Applying analytical thinking to today’s problems while trying to keep my check engine light off - respecter of realism and (pre-)progressive politics.
Atlanta, GA
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I meant to make this post last week when the article went viral.
Now, while I don’t think it is productive to quibble about minor abstractions all day, I do think we can extract something very obvious and useful here — that something is the (white) Western desire to universalize and appropriately extend moral status to all possible conscious agents (in this case, even ants lol)
Many economic historians and social theorists tend to overlook the causal power of ideas to focus on the relationship between observable social regularities or some easily defined and measured trait like IQ, which is easier to map over time.
However, I think ideas — like moral universalism — impact society in a deeper way than what we typically measure.
This is a huge reason why the white Western world, particularly liberal cities, attract people from all over the world. Some person from the tribal third world is treated horribly by his genetic kin of a different caste in his own native land, but can come over here and instantly get treated like royalty by a different race.
(Continued in comments)
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This is getting pathetic.
If you are primed to see racism in every black-white interaction and lack the perspective-taking necessary to evaluate alternative explanations for minor disputes between the races, it will be nearly impossible for you not to see racial harm being enacted against your group at all times.
This is why so many black people find it absurd that others do not see the racism they see so clearly — they are confined by this limiting racial assumption and have not cultivated the investigative tools needed to turn their criticality inward on their own unfounded assumptions. They are easily taken in by slogans and hollow talking points.
Public figures who actively encourage this do not seriously care about black people. They are just profiting and they are killing whatever reputational capital the community has left.
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I’ve said this before, but I really hate how third parties come into a dispute between two individuals or groups and try to distribute blame equally — 50/50 — making both sides equally guilty without any reference to the facts surrounding the dispute.
What this does is remove unique moral correction from the side that needs it most, giving cover for the worst behaviors to persist. In the real world, certain people or groups simply have worse moral attitudes and behaviors than others, so they need to be uniquely blamed.
I feel like this “we are all at fault” view is coincident with some form of feminism, because it comes off as an “agreeable” way to correct uniquely bad behavior.
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Not what I said. However, people respond to incentives. This is especially true for those who started off as slaves and remain in the same society as those who enforced it. You cannot take a population at a vulnerable point in their cultural evolution, saturate them with horrific media narratives/rewards for victimhood, and think they should be wise enough to see they are being politically gamed.
That said, black people are silly for continuing the game in an age of information, but white liberals share significant blame for exploiting political grievance to weaponize against their white counterparts across the political aisle.
So we helped you and gave you everything and its still our fault. Its never your own responsibility for your behavior, someone else caused it each and every time.
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I meant to make this post last week when the article went viral.
Now, while I don’t think it is productive to quibble about minor abstractions all day, I do think we can extract something very obvious and useful here — that something is the (white) Western desire to universalize and appropriately extend moral status to all possible conscious agents (in this case, even ants lol)
Many economic historians and social theorists tend to overlook the causal power of ideas to focus on the relationship between observable social regularities or some easily defined and measured trait like IQ, which is easier to map over time.
However, I think ideas — like moral universalism — impact society in a deeper way than what we typically measure.
This is a huge reason why the white Western world, particularly liberal cities, attract people from all over the world. Some person from the tribal third world is treated horribly by his genetic kin of a different caste in his own native land, but can come over here and instantly get treated like royalty by a different race.
(Continued in comments)
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The same moral universalism that makes the West desirable is also much more prone to pockets of internal exploitation once groups with conflicting moral philosophies and strategies are here.
Further, moral universalism possessed by sophisticated populations in the West also applies moral status to future persons, which could be the decisive factor in ensuring “progress” and a reliable continuation of civilization — we cannot just mix this with “developing world” moral values without a different (disastrous) set of outcomes.
And look, I’m not saying that my reasoning here is rock solid or suggesting any policy, but it is very hard to get hyper-rational Western liberals to partially acknowledge the issue. They just call you some “ism” and bury their heads in the sand, while using immigration statistics under different conditions from decades ago to justify very silly versions of immigration today.
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Sigh. I might have to pin this post.
This is like the umpteenth time I’ve been accused of being a bot or a white professor’s fake black account. It would really make my day if one of you accused me of being Sowell’s burner account.
Lol neither a bot nor a white academic would be able to detail the specific internal dynamics of ghetto subculture within the black community. The most I ever use AI is to scan for overlooked typos in my longer posts.
In fact, when I ask Grok to steelman a case against my claims, it tells me I’m generalizing because it doesn’t possess relevant experiential knowledge beyond fetching the most relevant formal data on a topic.
Not to mention, there are like 5 or 6 ppl here that followed me from my personal social media account.
You know what, just to tease and cause a little more cognitive dissonance. Here’s a “snippet” of my black hand reading about faulty positivistic assumption in economics:
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It’s not the action itself, but what it incentivizes.
I don’t know your race or background, but I’ve seen single mothers make posts calling out good men in their communities for not helping them with their boys.
It’s another version of the “the kids don’t have a positive outlet, so they shoot each other” logic.
These women seem to presuppose that society should be ordered in a way that allows them to go find a man with nothing but “good dick” and have several kids with the least effective in the community, while expecting men whose babies they “refused” to carry to swoop in and save the kids they had with those other men — it’s an ass-backwards reproductive strategy and has been disastrous for the community.
If coaches and mentors are the primary male role models in your area, then something has gone wrong. People only accept this because they don’t expect much of anything from black people.
Genuinely curious about what you don't like about the mentoring. Do you mean this mentor specifically or in general? Your "wrong signals" says something but I would appreciate more clarification.
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People do a lot of theorizing about what cognitive level is sufficient to be civil or part of a high-trust society. The debates seem endless.
However, a strong man teaching and enforcing values in children is more impactful than many social scientists care to realize — I’d suggest this is why religious men heading nuclear families produced higher social quality/order back in the day, even in areas where people lacked education.
This explanation isn’t as sexy or groundbreaking, but it is likely correct.
I’m not a huge fan of the mentoring and think it sends the wrong signals to single or lazy parents, but I can respect his work for what it is. Good stuff.
“Somebody gets paid to clean it” is not an excuse to be lazy.
Yes, somebody cleans the theater after we leave. That doesn’t mean we should leave our popcorn, cups and trash everywhere for them to pick up.
It takes a few seconds to grab what you brought in and throw it away on your way out.
A big part of being considerate is simply not making somebody else’s job harder when you don’t have to.
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People compartmentalize things. Hardly any black person walks around explicitly thinking/feeling what she has expressed here. In my encounters, black people only display this level of racial fear when they know white folks will hear it, which is why I said whites need to stop incentivizing it.
Also, I think we like to live in a continued struggle narrative because, in doing so, we feel we are continuing the “politics of triumph”passed down from the ancestors (we literally deify our ancestors). Making whites feel they have to atone for their historical sins and verbally checking them over perceived racial offenses or misspoken words serves as a source of power over them in society.
Think about it, for the bulk of black history in America, our economic and political power has centered around marches, boycotts and extracting financial/occupational favor from guilty whites — we do not know how to let this go and think we can reinvent racial trauma ad infinitum without whites ever getting tired of it. FYI, they are starting to get tired now lol.
You think she sincerely believes it deep in her heart? Or is she performing? I think she might actually believe it lol
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I’m glad so many non-believers reject materialist conceptions of mind. It shows a serious commitment to truth.
That said, I don’t quite understand the psychophysical harmony stuff/relevance, but this is still a pretty thorough article against epiphenomenalism — mental causation cannot be reduced away to fit a strict materialist view of the world.
You don’t have to believe absurd things just because you are an atheist or prioritize empiricism as a method of investigation.
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When whites stop financially and socially rewarding such behavior, it will die off.
This sort of performance increased post-Floyd because black people were heavily encouraged to share their victimization, even when it came at the expense of basic logic and our most agreed-upon evidentiary standards. I’d also say the feminization of our most important institutions plays a crucial role in enabling this trend.
Even by giving her a lengthy critique, you legitimize her thinking that this is a serious matter and requires a serious response.
She should simply be laughed at and ignored for behaving this way. That is all.
Black culture in America is a culture of induced mass psychosis, where every child from birth is programmed to be a victim, to think the whole world is out to get them, to read hostility into every facial expression from a stranger, every interaction with a cashier.
They’ve reached to point of becoming looney tunes characters hallucinating on a desert island. A white triangle becomes a klan hood. A garage door pull becomes a noose. People who have never been oppressed cosplaying as oppressed ancestors from centuries past.
Their own churches have exchanged faithful preaching of the word for perpetual race worship and DNC activism.
What a pathetic, miserable way to live. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This, by the way, is why I warn against white victimhood and white grievance politics. Because this is how you end up. Don’t go down that road.
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I really appreciate this page. These are conversations we should be having. Africans typically have a broader perspective on civilization than black Americans.
Black people don’t want to do the hard work actually civilizing themselves and living in a way constrained by what civilization demands for it to be sustained.
As I’ve said before, we are way too content with living in proximity to the economic charity and technological infrastructure of the white western world, but we shouldn’t continue as if access to this is a given.
When I mention this to my peers in real life, I’m always met with some version of “as long as you make money, you can do whatever in America” but this is only true if the foundation remains the same.
An Onlyfans star may be a millionaire, while some highly-skilled software developer only makes a quarter of that salary. However, the discrepancy in income here doesn’t accurately convey the order of civilizational indispensability of each profession — the former actually depends on the talent of the latter.
(Continued in comments)
Wherever Whites Are, Blacks Want To Be; Wherever Blacks Are, Whites Avoid. Why?
Very few people of European descent live in Africa, while millions of people of black African descent live in Europe and North America. Europeans in Africa are typically diplomats and professionals who are there to build, invest, or serve in various capacities, fitting within immigration and travel frameworks. In contrast, many black people in Europe and North America often breach immigration rules, which has put the entire concept of immigration into question.
This leads to a critical question: Why are people from sub-Saharan Africa so eager to live among white people when white people show little interest in living with them? Relationships, whether marriage or friendship, should be mutual and reciprocal. In this situation, one side seems uninterested—why can't black people see the signs?
Some might wonder why I do this: Well, I do this because no one else seems to. Westerners often treat black people from Africa like infants who are fragile and in need of tolerance, support, and protection. This has only made things worse because we now feel entitled to preferential treatment. Consequently, many continue to leave their home countries, forming unwanted diasporas in places where the local population may not want them. Most people in Africa, aside from a few countries like South Africa, aspire to move to predominantly white nations. This trend is unsustainable and increases friction and animosity between markedly different cultures. I raise this issue to highlight a problem that has persisted for decades and has dramatically escalated since the 2000s.
I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section if you disagree.
Watch the Full Video Here
👇🏿
piped.video/xXp2wmPte9w
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From what I can see, most of what brings high incomes to black Americans consists of entertainment, sports and cosmetic/soul food restaurants.
At some point high-earning black entrepreneurs must stop just caring about “getting to the bag” as goal and actually invest in their offspring to become valuable in civilizational terms.
We cannot keep relying on technological capacities carried by whites or Asians so we can go on to use said technologies to make “easy” money.
This is the true reason we never leave whites alone, despite pretending they are the most morally evil population to have ever existed. They create comfortable and relatively rewarding/peaceful societies.
I’m just making you aware of the problem.
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Responded to some of the “counters” to this here:
nitter.net/analyticbs4u/status/21…
@Luminary2009 @s__wme
This is my fault for not specifying.
I don’t mean a nurse bringing in 100k or something like that.
Rather, the things we do exceptionally well, like the occupational performances that distinguish us from other groups, revolve around the entertainment sphere.
Name a few exceptional black scientists who revolutionized a field, or a civilization-shifting innovator in tech/science, in the past 100 years.
Can you name a black analytic philosopher who has solved or brought clarity to a foundational epistemic issue?
The closest thing we have to a timeless public intellectual is Thomas Sowell. And black people, at least in our era, cannot stand his approach of dispassionate analysis and logical rigor — we think “smarts” should only be used to prop up whatever ideological trend is pervasive in the community at the time. It’s a poor incentive structure and keeps bright black people from shifting outdated paradigms within the community.
If we were so great in the high-paying fields you list, that would show up in at least one large black city. I’m not saying this as a defeatist or someone who gives high credence to rigid genetic determinism.
Sophisticated civilization is a very recent human phenomenon across the racial spectrum. Black people just have to stop romanticizing a Wakanda-like past and put in the mental effort in the current era. That’s all.
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This is my fault for not specifying.
I don’t mean a nurse bringing in 100k or something like that.
Rather, the things we do exceptionally well, like the occupational performances that distinguish us from other groups, revolve around the entertainment sphere.
Name a few exceptional black scientists who revolutionized a field, or a civilization-shifting innovator in tech/science, in the past 100 years.
Can you name a black analytic philosopher who has solved or brought clarity to a foundational epistemic issue?
The closest thing we have to a timeless public intellectual is Thomas Sowell. And black people, at least in our era, cannot stand his approach of dispassionate analysis and logical rigor — we think “smarts” should only be used to prop up whatever ideological trend is pervasive in the community at the time. It’s a poor incentive structure and keeps bright black people from shifting outdated paradigms within the community.
If we were so great in the high-paying fields you list, that would show up in at least one large black city. I’m not saying this as a defeatist or someone who gives high credence to rigid genetic determinism.
Sophisticated civilization is a very recent human phenomenon across the racial spectrum. Black people just have to stop romanticizing a Wakanda-like past and put in the mental effort in the current era. That’s all.
This isn’t even a true statement to base a premise on. The majority of Black Americans with high earning careers are in govt/military, healthcare, & professional/entrepreneurial ventures. There’s data to back this up not just “from what you can see”.
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I don’t have time to go into my views today, but I’d go with these 3 if you want good, modern defenses of culturalism. I’d start with Henrich.
Many online hereditarians are overly reductive, thinking they can easily transfer thinking from the domains of pure natural phenomena to cognition and human behavior. It’s not that simple lol.
Further, I’d say many confuse necessary and sufficient conditions throughout the whole debate about genes, culture, and civilizational outcomes. Just sloppy reasoning from both sides.
This is probably what @GlennLoury was trying to hint at during that exchange. Sowell isn’t even the main proponent of culturalism — some of our finest scientists and economists defend the position, as evidenced by the books below.
Asking not trolling: are there any intellectuals who are comfortable with some combination of race realism and Sowell's culturalist explanations? I'm sure there are. I guess the real question is if any of them are willing to admit it publicly. That's where I find myself fwiw.
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After that short list of books on the other post, start thinking about issues related to this video and check out the books attached on this post (they are more intermediate level though). @thelastof97
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Yeah, people don’t think too deeply about the finer details of things — they just say “genes” or “environment” as thought-terminating cliches, without detailing any processes.
It’s not only anonymity, but the psychological variance between the north and the south at the time. The black folks who came from the Great Migration waves had only ever experienced “might makes right” morality, first in Africa and then in the less sophisticated white culture of the antebellum South.
By contrast, white populations who settled along the coastal northeast were already steeped in WEIRD psychology, where moral reasoning and consistency took priority, and people self-regulated through internalization of their own guilt.
Black “rednecks” who came from the externally-driven honor culture of the south simply possessed the wrong moral psychology to flourish in urbanized areas.
Many researchers only look at WEIRD psychology between Western and non-Western populations, but we can use these tools internally, since many black folks (and a few white hillbilly/rural populations) still have yet to immerse themselves in the Western world.
(I’ll leave a very interesting video in the comments of older, urbanized WEIRD black folks who were very upset by the wave of black southerners headed for their towns.)
The anonymous forces of urban society are a tremendous strain on new arriving groups that have rudimentary understandings of anonymity which is required for urban flourishment unlike in a small community.
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Going to answer this on my post recent post so others can see and cut down on asking me the same question(s):
We can only distinguish white rednecks who fled north by indirect clues of regional surnames or something like that. Intermarriage between southern and northern whites probably makes this much more difficult.
Besides, a smaller proportion of southern whites migrated north, and they weren’t (EASILY) distinguished as a group on paper and granted political paternalism the same way as black folks.
Sowell covers a good bit of this in Black Rednecks and White Liberals. If those who seek to rebut it actually read the book, they’d see how much sense it makes of a very confusing issue.
nitter.net/davidrcampbell6/status…
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