It does appear that almost all racialists are looking for excuses to hurt others — to justify defection and other loser moves in Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, and other payoff matrices — by inventing wrongs done to them either by members of other races; or by the existence, visibility, or prosperity of other races.
This seems almost as if an imaginary foe is running a “divide-and-conquer” strategy against humanity: running K-means clustering, reifying the clusters, and trying to convince members of one cluster that they can’t trust and should defect against members of another cluster. We know well from the history of organizations and intelligence agencies — and from history in general! — that this sort of thing is a significant risk.
“Salterism refuted: removing wheels from racial Idealist heads”
I found that post a fun and interesting one too, I think I’ll probably be linking to it in the future when I see some unfortunate comments by otherwise intelligent people elsewhere online.
struck me as amusingly Quirrellish — as opposed to Malfoyish.
Heh, yeah that’s a good way to put it.
It does appear that almost all racialists are looking for excuses to hurt others — to justify defection and other loser moves in Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, and other payoff matrices — by inventing wrongs done to them either by members of other races; or by the existence, visibility, or prosperity of other races.
This is just basic tribalism no? We should emphasise it is hardly unique to racialist sentiment, indeed it prevades a large fraction of the human experience. One can see it quite clearly whenn it comes to nationality, religion, language, philosophical positions, partisan affiliation, culture, taste (be it in sex, food, architecture,...) and even sports team fandom.
This seems almost as if an imaginary foe is running a “divide-and-conquer” strategy against humanity: running K-means clustering, reifying the clusters, and trying to convince members of one cluster that they can’t trust and should defect against members of another cluster. We know well from the history of organizations and intelligence agencies — and from history in general! — that this sort of thing is a significant risk.
I do find this amusingly ironic however. I can easily imagine say a pro-Black racialist disparaging those who are promoting local tribes and nationalities as engaging in a divide and conquer strategy against the Black race.
Clearly you sir are displaying speciest tendencies. ;)
I can easily imagine say a pro-Black racialist disparaging those who are promoting local tribes and nationalities as engaging in a divide and conquer strategy against the Black race.
Economic classes might be a more frequent example than “tribes and nationalities”. Historically, there has also been the argument made by some on the Left — especially anarchists such as the IWW — that racism is capitalism running divide-and-conquer against the working class. “Who benefits when white workers and black workers can’t organize together because of racial tensions between them? The bosses do!”
Clearly you sir are displaying speciest tendencies. ;)
“You might cooperate with a Pebblesorter on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but would you want your son to marry one?”
Economic classes might be a more frequent example than “tribes and nationalities”.
Right some racialist have also argued against class divisions. Most infamously the you-know-whos.
Historically, there has also been the argument made by some on the Left — especially anarchists such as the IWW — that racism is capitalism running divide-and-conquer against the working class. “Who benefits when white workers and black workers can’t organize together because of racial tensions between them? The bosses do!”
I heard this argument not on race but on nationality attributed as a position held by some socialists in the aftermath of World War One. It was one of the basis of some quite elaborate explanation of cultural forces as tools of the ruling class. I find it somewhat amusing how right-wing Moldbuggianism (which is basically endorsed by James_G) is very similar to such notions just with a different idea of who the ruling class is.
Looking at this from the leftist perspective though I find the Chomsky-ite argument on race and capitalism far more convincing:
“See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist — it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because its anti-human. And race is in fact a human characterstic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevent, and usually a nuisance.”
Can you imagine a racist Coca-Cola Company in a global economy? Thought I sometimes wonder if their commercials would be slightly less subtly disturbing then.
I think that cultural hegemony is a reasonable and far from overwrought explanation for many social phenomena… but racism isn’t one of them. So I also think Chomsky’s right on this.
Right some racialist have also argued against class divisions. Most infamously the you-know-whos.
Lip service mostly. Nazi policies generally moved to the right since the break with Strasserism and the purge of the SA, and the “Proper”/”German”/”Volkish” social hierarchy espoused by propaganda was (for all its utopian or faux-medieval motifs) in practice directed at recreating the class structure of Bismarck’s Prussia, which was viewed through rose-tinted glasses by many at the time.
True, when the conservative aristocrats showed some resistance, they were chastised (and the July plot brought an anti-aristocratic pseudo-populist turn), but when they went along with the new regime, the Nazis helped secure their position. The non-Jewish industrial and financial elites got a pretty sweet deal at first, and enjoyed it before being dragged into a suicidal war.
Lip service mostly. Nazi policies generally moved to the right since the break with Strasserism and the purge of the SA, and the “Proper”/”German”/”Volkish” social hierarchy espoused by propaganda was (for all its utopian or faux-medieval motifs) in practice directed at recreating the class structure of Bismarck’s Prussia, which was viewed through rose-tinted glasses by many at the time.
True, when the conservative aristocrats showed some resistance, they were chastised (and the July plot brought an anti-aristocratic pseudo-populist turn), but when they went along with the new regime, the Nazis helped secure their position. The non-Jewish industrial and financial elites got a pretty sweet deal at first, and enjoyed it before being dragged into a suicidal war.
Right, but one could use many of the same argument against post WW2 social democrats no? The quality of life of the German working class much improved in the 1930s.
Again I wasn’t arguing they did that much on their stated beliefs but I said they where an example of racialists arguing against class divisions.
To give another example from Fascists rather than Natonal Socialists (I think there is a notable difference) listen to this speech by Sir Oswald Mosley.
Right some racialist have also argued against class divisions. Most infamously the you-know-whos.
Rather common among nationalists in general, not just racial ones; see the use of “class warfare” rhetoric today.
Can you imagine a racist Coca-Cola Company in a global economy?
“Racism” means too many different things. A Coca-Cola company whose views of the market were clouded by racial prejudice would be at a competitive disadvantage. But one that participated in systems of racial privilege would not necessarily be.
To cherry-pick a famous example from history — the Montgomery bus service of Rosa Parks fame was not owned by Southern race-haters, but by National City Lines, a front company for General Motors and Firestone Tire. It still participated in a system of racial privilege by enforcing segregated seating. Doing so was kind of an obvious business move for NCL, since segregated seating was required by Alabama law.
Doing so was kind of an obvious business move for NCL, since segregated seating was required by Alabama law.
Right but regulatory capture means that most business would not only have a financial interest lobby against such laws to boost profits but also probably be quit effective at them.
To give an example requiring a larger number of toilets because segregation was required by law in your factory was clearly a unwanted expense, especially for investors coming in from the outside.
It sounds like you’re suggesting regulatory capture effects would have led NCL to eventually lobby against segregation laws in order to make more money by better serving black Alabamians.
But isn’t it at least as credible that regulatory capture would have led NCL to lobby for the maintenance of segregation to deter competition from upstarts offering desegregated service to those who wanted it?
Regulatory capture usually offers to explain established businesses supporting regulation, or favoring forms of “deregulation” that end up entrenching them at the expense of new competition. So this might explain it if NCL had lobbied for anti-discrimination laws (thus forbidding whites-only competitors) but I don’t see how it would predict supporting merely the removal of segregation laws.
This line of thinking leads me to wonder how much predictive power the “regulatory capture” idea actually has …
struck me as amusingly Quirrellish — as opposed to Malfoyish
Having read that blog… frankly, given equal general intelligence and competence, I’d pick Quirrell over James_G any day. The former isn’t hung up on any particular grand theory, seems to have charisma, a sense of humour and a dry aesthetic of his own. He’s just plain cool. The latter clearly has an IQ through the roof and excels at formal reasoning, but is monomaniacal about his “rational” hedonic utilitarianism in the face of numerous dismal conclusions, seemingly can’t appreciate the value and importance of “mere emotions” for most people… and the pictures of his “strong aesthetic sense” make me question whether I’d want to exist in his world at all, no matter how many hedons he might provide to how many people.
Seriously, ew. Give me neo-feudalism as originally proposed, or give me chaos and ruin, just not this squeaky clean brave new world! Absolute monarchy and unrestricted capitalism both seem like such trifling worries to me compared to the prospect of this covering a living, breathing, diverse nation-state!
is monomaniacal about his “rational” hedonic utilitarianism
Even I find it mildly disturbing especially since it strikes as more or less the same “rational” hedonic utilitarianism that is the de facto norm on LessWrong.
Besides this and the critique of “Salterism” fubarobfusco liked to I’d also recommend these posts. I’m really quite fascinated by his concept of the “eminent self” and wish he wrote an article about how this fits into metaethics and rationality on LessWrong.
There is such a thing as genetic groupings of humans. There is such a thing as groups recognized by a given society based on heritable physical markers that are treated differently and thus develop different cultures. The word “race” is already used to describe the second one. “You’re the race cops think you are”, and a police officer will classify the Bantu and the San as black and the Scot as white, not the Bantu and the Scot as haplogroup L3 and the San as L0. Why overload the word, if not to justify preexisting racism?
Actually the word race is about what part of your ancestry you identify with or society identifies you with. Obviously both culture and genetic diversity correlate strongly with ancestry. The word race was also used in a taxonomic sense in the early 20th century. Indeed racial classification is still used that way in say medicine though naturally euphemisms are gaining popularity.
not the Bantu and the Scot as haplogroup L3 and the San as L0. Why overload the word
You really miss the point here so I suspect you didn’t read the article.
When you take a look at the entire genome of the person and look for clusters in thing space you find groupings that basically match old racial classifications. For all the number crunching gene analysis that went into it this map does not much differ the map Lothrop Stoddard would have presented when asked about the distribution of racial groups before the Age of Discovery. Clearly they are touching the same underlying reality.
Sure looking at one or two genes a Scott might be more similar to a San than a Sardinian, but as you increase the number genes you are looking at, the similarity more and more matches to the first approximation what you’d guess from looking at faces.
Why overload the word, if not to justify preexisting racism?
Creating two words for the basically the same cluster in thing space in order to diffuse “x-ism” will only makes the x-ists feel more clever than they are. This gives the ideologies they create a new source from which to pump warm fuzzies into believers and a hook with which to appeal to people who figure out it is the same cluster.
Races are clusters in DNA-space by James_G
“Salterism refuted: removing wheels from racial Idealist heads” struck me as amusingly Quirrellish — as opposed to Malfoyish.
It does appear that almost all racialists are looking for excuses to hurt others — to justify defection and other loser moves in Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, and other payoff matrices — by inventing wrongs done to them either by members of other races; or by the existence, visibility, or prosperity of other races.
This seems almost as if an imaginary foe is running a “divide-and-conquer” strategy against humanity: running K-means clustering, reifying the clusters, and trying to convince members of one cluster that they can’t trust and should defect against members of another cluster. We know well from the history of organizations and intelligence agencies — and from history in general! — that this sort of thing is a significant risk.
I found that post a fun and interesting one too, I think I’ll probably be linking to it in the future when I see some unfortunate comments by otherwise intelligent people elsewhere online.
Heh, yeah that’s a good way to put it.
This is just basic tribalism no? We should emphasise it is hardly unique to racialist sentiment, indeed it prevades a large fraction of the human experience. One can see it quite clearly whenn it comes to nationality, religion, language, philosophical positions, partisan affiliation, culture, taste (be it in sex, food, architecture,...) and even sports team fandom.
I do find this amusingly ironic however. I can easily imagine say a pro-Black racialist disparaging those who are promoting local tribes and nationalities as engaging in a divide and conquer strategy against the Black race.
Clearly you sir are displaying speciest tendencies. ;)
Economic classes might be a more frequent example than “tribes and nationalities”. Historically, there has also been the argument made by some on the Left — especially anarchists such as the IWW — that racism is capitalism running divide-and-conquer against the working class. “Who benefits when white workers and black workers can’t organize together because of racial tensions between them? The bosses do!”
“You might cooperate with a Pebblesorter on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but would you want your son to marry one?”
Right some racialist have also argued against class divisions. Most infamously the you-know-whos.
I heard this argument not on race but on nationality attributed as a position held by some socialists in the aftermath of World War One. It was one of the basis of some quite elaborate explanation of cultural forces as tools of the ruling class. I find it somewhat amusing how right-wing Moldbuggianism (which is basically endorsed by James_G) is very similar to such notions just with a different idea of who the ruling class is.
Looking at this from the leftist perspective though I find the Chomsky-ite argument on race and capitalism far more convincing:
Can you imagine a racist Coca-Cola Company in a global economy? Thought I sometimes wonder if their commercials would be slightly less subtly disturbing then.
I think that cultural hegemony is a reasonable and far from overwrought explanation for many social phenomena… but racism isn’t one of them. So I also think Chomsky’s right on this.
Lip service mostly. Nazi policies generally moved to the right since the break with Strasserism and the purge of the SA, and the “Proper”/”German”/”Volkish” social hierarchy espoused by propaganda was (for all its utopian or faux-medieval motifs) in practice directed at recreating the class structure of Bismarck’s Prussia, which was viewed through rose-tinted glasses by many at the time.
True, when the conservative aristocrats showed some resistance, they were chastised (and the July plot brought an anti-aristocratic pseudo-populist turn), but when they went along with the new regime, the Nazis helped secure their position. The non-Jewish industrial and financial elites got a pretty sweet deal at first, and enjoyed it before being dragged into a suicidal war.
Right, but one could use many of the same argument against post WW2 social democrats no? The quality of life of the German working class much improved in the 1930s.
Again I wasn’t arguing they did that much on their stated beliefs but I said they where an example of racialists arguing against class divisions.
To give another example from Fascists rather than Natonal Socialists (I think there is a notable difference) listen to this speech by Sir Oswald Mosley.
Rather common among nationalists in general, not just racial ones; see the use of “class warfare” rhetoric today.
“Racism” means too many different things. A Coca-Cola company whose views of the market were clouded by racial prejudice would be at a competitive disadvantage. But one that participated in systems of racial privilege would not necessarily be.
To cherry-pick a famous example from history — the Montgomery bus service of Rosa Parks fame was not owned by Southern race-haters, but by National City Lines, a front company for General Motors and Firestone Tire. It still participated in a system of racial privilege by enforcing segregated seating. Doing so was kind of an obvious business move for NCL, since segregated seating was required by Alabama law.
Right but regulatory capture means that most business would not only have a financial interest lobby against such laws to boost profits but also probably be quit effective at them.
To give an example requiring a larger number of toilets because segregation was required by law in your factory was clearly a unwanted expense, especially for investors coming in from the outside.
It sounds like you’re suggesting regulatory capture effects would have led NCL to eventually lobby against segregation laws in order to make more money by better serving black Alabamians.
But isn’t it at least as credible that regulatory capture would have led NCL to lobby for the maintenance of segregation to deter competition from upstarts offering desegregated service to those who wanted it?
Regulatory capture usually offers to explain established businesses supporting regulation, or favoring forms of “deregulation” that end up entrenching them at the expense of new competition. So this might explain it if NCL had lobbied for anti-discrimination laws (thus forbidding whites-only competitors) but I don’t see how it would predict supporting merely the removal of segregation laws.
This line of thinking leads me to wonder how much predictive power the “regulatory capture” idea actually has …
[Warning: more of my neurotic bullshit!]
Having read that blog… frankly, given equal general intelligence and competence, I’d pick Quirrell over James_G any day.
The former isn’t hung up on any particular grand theory, seems to have charisma, a sense of humour and a dry aesthetic of his own. He’s just plain cool.
The latter clearly has an IQ through the roof and excels at formal reasoning, but is monomaniacal about his “rational” hedonic utilitarianism in the face of numerous dismal conclusions, seemingly can’t appreciate the value and importance of “mere emotions” for most people… and the pictures of his “strong aesthetic sense” make me question whether I’d want to exist in his world at all, no matter how many hedons he might provide to how many people.
Seriously, ew. Give me neo-feudalism as originally proposed, or give me chaos and ruin, just not this squeaky clean brave new world! Absolute monarchy and unrestricted capitalism both seem like such trifling worries to me compared to the prospect of this covering a living, breathing, diverse nation-state!
Even I find it mildly disturbing especially since it strikes as more or less the same “rational” hedonic utilitarianism that is the de facto norm on LessWrong.
His hedonic utilitarianism or my rant? If the former… then thank you yet again for seeing a method to my madness :)
His hedonic utilitarianism.
Of course there is, we actually share many of the same misgivings about the smiley faced worlds that utilitarianism might build.
Besides this and the critique of “Salterism” fubarobfusco liked to I’d also recommend these posts. I’m really quite fascinated by his concept of the “eminent self” and wish he wrote an article about how this fits into metaethics and rationality on LessWrong.
There is such a thing as genetic groupings of humans. There is such a thing as groups recognized by a given society based on heritable physical markers that are treated differently and thus develop different cultures. The word “race” is already used to describe the second one. “You’re the race cops think you are”, and a police officer will classify the Bantu and the San as black and the Scot as white, not the Bantu and the Scot as haplogroup L3 and the San as L0. Why overload the word, if not to justify preexisting racism?
Actually the word race is about what part of your ancestry you identify with or society identifies you with. Obviously both culture and genetic diversity correlate strongly with ancestry. The word race was also used in a taxonomic sense in the early 20th century. Indeed racial classification is still used that way in say medicine though naturally euphemisms are gaining popularity.
You really miss the point here so I suspect you didn’t read the article.
When you take a look at the entire genome of the person and look for clusters in thing space you find groupings that basically match old racial classifications. For all the number crunching gene analysis that went into it this map does not much differ the map Lothrop Stoddard would have presented when asked about the distribution of racial groups before the Age of Discovery. Clearly they are touching the same underlying reality.
Sure looking at one or two genes a Scott might be more similar to a San than a Sardinian, but as you increase the number genes you are looking at, the similarity more and more matches to the first approximation what you’d guess from looking at faces.
Creating two words for the basically the same cluster in thing space in order to diffuse “x-ism” will only makes the x-ists feel more clever than they are. This gives the ideologies they create a new source from which to pump warm fuzzies into believers and a hook with which to appeal to people who figure out it is the same cluster.
Thank you. Lesswrong needs more race realism under what ever name.
Why? Racialism appears to be a loser move. People focus on their race when they have nothing better to say about themselves.
Race realism in the sense that races are real clusters in thingspace, not in the sense of racialist politics.