This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The author doesn't build any connections, he just asserts them. To that extent there is no reason to make any assumptions based on what he writes as being true. It could all just as well fall under the umbrella of baseline brown inferiority and white supremacy when it comes to the gaps between the groups.
More to your question: There is no world in which parents accept placing their children into worse education facilities than they have to. The only way 'desegregation' is done is through direct or indirect coercion. It has long been the case that the poorest and worst off whites have to suffer living with the browns. Nothing about this will change. It's only now, as is evident in the comment section of the article, that the white middle class is feeling the heat it once left the white lower class to sweat in.
There is certainly justice involved in the disintegration of the white middle class in America. But it's not to anyone's benefit. Schools will still have to segregate the bad browns from the good. And for every brown that might be uplifted by white excellence, there might just as well be a white child dragged down by brown inferiority.
On a final note, something about this topic always strikes me as disturbing. Maybe it's a personal problem but I find it hard to tease out some cosmic righteousness through the suffering of children. If the fine folks in favor of these policies want to volunteer theirs to make things right, so be it. But if they want to volunteer other peoples children for this sort of endeavor I would find it more right those same people be thrown off a cliff. Because there is an inevitable increase in suffering coming the way of children that would otherwise be free of it, if not saddled with browns. I don't feel like anyone owes society their children in an effort to facilitate some devils bargain to differently distribute suffering amongst children. But considering the support for desegregation across the board, I'm not surprised the discussion crops up from time to time. People accept the suffering in the name of social justice.
Counterpoint: I have been thinking about the parable of the polygons recently which is a math-backed claim (dunno if it breaks down for more than bipolar groupings) that to avoid natural-process segregation from those who are okay being a minority as long as the minority is not excessively small in a given area, actually all we need to do is add in a parallel insistence that too much homogeneity is equally unacceptable. In other words, a manipulation of priorities can result in gradual re-integration without extreme policy interventions. That feels a lot more achievable than what many antisegregation people sometimes throw around, which as you correctly note, is often a hard pill to swallow.
In the context of education, that means even if parents are hyper-focused on getting the "best" for their kid, as long as you 1) extoll and encourage minimum levels of diversity 2) at least somewhat smooth out imbalances in different schools and 3) probably one other thing that escapes me for now; everything can still turn out relatively okay.
So yeah, I think a fundamental part of this is a deliberate cultivation of the values of diversity (which are real, if sometimes overstated or sliced too finely!) It's sadly not quite what modern liberals are doing, which have very self-evidently gotten lost in the trees, but at least the general thrust is praiseworthy, IMO.
Counterpoint: Your neighbors child(A smiley square) got its head stomped on repeatedly by schoolmates(smiley triangles). Its head bounced off the pavement again and again and now its braindead in a hospital bed. Are you happy with your child(a smiley square) attending that school knowing the persons responsible are going to attend it again in a year?
To make my point clear: I am not against social interventions. I don't understand why you would think that. I am against putting innocent children in harms way for the sake of some ethno-sadomasochistic ideology. The squares and the triangles are not equal in the real world. We can abstract the real world to a point where we don't see the relevant details. But basing our arguments on those abstractions is no different from lying.
To further elaborate, maybe if this particular act of triangle on square violence was an isolated abnormality, we could excuse it as such. But it's not. It just so happens that smiley triangles, despite being 13 percent of the population, commit over half of all violent crime. It just so happens that smiley triangles are more likely to engage in bullying. More worryingly, smiley triangles are more likely to view bullying activities as high status, unlike smiley squares.
So yeah, we can pretend that our extreme child-sacrifice based interventions are not actually that by using smiley faces. But I am not going to pretend with you. I will, as politely as I can, point out that you are intentionally throwing children into a chain of causality that has many more bad outcomes than they otherwise would have had. This is evil and you should be punished for it.
You are intentionally throwing children into a chain of causality that has many more bad outcomes than they otherwise would have had by allowing them to attend school at all (homeschooling has, I would assume, close to a 100% record of being bullying-free). This is evil and you should be punished for it.
Should boys be prevented from attending school with girls, since men commit the vast majority of violent crime despite only comprising 50% of the population?
I am in favor of homeschooling and sex segregated schools.
On a different note, the school system in general serves a purpose. I.e. daycare for kids. Desegregation does not serve a purpose, as there is no magic dust sprinkled on white kids that can make the brown children behave better via proximity. All you're doing is drowning out the statistics that would otherwise be very noticeable.
Putting your children in school is a risk, but the assumption being made is that it's something you must do if you want what is best for your child. The assumption is not 'if I sacrifice the potential wellbeing of my child some brown people some other place might become more literate'.
You’re ignoring the obvious counter point, which is “it is useful for children to learn to interact productively with people that neither look, act, nor think like them, lest they become unemployable social outcasts.”
If your child is the smartest person in their school, then it is likely they will continue to be one of the smartest people wherever they go. Learning to interact with 100 IQ “subhumans” is essential to becoming anything more than a white collar grunt who takes orders for a living.
This is a counter point to what? Homeschooling works great, sex segregated schools work great. Highly homogenous schools work great. Where are you getting the impression kids from these backgrounds are growing up to be social outcasts?
I highly doubt that. Maybe if they're in a very big school, but even then there are a lot of smart cookies in the world.
What even is this... Like, I don't know where you are coming from but you don't need to go to school with brown people to learn how to interact with people who have lower IQ's than you.
But this is all very much besides the point, which is that the people proposing these changes, like the one in the article, are not proposing we do this for the benefit of the white children. Your attempts to tease out some necessitated benefit after this has been pointed out are bizarre to a point of self refutation.
And the best schools on Earth, as well as the ones most people choose to attend, are none of those things. So I suppose desegregated schools also work great, and your objection to them is rooted less in reason than you seem to think.
I suppose you can bend the rules to say that children raised in bubbles grow up to be well-liked and sociable in their bubbles. But that presumes life in a bubble is man’s greatest aspiration.
Have you interacted with homeschooled children turned adults? Or people who went to private school? They are, generally speaking, socially stunted and awkward.
You highly doubt that someone who graduates valedictorian and places in the top 3 of their class at the SAT will continue to be smarter than most of the people around them? Very smart people still have to employ and work with normal people and idiots.
We’re not talking about historical geniuses here. Just normal working professionals.
Yes, but it certainly helps. Homeschooled children are weird, unsociable misfits who become predisposed to blindly trusting authority figures and struggle to wake up for work on time. Women who never go to school with men become sexually repressed fetishists who chase cock in their 20s and 30s instead of starting families. To say nothing of the men who grow up to be incels because they never learned heterosocial customs.
Uncharitable generalizations cut both ways.
Become too insulated in a hyper intelligent bubble, and you become the kind of person who genuinely wonders why no one likes your plan to sterilize or segregate vast swathes of the population because a black boy bullied a white boy once.
The best schools on earth are in Finland, Japan and Denmark. These schools are very homogenous.
These children raised in these "bubbles" are well liked and sociable everywhere they go in life. Stop lying about people you know nothing about.
No they're not. What a hateful, ugly and bigoted thing to say. The vast majority of the research says otherwise. And if you knew anything about homeschooling you'd know that the kids get a lot of social interaction outside of school, such as in various club or sporting activities.
Anyone who graduates HS and goes to a competitive workplace or university will very likely not be the smartest person around. I point this out just as a simple statistical fact.
But that's besides the point, which is that you don't need to interact with brown people to be able to socialize with people who are less intelligent than you. Like, that's just nonsensical. White societies work just fine and there are plenty of not so smart people in them.
This is completely untrue and you are ridiculing yourself by saying such obviously untrue things. A simple google search can show you how wrong you are, as homeschooled children faire just as well or better than publicly and privately educated children.
Again, this is ridiculous.
What? You're not generalizing, you're just saying obviously untrue things.
Again, what even is this?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link