I can no longer read most of what Hanania writes because of his TDS and his obsession with not merely going after the far MAGA right but claiming that almost the entirety of the right IS now the far MAGA right. And therefore the Democrats are the superior political party and “The Media is Basically Honest and Good.”
I actually attribute this otherwise highly irrational behavior change on his part to his desire to get as far away as he can from his racist past. But on that point I am just guessing.
This change in Richard is sad, because he used to be incredibly interesting, 85% on target with 15% eye-rollingly infuriating bad takes. But now the ratio seems to be reversed.
But all that said, I agree that claims that today he is “racist” are just dead wrong.
"I can no longer read most of what Hanania writes because of his TDS and his obsession with not merely going after the far MAGA right but claiming that almost the entirety of the right IS now the far MAGA right."
Every Republican primary that becomes contested nationally now revolves around loyalty to Trump and practically no other issue. I don't know what else would need to happen for people to conclude that Trump is conservatism now.
1) [Accepting your premise] Please show me all the Dem candidates who won contested primaries while bucking Obama and Clinton. Or GOP and Reagan for that matter. I don’t think you’re gonna be able to produce many, and surely none prominent.
2) Thank you for demonstrating my point about your TDS. Included nowhere in your response was the fact that Trump policy is objectively better on net for almost all of the things you have always claimed to support than is the policy of the current Dem party.
Of course Trump is highly imperfect. I am no fanboy. And on domestic policy Trump 47 is clearly worse than Trump 45. But on policy vs Dems it’s not remotely close. And on awful things done by the executive (or his Autopen), at the barest minimum Biden gave Trump a run for his money.
So yeah, yeah, Orange Man Bad. Go on continuing to blur the distinction between policy, what Trump says, what Trump does, and what the *worst* elements of the *far* right believe and say. And holding the right to far, far higher standards than you hold the left.
I miss the old, really interesting Richard. But I know we ain’t getting him back any time soon, if ever.
The question was ran against their president in a contested primary, and won the nomination.
I found only one (Blanche Lincoln). Who then lost in the general election.
The question was whether you can show examples who ran against their president in the contested primary and won.
[The lol above is because I ran a similar ChatGPT conversation to Richard’s before I wrote my previous response. Which required an additional prompt or two to get to the question of opposing their president while running in primaries, as opposed to differences on particular policies.]
It appears you don’t follow the news. People like John Cornyn don’t “run against Trump.” They kiss up to him and then lose because they lose to complete scumbags who don’t have scruples.
Republican voters have had elected officials lie to them for years about being against illegal immigration or being unable to stop it. Trump has very effectively highlighted that they were all full of shit. The fact that Trump, who feels basically zero obligation to have anything coming out of his mouth match reality, is justifiably seen as significantly more credible than the average republican politician is damning of republican politicians, but that doesn't mean that Trump is the party. It just means that he has credibility on a few of the issues republican voters care about when politicians are vulnerable on those issues, he has a lot of sway. Republican voters care a lot about election integrity now. They view the SAVE Act as something that is an existential issue. I am a fan of the filibuster, but I can completely get why voters would be willing to sacrifice it for the SAVE Act and it makes perfect sense why it would cost Cornyn his seat. He could have bucked Trump on basically any issue but illegal immigration and the SAVE Act and probably have been safe, because those other issues would have just been seen as a dispute with Trump, not a fundamental difference with his constituents.
Trump being the median of the GOP - and I don’t actually deny that the median of the GOP is Trump is close to the median of the group known as “MAGA” - is very different from the claims that the median of the GOP is the far right fringe of MAGA.
He supported Trump in 2024 and thought his populist rhetoric was just empty rhetoric. Part of the reason he changed his mind is Trump actually appointed RFK Jr. to head HHS. He was and is anti-woke but it’s impossible to deny that Trumpism (the dominant ideology of the Republican party in America today) is utterly and thoroughly populist in its ideological content, way of thinking about and understanding the world, and quite plainly doesn’t take ideas seriously. The facts changed and he changed his mind.
I do have a problem that he tars everyone on the right because they won’t simply buck the sitting president on most things. He knows full well this is how the real world works. But even this only a moderate objection.
I have the biggest problem with his claims that the Dem party of today is better than the (Trump-dominated) GOP of today. Because so obviously false. Unless (recursively) TDS.
Your claim about “doesn’t take ideas seriously” is just vibes, not facts.
3 of the 4 Republicans who voted to release the Epstein files were cancelled in the primaries.
So not the entirety of the right, but 75% is fair.
That being said, the fourth, Lauren Boebert, did not have a primary opponent. So Richard has been right in 3 of 3 contests of do Republicans pick Trump or the most obvious moral principle ever.
Yes, obviously the Epstein files is the single most important, defining issue of our time. Anyone on the wrong side of that issue is by definition the worst person ever.
And anyone who doesn’t break with the president whom TDS leftists believe is uniquely awful is also an unprincipled worst person ever.
But it *is* the wrong side of the issue, as you said. Which makes it all the stranger that Republicans want these people out specifically for not taking that side.
I didn't say anything about Republicans being the worst people ever, I merely pointed out the preference for Trump over an obvious moral principle. You filled in the rest, because you perceive the logic of it - that Trump's corrupt and immoral leadership, however much it may agree with some of your politics, is not an end that will ever be worth the means. You can reach the conclusion I didn't even have to say. It's your own conclusion, but you argue against it.
You don't have to. Trump has done nothing but embarrass the right and make a mockery of what used to be its intellectual underpinnings. There's no good that comes from trying to excuse him and his supporters.
Dude, you were the one who brought up the Epstein files issue in this context.
I don’t blindly defend Trump.
If we were going issue by issue like this, then every single Democrat would be disqualified over and over and over again.
And probably most Republicans would be too. So what?
Yes, I agree the GOP is a “more worse” party in toto than it used to be.
But the Dem party is a far, far, far worse party than it used to be. Some of its positions are whack on economics. Others of its positions (cough, cough, pro-Hamas) are immoral.
Curious what your best attempt of a definition of "racism" would be.
For feminism, there is a natural "how do people who use the word about themselves differ from the outgroup". But seldom anyone, let alone anyone whose views or definitions I'm interested in, considers themselves a racist. It is almost always an accusary term.
However, in this essay, i got the impression you thought the term did have some descriptive meaning, so I wonder if you had to describe how you use the word
Racism is the believe that someones race has meaningful predictive content on their future behavior above and beyond other available metrics.
For instance, if you presented two people with SAT scores of 1400 and then told me their races, I think I could meaningfully improve me model of how they were likely to act above and beyond simply guessing how a random 1400 SAT score person would act.
Unfortunately I don’t think that was a typo. Can’t post screenshots in post comments, but you can check out a very long 5-point response to this piece on the person’s own Notes page (dated 10h ago as of this writing).
One definition is anyone who uses a collective trait, real or not, to punish or restrict individuals.
Whether or not blacks as a group have lower IQs, some clearly have higher IQs.
I have never met anyone who dislikes blacks mere for not liking dark skin. The old "tall, dark, and handsome" shows that is not a common dislike. But I would not call that racism, since it is based on an individual trait and would apply across all of humanity to some extent.
Not a very good definition, I think. But it's the best I can do.
Thomas Sowell has an extremely high IQ. But even if I had no idea what it was I would still greatly admire him and his work because of its quality. This is the same reason why I admire Fredrick Douglass whose intelligence is quite evident upon reading his speeches and autobiographies.
It is awkward to hold opinions that are mostly held by nasty, ignorant people, people with whom you largely disagree: Observers reasonably suspect that you are one of the nasty ignoramuses. You may blame the nice educated people for this situation: if they were truly enlightened they would share your heterodox views, and so would have no occasion to lump you in with the bad guys. But whoever is to blame, you are awkwardly placed.
I think there is a clear difference between bigotry and policy stances. A Catholic priest opposes gay rights but is the opposite of someone who shouts homophobic abuse at strangers.
If some subgroup of humanity are less intelligent than others, Ricardo's law becomes relevant: They can specialize in work for which low intelligence is less of a problem, and both enrich themselves and make the more intelligent better off.
Define "less intelligent". If you mean all of them, every last single one, you might have a point. But unless you specifically defined your subgroup as "low IQ", then judging all individuals in that subgroup based on an average collective trait is my definition of racism, or bigotry in general.
What about the nations, technologies, economies, and societies created by people of races with lower average intelligence compared to those created by other peoples/races possessing higher average intelligence? Perhaps a comparison of the nations built by Jews (highest average IQ), East Asians (high average IQ), Europeans (moderate average IQ), indigenous peoples around the world (lower average IQ), and sub-Saharan Africans (lowest average IQ) might be illuminating.
At any rate, common traits in the various countries might be identified, categorized, and rated positively or negatively (for future reference, especially with regard to ranking preferred sources of potential immigrants, always with an eye toward regression to the mean for the statistically aware).
You put an awful lot of faith in IQ tests being reliable AND accurate. I put no faith in either.
I also find it laughable to think country borders are impermeable and reliable barriers to population shifts. Which Polish and German and French borders would you use, for instance? Or Italy, the Balkans, or Europe itself?
That's because you've avoided exposure to the scientific literature on both IQ (see Arthur Jensen) and the genetic mixing of populations over time (see David Reich). There is no more replicated, verified, and predictive result in social science than that produced by IQ testing applied to individuals and aggregated into racial and ethnic means. Selective breeding for expression of desirable traits and suppression of undesirable ones does not exempt homo sapiens from its calculus. How could it?
My "faith" is in the scientific method and the results it produces, whether or not they fit my often hazy and preconceived notions (see "AI" for example). What you find laughable only remains so until you lean into the subject and learn about it. In general, people and their origins are no laughing matter (ask them).
No, Jackson, it's because (a) no one agrees on what IQ tests actually measure, (b) no one even agrees on what intelligence is, (c) and borders have been far too permeable over even the past couple of centuries to make country-by-county comparisons valid.
And yet you think you can use IQ tests as some sort of proxy for genetic intelligence.
If you actually had any faith in science, you wouldn't prattle on about non-repeatable nonsense like IQ tests.
I regret to say that you seem not to have seen the point my comment was making, in several ways:
(i) I did not and do not assert that any two subgroups are actually unequal in this way; I'm not knowledgeable enough about psychometrics to argue for such a point. My statement began with a hypothetical supposition, addressed to people who believe that to be true.
(ii) Without loss of generality, the statement could apply to any two subgroups. It could even apply to human beings and artificial superhuman intelligences, if such existed.
(iii) The key to the statement is the appeal to Ricardo's Law of Association, one of the oldest and best established results in economics, and one of whose truth I AM confident. From that law it follows that the more capable can virtually always benefit from the services of the less capable (the conditions under which this is not so are very restrictive, and I think clearly would not apply to differences in intelligence, which is more important for some activities than for others).
(iv) Ricardo's law is normally presented as a statement that could apply even to two individuals with different capabilities; it doesn't apply only to two populations of identical beings. But if there ARE two populations with statistically unequal abilities, there will be more cases where individual a-sub-m from the more capable population is superior to individual b-sub-n from the less capable population than the reverse. Ricardo's law will apply to this statistical majority of cases. The conclusion that the less able population is a waste of space and could be eliminated without cost is thus mistaken, and people who make it are wrong, even supposing their assumption is true.
You are welcome to your own evaluation of the laws of economics. I don't share it but I won't take the time to debate it with you; better men than I have addressed the matter at greater length than I have time or space for. But I think it was hasty of you to interpret as an apology for racism a statement whose point was that racist policies didn't make sense even on the assumption of unequal abilities.
Perhaps you need more experience with English as she is spoke. I will restate my comment for you.
Ah, your spherical cow. I did not realize you were playing with theoretical nothings, and that is my bad. I still find them more suitable for jokes than contemplating reality.
Good discussion. The method you use is applicable to literally all opinions. For every opinion you hear, ask two logically separate questions: (1) is the claim true? and (2) what is the person's motivation for making this claim, in this context, at this time?
I hesitate to ask, but how does the replication crisis (the big Nature study) affect public confidence in all of these "studies" about "differences"? As a Randian I want as little to do with studies as possible, of course, but since they are in your dream, I wondered whether your confidence in them has been shaken.
You have said you are a "realist" about IQ. What does this mean exactly? I haven't identified any psychometricians or psychologists of intelligence that view IQ as a proxy for what people mean by "intelligence" or that it's a good way to find out what's causing an earnings disparity or to determine what field someone should go into (except of course for the few people who do the pop psych intelligence stuff like Charles Murray and Jordan Peterson).
It is relatively obvious why when you consider high IQ people. If IQ were highly informative about cognitive capabilities, Einstein could easily have done medicine, or abstract algebra, and similarly, a high IQ doctor could easily do chemistry, or engineering. The reason neither of them magically are able to transition quickly to another field is because physics involves its own intelligences, as does chemistry and medicine, so the latent factor (g) that IQ is measuring is not a very useful number to explain Einstein's behaviors or success in anything, even physics.
These is no single variable equation that is the "grand unified theory of chemical, physical, medical, economic, social, emotional, etc. intelligences", this would be like there being a single variable equation for understanding crime in the United States, or a single variable equation to predict the behavior of a galaxy's stars.
This has been known since Binet. He and other psychologists used IQ to study clinical disorders, not to make sweeping generalizations about which humans can do which professions or what they are capable of learning or various other things, since again, they regularly observed wild swings in performance across different subject matter every few weeks in individuals, as well as low IQ individuals outperforming high IQ individuals on any real-world cognitive task.
I'm quite happy to bring up this topic at a wedding involving people of any race, because typically they find it quite amusing that Charles Murray thinks he's more intelligent than, say, Nigerian or Senegalese young professionals, when these same young professionals appear to perform better on, say, medical or general knowledge tasks than he would.
So, yes, believing that IQ differences imply differences in intelligence or capabilities does strike me as rather racist, since a 5 minute google search can confirm that this is a misuse of that particular number.
On the other hand, simply believing that among racial populations, there are differences in chemical, physical, medical, engineering, social, emotional, etc. intelligences is not, I think, racist as long as you specify which intelligences you're talking about and why you think the gap is significant or causes anything.
As you said, often the people who believe this think the differences are immutable or caused by genes, which seems pretty racist since its rather strange to think there is an "economic intelligence" part of the genome along with a "chemical intelligence" part of the genome and one or both of them is lower in one race than another despite the fields of chemistry and economics being relatively recent additions to our evolutionary history.
Tangential, but am so tired of hearing about “low iq in africa”. Since when was this an objective measurement? Since when did we even agree on a definition of intelligence?
A lot of people asked if Bryan blocked my comment on this issue out of fear. At first I said no, it might have been automatically filtered due to its length. But it’s been four days now and Bryan could have unblocked it manually or the filter could have expired. I also see several comments at least as long.
I’m forced to conclude he was afraid enough of the ideas that he had to block them. This isn’t the end of the world, lots if substacks restrict comments. But it’s the first time I’ve seen Bryan do so.
I think you said it well: "True, simply believing in racial differences — even large genetic racial differences — is never racist. Expressing these views, however, often is a strong symptom of racism." I acknowledged there are racial differences in IQ, criminality, etc. But I don't obsess over it. Even if a disproportionate amount of black people commit crimes, for example, that doesn't mean most black people are criminals. But, generally, one hwho obsesses over facts like these tends to be racist, like you said. I do believe Richard Hanania has changed his mind about immigrants. But, based on his Substack and X Posts and his book "The Origins of Woke", I do believe he is still quite racist towards African-Americans. I was surprised to see him quite defensive of Somali immigrants, in the wake of the recent BS in Minneapolis, but I do get the impression that he has quite the disdain for black American descendants of slaves.
hWhilst reading The Origins of Woke, I got the impression: "Man, this guy is just chomping at the bit to legalize discrimination!"
As a libertarian~ish minded person, I do appreciate that anti-discrimination laws can lead to "disparate impact" laws. i.e. Your company could hire a lot of women but if you constantly harass them till they quit, that could still be seen as discrimination against women, but it's a shame we have to walk eggshells around people and can't say "That's hWhat She Said" jokes, at work, for example. And a FEW women getting REALLY harassed at work, to the point they quit may be a small price to pay for millions more men and women having more free speech at work.
And I do get how sometimes you want to work with people from your own culture. Like, it could be awkward to have a Shawarma shop hwhere everybody is speaking Arabic all day, except for the one hwhite dude you have to speak English to. (And the customers.)
And that, anti-discrimination laws could get in the way of meritocracy. It may seem that two candidates are equal, but they actually aren't, but sometimes employers hire the slightly weaker of two candidates to avoid allegations of discrimination. And I do get that freedom of association includes the right to discriminate.
But, MAN! Out of all libertarian~ish priorities: lower taxes, legalize immigration, legalize drugs, end zoning restrictions, end affirmative action, end sexual harassment laws (at least the ones that prevent you from making 'That's hWhat She Said' type jokes at work), etc. Abolishing anti-discrimination laws are really at the BOTTOM of the list, for me. They seem to be at the top of the list for Hanania.
Maybe I can try to find some examples, later. So, I guess: Take my comment with a grain of salt, for now. But, yea, I suspect that, although Hanania has come around on immigrants, I suspect he still really harbours a deep disdain for African-Americans. He is the type of person you describe: Not just acknowledging racial differences but really OBSESSING over them.
But, maybe I'm just biased against him because I disagree with him, sharply, aboot abortion.
>Critics who think that Richard is still blatantly and by definition racist because he believes in racial differences in IQ, personality, criminality, and beyond.
i think that in time, the meaning of the word racism has shifted to the one in the quote above. under that definition, hanania is racist. as is every reasonable person, because racism (human biodiversity) is true. accusing people of racism seems like a kind of rhetorical trick to me.
Well done.
I can no longer read most of what Hanania writes because of his TDS and his obsession with not merely going after the far MAGA right but claiming that almost the entirety of the right IS now the far MAGA right. And therefore the Democrats are the superior political party and “The Media is Basically Honest and Good.”
I actually attribute this otherwise highly irrational behavior change on his part to his desire to get as far away as he can from his racist past. But on that point I am just guessing.
This change in Richard is sad, because he used to be incredibly interesting, 85% on target with 15% eye-rollingly infuriating bad takes. But now the ratio seems to be reversed.
But all that said, I agree that claims that today he is “racist” are just dead wrong.
"I can no longer read most of what Hanania writes because of his TDS and his obsession with not merely going after the far MAGA right but claiming that almost the entirety of the right IS now the far MAGA right."
Every Republican primary that becomes contested nationally now revolves around loyalty to Trump and practically no other issue. I don't know what else would need to happen for people to conclude that Trump is conservatism now.
Two entirely different points:
1) [Accepting your premise] Please show me all the Dem candidates who won contested primaries while bucking Obama and Clinton. Or GOP and Reagan for that matter. I don’t think you’re gonna be able to produce many, and surely none prominent.
2) Thank you for demonstrating my point about your TDS. Included nowhere in your response was the fact that Trump policy is objectively better on net for almost all of the things you have always claimed to support than is the policy of the current Dem party.
Of course Trump is highly imperfect. I am no fanboy. And on domestic policy Trump 47 is clearly worse than Trump 45. But on policy vs Dems it’s not remotely close. And on awful things done by the executive (or his Autopen), at the barest minimum Biden gave Trump a run for his money.
So yeah, yeah, Orange Man Bad. Go on continuing to blur the distinction between policy, what Trump says, what Trump does, and what the *worst* elements of the *far* right believe and say. And holding the right to far, far higher standards than you hold the left.
I miss the old, really interesting Richard. But I know we ain’t getting him back any time soon, if ever.
For TDS to be a thing, you need things to be Deranged about. When essentially every action taken is shitty, you’re not deranged for pointing that out
Here you go
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a2b7976-e1e4-83e8-986a-19eddd14afaf
Lol, here *you* go.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a2b7acf-6ce4-83ea-8281-65c96f0a5cc0
The question was not about policy differences.
The question was ran against their president in a contested primary, and won the nomination.
I found only one (Blanche Lincoln). Who then lost in the general election.
The question was whether you can show examples who ran against their president in the contested primary and won.
[The lol above is because I ran a similar ChatGPT conversation to Richard’s before I wrote my previous response. Which required an additional prompt or two to get to the question of opposing their president while running in primaries, as opposed to differences on particular policies.]
It appears you don’t follow the news. People like John Cornyn don’t “run against Trump.” They kiss up to him and then lose because they lose to complete scumbags who don’t have scruples.
Republican voters have had elected officials lie to them for years about being against illegal immigration or being unable to stop it. Trump has very effectively highlighted that they were all full of shit. The fact that Trump, who feels basically zero obligation to have anything coming out of his mouth match reality, is justifiably seen as significantly more credible than the average republican politician is damning of republican politicians, but that doesn't mean that Trump is the party. It just means that he has credibility on a few of the issues republican voters care about when politicians are vulnerable on those issues, he has a lot of sway. Republican voters care a lot about election integrity now. They view the SAVE Act as something that is an existential issue. I am a fan of the filibuster, but I can completely get why voters would be willing to sacrifice it for the SAVE Act and it makes perfect sense why it would cost Cornyn his seat. He could have bucked Trump on basically any issue but illegal immigration and the SAVE Act and probably have been safe, because those other issues would have just been seen as a dispute with Trump, not a fundamental difference with his constituents.
Way to not answer the question.
I’m not disputing your claim that no one in the GOP today runs against Trump. I’m saying on this front the GOP under Trump is not unique.
Show me the people who ran and won bucking Obama or Clinton or Reagan.
You can’t do it.
Trump being the median of the GOP - and I don’t actually deny that the median of the GOP is Trump is close to the median of the group known as “MAGA” - is very different from the claims that the median of the GOP is the far right fringe of MAGA.
Which was the thing I explicitly objected to.
He supported Trump in 2024 and thought his populist rhetoric was just empty rhetoric. Part of the reason he changed his mind is Trump actually appointed RFK Jr. to head HHS. He was and is anti-woke but it’s impossible to deny that Trumpism (the dominant ideology of the Republican party in America today) is utterly and thoroughly populist in its ideological content, way of thinking about and understanding the world, and quite plainly doesn’t take ideas seriously. The facts changed and he changed his mind.
I have no problem that he hates on Trump. Truly.
I do have a problem that he tars everyone on the right because they won’t simply buck the sitting president on most things. He knows full well this is how the real world works. But even this only a moderate objection.
I have the biggest problem with his claims that the Dem party of today is better than the (Trump-dominated) GOP of today. Because so obviously false. Unless (recursively) TDS.
Your claim about “doesn’t take ideas seriously” is just vibes, not facts.
3 of the 4 Republicans who voted to release the Epstein files were cancelled in the primaries.
So not the entirety of the right, but 75% is fair.
That being said, the fourth, Lauren Boebert, did not have a primary opponent. So Richard has been right in 3 of 3 contests of do Republicans pick Trump or the most obvious moral principle ever.
Yes, obviously the Epstein files is the single most important, defining issue of our time. Anyone on the wrong side of that issue is by definition the worst person ever.
And anyone who doesn’t break with the president whom TDS leftists believe is uniquely awful is also an unprincipled worst person ever.
Got it.
But it *is* the wrong side of the issue, as you said. Which makes it all the stranger that Republicans want these people out specifically for not taking that side.
I didn't say anything about Republicans being the worst people ever, I merely pointed out the preference for Trump over an obvious moral principle. You filled in the rest, because you perceive the logic of it - that Trump's corrupt and immoral leadership, however much it may agree with some of your politics, is not an end that will ever be worth the means. You can reach the conclusion I didn't even have to say. It's your own conclusion, but you argue against it.
You don't have to. Trump has done nothing but embarrass the right and make a mockery of what used to be its intellectual underpinnings. There's no good that comes from trying to excuse him and his supporters.
Dude, you were the one who brought up the Epstein files issue in this context.
I don’t blindly defend Trump.
If we were going issue by issue like this, then every single Democrat would be disqualified over and over and over again.
And probably most Republicans would be too. So what?
Yes, I agree the GOP is a “more worse” party in toto than it used to be.
But the Dem party is a far, far, far worse party than it used to be. Some of its positions are whack on economics. Others of its positions (cough, cough, pro-Hamas) are immoral.
Name one Democrat who advocates for a more pro-Hamas US policy.
You know who does argue for more pro-Hamas policy? Bibi Netanyahu.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
Ilhan Omar.
But I will respond to you no further with “arguments” like that.
Hanania left the plantation, and they can’t stand it
Curious what your best attempt of a definition of "racism" would be.
For feminism, there is a natural "how do people who use the word about themselves differ from the outgroup". But seldom anyone, let alone anyone whose views or definitions I'm interested in, considers themselves a racist. It is almost always an accusary term.
However, in this essay, i got the impression you thought the term did have some descriptive meaning, so I wonder if you had to describe how you use the word
Racism is the believe that someones race has meaningful predictive content on their future behavior above and beyond other available metrics.
For instance, if you presented two people with SAT scores of 1400 and then told me their races, I think I could meaningfully improve me model of how they were likely to act above and beyond simply guessing how a random 1400 SAT score person would act.
That is not the definition of racism, also it is belief, not believe, you fucking dumbass
You mean you don’t think so, right?
Unfortunately I don’t think that was a typo. Can’t post screenshots in post comments, but you can check out a very long 5-point response to this piece on the person’s own Notes page (dated 10h ago as of this writing).
One definition is anyone who uses a collective trait, real or not, to punish or restrict individuals.
Whether or not blacks as a group have lower IQs, some clearly have higher IQs.
I have never met anyone who dislikes blacks mere for not liking dark skin. The old "tall, dark, and handsome" shows that is not a common dislike. But I would not call that racism, since it is based on an individual trait and would apply across all of humanity to some extent.
Not a very good definition, I think. But it's the best I can do.
Thomas Sowell has an extremely high IQ. But even if I had no idea what it was I would still greatly admire him and his work because of its quality. This is the same reason why I admire Fredrick Douglass whose intelligence is quite evident upon reading his speeches and autobiographies.
Very nicely done.
I have the same dream.
I have more trouble than you in reading Richard, but it has nothing to do with alleged racism. I just find him verbose.
To one of his rants, I posted: “You need an editor.”
It is awkward to hold opinions that are mostly held by nasty, ignorant people, people with whom you largely disagree: Observers reasonably suspect that you are one of the nasty ignoramuses. You may blame the nice educated people for this situation: if they were truly enlightened they would share your heterodox views, and so would have no occasion to lump you in with the bad guys. But whoever is to blame, you are awkwardly placed.
Dangerous topic and fraught history of bad acts by bad actors but should be discussable
I think there is a clear difference between bigotry and policy stances. A Catholic priest opposes gay rights but is the opposite of someone who shouts homophobic abuse at strangers.
If some subgroup of humanity are less intelligent than others, Ricardo's law becomes relevant: They can specialize in work for which low intelligence is less of a problem, and both enrich themselves and make the more intelligent better off.
Define "less intelligent". If you mean all of them, every last single one, you might have a point. But unless you specifically defined your subgroup as "low IQ", then judging all individuals in that subgroup based on an average collective trait is my definition of racism, or bigotry in general.
What about the nations, technologies, economies, and societies created by people of races with lower average intelligence compared to those created by other peoples/races possessing higher average intelligence? Perhaps a comparison of the nations built by Jews (highest average IQ), East Asians (high average IQ), Europeans (moderate average IQ), indigenous peoples around the world (lower average IQ), and sub-Saharan Africans (lowest average IQ) might be illuminating.
At any rate, common traits in the various countries might be identified, categorized, and rated positively or negatively (for future reference, especially with regard to ranking preferred sources of potential immigrants, always with an eye toward regression to the mean for the statistically aware).
You put an awful lot of faith in IQ tests being reliable AND accurate. I put no faith in either.
I also find it laughable to think country borders are impermeable and reliable barriers to population shifts. Which Polish and German and French borders would you use, for instance? Or Italy, the Balkans, or Europe itself?
That's because you've avoided exposure to the scientific literature on both IQ (see Arthur Jensen) and the genetic mixing of populations over time (see David Reich). There is no more replicated, verified, and predictive result in social science than that produced by IQ testing applied to individuals and aggregated into racial and ethnic means. Selective breeding for expression of desirable traits and suppression of undesirable ones does not exempt homo sapiens from its calculus. How could it?
My "faith" is in the scientific method and the results it produces, whether or not they fit my often hazy and preconceived notions (see "AI" for example). What you find laughable only remains so until you lean into the subject and learn about it. In general, people and their origins are no laughing matter (ask them).
No, Jackson, it's because (a) no one agrees on what IQ tests actually measure, (b) no one even agrees on what intelligence is, (c) and borders have been far too permeable over even the past couple of centuries to make country-by-county comparisons valid.
And yet you think you can use IQ tests as some sort of proxy for genetic intelligence.
If you actually had any faith in science, you wouldn't prattle on about non-repeatable nonsense like IQ tests.
No one?
Ah, I see. OK, disengaging.
I regret to say that you seem not to have seen the point my comment was making, in several ways:
(i) I did not and do not assert that any two subgroups are actually unequal in this way; I'm not knowledgeable enough about psychometrics to argue for such a point. My statement began with a hypothetical supposition, addressed to people who believe that to be true.
(ii) Without loss of generality, the statement could apply to any two subgroups. It could even apply to human beings and artificial superhuman intelligences, if such existed.
(iii) The key to the statement is the appeal to Ricardo's Law of Association, one of the oldest and best established results in economics, and one of whose truth I AM confident. From that law it follows that the more capable can virtually always benefit from the services of the less capable (the conditions under which this is not so are very restrictive, and I think clearly would not apply to differences in intelligence, which is more important for some activities than for others).
(iv) Ricardo's law is normally presented as a statement that could apply even to two individuals with different capabilities; it doesn't apply only to two populations of identical beings. But if there ARE two populations with statistically unequal abilities, there will be more cases where individual a-sub-m from the more capable population is superior to individual b-sub-n from the less capable population than the reverse. Ricardo's law will apply to this statistical majority of cases. The conclusion that the less able population is a waste of space and could be eliminated without cost is thus mistaken, and people who make it are wrong, even supposing their assumption is true.
Ah, your spherical cow. I find them more suitable for jokes than contemplating reality.
You are welcome to your own evaluation of the laws of economics. I don't share it but I won't take the time to debate it with you; better men than I have addressed the matter at greater length than I have time or space for. But I think it was hasty of you to interpret as an apology for racism a statement whose point was that racist policies didn't make sense even on the assumption of unequal abilities.
Perhaps you need more experience with English as she is spoke. I will restate my comment for you.
Ah, your spherical cow. I did not realize you were playing with theoretical nothings, and that is my bad. I still find them more suitable for jokes than contemplating reality.
Good discussion. The method you use is applicable to literally all opinions. For every opinion you hear, ask two logically separate questions: (1) is the claim true? and (2) what is the person's motivation for making this claim, in this context, at this time?
I hesitate to ask, but how does the replication crisis (the big Nature study) affect public confidence in all of these "studies" about "differences"? As a Randian I want as little to do with studies as possible, of course, but since they are in your dream, I wondered whether your confidence in them has been shaken.
You have said you are a "realist" about IQ. What does this mean exactly? I haven't identified any psychometricians or psychologists of intelligence that view IQ as a proxy for what people mean by "intelligence" or that it's a good way to find out what's causing an earnings disparity or to determine what field someone should go into (except of course for the few people who do the pop psych intelligence stuff like Charles Murray and Jordan Peterson).
It is relatively obvious why when you consider high IQ people. If IQ were highly informative about cognitive capabilities, Einstein could easily have done medicine, or abstract algebra, and similarly, a high IQ doctor could easily do chemistry, or engineering. The reason neither of them magically are able to transition quickly to another field is because physics involves its own intelligences, as does chemistry and medicine, so the latent factor (g) that IQ is measuring is not a very useful number to explain Einstein's behaviors or success in anything, even physics.
These is no single variable equation that is the "grand unified theory of chemical, physical, medical, economic, social, emotional, etc. intelligences", this would be like there being a single variable equation for understanding crime in the United States, or a single variable equation to predict the behavior of a galaxy's stars.
This has been known since Binet. He and other psychologists used IQ to study clinical disorders, not to make sweeping generalizations about which humans can do which professions or what they are capable of learning or various other things, since again, they regularly observed wild swings in performance across different subject matter every few weeks in individuals, as well as low IQ individuals outperforming high IQ individuals on any real-world cognitive task.
I'm quite happy to bring up this topic at a wedding involving people of any race, because typically they find it quite amusing that Charles Murray thinks he's more intelligent than, say, Nigerian or Senegalese young professionals, when these same young professionals appear to perform better on, say, medical or general knowledge tasks than he would.
So, yes, believing that IQ differences imply differences in intelligence or capabilities does strike me as rather racist, since a 5 minute google search can confirm that this is a misuse of that particular number.
On the other hand, simply believing that among racial populations, there are differences in chemical, physical, medical, engineering, social, emotional, etc. intelligences is not, I think, racist as long as you specify which intelligences you're talking about and why you think the gap is significant or causes anything.
As you said, often the people who believe this think the differences are immutable or caused by genes, which seems pretty racist since its rather strange to think there is an "economic intelligence" part of the genome along with a "chemical intelligence" part of the genome and one or both of them is lower in one race than another despite the fields of chemistry and economics being relatively recent additions to our evolutionary history.
Tangential, but am so tired of hearing about “low iq in africa”. Since when was this an objective measurement? Since when did we even agree on a definition of intelligence?
A lot of people asked if Bryan blocked my comment on this issue out of fear. At first I said no, it might have been automatically filtered due to its length. But it’s been four days now and Bryan could have unblocked it manually or the filter could have expired. I also see several comments at least as long.
I’m forced to conclude he was afraid enough of the ideas that he had to block them. This isn’t the end of the world, lots if substacks restrict comments. But it’s the first time I’ve seen Bryan do so.
A pet peeve of mine is nice people saying, "You'll be asking would you like fries with that." All work has dignity.
I prefer Ben Sass's frequent question to his daughter, "Who did you serve today."
The "I have a dream" paragraph was worth the entire article.
I think you said it well: "True, simply believing in racial differences — even large genetic racial differences — is never racist. Expressing these views, however, often is a strong symptom of racism." I acknowledged there are racial differences in IQ, criminality, etc. But I don't obsess over it. Even if a disproportionate amount of black people commit crimes, for example, that doesn't mean most black people are criminals. But, generally, one hwho obsesses over facts like these tends to be racist, like you said. I do believe Richard Hanania has changed his mind about immigrants. But, based on his Substack and X Posts and his book "The Origins of Woke", I do believe he is still quite racist towards African-Americans. I was surprised to see him quite defensive of Somali immigrants, in the wake of the recent BS in Minneapolis, but I do get the impression that he has quite the disdain for black American descendants of slaves.
hWhilst reading The Origins of Woke, I got the impression: "Man, this guy is just chomping at the bit to legalize discrimination!"
As a libertarian~ish minded person, I do appreciate that anti-discrimination laws can lead to "disparate impact" laws. i.e. Your company could hire a lot of women but if you constantly harass them till they quit, that could still be seen as discrimination against women, but it's a shame we have to walk eggshells around people and can't say "That's hWhat She Said" jokes, at work, for example. And a FEW women getting REALLY harassed at work, to the point they quit may be a small price to pay for millions more men and women having more free speech at work.
And I do get how sometimes you want to work with people from your own culture. Like, it could be awkward to have a Shawarma shop hwhere everybody is speaking Arabic all day, except for the one hwhite dude you have to speak English to. (And the customers.)
And that, anti-discrimination laws could get in the way of meritocracy. It may seem that two candidates are equal, but they actually aren't, but sometimes employers hire the slightly weaker of two candidates to avoid allegations of discrimination. And I do get that freedom of association includes the right to discriminate.
But, MAN! Out of all libertarian~ish priorities: lower taxes, legalize immigration, legalize drugs, end zoning restrictions, end affirmative action, end sexual harassment laws (at least the ones that prevent you from making 'That's hWhat She Said' type jokes at work), etc. Abolishing anti-discrimination laws are really at the BOTTOM of the list, for me. They seem to be at the top of the list for Hanania.
Maybe I can try to find some examples, later. So, I guess: Take my comment with a grain of salt, for now. But, yea, I suspect that, although Hanania has come around on immigrants, I suspect he still really harbours a deep disdain for African-Americans. He is the type of person you describe: Not just acknowledging racial differences but really OBSESSING over them.
But, maybe I'm just biased against him because I disagree with him, sharply, aboot abortion.
>Critics who think that Richard is still blatantly and by definition racist because he believes in racial differences in IQ, personality, criminality, and beyond.
i think that in time, the meaning of the word racism has shifted to the one in the quote above. under that definition, hanania is racist. as is every reasonable person, because racism (human biodiversity) is true. accusing people of racism seems like a kind of rhetorical trick to me.