The question is, what do you do when they gain power?
I mean have you actually seen the "science" used to claim even the existence of different races? It's all misleading statistics and pseudoscience. You group a bunch of people together based on geographical origin and then observe some differences in the averages between the two groups, ignoring that the differences within each "race" are larger than the differences between "races," and that the lines are being drawn arbitrarily, and that even the measured averages could be different as a result of environment or culture rather than genetics.
There is no way for a Nazi to win that on the facts because the facts are against them. Which is why they have so little actual support. There are probably more trolls pretending to be Nazis than there are actual Nazis.
They're used as the boogeyman specifically because there is such widespread agreement that they're wrong.
If you want to understand the terror of total state censorship practiced "the first time", then look to Lenin specifically and communism more generally.
Alternately, one can argue this climate of fear and systematic repression was present during the French revolution, but not localized to the entire state.
Once you start studying groups by linguistic origin (not "race") things become much clearer since people historically didn't really move around that much, and genetic markers are quite visible (a la 23andMe). I don't think you need to be a Nazi or a troll to be interested in any of this.
1. https://openpsychologyjournal.com/contents/volumes/V3/TOPSYJ...
And it's a completely arbitrary line. If Swedes are on average taller than Austrians, are they different "races" then? It's balderdash. There are genes that affect height and whatever else, but they're widely distributed throughout all "races."
Edit: To your point about group taxonomy, usually precision is only available to a level where genetic markers are present and distinct. This in turn comes from groups not interbreeding. For instance, using 23andMe's taxonomy, Sweden belongs to the "Scandinavian" group and Austria belongs to the "French & German" group:
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212169298...
Edit: Also to assert that, given two random people on opposite ends of the height spectrum, it's much more likely that they are distantly related than closely related (controlling for sex) because (controlling for nutrition) height is a heritable trait.
But we already know that, by and large. It's genetics. And the thing we know about genes is that they align very poorly with "races".
It's like grouping animals by color. Then you discover that brown animals are bigger than red animals, because bears are brown and bears are big whereas cardinals are red and cardinals are small. But sparrows are brown. Using the logic of "race" we put the sparrows in the same category as the brown bears. The black bears go in with the black housecats. The red housecats are with the cardinals.
The fact that you can find statistically significant differences between the color groupings doesn't mean you're not doing something preposterous.
The thing about groupings like this is that they only exist in the statistics.
If you take two populations of otherwise identical people and then isolate them from each other, they'll diverge over time. Maybe the land is different, or the weather, and some genes are better adapted to one place or the other so they become more common there.
That's just averages. Originally 50% of the combined population had trait A. Over time, it becomes the case that 30% of the first population has it and 60% of the second population. You can measure the difference in the average. But the people in the first population who have the trait are the same as the people in the second population who have the trait. It just happens to be the case that that trait is better adapted to the place where the second population lives. If you want to talk about something, talk about people who have the trait or don't, rather than where their ancestors lived.
> When we're talking about IQ, asking "why is does it differ across identifiable groups of people?" seems to be a very controversial question to ask or attempt to answer, often getting you lumped in with the Nazis, which was my original point.
Oh, absolutely. And if that's true, it's true whether you want to hear it or not.
The salient point is that the Nazis are still wrong even if it is. Because it's all still just averages. If there is some gene that makes you smarter and 55% of "white people" have it and 45% of "black people" have it and as a result the averages are different, the conclusion obviously isn't that all white people are smarter than all black people, so Nazis are still wrong.
There is also no concrete proof that that's the case rather than the disparity being a result of nurture rather than nature. It's legitimately hard to separate them out even when it's not as politically charged as this.
You could say that about any grouping of people whatsoever.
> If you want to talk about something, talk about people who have the trait or don't, rather than where their ancestors lived.
But clearly where there ancestors lives is a major factor in identifying the likelihood that a person will have a particular trait. And all of this matters because people have gotten it into their heads that every cultural/ethnic group should be equally represented in every field. When you point out that, for the above reasons, this is just as absurd in executive leadership as it is in basketball, they call you a racist/Nazi.
The same objection is raised when people ask "Why are Ashkenazi Jews disproportionately rich/powerful/successful?" or "Why are African Americans disproportionately not?" and you point to the IQ data. In fact you're a racist for even thinking to study this in more detail. This is why I'll never trust anyone to decide what is and isn't an offensive thing to say.
> The salient point is that the Nazis are still wrong even if it is.
It depends on what you mean "wrong". They're clearly morally wrong for murdering and sterilizing millions of people. They're not however wrong that eugenics programs are just as effective in humans as any other animals. And there's more than one way to do eugenics. Why not, for instance, as a matter of public health, simply incentivize people with desirable traits to produce more offspring?
> It's legitimately hard to separate them out even when it's not as politically charged as this.
I agree. Like most things it seems to be genetic predisposition in combination with environmental factors.
By these logic every form of life it's the same since all evolved from the same unicellular organisms.
And yet my cat doesn't have leaves while my plant I keep in the pot doesn't meow.
What about "ethnic groups"? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples
>It's like grouping animals by color. Then you discover that brown animals are bigger than red animals, because bears are brown and bears are big whereas cardinals are red and cardinals are small.
Are the grizzlies the same with pandas?
And there are two trees with different height from the same species. Both make the same kind of fruits.
Valable also for German Shepherd and Golden Retriever.
>If Swedes are on average taller than Austrians, are they different "races" then?
But Swedes can be still considered a different ethnic group than Austrians. Does the exact terminology matters? Various groups of people have both differences and also things in common. So what?
"We are what we pretend to be." --- Kurt Vonnegut
And to the extent that it is true, it implies that we should stop using Nazis as the boogeyman. Because trolls are going to use whatever will get a rise out of people. Best not have it be this that they summon up.
That is true enough for most, but not all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gonzalez_(spree_kille...
Daniel clearly could not separate the Freddy mask from fiction and made it a tragic reality.
No one dares to do such studies anymore so we can conclude that the "good" has won.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7015e2.htm
So it depends what you mean. If you mean there are no studies done with such partitioning aimed towards the benefit of those groups, I call that bunkum.
If you mean studies are not sponsored where the outcome is of no societal value beyond reinforcing or justifying an established hegemony or excusing discrimination, then perhaps... and good.
>no societal value beyond reinforcing or justifying an established hegemony or excusing discrimination Researchers might have hypotheses they want to test, and any hypothesis that's not "good" is not explored. Because 1. real identities and careers are affected 2. collected data isn't good enough for journals
"A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots."
It doesn't matter how solid your facts are if people are listening to vox pops of people who back their own internal beliefs.
> There is no way for a Nazi to win that on the facts because the facts are against them. Which is why they have so little actual support.
They don't need support, they just need an echo chamber to be encouraged. Pop onto stormfront and try convince a handful of posters there and see how far you get.
> There are probably more trolls pretending to be Nazis than there are actual Nazis.
If x% (where x is some suitably small number) of a group are the only ones who truly believe it, and the rest are just trolls, then increasing the population size leads to both more trolls and more Nazis. It also doesn't matter to anyone whether the person spewing vitriol is actually a Nazi or a troll when the abuse is directed at them.
> Pop onto stormfront and try convince a handful of posters there and see how far you get.
I've actually done this - it's far easier than you make it seem. I haven't really started collecting metrics on success, but that's kinda what we're missing - messengers who construct a pyramid of truthy statements and go back up the chain to whoever convinced THEM to a particular viewpoint when they find resistance to change from the opposite side. We're missing tech that incentivizes such behavior.
Of course this requires that everyone has a set for themselves a threshold for when they would change their mind about a topic - which I find is far more prevalent among US conservatives (at least online, as they behave to me), than when you try to establish the same among US liberals. Of course, ignoring the obvious field that doesn't have a threshold by design - supremacist religion.
My working theory is that supremacist religionists who converted out of it simply replaced it with liberal ideas (and were being supremacist about those), while there are both religionists and non-religionists among the conservatives.
IF we fixed THAT problem (with new technology, an early one is https://www.kialo.com/tour, but it's not good enough), we can have what you want.
Right now, we're effectively the same tech level as the 1900s (perhaps in a more dangerous way) w.r.t finding truth or the "right" arguments