All true, though I’ll ADBOC a little since I think these are viewpoints of a loud but tiny minority.
I’m not sure I see the connection, though. That there are a few racial pseudoscience believers in the audience doesn’t change genocide being wrong, just as there being a few homeopathy users in the audience doesn’t change fraud being wrong.
That there are a few racial pseudoscience believers in the audience doesn’t change genocide being wrong, just as there being a few homeopathy users in the audience doesn’t change fraud being wrong.
Perhaps you haven’t read much of those folks? (Not that I blame you, it can be stomach-turning.) They claim that they’re the voice of Actual Science on human sociobiology. It is the accepted consensus of polite society today—that xenophobia is wrong and immoral and destructive, that non-”white” people aren’t, as a group, cognitively inferior/inherently antisocial/undesirable—that they accuse of being ideologically corrupt pseudoscience.
They’re very insistent on the fact that theirs is the True Enlightened Scientific racism, and that, therefore, there’s nothing irrational or wrong with the stereotypes they deal in. Many—like, say, Mencius Moldbug—fancy placing themselves in opposition to the “vulgar” and “unreasoned” xenophobes, even as they espouse similar policy measures (barbed wire and apartheid 2.0).
P.S.: “in the audience”? In these circles at least, a few of them—like the aforementioned bloggers—are undoubtedly on the stage as well. Hell, Anissimov held the post of Media Director or something. (He claims his firing to be unrelated, and not damage control by SIAI.)
It is the accepted consensus of polite society today—that xenophobia is wrong and immoral and destructive, that non-”white” people aren’t, as a group, cognitively inferior/inherently antisocial/undesirable—that they accuse of being ideologically corrupt pseudoscience.
One helpful tactic when discussing views you dislike is to try and be as precise as possible about those views. One unpleasant result of interaction between factual matters and social dynamics is intellectual hipsterism, where different tiers of engagement with an issue seem stacked so as to maximize the difference with the previous tier. But a tier above you and a tier below you are unlikely to be similar, even though both feel like The Enemy.
In this particular case, there are a couple parts of your comment that comes off as an “invisible dragon,” where you know those two groups are different but want to pretend they aren’t. Everyone agrees that racial purists like Ploetz aren’t right that the Nordic race is the master race. Everyone includes Razib and Mike, except you’re still calling them racial purists. In order to do so, you need to put scare quotes on “white” or put “insufficiently” in front of white.
Why that looks like an invisible dragon to me is you know that Razib and Mike don’t particularly care about skin color. It’s just cosmetic. What they care about is what’s inside skulls, and every scientific racist will agree that the IQ progression goes roughly Jews > East Asians >= Europeans > Hispanics > Africans. (I’m using >= because there are some subtleties in the comparisons between Asians and Europeans, but there are several large groups who seem to do noticeably better than Europeans. Also, Nordics do score higher on IQ tests than southern Europeans- but the difference is tiny compared to the difference between Jews and Africans.)
Now, everyone knows that color is just color, and ascribing moral value to it does little. But the claim that smarts is “just smarts,” and that it shouldn’t have any impact on our decision-making, is contentious (and I would go so far as to call it silly). The claim that some people are “insufficiently white” doesn’t fit with modern societies, but the claim that some people are “insufficiently smart” does, and so the association of “white” with “smart” looks like a rhetorical trick at best.
All true, though I’ll ADBOC a little since I think these are viewpoints of a loud but tiny minority.
I’m not sure I see the connection, though. That there are a few racial pseudoscience believers in the audience doesn’t change genocide being wrong, just as there being a few homeopathy users in the audience doesn’t change fraud being wrong.
Perhaps you haven’t read much of those folks? (Not that I blame you, it can be stomach-turning.) They claim that they’re the voice of Actual Science on human sociobiology. It is the accepted consensus of polite society today—that xenophobia is wrong and immoral and destructive, that non-”white” people aren’t, as a group, cognitively inferior/inherently antisocial/undesirable—that they accuse of being ideologically corrupt pseudoscience.
They’re very insistent on the fact that theirs is the True Enlightened Scientific racism, and that, therefore, there’s nothing irrational or wrong with the stereotypes they deal in. Many—like, say, Mencius Moldbug—fancy placing themselves in opposition to the “vulgar” and “unreasoned” xenophobes, even as they espouse similar policy measures (barbed wire and apartheid 2.0).
P.S.: “in the audience”? In these circles at least, a few of them—like the aforementioned bloggers—are undoubtedly on the stage as well. Hell, Anissimov held the post of Media Director or something. (He claims his firing to be unrelated, and not damage control by SIAI.)
One helpful tactic when discussing views you dislike is to try and be as precise as possible about those views. One unpleasant result of interaction between factual matters and social dynamics is intellectual hipsterism, where different tiers of engagement with an issue seem stacked so as to maximize the difference with the previous tier. But a tier above you and a tier below you are unlikely to be similar, even though both feel like The Enemy.
In this particular case, there are a couple parts of your comment that comes off as an “invisible dragon,” where you know those two groups are different but want to pretend they aren’t. Everyone agrees that racial purists like Ploetz aren’t right that the Nordic race is the master race. Everyone includes Razib and Mike, except you’re still calling them racial purists. In order to do so, you need to put scare quotes on “white” or put “insufficiently” in front of white.
Why that looks like an invisible dragon to me is you know that Razib and Mike don’t particularly care about skin color. It’s just cosmetic. What they care about is what’s inside skulls, and every scientific racist will agree that the IQ progression goes roughly Jews > East Asians >= Europeans > Hispanics > Africans. (I’m using >= because there are some subtleties in the comparisons between Asians and Europeans, but there are several large groups who seem to do noticeably better than Europeans. Also, Nordics do score higher on IQ tests than southern Europeans- but the difference is tiny compared to the difference between Jews and Africans.)
Now, everyone knows that color is just color, and ascribing moral value to it does little. But the claim that smarts is “just smarts,” and that it shouldn’t have any impact on our decision-making, is contentious (and I would go so far as to call it silly). The claim that some people are “insufficiently white” doesn’t fit with modern societies, but the claim that some people are “insufficiently smart” does, and so the association of “white” with “smart” looks like a rhetorical trick at best.