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
Joined July 2024
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I think the glee is reserved for the white liberals who artificially prop up these black scholars while attempting to alleviate rigorous standards for them at every turn, all under the guise of “helping.”
I always say white progressives push epistemic and moral relativism from a place of privilege. Your ancestors literally went to war over ideas and their application in creating the modern world, and you all benefited from this long process of intellectual refinement. Now that you’ve inherited those benefits, you want to remove the same organic developmental phase for black folks. It doesn’t work.
We don’t need your protection. Stop trying to insert yourselves into a political drama that doesn’t exist.
The biggest issue in this conversation goes back to my post yesterday about our current mismatch with the Western world. The addiction to restructuring external systems and presupposing that all solutions come in the form of centralized, top-down change is indicative of our lack of assimilation into the thinking that sustains the first world.
They are so preoccupied with embodying a confrontational posture to anything considered to be in close proximity to whiteness or white talking points, while offering nothing honest or substantive for the black public to chew on.
Most of the panel refuses to think of the world in terms of individuals, who are developed by freely formed and intentional families, who are themselves held accountable by an even larger social web of like-minded families and individuals derived from that effective setup.
After Delano relayed depressing statistics about the black family structure, these people instantly brought up the most recent high-profile investigation (Nolan) and started using formidable-sounding language to mask their real disinterest in actually helping black folks to be better people toward their children.
I wasn’t going to bring up marriage and family, but @angela_rye opened the door so I had to be honest about both why—and where—I do my work. This interaction is why it is so important to have conversations that cross political and ideological lines.
There are so many people who love my takes on racial and cultural issues but hate Thomas Sowell’s explanations on these same topics. I don’t get it lol.
People would benefit immensely from actually reading Black Rednecks and White Liberals if they are confused about black dysfunction. It’s not this simple caricature of “blacks learned violence from whites, and that’s the whole story.” I hate how people who don’t read books misrepresent his work on here.
As a matter of fact, just read Intellectuals and Society by Sowell if you want your social epistemology challenged. The book will be a classic in political philosophy in the coming decades.
Many people forget he earned a PhD from a top economics department prior to heavy preferential admissions for black people. I wouldn’t recommend a slouch.
Another thinker who influenced my thinking prior to Sowell is J.P. Moreland. I no longer share his religious views, but he’s probably a big reason I utilize a broader cognitive toolkit to evaluate culture. He was the first person to ever articulate my gut feeling that people were misusing science (scientism) and pretty much predicted the moral rot that would occur by relegating values to the realm of opinion.
I cannot recommend these two enough to any young thinker who reads my stuff.
Hmm. I think this oversimplifies human psychology and how our epistemic priors (background knowledge) inform any piece of information presented to us.
For example, I have competing desires that I can weigh, not just one. I can recognize that if I mimic behavior Y among successful whites, then it is probable that I will get positive result X alongside them.
But the motivation to do this can be less preferable if I live in a society that discards identical standards between the races and shows selective political paternalism toward one over the other — there’s no strong incentive for the favored to sacrifice in this case.
Black people have the misfortune (yes, misfortune) of trying to develop human capital within the context of material abundance and white paternalism.
When whites were developing, there was no similar setup in place. They literally had to take raw feedback from the world and develop behavioral competencies through trial and error.
I could go on here, but a narrow behaviorist and positivist framework of seeing human nature through mere external, observable relations is a bit dated. Ideational factors heavily impact results, whether they can be easily investigated or not.
^^ none of this rests on a belief in genetic determinism (to be clear).
I’m going to keep saying what secular conservatives and sophisticated liberals will not say about race.
We are not culturally sophisticated Europeans who are steeped in centuries of enlightenment-style thinking. At no point in our transcontinental history have black people ever been forced to develop an individualistic, self-regulated ethical approach. We have mostly lived under “might makes right” ideas, where external controls like threat or public shaming are used to correct behavior.
When it comes to black people, you cannot dismantle a realist conception of moral values and then delegitimize the transcendent (God/religion) mechanism used to impose and distribute said values among the black population. We need these things.
You can acknowledge that different groups occupy different points of the civilizational spectrum. This doesn’t require that you believe in innate inferiority or any irreversible trend rooted in genes.
We simply haven’t gone through some modern civilizing process to be equipped to be free in the modern world.
Can we just acknowledge this much? Lying hasn’t benefited anyone.
This post is an extension/application of my thinking here:
teapaw.org/analyticbs4u/status/21…
Following up on the (quoted) post:
Conservatives need to wake up and really stop with all the laid back, passive ethical approaches. I’d take the old Religious Right over what I see today.
I’m not a religious man at the moment. However, successful behavioral traditions preserved through religion give the average man and woman in the street a tangible, less arbitrary method of moral correction.
It also depersonalizes criticism when you tell someone they are wrong because “God says” X is wrong. Many secular conservatives are too scared of being associated with religion to admit this fact.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been trying to rationally explain why X or Y behavior is bad (in a case where it is clearly bad to anyone with a decent level of abstraction) and the opposing person just starts employing some version of subjectivism to evade what I’m saying or starts shouting “Who are you to say?” nonsense.
Low-income black hoods are the canary in the coal mine and I wish others would take heed. You cannot have a society with freedom and excess material comfort that also thinks its members can arbitrarily construct their own “personal” moral values as long as they are not immediately hurting anyone. Social cohesion will continue to unravel or transform into something less desirable as long as this view persists.
High IQ individuals need to be in the correct institutional framework to flourish.
This post is an oversimplification. Many high IQ people are penalized in certain respects today, especially in the black community, where the incentive structure doesn’t actually reward higher IQ individuals.
Also, IQ needs to be properly directed and accompanied by correct values to be useful in a market. There are plenty of intelligent young progressives who spend their time protesting and trying to tear down the institutional mechanisms that enable a largely merit-based society.
I get that IQ has high predictive power in certain contexts or conditions, but you have to monitor these background conditions from generation to generation to make sure the claim still applies — you can’t just say IQ does X or Y in a vacuum.
To illustrate this point, think about all of the higher IQ individuals who come from poor regions of the world. They migrate here because their exceptional mental capacity is of little to no use in their native sociopolitical environment.
And the more our institutional conditions and processes begin to reflect the non-Western world (sans East Asia), the less value IQ will hold for social mobility within our own borders.
America is largely a capitalist meritocracy. If you are not successful, it is because you probably do not have the prerequisite IQ level. Since we cannot change IQ, we cannot make everyone successful without rigging the system. The mass importing of low-IQ migrants into the US will only result in mounting resentment against the cognitively endowed, false accusations of "systemic racism," and demands to implement socialism to spread wealth.
James Madison was correct that differences in property ownership arise from differences in individual ability. Until we acknowledge that humans possess unequal capabilities, which results in disparate allocation of material rewards, we will forever be chasing a perfect society that can never exist.
Following up on the (quoted) post:
Conservatives need to wake up and really stop with all the laid back, passive ethical approaches. I’d take the old Religious Right over what I see today.
I’m not a religious man at the moment. However, successful behavioral traditions preserved through religion give the average man and woman in the street a tangible, less arbitrary method of moral correction.
It also depersonalizes criticism when you tell someone they are wrong because “God says” X is wrong. Many secular conservatives are too scared of being associated with religion to admit this fact.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been trying to rationally explain why X or Y behavior is bad (in a case where it is clearly bad to anyone with a decent level of abstraction) and the opposing person just starts employing some version of subjectivism to evade what I’m saying or starts shouting “Who are you to say?” nonsense.
Low-income black hoods are the canary in the coal mine and I wish others would take heed. You cannot have a society with freedom and excess material comfort that also thinks its members can arbitrarily construct their own “personal” moral values as long as they are not immediately hurting anyone. Social cohesion will continue to unravel or transform into something less desirable as long as this view persists.
I’m going to continue sharing videos like this one to throw in the face of “rational” conservatives who are merely concerned with statistical improvements on paper.
I’m tired of secular conservatism and how “cool” it tries to appear. It is pointless to try to reduce poor quality-of-life metrics in our communities without having some realistic conception of values — rational libertarianism is not sufficient for large populations.
I don’t think academic conservatives realize how hard it is to correct and enforce positive behavior with the sort of secular “do as you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone” philosophy.
Most people don’t possess a sufficient level of abstraction and awareness of historical trends to evaluate and anticipate how likely their casual behaviors are to produce poor(er) results.
For example, during the sexual revolution decades ago, most people wouldn’t have anticipated that their consensual but loose sex culture would erode the institution most beneficial for rearing children and successfully civilizing each generation to maintain basic societal standards and order.
We still had our unique issues relative to other groups (mainly just whites then), but we were a beautiful and unique American population.
Urban Analytic Nonsense retweeted
I’m going to continue sharing videos like this one to throw in the face of “rational” conservatives who are merely concerned with statistical improvements on paper.
I’m tired of secular conservatism and how “cool” it tries to appear. It is pointless to try to reduce poor quality-of-life metrics in our communities without having some realistic conception of values — rational libertarianism is not sufficient for large populations.
I don’t think academic conservatives realize how hard it is to correct and enforce positive behavior with the sort of secular “do as you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone” philosophy.
Most people don’t possess a sufficient level of abstraction and awareness of historical trends to evaluate and anticipate how likely their casual behaviors are to produce poor(er) results.
For example, during the sexual revolution decades ago, most people wouldn’t have anticipated that their consensual but loose sex culture would erode the institution most beneficial for rearing children and successfully civilizing each generation to maintain basic societal standards and order.
We still had our unique issues relative to other groups (mainly just whites then), but we were a beautiful and unique American population.
I’m going to continue sharing videos like this one to throw in the face of “rational” conservatives who are merely concerned with statistical improvements on paper.
I’m tired of secular conservatism and how “cool” it tries to appear. It is pointless to try to reduce poor quality-of-life metrics in our communities without having some realistic conception of values — rational libertarianism is not sufficient for large populations.
I don’t think academic conservatives realize how hard it is to correct and enforce positive behavior with the sort of secular “do as you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone” philosophy.
Most people don’t possess a sufficient level of abstraction and awareness of historical trends to evaluate and anticipate how likely their casual behaviors are to produce poor(er) results.
For example, during the sexual revolution decades ago, most people wouldn’t have anticipated that their consensual but loose sex culture would erode the institution most beneficial for rearing children and successfully civilizing each generation to maintain basic societal standards and order.
We still had our unique issues relative to other groups (mainly just whites then), but we were a beautiful and unique American population.
teapaw.org/analyticbs4u/status/21…
Also, see my post here on how black migrations to north impacted the civilizational development of the community.
I still stand by this take. When rural black folks mass-migrated to the urban north, they weren’t culturally equipped and lacked the sophistication to shield their offspring from the temptations of the city. This is one reason “hood culture” is much more prevalent now than it was then.
As I explain in the (quoted) post, political subsidy enabled and entrapped black people in a cycle of “redneck” city living. We kept our rural ways of life, diet, accents and thinking while living alongside groups (asians, whites) whose level of urbanization had naturally developed for city life. This is why government is such a bad helper of undeveloped populations. It shields groups from receiving proper signals and feedback from the market.
Just think about the anonymity enabled by living in large metropolitan areas. It makes sense that “redneck” traits carried in the black migrations would produce different results once you break down the social mechanisms of familial accountability that small towns permitted.
I think it is bad for men not to have families, but it isn’t *as* bad.
For one, we socialize men to understand cause and effect regarding bad behavior, while we minimize consequences for women — this is why women generally don’t understand their role in facilitating bad things until those things reach full disaster. The whole notion of victim-blaming seem to coincide with the rise of feminist thinking.
Further, as I mentioned above, men have skin in the game because they have political obligations to defend what they’ve created. Young men can literally be drafted if their political decision-making leads to one conclusion over another.
More importantly, men and women aren’t equally influenced by the same impulses. Women tend to be very moved by images of downtrodden 3rd Worlders and vehemently defend the “rights” of said 3rd Worlders.
This is just a misappropriation of their maternal instincts, which is why it is important to connect these impulses to actual offspring and not exploitative strangers from another country.
These are just a few things. I just think it’s pretty obvious that single and childless women in the West have unique zeal for unwise (and costly) political decision-making. Not all and there is a bit of a spectrum here, but we need to to have a serious conversation.
I’d much rather women be offended than assaulted by migrants.
To me, talking about this stuff is far more interesting and important than talking about my more abstract interests in analytic philosophy or science.
Think about it: if you cannot first preserve the civilization that rewards scientific or philosophical investigation, then it will not matter if you have accumulated this or that intellectual capital.
The intellectual capital many of you possess is only valuable within this particular institutional framework. You have to protect it.
It sounds weird, but we should be revisiting debates on whether or not women should be able to vote in the absence of families.
You just don’t have enough skin in the game without a vulnerable family to consider or the threat of being on the frontline, facing violence.
It’s almost as if traditions that pushed marrying and having families at a young age weren’t there to arbitrarily rob women of occupational autonomy, but served a deep purpose to instill a sense of collective duty and boundaries in a population. I’ll take mature wisdom over bare intellect any day of the week.
We need to have hard conversations. Who is likely to vote in enemies of the Western world, and why?
I can appreciate your impulse to want to move beyond the counterproductive forms of community participation black people have in particular, but I just don’t think this captures the issue.
Even if you were to lessen the degree of ideological conformity within the black community, other groups would still develop a set of priors about black behavior based on what they’ve been exposed to in the past — this is especially true for crime-related behaviors, since they knock up against survival instincts.
Humans developed instincts, intuitions, and heuristics to help navigate the social world and avoid danger.
As a stranger, your race/ethnicity is your most distinguishing characteristic and conveys useful information in the absence of detailed knowledge of your individual traits, whether it is found to be accurate or not.
Humans evolved to live and naturally think in tribes and we lived that way for most of our civilizational timeline. You just can’t remake society without reference to our (useful) cognitive impulses that help us navigate the social world.
(This shouldn’t be read as me not seeing the historical benefits of the level of individualism that emerged in NW Europe and that we inherited here.)
I disagree wholeheartedly. There is no “community,” There is no we nor us, and the only reason that Asian family would be cautious of me is because blacks at large have outwardly developed a sense of tribalism to where the behavior of one affects the whole, everyone knows this, and therein lies the problem.
Furthermore, this notion that “we” should care about the behaviors of complete strangers all because we share the same skin color, continues to perpetuate the false narrative that we are somehow this nation within a nation (DuBois’ idea that I reject vehemently), and it continues to pigeonhole productive blacks associating them with the worst their race has to offer; all because of a misguided social movement in the 60’s taught impressionable blacks the inferiority complex mind state that they were all the same, no matter their differences in the eyes of the white man.
(I’m only QT’ing so everyone can see our exchanges, this is a great discourse)
I just don’t think Andre “owned” anyone in that clip. Even if he successfully had a gotcha moment against one of them somewhere in there, I’d still be analyzing the coherence and soundness of his thinking apart from that.
As for what you say about me, I think it is misleading to call me pro-black. I want the community to improve, but my point in telling people like you and @FreedmanJournal is that we should care about the community’s behavior from a reputational point of view.
It’s an imperfection of our human cognition that our knowledge is mostly incomplete, especially when it comes to social contact with strangers. The misbehavior you ignore in the broader black community will continue to (negatively) inform the preconceptions the rest of the world develops toward you, or young members of your family that you care about.
The Asian family getting off the MARTA at night will be cautious of a younger Barrington irrespective of your internal mental states or the effort you’ve put into yourself, which will be largely unknown to them as strangers.
I saw it in passing. It is a symptom of declining social values and standards.
As for white people complaining about discrimination, I see their grievances. I think it is a complex issue. I will probably make a post on it at some point.
I get that there should be continuity between founding stock and subsequent generations. However, we all have to embody a duty-based posture toward retaining a spirit of exploration and continued effort in cultivating the special thinking that set the country apart in the first place. You can’t slack on that, then complain about lack of available work — this holds irrespective of anti-white sentiments in our institutions. Talent generally trumps subjective prejudices.
This is why I always specify in many posts that intellectual talent is concentrated in *coastal* whites. Many generational southern whites possess the same anti-intellectualism we see in black communities.
Resharing this in light of the Tesla Roadster display yesterday — Elon is out here toying with flying cars. This is why I say the stuff that I do. Black people have to become way more intellectually curious and serious about systematizing our thinking to fit and extract valuable information from reality. Reality is much more interesting than your victimization.
“Even many well-off black folks in the Western world think: “I can just make money any kind of way, mind my business, and that’s sufficient for generational development,” without cultivating a deep intellectual curiosity/moderate individualism in their children necessary to be innovative in the first place. This is a mistake.
As much as it pains me to say it, we can not continue to passively live off the technological sophistication and civilizational comforts produced by whites, while we pride ourselves on being able to make money off podcasts about perfecting relationships, sex, and entertainment, all enabled by technological infrastructure we didn’t (and cannot) produce. What happens in the case that the white population dwindles away or separatism becomes more fashionable? Both are happening.”
Before I make this post, please don’t get in the comments lazily asserting “it’s just the genes” or any variation of racist nonsense. I will be leaving a post directly in the comments explaining why the “it’s genes” explanation is not wholly sufficient to explain civilizational gaps between the races.
However, I want to follow up on this post. Look at the first picture and imagine what processes had to take place for some primitive population to get from living in the midst of untamed land to building large reusable rockets — a vessel that makes interplanetary travel a more realistic option.
Could a population that operates off a lived-experience view of knowledge, like many Africans (and African Americans), make such a huge transition in living conditions?
Even many well-off black folks in the Western world think: “I can just make money any kind of way, mind my business, and that’s sufficient for generational development,” without cultivating a deep intellectual curiosity/moderate individualism in their children necessary to be innovative in the first place. This is a mistake.
As much as it pains me to say it, we can not continue to passively live off the technological sophistication and civilizational comforts produced by whites, while we pride ourselves on being able to make money off podcasts about perfecting relationships, sex, and entertainment, all enabled by technological infrastructure we didn’t (and cannot) produce. What happens in the case that the white population dwindles away or separatism becomes more fashionable? Both are happening.
We have to get serious about learning the things foundational to the civilization we enjoy, not just making as much money as possible, as if all ways of making money are equally valuable or convey something of long-term importance.
This point is not discussed enough in academic discussions on racial progress. See my two posts on black folks being “mismatched” with the city:
“As I explain in the (quoted) post, political subsidy enabled and entrapped black people in a cycle of “redneck” city living. We kept our rural ways of life, diet, accents and thinking while living alongside groups (asians, whites) whose level of urbanization had naturally developed for city life. This is why government is such a bad helper of undeveloped populations. It shields groups from receiving proper signals and feedback from the market.”
I still stand by this take. When rural black folks mass-migrated to the urban north, they weren’t culturally equipped and lacked the sophistication to shield their offspring from the temptations of the city. This is one reason “hood culture” is much more prevalent now than it was then.
As I explain in the (quoted) post, political subsidy enabled and entrapped black people in a cycle of “redneck” city living. We kept our rural ways of life, diet, accents and thinking while living alongside groups (asians, whites) whose level of urbanization had naturally developed for city life. This is why government is such a bad helper of undeveloped populations. It shields groups from receiving proper signals and feedback from the market.
Just think about the anonymity enabled by living in large metropolitan areas. It makes sense that “redneck” traits carried in the black migrations would produce different results once you break down the social mechanisms of familial accountability that small towns permitted.