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I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
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7hr ago
Okay, but we're right here, right now, and last I checked we're a long, long way from being separated into different human sub-species. We interbreed without real issue, genetic distance is pretty close compared to, say, our former cousins the neanderthals or whatnot, and we don't really inhabit different ecological niches or anything either. Sure, we have a few random health quirks like disease resistance, predisposition to certain conditions, etc. but these are pretty minor overall.
What do you call the child of a Dane and a Yoruba? Why do we call a black Brazilian Hispanic? What about someone with more indigenous heritage from Chiapas in Mexico? Or half Inuit? What about Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian and African-American parents? Do we still care about English vs Irish vs German vs Slavic vs French heritage differences within the "White" category? What about Palestinians vs Persians vs Turks vs Afghans? How close are they? Are they Asian? MENA? Something else, or are more specifics needed? The problems go on.
The fact of the matter is that particularly in America, where intermarriage rates are rising for almost every category, the underlying categories will increasingly be revealed as fundamentally flawed. The fact of the matter is that modern racism grew up partly out of the Transatlantic slave trade, but also out of the Enlightenment-era emergence of early forms of modern nationalism. The people and society who began to spread what we now would label racism (we're talking ~1700s) hadn't even figured out evolution yet, and wouldn't for over a century, so they hardly were working from scientific principles to begin with! Yet for some reason a lot of people seem to be so fixated on perpetuating those same thought patterns despite their obviously poisoned and low-quality origins. Now given, there's still some debate, but by and large the evidence and scholarly (by actual scholars not the performant ones) suggests that most people do indeed think about race differently today than they used to, and it's mostly driven by a white vs black paradigm and its influence on Western thought.
EverythingIsFine
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8hr ago
Oh please, why don't you try and apply some reading comprehension, eh?
The definition of race is relevant only because the original claim - "racism is the default state of humanity" invokes it indirectly (you can't have racism without race). The obvious implication is that by racism they meant our current definition, and as I demonstrated, the current definition doesn't apply to the past very well at all. Thus the claim is false.
If you want to be incredibly pedantic about race not existing, fine, let me rephrase: race is fundamentally incapable of being defined with any kind of real rigor. Happy?
We still have to recognize that (the modern idea of) race has more of the properties of a social construct than it does the properties of some innate, rigorous, underlying biological truth. Sure, fine, it exists on a continuum or something, but this is very much a "category made for man, not man for the categories" kind of situation. The fact most data collection about them is done via self-identification is more revealing that it would at first appear. The fact that even a single mixed-race child doesn't fit in either category is revealing. The fact that you somehow think that race can be determined with high accuracy based on physical features also belies how you've been psy-opped by modern society into putting great faith into something fundamentally illogical - it leads to the opinion that race is purely determined and exclusively defined in terms of how others see you. That's contradictory!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8hr ago
The heck is going on with the motte servers, or is it just me? Got a nginx crash homepage a day or two ago, and loading slowly for me today.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20hr ago
To summarize: genetic diversity and local groupings are constantly changing (fact of history) and any definition of race you make fundamentally requires you to choose a snapshot in time to use as a baseline (bad and subjective); this concept of race, ill-defined (it's a very high-dimensional space), generalizes poorly to groups with any significant intermixing (which is most groups), and especially generalizes poorly to any given individual (especially recently mixed-race ones). Slicing race more finely, in terms of geographic origin (e.g. "ethnicity"), fixes some of these problems, but far from all.
EverythingIsFine
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20hr ago
That's sort of exactly my criticism of race and racism, it just doesn't serve the purpose. We should either talk about discrimination on the individual level, or talk about stereotypes on the group level (and not limit it to poor pattern-matching, open it up to more than just genetic ancestry - let's talk culture and more, directly). Racism is a bad word because it can be applied to either case! Race by itself means genetic ancestry, and quite obviously genetic ancestry is not the biggest thing that matters when talking group-wide trends, fair or unfair alike (plus as I pointed out the ancestry gets fuzzy edges way too easily in modern life, especially melting pot countries like the US). I'm not even trying to start a HBD debate or anything. I agree on the trivially true bit and maybe even a bit more FWIW. But if you think pre-industrial humans believed in HBD or something like it, you'd be wrong on at least two levels.
EverythingIsFine
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20hr ago
IIRC they both said she wanted more green energy stuff generally (power generation, that is), which I counted. My mom also said... "something about housing? I don't really know and can't remember" which I didn't count because it was too vague. She was right though, that was one I named, the first-time homebuyer credit. I also could name the expanded child and childcare tax credit, and her vague gestures at tightening the borer. After thinking about it a little longer, I think I was able to remember some plan to negotiate Medicare drug prices, but Trump also had some similar-sounding version of the same plan, so I wasn't sure if that counted - or if the border tightening counted either, since she was basically forced into it.
EverythingIsFine
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20hr ago
I said "first of all" but so far responses have been fixating on this point rather than the broader point that modern racism doesn't back-extrapolate to history very well at all. That's presentism. Modern racism has at best very imperfect analogies historically (at the very least, pre-industrial ones). I just want to register my annoyance that I'm being argued with on a point that's not germane to the topic I was trying to refute.
What you say is true! Any categorization algorithm, which usually involves some kind of "cutoff" that is chosen, is inherently subject to a confusion matrix with its accompanying tradeoffs. Right? You have false positives, true positives, false negatives, true negatives. To continue that analogy, in the modern world, the tradeoffs are actually kind of large. Total model "accuracy" hits unacceptably low numbers, in my opinion, because of how many blurred borderline cases there are, resulting in miscategorizations of various types. So I guess what I was trying to say is that people have currently 'latched on' to race because of its salience in the political conversation, but it's a poor tool for the job. So sure, race as a categorization algorithm "works" to some extent, and so in that sense it's "real", but we shouldn't be in the habit of substituting models of reality for actual reality. That's the sense by which I call it "not real" - it works (kinda sorta) but it isn't a true depiction of reality. A lot of people especially on this forum go around pretending that race is a Big Deal, and are the equivalent of the gender essentialists (which I actually kind of am) but for race (which I am definitely not). But gender is like, obviously and self-evidently a Big Deal, and race is... well, it just isn't. Not by itself!
This is why I always try and insist that we should have different conversations for issues of race (broad category that, critically intersects with a lot of more-potent things like culture, social status, economics, etc that we might as well discuss more directly!) than we do for issues of discrimination (where we debate and talk about ethics and how they intersect with practical reality and probability) because otherwise everyone always ends up at cross-purposes.
EverythingIsFine
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21hr ago
Bad comparisons. Religions, for example, have hierarchies of categorization. The modern Western understanding of race does not. Religions, to continue the example, have literal self-imposed structures inherent to their organization (OK, to be fair, at least most do). No inherent bright delineations exist when it comes to ethnicity. One reason I prefer the term "ethnicity" to "race" is that it's more localized/specific - partly due to connotation, but not entirely. Languages... eh, kinda, but still mostly no? Although it's true that languages intermix on a broad scale, and drift as the rule instead of the exception, the mechanism through which languages change and drift is by definition on a group level. Two individuals speaking different languages don't really create their own language. However, every human no matter their race or heritage can interbreed. Their children exist, and ruin the categories.
but there's been no mass political movement to try and convince the public that these things "don't really exist"
There isn't a mass political movement to paint race is something that doesn't exist, though? I'm one of the few people saying it, and I'm a strong minority in that sense (no pun intended). It's sort of like the gender-queer debate. "Liberals" (for lack of a better term) can't decide whether gender roles exist, but are bad, or whether gender is a construct, and thus doesn't matter. This indecision leads to a weak foundation. When it comes to race, they are trying to have it both ways, and this also means there's a weak foundation. This contradiction is true even for supposed "academics" in the liberal arts! Insofar as "woke" counts a mass political movement, woke never consistently claimed that race didn't exist, and still doesn't.
My whole comment is pointing out that "race" as currently understood in the West is ahistorical and has accumulated a bunch of recent baggage. The commenter above directly claimed that racism is the default state of humanity, and that's wrong. You quite obviously can't have racism without a conception of race. If the commenter above had said something more general, like "humans always discriminate against outgroups and foreigners" then we might have more of a real conversation based on truth, but they didn't, and I'm calling that out.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
As always, the historically aware people have better perspective. Cotton gin is an interesting example. Deeply ironic: making the labor much easier for processing cotton increased the demand for labor for the cotton itself. It still took 30 years for the US slave population to double, and 40 years to double again, and the entrenchment of slavery took 70, all spurred by the technological invention, but the social and economic changes took decades to come to a head with actual war. Most every other important invention in history, even when adopted rapidly, usually takes decades to percolate and fully influence the economy and social fabric of a country.
The "population bomb" people being so obviously wrong is also a great example why the new "population stagnation" people are also probably going to be obviously wrong. "Doom" happens slowly.
EverythingIsFine
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22hr ago
Honestly I don't think domestic life is going to be too awful. The real shock for the US is going to be the precipitous decline in US foreign policy influence. At some point this century, Americans are going to wake up to some kind of rude and jarring awakening to how (relative to the past) impotent the influence has become.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
Gave me a nice chuckle. Honestly, one of the things I admire about Approval Voting is that - on an individual level - there's almost no such thing as regretting your vote. The simplicity is refreshing. Vote for two people, even if you prefer one? The non-preferred one wins, but you still voted for them, so your vote "worked" as intended. Don't like someone? Don't vote for them. Like someone so much that you wouldn't be happy with any other? That's fine too, vote for them only! "I am okay with X person elected or I am not" is admittedly a little reductive, but is that really worse than the current system? I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 as a protest vote, even though I infinitely preferred Clinton to Trump. Strategically, I felt a little bad about it, but it seemed like there was no other way to be seen. Even then it was a little out of character for me, an avowed moderate and work-within-the-system type, but I guess it does represent how bitter I was feeling about the way Clinton wrapped up the primary with a little bow (not even re: Bernie, I was more annoyed with how she preemptively pushed all other candidates out before the primary even started via a combination of threats and influence peddling. Plus, I guess, I hate her as a person, so that too)
EverythingIsFine
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22hr ago
Yes, this is mostly Harris' fault, although her advisors were always quick to blame Biden. Most notably, she asked to be put in front of something significant, and Biden gave her immigration. Then, she turned around and complained about being put in charge of a "no-win" type of issue, and sulked about it. Biden's advisors then got mad and thought she was being ungrateful. However, you could perhaps imagine a world where Harris actually took that lead on immigration and pushed for more border enforcement - might that have deflected later attacks by Trump against her? Actually, quite plausibly. Instead she did some tours of Central American countries to try and pressure them to stop the flow and tried her best to dodge media attention about it. (Ironically this was at least mildly effective, as far as I'm aware, but selection bias means that it's hard to take credit for this kind of thing).
At any rate, the bad feelings about the immigration assignment meant that Biden's camp dragged their feet about giving her something else. She was also eventually put in charge of "voting rights" (federal level) as a portfolio, but IIRC they never managed to pass anything. Instead she just spent the whole time accusing Republicans of various things, which I think most people easily tune out. If she had managed a win there, maybe she could have talked about it more.
EverythingIsFine
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23hr ago
I would have thought that by September they would have had a clear policy platform that was different enough from Biden's that Kamal could call it her own
I was saying this loudly and from the beginning. She basically had a classic "fork in the road": do I stay the course and hope that Trump is too unpopular to win, letting me win by default, or do I try to do something notable to make me stand out, and run a more traditional campaign? She took the first road, and I was screaming the whole time that it was the wrong one.
In fact, the sloooooow roll-out of a nearly non-existent policy platform was excruciating to watch. Did you know I asked my (liberal, news-reading) family about if they could name 3 policy proposals Harris had? They could name ONE. ONE policy! In a major election! That's insane! They should be the demographic most knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, my mom phone banked for Obama twice and they are both white college-educated liberals (since ~2005). I'm a self-admitted news junkie, and I could only name three!
EverythingIsFine
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23hr ago
And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent
Sorry, I have to push back about the VP chosen because Black Woman narrative. This is wrong, and absolutely NOT the "Original Sin". It's true that Biden committed to a woman as VP. But the reason Harris specifically was chosen was loyalty. So we shouldn't be surprised that she never stabbed him in the back, because she was chosen on precisely that criteria!! Being Black or possibly the beneficiary of Democratic affirmative candidate action is mostly irrelevant. Extensive evidence here about the process of selection. If you want to play with counterfactuals, the other women in contention were: Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer, and Susan Rice. So the more fair question is if Warren, Whitmer, or Rice were VP, would they have spilled the beans, or pushed back against a doomed re-election campaign?
What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
That the government works fine without the extensive input of the President is a feature, not a bug. The fact that most Americans don't recognize that this has always been the case, even with more attention-hungry presidents, has more to do with how attention-hungry presidents are than the facts of who does the work. The Cabinet and bureaucracy has always done the lion's share of the work. And most Cabinet members, quite honestly, are also at least nominally capable of being president themselves, so it's not as if they are incompetent. And (relative) stability in US governance is partly why the US had such an excellent 20th century (of course far from the entire reason, but it helps a lot).
Ultimately I agree that Tapper doesn't actually want to find the Original Sin too badly. I just don't think there is a smoking gun anywhere. It's a larger Democratic problem, and not even a new one! However, if you insist on identifying, if not a smoking gun, that at least a moment in time that demonstrates the impending problems, you don't need to look any farther than 2016. Hillary Clinton and her campaign is the Democratic Party's original sin. Or, maybe, that Obama decided to make a deal with the devil in the first place? Anyways, nearly every single flaw of the Democratic Party today is visible in nascent form in 2016 already, from the cynical insider takover of the primary process, to the sanctimoniousness of the rhetoric about electing a woman, to the lack of Obama-style vision to help regular people's pocketbooks, to the mistrust of a temperamentally and ethically aloof Clinton herself.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23hr ago
Racism is, after all, the default state of humanity
Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups. There are some genetic quirks here and there. Sometimes these genetic quirks collect in particular geographical and sexual assortment groupings. But groupings mix and blend like crazy, and different quirks show up, and then sometimes get re-blended, and sometimes groupings get big enough that humans in their constant drive for classifying and categorizing and delineating end up giving them a linguistic label. Sometimes, quite frequently in fact, these linguistic labels end up being poorly applied, but sometimes they are pretty accurate, or the label shifts and stretches to match some underlying grouping. And anyways, these labels very often extend poorly and incompletely to individuals: even a single mixed-race person breaks all the categories.
In this context, the modern (popular) understanding of race is probably less objectively "correct" (insofar as it even makes sense to say) than the more ancient understanding of race. Historically, and I mean by that roughly before the initial advent of genetic theories and eugenics and all that stuff, racism was the case where it applied geographically to clustered sexual assortment groups. And usually (but not even all the time) this worked just fine, because mass migrations and mixings were semi-rare. We should also note that even here, culture and race are basically intertwined quite tightly, because both are primarily geographic and spatial in nature (although culture can spread memetically and through trade links faster than actual sexual interlinkage). These migrations did happen though with some decent regularity, but the typical person alive would have limited exposure to other groups anyways. As especially "empires" grew (typically defined as a cross-cultural/ethnic political entities, as opposed to "kingdoms"), and increasingly leveraged what we could call cultural technologies, you did start to see some differentiation.
But here, it's important to take things into perspective. Locally, skin tone differences due to tanning would imply social things mechanically, but melanin differences were not seen as the primary differentiator, and nor were other ethnic groupings. Empire-wide, you'd get some local-geographical discrimination and categorization, but the interplay with culture was also very important. And even more than culture, social status. If you look at Rome, for example, as a time in history when you had different ethnic groups interacting all over, and frequently (in a relative sense), social standing and nationality seemed to matter much more than localized ethnic groupings inherently. There was this general idea of "barbarians" but that had again more to do with culture than race.
Fast forward. Today, many people think of race as skin color, and maybe a few other scattered traits like facial structure or whatever. This is ahistorical, frankly, at least when it comes to skin color. Slavery really did a number on the country and dichotomized things, for one, and also the modern "categories" are, frankly, terrible, even without skin color explicitly. "Hispanic/Latino" is such a uselessly broad categorization. Brazilian is its own pot of crazy. "Middle Eastern/North African" is like, very loosely its own category but doesn't even show up in many official government questions. We now have this vague notion of "white" which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't include Eastern European origin in addition to Western European origin, and sometimes includes Spaniards but sometimes doesn't, and anyways I'm not going to get into all the (common) edge cases, hopefully you get the idea.
And underneath it all, you have increasing rates of "interracial" kids. Underneath it all, even if you are to try and be scientific about "race", you still have to make a highly controversial and indefensible decision, which is where to "snapshot" racial differences as a baseline. When we are talking about Chinese people, are we talking before or after the Mongol invasion? How local are we going? Are 'Han' Chinese from Northern China different than 'Han' Chinese from near the Vietnam border? Do we distinguish Koreans from Chinese? What about Japanese, who objectively stayed more isolated historically? How linearly do we interpret genetic distance? Is a Japanese person more or less different than a Chinese person vs a White English descent person from a Portuguese? Are we just admitting that we're taking culture and history into account, or are we still insisting on some genetic measure? If we're talking genetic facts, are we allowing for snap judgements?
All this to say that sure, historically humans discriminate, but no, they didn't think of race like we do now. Racism is an obsession of modern discourse, and it just doesn't make sense. Most notably, there's this conflation of culture, nationality, and genetic "race" as one giant construct - often this is lazily referred to as "race", but it really is more broad. Maybe we need a better word.
Now, many people here at the Motte seem to take the tack that so what, categories are imprecise, but all that matters is some kind of "predictive accuracy" for my mental heuristics. Can I predict that a Black-presenting person will rob my store, and does that merit treating them different? These are different questions, and have more to do with "discrimination" (which includes much more than race) than they do race itself, and I've gone on too long, but let me just end by saying that if you think historically there was anything remotely like these modern issues of 'asians are good at math' or 'blacks are criminals' you are dead wrong. Historically, those statements are really weird to say. Charitably, you can maybe say that these issues are common to the last ~2 centuries of history, as transportation technologies accelerated migration trends, but you really can't say more than that.
EverythingIsFine
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4d ago
I think maybe a good smell test would be: am I discussing the culture war, or waging it? No one is ever not guilty of breaking this from time to time but the ratio of “waging” posts to “discussing” posts is outta whack
EverythingIsFine
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4d ago
The fact this doesn’t strongly happen is more to with how social conservatism in the US picked up an emphasis on the nuclear family, which sort of intrinsically shuts out grandparents in a way other conservatives don’t.
EverythingIsFine
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4d ago
I said at the time and look to have been validated, that people have this idea of the USSS as a super competent organization. But at the end of the day they are still an organization, and are thus not immune to the common failure modes of organizations. As I understand the facts that we have, the communication failures (separate radio networks for the main detail and local support), the “good enough” problem (they had someone in the building, just not covering the roof), and “someone else’s problem” (bad or incomplete assignments during the planning phase) are absolutely classic organizational problems that crop up just as easily and pervasively in the USSS as they do in a large for-profit corporation. If anything, there’s less will to shake things up like a CEO might.
EverythingIsFine
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4d ago
Just today I took note of this article in n case people are still on the conspiracy train: WaPo: The lingering mystery of the Trump shooting: Why did this young man do it?
After Trump took office again in January, his new picks to lead the FBI — Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — asked to be briefed on the investigative steps that had been taken before they arrived, they said in a televised interview. They personally visited the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, to view the evidence, including laboratory and ballistics evidence, and examined Crooks’s rifle.
Bongino, who in August had complained on his podcast that he didn’t entirely trust the FBI’s claim that Crooks had no political ideology, had a professional reason to be obsessive as he poked and prodded his briefers with questions.
He had served as a Secret Service agent for 12 years, including on threat investigations and on the protective details for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino had a deep knowledge of the Secret Service’s landmark Exceptional Case Study Project, which documented striking similarities among people who had tried to kill presidents and prominent political figures.
In studying and interviewing 83 people known to have attempted or plotted such an assassination from 1949 to 1996, the research found they were overwhelmingly White males who were relatively well educated. They were also deeply isolated, often friendless and suffering from a mental health disorder. Often, after a personal crisis or break, they began to fixate on assassinating a high-profile figure as a route to fame or affirmation.
After reviewing the evidence, Bongino firmly agreed with the conclusion of his FBI predecessors. Crooks was just “a lost soul” akin to the many would-be assassins interviewed for the Exceptional Case Study Project, he told colleagues. There was “no there there” to the conspiracy theories about an inside job or Iran.
In a Fox News interview on May 18, Maria Bartiromo asked Patel and Bongino why the public had almost no information about what led to the shooting in Butler as well as an apparent attempted assassination of Trump on a golf course in Florida. Bongino stressed that there was no “big explosive” evidence tying Crooks to an international conspiracy or any larger plot.
“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth. And whether you like it or not is up to you,” Bongino told Bartiromo. “The there you are looking for is not there. … It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.”
Basically you have a total expert, Trump supporter, and skeptic get full access and found nothing. Can’t ask for much more than that. Shockingly, the article claims that a lot of people were working on it:
It consumed FBI agents and analysts from half of the bureau’s field offices, nearly every headquarters division and some international offices.
EverythingIsFine
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4d ago
No, this is just the Rotten Tomatoes problem all over again. Up/down works fine but not stellar because a movie everyone universally finds to be on the good side of fine, gets near-100 ratings while movies with higher highs and lower lows, that are on the whole “better” movies, get lower ratings.
I rate movies about how far they are above or below replacement, reflecting the fact that that’s how most people actually decide what to watch. A 3.5 is fine: you can watch it, it will be a movie with average enjoyment. A 4 is better than its peers: prefer it in any head to head comparison. A 4.5 is one to go out of your way to watch. A 5 is a 4.5 but one that had an especially memorable impact on me personally. A 3 is worse than replacement - it’s a below average movie. And ratings from 2.5 and down are various degrees of how aggressively you should avoid them, with a 1 star creating a negative memory you’d rather have lived your life without, ie actively harmful.
EverythingIsFine
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4d ago
Starting to dip my toes into Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, to be followed up in the case I don’t lose interest by another book that extends reconstruction through the Gilded Age. The most interesting part of American history I know the least about, in my eyes!
Though I also have this Ben Franklin autobiography hanging around that sounds interesting and of course my regular diet of fantasy stuff.
Speaking of, I’m going to throw out a recommendation for Guild Mage: Apprentice, which is free to read (serialized) for another month or so. Has that classic fantasy feel, with good writing and with an interesting world and magic. Very enjoyable read.
EverythingIsFine
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4d ago
My memory is that the Federalists were very pro-national banking (and pro centralization more loosely), which led to pro-international finance and trade links, which at the time in America was a big, big deal and created a lot of dissent, not only between the “rural” vs “urban” areas but led to some foreign policy disagreements. Some New Englanders almost became pro-British, not super popular between Revolutionary aftermath and the later war of 1812. But more of it was the original rural-urban split, and Federalists were seen a bit as elitist. Doubly so when some states started expanding suffrage to non land owners. Circling back to “money” of course - at this time there was no centralized currency, and attempts to do so were seen as promoting corruption and stiffing farmers. After all if you’re a farmer at the time, how can you tell you’re not getting ripped off by exchange rates and early financial instruments? So Federalists being hated doesn’t surprise me at all. These banking issues by the way would persist as very potent forces in elections for at least another 50 years. And understandably so! You needed a catalyst like the Civil War to fully get on the nationalized paper money train, and even then gold and silver standard stuff would persist as issues.
Fun fact: I read yesterday that from the start to the end of the civil war, the federal budget went from 60 million a year to 1.3 billion per year. Not to mention the debt load created by the war and pension plans. But before that, it’s a totally different era.
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6d ago
I think it really just turns on what you consider "diversity". Obviously and famously past Americans considered Germans and Irish and such as contextually diverse in all four of those senses, while today we would probably not say the same of their descendants. I'm sure you could take a stab at some rough numbers about what it might have been over time if you used diversity "in context" for contemporaries, but that would probably be pretty difficult and subjective. Still, I like the instinct here, because it does always annoy me when we hear the similar idea about "division" being the worst it's ever been when the country literally fought a civil war before.
Linguistic and religious diversity might be exceptions, though. This article has a few stats for language that implies it was higher even (or especially) at the Founding, although also worth a side-note that the voting percentages would have been different to some extent. In terms of religious diversity that's also tricky - how do you count "religiously unaffiliated" and its various flavors? I don't really think a fair historical comparison is possible, and I guess you could try, but I won't.
EverythingIsFine
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6d ago
Off topic, but I kind of wonder how the racial estimate question might change if you gave people a slider that forces all the percentages to sum to 100
Why don't you just come out and define race then, or contribute something, anything, rather than reply with short, under-specified criticisms?
Surely you mean to use a different word other than race. Are you reading what you just wrote? Genetics pass on a lot of things, with a decent degree of randomness, but certainly "race" isn't one of them.
The history pretty strongly shows that race leans heavily on the social construct side. If you want to say otherwise, the burden of proof is on you.
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