What’s Happening Now and Why, by Irish Paleo over at Steve Sailer’s blog. Some interesting thoughts from a longish article.
The more historically remote any real legal and institutional impediments to the advancement of women and non-whites becomes, the more embarrassing it has become to them and their sponsors that the principal indices of high status and achievement are still dominated by white males. This, almost by definition, requires hard-boiled equality ideologues to spin ever more bizarre and unbalanced yarns to explain why their utopia has yet to arrive.
One of these manifestations has been an increasing resentment of the fact that the history of civilisationally consequential achievement has been so predominantly white and male. In an atmosphere in which there was a broader expectation that the future would differ from the past, this resentment could never reach fever pitch but the last 20 years have been sufficiently disappointing that it represents quite a predictable traumatic response.
Equally predictable is that a predominantly white and male establishment would seek to point that resentment in sterile directions that will not harm it, and use it to advance its own agenda where possible.
As the SJWs go from asking questions which are respectably current or prospective such as why there aren’t more black CEOs or women coders, to why nothing has been written about the women who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Africans who invented penicillin, the establishment seems, at least on some level, to have concluded that indulging the appetite for “diversity” porn is safer to pursue in the theatres of history (i.e. stuff that happened in the past), celluloid (i.e. stuff that never happened at all) and the social science faculties (stuff that happens outside the real world) than in something like business, finance or systems science research which is real and current, which matters a whole lot, and in which the consequences of “diversity”-induced screw ups are enormous and reverberative (#OscarsSoWhite may be irritating as hell but to the average Davos denizen #GoldmanSachsSoWhite would be infinitely worse).
The logic isn’t hard to understand. If we have to start engaging in pretences such as that Neil deGrasse Tyson is somehow the equal of Stephen Hawking … the real-world consequences will be devastating and perhaps uncontrollable. On the other hand, there is, at the very least, a superficial attractiveness to instead: … pretending that George Washington Carver was as consequential a scientist as Albert Einstein … [or] making movies that depict Charlize Theron as having the upper body strength of Arnie in his prime. …
So hence, the establishment has thrown its weight behind a bizarre plot to apply affirmative action to the past, to fantasy and to parts of reality that don’t matter very much (like African American Studies Departments). The questions is thus: will it work?
Guessing from their last project (making Obama the president), the answer is no. The whole idea behind Obama (and his designated female successor Kamala Harris) was that by getting a part-black exotic who was properly acculturated into white liberal norms and making him president, they could somehow induce blacks to stop feeling resentment at their embarrassing achievement deficit relative to whites and Asians (which, thanks to affirmative action and redistributive programmes, is far larger than the equivalent wealth and income gap).
It didn’t work because blacks and other economically unsuccessful groups seem to have a sort of “cargo cult” belief when it comes to wealth and achievement, that they are somehow prizes allocated to people of certain ethnicities based on their political power. … Blacks believed that having one of their own in power would result in a gusher of money, jobs and prizes coming their way [which] didn’t happen (in spite of Obama’s best efforts) because that’s not how the world works …
This leads me to believe that this move to retcon the history of human achievement will backfire horribly. … As the likes of Lin Manuel Miranda and the makers of Mad Max movies steal achievements and plaudits from the respective realms of history and reality and allow the “emerging” and “diverse” western world that has little prospect of ever achieving much of its own to wallow in its fantasy of success in proportion to its numbers, it seems likely that the “diverse” masses will look at the increasing gap between the image that popular culture projects of them as repositories of “vibrancy” and “brilliance” and the squalid reality of ghetto blasters, foodstamps, 7-11 jobs and tubs of Ben & Jerry’s in lieu of boyfriends and conclude what they always do (namely that the white man is screwing them over) …
They will demand more de jure political (and economic) power (and the prestige that goes with it) so that a lucky few of them can feel like the characters they read about in doctored history books (like black Hamilton) or see in trashy movies (like Wonder Woman or Mad Max).
A world run by the coalition of the “diverse” will, of course, be much less competently run than it is now and, much like Detroit and South Africa, infrastructure and social capital will disintegrate.
