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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   29349 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Matty Y thinks he has the answers for the Democratic Party. It's a pretty good list but it shows an astounding lack of self-awareness: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1854334397157384421

How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet? Hopefully the Trump administration can build a big tent that includes these people, but I'd also settle for a less insane Democratic party.

Here's Matty's list:

  1. Economic self-interest for the working class includes robust economic growth

  2. Climate change is a reality to manage not a hard limit to obey

  3. The government should prioritize the interests of normal people over those of people who engage in antisocial conduct

  4. We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin

  5. While race is a social construct, biological sex is not

  6. Academics and nonprofit staffers do not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private sector workers

  7. Politeness is a virtue but obsessive language policing alienates normal people and degrades the quality of thinking

  8. We are equal in the eyes of God, but the American government can and should prioritize the interests of American citizens

  9. Public services must be run in the interests of their users not their providers

Edit: I found another one, this time by the "Liberal Patriot" Ruy Teixeira. When will these people realize that they are essentially Republicans now?

'Race is a social construct'

I really hate these word-games they play. You can have endless debate over whether Greeks or Bulgarians are white, about mixed-race offspring, about the shifting meaning of Oriental or Asian based on where you are, about the genesis of the term 'white'. So yes, race is a social construct, congratulations.

But we know that blacks are superior runners, whites are superior weightlifters. We know things about sickle-cell anemia, blood type and bone marrow differences between races. We have the basic human quality of knowing that different couples would produce different-looking children. We have the basic human quality of seeing distinctions in a continuous spectrum and assigning words to clusters: races.

We have the basic human quality of appreciating that some races produce good schools, STEM Nobel prizes, powerful armies, well-maintained infrastructure and advanced technology while others don't (I say basic because I mean this is the origin of racism millennia ago, not out of consensus-building). Those continuous differences cause civilizational effects on a large scale. We have the advanced human science of genetics too, providing the causal logic behind the above phenomenon.

Saying race is a social construct is so shameless. It's communicating a specific idea via an easily defensible fact, something so defensible that the mere fact of saying it implies you mean something else entirely. And in this case, what is really being said is that there are no significant biological differences between races (in contrast to biological sex).

"Money is a social construct. It's unfair that he has more wealth than me (there aren't truly legitimate reasons why this might be) - we need to fix this inequality. I need his wealth."

"It's OK to be white. Us whites need not feel ashamed for our ancestors or privileges. There are lots of people who clearly think it isn't OK to be white: they have bad intentions."

The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct. It’s meaningless as a claim. Religion is a social construct and likewise contains legions of subgroups and deviations that make generalizations difficult. And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.

Further, most of the ideas of what to do (generally deconstruct it) are silly. Just because it’s no longer seen as anything other than a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something of a force of reality. People are affected by social constructs, gender roles, social norms, and other social conventions because that’s how society actually works. Even if we recognize that we drive on the right side of the road in the USA as “just a social construct” that doesn’t mean that change is desired.

And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.

The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.

Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary across climes.

These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".

It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.

The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct.

I once heard this problem neatly solved with the saying "a house is a social construct, but I do rather prefer to live in one"

The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. You say that whites are superior weightlifters (already a dubious claim), but Bulgaria has 13 gold medals in olympic weightlifting and Finland has 1. Yet both Finns and Bulgars are white (don't @ me). The steelman is that the category "white" (or "black" or "Asian") contains a variety of different ethnicities with different characteristics and the way that ethnicities are assorted into broad racial categories is not a fact of nature, it is indeed socially constructed.

It's just a motte-and-bailey, because "race realists" would be quite happy to carve up races further for precision (and do ime) but their opponents have no interest in that task at all.

Admitting that the colloquial definition of "Asian" isn't fit for purpose and maybe we should speak of "East Asians" and so on has never, AFAICT, won someone over to some sort of race realist view. If anything, people just seem to ignore it altogether and go back to attacking the model that has like five races.

The classification based in the idea of notable biological differences itself is the sin.

The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints.

Cool, because if that's the steelman, then we can say that the entire notion is false, since it doesn't get better from there.

This is false, it does cleave reality at the joints. You can run a genetic clustering algorithm, and you'll see coherent clusters emerge that correspond to the colloquial understanding of "race". Containing a variety of different subgroups does not blow up a category, and if it does, you just blow up the entire system of biological taxonomy as a whole, as well as each of it's components individually

Okay, let's see the clustering.

I hope it considers that all Mexicans are white (as a federal court did in in re Rodriguez), that people who are half white and a quarter Japanese and a quarter chinese are not white (in re Knight), Syrians are white (in re Najour), Afghans are white (in re Dolla), Armenians are white (in re Halladjian), Indians are white (United States v. Balsara), Syrians are not white (Ex parte Shahid), Indians are not white (In re Sadar Bhagwab Singh), Afghans are not white (In re Feroz Din), Arabs are white (In re Ahmed Hassan) and that arabs are not white (In re Ahmed Hassan).

If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language and society doesn't always conform to what you might see on a multidimensional genetic chart. That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used. Hence, "socially constructed".

If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language

That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.

That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used.

If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.

The precedence defense is confusing considering how many of these cases contradict each other.

If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality (which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?)

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality

I'm not sure what you mean by "objective", I only said it's not socially constructed, but let's go with it, I guess. I don't know how you're separating the two. Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.

which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?

If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.

Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.

The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.

If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.

If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?

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This is the game played when calling it socially constructed. Of course there are messy edge cases where the lines get blurry and arbitrary socially constructed rules throw people into one bucket or another. You could play the same game with most other categories like species or colors or flavors and so on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

I haven't encountered the notion that Indians are an edge case before.

that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

Neither is calling it socially constructed. Colors are a great example - the set of colors in English is totally arbitrary. Some languages have more, some less, some as few as two. There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

Yeah, but that's irrelevant. Again ask people to sort colors by similarity, and they'll reach pretty much the same result, regardless of their language and culture.

Are you sure? The phrase that comes to mind is "wine-dark sea". I've seen academics suggest that the notion of blue is a surprisingly modern invention.

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Nobody is saying that the similarity of colors to each other is socially constructed (or at least I've never heard this claim).

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We do well in strongman contests, though, or at least did in the 90s.

Apparently (according to some Instagram posting I found) Finland didn't send a weightlifting team to olympics between 1920-1948, which also represents (apart from 1952 and 1956) the golden era of Finnish Olympics success, with the general medal count beginning its fall to 0 (in the most recent Olympics) after that. Perhaps the strong athletes were just sent to wrestling or some other strong guy sport.

Well, there is currently a ton of people on (Matt's) Twitter feed socially reconstructing Latinos from the category of "non-white" to "white, white adjacent, possibly white supremacists".

One thing I find interesting about this is that if we continue to shave "minorities" off of the "minority" list and add them onto the "white" if they vote a certain way, we will have built a more diverse coalition of "whites" than "minorities." "White" now contains Asians, Whites, and Latinos.

Most Asian American group lean Democrat,with few exceptions (Vietnamese lean Republican), none of them vote R as strongly as whites.

Asians have already been put in the White category for overperforming other minorities (and even whites) in school grades and earnings. Further, I think that they're way more fickle than a lot of other demographics. (East) Asians are much less political than other races until someone messes with their schools. You see this repeatedly in California, where every single initiative to make schools more "equitable" guarantees that Asians vote against it.

White already expanded to take in Italians. It can't get any worse than that.

Who are the big left twitter people besides Matt? I checked Hasan and he's calling for more progressivism - Kamala was centre-right with her 'lethal military' and 'border protection' rhetoric!

I think it is a fair critique that Harris ran to her right. The problem with running to her right was that it was fake. She didn’t assure moderates because she couldn’t explain why she switched on numerous positions (it felt fake). But her left wing was pissed because she ran from them.

I'm not sure about big accounts, I mean stuff of the sort that one can find in the comments and retweets of this tweet, for example. (though admittedly in a lot of cases it's more like "white adjacent" or "think they are white" or so on.)

Glad to see my pet peeve about American racial categories getting support from an actual Latin American.

What are your predictions for the new 'Hispanic' census label? I expect mestizos to continue using it but I imagine the next generation of castizo children will abandon it for 'white'

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