Another hapless attack

The strength of the Alt-Right political philosophy can readily be seen in the utterly inept attempts to critique and discredit it. Fred Reed foolishly attempts to have a go:

Something called the Alt-Right that believes the white race to be superior and wants to rid the country of of encroaching dark scum. The Human Biodiversity movement, HBD, more scientific and less surly but picking whites while conceding that yellow are smarter. Finally IQists, who believe that IQ is a reliable measure of genetic intelligence. They too put yellows as more intelligent.

The Alt-Right believes that the whites are innately–i.e., genetically–superior to all other races, that they have dominated the world through higher intelligence, and that their mastery is the result of Darwinian selection. Whites, they say, have a marvelous track record of achievement, and they don’t want to dilute it by intermarriage.

They have a point. It is not thought politic in today’s racial climate to notice the obvious, that white Europeans have been far and away the most successful race yet. (The “yet” is important.) No other has even come close. Various peoples have learned to use the products of European civilization–the Japanese, Latin Americans, Thais, etc. at length–but have not engendered it. Look around you and see whether you can find anything that was not invented by European whites (other than paper and gunpowder).

But:

International Physics Olympiad. Internationally, top four contestants were Chinese, Chinese, Korean, Korean, with eleven of the top fifteen being east Asian. The US first appeared in sixteenth place. The American team: Jason Lu,  Srijon Mukherjee, Vincent Liu,  Abijith Krishnan,  Jimmy Qi. Less than six percent of America is Asian. International Physics Olympiad. Internationally, top four contestants were Chinese, Chinese, Korean, Korean, with eleven of the top fifteen being east Asian. The US first appeared in sixteenth place. The American team: Jason Lu, Srijon Mukherjee, Vincent Liu, Abijith Krishnan, Jimmy Qi. Less than six percent of America is Asian.

Many in HBD concede that north Asians, specifically, the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are more intelligent than white Europeans. While many outside of HBD (including me) doubt the reliability of IQ tests as measures of intelligence, the HBD people do not. They often assert that observation supports their view–that achievements of both individuals and peoples track IQ, that high achievement is therefore evidence of high IQ.

It would then seem to be Asians, not whites, who are wildly over represented in intellectual achievement. Races other than white and yellow races are not even in the running.

Although Asians comprise only 13 percent of California’s population, three-fifths of the state’s National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists have Asian last names. (Good article on this: Taki’s Magazine) These Semifinalists are in the top .5% in intelligence, or one in two hundred. The Asian kids outnumber the whites by more than four to one.

Psychometricians, who are neither the highly politicized IQists nor racist peddlers of Hitlerian pseudoscience, but very careful statisticians, put Chinese IQ at above 105, white at 100. This is not a trivial difference, and has serious consequences at the high end of the distribution.

China rises with astonishing speed. Alt-Righters are thus caught in a trap: Their arguments for the superiority of whites to blacks and Latinos equally show the superiority of Asians to whites. Anyway, if their conclusions are correct, the Chinese will be well advised not to intermarry with whites and thereby lower their mental capacity. I presume that HBDists will sympathize with this attitude as they too want to protect their genetic purity.

The errors in Fred’s critique are entirely obvious:

• The Alt-Right does not believe the white race to be intrinsically superior. It believes that each nation finds its own race and culture to be self-preferable, including the various white nations. That being said, the fact that so many diverse population groups observably prefer white cultures and societies to their own does tend to indicate the objective superiority of those cultures and societies.
• The Alt-Right does not believe that whites “have dominated the world through higher intelligence, and that their mastery is the result of Darwinian selection” for the obvious reason that the Alt-Right knows that a) there is a wide range of intelligence between the white nations, b) the most dominant white nations have not always been the most intelligent white nations, c) national intelligence is far more likely to be the result of various non-Darwinian selection processes such as sex selection and social class distinctions, and d) the white race is not the most intelligent. Unlike Fred, the Alt-Right understands that both average intelligence and the maximum elite intelligence are merely factors in the success of a society, factors that are heavily influenced by other cultural and genetic elements, such as Christianity, time expectations, and in-group trust.
• Fred relies upon a measure of intelligence in which he does not believe as the basis for his strawman argument. This is doubly dishonest.
• Intellectual aptitude is not intellectual achievement. Fred is confusing the two. I am a National Merit Scholarship Finalist; that is an indicator of my intellectual aptitude. SJWAL and AODAL are intellectual achievements.
• There is no trap. First, the Alt-Right points to both white intellectual aptitude and intellectual achievement in distinguishing the white nations from other nations. Second, the Alt-Right case is not made on the basis of that aptitude and achievement, but upon the right of whites to exercise that aptitude and achievement on their own behalf and in their own interests.