Open Thread and Link Farm, happy robot edition
- An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border
“Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz.”
- After two trans migrant women died in ICE detention, Tucker Carlson says trans detainees are treated better than American citizens
- Inside the horrors of migrant detention centers – Axios
“At a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility in El Paso, Tex. more than 150 migrants were held in a cell meant for just 35 people…”
- What’s Actually Causing Infectious Disease Outbreaks in Immigrant Detention Centers? – Pacific Standard
- Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy — and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show | Opinion
People underestimated Hitler, because you don’t have to be competent to do a lot of harm.
- Could Oregon Become the First State to Ban Single-Family Zoning? – Willamette Week
“… allowing smaller dwellings or breaking up single-family homes into multiple units creates more housing and the chance to make housing more affordable in pricey neighborhoods.”
- Every NIMBY’s Speech At a Public Hearing – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
“I’ve lived in the same house in the Elm Heights neighborhood for the past twenty years, and I just love everything about this town except for the problems that my politics have directly created.”
- I’m from a Mexican family. Stop expecting me to eat ‘authentic’ food. – The Washington Post
- Why Elizabeth Warren Left The GOP – POLITICO Magazine
“Warren says the first trip to a bankruptcy court in San Antonio upended her feelings about Law and Economics and the more theoretical, free-market approach she had espoused.”
- Incels are now mad about women smiling at them :: We Hunted The Mammoth
“Now I have been black pilled about female smiles just being another form of teasing.”
- A Year After Internet Infamy, Ronaldo Sculptor Gets Another Shot
The weird thing is, the first sculpture is so much more engaging and interesting than any better-done sculpture could be. But I’m glad he’s gotten another chance; hopefully he’ll get to keep on sculpting.
- My Jewish Trek | Jewish Journal
“‘Gene was anti-Semitic, clearly,’ Nimoy replied as my heart sank.”
- Global Implications of FOSTA | Slixa
“The passage of FOSTA rests on an extensive history of abolitionist attempts to pass legislation that restrict sex work or apply paternalistic narratives to workers.”
- Baby Anacondas Born At New England Aquarium — Without Any Male Snakes Involved
- Political Cartoonist Not Sure How To Convey That Large Sack In Senator’s Hand Is Full Of Money – The Onion
- Report: Google News Does Not Have an Anti-Conservative Bias So Much as a Pro-Credible Source One
And, unsurprisingly, a pro-gets-a-lot-of-clicks bias. (Conservatives will respond that the measures used to access “credible” are also biased against conservatives.)
- Virginia EMT who made racist remarks on podcast loses his job – CNN
As y’all know, I’m generally against firing people for their off-the-clock political speech. Well, here’s a case where I completely approve of the firing.
- The Trade Secret: Firms That Promised High-Tech Ransomware Solutions Almost Always Just Pay the Hackers
Via Ozy.
- Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Them – The Atlantic
“For the study, a team at the University of Portsmouth’s Dog Cognition Centre looked at two muscles that work together to widen and open a dog’s eyes, causing them to appear bigger, droopier, and objectively cuter.”
- Black Missouri drivers 91% more likely to be stopped, state attorney general finds | PBS NewsHour
- The Political and the Principled: A Different Take On Grievance Studies
- Many Analysts, One Data Set: Making Transparent How Variations in Analytic Choices Affect Results
Journal article giving the same data to 29 teams of analysts; the various teams found significantly different results, despite using the same data. “These findings suggest that significant variation in the results of analyses of complex data may be difficult to avoid, even by experts with honest intentions.” Thanks to Harlequin for the link!
- The kidnapped Yazidi children who don’t want to be rescued from ISIS – The Washington Post
What a nightmare.
- Animals Are Becoming Nocturnal To Avoid Interacting With Humans
- Pleading Guilty to Get Out of Jail – The Appeal
Too many people have a choice between 1) remaining in jail because they can’t afford bail, or 2) pleading guilty to a misdemeanor in order to get free.
- Which is why there are movements to end cash bail. But the politics can be complicated, plus there’s the worry that without cash bail, DAs and judges will try to divert more people into simply being jailed with no bail possible.
- D.C. Sex Workers Want Decriminalization—and City Council Members Agree – Reason.com
The article doesn’t give a sense of how likely the bill is to pass, however. Anyone got a feel for that?
- Everyone Got the Dutch Teen ‘Euthanasia’ Story Wrong – Reason.com
The real story – a complex story of a suffering teen choosing not to eat and her parents choosing to no longer force-feed her – became, in English newspapers, a completely fabricated cautionary tale about euthanasia.
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@Gracchus#200- I think they were definitely right about Communism being evil when many on the Left tried to pretend it wasn’t- between 1917 and 1956.
@Michael: The idea that communism was OK wasn’t mainstream in the western left during the 1930s. Most left wing parties and intellectuals denounced Stalin’s purges. Which is not to say every single individual leftist did, I will give you that, but I assume you realise when I talked about “the left” as a whole I wasn’t talking every single leftist in the world.
I notice you marked 1956 as the date on which “the left” apparently turned against communism, and it’s true Hungary drove a lot of people away from communism. But if we look at most mainstream left wing parties in Europe prior to 1956 – the French socialists, British Labour, the German social democrats – they were all anti-Soviet and specifically committed to a military alliance against the USSR. In the UK it was the left, while in government, that took the initiative in building nuclear weapons; who do you think the British socialists thought those nuclear weapons were going to be used against? I will give you a clue – it wasn’t the USA.
What the left did say was that actively seeking violent confrontation with Soviet communism wasn’t a good idea. Which is something that was pretty much vindicated. British conservatives in 1940 wanted to bomb the Soviet Union – probably a good thing they didn’t.
I think it’s worth pointing out that same-sex marriage was brought in by Conservative parties in Australia, Canada and the UK. Of course it’s probably necessary to point out that social conservatism is only a part of the broader make up of those parties.
But then it’s also necessary to point out the broader role of social conservatives in general. Their role isn’t to be on the right side of history, their role is to stop the progressives being on the wrong side of it.
@Gracchus#202- And when I said the Left I didn’t mean every single person on the Left was pro-Communist until 1956. I also meant the Left, not the Democratic Party in the United States.
For example, take a look at this chart of how the Communist Party did in France after 1945:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_French_Communist_Party#/media/File:Vote-communiste-1945-2007.png
It was consistently getting over 20% of the vote from 1945 to the 1970s.
The Italian Communist Party also got over 18% from the 1940s until the break with the Soviets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Communist_Party#Post-World_War_II
The British Left made excuses for the Soviets before World War II- see, for example, Giles Udy’s book Labour and the Gulag.
LimitsofLanguage & Sebastian:
Yes, you absolute goobers, of course I was talking about US politics post-1950 or so. Richard Jeffrey Newman got it right, and I thought I was being pretty straightforward by using only examples from that time & place.
I mean, I didn’t bring up Chilean death squads or Germany in world war 2 or witch burnings or anything. I’m clearly not playing the, “what are the worst things conservatives have ever done,” game. Don’t be dicks about this.
Also, as I said before but apparently need to repeat, I’m talking about mainstream civil rights positions on the left and right. That means you can leave your “this one commie killed JFK” and “a fringe element of a fringe element on the left said some good things about pedophilia in the 70’s” arguments at home where they belong.
Was support for pedophilia mainstream within the left at any point in the postwar US? How about support for communism? Obviously not on both counts.
If you want to back up your statements, please do! But you can’t just say things that don’t pass the smell test and give such flimsy evidence.
Finally, I 100% do NOT believe that conservatives can do no right and liberals can do no wrong. My hope in pointing out the troubling history of conservatives on matters of discrimination and prejudice is to trigger soul searching in the conservatives here. Guys, there’s a reason you made such wild and flimsy arguments (Support for pedophilia? That’s insulting and lowers us both.) rather than something substantive or responsive.
I swear, I’m not trying to dunk on you or score points or anything. Please stop treating this like it’s about “winning.”
@desipis: Those are all conservative parties, and notably, they were all against same-sex marriage at a point when the national left-of-centre parties were for it; sometimes for as long as a decade. Notably, the Australian liberals fought three elections where opposition to marriage equality was part of their platform before reversing their position. So, this is hardly a case of conservatives being on the right side and the left on the wrong side – it’s a matter of conservatives being on the wrong side for a while and eventually coming around, but coming around at a time when they were in power. I am not sure that is really a good example of conservatives getting it right on a social issue – unless there is some reason that same sex marriage is a good idea in Australia in 2017 but a bad idea in 2011. (Spoiler alert: there isn’t)
@Michael: I’m aware you don’t mean the American democrats – you’ll note none of my examples related to the USA.
If communists supporting communism is an example of “the left” supporting communism, then I think it is kind of a meaningless metric – it would be unfair to say that conservatives supported fascism in countries like Romania or Hungary because fascists existed, especially when non-fascist conservatives were opposed to fascism. The same holds true for communism. You are right, some British leftists defended Stalinism, but I don’t think that is a meaningful metric. For every book written or speech given by a British Labour member supporting Stalinism or minimising Stalin’s crimes, there were three or four attacking them. For every Udy there is a Foot, an Orwell and also an Atlee. But even if we go beyond what was written, on the one hand we have some pro-Soviet books on the left, on the other hand we have a left wing government joining an international military alliance to fight the USSR. So, I would say the balance is pretty firmly on the anti-communist side. (I would say exactly the same thing for the French socialists).
I think this argument hinges on what it means to “support”. But to draw back a bit, you will recall that I was prepared to accept there were times both conservatives and the left got it wrong. I would say that the meta issue is not supporting communism specifically, but supporting totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Both the left and right got this wrong to about the same extent in the interwar period. Yes, conservatives didn’t support communism, and yes, the left didn’t support fascists, but overall the failure is not in supporting a specific totalitarian system, it’s in being prepared to contemplate (or, more commonly, minimise the horror of) totalitarian solutions to social problems.
Celeste,
Please refrain from calling other commenters names. Thanks.
This is a reminder that the Trump administration is putting legal asylum seekers and their children into concentration camps right now, as we debate which side was worse in the mid 20th century. We have an incipient right wing authoritarian regime forming in the U.S.. There is no need to fear the excesses of the left at this point in U.S. history, because even if they were to gain control of the presidency and both houses of congress, the courts are controlled by Republican appointees and the Democrats still respect the rule of law.
I apologize for calling LimitsofLanguage and Sebastian “absolute goobers.”
“This is a reminder that the Trump administration is putting legal asylum seekers and their children into concentration camps right now, as we debate which side was worse in the mid 20th century. ”
I apologise for derailing the conversation away from the modern concentration camps.
At the very minimum civil asset forfeiture and misuse of imminent domain are civil rights issues that the right was better on much earlier than the left—a practice which is incredibly destructive to black communities. The left caught on to the evils of the first in just the last 10 years (all the best reporting on it until very recently was associated with Reason magazine) and the left still hasn’t turned on misuse of eminent domain even though it devastated black communities (which were always over represented in ‘blight’ condemnations in the 50s-70s.)
If this is correct (and I’d need to see data on that*), it still seems relatively minor compared to:
As important as property rights are, the right to bodily autonomy (and imprisonment is a violation of bodily autonomy which should not be undertaken lightly) is more fundamental.
*My understanding is that most of the worst states for civil asset forfeiture are in the south. That may have started under southern Democrats, but I would absolutely not describe them as “the left”. Now, my understanding is that Republicans are worse on that. Abuse of imminent domain, I would expect to be a bigger issue in urban areas generally, no matter which party is in control.
I’m putting out a challenge to everyone in this thread who cares about the concentration camps at the U.S. border, before you add anything more to this theoretical discussion, do something – write to your senators and congressman; contribute to RAICES; more ideas here.
Kate, I feel like that quote brings up an important point, and a great rebuttal to those that argue “Why didn’t you care about the camps when Obama was in office?” that I hadn’t heard before: there were people who protested Obama’s immigration policies on the grounds that they were too harsh, and those people say that Trump is far worse.
It looks like antifa have escalated from giving reporters brain injuries to armed assault on government facilities. Presumably connected to the left wing obsession with the detention centres, their hyperbolic language over “concentration camps” and statements that the detainees need to be liberated “by any means necessary“.
On what grounds do you believe the use of the term “concentration camps” to be hyperbolic?
desipis
Are you defending putting people who have not broken any laws in prison and taking away their children? Are you defending conditions in U.S. detention facilities along the border?
I still think peaceful protest is both the right thing to do and the most politic. However, I don’t think, given current conditions, discussing moving to physically free detainees should be off the table for discussion. But, it needs to be done right. Individuals committing suicide by cop aren’t going to do any good.
The position that desipis has taken as their own is that antifa is objectively worse than the fascists, the nazis and the concentration camps. The only thing that desipis contributes here is a fanatical dedication to enumerating every single bad or violent act that can be pinned on antifa. desipis cares not a whit about concentration camps nor other forms of current right wing violence. desipis is, based on their commentary, a devoted follower, promoter and enabler of all current right wing violence in the US because, they say, antifa is inarguably worse.
I see no point in paying further attention to them on this subject. They can take comfort in the fact that they are not alone in this awful position. The rest of us can merely despair that this is happening here. Again.
Sigh.
The armed ICE assailant was trying to commit suicide by cop in his own anarchist way. He was ill, his death is tragic, and I really don’t think his story tells us much about the state of US politics. Way too many people on all sides of all political disputes like to spin tragedies like his into narratives.
I think antifa is shitty and harming many causes of the democratic party, but they aren’t about to escalate the culture war into an armed conflict.
AJD:
Because the images and implications that the term bring to most people’s minds are vastly different to the current reality.
Kate:
It’s a normal function of any state to detain people who haven’t been through the proper immigration channels and haven’t (yet) established a right to be in the country. Some of the reports of the conditions people are detained in certainly seem to be below the standards I would expect of a developed country. The policy to remove children from parents was certainly misguided, however it no longer appears to be in effect.
@Kate: Thanks for the guide – it seems to be based on the assumption that the reader is a US citizen and/or based in the USA. Do you have any advice on how non-Americans and residents of other countries can meet their obligation to help?
J. Squid,
Yet that’s what Putnam found in his famous study.
Nancy St. John studied 100 schools that students were bused to and found no cases in which significant black academic improvement occurred, but many cases where race relations suffered due to busing. Researcher David Armour found that busing “heightens racial identity” and “reduces opportunities for actual contact between the races.”
Crime statistics in general and school detention/punishment statistics specifically show that non-white people transgress far more often.
I understand that many progressives see acknowledging an unpleasant reality as racist and prefer to deny reality. However, I respectfully disagree with such a definition of ‘racism.’ Not in the least because it doesn’t actually help non-white people.
Note that many black people and black leaders opposed busing. All racists, I guess.
Busing was a success even asracist politics effectively ended the practice.
All those beliefs you hold that you argue are not racist… could the results be caused by something you’re not acknowledging but are widely understood to be the actual causes? Yes. Yes, they can. Your support of and agreement with the racist statement by the RAND corporation has been noted and acknowledged.
desipis:
Citation needed.
This is just silly. What makes you think that this has anything to do with skin color?
Mixing populations with different cultural norms and traditions leads to an increase in crime. There are so many EU studies showing an obvious correlation, that it is not even funny. What is funny though, is that the effect is pronounced even if the influx is by Europeans or Chinese. That has been well observed and recorded, among other places, in Japan, Malaysia, and Libya (back in the 80s, by Commies, before the recent shittification)
The crime does not even have to originate in the newly arrived population – it increases in both the locals and the immigrants, inversely correlating with wealth. (Duh!)
And if you stop to think for even a second, the mechanism is obvious. The two cultures have different social norms. Members are suddenly exposed to a different set of values, thus come to question what earlier was a given. They see behaviors that were previously unthinkable go unpunished, and we all know what unpunished rule-breaking leads to.
If you want examples, recent news are full of it. But I much prefer to babble about my personal experience. Back in the 80s, I had to deal with trouble arising after relatively secluded [redacted] villages had a large dam constructed nearby by a company of [reacted] students labor (yeah, that was a thing in ‘Socialist’ countries)
The locals men saw incoming women dressing unmodestly and interpreted it as asking for it. The incoming men saw the locals openly wearing knives and brawling casually (and did not understand that the knives do not come out, ever) Both sides had a serious case of “the others are getting our women”. The locals saw electronics which they could not dream of obtaining legally (Western cassette players) The incomers were supposed to work hard on food that had been pilfered by three separate middlemen, and were surrounded by fields of abundant produce.
And let me tell you. Neither the traditional villages nor the three departments of the country’s best Engineering Institute were hotbeds of violent crime. But after they got mixed, they were mass brawls, two homicides, at least one guy crippled for life, rapes galore, and so much property crime that no one had time to address it.
The military got called in, because the militia simply did not have the resources to deal with it. Even we (counter-intelligence) got called in, for some covert work to figure out how to quiet things down without breaking the local economy, the dam construction, or a four years of engineering students. And maybe it was because of my assumed position as a (fake) mufti, but the college boys and girls did not seem all that civilized. And after the dust settled, and order was restored, no one looked good, no matter what their religion, education, or the shade of their skin. (‘Bulgar’ originates from ‘mixed’, but we are all Caucasian, which of course did not prevent me from being called a “blackass”, i.e. Tatar, despite being three quarters Slavic.)
By the way, a lot of the trouble was due to quartermasters enriching themselves and local patriarchs stirring trouble to make themselves relevant. I like remembering that cover, because everyone whom we fingered got punished, and let me tell you, that was not the rule in Communist Bulgaria.
All this to say, it is not that colored people are crime prone. It’s that mixing cultures increases disorder, and the poor and powerless minority (not necessarily non-white) usually ends up blamed and repressed for it.
LOL wrote:
At the very least, the picture is more complicated than his response makes it out to be. From a 2016 paper refuting “what Putnam found:”
This article from Scientific American summarize the findings of this second paper. Also, this article in The Chronicle discusses Putnam’s own reservations about the ways in which people have used his paper to reach the conclusion that is at least implicit in LOL’s comment:
Petar:
I’ve also seen studies supporting this, but in no way does this disprove LOLs claims. It is entirely possible for populations to have different rates of criminalality/detention/school-attendance/whatever-really without the cause being a difference in skin color, genealogy or whatever. This has to be the position for anyone who isn’t a scientific racist because some of these population differences are big, even with normal SES controls.
Homicide is the number one cause of death for young black men (a source: https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/aug/24/juan-williams/juan-williams-no-1-cause-death-african-americans-1/) it’s imperative that we don’t deny the disparity, which is 10-1 between black and white people.
We need to accept the problem and work to solve it, but too often stats like these are either sheepishly ignored, or used to further pet causes, like linking income inequality or economic growth to crime rates (nope & nope). Or denying solutions that do work, but are unpopular, like more police officers on duty.
I think busing could be part of a long term solution, though it’ll be politically unpopular. It’s a belief I hold with low certainty, I’d need to see more individualized data on the effects of desegregated schooling on attendance/detention rates.
I’m not aware of anyone denying that the disparity exists. I mean, I’m sure someone out there exists, but I don’t think it’s a prominent view.
The disagreement is mainly over causes of the disparity, not the existence of the disparity. AFAIK.
(I started to fall down a research hole about this, but then stopped myself because I have a big work deadline on August 1st.)
First off, thank you, Sebastian, for actually responding. I really appreciate it.
I think this is fair, to some degree – my only quibble is that I’m not sure how much Reason magazine reflects the mainstream of conservatism. My understanding is that Reason often holds positions on civil rights issues that the rest of Conservatism does not.
Again, not trying to be a jerk – I’m not sure Jacobin is the best guide to what’s mainstream on the left either, you know?
So to try to look into this and figure out if I’m being fair or unfair, I checked out the Institute for Justice’s ratings of the state-by-state worst offenders on Civil Forfeiture and Eminent Domain. My attitude, roughly, is that is either the left or the right is actually better or worse on this, that ought to be reflected in the laws, state-by-state. If Massachusetts, New York, and California are all bad on civil forfeiture, maybe you’re right. If Texas, Georgia, and Mississippi are all bad on it, maybe I am.
Of course, unhelpfully, it’s not that clear.
Using 2013 data, for Civil Forfeiture, we’ve got:
New Jersey – Democratic
Ohio – Republican
Oklahoma – Republican
Pennsylvania – Republican
South Dakota – Republican
Virginia – Democratic
West Virginia – Republican
Wyoming – Republican
Massachusetts – Democratic
North Dakota – Republican
Democratic: 3
Republican: 7
And using 2002 data, for Eminent Domain, we’ve got:
Connecticut – Democratic
Florida – Republican
Illinois – Democratic
Kansas – Democratic
Massachusetts – Democratic
Mississippi – Republican
Nevada – Democratic
New York – Democratic
Ohio – Republican
Texas – Republican
Democratic: 6
Republican: 4
Now, this is a quick-and-dirty analysis, I didn’t go back to who had control of a state in the lead-up to the Institute for Justice’s 2013 or 2002 analysis, just went with who controls them now, so some of this will be off, but it doesn’t look like either the right or the left is entirely on the side of the angels here. (There’s also no analysis taking into account ‘moderates’ like Joe Manchin or Susan Collins or any crap like that.)
I’ve looked a bit, and I’ve been unable to find polling gauging left vs right on Eminent Domain or Civil Forfeiture, which is too bad. I think that’s probably the best way to determine whether something is in the mainstream of political thought on either side.
I figured Sebastian was just talking about Kelo v New London, where Justice Kennedy joined the supreme court’s left to uphold a pretty sketchy application of imminent domain.
Best response on Twitter to the “Trump’s statements aren’t racist” discussion:
“They’re not racist. To be officially racist, they must come from the Racist Region of France. Thus Trump’s remarks should be referred to as mere Sparkling Ethno-Nationalism.”
I am pleasantly surprised to see the media (well, NPR anyway) actually refer to the tweets as racist, rather than “racially divisive,” “controversial,” or whatever.
I have been unable to stand NPR’s political coverage since the 2004 primaries. Liberal, my ass.
I don’t know. Doing the bare minimum and doing it late (AP, CNN, a shit-ton of regional papers et al got there first) and making sure to publicize your VP of Newsroom Diversity (good lord) and Training’s foot-dragging doesn’t really warrant headrubs, cookies, or gratitude in my book.
Facepalm.
I think Fox news is shit, but I’d celebrate- possibly go and dance in the street, if their commentators started regularly referring to anything Trump does as racist. The “what? you wanna cookie?” shtick is tired and seriously unhelpful. I would give Tucker Carlson a thousnad cookies if he started calling Trump a racist on a regular basis.
I assume that in this hypothetical that Tucker Carlson has suffered a stroke that changed his personality and he is no longer a white supremacist.
Whatever it takes, I’d put on an apron and get baking.
Taipei high school allows male students to wear skirts: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201907220009.aspx.
Jeffrey, why are you talking about Fox News when your original comment was in praise of NPR? Do you expect the same from both, or generally hold them to different standards?
My point is that any improvements in reporting by any news outlets are a good thing, and I’ll commend any reporter at any major outlet who is willing to call obviously racist tweets racist. (Insert story about the Dazexiang Uprising here)
I hold Fox and NPR to different standards in that I actually care about NPR and listen to it daily, so I’m more upset if they botch a story or broadcast a transparently dumb take. Fox news is something I only experience at my parent’s house or the gym. I don’t pay much attention to Fox, but I live in a country where many people consume nothing else, so I’d love it if Fox viewers were exposed to views even slightly to the left of Fox’s standard fare. If your asking me “when you consider your willingness to consume news, do you hold all outlets, even Fox, to the same standards?” The answer is yes, which is why I don’t watch Fox.
So just when Carlson is both physically vulnerable and criticizing Trump, you’d try to kill him with fat and carbs?
I guess that’s one method to limit the opportunity for back-sliding….
desipis @ 203: I’m aware this is somewhat nitpicky of me, but it’s an open thread, and I lived through it, so :p
Same-sex marriage was approved at federal level in 2005 in Canada, via legislation both introduced and passed by the Liberal [a centrist party] government. The Conservative Party, which formed in 2003 following the merger of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Alliance Party, and was the Official Opposition, declared that the vote on the legislation would be a ‘free vote’ for their MPs (which is unusual in Canada; most votes in the House of Commons are strictly whipped). Almost all the of 99 Conservative MPs voted against passing the law. [There were 308 seats in the House at the time.]
The Conservative Party also held government in Canada from 2006-2015, campaigned in 2006 on reopening the same-sex marriage debate, and did not remove their party’s official platform position on marriage as “a union between one man and one woman” until 2016 (!!), and even then, it was changed only to a ‘neutral’ stance. The Conservative Party did not by any metric “bring in” same-sex marriage to Canada, nor did conservatives in general.
Amp, your “I’VE BEEN SILENCED” cartoon has been noticed by Kevin Williamson, and he wrote about it at National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/silenced/
Petar #225,
Took a little break.
Ethnicity is correlated with skin color. Social Justice people are obsessed with skin color, so I often use their language to be better understood (perhaps ironically, ‘race realists’ often use a lot more nuanced language).
This is completely wrong. First generation migrants typically have lower recorded crime rates and the well-integrated second/third generation tend to quickly regress to the mean.
Groups that are poorly integrated can differ, like black people descended from slaves in the US and Maghreb migrants in Europe. Note that black people at top US colleges are very disproportionately 1st/2nd/3rd gen African migrants (like Obama), rather than ‘African-Americans.’
Note that Chinese Brits have lower arrest rates than white natives. They are also poorly integrated, but being from a low crime culture, that results in lower crime rates (although also underrepresentation in politics and top jobs).
It doesn’t necessarily go unpunished. It depends on the number of people who migrate from each individual culture and in general, the willingness of the natives to enforce norms, the culture of the migrants, etc, etc.
This is the point of many who oppose multi-culturalism, especially the kind fueled by identity politics. You need a dominant culture that sets certain norms.
If certain people get declared to be victims, which results in none of their cultural behaviors being able to be recognized as incompatible/dysfunctional, then the only alternative is that natives get expected to alter their culture to adapt to the migrants/outliers. As you note, this tends to hit the poor and powerless the most, because the ‘Progressive Activists’ as identified by Hidden Tribes tend favor their own interests, just like everyone else. For all the shitting on ‘white men,’ the rich and powerful Social Justice-favoring white men aren’t going to step down. They’ll harm the poor and/or powerless in their quest for ‘justice.’
RJN #226,
Black Americans have way higher crime rates than white Americans on average, so of course white Americans lose trust way more due to mixing. If you’d plant me in Beverly Hills, I probably wouldn’t like my neighbors very much, but I wouldn’t particularly worry about them stealing from me or otherwise being particularly unreliable. If you’d put me in a homeless shelter, I’d probably learn to distrust my neighbors very quickly, given the supposedly high levels of crime and such in those places.
Putnam is the kind of person who is honest enough to publish his findings (although it was close, as he sat on his famous paper for 10 years), but also very ideologically biased, making him refuse to actually believe his own findings. He resolves this by minimizing those findings, speculating about the future and taking these speculations as fact.
More specifically, he found short term problems with ethnic mixing and speculates that mixing has large long term benefits. However, nowhere in his research has he found these long term benefits. He simply assumes them, because doing so is necessary to save his ideology from his own research.
Jeffrey Gandee,
Note that Kevin Williamson makes pretty much the same argument as I did in response to the cartoon: that certain people are insulated from harm to an extent that many other people aren’t. You’d think that Social Justice advocates would fairly easily recognize this, given that ‘silencing’ is SJ doctrine, but apparently the other tribe is categorically assumed/stereotyped as oppressors, who cannot experience negative behaviors by others that are often recognized as being very common.
1st/2nd/3rd gen African migrants to America are “African-Americans,” obviously.
I saw! Overall I’m very pleased. Although they should have credited me. And why use such a tiny copy of the strip?
I feel dumber for having read that piece. I also have confirmation that Kevin Williamson is just as awful as I had been led to believe. The big words do nothing to distract from the smallness of what he has to say.
I also thought it was weird you weren’t credited and that KW said he’d steal your work. Sort of flattering, but not very ethical.
LOL wrote just above:
Further upthread, the conversation went like this:
Jake wrote, responding to something LOL had written earlier:
LOL responded with this:
I then responded by linking to this study, along with a summary of its findings, and suggesting that perhaps things were not so simple as LOL’s reference to Putnam made them sound.
Well, I have not finished reading the article I linked to yet, and it’s not my field, so I will have to read it a good deal more carefully to make sure I understand it fully, but even a cursory reading of as far as I’ve gotten confirms my original statement, which is that what the research shows is not as simple as LOL’s reference to Putnam would suggest it is.
With that summary as context, I am just going to allow the way LOL phrased the first sentence of the comment I quoted above to speak for itself.
Chris,
I put the quotes there to express sarcasm.
My point is that descendants of slaves are a different ethnic group from more recent African migrants. Conflating the two is a rather common error, which leads to such things as setting up programs to help black Americans, whose benefits go very disproportionately to recent migrants, who suffered from slavery in America no more than a Mexican or Russian migrant (and perhaps actually benefited from it, because those enslaving Africans and selling them initially were other Africans).
When arguments that only apply to one ethnic group get used to help another ethnic group, just because they have the same skin color, that is called…
RJN,
Nothing in that paper disproves my statement. They recognize that black neighborhoods have less trust in the first place. They have done no research to figure out why.
It’s really rather amusing that you see extremely anodyne statements as some horrible racism. It just underscores how far-left you are.
Please name some of these programs that were created 1) specifically to help descendants of black American slaves and that 2) have benefits that go disproportionately to recent black migrants. I can’t think of any existing programs that meet this description.
It is becoming clearer to me why you are very invested in carving out a special right for unapologetic racists to not be turned away from Harvard.
LOL:
As defined by Merriam-Webster, anodyne has two meanings:
1. Serving to alleviate pain
2. Not likely to offend or arouse tensions
I assume, in the sentence I’ve quoted above, that you mean the second. If I am right, I have to wonder whom you think your statement—”Black Americans have way higher crime rates than white Americans on average, so of course white Americans lose trust way more due to mixing”—is not likely to offend and among which group you think it is not likely to arouse tensions.
Or, despite your protestations to the contrary, how fundamentally far right you are, but I actually don’t think those labels are terribly useful. They tend to obscure far more than they reveal and are, more often than not, used to score points than actually to make arguments.
I see no need to listen to those espousing racist beliefs nor those defending racist beliefs nor those who insult those who see the racism in racist beliefs. As such, I am done acknowledging that commenter.
(I will refuse to do so for as long as I can remember which one it is, which is often not as long as I’d like. In this case, I think it’ll be quite a while.)
University of Mississippi Students Kicked Out Of Fraternity After Posing With Guns in Front of Shot-Up Emmett Till Memorial
Since the sign was erected in 2008, it’s been destroyed by vandals three times. They’re now working on replacing it with a bulletproof sign.
It’s probably just art criticism and not, in fact, vandalism.
*** Takes off racism/white supremacy apologist hat, collapses it neatly after brushing the dust off, and puts it in its box on a shelf in the closet ***
Chris,
Affirmative action at universities, for example.
RJN,
There is a fundamental difference between disliking a trait that happens to be more common in a group and for which there is a legitimate reason to dislike it & a bias against the group itself.
For example, if Jesse is allergic to strong perfume, Jesse may very well be more likely to steer clear of women, who seem to more often wear strong perfume. However, if Jesse steers clear of all people with strong perfume, Jesse is not judging people by gender, even if the outcome is not gender-neutral. I would argue that the inequality of outcome is not due to Jesse, but due to gender roles. After all, Jesse’s behavior only results in a gender difference because the genders behave differently on average. If men and women would be equally likely to wear strong perfume, Jesse’s behavior would result in equal outcomes.
What I see a lot among Social Justice advocates, is behavior that is similar to calling Jesse a misogynist for not having mostly male friends, even though it seems rather unfair to call Jesse a misogynist for not actually having any bias, but for living in the world where women just happen to more often engage in behavior that harms Jesse.
In fact, Social Justice advocates often seem to place blame according to where the involved people/groups are on the ‘progressive stack.’
So back to this case.
Any claim that certain cultural traits are unpleasant to other groups is of course somewhat offensive, but my claim is probably one of the least offensive to the group in question, because very many black Americans seem to agree that crime is a big problem in black communities.
Ultimately, my claim is based on one factual claim and one ethical claim. The first is that crime is much more common among black Americans, for which the evidence is immensely strong. The second is that it is legitimate to dislike a community with a high level of crime.
Add these together and the logical result is that one has to consider it legitimate to dislike the average black community more than the average white community, for being more criminal.
LoL,
What is your evidence that affirmative action in the US was originally meant to benefit descendants of black slavery in the US, before primarily benefitting recent black migrants?
LOL:
Up above, in response to your self-characterization of your position as “anodyne,” I asked you this:
This was your response:
So, in other words, you don’t really know whether Black Americans would find your claim, either whole or in part, offensive and/or tension-causing, right? You draw that conclusion, at least as you have written it here, based entirely on your own belief in the claim’s unimpeachable logic, which you assume Black Americans would/should share. In other words, as you’ve written it here, you are projecting onto Black people the concurrence you need in order to assert that the way you phrased your claim upthread is not racist, or, if we take it for the sake of argument as descriptively true, does not describe at least one expression of racism.
To put that another way, the claim you are making—again, at least as you have written it here—seems to me more of an anodyne for white people, who can use it to project concurrence onto Black people, rather than an actually helpful contribution to any sort of discussion about race and racism. Or, to go one step further, a description of what Black Americans actually think about what we are discussing.
Turns out the Gilroy shooter is, surprise! a white supremacist.
But, please, do go on about how Antifa is way more violent than the fascists & white supremacists they oppose.
Chris,
The Historical Roots of Affirmative Action
Frankly, this exchange makes it even harder for me to believe that you are participating in good faith. Do you seriously want to argue that the intent of most people who support affirmative action is to allow the disadvantages for those descending from (American) slaves to persist and to achieve ‘representation’ that consists of great over-representation of relatively recent African migrants and great under-representation of those descending from (American) slaves???
RJN,
You are twisting my words.
My point is that the two basic claims that I made are relatively uncontroversial, with only quite radical people disagreeing. Draw a logical conclusion from them and the resulting claim suddenly becomes more controversial, because it threatens dogma much more directly.
Then there is also the issue of good/bad faith. When Obama or other people from your side make the same claims as I, they tend to get interpreted in good faith. When I say the same, I get called a racist.
Feminist scholars complaining about being silenced/persecuted/harassed/no-platformed/etc for their views.
While some of you may celebrate how left-wing authoritarianism affects people like me, intolerance never limits itself to just the other; or rather, it will target your diversity of beliefs and ‘other’ you for it.
LoL, nothing in that link supports your contention that affirmative action was created to primarily benefit descendants of African slaves before primarily helping recent black migrants due to conflating them into the term “African-Americans.” In fact, both that link and simple awareness of other groups affected by affirmative action contradict that theory. We do not think of non-black ethnic groups or women as “African-Americans,” and yet as that article clearly points out, and as I find it hard to believe you do not already know, they all benefit from affirmative action. So the idea that calling recent black migrants African-American leads to them receiving benefits meant for the descendants of African slaves remains groundless; there are no such benefits in this country. We have programs for minorities in general, as well as women, who all face certain structural disadvantages in our society; being a descendant of slavery has never been a qualifying factor in any of them. In fact, white women are the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, not recent African migrants. To cite an article pointing out that affirmative action may have been originally thought of as a way to compensate descendants of slavery while also applying to other disadvantaged minority groups and women is a phenomenal moving of the goalposts, and has almost nothing to do with your original claim here:
This claim remains groundless, and I personally see it as an attempt to racially divide by pitting minority groups against one another.
Too specific, in my opinion, for the those whose raison d’etre is justifying racist beliefs. It’s just trying to show that attempts to help minorities are racist acts – always against the clearly superior whites and, sometimes, against other , obviously inferior, minorities. A laughable position, if there ever was one. The claim has no significant differences from the racism and excuses for racism that we’ve seen for decades. Centuries, even. What surprises me is the total lack of shame that allows these flimsy attempts at cover to persist, lo, unto the end of time.
J Squid:
I was under the impression that AA programs (explicit or otherwise) at universities are mostly harmful to the “clearly superior” (to use your words) Asian applicants. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that white enrollment would decrease at many schools if AA programs were eliminated. I have mixed views on AA, myself, but I think it’s incredibly unfair to assign motives as you have here given the fact that most opponents of AA are aware that white people are not on top when it comes to grades and entrance exams.
It sounds like Chris and LOL are talking past one another. FWIW, I’m friends with an old workmate who is- I don’t really know the word, but a sort of political radical whose politics are very much informed by his own blackness. He’s almost, but not quite a black nationalist. He’s very active on social media when it comes to issue that affect his community, and he has expressed concern that scholarships could go to his daughter will be given to recent immigrants instead. I’ve seen this argument in other places before, here’s an example:
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09/cornell-students-revive-debate-whom-colleges-should-count-black
I think there’s something to this, given that a couple of professors in the article linked above estimated that 2/3 of the black students at harvard were immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa, and I can’t imagine a justification for AA where that’s an acceptable outcome. It neither serves as a form of reparations for slavery, or reflects the diversity of America…. Well maybe it does. I suppose one huge benefit is that black graduates from Tufts, Cornell, Harvard and Yale are likely to land in positions of power and influence where their being black could play a role in combating racism, regardless of their ancestry. It’s possible that the benefits of AA at ivy league institutions aren’t about diversity or reparations, but rather showing American’s what’s possible. I imagine that If I was talking to my friend Carlos, and pointed out that Barrack Obama is one of these immigrants who got to go to an ivy league, he might get nudged a bit toward accepting AA as practiced now, even if it is less beneficial to his daughter directly.
If our options are the AA we currently have or no AA (which are the options currently available), I’ll stick with what we have, thank you very much. Suboptimal is much better than non-existent. There’s the justification for you.
As to my quote in your above comment, I am unable to see the relevance of your response to the motives I attribute to racists and racism apologists. That response would be covered under the second part of the quote you pulled. The inherent bigotry required to believe that Asians are, inherently, more intelligent than Whites doesn’t negate the simultaneously held belief that Asians are inferior to a racist or racism apologist.
LOL wrote:
(Where the “mixing” here was, I believe, initially “busing students to integrate schools”, if I follow the comments back to #196.)
In addition to the problems that people here have already pointed out, one issue I take with this statement is that it is the beginning of a conversation, not the end. Some of the things that conversation might cover:
– Why is “crime rate” a useful/dominant proxy for community similarity, when the vast majority of people in both communities are not criminals?
– If crime rate does play a role in why white people object to busing, is the size of loss of trust commensurate with the difference in crime rates? That is, if a white community with the same crime rate was bused into an equivalent school district, would the bused-to white community suffer similar levels of loss of trust? How about an affluent black community with low levels of crime, would the loss of trust be that much less? “I expect effect X to go in direction Y” does not necessitate “all–or even any–of the change in direction Y can actually be attributed to effect X”. (In addition to race, this is a huge problem with lots of arguments that try to explain differences in gender outcomes with biology, where, metaphorically speaking, ten different 100-pound effects all get attributed to the same 10-pound difference.)
– Even if we decide that the loss of trust is primarily attributable to differences in crime levels, do white people have accurate senses of how different the crime levels are? Is the loss of trust based on real or on inflated assumptions about crime rates? This is leaving aside issues of the “on-paper” crime rate being more discrepant than the real crime rate due to issues like rates of contact with police, and with (for example) the way petty theft is treated differently than embezzlement.
– Is it relevant that some experts think one of the reasons for the high crime rates in black communities is the forced movement caused by public housing policies that mixed different communities with different norms together? Why is “loss of trust” only an important measure now that we’re talking about white people losing trust?
– Is it relevant that the community norms are different partially because of the many deliberate and systematic racist choices and policies that have kept white people living in different communities than black people in the first place?
– Even taking that all into account, if it turns out that white people’s feelings about busing are perfectly logical and justified, why is “white people lose trust” an important philosophical point rather than one factor among many that should be managed to ensure greater justice overall? (Your statement about the effects of busing cites a single 40-year-old study, and I’ll say that the picture is more nuanced than that, though hardly conclusive one way or another; and anyway busing isn’t the only thing you can do.)
To be clear–I don’t have nearly enough information to usefully answer any of those questions, and also I’m having one of the most stressful summers of my life (everything’s fine! Just stressful! Changing careers and moving cross-country!), so I’m not going to debate them right now. Just pointing out that this kind of conversation is way more nuanced than your simple model indicates.
A twitter thread criticizing the “feminist scholars complaining” piece LOL just linked to: “Really interesting how many of these accounts of “gender critical” academics being Silenced and Suppressed are actually complaints about others being permitted to express the opposing view.”
Harlequin:
This is undeniable, but the asymmetrical demands for rigor with regard to these issues is also undeniable, and why we need to preserve a more open Overton window and avoid labeling LOLs takes as racist (not acussibg you of this, obviously)
Whoops. I left a comment awaiting moderation because of a slightly different handle (I think). I didn’t mean to, it’s just that I busted my phone’s screen and am using a temporary phone until I can replace it.
Yes, it would be impolite to point out that racist statements and beliefs are racist. Why, that’s just beyond the pale. If we label racism as racism, we can never address racism.
Is there really a debate about whether the Rand Corporation quote is racist? Do we really believe that we can only be sure it’s racism if it’s prefaced with, “This is racist?” I’m not buying that for even a second.
‘And Reagan went on to say, “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” ‘
Is it okay to call this a racist statement? Or am I violating social norms to say, “Wow, Mr. Reagan, that is a racist thing to say?” Has enough time (and the person in question) passed for us to say, unequivocally, that this is a racist thing to say? When will it be okay to do so for the racist statement from the Rand Corp.?
is “immigrants” a uh typo for “children of immigrants” here, I hope
OMG, yeah. I’m definitely not a birther! In the article I linked, children of immigrants or grandchildren of immigrants were included as over-represented among attendees of prestigious schools. Just a brain-fart. I should spend more time proofreading my posts.
Did the comment get approved by someone? There’s nothing currently awaiting moderation.
That statement from Reagan is racist without question. People say racist things all the time. I’m a construction worker from Ohio, I’ve got stories of racism that are so terrible I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t do anything for fear of losing status among a bunch of rural White men who already didn’t like me. LOL’s statement really wasn’t racist, IMO, though it may be a bit taboo.
I was raised in a very white place, and the minorities who did live in Worthington, Ohio were disproportionately East-Asian, Indian, and Jewish. It is also a wealthy suburb. Put that all together and you get very low crime and high trust, even though I was raised during some of the highest levels of crime in the US. I would roam my block unaccompanied at 5, and roam my whole town for miles at 13. Violence was rare and drivers were very careful about watching out for children. I never saw any illegal drug use outside of pot, alcohol and whippets in Worthington. Neighbors looked out for each other and each other’s kids. It was a fantastically safe place to grow up.
I live in DC now, and the trust is nothing like this, and for me, crime has much to do with it. Shootings aren’t uncommon in my neighborhood, we have several houses within 3 blocks of mine that deal drugs, and users stand around outside drinking, using terrible language, and consuming whatever drugs they’ve purchased as kids are walking by with their parents when school lets out. This sort of activity leads to frequent burglaries, car-break-ins, package thefts, muggings, and sometimes worse. There is constantly litter in the yards. Kids are violent to each other and adults (I’ve witnessed two random assaults on adults doing nothing but walking down the sidewalk). My wife and I once had to speed away from kids throwing rocks at her beautiful blue Miata, The crime copter is circling my house about once a week, and I live in a part of DC that is relatively safe.
So I’m just one data point, but chalk me up as a person who moved to a more diverse place from a very white place, and now trusts his neighbors less, even if I have some neighbors who I trust a great deal, it’s nothing like where I came from. My wife is even less trusting and also comes from a midwestern suburb, so that’s two data points. It’s just really easy for me to believe that my story is a common one, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with LOL’s inquiry, even if his model is incomplete. The truth is, what he’s saying is part of the picture, but you’re making it dangerous for him to say it.
I find it funny that you said “I can’t imagine a justification,” and immediately came up with a good justification!
Although for me, personally, it’s not just that having more Black Senators (etc) might have good policy effects. I also think it’s ugly and wrong to have an entirely-white ruling class, and our ruling class generally comes from Harvard and a handful of similar schools. The whiter those institutions are, the whiter our ruling class is.
That said, if 2/3rds of Black students at Harvard are descended from relatively recent immigrants, does that mean that 1/3 are from families that have been here much longer? If so, that’s not nothing, and I fail to see how getting rid of AA
(I guess to spite more recent Black immigrants?)would improve things for those families.Finally, how sure are we to think that what happens at Harvard is representative of what’s going on at second and third tier schools? Who goes to those schools matters less in terms of the pool that Senators and Supreme Court, but there are other reasons to want to diversify who goes to good schools.
Explicit AA programs are insignificant compared to the informal forms of AA that help well-off white students (such as, but not limited to, legacy admissions). At Harvard, 7% of students are Black, and 36% are legacy students.
There’s no good reason, that I can see, to look first at eliminating AA in order to make things fairer for Asian students, rather than addressing informal AA that helps White students.
Without commenting either way on the rest of your comment (because I’ve got a huge deadline on top of me, which is why I’ve been participating so little for weeks).
Me, too – and when I was five, I lived in New York City. I think that our perception of what’s safe for children to do – and in particular, if it’s safe to let them go outside and play – has changed a great deal since I was a kid, in both urban and suburban areas. And in general (not commenting on your specific situation), I think it has less to do with actual change in how dangerous things are, then with our changing perception of how dangerous things are.
(I honestly have no impression of if it’s changed or not in rural areas).
That pretty well sums up one of my core beliefs. When I was 6, I roamed my neighborhood in Brooklyn. When I was 12, I often went to NYC and roamed the streets of the East Village. By the time I was 13 I was hanging out on the Bowery so I could sneak into the CBGB’s Sunday Punk Matinees. Keeping in mind that “the Bowery” was synonymous with, “dangerous place full of winos, junkies and the homeless,” I never witnessed violence, traffic seemed safe and I never saw any illegal drug use outside of underage drinking in the Bowery.
It’s all in the perception.
And the Rand statement is a racist statement because it takes it as a given that the cause of the problems listed is non-white people. If that were true, I must’ve been living in a fictional utopia full of peaceful, friendly, helpful non-white people during my years in Harlem and my months in Hawaii.
The Rand statement is a racist statement and defenses of Rand are just another way to excuse white supremacy. I think that folks who can’t see the obvious racism in the Rand position are trying very hard to not see racism.
Amp:
It happened in real time, so I just wrote it out as I thought of it.
The neighborhood I grew up was without a doubt safer and more communal than this one. It’s really not close by any metric. There are so many other mid-westerners here in DC who echo my sentiments, even if we are still happy to have moved away for other reasons. I agree that the perception of danger is sky high at the moment, I’m annoyed by it myself. It’s just that it feels really terrible to come home from work and hear a few kids run out the back door, only to realize all your valuables, including a laptop with my wife’s thesis, are gone, or to leave a bar, and find that the bike you used to place in several road races and criteriums, a bike that was lovingly customized and maintained, has been cut free from it’s lock and stolen. About a year ago, I found 9mm shell casings all over the ground on the way to my local market, a walk I make a few times a week. The cop wouldn’t let me actually lead him to the spot because: “if people see you with me, it could put you in danger.” This shit didn’t happen to me before moving here. I’m lucky that I’m big and in decent shape. I don’t feel scared walking around here, but my wife does, and I don’t really blame her. It makes me angry that she has to feel that way. It makes me angry that she gets harrassed by people who live just a few doors down from me, and that such behavior is considered normal. On the block where I grew up, a man who harassed a woman from his porch would… it just wouldn’t even happen because the heaps of shame and scorn from the entire community make such a thing unthinkable.
J-Squid,
I seriously don’t think you or I know why crime rates vary between populations. including different populations of white people. Any model you put forth could be shot down easily, Harlequin-style, by a layman who can use google. LOL’s argument is not dependent on criminality being intrinsic to being black, and allows for a multi-causal explanation for the phenomenon. I don’t think LOL’s explanation explains 100% of the increased distrust among white people in diverse neighborhoods, but it must be part of the picture, is that a conversation that you’ll allow people to have? Or is such an inquiry out-of-bounds?
No, the Rand statement explicitly blames all those problems on people of color. It mentions no possible causes aside from not white people. The Rand statement is racist.
Now, were the Rand statement to be making the inquiry you mistakenly attribute to them… it would be a thing that is entirely not the Rand statement as it exists in our reality.
There is no reasonable way to read the Rand statement – a statement from a professional think tank – in any way as other than racist. To attempt to do so is to give credence to the most gossamer thin hint of the existence of plausible deniability as is possible to drape one’s racist statements with.
Your finding plausible “just asking questions” in the racist statement from the professional think tank is both bewildering and a testament to the ubiquity and power of structural racism in our culture.
What you see as “asymmetrical demands for rigor” I see as an example of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The studies LOL cites were from the 1970s–less than 15 years after the Civil Rights act, sometimes only a year or two after busing had been implemented in some of the relevant communities because schools were not desegregating. If someone wants me to believe that racism played no large part in why white people in the 1970s didn’t like busing, they’re going to have to work way harder than saying “They didn’t hate black people, they just disliked people who were…different! Yeah, different! Nonspecifically different!”
Did you intend this to be as insulting as it sounds? What Google search did you think I performed to produce my comment @267? And why do you think it’s a problem if arguments that are easy to shoot down are shot down? Doesn’t being easy to shoot down imply they weren’t very strong arguments to begin with?
No! Ugh, I’m a terrible writer. I meant any proposed model could be deconstructed rigorously, as you so often do (seriously, it’s appreciated), but with nothing other than easily available data one could google. Sorry about that, I see how it sounds insulting, you’ll just have to take my word for it that I didn’t mean it that way at all. Sometimes I wonder if increasing polarization in the USA is partially the result of people like me who are way better at conveying meaning in face-to-face conversation than in the increasingly more common text format. I’m not good at this, and the same can be said for other people I know who are kind and open, but accidentally come off as aggressive while texting or posting comments.
I listen to NPR daily, I have no friends to my political right. As a result, the narratives I hear concerning crime in places like DC are all pretty much the same- the crime is mostly attributed to poverty, and nothing else. I even occasionally hear something like “actually, the crime rates are the same and the differences in criminality between white/black or urban/suburban are due to uneven enforcement.” This just isn’t true. There are almost certainly cultural components, just as there are cultural, as well as material reasons why blue collar guys from Southern Ohio abuse pain pills, and drive intoxicated more frequently than people from central Ohio do. Drinking and driving is just considered more acceptable in that crowd, even if part of the reason they do it is because you can’t just call an uber if you live 45 minutes outside of Columbus.
I think statements like “crime causes distrust in a community,” “more diverse communities are often more diverse because of higher percentages of black residents” and “communities with higher black populations have higher crime” are all not really that extraordinary, especially compared to other claims made here or in the links.
My problem with the discourse here is that these are perfectly plausible (and likely true to some extant) explanations for observed phenomena but some, in this instance J Squid, would declare that such statements are “racist.” This just cannot be the acceptable norm if we care at all about constructing better models.
J Squid, I tried using the search function, and can’t Identify the “Rand statement.” I imagine it’s from one of LOL’s quotes, likely quoting a researcher working for Rand, but I don’t know which.
Jeffrey,
Take a look at comment 196 and the discussion that follows.
Jeffrey:
As you have written this, this is how I understand the comparison you are making here: just like “drinking and driving is considered more acceptable in [the central Ohio] crowd,” criminal activity is, or must be, considered more acceptable in the Black community. Otherwise, any explanation for higher crime rates among Blacks is, by definition, incomplete.
I hope that I have either misunderstood what you’ve written or that my understanding is an unintended consequence of the fact that this is a blog comment, after all, and none of us on here probably writes as carefully as we otherwise might. Either way, it leads me to this question: What precisely do you mean by “culture” when you make statements like this?
RJN, I’m mostly talking about norms. Here’s a real world example from my neighborhood:
So I mentioned shady drug houses close to my own, but a little while ago we had something almost like legitimate dispensaries on our neighborhood’s main shopping area. Pot is legal in dc, but it’s not legal to sell it, that said, some people get around this by hosting “parties” at venues where one can buy tickets that allow them to get “free” pot from various vendors set up around the room working on card tables. Two minority owned businesses were doing this and business was obviously booming. I have no problem with pot use, but these places were causing problems and residents were getting pissed. I have no idea why these places weren’t minimizing their presence, as I doubt anyone would have cared otherwise. I don’t want to go into detail, as the problems aren’t important, but I can if you want.
Anyway, our neighborhood listserv started discussing these places, with many neighbors, mostly white, advocating a community-wide campaign to get the attention of the police. Around here it takes a whole lot of calls from a whole lot of people to get the police to be proactive. There was instant disagreement about whether or not getting the police involved was ethical, and it split pretty neatly on racial lines. I’m not here to say who is right, I’m pretty libertarian about drug use, especially just pot, but what is and isn’t considered normal activity on our neighborhood’s main drag differs across cultures. There are thousands of differences like this, for example, the acceptability of cat-calling women, or the acceptability of skipping school. Truancy at my school meant an automatic 2 week suspension and a whole bunch of shame, here it’s just a normal thing kids do, you can read about it on NPR. I think these norms add up. I also think there are feedback loops, where high crime rates lead to high incarceration and more frequent policing and thus abuse which leads to anger and distrust of the police which leads to people taking justice in their own hands which leads to high crime rates. That sort of thing.
So I’ve mentioned it before that my wife has a condition that may force us to eventually move somewhere warmer, but that both of us don’t want to move to the SE states because we don’t like the culture. Their are norms there that we just don’t like, and when I say that about the South, I suspect you know what I’m talking about. Their are norms here in DC too, and some of them lead to crappy outcomes. There are different norms all over the USA, and it’s often why some problems as well as some successes are regional. This just seems obvious to me. There’s good reason why immigrants to the USA from various countries have very different social mobility. I’m not one to believe Chinese and Indian people are more intelligent than everyone else, I think there are cultural norms shared by many Chinese people that work really well here in the US.
Jeffrey,
Since I don’t have a lot of time to tease out why I find the examples you give here and here confusing in terms of how you see them supporting the argument I think you’re trying to make, I want to respond to this:
I know very few people “on my side” (to use LOL’s formulation) who would disagree with that description of what happens in predominantly Black neighborhoods with high crime rates. My wife taught for about ten years in just such a neighborhood. Nor do I think anyone would disagree that the feedback loop you describe will end up generating neighborhood norms that tend to reinforce it, rather than subvert it. As you have stated it, though—and this is not a criticism of you; just an observation about how it fits into your comment—it is a description without
a context and context is everythinganalysis or discussion: in terms of understanding how and why the loop got started, how and why it is perpetuated (and by whom), how and why it is analyzed, discussed, and responded to, etc. and so on.In the neighborhood where my wife taught, for example, the prison-industrial complex has been applying algorithms to high school drop out rates in order to predict how many jail cells they will need to house the neighborhood’s future criminals. In other words, they are already thinking about how many of the kids currently in pre-K (which is what my wife taught there) will eventually end up in prison. Meanwhile, no one, not the city or state government, not private corporations—the neighborhood itself does not have the resources—is making (or seems even willing to make) the kinds of investments that might change those outcomes.
My point is not that those investments would, in and of themselves, abracadabra, change things over night; but I’d like you to consider that describing the feedback loop as if it is, mostly or entirely, self-created, self-contained, and self-perpetuated is precisely the kind of thing that is likely to get labeled racist because, regardless of whether the person doing the describing intended it or not, this framing either implicitly or explicitly, or both, ignores and/or denies the lived experience of the people who are caught in the loop, not just in relation to themselves within the loop, but in relation to society at large; and, perhaps especially in these kinds of conversations, framing matters. And, I hasten to add, though I doubt it will do much good, a description is not an accusation. (Also, just to be clear, since I have pulled your description of the feedback loop out of the context in which you originally wrote it, I am not saying this label applies to what you wrote.)
The issue of framing was also what bothered me about LOL’s claims. Writing in response to Celeste, he said:
In other words, as per Harlequin’s comment, LOL presented his position not as the starting point of inquiry, but as settled fact, and it is that position, not the specific claim that he makes about how white people might feel about integration/diversification in light of high crime rates among Blacks (which is an idea worth exploring), that I think deserves the label racist—and I will hasten to add here that a description of the language in a blog post is not an accusation. I am not saying anything about LOL as a person.
Perhaps more to the point, I think you can trace this aspect of LOL’s position pretty consistently through the rest of the conversation. I’m not going to go through the whole conversation, but, for example, later on, he says, in response to Jake’s assertion that the “idea that non-white people cause increased discipline problems is a racist belief,” the following:
It is, again, a description without a context. There are plenty of examples of Black students being officially disciplined for behavior that, in white students, is given a pass or not necessarily even remarked upon. According to the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, for example:
Teasing out the implications of that is a far more complex task than I have time for. All I will say is that, at the very least, it helps to complicate the question LOL seemed to be trying to reduce to a simple equation.
No worries–it’s why I asked instead of ranting at you (too much). Communication is hard. I have a friend who thinks that part of the problem with widespread Internet communication is that we read words more harshly that we would hear them in person with facial expressions and tone of voice and so on, and I think he may be right.
Oh, look! Another mass murder, another white supremacist. I’ll start being concerned about violent Antifa when they start mass murdering folks.
Since it was brought up earlier in this thread, Let’s go to “Adam Ruins Everything” to tell us about why the concept of high IQ Asians is also racist.
Desipis and LOL, thanks very much for your contributions to this forum.
But I’ve decided not to host your thoughts anymore. You’ve both have posted enough words here to fill a book, or several books; you’ve had a more than fair chance to state your views.
But I’m tired. I’ve been debating with you, or people like you, for decades, and all it’s really accomplished for me, for the last few years, is making me question the value of civil debate with the current right. And as your ideological fellow-travelers gun down people to oppose immigration, and run concentration camps on the borders – both events that neither of you will oppose with one-tenth the passion you’d bring to opposing a black block person punching someone, or to a racist being kept out of Harvard – civil debate seems less relevant than ever.
(Clarification: I’m not saying you’d be in favor of the mass shootings; I’m sure you’re not. But insofar as it’s fair to blame the left for antifa occasionally punching people, which I’m pretty sure you both do, it’s fair to blame the right for mass shootings like the one in El Paso.)
The bottom line: I no longer have faith that we have a common moral foundation to argue from. And although I firmly believe in freedom of speech, freedom of speech includes my freedom to decline to host your writing on this website.
If you want a forum where people of different ideologies argue (or even discuss) while maintaining a surface of civility, I recommend you check out the “Change My View” forum on reddit; hopefully you’ll find that it fills your needs, and perhaps I’ll run into you there sometime.
That’s been my issue with them and their fellow travelers for quite some time. There is no common ground when one party cannot or will not see racism in clearly racist acts and statements. How can there be anything gained by either side in a discussion about racism when that’s the case. It’s despair inducing.
I wasn’t going to ask, Amp, but I was hoping against hope. Eventually (probably within a week) I’d have forgotten who I wasn’t responding to any more and gone right back into the whirlpool of calling racism, racism in the face of their protestations otherwise. So, thank you.
It’s not just racism. It’s empathy. Not all conservatives lack empathy, and some here certainly show empathy — surely, but the trolls who spend their time doing what these two did? We don’t feel the same about our fellow humans. Yes, my heart bleeds. And it was never a bad thing.
Cloudflare has had enough, cutting off 8chan | Ars Technica
This was the third mass shooting this year to be linked to 8chan. It seems likely that 8chan will find another host, however. (Unless whoever owns 8chan decides not to bother.) Here’s the (lengthy) statement from Cloudfare.
I have a hard time figuring out how much empathy plays into it. Can you have empathy and be (overtly) racist at the same time? How about empathetic and misogynistic? Are bigotries separate from lack of empathy? In the end, I don’t think I care enough to spend the time to tease it out. We can encourage kindness and discourage cruelty. I’ll leave it to others better equipped than I to figure out the why of the matter.
I see that it got to a point with 8chan, Amp, where Cloudflare saw a potential negative impact to their profits. I don’t think they deserve any credit for this decision when it’s been clear for years exactly what 8chan is. As long as it made money for them, they didn’t give a shit. Corporations are, due to our political, legal & economic structures, sociopaths. We shouldn’t be surprised when they act that way. This is probably the reason that you and I differ on boycotts. To me, boycotts are one of the few ways we have to constrain the behavior of corporations.
Well, crap. Guess I’ll have more time to spend here….
From the NYT:
Damn, it’s like this story is designed for maximum divisiveness. (especially after wiki-ing 8chan and learning that is hosts links to child pornography) I have no idea what to think except to say that I would never describe Cloudflare as “responsible” for the content they protect from hackers and the like, even if the content is repulsive and I myself wouldn’t feel OK providing 8chan with any service at all on the free market.
Cloudflare isn’t responsible for the content but they are responsible for protecting 8channers content and anonymity. Notice how, even though Cloudflare doesn’t host it, 8chan went offline today? Cloudflare bears some responsibility for 8chan’s ability to exist.
Yeah, I agree with this, but 8chan’s “ability to exist” isn’t why people are repulsed by 8chan. It’s the content itself, and I’m not comfortable with a moral framework where we would assign responsibility to Cloudflare for that content. This is like holding the ACLU partially responsible for Nazi marches, given the fact the the ACLU once defended the rights of nazis. It may be the case that you do in fact hold the ACLU responsible for their contribution to nazi marches, and if so we probably don’t disagree much about the facts, and instead have different moral frameworks.