In 2017 Idiocracy is a Documentary

[VickyCaramel]

Oh yes, I can assure you that many white people on the Left are so conditioned to self-hatred as to have a feeling of disgust when they see images like this. Even at best, it's a laughable image. Think of Merkel's instant moue of disgust when she was handed the German flag - that sort of encapsulates the feeling. Yes, there was probably some calculation about how "nationalistic" it would look if she waved the flag, but the reaction itself you can see is instant and visceral.

It's the conditioned association of that kind of image with what it's supposed to lead to that causes the feeling of disgust. The nuclear family is supposed to lead to bad things, wives who look forward to this lifestyle are "Stepford Wives", the husband in this scenario is no doubt molesting his daughter, the cute little boy will grow up to be a misogynist, anti-Semitic little thug and bully. The neatness and orderliness of their lot must necessarily be a sign of neurosis, covering a deeply sadistic/masochistic relationship of authority and submission. They look happy but really underneath it all they're seething bundles of hatred for other races, for minorities. Etc., etc., etc.

Just wanted to say I think this is spot-on, I've come from this way of thinking myself and still encounter it constantly: female friends of mine who (now in their 30s) clearly want kids but don't have them because having a family is bad. This might sound mental to any of you who have never been fully leftist but I assure it's what people think and say.

Where do you people come from? How do you get indoctrinated? I have never been exposed to any of this stuff... I am aware that there are working class people from Industrial cities who have supported the Left since the beginning, so that it is traditional and tribal. But as far as I knew even they wouldn't go this far and are just as misogynistic and racist as anybody. The other half of the working classes are aspirational and not onboard with the left. So I am assuming this comes from the middle classes?

by-the-by, I was listening to that Ayn Rand stuff earlier while I was nursing a cold. It was really starting to make sense so I switched it off, sleep deprivation can be a terrible thing.

[VickyCaramel]

You know he is going after Based Momma right? He's going to kill Kilroy, that will be the punchline.
A lot of people have been dancing around this, but he is going to twist the knife.

I have to admit it, I am loving this.

Who is going after Based Momma? The "Alt-Righters?" Or Metokur? Metokur seems to be just in it for the pointing & laughing. The "Alt-Righters" seem to have a legitimate beef with her actions. The identitarians are the ones really gunning for her now.

Kraut & Tea's choices were majorly disappointing to the degree you have to ask what would make him think he is any better than the SJWs other than his personal belief that he was on the "right" side.

Looking at the hit list on their discord server, it appears that their aim to go after "race realism" suffered from significant mission creep. On the flip side, I think that tarring & feathering anyone signed up to that discord server alone is too much. You need to look at the actual actions of individuals and hold those individuals accountable. People who just signed on once, or floated around a bit but did not get involved should not be held accountable for other people's actions. Just as I am not responsible for Steersman's opinions here. So far I have not seen evidence of Based Momma engaging in doxing or other disreputable behavior. But her bias may have floated over to her management of the Kilroy event, which is I guess the real problem.

Hell, they could of nixed the identitarians from kilroy had they thought it was too hot to handle if they had just be honest & upfront about it. But trying to pretend like it wasn't what they were doing is what doomed them.

You can't underestimate Jim. He is a shitlord and will "burn it down" for the shits and giggles, but he also has a code and is uncompromising in his principles.
Kilroy has done two things that will really piss him off judging by past experience. The first is to have a free speech event in which they later disinvite people, especially the most controversial from the right. As well as being an affront to free speech, it's also a bait and switch. Jim seems to get really techy about money. Not to mention that it was fully funded yet they are charging admission.

I suppose he probably sees the situation, the server and the people on it, much the same way I do.

Firstly, so what? Even if there are racial IQ differences I don't think National Socialism is the answer.

Knowing what we do of evolution, I would expect there to be racial differences in IQ. So it's would be my starting point that the "race realism" proposition is true. If I apply skepticism to this I would look at the evidence (to the best of my understanding), find there isn't really anything definitive and so return to that default position.
I think that if you are taking the position that evolution doesn't apply to humans above the neck, and you are setting out to defend that against "race realism", then you have got to be politically motivated.

If you can't work this out with just a cursory look at the subject, then you have no place calling yourself a skeptic. If after weeks of this, you are completely ignoring the fact that environment drives evolution in order to make the argument that, "It could be environmental", then something is seriously wrong you. Many of the people on that server are bright people, yet I saw the likes of Academic Agent chasing red herrings and making self defeating arguments.


So I have the view that the people on that server cannot be all be tarred and feathered on the doxing stuff (which probably wasn't doxing, but was playing the man rather than the ball).

However, at some point in time, I have followed about 40-50% of these people on YouTube or Twitter. And all but two of them I had already unfollowed months ago as people who have a strong ideological bias, being unable to use skepticism to overcome their biases, and of having little of importance to say. Having a political opinion is one thing, the the whole point of rational skepticism and scientific method is to help us overcome our personal biases. I don't have time to listen to hours and hours of people being obviously wrong.

The exceptions are Woz Lee who is a class snob and left wing bigot, but can still be insightful and entertaining, and Academic Agent who is an actual academic and is Iranian, so race realism has little to offer him. I think he carries a hammer and see most things as nails but he has opinions I enjoy disagreeing with.

Based Momma isn't somebody I ever followed, but I was aware of her as somebody who moved in that circle of people who I don't think are worth wasting time on. As she is very chummy with Dave Cullen and Some Black Guy, I assumed she leaned towards anarcho-capitalist, which is a whole other kind of stupid. But her being on the server puts her on the left.

There's actually more to this than Left-Wing ideology, or even classical liberalism. That is not the problem.
The problem is that they made the same mistake as the SJWs in believing that they were the good guys, and because they are the good guys, the facts must be on their side. This still wouldn't be a fatal error if they had said, "assuming race realism is true, what should we do about it?", and then attacked the Alt-Right on their polices. It's not like fascism is easily defended!
So they go after the science and when that fails they go after the people. And it isn't just Alt-Right, it is also the Alt-Lite.... why? That makes no sense unless they are on a moral crusade. And why not use classical liberalism to attack the right, could it be that they aren't classical liberals?

Anyway, sorry for the tangent and the rant. I think they are are a group mainly made up of left wing ideologues, and I think this largely holds true even of those who weren't caught up to no good. Based Momma included. I Think Metokur is going to go Joe McCarthy on all of them and see what sticks. He is like an inquisitor, he asks all the right questions.

[Easy J]

Where do you people come from? How do you get indoctrinated? I have never been exposed to any of this stuff... I am aware that there are working class people from Industrial cities who have supported the Left since the beginning, so that it is traditional and tribal. But as far as I knew even they wouldn't go this far and are just as misogynistic and racist as anybody. The other half of the working classes are aspirational and not onboard with the left. So I am assuming this comes from the middle classes?

by-the-by, I was listening to that Ayn Rand stuff earlier while I was nursing a cold. It was really starting to make sense so I switched it off, sleep deprivation can be a terrible thing.

This was always something floating around in the cultural zeitgeist when I was coming of age. That picture is a decent symbol of what a lot of the left &/or the general counterculture were pushing against. There's a presupposition that it's a basket of values & expectations that are being imposed on you. There's a vague sense of being "red pilled" once you become a cool kid & reject it. When you heard pseudo-political references to "society" from middle class malcontents or whatever, that amorphous symbol & it's values was being gestured at, however vaguely. "White picket fences", "Beaver Cleaver family", ect. People who want that stuff are uncool normies & sellouts.

When the Christian Right was making noise in the 80's, it felt like that 50's caricature was what they were wanting to usher in. So the 80's idea of that ideal was more clearly in mind than the 60's cultural rebellion, due to the distance in time (& lack of anything original countering it by then). When Reagan was elected there was a shitfit similar to what we have today over Trump. A lot of the 80's hardcore punk albums I listened to had that big backdrop of a 50's monoculture being ushered in by Reagan, nukes, televangelists, greedy capitalists & jackbooted cops. It was a dumbed down cultural shorthand for the radical Left's critique of America.

[feathers]

It seems to be Let's-Shoot-Ourselves-In-The-Foot season at Wilfred Laurier University.

Christie Blatchford: Pay raise for women at Wilfrid Laurier creates new inequity — for men

An all female committee has awarded female professors a 3% raise backdated to July 2016, and a 3.9% raise to female associate professors. Male faculty members, being paid exactly the same salaries for the same length of service, will not receive a raise. This hasn't a chance of surviving if taken to the Ontario Labour Relations Board as it is a straightforward Charter of Rights issue.

So what do the trans/genderfluid get? What if Davielle Muscato worked there?

[CaptainFluffyBunny]

I left out that it's a long movie and it's slow. You'll feel every minute of it.

Saw it tonight with the family, had many of the same objections/problems with it. The wife liked it a bit, but the kids tore it to shreds. I couldn't really like any of the characters, so I couldn't really be involved. Meh.

[Kirbmarc]

The cannibal feeding frenzy of the Puritan Left is now after Cenk Uygur:

So apparently some racy jokes and wanting to get laid are "barbarism" in the Social Justice Democratic Party :bjarte: Cenk didn't even DO anything, he just WROTE some blog posts.

As always, just as I thought that the Democratic Party might have a chance to improve they go ahead and start (to borrow a Damion-ism) yet another circular firing squad.

Expect a lot of prominent democrats being "outed" as horrible shitlords for having said or written something that somehow goes against the feminist dogmas. I think that the GOP is definitely going to take advantage of this and will try to expose more and more Democrats as people who didn't have the feminist-friendly morals (which, since the bar is set so low, won't be hard at all).

We live in interesting times.

[Kirbmarc]

If I were a GOP strategist I'd be compiling lists of Republican women to compete against Democratic men, then send my attack dogs out to "expose" the Democratic men for having made a racy joke or written something un-feminist in their past career and let the SocJus outrage machine do the rest.

I think that the Dems are going to regret allowing the SJWs to be part of their political entourage. I hope that they'll be able to react against this.

[MarcusAu]

If I were a GOP strategist I'd be compiling lists of Republican women to compete against Democratic men, then send my attack dogs out to "expose" the Democratic men for having made a racy joke or written something un-feminist in their past career and let the SocJus outrage machine do the rest.

I think that the Dems are going to regret allowing the SJWs to be part of their political entourage. I hope that they'll be able to react against this.

It's weird how selective the public can be in judging people though.

Bill Clinton managed to get elected after all (though maybe things have changed since his time).

And Bernie managed to smooth over the 'controversy' of a story he had written in the late 60s/70s that was deemed insensitive by the right minded amoungst us - during his 2016 campaign.

Feminists (or Democrats) have made deals with the devil in the past - and likely will again in the future - especially if the Fems think they might have the material to prod them in right direction (or remind them where their loyalties lie) once they get into office.

The Dems are having a rather rough time of it of late - but this is just the sort of thing that could effect the 'Pubs (or people in general) soon enough.

[MarcusAu]

I must admit, I thought I was completely jaded on schadenfreude - but I seem to be warming to it when I see the calibre of critics Cenk Uygur has attracted.

From what I recall Cenk has said that he used to be a Republican. I could foresee him reconsidering his allegiances at some point in the not too distant future.

[Kirbmarc]

Knowing what we do of evolution, I would expect there to be racial differences in IQ. So it's would be my starting point that the "race realism" proposition is true. If I apply skepticism to this I would look at the evidence (to the best of my understanding), find there isn't really anything definitive and so return to that default position.

The problem I have with "race realism", from a purely non-ideological point of view, is that it seems to make some very broad claims about very diverse groups and characteristics. IQ tests have many components (spacial, linguistic, mathematical, etc.), some of which are more culture-based and others less so, and it seems pretty unlikely to me that diverse populations living in diverse environments developed trends about all of those components. "White people" are pretty diverse and lived in pretty diverse environments (just compare Sweden to Spain), and so are "black people" (Nigeria and Somalia have little in common) or "east Asians" (Japan and inner China).

When I read "race realist" claims like "East Asians have higher IQ than white people, which have have higher IQ than black people", even keeping in mind that this is about averages I can't help but think that those claims are extremely broad and generic and might be a statistical artifact rather than telling us something concrete.

To explain what I mean I'll make an analogy with sports. Being freakishly good at sprinting (and so being able to beat world records) definitely has a strong genetic component: we can't all be Usain Bolt. It also seems likely that the genetic component might be localized, and so some human populations are far better at sprinting, on average, than other human populations. But to jump from that to saying that "black people" are better on average in all sports (hell, even just in all the different fields of athletics) than "white people" is quite a stretch.

The same seems likely with IQ. Maybe Han people from coastal China are freakishly better on average than, say, people of Scot-Irish background at doing maths, and maybe this is because of genetic factors. But it's quite a stretch to assume that this means that "East Asians" are on average smarter than "white people".

Consider the Maori-Moriori conflict. Maori had a very aggressive, militaristic culture, and it has been suggested that this had something to do with the so-called "warrior gene", which is a possibility that I won't discard out of hand. But the Moriori had a very pacifist culture based on sharing, even though they were closely related to the Maori. So it's perfectly possible that the isolation of the Moriori on the Chatham Islands weeded out the violent tendencies (and maybe the violent genes too, through selection) relatively quickly.

If a different environment can change the shape of a culture (and maybe even the genetic makeup of the people who make up that culture) in such a quick and extreme way, with such important consequences (the Maori wiped out the Moriori) how can we make such sweeping claims as the difference between "white people" or "black people" in terms of intelligence, when those big groups are so diverse and have lived in so many different environments?

I've read some "human bio-diversity" blogs (JayMan, HBD chick) and sometimes they do delve in finer, more "granular" differences, but they also make some pretty wild assumptions about larger populations, and hand-wave away some problems with those broad assumptions by saying "oh, there's factor X which we haven't discovered but we are likely to do in the future", which doesn't seem very honest to me.

Razib Khan and Yeyo (@Yeyoza on twitter) are pretty much the only ones in the "human biodiversity" field which admit that there are still some grey areas, controversial data and are cautious about making generalizing assumptions.

[Easy J]

It grew legs. Turns out that it was his conservatism that made him do it.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... -insensit/

http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/22/super ... servatism/

[Keating]

When I read "race realist" claims like "East Asians have higher IQ than white people, which have have higher IQ than black people", even keeping in mind that this is about averages I can't help but think that those claims are extremely broad and generic and might be a statistical artifact rather than telling us something concrete.

To explain what I mean I'll make an analogy with sports. Being freakishly good at sprinting (and so being able to beat world records) definitely has a strong genetic component: we can't all be Usain Bolt. It also seems likely that the genetic component might be localized, and so some human populations are far better at sprinting, on average, than other human populations. But to jump from that to saying that "black people" are better on average in all sports (hell, even just in all the different fields of athletics) than "white people" is quite a stretch.

Interesting that you choose sprinting, as that is actually something that seems to be fairly well localised:

https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... es/256015/

I see it as a statistical argument too. In a fair sprint, where everyone has equal opportunity to training, we expect a high proportion of the winners to be Kenyan because of genetics. Similarly, in a completely fair industry where intelligence is of dominant importance (e.g. tech), we'd expect a high proportion of east Asians and very few Africans. Such a discrepancy does therefore not necessarily imply racism. The real problem is that society is moving towards an environment where high intelligence corresponds to material success.

[Kirbmarc]

When I read "race realist" claims like "East Asians have higher IQ than white people, which have have higher IQ than black people", even keeping in mind that this is about averages I can't help but think that those claims are extremely broad and generic and might be a statistical artifact rather than telling us something concrete.

To explain what I mean I'll make an analogy with sports. Being freakishly good at sprinting (and so being able to beat world records) definitely has a strong genetic component: we can't all be Usain Bolt. It also seems likely that the genetic component might be localized, and so some human populations are far better at sprinting, on average, than other human populations. But to jump from that to saying that "black people" are better on average in all sports (hell, even just in all the different fields of athletics) than "white people" is quite a stretch.

Interesting that you choose sprinting, as that is actually something that seems to be fairly well localised:

https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... es/256015/

I see it as a statistical argument too. In a fair sprint, where everyone has equal opportunity to training, we expect a high proportion of the winners to be Kenyan because of genetics. Similarly, in a completely fair industry where intelligence is of dominant importance (e.g. tech), we'd expect a high proportion of east Asians and very few Africans. Such a discrepancy does therefore not necessarily imply racism. The real problem is that society is moving towards an environment where high intelligence corresponds to material success.

Uhm. I'm not entirely sure that the situation is so clear-cut, as I have written before. "Kenyans" is a more localized population than "African", and the field of sprinting is more restricted than all fields which correspond to material success (tech skills are different from lawyer or doctor or business exec skills). I'm not sure that the disparities are only due to genetics, either: poor or lacking education, just like poor or lacking training in the case of sports, surely plays a role, to say nothing of the environmental effects (lead exposure, for example, is proven to reduce cognitive skills, and poor urban people are more exposed to high levels of lead).

A lot of what is called "institutional racism" has more to do with class/urban problems than with race.

Anyway I think that the problem is multi-layered: on one hand there's the issue of social mobility (which is what "representation in tech" is about) and on the other the problems of the growth of the "working poor" working-class and of things like poverty and welfare traps.

The SocJus, weirdly enough considering its Marxist origins, seems to be concerned primarily with high-paying jobs and social mobility more than with improving the conditions of the working poor or of those trapped in poverty. Class is almost completely ignored in favor of identity. Poor black people with no tech or business qualifications are more or less ignored along with poor white people in a similar situation.

The Democratic solution to unemployed or underemployed people with low skills seems to be "make them learn how to code", which ignores the reality that not everybody can acquire the necessary skills to work in tech. Intersectionality fans gush over the idea of black female business execs or game developers but seem not to give a shit about black male factory workers or unemployed black women.

The SocJus seems to aim for a very shallow understanding of how to improve living conditions of poor people: hiring 200 more black women in tech will not nothing to improve the conditions of 10,000 poor black women who don't have tech skills. The SocJus seems to have a "racial trickle-down" view of economics, so if more black people are business execs other black people who DO NOT work as business execs will benefit from it somehow because of "privilege" or whatnot.

This is pretty stupid. Bill Gates' wealth doesn't really help poor whites in Alabama just because they have the same skin color, so why should a black executive's rise to power solve the problems of poor urban blacks?

[DrokkIt]

Just wanted to say I think this is spot-on, I've come from this way of thinking myself and still encounter it constantly: female friends of mine who (now in their 30s) clearly want kids but don't have them because having a family is bad. This might sound mental to any of you who have never been fully leftist but I assure it's what people think and say.

Where do you people come from? How do you get indoctrinated? I have never been exposed to any of this stuff... I am aware that there are working class people from Industrial cities who have supported the Left since the beginning, so that it is traditional and tribal. But as far as I knew even they wouldn't go this far and are just as misogynistic and racist as anybody. The other half of the working classes are aspirational and not onboard with the left. So I am assuming this comes from the middle classes?

by-the-by, I was listening to that Ayn Rand stuff earlier while I was nursing a cold. It was really starting to make sense so I switched it off, sleep deprivation can be a terrible thing.

It's complicated I guess, but I think it boils down to a couple of things.

Firstly, I'd say a huge chunk of it is just down to innate personality traits and how that plays out. When you look at an image of a white family like that and have a reaction against it you are basically confronting the shadow of your own ego. The concepts around it being fascistic come much later and are laid onto a bedrock of basic alienation and distrust of 'the norm'.

Coming from a poor working class family means I was brought up to intensely dislike the wealthy and have disdain for politicians. This is just what poor folks think and say, it's a pre-condition. Rightwing ideology seems to be the position of the ruling wealthy class so you end up in blanket opposition to it.

I was born in 1980 and thus in secondary school in the 90s, maybe this has just generally stepped up over the years? Young kids now seem *waaay* more leftist than I ever have been.

FWIW I still hold the same values I ever did, and I'd say they are generally leftwing in a lot of ways, but the zeitgeist moves what that means away from you.

[Kirbmarc]

Just wanted to say I think this is spot-on, I've come from this way of thinking myself and still encounter it constantly: female friends of mine who (now in their 30s) clearly want kids but don't have them because having a family is bad. This might sound mental to any of you who have never been fully leftist but I assure it's what people think and say.

Where do you people come from? How do you get indoctrinated? I have never been exposed to any of this stuff... I am aware that there are working class people from Industrial cities who have supported the Left since the beginning, so that it is traditional and tribal. But as far as I knew even they wouldn't go this far and are just as misogynistic and racist as anybody. The other half of the working classes are aspirational and not onboard with the left. So I am assuming this comes from the middle classes?

by-the-by, I was listening to that Ayn Rand stuff earlier while I was nursing a cold. It was really starting to make sense so I switched it off, sleep deprivation can be a terrible thing.

It's complicated I guess, but I think it boils down to a couple of things.

Firstly, I'd say a huge chunk of it is just down to innate personality traits and how that plays out. When you look at an image of a white family like that and have a reaction against it you are basically confronting the shadow of your own ego. The concepts around it being fascistic come much later and are laid onto a bedrock of basic alienation and distrust of 'the norm'.

Coming from a poor working class family means I was brought up to intensely dislike the wealthy and have disdain for politicians. This is just what poor folks think and say, it's a pre-condition. Rightwing ideology seems to be the position of the ruling wealthy class so you end up in blanket opposition to it.

I was born in 1980 and thus in secondary school in the 90s, maybe this has just generally stepped up over the years? Young kids now seem *waaay* more leftist than I ever have been.

FWIW I still hold the same values I ever did, and I'd say they are generally leftwing in a lot of ways, but the zeitgeist moves what that means away from you.

Weirdly enough in Switzerland most working class people are very conservative and right wing, while the very rich are right-wing libertarians and the educated middle class is center-left to left wing, at least according to my experiences.

[shoutinghorse]

If you are going to wear a 'Blackamoor Brooch' then have the bollocks to tell the perpetually offended to fuck off. Don't fucking apologise Princess Pushy or at least one of her advisors must have known this would be picked up in today's snowflake climate. :doh:




http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42462724

[VickyCaramel]

Knowing what we do of evolution, I would expect there to be racial differences in IQ. So it's would be my starting point that the "race realism" proposition is true. If I apply skepticism to this I would look at the evidence (to the best of my understanding), find there isn't really anything definitive and so return to that default position.

The problem I have with "race realism", from a purely non-ideological point of view, is that it seems to make some very broad claims about very diverse groups and characteristics. IQ tests have many components (spacial, linguistic, mathematical, etc.), some of which are more culture-based and others less so, and it seems pretty unlikely to me that diverse populations living in diverse environments developed trends about all of those components. "White people" are pretty diverse and lived in pretty diverse environments (just compare Sweden to Spain), and so are "black people" (Nigeria and Somalia have little in common) or "east Asians" (Japan and inner China).

When I read "race realist" claims like "East Asians have higher IQ than white people, which have have higher IQ than black people", even keeping in mind that this is about averages I can't help but think that those claims are extremely broad and generic and might be a statistical artifact rather than telling us something concrete.

To explain what I mean I'll make an analogy with sports. Being freakishly good at sprinting (and so being able to beat world records) definitely has a strong genetic component: we can't all be Usain Bolt. It also seems likely that the genetic component might be localized, and so some human populations are far better at sprinting, on average, than other human populations. But to jump from that to saying that "black people" are better on average in all sports (hell, even just in all the different fields of athletics) than "white people" is quite a stretch.

The same seems likely with IQ. Maybe Han people from coastal China are freakishly better on average than, say, people of Scot-Irish background at doing maths, and maybe this is because of genetic factors. But it's quite a stretch to assume that this means that "East Asians" are on average smarter than "white people".

Consider the Maori-Moriori conflict. Maori had a very aggressive, militaristic culture, and it has been suggested that this had something to do with the so-called "warrior gene", which is a possibility that I won't discard out of hand. But the Moriori had a very pacifist culture based on sharing, even though they were closely related to the Maori. So it's perfectly possible that the isolation of the Moriori on the Chatham Islands weeded out the violent tendencies (and maybe the violent genes too, through selection) relatively quickly.

If a different environment can change the shape of a culture (and maybe even the genetic makeup of the people who make up that culture) in such a quick and extreme way, with such important consequences (the Maori wiped out the Moriori) how can we make such sweeping claims as the difference between "white people" or "black people" in terms of intelligence, when those big groups are so diverse and have lived in so many different environments?

I've read some "human bio-diversity" blogs (JayMan, HBD chick) and sometimes they do delve in finer, more "granular" differences, but they also make some pretty wild assumptions about larger populations, and hand-wave away some problems with those broad assumptions by saying "oh, there's factor X which we haven't discovered but we are likely to do in the future", which doesn't seem very honest to me.

Razib Khan and Yeyo (@Yeyoza on twitter) are pretty much the only ones in the "human biodiversity" field which admit that there are still some grey areas, controversial data and are cautious about making generalizing assumptions.

I agree. These categories are too broad.

Being British, It is fairly obvious that there is a difference between the Saxons and the Celts. It is evident in our different cultures, the Celts being more passionate and emotional, while the Saxons are stoic and positive. Not to mention the stereotypes of the black Irish and the red headed Scots... there is no doubt there are physiological differences from the shape of the feet to the efficiency of the cardiovascular system. I think it would be silly to claim one is superior to another.

To me this means two things, the first is that it is largely pointless to talk about "Blacks", "Whites", "Asians" etc. The second is that IQ is only one of many factors which could be important. What about impulse control, levels of aggression, the ability to weigh future consequences of current actions? If you were going to factor racial characteristics into something like immigration control, I would think these would be more important.

There definitely grey areas in the research, and in the current political climate it is unlikely that that research is going to get done.

[Nicest of The Damned]

Everything that bothered me about The Last Jedi:

► Show Spoiler

How did Leia, Mothma, Ackbar and the rest fuck up so badly that the new republic crumbled after 30 years?

Humor in the opening scene fell flat and removed any possible tension it might have created.

The imperial ships looked bad-like models in a low budget Star Wars knockoff.

Imperial ships don't scramble fighters until it's too late and apparently they lack shields so they can be disabled by a single fighter.

Bombers in zero gravity is just dumb.

Imperial fighters can get through the shields of the rebel ships-hence flying space Leia-but then they're recalled so that the ships can begin the slowest chase scene in cinematic history.

Flying space Leia.

Luke is a dejected loser who tried to kill his nephew because he MIGHT go to the dark side. This is the same guy who risked his life to redeem his father who HAD gone to the dark side.

Rey receives approximately half a lesson from Skywalker and is a fully trained jedi.

Rey's mystical cave experience is literally just her reflection. It reveals nothing yet it's treated as something revelatory and profound.

Yoda is just bizarre.

Snoke's ship has the only hyperspace tracker in the fleet, and Snoke doesn't know about it.

Finn attempts to take an escape pod to go find Rey. Where did Finn think he was going in an escape pod? Are they equipped with hyperdrive?

Why was the Finn/Rose superfluous subplot even included? Did we need a break from the action to watch these two ride giant space llamas?

When Finn and Rose get to the tracker, why not just shoot the damn thing with a blaster?

Laura Dern's Admiral looks like she was on her way to a party and not leading a fleet. Where was her uniform? She refuses to share vital information with Poe(the hero who destroyed Starkiller Base)for no reason except to drive the plot, and she was kind of a smug asshole about it, so why should we care we she makes her suicide attack?

If Holdo can take out half the imperial fleet with a suicide attack, then why hasn't that ever been done before. Also couldn't a droid fly the ship?

Snoke can facilitate intergalactic telepathy between Ben and Rey and give them both false visions but he can't tell what Ben is doing when he's right in front of him.

After the fight in Snoke's chamber, how did Rey get on the Millenium Falcon almost instantly?

Phasma was a complete waste of time; worse than Boba Fett.

The whole ground attack on the rebel base was just dumb. Nuke it from orbit.

Finn should've been allowed to complete his self sacrifice. Rose is an idiot.

Luke's projection is given away by his appearance, light saber, and that he doesn't leave footprints in the salt of not Hoth.

The Reyeus Ex Machina ending, and the fact that now the entire new republic fits inside the Millennium Falcon.

► Show Spoiler

1) This gives me pause about the whole light/dark side dynamic. At this point, the Sith and the Jedi are just gangs fighting over turf. Why should the beings living in the galaxy care who's in charge. With the exception (notable as it is) of a certain reluctance on one side to blow up entire planets, who's in charge doesn't seem to make any difference in the average being's quality of life.

2) I chuckled at it at first, but of course Hux keeps talking and talking long after it's obvious he's being crank yanked. All in all the nazis in Star Wars are about as good at their jobs as the ones in Sound of Music.

6) Another thing about that: There is absolutely no reason that the Order can't have some ships hop ahead at lightspeed and cut off the fleeing rebels. Whole thing doesn't have to happen.

16) I can actually see an Admiral refusing to explain themselves to a Captain. From an asset management standpoint though, it's horrible. Po is a known quantity. The longer he's sitting around, the more likely he's going to do something like what he did. You find something for him to do that will actually help your cause. Hell, maybe his crazy plan would have worked if it had been coordinated with a distraction by the reb fleet.

17) If ramming ships at light speed was that effective, the Empire would never have fallen. inexhaustible supply of clones and a bloated military budget?

18) I actually liked this bit. Everything Snoke said about what Ren was thinking/feeling is true, there's just a bit of sleight of hand as to intent. I have no problem with Ren pulling this off by say ... concentrating on what he's doing instead of why he's doing it or whatever.

22) Inconsistent messaging. Finn want to sacrifice himself for rebellion, but it's wrong because of whatever deepity Rose spouts. Minutes later, Finn is stopped from going to Luke's aid because Luke is sacrificing himself for the rebellion and it's suddenly fine.

23) You've got sharper eyes than me. I figured he would only withstand the firepower by not being there, and appreciated him not making contact in the fight scene because of it.

[Nicest of The Damned]

Everything that bothered me about The Last Jedi:

► Show Spoiler

How did Leia, Mothma, Ackbar and the rest fuck up so badly that the new republic crumbled after 30 years?

Humor in the opening scene fell flat and removed any possible tension it might have created.

The imperial ships looked bad-like models in a low budget Star Wars knockoff.

Imperial ships don't scramble fighters until it's too late and apparently they lack shields so they can be disabled by a single fighter.

Bombers in zero gravity is just dumb.

Imperial fighters can get through the shields of the rebel ships-hence flying space Leia-but then they're recalled so that the ships can begin the slowest chase scene in cinematic history.

Flying space Leia.

Luke is a dejected loser who tried to kill his nephew because he MIGHT go to the dark side. This is the same guy who risked his life to redeem his father who HAD gone to the dark side.

Rey receives approximately half a lesson from Skywalker and is a fully trained jedi.

Rey's mystical cave experience is literally just her reflection. It reveals nothing yet it's treated as something revelatory and profound.

Yoda is just bizarre.

Snoke's ship has the only hyperspace tracker in the fleet, and Snoke doesn't know about it.

Finn attempts to take an escape pod to go find Rey. Where did Finn think he was going in an escape pod? Are they equipped with hyperdrive?

Why was the Finn/Rose superfluous subplot even included? Did we need a break from the action to watch these two ride giant space llamas?

When Finn and Rose get to the tracker, why not just shoot the damn thing with a blaster?

Laura Dern's Admiral looks like she was on her way to a party and not leading a fleet. Where was her uniform? She refuses to share vital information with Poe(the hero who destroyed Starkiller Base)for no reason except to drive the plot, and she was kind of a smug asshole about it, so why should we care we she makes her suicide attack?

If Holdo can take out half the imperial fleet with a suicide attack, then why hasn't that ever been done before. Also couldn't a droid fly the ship?

Snoke can facilitate intergalactic telepathy between Ben and Rey and give them both false visions but he can't tell what Ben is doing when he's right in front of him.

After the fight in Snoke's chamber, how did Rey get on the Millenium Falcon almost instantly?

Phasma was a complete waste of time; worse than Boba Fett.

The whole ground attack on the rebel base was just dumb. Nuke it from orbit.

Finn should've been allowed to complete his self sacrifice. Rose is an idiot.

Luke's projection is given away by his appearance, light saber, and that he doesn't leave footprints in the salt of not Hoth.

The Reyeus Ex Machina ending, and the fact that now the entire new republic fits inside the Millennium Falcon.

► Show Spoiler

1) This gives me pause about the whole light/dark side dynamic. At this point, the Sith and the Jedi are just gangs fighting over turf. Why should the beings living in the galaxy care who's in charge. With the exception (notable as it is) of a certain reluctance on one side to blow up entire planets, who's in charge doesn't seem to make any difference in the average being's quality of life.

2) I chuckled at it at first, but of course Hux keeps talking and talking long after it's obvious he's being crank yanked. All in all the nazis in Star Wars are about as good at their jobs as the ones in Sound of Music.

6) Another thing about that: There is absolutely no reason that the Order can't have some ships hop ahead at lightspeed and cut off the fleeing rebels. Whole thing doesn't have to happen.

16) I can actually see an Admiral refusing to explain themselves to a Captain. From an asset management standpoint though, it's horrible. Po is a known quantity. The longer he's sitting around, the more likely he's going to do something like what he did. You find something for him to do that will actually help your cause. Hell, maybe his crazy plan would have worked if it had been coordinated with a distraction by the reb fleet.

17) If ramming ships at light speed was that effective, the Empire would never have fallen. inexhaustible supply of clones and a bloated military budget?

18) I actually liked this bit. Everything Snoke said about what Ren was thinking/feeling is true, there's just a bit of sleight of hand as to intent. I have no problem with Ren pulling this off by say ... concentrating on what he's doing instead of why he's doing it or whatever.

22) Inconsistent messaging. Finn want to sacrifice himself for rebellion, but it's wrong because of whatever deepity Rose spouts. Minutes later, Finn is stopped from going to Luke's aid because Luke is sacrificing himself for the rebellion and it's suddenly fine.

23) You've got sharper eyes than me. I figured he would only withstand the firepower by not being there, and appreciated him not making contact in the fight scene because of it.

[Nicest of The Damned]

Nuts. Site gave me 'internal server error blahblah', so I clicked post again. Never click post twice.

[Ape+lust]

Brianna "I am a software engineer and will not be mansplained to, are we fucking clear?" Wu is entering his second day with his congressional campaign website down.

Update: As I am typing this, it's reverted to to GoDaddy's domain parking page. So, he finally noticed.

http://briannawu.com/

[screwtape]

It seems to be Let's-Shoot-Ourselves-In-The-Foot season at Wilfred Laurier University.

Christie Blatchford: Pay raise for women at Wilfrid Laurier creates new inequity — for men

An all female committee has awarded female professors a 3% raise backdated to July 2016, and a 3.9% raise to female associate professors. Male faculty members, being paid exactly the same salaries for the same length of service, will not receive a raise. This hasn't a chance of surviving if taken to the Ontario Labour Relations Board as it is a straightforward Charter of Rights issue.

So what do the trans/genderfluid get? What if Davielle Muscato worked there?

And if a currently female professor decides to transition to being a male? Does she/he have to give it back?

It did occur to me that countries that were the first to legislate equal pay may have written legislation that said 'women cannot be paid less than men for the same job' - in which case it would be perfectly legal to pay them more, but I believe the relevant federal and provincial laws are written in bi-directional language - equal pay for equal work, which is our definition of pay equality. There is another concept in provincial employment law called pay equity, which requires that male-dominated positions and female-dominated positions of comparable value must be paid the same within the same organisation. However, it doesn't apply to female professors doing precisely the same job as male professors with a common employer. They might try to make the case that they are correcting for the fact that they don't work such long hours, take all their vacation time, take maternity leave, take better care of their mental health and families and generally do a better job of work/life balance etc, but that would leave them being paid more for doing less work. This can't stand scrutiny, but the question is whether anyone will have the balls to make an official complaint about it (though official complaints don't seem to be a requirement at WLU! 8-)

[Tigzy]

[Shatterface]

Te: Race. Bret Weinstein discusses it on Sam Harris's latest podcast (well worth listening to for a number of reasons) and I think he makes a lot of sense talking about 'populations' and 'lineage' instead. The word 'race' is too vague and it's too tainted with historical associations.

[Lsuoma]

If you are going to wear a 'Blackamoor Brooch' then have the bollocks to tell the perpetually offended to fuck off. Don't fucking apologise Princess Pushy or at least one of her advisors must have known this would be picked up in today's snowflake climate. :doh:




http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42462724

Princess Heinkel, you mean.

[MarcusAu]

Blackamoor Brooch' then have the bollocks to tell the perpetually offended to fuck off. Don't fucking apologise Princess Pushy or at least o

May all your deviations be standard ones.

[katamari Damassi]

Princess Heinkel, you mean.

Messerschmitt!

[TheMudbrooker]

Princess Heinkel, you mean.

Messerschmitt!

What are you Fokkers talking about?

[Spike13]

One thing that put me off Star Wars was the progessive adding of powers to the Jedi/Sith as the movies went on.
In Star Wars( i refuse to use the “new hope” pronoun) the Jedi appeared to be hyper trained bad asses with some neat parlor tricks. This alone would be enough to set them apart, but nooo.. we need telekinesis,not just the ability to say, toss an ashtray across the room, but objects the size of garbage trucks,then the capstone, lighting jazz hands.

I could see maybe, ...maybe only the most powerful perhaps having some crazy power, but the prequals showed all the jedi force shoving and throwing all over the place.

For me, it was better when we thought anyone could be a Jedi if they trained and learned the secrets of the order, but, then it turns out you have to be “ force sensative super special”

Frankly the whole franchise has been spiraling down story wise since “The empire strikes back”

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Being British, It is fairly obvious that there is a difference between the Saxons and the Celts. It is evident in our different cultures, the Celts being more passionate and emotional, while the Saxons are stoic and positive.

I hope you're not attributing that to genetics.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Princess Heinkel, you mean.

Messerschmitt!

what the Focke are you talking about?

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Te: Race. Bret Weinstein discusses it on Sam Harris's latest podcast (well worth listening to for a number of reasons) and I think he makes a lot of sense talking about 'populations' and 'lineage' instead. The word 'race' is too vague and it's too tainted with historical associations.

The technical term is "sub-species". I don't foresee any problems using that.

[CaptainFluffyBunny]

When I read "race realist" claims like "East Asians have higher IQ than white people, which have have higher IQ than black people", even keeping in mind that this is about averages I can't help but think that those claims are extremely broad and generic and might be a statistical artifact rather than telling us something concrete.

To explain what I mean I'll make an analogy with sports. Being freakishly good at sprinting (and so being able to beat world records) definitely has a strong genetic component: we can't all be Usain Bolt. It also seems likely that the genetic component might be localized, and so some human populations are far better at sprinting, on average, than other human populations. But to jump from that to saying that "black people" are better on average in all sports (hell, even just in all the different fields of athletics) than "white people" is quite a stretch.

Interesting that you choose sprinting, as that is actually something that seems to be fairly well localised:

https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... es/256015/

I see it as a statistical argument too. In a fair sprint, where everyone has equal opportunity to training, we expect a high proportion of the winners to be Kenyan because of genetics. Similarly, in a completely fair industry where intelligence is of dominant importance (e.g. tech), we'd expect a high proportion of east Asians and very few Africans. Such a discrepancy does therefore not necessarily imply racism. The real problem is that society is moving towards an environment where high intelligence corresponds to material success.

Uhm. I'm not entirely sure that the situation is so clear-cut, as I have written before. "Kenyans" is a more localized population than "African", and the field of sprinting is more restricted than all fields which correspond to material success (tech skills are different from lawyer or doctor or business exec skills). I'm not sure that the disparities are only due to genetics, either: poor or lacking education, just like poor or lacking training in the case of sports, surely plays a role, to say nothing of the environmental effects (lead exposure, for example, is proven to reduce cognitive skills, and poor urban people are more exposed to high levels of lead).

A lot of what is called "institutional racism" has more to do with class/urban problems than with race.

Anyway I think that the problem is multi-layered: on one hand there's the issue of social mobility (which is what "representation in tech" is about) and on the other the problems of the growth of the "working poor" working-class and of things like poverty and welfare traps.

The SocJus, weirdly enough considering its Marxist origins, seems to be concerned primarily with high-paying jobs and social mobility more than with improving the conditions of the working poor or of those trapped in poverty. Class is almost completely ignored in favor of identity. Poor black people with no tech or business qualifications are more or less ignored along with poor white people in a similar situation.

The Democratic solution to unemployed or underemployed people with low skills seems to be "make them learn how to code", which ignores the reality that not everybody can acquire the necessary skills to work in tech. Intersectionality fans gush over the idea of black female business execs or game developers but seem not to give a shit about black male factory workers or unemployed black women.

The SocJus seems to aim for a very shallow understanding of how to improve living conditions of poor people: hiring 200 more black women in tech will not nothing to improve the conditions of 10,000 poor black women who don't have tech skills. The SocJus seems to have a "racial trickle-down" view of economics, so if more black people are business execs other black people who DO NOT work as business execs will benefit from it somehow because of "privilege" or whatnot.

This is pretty stupid. Bill Gates' wealth doesn't really help poor whites in Alabama just because they have the same skin color, so why should a black executive's rise to power solve the problems of poor urban blacks?

Excellent points. I live in a very diverse suburb of Seattle and North Tacoma. My kid's school district used to be okay, a bunch of failing schools, but a few bright stars, schools that performed well and that had innovative and engaging programs. A new POC SJW superintendent has largely sabotaged those good schools by gutting the programs for high achievers while shipping in the poorest performing students to the good schools for "peer instruction." The motto is "every student college bound." I've volunteered at these schools for years, and many of these students have neither the interest nor ability to go to college. Trade and vocational programs that might have given them some hope for a good job are eliminated. They push learning to code on some kids that can barely read or do basic math.

The idea that we are all tabla rasa and that any child can be in STEM with the right instruction is insane. If money was spent where it was needed instead of for utopian ideals, we might actually get somewhere. Instead they look at the scores, which show black students failing at an appalling rate and blame it on racism.

I helped run the chess club, which was fairly diverse, but certainly heavy on whites and Koreans. The superintendent pushed a lot of kids into the chess club, turning it into an after-school babysitting service. The best kids quit the club and they moved to a private church. I tried to keep it going, but the kids really had no interest in being there, and they knew and resented that they wouldn't master the game. The district tried to shape kids into something that they weren't.

There are a lot of really smart black kids, a lot of dumb ones too, ones that have both a low IQ and have grown up in an environment that dengrates academic achievement and celbrates gang culture. The idea that we can push an ideological education on every student and when some groups fail in larger numbers, blame it on racism is insane and pernicious. They continue to push an agenda instead of looking into the root of the problems and scientifically trying to sort them out. But every child is a blank slate, every kid a coder, an eventual STEM graduate. The idea that they might actually be more happy and successful as a welder or a line cook is blasphemous racism. Meanwhile successful whites and Asians are now fleeing the district or going to private schools, further sinking the school systems. The best teachers are leaving wholesale.

The causes of race discrepancies are complex and diverse, but people can't solve them by yelling "racism and then being surprised when that results in people becoming actually racist.

Sorry for ranting.

[VickyCaramel]

Being British, It is fairly obvious that there is a difference between the Saxons and the Celts. It is evident in our different cultures, the Celts being more passionate and emotional, while the Saxons are stoic and positive.

I hope you're not attributing that to genetics.

As cultures don't arrive on earth riding on the back of a unicorn.... yes I am attributing it to genetics.
In fact, much of our culture is dedicated to allowing the warlike Celts to live day-to-day without killing each other. It's why the British are famed for their etiquette.
Culture is a social construct, constructed around the people it belongs to. Hand in glove.

[Billie from Ockham]

Te: Race. Bret Weinstein discusses it on Sam Harris's latest podcast (well worth listening to for a number of reasons) and I think he makes a lot of sense talking about 'populations' and 'lineage' instead. The word 'race' is too vague and it's too tainted with historical associations.

The technical term is "sub-species". I don't foresee any problems using that.

My prediction is that many people will hear this as "sub-human" and the shit will hit the fan even more.

[Kirbmarc]

Excellent points. I live in a very diverse suburb of Seattle and North Tacoma. My kid's school district used to be okay, a bunch of failing schools, but a few bright stars, schools that performed well and that had innovative and engaging programs. A new POC SJW superintendent has largely sabotaged those good schools by gutting the programs for high achievers while shipping in the poorest performing students to the good schools for "peer instruction." The motto is "every student college bound." I've volunteered at these schools for years, and many of these students have neither the interest nor ability to go to college. Trade and vocational programs that might have given them some hope for a good job are eliminated. They push learning to code on some kids that can barely read or do basic math.

The idea that we are all tabla rasa and that any child can be in STEM with the right instruction is insane. If money was spent where it was needed instead of for utopian ideals, we might actually get somewhere. Instead they look at the scores, which show black students failing at an appalling rate and blame it on racism.

I helped run the chess club, which was fairly diverse, but certainly heavy on whites and Koreans. The superintendent pushed a lot of kids into the chess club, turning it into an after-school babysitting service. The best kids quit the club and they moved to a private church. I tried to keep it going, but the kids really had no interest in being there, and they knew and resented that they wouldn't master the game. The district tried to shape kids into something that they weren't.

There are a lot of really smart black kids, a lot of dumb ones too, ones that have both a low IQ and have grown up in an environment that dengrates academic achievement and celbrates gang culture. The idea that we can push an ideological education on every student and when some groups fail in larger numbers, blame it on racism is insane and pernicious. They continue to push an agenda instead of looking into the root of the problems and scientifically trying to sort them out. But every child is a blank slate, every kid a coder, an eventual STEM graduate. The idea that they might actually be more happy and successful as a welder or a line cook is blasphemous racism. Meanwhile successful whites and Asians are now fleeing the district or going to private schools, further sinking the school systems. The best teachers are leaving wholesale.

The causes of race discrepancies are complex and diverse, but people can't solve them by yelling "racism and then being surprised when that results in people becoming actually racist.

Sorry for ranting.

The problem isn't even about race per se, it's about the idea that Everyone Has the Same Potential Skills and Desire for Every Job (and so that people are only randomly assigned to jobs, and with enough education anyone can be an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor).

This is just insane. We readily accept that not everyone can be a good singer, or a good artist, or an athlete, but somehow being a good college student is something that MUST be achievable by all people, whether they like it or not, whether they have the necessary skills for it or not. Instead of trying to figure out the different strengths and weaknesses of different people to orient them towards a career path (and then ensuring that the career path gets you decently-paying jobs) we want everyone to follow the same path to socio-economic success.

Not everyone can be a software engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a business executive. As you write it's far better for the pupil themselves to find a more fitting vocational training (that can actually lead to decent-paying jobs, at least at times) than to force them towards college or even worse towards a specific major because that's the major that leads to a good career.

[Kirbmarc]

Democrats should fight to defend the rights and improve the living conditions of welders or cooks or factory workers or unemployed people rather than focusing on quotas in STEM/coding. People who already have a good salary as a programmer at, say, Google, don't really need as much welfare and legal protection. They're not working class, they're actually pretty "privileged" as far as income goes.

[gurugeorge]

When I read "race realist" claims like "East Asians have higher IQ than white people, which have have higher IQ than black people", even keeping in mind that this is about averages I can't help but think that those claims are extremely broad and generic and might be a statistical artifact rather than telling us something concrete.

I don't think so, the evidence has been in for a long time now and quietly accepted by the relevant scientists, it's just that it's been downplayed, not spoken of, and if anyone speaks of it in a broad public way (e.g. Charles Murray) they're shot down, and you get a flurry of virtue-signalling as people feel obliged to distance themselves from the miscreant. Race realism isn't an assumption, it's what the evidence shows.

There is definitely a troglodyte way of taking race realism (or any of that class of statistical artifacts) though, cleverly encapsulated in one of the images in James Damore's essay:-

https://i.imgur.com/oxQQwjk.jpg

It's true, I think, that unfortunately some on the Alt Right (not the big names certainly, but it does often seem to crop up among the stupider end of the Alt Right commentariat) read the facts in the top image as meaning what's represented in the bottom image.

But if you're on guard against that kind of stupidity, there's really no problem with race realism. It doesn't affect in the least the classical liberal principles, because the purport of those is that justice is about dealing with people as unique individuals, according to their actions and not according to your prediction of their actions based on a signifier of statistical likelihood.

IOW all that good stuff about treating people according to the content of their character not the colour of their skin is completely untouched by race realism (although "colour of skin" is a bit of a canard, since what race realists are really talking about is clusters of physical and psychological - and therefore by extension also cultural - traits that reliably go together, of which skin colour is just a reasonably good signifier).

What is changed by a race realist perspective is public policy. If the effect of environment on trait variability stands at a certain percentage, and the lesser percentage at that, then there's no point trying to push the effectiveness of public policy measures beyond that percentage, it's simply going to be a waste of time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

Another thing that's changed by race realism is that freedom of association looms larger and becomes more important, and the knee-jerk fear of (natural, voluntary) segregation has to go - and that is itself also a classical liberal principle.

The following facts are true, and can all walk and chew gum together:-

1. The state has no business mandating segregation (as the US state had tried to do prior to the civil rights era).

2. The state also has no business mandating desegregation (as Western states are doing now with mass immigration, etc., etc.)

3. States have a right to control their borders.

4. People will naturally segregate and mix as they see fit, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with either process. There's nothing wrong with having reasonably ethnically homogenous groups. It's a natural trait, and as with all natural traits it just has to be channeled by moral principles (just like everyone wants to kill their boss but refrains). In a trope: races are gigantic, diffuse families, and families are tiny micro-races. The instinct to flock with your own kind is natural and there's nothing wrong with it at all. But (all things being equal - which is of course arguable under present circumstances) there's also no reason for any great animus against individuals who do choose to race mix. It's none of your business - you can recommend and say your piece, but you can't force.

5. Ethnically homogenous societies can afford to be based more on trust (because of predictability), and as we learn from games like EVE Online, trust is the real basis, the pure gold of human co-operation in a universe that's 99.99% hostile to human life.

IOW, left to their own devices, but under the guidance of over-arching liberal principles that guard the rights of the individual, people will naturally tend to form ethnic clusters with distinct characters, with a bit of miscegenation on the fringes (e.g. in big cities) Most people prefer flocking together, some people are more psychologically open to mixing. And, again, there's nothing wrong with either process. (In fact, as I understand it, some degree of miscegenation is actually necessary for the health of a gene pool - that's probably why you will always find some people who instinctively go that way.)

As to the rest of it:-

1. Division of labour and comparative advantage are things - even if some particular ethnic group were the "master race" and the best at everything, it would still pay them to focus on min-maxing what they're super-best at, and delegating/exchanging/trading other things to other groups that are second-best and third-best, etc. IOW racial supremacy is leaving money on the table. It takes all sorts.

2. The very fact that these are statistical averages we're talking about implies that there will always be some substantial number of people in absolute terms from every race who are perfectly capable of getting on with each other intelligently, and that's what should be the basis of immigration policy. We want their best people, if we don't have enough best people of our own in any given field.

I'd much rather live next door to a smart Black guy than a stupid White guy or a stupid Jew or a stupid Asian. But then again, there are other factors - I'd rather live next door to a nice stupid White guy than a nasty clever Jew, and I'd rather live next door to a Black guy who's a master musician and a joyful human being, than a dour, snappish Chinese guy with no sense of rhythm ;)

The above general ideas are what I've settled on after wrestling with Alt Right ideas and race realism for several months now. The Alt Right has some considerable intellectual force, and it's right about some important things, but it's not right about everything. In particular, Sargon's instinct that the collectivist aspect of the Alt Right is what's problematic, is correct, although not yet well expressed (I think he'll get there eventually though, especially if he keeps reading into Objectivism). The reason why the Alt Right tends to collectivism is understandable - Whites have been browbeaten, and have browbeaten themselves, into a suicidal condition in which their imminent demographic demise is invisible to them. Some degree of collective awakening of survival instinct and fellow feeling is necessary to counter that, but it's really not necessary to go full national socialist. The best way to keep that elephant out of the room is to understand and acknowledge that Alt Right fears of demographic frog-boiling have a colorable rational basis in reality, go partway with them along the path of the recovery of some sense of natural, innocent white ethnic solidarity, stay in dialogue with them, and encourage them to keep their troglodytes in line.

[Kirbmarc]

Deep down the SocJus only defends the SocJus believers themselves. Most of its economic ideas (quotas in STEM, for example, or "diversity staff/diversity officers") are all about the needs and desires of middle-class, university-educated people who received a SocJus-friendly education.

SocJus professors like Melissa Click are ultimately defending their own jobs by arguing for the need of more diversity (and for themselves as the diversity enforcers). They more than often have degrees which can only get them jobs in academia. Their "allies" are also more often than not other academics who wish to defend their own jobs.

The same is true for game journalists or op-ed writers or "feminist activists". Ultimately the real nature of the SocJus is about defending the SocJus itself. Dealing with real issues is counterproductive, it's far more remunerative to share clickbait hot takes, support each other in Patreon circlejerks and try to take those who are not part of their circles down through scandals and outrage.

This is unsurprisingly mirrored by Youtube cliques of "social media activists", both SJWs and anti-SJWs. Controversy sells, supporting each other from the "haters"/"harassers" is also helpful, and getting the online masses outraged achieves all of those objectives. This is why social media are such a dumpster fire, there's quite a lot money in flame wars and online drama.

Meanwhile real issues are ignored or drowned by the noise of the new scandal.

[Billie from Ockham]

Democrats should fight to defend the rights and improve the living conditions of welders or cooks or factory workers or unemployed people rather than focusing on quotas in STEM/coding. People who already have a good salary as a programmer at, say, Google, don't really need as much welfare and legal protection. They're not working class, they're actually pretty "privileged" as far as income goes.

That depends on how you are using the word "should" (in the first sentence). If their only/actual goal is re-election, then their current approach of targeting the union bosses while ignoring the blue-collar workers is probably better. This is why I would argue, as weird as this may seem, that it's in the best interest of welders, cooks, and factory workers that their unions be barred from making political donations. They won't lose much useful power in the short term and the subsequent (consequent?) changes to the Democratic Party would help them in the long term.

[Shatterface]

I think preferences are more decisive than IQ differences especially among men and women. These are much more innate than SJWs will admit, mainly because they won't admit any innate differences at all.

Preferences along racial lines - or population lines - might be more amenable to social change but there's fuck all that, say, STEM fields can do to attract people from populations where peer groups value the acquisition of sports shoes and bitches over the an education.

[Shatterface]

Reading that book on AIDS I mentioned earlier, there's one chapter where one of the activists visits gay saunas and noted that most of the clientele at that point were black or Latino. Whites had largely turned away due to concerns over health; not coincidentally whites made up the main readership of magazines that had been promoting safe sex.

This is a point where intersectionality makes sense. Black and Latino gays weren't being oppressed, they just weren't being reached. An intersectional approach would include reaching out to the black community and maybe publishing safe sex guidance in Spanish.

A bonkers approach would be to look at the almost exclusively male leadership of the AIDS movement and conclude that there weren't enough women; that what the activist movement really needed was a 50-50 split between gay men and lesbians.

I suspect if AIDS had arisen this century that not only lesbians would have had to have equal representation in the movement but so would asexuals too. The goals of the movement would have to take second place to identity politics.

[VickyCaramel]

Excellent points. I live in a very diverse suburb of Seattle and North Tacoma. My kid's school district used to be okay, a bunch of failing schools, but a few bright stars, schools that performed well and that had innovative and engaging programs. A new POC SJW superintendent has largely sabotaged those good schools by gutting the programs for high achievers while shipping in the poorest performing students to the good schools for "peer instruction." The motto is "every student college bound." I've volunteered at these schools for years, and many of these students have neither the interest nor ability to go to college. Trade and vocational programs that might have given them some hope for a good job are eliminated. They push learning to code on some kids that can barely read or do basic math.

The idea that we are all tabla rasa and that any child can be in STEM with the right instruction is insane. If money was spent where it was needed instead of for utopian ideals, we might actually get somewhere. Instead they look at the scores, which show black students failing at an appalling rate and blame it on racism.

I helped run the chess club, which was fairly diverse, but certainly heavy on whites and Koreans. The superintendent pushed a lot of kids into the chess club, turning it into an after-school babysitting service. The best kids quit the club and they moved to a private church. I tried to keep it going, but the kids really had no interest in being there, and they knew and resented that they wouldn't master the game. The district tried to shape kids into something that they weren't.

There are a lot of really smart black kids, a lot of dumb ones too, ones that have both a low IQ and have grown up in an environment that dengrates academic achievement and celbrates gang culture. The idea that we can push an ideological education on every student and when some groups fail in larger numbers, blame it on racism is insane and pernicious. They continue to push an agenda instead of looking into the root of the problems and scientifically trying to sort them out. But every child is a blank slate, every kid a coder, an eventual STEM graduate. The idea that they might actually be more happy and successful as a welder or a line cook is blasphemous racism. Meanwhile successful whites and Asians are now fleeing the district or going to private schools, further sinking the school systems. The best teachers are leaving wholesale.

The causes of race discrepancies are complex and diverse, but people can't solve them by yelling "racism and then being surprised when that results in people becoming actually racist.

Sorry for ranting.

The problem isn't even about race per se, it's about the idea that Everyone Has the Same Potential Skills and Desire for Every Job (and so that people are only randomly assigned to jobs, and with enough education anyone can be an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor).

This is just insane. We readily accept that not everyone can be a good singer, or a good artist, or an athlete, but somehow being a good college student is something that MUST be achievable by all people, whether they like it or not, whether they have the necessary skills for it or not. Instead of trying to figure out the different strengths and weaknesses of different people to orient them towards a career path (and then ensuring that the career path gets you decently-paying jobs) we want everyone to follow the same path to socio-economic success.

Not everyone can be a software engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a business executive. As you write it's far better for the pupil themselves to find a more fitting vocational training (that can actually lead to decent-paying jobs, at least at times) than to force them towards college or even worse towards a specific major because that's the major that leads to a good career.

I'd go a step even further than this, because not everybody with a high IQ aspires to a prestige or high paying job. I am pretty sure that if they still had the old technical schools, they would attract their fair share of the brightest. It is not just about aptitude, there is no point in pushing people down career paths they have absolutely no interest in.

Besides, last I heard half of Europe is short of carpenters, plumbers and brick layers and is having to import them from Poland.

[VickyCaramel]

But if you're on guard against that kind of stupidity, there's really no problem with race realism. It doesn't affect in the least the classical liberal principles, because the purport of those is that justice is about dealing with people as unique individuals, according to their actions and not according to your prediction of their actions based on a signifier of statistical likelihood.

Indeed, classical liberalism is the antidote.

Academic Agent recently argued that race realism is dangerous because if generally accepted, it would least to more SJW quotas and affirmative action. I don't think he's right about that. I think it would actually lead people to once again argue that we have to judge by the content of their character, treat people according to their ability, and ignore the colour of their skin.

[jugheadnaut]

The problem I have with "race realism", from a purely non-ideological point of view, is that it seems to make some very broad claims about very diverse groups and characteristics. IQ tests have many components (spacial, linguistic, mathematical, etc.), some of which are more culture-based and others less so, and it seems pretty unlikely to me that diverse populations living in diverse environments developed trends about all of those components. "White people" are pretty diverse and lived in pretty diverse environments (just compare Sweden to Spain), and so are "black people" (Nigeria and Somalia have little in common) or "east Asians" (Japan and inner China).

At least in theory, race realism is just dropping all taboos about racial issues and just going with where the evidence leads. I first heard the term with respect to crime. It's often alleged as an example of still existing societal racism that restaurants will sometimes not deliver to black neighborhoods and taxis will not pick up black men in many areas. Some pointed out that the frequency of robbery and violence was massively higher in these cases, and the motivation of the restaurants and cabbies was rational support for their own well being, not racism For a time, this was called rational racism, but that term carries a ton of baggage, so eventually the nomenclature shifted to race realism. And now it's being applied to racial cognitive differences. It's fine in theory, but I agree with you about the potential for misuse. I predict that if race realism gets traction, it will be so butchered by motivated white identitarians and non-motivated statistical ignoramuses that, at least in mainstream thought, the taboo will be definitively reinforced.

[Billie from Ockham]

I think preferences are more decisive than IQ differences especially among men and women. These are much more innate than SJWs will admit, mainly because they won't admit any innate differences at all.

Preferences along racial lines - or population lines - might be more amenable to social change but there's fuck all that, say, STEM fields can do to attract people from populations where peer groups value the acquisition of sports shoes and bitches over the an education.

I agree with your opening, but you seem to slide too easily from something that probably has a genetic component to something that is probably entirely cultural.

[Billie from Ockham]

My reading of "race realism" is that it embodies the claim that important sub-species differences remain even when you control for cultural factors. It's a way of saying "I'm aware of the correlates of race, but there's more to the story than that."

But I've been told at least once that I have it exactly backwards ... that "race realism" is the idea that all observed "racial" differences are cultural (a la Ben Shapiro).

[CommanderTuvok]

The cannibal feeding frenzy of the Puritan Left is now after Cenk Uygur:

So apparently some racy jokes and wanting to get laid are "barbarism" in the Social Justice Democratic Party :bjarte: Cenk didn't even DO anything, he just WROTE some blog posts.

As always, just as I thought that the Democratic Party might have a chance to improve they go ahead and start (to borrow a Damion-ism) yet another circular firing squad.

Expect a lot of prominent democrats being "outed" as horrible shitlords for having said or written something that somehow goes against the feminist dogmas. I think that the GOP is definitely going to take advantage of this and will try to expose more and more Democrats as people who didn't have the feminist-friendly morals (which, since the bar is set so low, won't be hard at all).

We live in interesting times.

Didn't Talcolm X recently defend Linda Sarsour, who has much more serious allegations (covering up sexual harassment) made against her?

What a fucking hypocrite the cracker boy is.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Being British, It is fairly obvious that there is a difference between the Saxons and the Celts. It is evident in our different cultures, the Celts being more passionate and emotional, while the Saxons are stoic and positive.

I hope you're not attributing that to genetics.

As cultures don't arrive on earth riding on the back of a unicorn.... yes I am attributing it to genetics.
In fact, much of our culture is dedicated to allowing the warlike Celts to live day-to-day without killing each other. It's why the British are famed for their etiquette.
Culture is a social construct, constructed around the people it belongs to. Hand in glove.

I agree that culture has origins stretching back to innate behavior. However, I believe there are too many confounding elements to ascribe, as you do, certain cultural attributes to a specific race's genetics. The French are considered passionate and emotional by nature, being a 'romance' people. Yet their stock is a mix of Celtic, Germanic, and Norse. And even were we able to with any certainly -- and without bias -- categorize Celts as passionate and Saxons as stoic, to what extent would those traits be the product of inheritance, not the chance of social structures? And how do we compare? Quick - were the Gepids passionate or stoic?

[Matt Cavanaugh]

For the French, read: 'Celtic, Germanic/Norse, and Latin'

[Shatterface]

I think preferences are more decisive than IQ differences especially among men and women. These are much more innate than SJWs will admit, mainly because they won't admit any innate differences at all.

Preferences along racial lines - or population lines - might be more amenable to social change but there's fuck all that, say, STEM fields can do to attract people from populations where peer groups value the acquisition of sports shoes and bitches over the an education.

I agree with your opening, but you seem to slide too easily from something that probably has a genetic component to something that is probably entirely cultural.

I think it's easier to argue that gender differences are genetic because they are visible across races while racial differences aren't so visible across genders.

In other words it's easy to isolate gender based differences across cultures that must clearly be genetic and will still hold true no matter how we restructure society.

It's not so easy to isolate race based differences because you can't isolate them from culture.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Te: Race. Bret Weinstein discusses it on Sam Harris's latest podcast (well worth listening to for a number of reasons) and I think he makes a lot of sense talking about 'populations' and 'lineage' instead. The word 'race' is too vague and it's too tainted with historical associations.

The technical term is "sub-species". I don't foresee any problems using that.

My prediction is that many people will hear this as "sub-human" and the shit will hit the fan even more.

Okay, Dr. Placebo!

[Matt Cavanaugh]

I have encountered absolutely bitter hatred from the left while arguing for Brexit, far worse than I ever got when arguing against America's Religious Right. But I never knew they brainwashed the left into feelings of disgust and revulsion. You are going to have to explain yourself, because I am having visions of you being captured during the Korean war.

Oh yes, I can assure you that many white people on the Left are so conditioned to self-hatred as to have a feeling of disgust when they see images like this. Even at best, it's a laughable image. Think of Merkel's instant moue of disgust when she was handed the German flag - that sort of encapsulates the feeling. Yes, there was probably some calculation about how "nationalistic" it would look if she waved the flag, but the reaction itself you can see is instant and visceral.

It's the conditioned association of that kind of image with what it's supposed to lead to that causes the feeling of disgust. The nuclear family is supposed to lead to bad things, wives who look forward to this lifestyle are "Stepford Wives", the husband in this scenario is no doubt molesting his daughter, the cute little boy will grow up to be a misogynist, anti-Semitic little thug and bully. The neatness and orderliness of their lot must necessarily be a sign of neurosis, covering a deeply sadistic/masochistic relationship of authority and submission. They look happy but really underneath it all they're seething bundles of hatred for other races, for minorities. Etc., etc., etc.

I know it's insane, and yes it's really really bad that lots of people think that way; but don't blame me, that's how it is: images of "straight" white family health and happiness automatically have a cloud of suspicion and are at best laughable, at worst disgusting.

And it's precisely by signalling, in a thousand small ways, that you have this general sort of feeling of discomfort with what the mainstream would consider good and aspire to, that you pass as someone of the (hard) Left, that you have the "ant smell" of someone on the Left.

And this is why the natural prey of Leftist ideology is smart children of dysfunctional families. Because sure, the family thing doesn't always work out, and sometimes you'll have (e.g.) a nerdy rationalist kid growing up in a straightlaced Christian home with overly strict parents who hate each other and don't understand the kid - that type of thing. So obviously to a kid like that, the whole family thing isn't as prima facie nice an aspiration as it is to most normal people. And that's the hook that makes it plausible that their experience, rather than being the odd one out, is standard. (As you might guess, this is semi-autobiographical :) )

To be more precise about it, this is the feeling for a goodly portion of the Left, which is to say, not the "Quaker" strain of the Left derived from liberalism and from the general idea of ameliorating the human lot, but the "Puritan" strain of the Left that comes from a feeling of disgust with and anger about, exploitation. This is how Leftists who are "high in disgust" (in the Big 5 psychological sense) feel. Or to be even more precise, this is the character trait that the type of ideology they're attracted by plays on.

And it all basically comes from a cluster of texts from the Frankfurt School (and similar), mainly the 1950's study The Authoritarian Personality. In that study, which was based on questionnaires, responses from normal white Christian families, in which (among many other similar twistings of reality) children who expressed satisfaction with their family and love of their parents, were pathologized, using cod Freudianism, as "in denial," and children who expressed suspicion of their family, or hostility to their parents, were praised as being "honest" and seeing clearly. Another reversal of the truth is that such families are "atomized", separate from other families in little boxes, all made out of ticky-tacky - when actually the opposite is the truth, such families tend to be most engaged with their communities.

And The Authoritarian Personality, despite several high-level debunkings over the years, is still the main prism through which the standard European/American family is seen by politically committed social psychology - which informs the education systems of the West. But it's also bled through to the entertainment industry, for example in the way movies are made about relationships and nuclear families, which are generally viewed with a jaundiced eye (consider the purport of a film title like "Terms of Engagement"), underneath the layer of cynical pandering to starry-eyed romanticism. (But the latter isn't necessary in art-house movies, so there you tend to see the full horrorshow of psychological damage that the white European family form is believed to lead to - unless very carefully hedged about and made "progressive.")

This is a great summation of what's gone on. (Love "ant smell"!) And to answer Vickie's subsequent question: I, too, was exposed to this growing up. I even got the 'sticky tacky' reference.

[Billie from Ockham]

My objection, Shatterface, arose when you got all the way to "sneakers and bitches over education" while still seeming to focus on race over culture. I coach basketball at the junior-high level. It ain't race.

[VickyCaramel]

Being British, It is fairly obvious that there is a difference between the Saxons and the Celts. It is evident in our different cultures, the Celts being more passionate and emotional, while the Saxons are stoic and positive.

I hope you're not attributing that to genetics.

As cultures don't arrive on earth riding on the back of a unicorn.... yes I am attributing it to genetics.
In fact, much of our culture is dedicated to allowing the warlike Celts to live day-to-day without killing each other. It's why the British are famed for their etiquette.
Culture is a social construct, constructed around the people it belongs to. Hand in glove.

I agree that culture has origins stretching back to innate behavior. However, I believe there are too many confounding elements to ascribe, as you do, certain cultural attributes to a specific race's genetics. The French are considered passionate and emotional by nature, being a 'romance' people. Yet their stock is a mix of Celtic, Germanic, and Norse. And even were we able to with any certainly -- and without bias -- categorize Celts as passionate and Saxons as stoic, to what extent would those traits be the product of inheritance, not the chance of social structures? And how do we compare? Quick - were the Gepids passionate or stoic?

THE French weren't a single people with a single language until a few hundred years ago. I am confident that within France, they can also break down their ethnicities and cultures beyond what we from the outside see.

[Brive1987]

Twitter has purged Wife with a Purpose. Truely one of the more benign Nazi trad accounts.

[DrokkIt]

Weirdly enough in Switzerland most working class people are very conservative and right wing, while the very rich are right-wing libertarians and the educated middle class is center-left to left wing, at least according to my experiences.

I think this is where we pretty much are now -Brexit demonstrates this as does the election.
Historically the working class poor of Britain had a friend in Labour's union power as it was made up of working class men. That's not how it is now, and socjus people (who's power in Labour is increasing) tend to see the unions as corrupt and aristocratic.

[feathers]

If I were a GOP strategist I'd be compiling lists of Republican women to compete against Democratic men, then send my attack dogs out to "expose" the Democratic men for having made a racy joke or written something un-feminist in their past career and let the SocJus outrage machine do the rest.

No silly, you hire the Russians to do the exposing.

[feathers]

The technical term is "sub-species". I don't foresee any problems using that.

A subspecies human, that would be an Untermensch, no?

[feathers]

Not everyone can be a software engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer, [...]

I'd say society is doing its darndest best to make the latter come true.