HBD and “Systemic Racism”

There’s probably nothing here that I haven’t previously written, but here it goes anyway.

The left believes that there is some mysterious force that’s preventing blacks from being successful. (Successful as defined by elite whites. If you were to define success as being good at sports, then blacks are the more successful race.)

The thing is that the left is actually correct, there is a mysterious force preventing blacks from being successful. That force is HBD. However, HBD is taboo and to even talk about it is to be the worst kind of racist.

There are some people in the HBD community who think that HBD is so obvious that everyone must secretly believe in it. But they are wrong. Just as Christians genuinely believe in Jesus, liberals genuinely believe that there’s no difference in intelligence between blacks and whites, and their anger at anyone who says otherwise is very real and not just an act.

Because HBD is off the table as the force that’s preventing blacks from being successful, the left has focused on “systemic racism” as the cause. In this the left is actually more correct than conservatives who deny that systemic racism is a thing but agree with the liberals that HBD is racist and untrue.

Fifteen years ago I was optimistic that, thanks to the internet, the truth of HBD would get out there and finally become widely believed, but in fact the opposite has happened. If anything, the early naughts were the golden age of freedom to talk about HBD. The amount of online censorship of anything deemed to be “racist” is increasing, and HBD has been co-opted by a bunch of dumb proles who may be called “alt right” or “white supremacists” or whatever. The irony is that the white supremacists themselves believe in systemic racism and deny the truth of HBD; they promote a narrative that Jews are racists and the white gentiles are the victims of Jewish racism. Just like the liberals, they deny that Jews are more successful because they have high-IQ genes. When even the people who are supposed to believe in HBD don’t believe in it when it hurts their feelings, I guess it’s not likely that liberals are ever going to believe in it. At least not without some major society-shaking capitulation.

Trump supporters insist that Trump has expanded the so-called “Overton window,” but I see no evidence of that in the arena of HBD. During the last four years, the Overton window has narrowed and the types of statements that can get you censored online or fired from your job have increased in scope. Trump supporters say we are supposed to applaud Trump’s small victories in the arena of immigration, but those will be ephemeral and end as soon as Joe Biden takes over. In the more important battle, the battle for HBD, we have lost ground under four years of Trump.

The left is becoming more and more adamant that we must finally do something about the “systemic racism” that’s all around us, and without HBD there’s no way to disprove “systemic racism.” Therefore our problems are only going to get worse, and whatever the left does to try to end “systemic racism” is only going to make matters worse because you can’t end something that doesn’t exist and it will probably result in even more bad feelings between blacks and whites and liberals and conservatives, as well as rising crime because police are blamed for “systemic racism,” and with rising crime will come collapse of urban areas with a lot of blacks. Attempts to end “systemic racism” will make the live of blacks worse rather than better.

* * *

Commenter Simon writes:

There are only two ways to explain away the obvious inequalities: Either they’re the result of small but significant genetic differences, innate and intractable, or they’re merely the result of bias and of black economic disadvantage — in which case it’s our duty to throw more money at the problem, step up racial preferences, bow to black resentment, and foster a sense of white guilt.

So yeah, science is ultimately the only remedy.

The coming collapse of New York City

It has been a month since I last wrote a post about this topic. Since then, I have become even more pessimistic about the future.

To remind you of the basic thesis, although they say that New York City has many industries like finance and banking, business services, media and publishing, etc., in fact this can be generalized to say that New York City has only one industry: people working in office buildings. If that industry leaves New York City because everyone who used to work in office buildings is working from home, then I can’t see any other future for New York City besides a total collapse, maybe even worse than the collapse of Detroit because, as the proverb goes, the bigger they are the harder they fall.

New York City is a special case, because it has more density and is more dependent on public transportation than any other city in the United States, plus it’s also the most expensive city in the United States. The pandemic won’t cause mass migration out of Phoenix, Arizona (the 10th most-populated metropolitan area in the U.S.) which is more like a really big suburb than a city in the way that New York is a city. People have to live somewhere, so there’s no particular reason for people to move out of the Phoenix area even if they are working from home instead of working in the office.

New York City is like a Ponzi scheme that requires a constant influx of corporate jobs and gentrifiers and construction projects in order to balance its budget despite having the highest tax collection per capita of anywhere else in the United States. As businesses and rich people move out, budget cuts and reduction in services will make New York City an even a crappier place to live and more will move out. Garbage is already piling up, the presence and aggressiveness of homeless are increasing, shooting incidents have doubled since a year ago.

The big question is, when will people return to the office? Will they ever? The last report on this from the New York Times indicates that less than 10% of workers have returned to the office, primarily in real-estate and banks, two industries that are especially worried about a collapse in commercial real estate (with banks having lent lots of money to big construction projects) and are trying to set a “good example” for other industries. (With a “good example” actually being a bad example for public health.)

The reason I have become more pessimistic is because it now seems to me that the pandemic is not going to have a magical neat ending. I think people are imagining that everyone is given a vaccine and Covid-19 disappears never to return again. This is unlikely to be the case. Most worrying, to me, is that during the previous two weeks there has been a rise in cases in the Hasidic neighborhoods. The Hasidim have not been social distancing for months, so why are they suddenly getting sick again now? My answer is that immunity to Covid-19 begins to fade after five to six months.

My other thought is that there will probably be an outbreak of Covid-19 AFTER we start vaccinating people. I think it’s pretty predictable that, after receiving the vaccine, people will think they can go back to normal, take off their masks, go to crowded indoor places. But if the vaccine is only 75% effective, and only 75% of the people have been vaccinated, that’s a recipe for an outbreak. There are flu outbreaks every year despite vaccines and people having had the flu before.

I think that in order for the virus to go away, we need to force EVERYONE to get vaccinated, and I don’t think we have the political will to do that, just as we don’t have the political will to make everyone wear masks in places where they should be wearing them. Robert Redfield pissed off the virus-denier-in-chief when he said that masks may be more effective at stopping spread of the virus than a vaccine. But it’s probably true.

I don’t foresee the other 90% of New York City office workers going back to the office until Covid-19 is gone. Until then, people don’t want to take crowded trains and subways, ride crowded elevators, so they can stay cooped up indoors for 8+ hours where one infected person could infect dozens of their coworkers. Corporations don’t seem to be willing to make people do that given that remote work has been working well enough, and will probably get better as people learn how to adapt it.

If Covid-19 is not gone, even after a vaccine is widely available, I don’t see New York City ever recovering. Even if Covid-19 completely disappears next summer, New York City may not be able to survive because the work-from-home model has been proven to be successful and if 20% of office workers continue to work from home, that might be enough to continue the death spiral that leads to the collapse of New York City. But given my prediction that Covid-19 will NOT completely disappear within another year or two, the collapse of New York City is inevitable.

Once again, Lion’s prediction was correct, Biden won the debate

Right after viewing the debate, it was hard to know that Biden won, because Trump’s bullying of both Biden and Chris Wallace gave the impression that Trump won some sort of battle of machismo.

But based on the latest NY Times polling, using the only scoring system that really matters, whether voters are more likely to vote for one of the candidates after watching the debate, Biden won.

Voters want a President like Mitt Romney and not a President like Tony Soprano, even though Tony Soprano could beat up Mitt Romney in a street fight. Not to say that Biden came even close to Mitt Romney’s presidentialness, but not looking senile was all he needed to win, and he succeeded.

Trump has the virus, what next?

For starters, we don’t know the full extent of the outbreak. If the President, the First Lady, and Hope Hicks have all caught the virus, the outbreak is probably bigger than just the three of them. I think the story will inevitably grow bigger over the next two days.

Then the second unknown is whether or not Trump’s Mr. Magoo luck holds out. Two weeks from now, I can certainly imagine a healthy Trump saying that the virus is no big deal and that we need to open up the economy ASAP.

If Trump is hospitalized, then I don’t see how he can win the election. Although, even before today, I didn’t see any way for Trump to win the election. But the defeat will be that much bigger.

And if Trump dies, then a lot of people will have schadenfreude and it will be a poetic end to his presidency. I’d certainly be glad if Mike Pence runs the country for the final three months before Biden takes over. Pence is far more competent than Trump. I can’t imagine Pence making fun of people for wearing masks.

Of course, the ultimate in Mr. Magoo luck would be if Biden caught it from Trump at the debate and gets seriously ill while Trump doesn’t get ill, and Trump wins the election he otherwise would have lost.

UPDATE

Trump is in the hospital, so I think his Mr. Magoo luck has finally failed him.

Looks like I was right after all, Biden DID win the debate

According to an exclusive poll, Biden won the debate “convincingly.”

The poll surveyed debate watchers but then weighted the demographics of the survey group to the population of likely voters in November. Most pollsters don’t do this, which ends up skewing their results toward Democrats because left-leaning college graduates are disproportionately likely to watch debates.

But even with the more Trump-friendly weighting, the poll shows a clear win for Biden and, not coincidentally, a fairly overwhelming sense that Biden’s conduct during the debate was more presidential.

Another Lion prediction came true.