Forwarded from Magus Kalkin
https://www.takimag.com/article/motte-and-bailey-vs-outpost-and-heartland/
Still one of the finest articles on this long war:
> ...as the genetics of race become ever more scientifically apparent in the age of Ancestry.com and 23andMe, the claim that race does not exist genetically has become ever more often insisted upon.
The people who assert this are usually explicit about their outpost and heartland strategy, arguing that if race doesn’t exist, then logically there can’t possibly be racial differences in average intelligence between whites and blacks.
But is protecting the self-esteem of blacks the ultimate heartland in this ploy? In reality, there aren’t enough black intellectuals of the first rank to explain the popularity of this stratagem.
In the wake of the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, it finally dawned on me why so many of the intelligentsia raged against intelligence.
Banning scientific discussion of black-white IQ differences is largely an “outpost defense” of what they really care about, which is preventing awareness of gentile-Jewish IQ differences. If nobody is allowed to mention the outpost—that the average IQ difference between blacks and whites explains quite a lot about modern America—then it is less likely that an ensuing discussion would ever occur about the heartland: how IQ gaps between gentiles and Jews explain perhaps even more.
We saw this recently with the hilarious brouhaha in which bumptious New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, former editor of The Jerusalem Post, mentioned in passing that Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQs, not realizing that nobody is ever supposed to let this slip in public. His employer then memoryholed the offending facts from his archived column.
If you possess the term “outpost and heartland” in your conceptual vocabulary, you’ll see this device in operation all over the place.
But “outpost and heartland” is probably too self-explanatory to ever catch on.
The next obvious question: is the suboptimal metaphor that is Motte vs Bailey, complete with the emergence of TheMotte as an intellectual hub for contrarians, a higher-order maneuver in the war, to suppress the recognition of Outpost and Heartland patterns?
It's not the last obvious question in this line.
Still one of the finest articles on this long war:
> ...as the genetics of race become ever more scientifically apparent in the age of Ancestry.com and 23andMe, the claim that race does not exist genetically has become ever more often insisted upon.
The people who assert this are usually explicit about their outpost and heartland strategy, arguing that if race doesn’t exist, then logically there can’t possibly be racial differences in average intelligence between whites and blacks.
But is protecting the self-esteem of blacks the ultimate heartland in this ploy? In reality, there aren’t enough black intellectuals of the first rank to explain the popularity of this stratagem.
In the wake of the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, it finally dawned on me why so many of the intelligentsia raged against intelligence.
Banning scientific discussion of black-white IQ differences is largely an “outpost defense” of what they really care about, which is preventing awareness of gentile-Jewish IQ differences. If nobody is allowed to mention the outpost—that the average IQ difference between blacks and whites explains quite a lot about modern America—then it is less likely that an ensuing discussion would ever occur about the heartland: how IQ gaps between gentiles and Jews explain perhaps even more.
We saw this recently with the hilarious brouhaha in which bumptious New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, former editor of The Jerusalem Post, mentioned in passing that Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQs, not realizing that nobody is ever supposed to let this slip in public. His employer then memoryholed the offending facts from his archived column.
If you possess the term “outpost and heartland” in your conceptual vocabulary, you’ll see this device in operation all over the place.
But “outpost and heartland” is probably too self-explanatory to ever catch on.
The next obvious question: is the suboptimal metaphor that is Motte vs Bailey, complete with the emergence of TheMotte as an intellectual hub for contrarians, a higher-order maneuver in the war, to suppress the recognition of Outpost and Heartland patterns?
It's not the last obvious question in this line.
Taki's Magazine
Motte and Bailey vs. Outpost and Heartland
One oddity of discourse is that novel phrases seem more likely to catch on if their meanings are opaque than if they are self-evident. Having to know a semisecret code makes phrases such as “motte and bailey argument” more popular,...