Political positions on every issue

attempt #2

Making this post stems from my lack of willingness to confidently signal in favour of any particular tribe or side of a debate — the previous post I made on this topic was too long, detailed, and did not cover enough issues, so I decided to make a new one.

The short of it is that my positions on policy issues mirror those of a libertarian who supports restricting immigration/drugs/abortion, is open to autocracy, supports geoengineering, and would like there to be more regulation of food and water.

You could call me a libertarian who is aware of what an externality is — a conservative.

Immigration

The ideal immigration policy for the United States would involve a system that selects for the following variables:

• IQ (use education, wealth, perhaps english/knowledge tests as proxies).

• Admixture (preferably European, East Asian, Latin American, or Turkic).

Once polygenic scores get to advanced levels, perhaps genetic selection could be used to select for IQ. Using AI to select immigrants for attractiveness would be cool, but it could be gamed by the use of plastic surgery or extremely professional makeup.

IQ nationalism is a meme, but intelligent immigrants would engage in more Hajnal-like behaviour, be more likely to date Whites, have better English, be more productive, and engage in less ethnic nepotism. Selecting overtly for test scores could lead to perverse incentives like cheating, which would have to be dealt with by nationalizing test services and/or having the government administer the tests with identity verification mechanisms.

The optimal amount of immigration would be a small, sex-balanced, and constant number per year. Too much immigration would lead to shortages in goods that are less responsive to increases in demand, such as housing. Given that people tend to prefer to live around either White people or their own ethnic group, the United States should select for White-adjacent immigrants, especially as increased racial diversity causes reductions in social trust and fertility.

In terms of tech workers specifically, the United States has a surplus of tech workers due to students going into engineering/CS and job openings dropping, so I see no purpose to expanding visas for the purpose of getting foreigners into tech. In terms of ability, American CS majors score about a standard deviation above Indian, Russian, and Chinese CS students on tests of computer skills.

The most realistic immigration system would involve low baseline levels across all countries and skill levels; restrictions based on countries or attractiveness would be politically unpalatable. Perhaps immigrants could also be selected based on institutional quality — it would be easy to justify, and it would end up indirectly selecting for racial groups that create good institutions.

It is true that countries like America suck up the talent from less developed countries and inhibit their growth, but it is unlikely that those countries would develop to adequate levels even with the presence of that talent.

Because of the way supply and demand works, if somebody immigrates and works in a country, they recieve wages, spend those wages on products, increase demand, and therefore do not crowd natives out of jobs in general. They will, however, crowd natives out of jobs that they take over.

Trying to make open borders work by cutting welfare and removing housing regulations is insane.

Illegals need to be deported.

Birthright citizenship is fine, but should not be given to illegal immigrants.

Political ideology

Ideologies are memes.

Government size

Ideally small. Education/healthcare spending is about 3x what it should be, and pensions should be privatized too. Military spending and some other discretionary spending could easily be rolled back, charity could feed the starved.

There is little empirical evidence to support the view that economic inequality causes social problems, so redistribution of wealth is unnecessary.

Democracy vs autocracy

Not committed to either. Democracy/cathedralism has the advantage of being stable, but the disadvantage of reliably drifting towards the left; autocracy has the advantage of requiring much less political capital to accomplish tasks, but the disadvantage of being leader-dependent. Neither system is necessarily superior to the other, and both are appropriate in different scenarios.

Education

Some have ambitious ideas about what could be done with IQ testing and schools when it comes to elite selection. Most of them are too impractical and would end up being disappointing, either because they create an overly competitive schooling culture or because they do not select for elites well.

Here is a simple proposal that would take little effort to implement and have few risks:

• Only instruct students in writing, reading, and maths until 9th grade. Weed out 20% of students through a selection mechanism by this point; it does not really matter how.

• In high school, allow for students to take a maximum of three electives for 3 years. Test them on their aptitude in reading/math/writing as well as their knowledge in those electives. Then, post their grades in high school and performance on both of those tests on a public website for the purposes of selection. Prevent ~33% of students from graduating due to either poor performance in their electives or grades.

• The ceiling of the tests for the electives should be low to disincentivize trying too hard, while the ceilings of the reading/math/writing tests should be designed to be extremely high as performance in those areas is more innate.

• Undergraduate education should be scrapped, perhaps licensing requirements for medicine and law too.

In this system, high school has been effectively turned into an undergraduate education that selects slightly less effectively and at a younger age. The public test scores would compensate for the reduced selection by allowing employers to select for intelligence more reliably.

Cognitive public servants such as bureaucrats, politicians, or teachers should perform at least better than the average person in terms of academics. Less cognitive public servants such as firefighters or policemen should have at least reached at least the 20th percentile of ability. Too much selection for intelligence would be unnecessary and lead to too many highly intelligent people getting into otherwise unremarkable roles.

Ethnic nationalism

Even if I was White, I would not support White nationalism. I am motivated by human enhancement, not racial solidarity. It is also ineffective as “being White” is a bad cooperation mechanism within the United States — Whites are the high status race, have a lot of competing interests, and are culturally heterogeneous.

That aside, countersignalling White nationalism is unproductive; White nationalists and eugenicists agree far more on immigration than they do with any other group.

JQ

Jews are highly influential in American politics, disproportionately support the left, and the shift towards multi-ethnic societies. As such, their influence comes at the expense of msot groups that live in America.

Jews are not particularly ethnocentric, especially compared to non-Hajnal ethnic groups, and I do not support the MacDonald hypothesis — that Jews are a product of group selection for ethnocentrism, intelligence, and ladder-climbing.

I am skeptical of the idea that Jews are unusually deceptive or machiavellian.

Jewish eminence is largely a product of intelligence and an ambitious/greedy psychological profile, not nepotism, environment, or culture.

Anti-semitism as a political strategy will either fall flat on its face or encourage even worse Jewish political behaviour, which encourages more anti-semitism, and so on. I do not support extermination or remigration as a solution to the Jewish question. Any society that is based enough to kick out its Jews is demonstrably unsubverted enough, and Jews are already outmarrying at such high rates that Jewish power should be a null concern in 50 years.

Israel

The fastest way to solve the conflict now is to remove the Palestinians or the Jews from the West Bank. Perhaps if it dragged on for long enough then people would tire of it and forget the old atrocities and learn to live their lives, though one wonders whether one side would dominate the other before that happens.

Who “owns” the land does not matter. The righteous way to possess land is to steal it.

Brahmin question

I can’t say I dislike Indians. Some of them smell bad and have narcissistic personalities, but many ethnic groups have their respective faults that can be picked at. Upper class and 2nd generation Indians are very different from the lower class immigrants that people complain about online.

Their prominence in politics, finance, tech, and whatnot is mostly due to their high levels of extraversion and ambition, with perhaps some strong ethnocentrism as well.

The tendency towards ethnic nepotism however does need to be combatted somehow, preferably by reducing Indian immigration.

Anonymity

An uninsteresting debate. If you are posting edgy stuff and are financially/socially vulnerable, you should post under a pseudonym. If you are not financially/socially vulnerable, you may want to consider posting under a pseudonym anyway, since basically everybody I know says it is easier to make it without using your real name.

Politically, pseudonyms should be allowed, and banning them would result in apocalyptic levels of social cooling. It would reduce the likelihood of cancellation since everybody is just as vulnerable as everybody else, but fewer people would be willing to post edgy or controversial takes regardless.

Male Homosexuality

The West has a strange relationship with homosexuality: on one hand, people try really hard to make it non-taboo, but there is still a grassroots homophobic culture that refuses to die. I am not exactly sure what the ideal cultural attitude towards homosexuality would be, but I doubt that making it taboo is necessary — most people want to date the opposite sex anyway.

Beyond the sensitive nature of the topic, homosexuality is a conceptually complicated topic: I model it in terms of behaviour (sexual relationships and culturally masculine/feminine actions), attraction (what people feel towards the sexes), and identity (how people concieve of themselves and communicate to others).

I do not think that “homosexual lifestyles” cause depression or mental illness. Instead, the most plausible explanation for the link between homosexuality and depression is that the two traits have a genetic overlap.

I am skeptical about the degree to which sexual identity is innate and of there being a monotypical homosexual. Some homosexuals are probably born being attracted to the same sex due to their genes and prenatal environments and decided to have sex with people they were sexually attracted to. For some, I suspect it stems from identitarian misconception — they are innately attracted to women (or at least, not innately attracted to men), and become convinced they are homosexual due to obstacles in sexual development or finding conventional masculinity unappealing.

In some, I suspect it is a “choice”, where they are not innately homosexual, but consciously decide to live as one. There are many reasons as to why somebody might prefer to live as a male homosexual: in comparison to being an incel, being gay is more high status and is a better identity marker. Perhaps they find interacting with women to be too much of a negative experience, while interactions with men are more emotionally neutral and low-stakes. Perhaps men are easier lays. Who knows.

People overestimate the degree to which lowering testosterone, widespread porn, and cultural changes have contributed to the existence of more male homosexuality. More hostile relationships between women and men and celibacy becoming lower status are underrated causes of increased levels of male homosexuality.

Most women do not have a sexual orientation and are “bisexual” by default. There may be a few women who are naturally attracted to either men or women, but I suspect that for most women, sexual behaviour/identity is more influenced by “choice” than anything else. “Choice” being a composite of attraction, self-conception, perceptions of both genders, and ideas of what relationships should be. Bisexual men, in terms of arousal, are likely born-straights who developed an attraction to men as a paraphilia or born-gays who developed an attraction to women.

Religion

I am an innately unreligious person. There are very few people like me, and I am not sure if there should be more. People who turn away from religion will inevitably fill something with the void, like subcultural engagement (e.g. television, sports), politics, or voo.

I am skeptical of attempts to try to revitalize currently existing religions and also of attempts to create new religions, but most people cannot live life without sacrilizing something, so I am not sure where we go from here.

Abortion

No strong position on the issue, but I lean towards restricting it. Abortion is definitely murder, but murder is not necessarily wrong — if it results in increased human flourishing, then why oppose it.

I have doubts as to whether modern abortion eugenic — scientific studies and whatnot usually find no correlation between IQ and the number of abortions a woman has. Presumably, more impulsive and incompetent women would have more unwanted pregnancies, but perhaps the more conscientious women are more likely to seek abortions. The idea that abortion reduced crime in the 90s is erroneous, as Steve Sailer demonstrated in his back and forth with Levitt.

On average, children that grow up with mothers who would have otherwise aborted will have worse childhoods, though it would be better than not existing at all and it is unlikely that this poor childhood would go on to have a large effect on who they are as adults.

Abortions in the case of incest, genetic issues, and risk for the mother should be allowed. On the fence about rape exceptions — in principle it seems kind of barbaric to force somebody to go through with a pregnancy that resulted due to rape, but I question whether this restriction could be adequately enforced without raped women being forced to carry or other women abusing the system to abort in cases that would not be allowed.

Discourse around abortion is kind of nonsensical because it is a morally unintuitive issue. Given that most people’s morality revolves around social and emotional concerns more than any kind of utilitarian reasoning, it is unproductive to discuss abortion and I would not recommend trying to write on it. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that most of the great writers and bloggers rarely discuss it.

Racemixing

At the rate at which people are outbreeding today, Whites/Asians/Hispanics will breed into a hybridized population that is mostly of White in ancestry with trace amounts of Asian and Amerindian admixture. Black people still largely date within their race, and mixed-race White-Black hybrids tend to identify as Black.

There is a definive cultural and genetic barrier between Whites and Blacks that prevents integration; a mixed race Black is still Black. A mixed Asian or Hispanic, however, is more likely to integrate into White culture. If I recall correctly, Eric Kaufmann noted that mixed White-Black children are more likely to identify as Black, while mixed White-Hispanics or White-Asians are more likely to identify as Asian.

This could potentially lead to a more right wing culture around race, as phenotype becomes a much weaker proxy for ancestry; it is common in Hispanic families with high levels of European admixture for there to be siblings of different skin colours. I may write more on this in the future.

Some argue that mixed-race people’s higher levels of mental dysfunction and lower levels of risk aversion are reason to criminalize it, though this behaviour is a function of genetic selection, not identity or outbreeding depression.

Even if making miscegination illegal was for the best, it is unlikely that this law could ever be implemented.

Slavery

It was fine in the past since White workers were not phyisically capable of working for such long hours in the sun, but this is not the case in the modern day.

Some kind of underclass will always be necessary, especially since robotics are progressing slower than people thought they would. Whether this class should be enslaved for “legally free” is largely irrelevant in my opinion, though perhaps a more knowledgeable commenter could touch on this.

Indentured servitude and prison labour should be allowed regardless of the legality of normal slavery.

Racism

The nebulousness of the word aside, I think that racial hatred is unnecessary, and that there is more overlap between races than differences between them. I touched on this in the previous post:

What is more important is how perceptions of differences between races should play into behaviour. For example, people who are Christian psychologically differ from people who are not religious, but it would be silly to discriminate based on such small differences. On the other hand, when interacting with chimpanzees, it would be best to treat them as a chimpanzee, no matter how intelligent or beautiful they may be relative to their group. There is a kind of “racist” who thinks that the distribution of human quality and traits across racial lines has no overlap, and behaves as this is the case. Ultimately he is wrong, and human races do not differ that much in important traits.

Pronatalism

It would be for the best for developed countries to be able to preserve their current populations, but I question the extent to which current fertility levels could be increased using policy interventions. Birth rates at the moment are a marginal issue, few politicians talk about it, and the pronatalist community is dangerously adjacent to the eugenic/racist communities.

I question the logic of more humans = better, and think it is worth considering whether there are negative effects of overpopulation that are difficult to measure like increased interelite competition or long-term unsustainability that is not related to resource depletion.

Global warming

From an earlier piece:

Climate change in terms of direct effects is overblown. The effect of temperature on the economy and climate is largely overstated and difficult to determine — see Unsettled by Steven Koonin. CO2 and methane emissions will cause temperatures to rise in the future, but it’s unlikely that this rise in temperature will translate to more severe weather or unbearable sea levels; though it could make living more difficult near the equator, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

I support geoengineering interventions to cool the planet anyway; there is no good reason not to do them given the political and humanitarian risks.

Porn

I cannot help but feel that the hate for it is performative and less related to the harm that it actually does. It is a convenient scapegoat for people to blame problems that are caused by worse issues, like themselves or the fact that their girl is ugly.

Porn likely causes people to have more sexual paraphilias, though proving this empirically is probably impossible.

“Normal porn” is really awkward, performative, and weird; I find it difficult to understand why people like to view it. My erotica-related habits are a bit too personal to share here, but I am not much of a gooner.

Drug legalization

There will always be a demand for gangs, rebellion, and an underworld. Perhaps criminalizing drugs helps deal with this — it reduces the use of drugs in the regular population and allows certain types of people to be concentrated in separate social networks.

Regulations

Everybody wants less regulation until a pandemic happens, a car explodes, or somebody gets poisoned. Then the vibe shifts.

Reducing regulations would increase economic growth in the short term, but a certain level of regulation may be necessary for a post-growth low human capital economy.

Holocaust revisionism

No strong opinion on the matter. I have doubts about whether certain methods of killings were even used, though I think that mainstream accounts of how it happened are not more inaccurate than those that surround any other politically charged historical event.

I suspect that about one to four million Jews died in World War II beyond what would be expected from war casualties, largely due to pogroms, starvation, and disease. The Alternative Hypothesis’ theory that the 3 million missing Jews after WW2 are due to Stalin fudging the history books is interesting, but probably wrong.

The holocaust and to some extent WW2 is still worth talking about because the narrative that is told in schools is a cornerstone of the modern liberal world order, but personally, it does not pique my interest as my political views and perception of the holocaust are mentally uncorrelated.

Conspiracy theories

Along with religion, voo, and spirituality, I think that conspiracy theories are a coping mechanism that people use to live in a world that is boring and horrifying. That aside, there are a few conspiracy theories that I consider to have a marginal probability of being true:

Theories that are almost certainly true:

• I consider HBD to be a conspiracy theory, as it requires the existence of coverup and systematic denial to be true.

• The polio vaccine spread HIV from chimps to humans.

Theories that might be true:

• A group that is not Al-Qaeda performed the 9/11 attacks.

• The COVID pandemic started due to intentional spread.

• The COVID vaccine was only effective against the original alpha variant which it was designed against, but not the followup variants.

• The Oklahoma bombing was allowed to happen. Too many feds close to the suspects and network behind them.

• Vaccines have a marginal and small chance of inducing autism.

• AIDS revisionism: the idea that AIDS is in part caused by other aspects of homosexual lifestyle beyond HIV seems plausible, though the idea that the virus itself does not exist or strongly cause AIDS does not.

Unlikely or false:

• Freemasons/Illuminati control the world: institutional decay is too much of a thing.

• Aliens came to earth: no one particular reason, but the evidence seems to converge towards no.

• Fomenko history: carbon dating alone invalidates this.

• More than one shooter on JFK: Thomas777 has a great takedown of conspiracy theories regarding JFK’s assassination.

• Protocols of the Elders of Zion: confirmed parody or fake, IIRC.

• Epstein was murdered: good case for why he did kill himself.

COVID

60% zoonotic, 20% intentional leak, 20% lab leak.

The evidence as far as I can see is quite limited for all three cases. I used to be a confident lab leaker until I read an extremely well-written blog post in favour of the zoonotic origin hypothesis and listened to a debate on the subject.

The intentional leak theory is kind of seen as a meme, but if there is no consensus on what caused a pandemic, then that should shift one’s priors in favour of a potential of an intentionally leaked virus.

Oddly enough, there was a 4chan poster who predicted the COVID pandemic and the number of people it would kill. I am not inclined to trust these kinds of things, but the odds of predicting something this specific are quite low.

from here

Gun laws

Not a gun owner, so I cannot say I care much about the issue. That said, empirical evidence on gun availability causing violence is lacking, and there is little reason to extensively regulate them.

Background checks might be good but I think they are unnecessary; anybody that is such a risk that they cannot own a gun perhaps should not be on the streets.

Policing

Overmoralized issue. It does not really matter what the criminals deserve or why they did what they did. Locking up criminals who consistently reoffend can be easily justified on utilitarian grounds. Otherwise I support more lenient sentencing in general, particularly for white collar crimes, female criminals, and older criminals.

Mental illness

They’re identity categories now, just like gender, race, and class. They exist and are essential to some degree, but I think that society is too soft on people with mental illnesses and there should be responsibilities and negatives that come with being diagnosed in addition to preferential treatment.

Balance sheet

I am skeptical of the idea that economies need constant 1-3% inflation to grow; long term growth is largely dictated by technological advancement, not policy. The debt does not matter as long as economic growth outpaces deficit spending.

Imperialism

I vaugely support it in theory; competitive states that are more efficient should be allowed to rule over more people than those that are sclerotic and slavish. But perhaps the toll of war is not worth it.

Central planning

Human central planning is obviously bad.

I don’t think AI central planning would be any better.

Digital currencies

I am a crypto-skeptic. I don’t necessarily support banning it, but I do not think it will take off.

Healthcare

Meme issue. Most health spending is wasted and we would be better off with a truly private system that does not bother covering the expenses of the poor or old.

Voter IDs

Valid elections are overrated. But they should probably be mandatory.

Legality of weed

Ban it. It makes people lazy, stinks, and can cause schizophrenia.

Student loan debt

Don’t pay it off.

Prostitution

Too tame to ban.

Supplements

Keep them unregulated.

Access to puberty blockers

Their supposed “eugenic” effect is not large enough to justify the potential harm they can do to somebody’s life.

Lobbying

It’s good that law is subordinate to some kind of incentive structure, even if it is potentially corruptible.

Russia vs Ukraine

Russia.

Foreign Aid

Cut it to zero. Even for Israel.

Free trade

Too maligned. Not sure about the specifics but most of the basic econ arguments for it seem reasonable. I’m still somewhat reticent to support it anyway, since most of the faces behind free trade are globalists.

Food/environmental regulations

Increase them. I would rather not have a bunch of junk in food. It’s too much of a hastle to research every single chemical and process that could potentially give you cancer.

Critical age theory

Age restrictions in general should be reduced by 2 years or so.

Public transit

America is too racially and economically fractured to have a functional bus/train system that people will want to use.

Housing policy

YIMBYism sounds like one of those things that works in theory but stops working when you consider race and class realism. Some people who do know about the latter still back it, but those are the same people who back increased immigration.

Best tax

Sales tax and tariffs. Land tax could be justified based on the fact it is a limited good, but I think it is slavish.

Tax crypto

Only for sales.

Clean energy

Reducing funding would probably be for the best.

Anti-trust laws

Remove them. Thiel-pilled.

Federal land

Probably worth selling some of it. I hear that it is much more difficult to do things like hunt on private land, however.

Police body cameras

A negative in high trust societies, a necessity in low trust societies.

Term limits in congress

Unimportant issue, but yes.

Environmental regulations

Not sure about specifics, but I would like there to be more of them in general.

Homeless people

Do something about them, even if the solution is ugly.

Nuclear power

It’s good.

Birth control

I’m flirting with the idea of banning it.

Nukes

If civilization is too nihilistic and incompetent to avoid nuclear war, then perhaps it should suffer the effects of it.

Reduce airport security

Sure.

Remove central banks

Sure.

Roll back IP laws

Sure.

Private prisons

Sure.

Forced first amendment on social media

Sure.

Make family courts more male-friendly

Sure.

Maximum cap on alimony/child support

Sure.

Embryo selection

Adamantly support it. Make IVF + genetic selection free too.

Financial incentives for homeless/welfare users to get sterilized

Sure.

Net neutrality

Sure.

Gay adoption

Sure.

Surrogacy

Sure.

Death penalty

Sure.

Civil rights

No.

Rent control

No.

Forced remigration of non-Whites

No.

Ranked choice voting

No.

Requirement to label GMOs

No.

Enforce gender bathroom laws

No.

Ban lab grown meat

No.

Ban money in politics

No.

Minimum wage

No.

Genocide (phenocide) of <90 IQ people

No.

Genocide of <insert race>

No.

Gender-neutral alimony laws

No.

Female soldiers

No.

Ban extramarital sex

No.

Free childcare

No.

Free pre-K

No.

Ban raw milk

No.

Gay marriage

No.

Ban paternity tests

No.

Affirmative action

No.

Laws against lookism/heightism

No.

Regulate AI

No.

Mass surveillance

No.

Drug price regulations

No.

Expand DV laws to accomodate more men

No.

More funding for men’s issues/health

No.

Edit 1 — I mistakenly added two sections on nukes, one where I said I did not have a strong opinion on them and a 2nd one that I added later where I said that perhaps a civilization that creates nuclear war should suffer the effects of it.