.
Here's something I have never gotten a good response to. Why is all advertising left-wing coded? There are categories of right wing coded products, but almost all advertising even for lot of right wing products is left. The biggest company in the world is off and on Apple and their just default commercials are some of the wokest propaganda anyone can create and they suffer no penalty from it. You flip through say Reason magazine, National Review, or Daily Wire videos and it is some of the most scummiest buy gold bars or alphabrain pills type advertising with almost no CPG ads. This, despite DailyWire consistently being ranked near the top on Facebook; don't know about recently. My off the shelf thought about it for 30 minutes is that even conservatives deep down like egalitarian/woke advertising. It's aspirational. The reason why socialism, communism, fascism hits with people is we are animals.
I'm borrowing it from rationalists/people into evolutionary stuff. In our complicated world, you often have multicausal explanations for phenomenon and often... you can have one explanation that encapsulates the other. They tend to use distal and proximate to mean farther and closer.
As a crude example, you might take the question of why did that guy have sex with that girl? There are all kinds of proximate reasons you can provide: it feels good, boosts his social status, etc. The distal reason and sorry for anthropomorphizing evolution, but the reason evolution made sex feel good and implanted men with this searing drive for it is to reproduce.
Embedded in this, I am using a kind of best practice in science or reasoning like Occam's Razor. The theory that explains more phenomenon is probably more correct.
It sounds like "distal" is equivalent with the "final cause" in Aristotle's theory. In the case of sex, the formal cause is the presence of sex hormones which cause the erection. The material cause is the act of penetration. The efficient cause is a Tinder match, and the final cause is reproduction.
I agree with you that ideologies tend to appeal to atavistic emotional needs (the need for identity, familiarity, comfort, fairness, revenge, catharsis, safety).
Distal theories aren't necessarily more correct than proximate theories. You see this in macroeconomics or why Trump was elected. I side with many that Trump was a singular individual even though he was tapping into some deep well of populism. I don't think any of us knows what will happen when he goes away.
Advertisements are made by the educated class, and it shines through regardless of the product (radio ads are frequently more right coded just because of who makes them, I’ve noticed)
Everything is made by the educated class, but in most areas there are lots of things that subtly pander to conservatives. Every car company in America knows that trucks are right coded and do targeted marketing towards conservatives; it's just more bro than conservative and can be woke.
Every Nike ad is and has been super woke and it's the most popular clothing brand you see in America. It's just as prevalent in red america as in blue america.
There are conservative media, movies, music, events, and regions.
There is something deeper there that you don't want to admit to.
Back when Nietzsche was the bane of the GOP's Christianity, the left defended him. I recall the claim that he was influential on Nazis as being misinformed evangelical propaganda, by my own black progressive girlfriend.
Twenty years on it's "duh, of course they were inspired by Nietzsche"
It's easy to get confused on this issue, because Nietzsche was opposed to German nationalism in his time. But Ludendorff, for example, was a clear Nietzschean. People just don't read primary sources.
Frankly large parts of this analysis are backwards.
Also, people don't genocide the low IQ, enslave them, maybe, but not genocide.
Genocides are always against some high IQ group, the logic being some version of "why is this group doing better than everyone else? They must be witches/evil oppressors."
If you read the first few paragraphs of my article, you will see that I mention your arguments directly, and say I am not disputing them, but making a separate and specific point about white-vs-white ideological conflict.
The brief bios of the jurists who ruled on desegregation are very interesting. It certainly runs counter to many of the conspiratorial ideas often proposed. I wish the Right would spend more time reflecting on why the American ideological perspective on race has come to be. They seem to be laser focused on disproving it rather than understanding its development. Great article.
Moldbug came up with the answer more than a decade ago
The conclusion of such reflection (often encouraged by moldbug) is that the entire American project was criminally flawed from the start and founded by perverts masquerading as learned men. May contain truth but also unpopular and provides no proactive action to take
If George Washington is a pervert, I don't wanna be right.
Washington consistently had the character of a prince. But there is far less praise to give his colleagues like Hamilton and Franklin.
I embrace Hamilton's perversions and Franklin's debauchery; I also endorse Prince Arjuna, Prince Bhima, and the founding of states by inter-species impregnations and polyandry; and Romulus killing his brother and drinking wolf's milk; and the mentorship of Chiron, the shape shifting of Odin and Zeus... Perversion is not the "mistake at the heart of the American founders," this is a stuffy conservative take. I don't even think Moldbug would agree with that.
Perversion among famous figures is common, but I would argue it is a big liability when drafting a nation state so dependent on legal norms. The American system the founders envisioned broke down almost completely following their deaths for utterly predictable reasons.
If the founders were all Jesuit monks (or whatever stuffy form of monogamous sexlessness you prefer), I don't think that would have made America a superpower any sooner. Maybe you think imperialism is a sin too.
Hamilton was right on economics but otherwise a terrible human being.
This is an area where he is correct. The Founders need to be taken off their pedestals.
But who can you put in their places once they are gone?
That will be determined by future events.
Because white people (either as distinct ethnic groups, or more broadly as an ethnic category) have lost touch with the embodied spirits that animate them, they are trying to fall back on to either scientific race or doctrinal religion as a re-animating factor to generate life within and between them once more.
This is is what underlies many of the pagan versus Christian fights that I see on Twitter and Substack.
However, the problem is that, for the most part, these fights remain conceptual/intellectual, and barely do anything to impact the actual bodies of people that organize and carry out their lives. Everyone who participates in these brawls treats belief as a mental exercise, not a type of existential contact that puts one back into touch with genuine identity, mythology, communion, etc.
The idea that these roots can be manufactured through reason is a testament to how much liberalism guides collective Western mores and decision-making, even of those on the farthest ends of the right.
I might add that one of the reasons this project is such a struggle is that the West has completely stamped out the role of women (and the feminine) of acting as guardians and promoters of culture; not through any external or political position, but through their natural discernment and wile that selects for good, archetypal men.
HBD vs Woke dance off / collective wrestling event, winner takes all.
"Racist Americans, like most Americans throughout history, have an isolationist streak,"
The Southern US was actually the most pro-intervention part of the US in regards to WWII before Pearl Harbor. Maybe they cared more about foreign intervention when it was *white* people who were being brutalized.
I would love to see some data on isolationism if you have any. From the sources I have seen, only the Germanic west (especially the Dakotas) which were strongly anti-interventionist stand out. The rest of the country was still generally against intervention in WWII until Pearl Harbor.
By 1960, there was definitely a sentiment among racists in the south that foreign intervention was dumb when the communists were already taking over the American government (in their opinion). Wallace appealed directly to that with his commitment to withdraw from Vietnam. Would be interested in some evidence to the contrary. I agree that in 1940 things were different. Two different time periods.
Interestingly enough, for most of WWII, Americans understandably considered Japan and not Nazi Germany to be the biggest military threat to the US:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fropercenter.cornell.edu%2Fblog%2Fpolling-and-pearl-harbor&psig=AOvVaw0CNg44_djCOOKOun_u4z75&ust=1724713201603000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBcQjhxqFwoTCMCc_L-fkYgDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAd
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FMill226%2Fstatus%2F1422013252234403841&psig=AOvVaw0CNg44_djCOOKOun_u4z75&ust=1724713201603000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBcQjhxqFwoTCMCc_L-fkYgDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE
Additionally, the source you cite clearly shows that before Pearl Harbor, Germany was considered a bigger threat than Japan.
I appreciate the sources (although you may wanna clean up those links). The very clear facts are this: The most isolationist states were the Germanic midwest (Ohio to Minnesota) who were 15% in favor of war. The least isolationist were Arizona and Florida, at most 35%. Between 85% and 65% of Americans were opposed to war, including racist southerners in the south. That was my point. Wallace was trying to make gains specifically in Ohio, by the way, which was one of the most isolationist states.
Also they thought Japan was a non-White country getting to big for its breaches.
Unrealism is dangerous too. Pick you poison.
Singapore is/was run by someone that publicly espouses HBD and based his public policy on it. A lot of Asia kind of lower key does the same thing.
You are correct that east Asia has a different historical and cultural perspective on HBD. I am speaking to a western audience about a western issue.
Alright, but let's get down to business.
Let's take the creme del la creme, WWII.
Hitler: Germans good, maybe English, everyone else bad. Unless I need them then I guess Italians OK. Jews bad despite smart. Asians strangely effective yellow monkeys. Doesn't really understand IQ or genetics at all. Wants to send best genes in Germany to die in the Urals forever to preserve their Wagnerian romanticism.
Stalin: Genetics total nonsense and everyone genetically equal. People so equal that anything unequal must mean kulak saboteurs, PURGE!
Even fucking grain should not be hierarchal or evolutionary. All are equal. All will starve equal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Churchill: All the brown people of the world should be our colonies because we are fucking better than them. Never give up India. The Anglo shall triumph over the Teuton!
Everyones favorite hero of WWII. Figured out not to trust Stalin but betrayed by FDR.
FDR: My legs don't work. I guess I can trust this Stalin guy because he thinks people are equal. I'm going to bankrupt England and give ridiculous amounts of lend lease right up until the end of the communists can conquer half of Europe.
(I give him hard time he was alright).
What are you replying to? You're still dodging whether or not England was a command economy during WWI. Third time asking.
Do you really believe Stalin on a personal level rejected genetics and believed in literal biological human equality? I know what the ideological line was on that question which he paid lip service to but have my doubts he believed that on a personal level.
I think that it is possible that he was a Lamarckian, but I am not well-versed in Lamarckianism enough to understand it in detail. It is possible that Lamarckianism, at the time, seemed like a good system that smart people could reasonably believe in (with a bit of motivated reasoning), even if this is no longer the case. It's also possible that Stalin just never gave too much thought to the question and had no strong opinions either way.
Denying genetics entirely is fairly dogmatic, but also, genetics weren't really a thing until 1953. It's not entirely true Stalin "denied the science" when the science didn't actually exist to the extent that it does today. Stalin was a pragmatic man, and I think if the question of genetics ever hit him on a pragmatic level, he might soften his stance. However, genetics and issues of heredity are inherently intergenerational, and he wasn't around long enough for his views to have practical effects.
Stalin was pragmatic about his own power (to an extent). On everything else not so much. There was nothing pragmatic about the Holomdor or the purges. Just sheer ideological stupidity.
The point is that all the communists end up doing the same things over and over in different places and times. The ideology leads to it inevitably. They have no explanation for inequality, so they are constantly trying to “fix” it.
Without genetics there is no model of the world that accurately explains inequality.
Yes, it’s obvious that he believed in the equality of all people. Races, classes, individuals.
He really was a communist! That’s my take on him, but the specifics of Stalin aren’t important. Communism believes in this and that’s why all the different communists in all the different places all ended up doing the same things (killing people when they couldn’t make them equal, which was what was supposed to happen because they are equal).
People who believe in HBD have an explanation for persistent inequality. Some people are just better than others. There is nothing to fix, it just is what it is.
People who reject that explanation have to view the world as inherently unjust, and to the extent they care about injustice will do things to try to fix the “problem” and will inevitably create real problems trying to solve the fake problem, which can’t be solved.
It’s not at all ‘obvious he believed in the equality of all people.’ In reality, few communists believe in actual biological equality of groups or individuals. Stalin treated certain groups and individuals very differently than others.
Marx and Engels held views on race that would be considered racist by contemporary standards.
As far as killing large numbers of people, finance capitalism is up there with Marxism in body count.
In no ‘communist’ society such as the USSR, East Germany, North Korea, was there any insistence that ditch diggers could be interchangeable with physicists or that they should be paid the same.
People can treat different groups and individuals differently for all sorts of reasons. Stalin never said "the Ukrainians are biologically inferior and deserve it." But he has all sorts of reason to prefer Ukrainian peasants starved rather than city dwellers in Russia once it became obvious there wasn't enough grain.
"finance capitalism is up there with Marxism in body count"
I would strongly disagree. It's such a far fetched statement I'm tempted to give you basically no credibility.
Great piece. Beyond any moral arguments - which are usually ineffective at swaying true believers anyway - HBD is based on spurious science and should be resisted on those grounds alone. It's a political program with scientistic veneer.
I would go deeper, and say that HBD is a psychological need masquerading as a political program...
HBD is not based on spurious science.
What science isn’t spurious?
For example, genetics is a hard science that carries prestige as a source of truth, but population genetic research by serious researchers doesn't support a HBD political program. It doesn't necessarily conflict with one either, it's just too vague and complex to function as an endorsement of any particular political course. However, it can be interpreted disingenuously to make it appear as though it does, and then passed off to the layperson as science, when it is political pamphleteering sprinkled with a patina of scientific methodology.
HBD proponents do overstate how confident we can be about the extent to which the IQ/academic achievement gap is genetic. I do think that a softer HBD stance—one that holds that group differences do exist, are persistent, and that our best efforts to close these differences have failed—still carries political implications.
Anyone who will stand up for their beliefs, consequences be damned, has my respect. Real beliefs do have real consequences, and therein lies the danger. Working on a follow up article to clarify.
How does one know that any other genetic science isn’t being interpreted disingenuously to prove misleading points to layman grant people, or if other such studies were even correct to begin with? Hbd does not seem uniquely guilty of these practices
I actually addressed this topic in a recent piece, which I'll gladly paraphrase. Yes, the academy is probably cucked to some extent- there's obviously political influence when it comes to scientific research - but it's dubious to say the least to argue that HBD is uniquely not politically motivated, or that research that affirms it somehow isn't cucked despite also emerging from the ostensibly discredited academy. The fact that we can even speak of science as being based or cucked is probably a sign we're not talking about science at all.
Science is not sacred and findings can be interpreted and debated in a variety of ways. Whatever flaws exist in HBD the foundational premise( unequal distribution of intelligence and traits among and between population groups) is a reality. The debate exists around causes and origins, genetics, environmental factors, a combination of both, etc.
Couldn't have put it any better 💯
I'd like to see the data that white elites have an average IQ of 135.
What is the average IQ of a PhD student?
I'd be surprised if it was as high as 135. But in any case most elites don't have PhDs.
Can you describe an elite without a PhD? When I think of an elite without a PhD, I'm thinking of a stock broker, a self-made millionaire, and entrepreneur. Do you think these people are dumber than people with PhDs?
Those aren't elites. Elites are high-profile people in major media companies, (e.g. reporters for NBC or columnists for the NYT), everyone at the Ivy League, Everyone who works for the major Foundations, e.g. the Ford Foundation.
I disagree that a millionaire is less influential than a reporter. Reporters are selected by elites -- they live and die according to elite preferences. Reporters are middle management, at best. Your theory that reporters are elites is like calling Brad Pitt an elite. You're confusing actors and producers.
Putting aside reporters for a moment -- are you arguing that "everyone at the Ivy League" is less intelligent than the average PhD? People who work at the Ford Foundation are less intelligent than the average PhD?
edit: spelling
I agree that reporters are far below millionaires, maybe he was thinking about the owners of the companies.
-A reporter says a faux pas: they’re fired and memoryholed
-A millionaire says a faux pas: they get protested on social media by a boatload of people
There’s a big gulf in reaction simply because the millionaire is more powerful and needs to be sieged, while the reporter is trimmed like a branch.
Here's how I come at this from the black side of things:
I'll admit that when I got "redpilled" (more blackpilled in my case) I went through a catastrophizing spell where I would think stuff like "oh my god! they're gonna reinstate Jim Crow!" but after pondering it a bit more, I've come to conclusion while the return of exclusionary and discriminatory policies toward black ppl is certainly possible, the nature of our political system makes this extremely unlikely. It also, as you described, probably wouldn't alter the moral inclinations of liberal elites enough to really move the needle.
I think if race realism ever does become widely known and accepted by society, the biggest casuality for black people will be our own sense of self.
If I were to try and define what the ultimate project and aim of pro-black movements over the past century or so has been, in a holistic sense, I would say it's to provide black people with a positive racial identity in order to combat the self-hatred and inferiority complexes engendered by centuries of slavery and colonialism. This is what black existentialist writers like Frantz Fanon were talking about, and the "Black Power" movement that people like him inspired was, in addition to being a revolt against "oppressive" political systems, a kind a re-invention of how black people thought of themselves.
Things like wearing your hair "natural", changing our "slave names", celebrating black and African history, all came into vogue in the 60s and 70s as ways to tell everyone that we weren't going to be ashamed of who we were anymore and we weren't going to submit and be slaves ever again
HBD knowledge probably won't lead to anti-black genocide, but I think it will ultimately create a sense of nihilism among black ppl.
I disagree that black power movements were generally positively motivated. I think they were mostly fueled by political and ideological resentment from a leadership class of non-black or mixed race people.
There are a number of depressed white dudes who seem to think "white men are inferior athletically and sexually." I generally think that depressed people racialize (rationalize) their depression with large conspiracy theories. Normal healthy people don't get depressed because their "race" is dumb, weak, or has small peepee. But there are a lot of mentally ill Asians, whites, and blacks who will project their mental illness onto "racial circumstance," as if black people were the only race on earth, that their "inferiority complex" would disappear. Nope: mentally ill people just rationalize their depression rather than confront the fact that it is the product of irrational forces (either beliefs resulting from trauma or defective brain chemistry). Some of the dumbest people I know are also happy, narcissistic, and confident. They don't have an inferiority complex. They don't give a fuck.
Most of the early black power leaders were mixed race (NAACP): Douglas, Dubois, and Huey Newton were all racially mixed. Furthermore, black power was inspired, encouraged, and unleashed by ideological communists (usually white or Jewish). You can look into the early funding of "black power" newspapers if you're interested in an empirical look at this question. My argument is that black people didn't have a "crisis of confidence" in the 1960s. Instead, they were emboldened by white and Jewish elites, and lead into cultural agitation by a mixed race class of leaders. Not sure what your ethnic background is, if you have identifiable non-black ancestry, and I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you personally. But basically believe that black nationalism is a total fabrication, entirely astroturfed, with no basis in "natural racial blood loyalty." I feel similarly about white nationalism, and I would say that same thing about Hispanic or Asian nationalism (although the Spanish language + Catholicism is more significant in forming group distinction).
My contention is that nationalism is a religious phenomenon, and it rises and falls due to minoritarian pressures from ruling classes. It is not a natural biological "normal" that humans just gravitate toward forming racial blocs. Maybe in highly violent and unstable conditions, like prison gangs in the 1990s, but even that isn't strict:
The Texas Syndicate allows whites to join; Nazi Lowriders allow Hispanics to join; Dead Man Incorporated was allied with the Black Guerrilla Family and opposed the Aryan Brotherhood; Pale Kings has repudiated white supremacy (lol); Folk Nation used a star of David as their symbol and united gangs across racial lines. Even if society collapsed and "luxury beliefs" like anti-racism ceased to have elite support, most people don't "organically" identify with their race. Black people have been successfully psy-oped, initially by Black-and-Tan Republicans, and later by Truman-Democrats, to think and vote as "black nationalists." This was intensified by internally tortured mixed race people, who often allied with white and Jewish communists to foment the concept of "black identity." It is a hoax.
The same thing happened to Jews around the time of Jesus, where intense Hellenization resulted in ethnically mixed people, who created the "body of Christ" in response. I don't view races as eternal, immutable categories that people are stuck in. People can leave races, create races, and change races. I have spoken with a lot of angry or depressed black people who feel discriminated against, fetishized, or pigeonholed because of their blackness. I've also talked to white and Asian people who feel the exact same way, for different reasons.
Anecdotally, I find that a lot of black people who feel that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is causing their depression and frustration also have a complicated relationship with whites. It is a meme now that many "woke" women of color have white boyfriends, like AOC with her ginger partner. It seems to me that hatred of white supremacy is a fetishization of white sexuality, as evidenced by these anecdotes. I have also had black guys tell me that all whites are secretly racist, because his white girlfriend called him the n-word when she got angry. People are complicated, and often resentment is fueled by a sense of being "spurned." That is, many blacks wish they could be white, and their frustration at not being white transmutes into hatred of whites. By the same token, I believe Irish Catholics and Jews have also felt "spurned" in this way by Anglos, and I also believe there's a percentage of white racists who secretly are jealous of black male sexual success. (which I think is marginal, but that's a statistical question)
I'm not arguing that people can't, or won't, have some sort of affinity or ethnocentrism surrounding their ancestry or heritage. I'm just saying that racial nationalist movements, whether black or white, tend to be based on more than just genetic affinity, but have more to do with mythological or religious narratives that are constructed. I have done an article on interracial dating, and found that upper class liberals are the most "ethnocentric" in their dating preferences:
https://deepleft.substack.com/p/nationalism-and-liberal-ethnogenesis
I am not sure about blacks, but if I had to guess, I would say that the poorest blacks tend to be the most "ethnocentric." But if we account for socio-economic "class" as a form of in-group, then some of this "ethnocentrism" decreases. Among whites, Christians also tended to be less ethno-centric with regard to blacks, but more ethno-centric toward Asians. This is because more blacks are nominally Christian, whereas most Asians are not.
I think anyone who is dumb, black or white, is capable of using their lack of intelligence as an excuse to feel bad about themselves. Or, they can use their lack of athleticism, sexual success, or wealth. If individual black people feel anxious about their self esteem, I think political projects are a "surrogate activity" for self-work. White people with mental illnesses also construct grand narratives about how "the white race is under attack," and they choose "white nationalism" as their surrogate activity. My individualist focus on personal responsibility isn't going to convince most black activists, who will simply deflect that "personal responsibility" is a white supremacist concept. I don't know how much you feel like I am "white-splaining" to you, but just being honest.
I do believe that people need a collective sense of identity, and it is the job of religion or secular political ideologies to provide this. With the decline of Christianity, people are scrambling for a replacement. You could make the counter-argument that a "crisis of Christianity" among black intellectuals (Fanon) contributed more to the rise of black nationalism than the reasons I've cited. But I disagree that knowledge of IQ gaps (which are real whether or not they are biological) needs to inherently make people feel nihilistic. Shudra and Dalit in India feel they are inferior, but don't feel nihilistic. I hate to say this because it sounds mean, but black slaves didn't feel nihilistic. Nihilism is not merely "I'm oppressed!" but "I'm oppressed, and it's my fault." Nihilism is actually a form of internalized guilt/shame for not doing enough. I'm using the word nihilism different from how it is usually used, but I think you are too.
I think you do not understand what modern politics is even about. It is about how much *respect* whom gets, both individually and as a group. I mean like every debate about something useful like how much should be the minimum wage, devolves into one side disrespecting the poor for being lazy and the other side disrespecting the rich for being greedy.
Yes, people do have compassion for people with Down's. But it is a very condescending compassion. The older medical term for that was "retarded", people started using it as an insult, so it got removed from the medical vocab.
So now people try to argue that disability is a social construct because we do not want to disrespect whole groups of people by telling them that they are somehow inferior or defective.
And there is no way RR would not count as that kin of disrespect, insult.
You can read about this Nancy Fraser's The Politics of Recognition. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/william-davies-the-politics-of-recognition-in-the-age-of-social-media
Recognition means "equal dignity" i.e. respect. Modern politics is a sort of a group therapy telling everybody they are just as worthy as everybody else so that they can feel a bit better about themselves.
"Modern politics is a sort of a group therapy telling everybody they are just as worthy as everybody else so that they can feel a bit better about themselves." Would you argue that politics is like astrology for incels?
BTW another interesting outcome of this everybody feeling they are powerless subconsciously is precisely these social justice wars. Basically people belonging to some disadvantaged group feel like "Aha! That is why I am powerless!". Then they proceed to say whitedudes are powerful, which sometimes enrages them because they know they, too, are not. Predictably, it enrages the young white men the most, because they are the most powerless. The age cohort differentials in power, money, and generally life outcomes are enormous right now.
LOL, that's taking it a little too far. Basically very few people have power or have any chance to influence someone who has. But everybody can talk. So people feeling their powerlessness subconsciously in a nominal democracy (note that each individual would still be very powerless in a real one) tend to shift political discussion to whatever they like discussing, so under the guise of politics there is some kind of an enjoyable social dynamic. And then it turns out most people enjoy the "who should be dissed" kind of social dynamic the most. Or to put it a little differently: basically the most power most people will ever have will be pissing someone off, so it will be done a lot.
I suggest you check this article out:
https://deepleft.substack.com/p/politics-is-astrology-for-incels
There is a more fundamental issue with making something like race realism popular, in the western world specifically. People in the west have significantly higher brain hemisphere imbalance and are usually quite prone to the kind of disembodied context-less thinking that can make any sufficiently powerful idea extremely dangerous.
The banner of “Race Realism” could mean racial differences in IQ and other abilities in the here and now and in the precise ways that we have been able to measure(with the caveat that every now and then someone runs into a major gap or mistake made in the studies and then everyone has to readjust all their notions about each racial category); or it could mean that certain phenotypes and religious categories are superior because they seem to come attached with higher abilities to a disproportionate degree.
As far as I am aware, to the average non-western person outside of the urban monoculture in their country, the former view of it is self-evidently true and the latter is laughably naive. This is why you can have a widespread understanding and acknowledgement of group differences without it turning into some racial agitation. It is just the nature of things as they are and people are sufficiently seeped into that nature to just observe and accept reality on its own terms. To the average westerner, however, the latter seems self-evidently true- we’ve extensively studied and proven it haven’t we?!! There is a tendency in the west to see the here and now as a temporally collapsed “end of history” style reality in itself- in its *whole* self. And it is coupled with a confusion of the measurement of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. This is what makes a brush with something like Race Realism dangerous- it is a sufficiently juicy piece of reality to sacrifice to whichever ideological construct one is currently being hypnotized by.
I dispute the idea that westerners are uniquely prone to "disembodied context-less thinking." That sounds like ritualized cargo cults, mindless traditionalism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge to me. You could argue that communism is a "western mind virus" that took over Asian brains and infected them with western-style thinking, but I'm not sure if you would go that far.
I disagree that in non-white countries there is some kind of "Kumbaya" attitude toward ethnic or religious differences. The non-white world is full of ethnic hatred, conflict, resentment, enslavement, caste systems, and genocide. I offer you a platform to defend these views on an interview platform if you wish.
I’ve never been that impressed with race realism because the people there brag and obsess with all their data gathering to tell us something our primitive ancestors knew right away, that foreigners who look and act different are untrustworthy.
That being said, I don’t get your conclusion. Hbd as another idea might cause elite chaos even though every other right wing idea has been fed into the populist machine achieving nothing? And how would hbd elite chaos be worse than the garbage the progressives are already floating on us?
I'm pushing back against a very specific claim, that race realism is not dangerous. I'm not arguing that race realism is the only dangerous idea in the world.
Don't quite agree with the "elite" framing you provide. Elites are determinative in those movements, but I have a more distal theory that elites would have always ended up where we are regardless.
I think egalitarianism is a natural/atavistic impulse. When I read anthropologists; they generally describe hunter-gatherer groups as fairly egalitarian and kinda democratic. Robin Hanson has this farmer/forager theory that farming culture inculcated certain norms and structures that are in ways unnatural and that we are returning to our forager ways: you see this in the general culture with paleo diet, crossfit, seedoils, returning to natural pathways.
Of course, most conservative instincts are prevalent in people as well. Primates that evolved on the savannah had to be risk-averse, status quo inclined, outgroup hatreds, etc. Most groups and ideologies just optimize and hit on various categories of these impulses.
Here's something I have never gotten a good response to. Why is all advertising left-wing coded? There are categories of right wing coded products, but almost all advertising even for lot of right wing products is left. The biggest company in the world is off and on Apple and their just default commercials are some of the wokest propaganda anyone can create and they suffer no penalty from it. You flip through say Reason magazine, National Review, or Daily Wire videos and it is some of the most scummiest buy gold bars or alphabrain pills type advertising with almost no CPG ads. This, despite DailyWire consistently being ranked near the top on Facebook; don't know about recently. My off the shelf thought about it for 30 minutes is that even conservatives deep down like egalitarian/woke advertising. It's aspirational. The reason why socialism, communism, fascism hits with people is we are animals.
Can you explain how you are using the word distal? I'm not familiar with it.
I'm borrowing it from rationalists/people into evolutionary stuff. In our complicated world, you often have multicausal explanations for phenomenon and often... you can have one explanation that encapsulates the other. They tend to use distal and proximate to mean farther and closer.
As a crude example, you might take the question of why did that guy have sex with that girl? There are all kinds of proximate reasons you can provide: it feels good, boosts his social status, etc. The distal reason and sorry for anthropomorphizing evolution, but the reason evolution made sex feel good and implanted men with this searing drive for it is to reproduce.
Embedded in this, I am using a kind of best practice in science or reasoning like Occam's Razor. The theory that explains more phenomenon is probably more correct.
It sounds like "distal" is equivalent with the "final cause" in Aristotle's theory. In the case of sex, the formal cause is the presence of sex hormones which cause the erection. The material cause is the act of penetration. The efficient cause is a Tinder match, and the final cause is reproduction.
I agree with you that ideologies tend to appeal to atavistic emotional needs (the need for identity, familiarity, comfort, fairness, revenge, catharsis, safety).
Distal theories aren't necessarily more correct than proximate theories. You see this in macroeconomics or why Trump was elected. I side with many that Trump was a singular individual even though he was tapping into some deep well of populism. I don't think any of us knows what will happen when he goes away.
Advertisements are made by the educated class, and it shines through regardless of the product (radio ads are frequently more right coded just because of who makes them, I’ve noticed)
Everything is made by the educated class, but in most areas there are lots of things that subtly pander to conservatives. Every car company in America knows that trucks are right coded and do targeted marketing towards conservatives; it's just more bro than conservative and can be woke.
Every Nike ad is and has been super woke and it's the most popular clothing brand you see in America. It's just as prevalent in red america as in blue america.
There are conservative media, movies, music, events, and regions.
There is something deeper there that you don't want to admit to.
Civil rights law, and the Obama generation growing up having no moral code but civil rights law.
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wow that's some crazy spam
I think it can help. Not spam. People need an education.
not relevant to the article, Mr. Shameless Self Promoter
Back when Nietzsche was the bane of the GOP's Christianity, the left defended him. I recall the claim that he was influential on Nazis as being misinformed evangelical propaganda, by my own black progressive girlfriend.
Twenty years on it's "duh, of course they were inspired by Nietzsche"
It's easy to get confused on this issue, because Nietzsche was opposed to German nationalism in his time. But Ludendorff, for example, was a clear Nietzschean. People just don't read primary sources.
Read over half and still coud not understand what the author means by “race realism,” so I bailed.
You don't know what race realism is?
Frankly large parts of this analysis are backwards.
Also, people don't genocide the low IQ, enslave them, maybe, but not genocide.
Genocides are always against some high IQ group, the logic being some version of "why is this group doing better than everyone else? They must be witches/evil oppressors."
If you read the first few paragraphs of my article, you will see that I mention your arguments directly, and say I am not disputing them, but making a separate and specific point about white-vs-white ideological conflict.