Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notahacker 5600 days ago
People whose political agenda is shaped by "want[ing] the US to be whiter country" are no more likely to give an impartial analysis of the relevance of differences between races than those who openly proclaim their own race's superiority.

The point is moot; in reality the overlap between people holding a belief in white supremacism[1] and white nationalism is almost total and Steve Sailer claims to be opposed to both philosophies despite his willingness to articulate their arguments.

It doesn't really matter what motivates the author's obsession with proving innate racial differences though. The problem is, it's exactly the sort of clumsy analysis you'd expect to be produced by a racist think tank; it's a series of grotesque simplifications leading to a non-sequitur

It happilyy to take into account the possibility that very white European Austria's relatively poor test performance might be down to lack of teacher and student motivation before failing to extend the same consideration to the [almost certainly much worse] institutional failings and test aversion of the average school filled with underperforming US ethnic minorities and Latin Americans. Instead, we're left with the daft non-sequitur conclusion that the way to fix test scores of black kids whose lineage dates back further than your average Asian American is not to fix their underfunded, gang-ridden schools or their broken homes or the pervasive myth that their race will hold them back even if they are able to overcome those obstacles, but to impose a ban on immigration and hope they go away.

[1]Acknowledging the superiority of Asian tests scores is entirely compatible with white supremacist beliefs so long as one is prepared to make arguments that white people have a better balance of characteristics due to being superior in many other ways; usually by trotting out the dubious stereotype of Asian societies being uninventive. You won't find many "Japanese supremacists" on VDARE.

1 comments

It is odd that you're demonizing Malcolm X and Steve Sailer, while refusing to address their arguments. Apparently they are "clumsy," "racist," and "grotesque," producing "simplifications" and a "non-sequitur." But in the time it took you to tell me all about the hypothetical explanations for the data you refuse to believe but even more ardently refuse to check ("My dog didn't bite you, it's not my dog, and what do you have against bulldogs, mister?"), you could have, well, fact-checked Sailer's claims.

It is striking that you've mustered so much rhetoric about conclusions in order to avoid looking at the facts behind those conclusions. It is a little like preachers talking up hellfire when someone questions the 6,000-year-old-earth thing.

He didn't demonize Malcolm X, he simply ignored your random introduction of him into the discussion, and he didn't demonize Steve Sailer, just accused him of having an agenda and as evidence made an observation that Sailer had different explanations for the lower performance of Europeans in Austria as opposed to ethnic minorities in the US.

You, however, accused him of being intentionally obtuse then compared him to a young earth creationist.