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.
He was so far ahead of his time on these issues. Obviously, he isn’t going to get everything right, but his view here is solid.
People tend to argue for immigration by bringing up its positive effects under different conditions in the past. This is clearly a bad approach.
🚨 THOMAS SOWELL on IMMIGRATION & CULTURE (1996): Sowell is asked if America should open its southern border to "Mexicans".
Sowell explains that any immigration with a welfare state creates unhealthy dependencies and negative outcomes.
Why aren't there Federal laws preventing legal and illegal immigrants from receiving welfare?
Lately, I’ve been focused on the moral factors that contribute to social decline in the black community, but another big issue that differentiates the community from others is its inability to be truth-oriented.
I think when other races see black people asserting absurd things contrary to our best information on public cases like Nolan Wells or Karmelo Anthony, they tend to think this is largely political weaponization. Just a ploy to redistribute power through stubborn verbal bullying. This is only partly true.
The instrumentalist view of truth, where the correspondence of a statement to reality matters less than some short-sighted social validation, is very much present in our day to-day interactions with one another.
To be fair, all communities function with some degree of myth and polite lies. However, if you cannot agree on basic facts about relatively unambiguous events or evidence, then there is nothing that coordinates and facilitates shared understanding between individuals of a community.
With this in mind, is there any surprise that our communities are full of loud disagreements and toxicity?
Following up here. I’m not a religious zealot or anything, but my reading of smart Christian thinkers years ago instilled in me a desire to always identify the assumptions of my worldview and anticipate its (moral) consequences.
So many modern people, who would consider themselves to be “chill,” live as if they have a morally neutral view of the world, where everyone should do what makes them happy as long as they aren’t hurting anyone or breaking the law.
However, this is a view in itself. This is why it is important to read books and attempt to understand the processes that shaped the cultural milieu you inherited.
Don’t assume you are morally superior to your ancestors because you implicitly assume that our moral progress is identical with obvious technological progress.
I think we have a lot to learn from the moral and social intentionality of the old Puritans.
This is probably going to come off as a bit moralistic, but oh well. That’s the point.
Puritans were right to fear secularization, worrying about the effects secular music and film .
A big part of what made Puritans so successful in establishing productive communities and shaping the moral framework for the modern world was their belief in moral knowledge — the idea that moral beliefs/behavior can be right or wrong in objective terms.
What is the moral quality of a society but the moral attitudes and activity of the individuals that constitute it? There is no positive moral direction that exists in the air irrespective of the people who possess the capacity to direct it.
I assume this is why so many Puritans encouraged individuals to cultivate their moral faculties and live in a very morally intentional way.
Maybe I’m getting old, but as I look around, I see women whose wardrobes consist of clothing that always reveals half (or more) of their body, and men who are red-pilled, worried about not giving more for less than what her last man received.
I promise you, worthwhile men are never going to truly respect and really invest in half-dressed, outwardly sexual women. If strong men consider marital investment risky and only focus on ways to get sex more easily than her last man, you will surely run into deep societal problems.
The solution isn’t to force people to try to ignore the reflexive parts of their primal psychology, but to acknowledge that these deep instincts will always be there and implement a social strategy that properly regulates them and minimizes short-sighted pleasures for more effective ends.
nitter.gq/analyticbs4u/status/21…
I mention J.P Moreland here. He’s a Christian philosopher really good at examining worldviews. He was actually the first person I ever heard mention Jonathan Haidt’s psychological research, so he’s no hack.
Smart Christians have something very valuable to offer us because they’ve resisted the insane levels of biological reductionism fashionable in the academy.
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.
This is probably going to come off as a bit moralistic, but oh well. That’s the point.
Puritans were right to fear secularization, worrying about the effects secular music and film .
A big part of what made Puritans so successful in establishing productive communities and shaping the moral framework for the modern world was their belief in moral knowledge — the idea that moral beliefs/behavior can be right or wrong in objective terms.
What is the moral quality of a society but the moral attitudes and activity of the individuals that constitute it? There is no positive moral direction that exists in the air irrespective of the people who possess the capacity to direct it.
I assume this is why so many Puritans encouraged individuals to cultivate their moral faculties and live in a very morally intentional way.
Maybe I’m getting old, but as I look around, I see women whose wardrobes consist of clothing that always reveals half (or more) of their body, and men who are red-pilled, worried about not giving more for less than what her last man received.
I promise you, worthwhile men are never going to truly respect and really invest in half-dressed, outwardly sexual women. If strong men consider marital investment risky and only focus on ways to get sex more easily than her last man, you will surely run into deep societal problems.
The solution isn’t to force people to try to ignore the reflexive parts of their primal psychology, but to acknowledge that these deep instincts will always be there and implement a social strategy that properly regulates them and minimizes short-sighted pleasures for more effective ends.
This is like the 2nd or 3rd time I’ve heard about this scholar. Based on what the summary says, I agree.
We can see it within small communities already. Think about the (Black) blue collar/hood community where most men live in a constant state of “where the hoes at” or always hyperfocused on looking at ass/over-complimenting women as they pass by… in these communities men literally just work and hunt sex most of their waking hours out of it (or even mix sex/work if they work at one of the warehouses). This persists well into their 60s or 70s. I’m not saying this be overly square or religious, but being hyper-sexed like this is almost indistinguishable from how animals live.
Alternatively, when I’m in solidly middle or upper-class spaces, especially with different cultures, you almost never hear or see guys just standing around looking at butts or cat-calling for hours on end. Instead, they are usually in groups discussing ideas or some current affairs.
The guys from the previous class would consider the latter group nerdy or weird for not caring about attracting hoes, but the subtle difference in the attitude/time spent on sex is tied to their having better families and communities, it seems.
We’ve made it cool to be degenerate under the guise “if you aren’t [immediately] hurting anyone, then you are ok.” I’ll def have to find podcast on this book now.
Resharing for new followers:
“Marriage literally refines your parenting skills and makes you a more selfless person. It teaches you to get along with and develop a deferential/duty-based mindset with another person before you even meet a potential child. This will generally make you a better person toward that child and put you in a better position to sufficiently invest in any useful capacities that they may have.
It also establishes an inherent check on parental misbehavior that is practically impossible to replicate in a child-parent accountability situation, where one party is dependent on the other. Anyone who has ever tried to check a single parent will intuitively understand this point.”
I still stand by the idea of marriage as an obligation if you have children. The most successful communities still operate with marriage as a necessity.
Think about it in your own personal life. Have you ever observed a neighborhood full of single parents where most of the children grow up to be well-adjusted and successful?
Marriage literally refines your parenting skills and makes you a more selfless person. It teaches you to get along with and develop a deferential/duty-based mindset with another person before you even meet a potential child. This will generally make you a better person toward that child and put you in a better position to sufficiently invest in any useful capacities that they may have.
It also establishes an inherent check on parental misbehavior that is practically impossible to replicate in a child-parent accountability situation, where one party is dependent on the other. Anyone who has ever tried to check a single parent will intuitively understand this point.
I used to be someone who was cool with and benefiting from the loose sexual culture in the black community. But it is reckless and inconsiderate to the vast majority of children produced by such behavior — you cannot call babies “blessings” in a culture of accidental, hook-up births. Stop being selfish.
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:
nitter.gq/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.
nitter.gq/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?
