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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I was spurred to ask this question by this article and especially this paragraph where author builds logical sequence connecting segregation with various social ills:

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.

Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.

I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering. Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem. I think there's a high amount of overlap with poverty, of course, but sure. But this doesn't happen on every level. I would concede, of course, that changing school administration away from a "forgive everything" paradigm might be needed to make this work of course.

I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do? It's very well established that exposing kids to people different than them is by and large very effective at helping them understand that different is not necessarily bad. And it's not even all about race. Kids can very, very easily fall into bubbles far more easily than adults. My younger sister, for example, went through a phase in middle school where she was upset that our family vacations were only in-country because "everyone" was going to France or Hawaii or the Carribean or such. Which blew my mind because (at the time parents were upper-middle class and still are) at least part of my upbringing was in lower-middle class areas where I was quite aware that many families don't actually take family vacations hardly at all! That's just a small and trivial example. There are far more serious ones. Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.

So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child. And yes, that means that once in a while, a parent should go "I don't think my child has enough perspective and will be a more kind, well-rounded person if I break them out of their bubble a bit". This goes for many aspects of parenting. What you're proposing is exactly the same worldview as helicopter/lawnmower/bulldozer parenting and shares the exact same issues! Kids need to confront some sucky parts of life at some point, you can't coddle them forever! Learning interventions are best done young, just like how we now tell kids up-front they were adopted and that's fine rather than try and hide it until some future teenage moment.

Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.

Wouldn't you love a world where we don't have this 13% for half the violence stuff? We can get that world. America's violence problem is an aberration world-wide, which should be a clue that it's fixable. We aren't somehow doomed or powerless to simply attempt to live our lives in fear of radical violence. We are the architects of our own fate.

It's not like we've spent forever trying and failing. Brown v Board was in 1954 and rollout took a really long time -- major wide-scale efforts didn't start until over 10 to 15 years later and took over a decade to truly kick in. And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up. Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)

So basically, the data suggests that for one decade, we tried to desegregate schools exactly ONCE. This is a far cry from "pie in the sky intervention 8742". And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?

Almost literally no historian who has documented white flight ever claimed it was for "no good reason", and the level of historical ignorance overall in this comment is shocking. The old adage that history doesn't ever repeat but often rhymes bears mentioning here -- while surely some strong parallels exist, you can't seriously tell me with a straight face that literal slavery vs heavy Jim Crow vs segregation and redlining vs our modern setup are at all similar states of being. Things are an absolute fuckton better than they used to be for Black people in the US. On top of the whole notion of "blackness" which doesn't make genetic sense, it doesn't make historical sense, it doesn't generalize to the world, and can only be understood in a US context. And at the end of the day people are just, ya know, people! They behave like people, and we should treat them like people too.

I'm sure some people get sucked into some liberal ideological trap of extremes, it happens all the time to all sorts of movements, but at its core I think there's at least a significant number of people who want to, you know, just be kind. Is that so bad? Is that so evil? Is that so nefarious? Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream? Jesus fucking christ dude, get some perspective.

Things are an absolute fuckton better than they used to be for Black people in the US. On top of the whole notion of "blackness" which doesn't make genetic sense, it doesn't make historical sense, it doesn't generalize to the world, and can only be understood in a US context.

It's possible to cherry pick a some definition of "blackness" which does not make sense. Slaves from various Western African polities were brought to various American polities and were indiscriminately mixed, losing their pre-slave distinctiveness. So most other American polities got about same mix as USA did, the difference is that south to USA, there were more race mixing.

Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream?

And somehow we got non-sequitur "intelligence and personality are same on average for all populations"