It’s the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, a MacGuffin. It doesn’t really
matter what it actually is – we all know it’s some tedious, regressive,
reactionary take – the plot is still the same.
Same shit happened with 'the red pill' which can also just mean anything from 'you learn an uncomfortable truth', 'mens rights' to 'sexism is correct' to '((()))'/'hitler was right.
It is intended more as a signal/symbol for people to gather behind than a real consistent ideology. (And the lack of consistency doesn't make it any less dangerous esp as it is often used as a recruitment tool to direct hate to groups they don't like).
I am pretty sure that all of her fans are thinking about the same one, so it is less an act of genius and more of the trite "I am so silenced! We are so oppressed!" sketch.
Like, maybe the first ones to discover the trick (declining stand up comedians?) were geniuses, but at this point it is just the easiest possible thing, that nevertheless works because if reactionaries valued originality, they would not be reactionaries.
No I got the idea, and there are some people who actually pull it off ("The Matrix", "Fight Club", "They live" and so on), I just think that in this case it is just HBD (either in the phrenology or in the "Y cromosome is the source of any virtue" variant), anybody immediately thought "she is talking about HBD", she thought "anybody will understand I am talking about HBD".
SO the "I won't state it" seems more like "but I am not allowed to say because if I blew the cover of our brave agents infiltrated into woke territory they will be ripped apart by a mob of triggered mean bullies" that reinforces the point on how scared and silenced these dudes are, not something to trick the reader to see what they want (because again, no reader who knows her even superficially might think of something different than HBD).
But she seems to be completely willing to openly admit to believing in HBD. It can't just be a typical garbage rationalist opinion, because she (like all rationalists) will just *say* that shit.
HBD, is just one of the newest term for it, it switches names around every now and then. Often it is also called race realism (lot of Rationalists don't use these terms at all, and just speak about this stuff without mentioning it is race science again (See as an example Scotts interest in [albion's seed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/) (See also [steve sailer](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer) in the comments there, the man who created the term hbd)), and shock horror, people who talk about it always end up trying to suggest eugenics (Often using the worst arguments 'testing for a disease in the womb is technically eugenics so people who say who are anti-eugenics are also against this GOTCHA!'). It is also very popular among the manosphere people (because it never is just sexism).
It is great, esp when Rationalists pull it. Considering they declared that 'the worst argument in the world'.
'Calling stuff like sterilizing poor people eugenics is the worst argument in the world' also 'i think we should sterilize poor people, im pro eugenics'.
A quick web search for the term "racism" yields among other definitions the following: "the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another"
It is an observable fact that "different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities". This is borne out by simply looking around. You can detect racial differences even looking at X-ray images of people. Google "lactase persistence" for a genetic difference correlated with race.
What about the latter clause in the definition: "as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another"? Inferior or superior in what way? Athletically? Intellectually? In their talent for math? For language?
Or is this the kind of sloppy, illogical thinking through which we make a goddamn mess of our affairs individually and, thanks to our individual tendency toward sloppy thinking habits, as a society? By entertaining the silly idea that humans have some kind of intrinsic worth and that all God's children are special, we invite the kind of conflict and hatred that can be exploited politically, economically, and however else.
Related to this is the idea that people are somehow equal. Again, I ask, in what way?
If we mean that we are all somehow entitled to equal protection under the law, fine. But if you truly people are equal in all ways, you are obviously full of shit.
ETA: Instead of addressing the ideas I presented--trying to get at the denotative meaning of the term "human biodiversity" versus the connotation assigned to it for political reasons--I got the message through downvotes and rhetorical bullshit that I couldn't be part of your club. Oh, well. The reaction pretty much confirms for me that this sub is filled with people as pretentious as the rationalists they mock. Happy sneering!
You made an alt to post this? Lol.
'Don't you know not doing a racism causes the downfall of civilization you illogicites.' Says the strawman fighter who knows nothing of logic.
I may not be an accomplished logician such as you purport to be, but I have been able to think straight enough over the years to do ok in life. I am disputing the characterization of hbd as a form of racism.
People are different. Part of those differences are based on their genetic inheritance. Part of that genetic inheritance is tied to the genome group that can be called race.
As I pointed out, lactase persistence is associated with northern europeans.
And yes I made an alt to post this because of this kind of ad hominem bullshit.
Saying your logic is flawed isn't an ad hominem. Neither is flawed logical thinking some sort of curse which makes you do unwell. It does lead you to make statements like 'alts prevents against ad hominem attacks'. Which it doesn't of course (and saying that also shows that my accusation of you being illogical is true. Funny that, now if you really want a logical fallacy to pin on me you could argue that I did a strawman by changing your concerns into 'downfall of civilisation'. So in spirit you are correct, im not taking your arguments seriously at all)
What makes you illogical is stating assumptions as if they are true without backing them up. (Which happens a lot, esp with racists). You started stereotypical in a funny way, but reasonable strong, looked up the definition of racism worked on the two claims about racism (which and then you just dropped the whole bullshit 'end of civilisation' shit in there, without any backing up. (Sure you have assumptions which makes this conclusion logical from what you believe, but you must understand we do not)).
The difference in skin colors (or L persistence, because we white people love to take the L) doesn't prove HBD or any form of racism. Esp as this shit is a motte/bailey (which considering your name I assume you are familiar with), hbd people dont care about lactase, they care about IQ or whatever other measure they can find to create hierarchies of groups of people (and to back up this statement see how you did the same by worrying about we all can be exploited, how this creates hate and conflict because we the progressives somehow believe people are equal in all ways).
You are a fool however, you know what place this is, you know how we deal with these discussions (i assume). So there is nothing to be gained by you making an alt and discussing this, you are foolishly wasting your time.
And dont worry, I also suck at logic, I just know that when people say 'logical' they never mean 'it follows logical' but 'it makes sense to me'. Which is good because thinking and writing about formal logical thinking takes forever, is boring etc. (Think about this statement before you are tempted to write up a long reply, aka dont expect a response, esp as I prob dont have a moment of add obsession next time like I have now (not enough to properly edit this shit however) also note the subtext of this post that I don't really care about discussing your racism, sorry the accusation that HDB might be racist, oops did an ad hominem there ;))
Now you can accuse me of being a hypocrite and also a fool which is true.
Does make me wonder however, if you consider HBD not racist, do you also think that white nationalists (not to be confused with the racist white supremacists) are not racist? (thinking about why I ask this, and how this all compares to HBD should give you some insight on how the people who say HBD is racist think and why your strategy of defending HBD is doomed to fail. And to be complete, as I have long ago given up any pretense to having the soul of wit this post, I think that white nats are racists, and that the ideology is racist).
I did not say "alts prevent ad hominem attacks". I said I used an alt. I did not say why. Why should I debate someone who jumps to conclusions like that? I said my piece. You said yours.
The argument seems childish, yet we have armies of intellectuals investigating any potential difference in populations to explain it away as the result of devious prejudice.
Not really, no. That’s the picture you get from /r/TheMotte perhaps, but you don’t have to look very far on /r/TheMotte to find a very very very amusing style of motivated and conspiratorial reasoning which is shelf-packaged never to take research and claims of these “armies of intellectuals” at face value: all that “blue tribe” nonsense: imputing spurious motives all over the place and much worse. The real picture is much more complicated, obviously, and tied to all sorts of culture war bullshit that really would be silly if it weren’t so sad; if you unplug yourself from the rage machine it gets a lot easier.
So you’re here in the spirit of open discussion then, rather than just to pick a fight with me about HBD (or something very closely related thereto) which, you will have noted, is not my main concern in the original comment to which you replied
Im not that into axiomatic thinking, or HBD, but mostly I’m not interested in flattering your ego
Look into yourself, you might have worked out by now I can be thoughtful and intelligent person, one who has thought quite hard about equality systems and the biological constraints on their value, efficiency, and so on, and perhaps has a more developed view on the subject than the caricature you’re inclined to shout at as if it belongs to me (no harm as such, we all do it) - or I might not be, point is: what do you hope to achieve here?
I don’t really give a shit about what you think about ordinary people. Why don’t you go out and tell it to them. I also don’t give a shit about the enormous ego you have hanging out of the front of your trousers like a sex pest right now.
Likely truth is, you’re not seeing through as much as you think you are, the red pill was a dud.
I have arguments with ordinary people quite often on this topic. It is a dull and frustrating process. In pointing this out, my goal is not making myself seem very smart, but to make the ideas that have corrupted people's minds seem very dumb.
You should probably put those average abilities towards understanding how the equalities and anti-HBD arguments actually work in that case, because your caricature of the state of play is absurd and a depressingly predictable /r/TheMotte strawman
You’ve not said a lot, but that’s part of the point: there certainly aren’t armies of intellectuals setting out to refute that one of us is taller than the other.
There are armies of intellectuals (some very good, some stupid) ready to go to bat and say that doesn’t mean we should be ok with social inequality, or that there isn’t even a priori evidence that differences like IQ track across genetic lines according to causally complex but facially straightforward distinctions or groupings like race and ethnicity.
Treating those people like a blob of co-conspirators or dupes in a mass line to sophistically refute the brave but lonely truth - that all inequality is natural or indeed should be encouraged - is a childish attitude to the world, but I’m sure it feels satisfying.
> You’ve not said a lot, but that’s part of the point: there certainly aren’t armies of intellectuals setting out to refute that one of us is taller than the other.
They would be in a hurry to refute that groups of people differ on height on average, and be looking to reveal this to be a result of secondary or environmental factors. But yes, they do acknowledge individual height difference - but often not the politically sensitive topic of any sex differences.
>Treating those people like a blob of co-conspirators or dupes in a mass line to sophistically refute the brave but lonely truth - that all inequality is natural or indeed should be encouraged - is a childish attitude to the world, but I’m sure it feels satisfying.
The truth that human inequality goes hand in hand with civilization, every human civilization that has ever existed, is stunningly obvious. The belief that this inequality is unnatural or can be fixed should be considered insane with this in mind.
Recite chapter and verse all you want, I’m not here to buy what you’re selling, the explanation for why this response is childish is explained above already
Sort of? Sure. A “constant”? Not in any meaningful or historically interesting way of the kind you want me to grant. My whole attitude to the HBD programme is that this or that inequality being natural doesn’t really matter the way HBDers want it to because I actually have had a thought before, and this is a twelve year old’s level of analysis.
Like I said, I’ve got my own programme in mind which accounts for this sort of stuff pretty easily, or just ignores it as not all that relevant: this sort of move doesn’t do anything for me because I’m not a scary cartoon of a college student with blue hair or an atheist professor played by Kevin Sorbo.
As a constant, it is more fundamental than HDB. In mono-ethnic civilizations, there is still always a formation of classes, some with more wealth, some with few or none at all.
The armies of intellectuals I complain about are very strongly driven by the fundamental idea that class differences (and how these may overlap with race) are evil and inequality is unnatural.
That’s trivially consistent with your observation, hence the point about a twelve year old’s level of analysis: people have reasons to think the things you say they think which account for your observation about histories of inequality, indeed many are partly or wholly based on it
I will admit my arguments here are basic. I think there is a lack of a basic response to them that exists in the tree of leftism that has taken up most of academia.
Well you’re free to have your opinions about academia, just don’t treat me like a fucking idiot, you presumptuous asshole
It goes without saying that all of what you’ve said is routinely addressed and you should stop getting your ideas about the academy from cheap online rage bait
Are you trying to hone your craft to prepare for your Albert Einstein everyone clapped moment, or do you think there's a large undecided audience to win over in Sneer Club, of all places?
Are these armies of intellectuals in the room with us right now?
"We have armies of psuedointellectuals explaining away actual investigation as the work of devious cabal of armies of intellectuals"
If we can just bullshit everything we don't like is a conspiracy theory that's rationalization not rationality
It's not a conspiracy theory. Everyone knows about diversity and inclusion people worming their way in companies and government offices and how many people seem to be employed as sociologists. That is reality.
Oh ""everyone"" knows that's solid evidence right there!
> How many people seem to be employed as sociologists
Idk i don't think the academic job market is doing so great lately...
Do you deny the existence of diversity and inclusion boards on every major company?
>Idk i don't think the academic job market is doing so great lately...
It's not - because even though there are far too many of these academics, there are even more applicants who want those positions.
No, everybody is not good at equally good at everything. And that is NOT what "we" mean when we say everyone has worth.
In fact, the entire idea of intrinsic human worth has been argued as having pernicious effects. If you esteem yourself today, you might perform poorly tomorrow and esteem yourself poorly tomorrow.
It also seems that people have a tendency today to hold in low esteem those who disagree with them. Without ever actually considering that those people might have some valuable experience from which they have learned.
I say again, the idea of human worth is meaningless feel-good bullshit whose flipside is the idea of human worthlessness.
I am not talking about the worth of someone's talents or labor in a free market. I am talking about the kind of namby pamby feel-good bullshit peddled by the self-esteem hucksters who say that all children are special and above average.
If all children are special, then none are special.
You need to understand something: I’m mocking you, mostly for having a child’s understanding of logic and an angsty teenager’s axiology
You’re not handing out difficult pills to swallow here tyke
Did they really drop a 'If all children are special, then none are special.', argument in a discussion about the 'White northern Europeans rule, all others drool' people. Somebody worked really hard to get brain poisoned like this.
I wonder about their media diet. (At least alt righters are witty enough to just post the milk emoticon and not talk about 'lactase persistence').
I don’t know if it needs that much speculation: I think they’ve consumed a decent amount from a limited and rather obvious pool. My read is that they’ve genuinely swallowed [at least] two things:
One. HBD is literally “just” the observation that human differences exist. This can be skin colour, academic achievement, height, muscles, spiritual development - who gives a shit, it’s measurably different. That’s the classic bait-and-switch that I’ve argued about with people including the lauded HBDChick personally, because the trick is that once you get that you’re straight to a false transitivity argument that consequently anybody’s just foolish, kidding themselves, or lying if they go to the “other” or “mainstream lib” side and suggest that maybe black people aren’t double-digit IQ points down and doomed to barbarity.
Two. The edgy Fight Club shit, which again, the really appealing part of that bit is that it’s supposed to be a hard pill to swallow.
Hence: a child’s logic [not to mention a child’s understanding of the “other” sides logic]; teenage angst, adolescent value system [not to mention an adolescent understanding of what other people value, whether they have good reasons for it].
Sad…
Put it this way: you came in here to pick a fight, threw some angry shit at the wall, and strongly implied that anybody disagree was an idiot, an asshole, or both
Look into yourself: are you genuinely surprised or disappointed that you got exactly what you came in here looking for?
> I say again, the idea of human worth is meaningless feel-good bullshit whose flipside is the idea of human worthlessness.
The idea of human intelligence is meaningless feel-good bullshit whose flipside is the idea of human stupidity.
Two can play at that game.
The majority of world's educated people believed in geocentrism at some point too. [Majority opinion does not equal truth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum). It's also weird to attempt to appeal to authority by citing "education" while ignoring that those educations might be in fields that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. If we are going this route we should be paying attention to what is the consensus of the actual scientific community, not the hot takes of millions of chinese Econ majors. "Education" is not some nebulous entity that grants higher unscrutable powers.
There is absolutely no substantial evidence that HBD is a thing. Even those who spend the entirety of their live's free time scrapping every corner of academia for papers that would reaffirm the hypothesis always end up mustering malformed and cherry picked arguments, only hapzardly glued together with guesswork, conjecture and a chunky tonnage of confirmation biases.
the poorly educated are still educated, appealing to the authority of both "education" and "the majority" isn't really saying much. Here, try this instead: the overwhelming majority of those educated in genetics do *not* believe in HBD, because it is bunkum.
How much if any traction does HBD have with trained geneticists in Asia? HBD proponents usually argue that they're being suppressed for asserting politically inconvenient facts, and it seems like an underutilized counter (that doesn't require a lot of work debunking bullshit) to ask them how much support they get among researchers in places that don't give a shit about western political sensitivities.
Yeah basically exactly no traction at all, and not just in Asia, but everywhere. The message from the nucleus is very clear: we are all one continuum, skin colour is meaningless, any individual aptitude or trait can be found anywhere and can be predicted to be nowhere (and also it's kind of ghoulish to be measuring human "merit" in the first place).
Could you find numbers to compare the belief in HBD in China against the number of communist party members in China?
I think Communist Party of China has about 95 million members.
It's not a government thing. It's a folk belief, one that's shared by communist party members. It tried to eradicate it, and for most of 2nd half of 20th century, 'Han chauvinism' was believed counter-revolutionary. However, the behavior of Chinese since 1990, and especially the behavior of their official organs makes it clear they are still, to a great degree, bigoted, especially against Africans.
Chinese are still Chinese first, communists second. Despite Mao's best efforts, erasing 2000 years of culture accumulated while their country was the 'Middle Kingdom' and unquestionably the most powerful single country on Earth is pretty hard.
I'll quote the famous FOIA'd politological report for Pentagon
>Racism remains a key component of how the Chinese see the world, their central place in it, and the world’s other, inferior inhabitants. . .
Virulent racism and eugenics heavily inform Chinese perceptions of the world. United States decision‐makers must recognize that China is a racist state, much closer to Nazi Germany than to the values upheld in the West. Most often, the Chinese do not even recognize their racism as a problem. They believe that racism is a Western phenomenon and that Westerners are obsessed with race. This obsession is seen by the Chinese to be a strategic vulnerability of the West, whereas China is not affected by racism.
Second, racism informs their view of the United States. From the Chinese perspective, the United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline.
You just said it's universal yet you can't quantify it in any way. Your only "proof" is a Pentagon report, laughable. Mao didn't attempt to "erase" 2000 years of culture, in fact he and the Chinese community party only improved Chinese culture. Communism of course represents the apex of all human culture.
Liberalism and the free market (i.e. capitalism) are causing the US decline, not multiculturalism. This is obvious if you look at objective economic measures such as the rate of profit.
Honestly I’m deeply shocked that the person who tweeted
At this point, if I hear someone referring to an absolutely brilliant
woman they deeply admire for her work in advanced theoretical physics or
mathematics or something, I assign something like 50% probability to the
woman being trans
…or ashkenazi
would have any such controversial ideas, nor could I ever hope to
predict what they might be
I'm honestly not sure if it's more likely that her "controversial" opinion is something so horrifying even she understands it'd be dumb to say it out loud, or if it's something 99% of people agree with that she's convinced herself is fringe because she let the internet break her brain.
> Oh, oh, I know. It's "There are things to like about the odd-numbered Star Trek movies."
Insurrection is bomb tbh.
> I am being informed that it is in fact transphobia
Are we sure? I mean yes she's certainly transphobic but I feel like we might have to consult the bigotry roulette wheel to get a solid answer on this one.
'People claim star trek is left wing, but it is actually just "half the people throwing bombs should be women" centrist' (e: yes I watched voyager a while back how did you guess?)
>There are things to like about the odd-numbered Star Trek movies."
tbh star trek 3 is pretty great. Stealing the Enterprise is really fun and Christopher Lloyd is a great over the top Klingon adversary (as any good klingon adversary should be)
Star Trek III I always felt like suffers from A) Being sandwhiched between II and IV, both who are amazing in their own ways and B) Feeling like an extra-long TV episode. Not helped by it being the middle-part of a story. But yeah, it's good, just not as good as II and IV.
Now, if you want to be *controversial* defend V!
It’s kind of a mood movie, underappreciated but I wouldn’t say underrated, it’s as bad as everyone says it is if you watch it for what it advertises itself as
In fact, I would argue its best qualities are in being essentially a foreshadowing of some of the slower meditative TNG scripts (and yes, I’m sure this has been argued a million times before, I’m not a Trekkie, I just slept with one for three years; they were hot)
In a lot of ways, it's *Star Trek TNG Season 1: The Movie.* The brash but competent first officer, Will Decker/Riker, has a past romance with the sexy empath, Ilia/Deanna. They reconnect on a mission to investigate a Giant Glowy Space Thing.
I think it has a lot of good character moments, and the FX work creates a sense of real *alienness.* The script suffers from starting off as a TV pilot and not really having enough substance to sustain a whole movie, and the editing doesn't help. Recutting it might actually be a good exercise for a film student.
Lol, couldn't even add a 'climate change is unavoidable at this stage and will lead to massive unrest and wars' or something like that.
E: or 'agi isnt possible' now that is a spicy secret truth for Rationalists to hold.
Gee, I wonder if the precondition of “willing to confide in aella of all people” might be introducing some sampling issues here
It’s the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, a MacGuffin. It doesn’t really matter what it actually is – we all know it’s some tedious, regressive, reactionary take – the plot is still the same.
HBD of course. There is no great mystery to the rats.
“Richard Lewontin was correct in all his critiques of sociobiology and behavioral genetics.”
Honestly I’m deeply shocked that the person who tweeted
would have any such controversial ideas, nor could I ever hope to predict what they might be
Pee is stored in the balls
Typically we are the ones who claim that these people are filled with racist bio-truthers.
[deleted]
Oh, oh, I know. It’s “There are things to like about the odd-numbered Star Trek movies.”
(touches earpiece)
I am being informed that it is in fact transphobia
this tweet does show why it would be hard to be sure
https://twitter.com/g6feeler/status/1494212713987379204?s=20&t=etFScm6rT0MOZ6dLGkX2Iw
It’s either phrenology or something something transgenderism eugenism age of consent
I would prefer not to.
Han shot second.
No.
The Eugenics Society is a cool and good society but Adolf, bless him, was a right mess at the last meeting and brought it into unwarranted disrepute?
Do I care?
I don’t think it’s racism. Rats are ready to admit to being racist at essentially any time.