How to Pull Someone Out of the Alt-Right

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Would you mind clarifying what those 3 policies might be that have people accusing you of being so banned from the Left that they accuse you of being Alt-right.

I think that it is good if we can properly recognise what might just make a person some sort of centrist or still Left leaning but others have a strong reaction to.

I myself have been accused of being "woke", and thus unable of being reasonable.

Straight to ad hominem, Bradleigh, rather than engage with what was written. How did I know you would do that? Well two can play at that game...
Citing Nisbett in the way you did only proves you know nothing about this topic. I would bet a large sum of money that all you did was go to wikipedia and copy something clever sounding and that you had never heard of Nisbett before you did so. Nisbett is a fairly well known name among those who have actually read about this topic (you obviously haven't). The review you cite was originally commissioned as a direct response to the infamous Bell Curve book, even putting the first author aside, it should be carefully scrutinised.
He and his co-authors have been accused of cherry picking, overstating certain results and being deliberately misleading more than once in various books and articles. I wouldn't go as far as saying he is a politically motivated psuedo-scientist trying to ride the left-wing money train, but it is true to say politely that the ideas that he and his frequent co-authors hold of the environment being more important than the hereditary are seriously contested and somewhat beyond the fringe of that consensus you value so much. If I was being particularly ungenerous, I might say that Nisbett and co are to intelligence research what Graham Hancock is to archaeology.

A black person raised within a “middle class” environment comes out similarly to a white person raised in that environment. I’ve seen this many times.

If one is raised in “lower” socioeconomic conditions, one usually doesn’t do as well as one raised in “middle class” conditions, no matter the race of the person.

Myths are perpetuated because of “confirmation bias,” and through lack of exposure to actual members of the race being mythologized.

I was actually impressed, Medium.com and researchgate.net are apparently reliable sources. I decided to look more into the researchgate.net article, and it seemed rather even handed but a bit more towards saying evidence is not in yet to prove that there is hereditary is not a major impact, apparently stating something like a 15 points difference unaccounted for. But then I had a thought to look up who the author is, and by golly is Nathan Cofnas a little interesting. I would normally go to the Wikipedia article, but weirdly Wikipedia says the article on him was deleted within the last 24 hours, so something is afoot. But it is Rational wiki that shows his political nature. He self identifies as "alt-center" but really the only way he is actually different from the alt-right is the fact that he is not anti-sematic, and that is because he himself is Jewish, he agrees with the alt-right in every other way. I really don’t think that he is a reliable critic against Nisbett, for a matter of course he is not a biologist but actually a philosophy student, I can’t even find if has graduated, he is not a doctor, and everything points to him as more likely to skew data.

I would really like to get some information about the guy who wrote the other article, Noam J Stein, but I can’t find anything at all, even the link to his twitter says there is no account. I did find something on the first piece of evidence he provides in trying to explain what level of scientists believe intelligence is influenced by genes, it was correlated by a James Thompson, a controversial psychologist (not geneticist) who seems to have a bunch of ties to white supremacists and race realists, he hosted something called the London Conference on Intelligence, which attracted neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and child-rape apologist Emil Kirkegaard. Makes the work highly suspect. Next piece of evidence provided was by Thompson again and a Heiner Rindermann, who is very much similar story to Thompson and I can see quotes from him about calling skull sizes as an aspect for intelligence.

I won't say that these guys are Nazis, but Nazis sure like their stuff and it puts them at odds with the rest of the scientific consensus.




What is this mystical source of "left-wing money"? The Left does not have something like the Koch Brothers (former), who pollute the scientific discourse with their fake universities (PragerU) that platforms pseudo scientists so they can stay rich by saying that climate change is fake and the immigrants and minorities are to blame for everything. What rich people benefit disproving race realism and other progressive movements like socialism that would see redistribution from the rich to the poor?

I spent a good portion of my night, that I should have spent playing Last of Us 2, looking up race realist philosopher students and psychologists that appeal to Nazis. This is why I am making my way through so slowly.

Rather than having to read these people trying to disprove relevant experts disproving the Bell Curve, I really wish that I could just like Shaun's two hour and thirty nine minute video that debunks that awful thing.

ableists are accumulating on this platform.

Congratulations on managing to type this with a straight face - Murray is just as much of a crank as the Blank Slate lot.

There’s no serious doubt that intelligence is largely hereditary, although still debate about what exactly “largely” means and what exactly “hereditary” means.

There’s certainly no consensus that measured IQ differences between different racial groups are down to genetic differences between racial groups, and reflective of differences in g between racial groups.

We’re not very good at genetics and we’re even worse at intelligence research (at least all geneticists agree that genes exist!) so drawing hard conclusions seems like a recipe for being wrong. In the absence of good evidence, one must generally default to a null hypothesis of “no difference”.

Do you understand what ad hominem is? Do you understand why it loses you points in an argument?

They are the consensus in the relevant fields. The equalists/environmentalists are the radical minority. This doesn't mean the equalists are wrong, but you should stop announcing that scientific consensus matches your politically correct opinion.

To quote that same medium article:

At this point it is important to emphasize just how mainstream Murray’s views are in the field of intelligence research. The most controversial sentence in The Bell Curve attributed about half of the black-white IQ gap to genetics, the rest to environment. In 2013, a survey of 228 intelligence researchers found that the typical scientist in this field agrees:




This is a conversation for another day but short version: what I meant was - there is money to be made by playing to certain crowds, even or especially at the cost of scientific integrity.



Yeah that's pretty much what he said. Hey Bradleigh I found another Nazi and he's a moderator of this board dundundunnnnn.



Consensus: see above. I assume you know about mixed race studies. Almost without fail, no matter what controls you put on the experiment, they show mixed race people having measured intelligences somewhere in between the measured intelligences of the "original" races. That's pretty big indicator that it's a genetic phenomenon and is probably the main source of said consensus.

That is literally the data I pointed out was compiled by James Thompson, the psychologist that hosted the Conference on Intelligence that attracted all the literal neo Nazis. I don't trust him to have correctly represented the position he has that is actually a minority of scientific consensus, otherwise he would have a lot of scientists backing him up rather than calls to have his credentials recalled for racism.

Would they? You think scientists are always as willing as he is to throw their careers away for truth - to be chased out of polite society?

Us: Race science? But Asians and Jews have higher IQs than white people!

Them: Ummmm....okay....but white men have bigger d_cks!

Me: I'm out.

Soros is the right's favorite boogeyman of choice these days. It's because he's Jewish and capitalist but still donates to left-of-center causes. Even fox news sometimes entertains Sorosphobia. Viktor Orban and Fidesz in Hungary for instance have explicitly blamed Soros for this-that-or-the-other (mostly refugees). He's often invoked along with other anti-conservative "internationalists" (read: Jews) as responsible for the supposed decline of western civilization.

This all stems from the historic anti-semitic nature of nationalism. Jews who do not emphatically support the nation they live in are treated with suspicion if not outright hatred by nationalists. The fact that there is now an officially Jewish state has not helped this, bc now they can be accused of being loyal to a foreign nation instead of the one they live in. It's similar to how Catholic-bashers sometimes accuse Catholics of wanting to institute "Rule from Rome" any time they try to increase their influence in government, eg: some Irish Unionists; some Protestant Americans wrt JFK's presidency.



I can't speak to your experience but I see plenty of conservatives or right-libertarians on here, and I don't usually see them decried for being 'alt-right'. I think it's less common for older conservatives to be lumped in with them bc of the strong association of the alt-right with modern internet culture. Younger, less mainstream conservatives seem to get the label more than others.
I see a lot of self-identified centrists accused of being alt-right mostly if they are right-of-center economically and don't identify completely with either party on social issues (again, generally speaking). This seems like the boat you're in, but I don't know what specific 3 policies you're referring to here.

Except for the fact that you’ve declared yourself a trump supporter and djt is a far right wing whackjob politician, sooooo, kinda hard for anyone to not perceive you as Alt Right vs. a centrist republican who just likes croney capitalism, gun rights, and keeping healthcare from poor people and minorities.

He has thrown his career away because he is irrational, stuck on junk science of people who tried to apply Darwinism for between different humans to justify how they felt about people of different races, something Charles Darwin explicitly avoided doing when he published his main work. If this was a consensus of the scientific community, they would not be getting chased out of polite society, they would probably have been accepted several decades ago when this was considered accurate, but science has since moved on, leaving a lot of people who want to justify feeling a certain bad way about certain people to cling to them.

Rather than focusing on these scientists and other people that garner controversy for trying to justify the point of view that racists have, who spend their time playing the victim because they just want to "speak truth", you should see people of all different races as diverse. That they are all worthy of equality, and perhaps racial groups that do not have equality is due to systematic discrimination that evidently has not given everyone an equal chance. It does not mean everyone white person is evil, but it might encourage many of us to come to terms to an uncomfortable truth that we had advantages that we might not have had if our skin was different.

Alt-right isn't an insult so it's not intended to shut down discussion, it's shorthand for part of the political spectrum. Basically the part of the political spectrum that's less enamoured with neo-liberal economic policy and more isolationist, protectionist and nationalist than the core of the 'conservative movement'.

You openly discuss surrounding yourself with right-wing extremists, so appearing somewhat sane in comparison to them might make them view you as 'left-leaning' but would make you still fall outside of the mainstream of establishment conservative thought. Perhaps in those contexts you make different arguments then you make here, but over here you largely seem like a somewhat more compassionate version of those folks.

A single view can make one fall 'out of touch' with people they otherwise align with. I'm 'to the right' of the Tories on gun control in Canada, this one issue puts me out of touch with most people I'm otherwise aligned with when this issue is being discussed.

^ Good point arrived at (or implied by) final paragraph as I read it.

We live in a cultural world which is infused by a wide array of live ideologies, and the culturally fossilised remnants of dead ideologies: but although these can and do/did operate as self contained sub-cultural “boxes”, their propaganda and the concepts contained therein float through conversations, thought processes and the media scene, free to split down to smaller sets of ideas, or single ideas and recombine continually without end.
As individuals our psyches are continually buffeted by this storm of conceptual fragments, some of which we reject, and some of which we accept: the control principle governing this conceptual discrimination appears to relate back to prior knowledge, experience and previously ideas accepted, governed by the need to feel one is internally consistent in thought and deed.

Or, to put it much shorter and simpler: we’re all, ideologically speaking, a mixed salad.

..........

When a major historico-political event occurs it is common to make attitudes to that event as shorthand for an “us vs them” division of the citizen body of the state in question.

It happened in the UK with the Brexit referendum, with “leave” being defined as “right wing” regardless of the support for that position by several trades unions and most of the communist parties at the fringes of our political system. And “remain” was likewise glossed as “left wing”, completely ignoring the large number of broadly conservative minded people who voted for that position.

Same thing seems to be occurring in the US re: BLM.
(At least as far as I can gather from news reports at the distance of one metric Atlantic Ocean)