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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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It's been asked enough times that the answer has gotten quite compact. HBD is a defense against the tendency of Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps. The future where HBD understanding in the mainstream is not one where Black people are discriminated against openly, it's one where we become as disinterested in the achievement gap between whites and Asians as we are with the achievement gap between blondes and brunettes. I think this is a better future.

Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps.

Blank slatism does not mean that all disparities have to be explained by racism. Now, I actually think that black underperformance in very large part is explained by the legacy of slavery and subsequent structural racism, but, for instance, in the case of Asian-Americans, the selection effects of the American immigration system appear to account for their above-average performance in education etc.

Furthermore, 'tear society apart' seems just a little hysterical. Where and how has this happened?

Blank slatism does not mean that all disparities have to be explained by racism.

Yes it does. You even call the other source you postulate racism. Those things can be controlled for in statistics and the gap persists.

'tear society apart' seems just a little hysterical. Where and how has this happened?

BLM? Embedding every institution public and private of a certain size with DEI initiatives? States like California trying to repeal laws against racial discrimination so that they can institute corrective racism? The increasingly hysterical insistence that racism is baked into the very core of our society and thus our society must be deconstructed brick by brick is not some unheard of sentiment. Where have you been?

Suggesting that BLM is caused by affirmative action rather than by animosity between cops and black folks is a huge stretch.

I may have misread the original comment, but I don’t believe he suggested affirmative action caused BLM, but rather that blank slatism did. And that blank slatism also causes affirmative action

I believe the argument would be like this. Blank slatist observes more black men are shot/killed/imprisoned by police and the justice system. Because of blank slatism the only conclusion can be that this is a result of systemic racism, as opposed to any difference in criminality or violence in the affected populations. This same reasoning is leveraged for affirmative action and BLM: that any different average outcomes can only be the product of racism because of blank slatism.

In my view this is an accurate diagnosis of the faulty reasoning underlying both movements

It's a little silly to suggest that people woud look at the data and say 'ahh well, it's fine that a.man was choked to death because statistically he had 15 lower IQ points and was thus slightly more predisposed to criminality. I guess we'll just accept our lot.' The blank slate argument is just giving voice to an already held belief.

The premise of BLM is not that what happened to George Floyd was a personal tragedy for him but a rare, highly-unrepresentative stroke of bad luck, requiring a calm local investigation into what went wrong. The premise of BLM is that cops are routinely targetting black men for death, requiring nationwide [protesting/rioting and arson] to persuade the authorities to rein in the police violence ... and, implicitly, that the racial disparity in rates of deaths-by-cop cannot be accounted for by a comparable disparity in the rates of the kind of behavior that tends to draw the potentially-lethal attention of the cops.

You're missing a key component though: getting away with it. What really outrages people is when they think someone is getting away with murder. No amount of 'well, it's very rare' will mollify a person angry about that.

No amount of 'well, it's very rare' will mollify a person angry about that.

True, I suppose, but if cops get away with murdering black people less often than black people get away with murdering black people, it at least allows you to point out the skewed priorities (where 'get away with' includes the perpetrators never being identified because the witnesses all refuse to cooperate with the police).

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