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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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But women were also told they were allowed to do particle physics and philosophy and drive garbage trucks and become plumbers, but for some reason women didn't choose to do those things as often as men did.

This is fairly obviously a gross oversimplification. For starters, especially in the kind of blue-collar communities from which most garbage men and plumbers will come, those kinds of jobs are surely still very male-coded. Certainly, fewer people are telling women they can't be plumbers etc. but, ironically, it's a very urban elite perspective to suggest that we've wholly eliminated gendered employment expectations, so all discrepancies must now be genetic/natural/whatever. A survey from a few years ago by City and Guilds suggested that, in the UK, around 17% of surveyed students were encouraged by their school to consider apprenticeships, compared to 33% of men. It's also important to remember that these things reinforce themselves without any individual engaging in career stereotyping - if every plumber who ever comes to your house or truck driver you see go past is a man, then one can see how girls might be dissuaded from such career choices.

And affirmative action for racial minorities doesn't seem to have actually solved anything; in many cases, things were made worse, as universities and businesses hired token minorities who failed to succeed because they were not equipped to succeed in the first place

This needs some sourcing; the onset of quota-based affirmative action in the 1970s saw an explosion in the number of black Americans graduating, not just enrolling, so clearly most of them were sufficiently well equipped to deal with the universities into which they began to enrol in larger numbers.

Reparations won't stop bad things from happening in black communities,

Again, a baseless unsourced claim; there is evidence to suggest that more generous welfare provision does actually reduce crime;

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07418829800093741?needAccess=true

Look this pretty much goes for every claim you make. So many words and yet a total absence of any evidence to substantiate some fairly dramatic claims.

I think you missed the part where it’s a person quoting another person steelmanning a position he doesn’t necessarily hold himself.