I was a bit sad to hear that I'm assumed to be fascist, as a tech worker who has no major issues with slate star codex. But I guess the culture war stuff can wait until after the US has sorted out its constitutional crisis.
If you have no major issues with Scott Alexander Siskind Slate Star Codex, you have no major issues with his ongoing discussion of race science, racial IQ differences and "human biodiversity". This has been known and litigated for years. It keeps cropping up. The most recent example is from January 15, 2025: How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates is entirely based on the work of an infamous racial scientist:
Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore). People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology.
Those horrible activists. Must've been more "culture war stuff" from woke moralists who don't understand science.
For 50 years, Richard Lynn has been at the forefront of scientific racism. An unapologetic eugenicist, Lynn uses his authority as professor (emeritus) of psychology at the University of Ulster to argue for the genetic inferiority of non-white people. Lynn believes that IQ tests can be used to determine the worth of groups of people, especially racial groups and nations. The wealth and power of nations, according to Lynn, is due to their racial intelligence and “homogeneity” (or “purity”). He argues that the nations with the highest IQs must subjugate or eliminate the lower-IQ groups within their borders in order to preserve their dominance.
Since the 1970s, Richard Lynn has been working tirelessly to place race, genes, and IQ at the center of discussions surrounding inequality. [...] Lynn also recycles Nazi-era arguments for Nordic superiority within the “Caucasoid” group, claiming that a “north-south continuum” exists, with people from northern Europe having evolved to be more intelligent than their southern neighbors.
[...] Lynn is referring to his belief that racial groups have genetically determined behavioral patterns, and that crime, disruptiveness, and antisocial behavior are part of minorities’ genetic makeup. In this way, Lynn has provided a veneer of scientific respectability to long-discredited racist theories like those popularized by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve.
[...] Lynn is one of the few remaining “race scientists” who is willing to explicitly endorse addressing these supposed problems through eugenic policies. [...] Lynn unabashedly suggests just that, favoring a “parental licensing scheme” in which “couples would have to apply for and obtain a license to have children.” He also believes that there is “a good case for reviving the sterilization of the mentally retarded and criminals,” and has promoted a “commendable scheme” targeting poor mothers which “would require sterilization as a condition of receiving welfare.” (x)
“If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall… . What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of “phasing out” of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”
This brief summary is the political project that writing these blog posts advance and reflects who Slate Star is as a person. You have to be profoundly stupid or profoundly racist (but I repeat myself) to think these fascist worldviews don't affect someone's research—indeed, that someone's research isn't a product of, in service of those views—and here I mean both Lynn and Slate Star. To overlook all this and go on favorably citing Lynn is damning. You shouldn't be able to show your face in polite society after this.
Speaking of the political project in question, Lynn funded, and was funded by, neonazis, white supremacists, and hate groups, some violent, throughout his life. He served on the editorial board of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscientific racialist journal once described as "written by racists for racists," founded in 1960 by segregationists to advance their cause, and funded by notorious segregationist, anti-semitic, pro-apartheid groups. The people involved in its founding, publication, and articles, including Lynn, were complete pariahs, too racist for what was a racist society—but one that had beaten a blow to nazism and pulled back from those levels of explicit extermination, able to see the link between racial science and the logical teleological end of genocide. The chief founders were Reginald Gates, Henry Garett, G.r. Gayre and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. The last was a prominent, famous German-Dutch racial scientist and member of the nazi party, who was not only Mengele's PhD supervisor but who encouraged him to go further with his experiments during the Holocaust; he was able to launder his reputation as a "genetics researcher" postwar, though he was unrepentant. Henry Garett was a lawyer who testified against integration in Brown v Board of Ed. Gates was also a famous scientist fired from Howard University for opposing segregation:
Note the language they (Gates) use to carefully disguise their political goals under a mask of detached, clinical, objective science:
The journal was immediately attacked by legitimate scientists who saw through their obvious machinations. The political goals were evident (x):
Mankind Quarterly never disappeared. It remained closely connected to shadow networks of white supremacist organizations and funding called the Pioneer Foundation, partially a trust for Draper's money. Currently, the journal is published through the Human Diversity Foundation (HFD) by the German white nationalist and AfD social media manager Erik Ahrens and Danish neonazi Emil Kirkegaard, who perhaps plays the most important role in organizing HFD, Mankind Quarterly, Aporia Magazine (another online scientific racism rag), and connecting and bringing to prominence white nationalists, racialists, and hygienists worldwide. Both have defended nazis and the Waffen SS.
Kirkegaard is a named author on more than 40 papers published in the journal Mankind Quarterly, a longstanding outlet for race science theories. The topics of Kirkegaard’s inquiries have included whether black Americans earn less than white Americans because of “average intelligence differences”, comparing penis size, testicle size and “breast-buttock preference” by race, and an attempt to show that in Denmark those with “Muslim names” have lower IQs.
The geneticist Adam Rutherford told the Guardian that Mankind Quarterly and similar periodicals were so discredited that it would be “career suicide” for a genuine academic to publish in them. Kirkegaard’s positions appear closer to racism than science. “Africans,” Kirkegaard wrote on his blog in July, “are prone to violence everywhere.”
[...] Nonetheless, Kirkegaard enjoys some influential connections. The recordings show him claiming that in 2019 he was among the “online dissidents” that the tech billionaire and rightwing donor Peter Thiel flew to Silicon Valley for discussions. (x)
Kirkegaard is also a pedophile:
In a 2012 blog post, Kirkegaard wrote that it would be a "good idea to legalize child porn" because he thinks viewing this content would reduce the number of rapes committed by pedophiles. He’s also stated that he would support lowering the age of consent to 13 or lower if puberty begins earlier.
Despite his own views on child porn and age of consent, Kirkegaard has tried to link homosexuality to pedophilia and categorized all left-wing people as pedophiles on his blog. (x)
We've established how these people operate, how they lie, what rhetorical tricks they pull, what their real goals are, what their history is—the holocaust, apartheid, segregation—and what their political project is—AfD, Trump, Thiel, remigration, eugenics. Going back to Slate Star's blog post:
Thanks to Emil Kirkegaard for the blog post that finally cleared this up for me.
Kirkegaard and Slate Star communicated and collaborated on this. You'll find Kirkegaard in the post comments, along with Steve Sailer, yet another prominent American white supremacist. Kirkegaard retweeted this post when it came out, as did dozens of decrepit, committed, hardcore neonazis and white supremacists. Why are they all cropping up here? Why does he keep talking to them? The answer is clear:
Slate star codex is a white supremacist espousing race science. He is in conversation with other white supremacists, he gets published by them, he cites them. They're his friends, colleagues, patrons because he's a fascist neoreactionary. The people retweeting this stuff are among the most vile, despicable creep freaks raising up the spectre of genocidal racial war, segregation, and apartheid—and they are exactly the ones sponsoring or carrying out the constitutional crisis. Chris Rufo, an unhinged nazi DeSantis ally currently ransacking the Department of Education, is friends with Kirkegaard; he's published in Aporia, cited by SSC. SSC is in league with them, but he keeps a winking distance—look at these ideas, look at these studies, I have so much data—of plausible deniability. Not plausible to me.
This isn't new, either. @vilestviolist kindly provided a link to leaked emails from years ago where SSC revealed he agrees with HBD (human biodiversity, a euphemism for race science) and their conclusions, but just like the original editors of Mankind Quarterly, he knows he couldn't say it openly (then):
He does the exact same thing as the founders of Mankind Quarterly in the exact same way. You can't incorporate ideas from neoreactionaries in your worldview and not wind up one yourself. Don't play coy.
In the post I linked at the beginning, he makes the argument—while citing bunk data—that substandard African IQs, around 60-80, can be improved with development. Ostensibly, the argument is for development. In reality, what he's doing is peddling the idea of racial IQ disparities wrapped in the acceptable idea of development and his blundering, bloviating prose. I am not citing anything further from his rank filth post because race science is a pseudoscience; none of this is legitimate. These people have been completely shunned, banned, and cast aside for decades because the political ends of these nonsensical arguments are patently clear.
This is not "culture war stuff." Saying so deliberately obfuscates and minimizes explicit white supremacy, eugenics, and racial hygenism through a pathetic euphemism. It's the same cloaking mechanism that the original racial scientists used. It doesn't get more explicit than that: this is original, old school, classic fascism. In part or in whole, you're constructing a world that entirely excludes non-white people on the basis of pseudoscientific studies on "human biodiversity" falsely alleging innate, biological differences in intellect and capability. If not, you're engaging and taking in the work of someone who dines with fascists, takes their money, and spreads their views. You're being amoral, context-blind, so open to ideas that you're damaging everyone. This isn't a "discussion," there's no legitimate research here; these ideas have real, tangible consequences. You enjoy reading this drivel while pointing, or being pointed towards white supremacy and debunked racist propaganda. There's no coming back from this. At best, you're a complete dupe. Otherwise, you are a fascist.
