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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31247 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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It occurred to me recently that I have no idea why Jim Crow laws existed.

I know from life experience that white flight isn't the result of racist white people wanting to avoid being near people who look different from them, but rather, reasonable people wanting to avoid black crime. I could extrapolate from this that the point of Jim Crow laws was to keep black criminals away, but that makes no sense. Black people had been enslaved for their entire time in the new world, so they didn't have the opportunity to become a criminal underclass. White people would not yet have any basis for the claim that black people are dangerous to be around, would they?

Before blacks were a criminal underclass, they were the sort of people inclined to become a criminal underclass; Whites historically disliked them, and Jim Crow laws were in fact designed to disenfranchise them. Given how the black bloc consistently votes these days, I miss ol' Jim Crow.

  • -18

Permabanned for ban evasion and racial slurs.

How can one address historical sentiments without using the words of the time?

Are all historical questions off-limits if they lead to bans?

How shall one keep updated to the current-day appropriate language toward any arbitrary time period? Columbus Day or Indigenous People Day? Perhaps we'd need some kind of Brazilian guidebook.

Just to make this clear, they weren't "using" racial slurs in the sense that they used the word while talking about its historical context, they were literally using racial slurs to attack people in the community.

You've brought too much heat and too little light, here. You're also not writing to include everyone in the conversation. To refer to an entire group, the majority of whom are not criminals, as a "criminal underclass" is clearly inflammatory. The rules do not forbid inflammatory claims; what they forbid is claims that are not also proportionally effortful, bringing argument and evidence (and kindness and charity!) to bear.

And I'd leave it at that, but in the short time we've been on this site, you've managed to accumulate a ban from Zorba, a ban from Amadanb, and five other warnings besides! Take two weeks off this time. You do not seem interested, at present, in the project of making this place a fruitful discussion ground. If you continue to show that unwillingness, your bans will only continue to grow.

If Blacks and Latinos actually voted according to their beliefs they would all vote NOT Democrat. Blacks, Latinos, Asians or just about any non white immigrant in the US is significantly more socially conservative on average than whites.

Consider it a failure of the NOT Democrats Political parties to capitalize on that.

"It's the Republican's fault they don't bribe the minority underclass enough" is a true statement, but I'd rather be rid of that particular underclass than held hostage by their vote.

Good conflict theory. What are you going to do about the fact that you are "held hostage" by women being far more left wing than men?

I'm no wokie but I don't think wanting to be "rid" of black people is an idea I can get behind. And frankly that's just a ridiculous statement to make at its face. How do you propose getting rid of them? You are absolutely free to your own views, but views that will never ever be implemented ever and saying them with a straight face is called "larping"

The mass physical deportation of minorities is off the table. The mass disenfranchisement of them is not only on the table, it's frequently being discussed as a real thing that's actively happening.

So I don't want to deport them. I just want to strip their voting rights.

views that will never ever be implemented ever and saying them with a straight face is called "larping"

Just saying that would make an awful lot of actual political views larping, including actual Communism, Anarcho-Capitalism, religious fundamentalism, etc.

I'm just saying, free one-way tickets to Wakanda or that all-women island Wonder Woman comes from would be pretty cheap and self-select for problem cases ("lesbians with penises extra welcome!!!") Even if we had to buy some countries to rename first.

Liberia didn't work out, but I'm sure people would have put more effort into it if they knew how the next few centuries would go.

It's true that the hispanic population is generally socially conservative, but aside from homophobia secular blacks don't seem that socially conservative, and it's unclear that asians are socially conservative rather than just expecting a functional society.

That gets to the question of what we mean by 'socially conservative'. African Americans are religious, significantly more likely to oppose abortion than Democrats (though less likely than Republicans), significantly less likely to be accepting of homosexuality than Democrats (though more likely than Republicans), etc... but social conservatism in the US tends to imply conformity to Red Tribe cultures and political priorities, not just individually conservative views. So even though there are a fair number of blacks who would tally as socially conservative if we took them issue by issue, they're not necessarily very attracted to the politics of American social conservatism.

As far as hispanics go, most of the same dynamics are in play - they're more socially conservative than Democrats but less than Republicans, but overall just don't have the same priorities.

Blacks, Latinos, Asians or just about any non white immigrant in the US is significantly more socially conservative on average than whites.

hmm...not sure about that https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2012/04/4-25-12-8.png This shows the difference rapidly narrowing

Whites and Hispanics almost tied:

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2017/06/1_31.png

Good article on the subject by a former participant here. Important points like Asian republicans being more anti-gun than white democrats, and literally all non-white groups regardless of party affiliation being even more hostile to free speech than white democrats.

I wish we could get him back on here.

I'd always assumed Jim Crow laws grew out of the same sentiments held in South Africa around that time; that black and white people would thrive better if separated.

Jim Crow laws were created because of pervasive white supremacist sentiments in the South. They served to keep southern blacks politically disempowered and economically subordinate to Southern elites while also satisfying demand for racism among the general southern population.

The scientific perspective of the time was that blacks were inferior intellectually and culturally. The ethical consensus of the time was that groups were allowed to keep their wealth and have dominion over the towns and cities they created. The geopolitical-historical perspective of the time was that white people were simply one member of a multicultural family of enslavers and were not uniquely guilty of any sin. The cultural perspective was that blacks were more prone to criminality, and that white people were unique in certain “civilizational” abilities. All of these combined form a strong argument (for the late 1800s) in having white towns staying white.

A possible solution to your quandary is that a black criminal underclass did in fact form in the intervening years between emancipation and the creation of Jim Crow laws. The black ghetto subculture that colonized Northern industrial cities during the Great Migration was not a novel development but grew out of a preexisting subculture that had existed for generations in small Southern cities dating back to emancipation.

I may be misremembering, but I believe a lot of ghettos originally grew out of the Contraband Camps set up by the Union. After Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves were 'seized' as contraband and put in camps. This became a humanitarian crisis, as disease ravaged these camps and there were shortages of food. I believe some hundred thousand+ black people died. Many former slaves returned to the south, or travelled north, after the war ended, but many stayed in these camps. It'd be interesting to overlay the historic locations of those camps with various post-war maps and see if any of them are still ghettos and/or predominantly African-American.

I thought states started adopting Jim Crow laws almost immediately after the Civil War ended.

No, immediately after the Civil War the south was occupied by the Union and went through a period called reconstruction where it was forced to accept the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and basically existed under the control of the federal government.

It was only after the south was fully reintegrated with the Union and reconstruction ended that they could start passing Jim Crow laws in the late 19th and then early 20th century.

Though, of course, there was extra-judicial violence and prejudice against blacks like the original KKK. But, the actual Jim Crow laws are decades after the Civil War.

Huh, is that so? It always felt like there was a mysterious void in history class around that period. Any books you can recommend on it?

I'm pretty sure "white flight" in the US was a phenomenon almost entirely concentrated in the North, and mostly happened as a consequence of the Great Migration, after the Civil Rights era, so it has scarcely anything to do with Jim Crow laws.

The justification was about preventing miscegenation. Jim Crow laws were written with the assumption that black men sleeping with white women was an inherent harm, that white men sleeping with black women was also less than ideal, and that it was important to whiten the population and keep it that way. Louisiana briefly attempted to segregate its public schools by sex to prevent black and white students dating after brown v board of ed.

Miscegenation was the primary reason for Jim Crow laws- most were written to maintain distance, and while blacks were definitely viewed as lesser, maintaining a subordinate position(rather than protecting the purity of the white race) was a distinctly secondary goal. Black wealth was tolerated and blacks were permitted to attend college(but segregated to ensure they didn't impregnate any white women). This is a different story from Apartheid in S Africa.

I thought anti-miscegenation laws were separate. Was the idea that people might be tempted to break those laws without forced separation?

Do you have evidence on this? We have a ton of writings from the south during reconstruction, and while the rape of white women by black men was an important issue (it influenced the Tulsa race riot), and still is an important issue according to fbi stats, I don’t recall much writing talking about consensual sex being the important issue.

The people writing Jim Crow laws didn't make a strong distinction between rape and consensual sex when it came to a white woman and a black man, just as today we wouldn't make a strong distinction when it comes to a 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man. Segregationists had a different mentality about miscegenation combined with a view that black males were inherently rapey towards white women and thus couldn't be trusted around them.

I don't say these things to make value judgements, but I do think it's important to remember that people in the past had values dissonance when we try to understand their thinking.

This doesn't show that their "primary" fear was about what today would be considered consensual relations rather than what would today be considered rapes.

Pretending for a moment that this question is asked in good faith and not the obviously loaded "Howdy fellow kids, golly gee why is racism?" question that it is, there are actually history books written about this.

Jim Crow laws were not just about "keeping black criminals away" but as much as possible, enforcing the subjugation of black people that had previously existed under slavery but was no longer technically legal now that they were (on paper) equal citizens.

Consider for a moment the possibility that racism actually exists, and that sometimes people act in a discriminatory and oppressive fashion not solely because they are rational actors responding in an evidence-based manner to anti-social behavior, but because they don't like certain classes of people and consider those people inferior to them, and are very unhappy about not being able to legally prevent those people from working and living and mixing with them.

Based on my experience asking these sorts of questions, I figured that at least some people would assume that I'm acting in bad faith. I appreciate you answering my question in spite of this assumption.

Slavery has an obvious economic incentive in that it's profitable for businesses to make people do unpaid labor at gunpoint. When you say that the purpose of Jim Crow was to maintain the subjugation of black people that started under slavery, you seem to be implying that subjugating people was an end in itself. Slaveowners, for the most part, weren't people who found human suffering an inherent positive. They were indifferent to human suffering, which means they would gladly enable it for the sake of profit. To my knowledge, Jim Crow was not a way for white businessmen to make money, and so it did not serve in any way the same purpose as slavery. If there was a way for Jim Crow to be used for profit, then that would change my understanding of this period in history.

Telling me to read books doesn't work unless you name specific books. I don't trust my own education, or anything I'd randomly pick up at the library. I'm well aware now that any issue relating to race will be skewed in the present-day news, and I have no reason to believe this would be different for books about historical racial issues.

In addressing your last paragraph, I know that some racists of the kind that you describe exist, but I have no idea how numerous they are now or how numerous they were historically. I only know that I, and many others, have been falsely accused of being this kind of person, no matter how much we champion liberal values or equality under the law, and the amount of false positives does make me wonder how common the real deal ever was. If I take your description of historical racism as the truth, and I try to imagine how that would work with my understanding of tribalism today, I suppose that historic racism would poor whites treating poor blacks as their outgroup and rich whites as their far group. That would be comparable to things I'm aware of.

Most people don't enjoy human suffering. In order to profit from it at scale, you evolve a culture that frames your inhumanity to fellow men as something else. The slavery was gone, but the culture that had evolved to enable it persisted. Understand?

Jim Crow laws required all blacks to have jobs and allowed the local authorities to find jobs for them, at whatever rate of pay they saw fit, if they were noticed to be unemployed in any way, at least in their original, pre-Plessy, form.

When you say that the purpose of Jim Crow was to maintain the subjugation of black people that started under slavery, you seem to be implying that subjugating people was an end in itself.

I'm saying white people didn't believe that black people should hold equal stature to them and in particular did not think they should intermingle with them in society. White Southerners especially, having recently lost a war and been forced to free their slaves, were not keen on their oppressors (as they saw it) dictating that they treat their former slaves as equals. Others have pointed out that a large part of this was fear of race-mixing (i.e., white women sleeping with black men), and that was certainly a large part of it though not the entirety of it.

I am not sure what to tell the persona you are adopting that pretends to be unaware of basic facts of American history. Leaders of the day were not subtle or covert about their motives; they spoke very openly about wanting to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, and why. I don't think even white supremacists will disagree with my summary. They will only disagree about whether the motives and means were justified.

What other reason do you think there would be for Jim Crow laws if not racism? The motive I suspect you are trying to extract from this discussion is "It must have been justified by their actual dealings with black people." Even if made in good faith, this attempt to map "rationality" onto all past behavior doesn't work because people are not, for the most part, and especially not in large groups, rational actors.

I know that they didn't want to share schools or restaurants with black people. What I am having trouble understanding is was why. I don't know what leaders of the day said, I only know what memes I learned in high school history. With that said, your explanations do make sense and I am currently internalizing them as part of my world view.

Of course white supremacists wouldn't disagree with your summary - it gets them off the hook for having to actually explain how any of their beliefs are supposed to make sense.

I have read quite a few racist authors since joining the motte, but I don't think I have seen any who declared racism good as is. Who had no justifications for it, zero logic behind their position, just an inherent intolerance for black people which they considered reason enough to build a society around. Anyone asks them why they don't like black people and they say 'I'm racist, now help me institute these laws'.

Like everyone else on the planet, racists are motivated by logic. It is usually terrible logic, and usually post hoc justification for inherent intolerance, but there is a chain of thoughts which they use to justify their beliefs to themselves and their peers. They always have reasons like "criminal dispositions" or "racial purity" or "God said so".

Determining the logic which led to Jim crow laws would in no way justify it, and in fact gives us the best opportunity to demonstrate the flaws in their logic. If you are so certain you have augured the op's motivation, why not use it to demonstrate the flaws in their beliefs for everyone else reading?

Of course racists never say they are racist just because they hate black people for no good reason. Everyone has reasons for feeling the way they do.

Like everyone else on the planet, racists are motivated by logic.

I don't agree with this so much, though. You can usually find some logical thread in the motives of sane people, but that doesn't mean everyone is actually motivated by logic. Many people are motivated by feelings, including aggrievement, resentment, or a sense of righteousness. And sometimes, yes, naked hate.

If you are so certain you have augured the op's motivation, why not use it to demonstrate the flaws in their beliefs for everyone else reading?

Because I see little value in doing that, especially when I doubt the OP's sincerity.

I'm saying white people didn't believe that black people should hold equal stature to them and in particular did not think they should intermingle with them in society.

Your phrasing here glosses over a slightly more complex picture--namely, that Northern and Southern anti-black racism had different emphases. There's a reason that the preclearance measures of the VRA covered several northern cities as well as several southern states. Northern racism said that blacks could be "high but not near;" Southern racism was "near but not high." In other words, the racists of the North tended not to be threatened by powerful black people, but they didn't want to live near them. The racists of the South had less of an issue with black people nearby, so long as they didn't get "uppity."

Neither viewpoint is remotely admirable, but the details go some way to explaining how race relations, preferred policies, living patterns, and the like developed in somewhat divergent directions long after the Civil War. As I understand it, this was also a difference in emphasis, not 100% this vs. 100% that.

I'm aware, but I was presenting a simplified version for our OP who suspects racism is just something modern race activists made up.

The old saying that Southerners loved black people but hated the black race, while Northerners loved the black race but hated black people, is also a simplification but has some degree of truth.

I can understand a certain reluctance to simply accept at face value that the authors and supporters of Jim Crow were actually super racist, given modern trends. But I don't think it makes sense to reject it entirely. IMO it is likely true and fits all of the classic patterns of outgroup-suppression. We hate them because of some easily-identifiable difference and so will stomp on them and make up reasons for it later. It's a pattern as old as time itself, no reason to assume we're immune to it.

In fact, my model for how wokeness went crazy is that, back when there was substantial and established actual racism, we established a bunch of groups to fight it, which is basically a good thing. The problem comes in when those groups become established institutions with money and power and people identify with their participation and support of them. The consequence of that is, when you're actually successful and the problem you were created to fight has 95% gone away, you don't just pack up your bags and go home, hanging a great big "Mission Accomplished" banner behind you. You have to find a way to declare that the problem is now worse than ever and so you still need even more money and power than you had before. It can't ever be admitted to have gone away because then your position and identity goes away too.

The problem comes in when those groups become established institutions with money and power and people identify with their participation and support of them.

They then go on to become the monster that they were created to fight (ala anti-white, anti-christian, anti-male bigotry).

I think perhaps the root of your inability to understand why Jim Crow laws existed is that you seem to have a misunderstanding about what they were. You seem to think that they were simply residential segregation laws. But, that goal could be served by restrictive covenants, and the quintessential example of a Jim Crow law was, of course, the requirement of separate water fountains. That was obviously not about fear of crime. Nor were laws requiring separate dining facilities. Nor laws requiring separate cemeteries. Nor laws requiring separate swimming pools. Nor laws requiring bus companies to have separate ticket windows for each race. Nor laws requiring separate hospital entrances.

And, of course, there were the cultural aspects of Jim Crow, such as this one:

The white owners of clothing stores did not allow blacks to try on clothing as a general rule, fearing that white customers would not buy clothes worn by African Americans. Some stores did allow blacks to put on clothing over their own clothes or to try on hats over a cloth scarf on their heads. Shoes were never tried on as a general rule, but most white clerks did allow exact measurements to be made.

As should be obvious, much of Jim Crow was about trying to maintain "purity."

Cheezus. You're right, I didn't know the full extent of Jim Crow. This is nuts and I appreciate you telling me about it.

It's very hard to believe this question has been asked sincerely, but you're also getting a lot of questionable answers. White southerners were very often racists, in the classical sense of believing in their inherent racial superiority. But you're right that simple racism is probably not sufficient to support Jim Crow laws all on its own.

If you know anything about the history of the Civil War, though, you know that after the Civil War, the South was Occupied Territory. All the newly-freed slaves formed an enormous voting bloc, and they all voted Republican. This was a huge opportunity for carpet baggers from the North to break into federal politics, which were substantially dominated by a New England elite. If the Southern states were to have anything approaching self rule ever again, it was extremely important to disenfranchise the Republican-captured black electorate. And so: Jim Crow.

Once you've got the practical foundation of "we need to disenfranchise black Republicans" in place, then the rest of the stuff--anti-miscegenation, segregation, etc.--follows pretty naturally from the prevailing (racist!) worldview of the politically powerful whites in the "Reconstructed" South. But the New Deal starts bringing black voters over to the Democratic Party, and segregation becomes a regional issue rather than a party issue for much of the 20th century. After that, it was just a matter of institutional inertia.

Of course, people in the past didn't know many of the things we know now, but that doesn't mean they were stupid. The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried; nationality and race were (and in most places still are) indistinguishable concepts. Native Americans are to this day allowed to (encouraged to!) live in racially segregated communities, and presumably some well-meaning individuals saw parallels there as well. So I don't mean to suggest that there were no plausible arguments (beyond racism) for Jim Crow laws. I just think that, in purely political terms, the desire of Southerners to cast off, if not the yoke of the Union, at least the yoke of the Republicans, is quite sufficient to explain their desire to disenfranchise black voters by whatever means necessary.

Isn't it also the case that blacks lost their majority of the population in many southern states when many of them migrated to the north?

In some cases--but substantial migration doesn't appear to have happened immediately, and not every state was majority black. South Carolina was 57% black at the outbreak of the Civil War, and is 27% black today. Mississippi has similar numbers. Georgia was about 44% black at the outbreak of the Civil War, and is today about 30% black. Florida was also 44% black in 1860, but is just 17% black today.

Today the states with the highest absolute number of black residents are Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, and California; four of those five are also in the top four most populous states (Georgia is #8 on that metric). The so-called First Great Migration of black Americans north and west is commonly held to have begun some 45 years after the end of the Civil War; I guess if you really wanted to know the precise year when South Carolina or Mississippi became more white than black, you'd have to do a deep dive into the census numbers.

Thank you so much! This explanation makes the most sense to me. It is very thorough and I'm going to use it as a guide for further research.

“The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried”

  • is this a little too strong? I guess if you define racially diverse as black/white/yellow. Is Italy/Rome a counterexample as they let barbarians into the Senate. UK thought of the Irish/celts as a separate race. Mexico and a lot of South America seems to have implemented a mixed people earlier. Perhaps Russia at times was more diverse.

is this a little too strong?

Well, maybe! "What's a race" obviously matters a lot in deciding the question. Rome was pretty diverse overall but also mostly, and most of the time, segregated by dint of geography and language--Roman citizens had freedom of movement, vassals less so. Irish migration to Britain versus British migration to Ireland is something I don't have any priors concerning, and I know even less of Russia.

The apparent willingness of the Spanish and (to a lesser extent) Portugese to "go native" is also interesting, but Mexico becomes a country in the same approximate era as the Civil War itself, and I would tend to characterize the Mexican people as more a mixed people than a diverse people. This may be the idea that was working in the background of my thought process, there. Humans have been migrating, and mixing, forever. But "mix" or "exterminate" seem to have been the default historical options, followed eventually by "colonize," which ends up being a confusing combination of the two. "Mixing" with blacks was often explicitly not the goal of even the white, progressive abolitionists who spearheaded the North's anti-slavery efforts.

In a way, this plants the seeds for contemporary ideas about race--is the ultimate outcome for the United States to be a slightly-whiter-and-blacker version of the aboriginal/European mixed heritage that dominates South and Central America? Or is it to become a collection of pseudo- or actual-ethnostates, from the Navajo and Apache and Cherokee reservations, to Black and Christian nationalist microstates, and so forth?

Well, that's pretty far afield, but the point is that maybe it is a little too strong... but still I think something new was being tried, there, even if I have failed to characterize it perfectly, and that whatever it was, it continues to have unique consequences today.

How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level. We've known for a long time now that intelligence, mental health and a whole bunch of other traits relating to ability and personality are very heavily influenced by genetics, and it's perfectly logical this could lead to differences in outcomes on an individual as well as population level.

However this gets dismissed away with a lot of spurious reasoning (which is usually presented with a huge amount of nose-thumbing and "Scientists say..." type wording in order to scare the reader into not questioning it). As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.

There is also another level to this denial of evolutionary principles that extends far beyond genetics, however. Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.

I'm no religious nut - I'm quite atheist, but religion is a social technology that exists so that large-scale societies can remain cohesive and retain a shared moral foundation, and I would call it a good thing overall (and yes, my perspective often pisses off both religious people and atheists). However this is never properly engaged with by the orthodoxy outside of "yeah people facing hardship make up bullshit to make sense of the world, it's got no validity or use outside of that". Such stock explanations that handwave away traditional social norms (at least, those which contradict the woke moral system and outlook) as being functionless at best and damaging at worst are painfully common, despite many of these social norms being absolutely everywhere up until recently.

Among the supposedly educated any discussion of these topics through these non-approved lenses tends to invoke accusations of "social Darwinism" with the implication that applying any kind of evolutionary logic to humans and human societies is invalid because it could be used to justify Bad Things. This is all consequentialist reasoning which has no bearing on the truth of the claim itself, and lumping in all kinds of belief systems under the same category is a very clear composition fallacy which is clearly done to tar every single idea contained within its bounds with the same brush.

More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding and come off to me as being borderline superstitious. In order to strongly believe that insights from genetics and evolution can't be applied to human behaviour and that humans do not come programmed with specific predispositions that depend on what you've inherited, you have to believe in metaphysical, dualist ideas of the mind which are essentially detached from anything physical that could be affected by genetics. Once you adopt a view of the human mind as a physical entity the shape of which is determined by the specifications of genetic instructions, it opens up that whole Darwinian can of worms and everything that stems from it, and many wokes simply do not want to acknowledge the possibility that it could have any amount of validity. Unless they're able to maintain an absolutely unreal amount of cognitive dissonance, I'm unsure how their ideas can be anything but superstitious.

It's even worse when it comes to their idea of social norms as something that just drop out of the sky and persist and propagate over the long term regardless of the adaptiveness of these norms, since there is clearly nothing controversial about the idea that societies compete against each other, and this will tend to select for those norms that promote functioning (which is why you find common threads). But you still come across this type of knee-jerk denial nevertheless. Regardless of how well-read they may be, their reasoning remains fundamentally sloppy, and I'm unsure how they manage to square this circle.

Agree with @07mk. Most people are not logical thinkers and don't care to square the circle on issues like this.

Social constructivists often attack science and empiricism. They will say that objectivity, logic, and the like are tools that the powerful uses to oppress the weak. For you, the world we live in looks like world (1): Reason is real, some things are true and some things are false. For social constructivists, the world we live in looks like world (2): Reason and truth aren't real, but are illusions that an existing hegemony and powerful order uses to justify its power. That's why it appears so real, or appears that truth is so convincing.

Since you're all about empiricism, and supporting your beliefs with evidence, how would you distinguish the world we live in from (1) or (2), or do you just take it on faith that we live in (1)?

Reason and logic aren't properties of our world: They are absolute. You could say they are necessary properties of any world, there is no possible world where 2+2=5. They aren't empirically derived, they are what empiricism itself is built on.

It's true that entities can attempt to push false reason to gain social power. The answer to this is actual, better reason.

I believe what you call social constructivism is to some degree such an attempt: Delegitimizing logic and replacing it with an inconsistent system that elevates the viewpoints of specific people.

I agree that there are absolute truths, but how sure are you that you have direct access to them? I agree that actual, better reason will always illuminate false prophets, but seeing a true proof and seeing a false proof look very similar.

I agree social constructivism is an attempt to dethrone an existing hegemon, and has an agenda.

I think ultimately enlightenment, reason, and empiricism are mistake theory, and require some sort of shared assumptions or shared trust in order to work in practice. Once you step outside of the narrow scientific domain, and into the wider one of relations and conflict, is reason really all that important? Would you accept an argument from an enemy?

I agree that there are absolute truths, but how sure are you that you have direct access to them? I agree that actual, better reason will always illuminate false prophets, but seeing a true proof and seeing a false proof look very similar.

Yes, my mind could be influenced in some way making me entirely incapable of applying reason - but following that line of thought only leads to intellectual capitulation. At some point I have to axiomatically assume that I'm in principle capable of understanding logic. So far it has worked out, and my ability to navigate the world I experience has consistently improved.

I think ultimately enlightenment, reason, and empiricism are mistake theory, and require some sort of shared assumptions or shared trust in order to work in practice. Once you step outside of the narrow scientific domain, and into the wider one of relations and conflict, is reason really all that important? Would you accept an argument from an enemy?

Yes, absolutely. I would, naturally, apply increased scepticism and scrutiny, double check their arguments and critically examine the sources for their factual claims. But in the end, being my enemy doesn't reliably prevent them from being right, so I can't dismiss their argument out of hand.

Reason is important because finding the truth is important. Conflict exists, which means some people don't work towards the truth - but this just makes it more important that I do. What else am I supposed to do? Even if I were to embrace conflict and work to maximising my own gain (which I don't want because it would make me a bad person) that mostly* doesn't tell me what policies would achieve that.

*Even many classic identity politics topics. For example, gender quotas in high positions: It seems my position would derive from my gender, but most men and women aren't actually directly affected by this, and there are arguments that a quota would benefit men (not sure how to steelman this, but it could still potentially be true), as well as harm women (by introducing stereotypes of "only got in by quota").

Radical hat on: the only absolute truth is power, and those with power use it to peddle and back other so-called truths.

One more comment on this woke thread. This is attempt to steelman the woke mindset, attempt to explain by analogy how "the woke" feel about whites and whiteness.

Imagine country controlled by mafia, country where mafia families own disproportionate share of wealth and power.

How would non-mafiosi feel about the mafia?

There are mafiosi born and raised in mafia. These are bad hombres, and few mafia victims are willing to contemplate whether it is really their fault.

There are "mafia adjacent" people, who hang around mafiosi and try to behave like them. These are also highly sus people.

There are mafiosi who were not born into mafia, but joined it willingly. These are the worst people around.

There are also "penitents", mafiosi who renounced the mafia and fight against the mafia system. They are not bad people, but they have to understand they will not be ever as trusted as someone who was never in mafia.

(There are also mafiosi who claim to be victims. "No one was as oppressed as us! Our family was nearly wiped out by other families! Why you cannot feel our pain?" These are justifiably viewed by real mafia victims as the most revolting kind of mafia ever.)

Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.

This paragraph confuses natural selection of ideas with natural selection of the hosts those ideas apply to. It is entirely consistent with the idea of religion as a hyper-effective brain parasite / mind virus that spreads more easily in well-connected and organized societies.

It took me awhile to realize what you are saying here. For those who are as dull as me: OP falsely thinks "religion is abundant" implies "religion is a fitness improvement" but it actually implies "religion is fit." For example, religion could actually hurt its hosts, but the idea itself spreads & doesn't kill hosts too quickly.

Indeed, the phrasing, "religion is a fitness improvement" is actually confused, because I don't think it makes sense to talk about a fit organism only a fit gene. Organisms are completely irrelevant to the overall picture of things. A gene that causes an organism to reproduce way more, and also die early and feel pain, is by all accounts bad for the organism but that gene is good for itself. Maybe this is the insight that leads to hot-take phrases like "selfish gene." Can a gene be a parasite?

Back on topic, religion/ideas/memes having evolutionary considerations does not defend the accusation of arbitrary. In this case, "arbitrary" doesn't mean random, since the constructivist will agree that the norm is caused by specific historical circumstances. I think when a social constructivist calls it arbitrary, he just means he doesn't value the cause-and-effect process that generated it. Rejecting social darwinism is good actually, because evolutionary fitness etc. can be at odds with our goals.

"Selfish gene" comes from the eponymous book by Richard Dawkins, and centers on exactly that idea.

Religion is an interesting one, because I've just read a great book called "The Secrets of our Success", which talks about culture and inter-group competition, and religion seems a very effective way to strengthen cultural norms, and also to strengthen inter-group non-family ties, both of which are important for intergroup competition.

I'm personally still not a big fan, but it was interesting, and I do note a slide towards conservatism as I get older (although I think that's also the shift of the left away from liberality (of which I'm a fan) towards identity politics (of which I"m not).

I've seen quite a bit of suspicion about the idea that religion is pro-social (often substituted for the idea that religion instead is a memetic parasite that spreads by taking advantage of certain human biases without conferring an advantage upon those who adopt it), but I will say there is support for my hypothesis in the literature.

For example: "Converging lines of field and experimental evidence suggest that cultural evolution, building on certain innate cognitive foundations, has favored the emergence of beliefs in powerful moralizing deities concerned with the prosocial behavior of individuals beyond kin- and reciprocity-based networks (Norenzayan and Shariff 2008). Cross-cultural analysis of 186 societies has found that larger and more complex societies were much more likely to subscribe to potent deities directly concerned with morality and willing to punish norm violators (Roes and Raymond 2003; Johnson 2005). Studies conducted across a diverse range of societies including foragers, farmers, and herders, show that professing a world religion predicts greater fairness toward ephemeral interactants (Henrich et al. 2010). Experiments with North Americans show that unconsciously activating religious concepts lead to reduced cheating and greater generosity toward strangers (Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Mazar and Ariely 2006; Shariff and Norenzayan 2007), except among ardent atheists. Together, these cross-cultural, historical, and experimental findings suggest that (1) religion—as a phenomenon with potentially deep roots (Klein 1989)—has not always been about high moralizing gods and (2) modern world religions may have evolved to create a potent linkage between the supernatural and the prosocial. Thus, we hypothesize that cultural evolutionary processes, driven by competition among groups, have exploited aspects of our evolved psychology, including certain cognitive by-products, to gradually assemble packages of supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals that were increasingly effective at instilling deep commitment, galvanizing internal solidarity, and sustaining larger-scale cooperation."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1162/BIOT_a_00018

I think I agree that religion can offer group selection benefits to a society and that this likely has been relevant in history.

Some of it also may have just been by chance as well, humans like a good story and maybe some of these religions are just very successful memes that do a good job at lighting up our neurons in a way that reproduces itself well. We should be careful to not fully confuse evolutionary fitness on the memetic landscape with fitness on the landscape of intergroup competition.

But it’s definitely true that it’s a useful lens. How else do we explain for example that once a man came out of a cave with a prophetic vision, and within one generation a group of desert nomads have conquered half of the known world, and that the territory they originally conquered still maintains their religion and often too their language some 1500 years later. That was a highly successful cultural meme which was the main driver leading a backwater ethnic group to huge social and linguistic power.

But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world. And I believe this to be true. The intergroup competitive landscape is not what it was in the pre-modern world. If a modern secular country were to become deeply religious, there may be consequences in the level of their decision making which puts them at a disadvantage relative to other countries. Even if you have trouble accepting that conclusion, if we’re working from the thesis that a societies’ worldview determines evolutionary outcomes at the scale of the group, were confronted with the fact that it’s the secular countries which lead the world and that “your society having one religion they all believe” is currently inversely correlated with measures of human development, as well as with geopolitical power.

If we’re using an evolutionary lens to explain these things (which I think is quite useful and a fun way to look at history), we might also acknowledge that sometimes the evolutionary landscape itself shifts and favors certain adaptations over others. I’m waiting for any non-diverse mono-religious society to rise to global prominence to prove this thesis wrong, but I have trouble even imagining such a thing occurring in the modern world. I just don’t think it’s one of the favored adaptations for our current landscape.

But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world.

I wouldn't get so ahead of ourselves. Societies have only been secular for the last 60 years or so - depending on how you define it, was 1950s American society (not just government) truly 'secular'? - while religious societies have been around since, well, since the dawn of history. The contemporary secular society is really a flash in the pan compared to the entirely of human history. Yes, I know that you could make some argument that the speed of history is accelerating or whatever, but it's still important to consider that the secular society is still in relative infancy. Any negative consequences of mass but societal changes will usually have some lag time. Maybe the broad decline we're seeing across the West is in part a consequence of the secularisation of society.

In addition to this, it also may be the case that widespread secularism in the first place is a consequence of the removal of environmental/selection pressures. In evolution, there's an idea that once selection pressures are removed, this no longer creates pressure that maintains the traits that were previously adaptive, leading to decay of traits down to the level that selection is operating. Most mutations degrade functioning instead of promoting it, and without selection pressures to weed out these destructive mutations they can accumulate and cause phenotypic loss.

Perhaps there has been a version of this occurring on the social level in that the technological advances in the West have led to relaxed selection pressure on these societies and their norms. It's an idea I've been playing with for a while that abundance and lack of competition has allowed for the fostering of historically unique social practices which can emerge only under a condition of relaxed selection. In other words, only the societies that don't have much to worry about and possess such a decisive advantage that few others can realistically compete with them can actually sustain a secular society (and not without creating problems of internal strife in the process).

This reconciles pretty well with the following observations that 1: secularism is a very recent and localised phenomenon whereas religion was absolutely ubiquitous for the vast majority of human history (and the more organised, moralising religions developed independently many times), 2: evidence exists to suggest that religion has pro-social effects, 3: the key scientific and technological advances that catapulted Western societies into being a world power were made long before they were secular, and 4: the adoption of secularism seems to correlate with the "broad decline" you've mentioned.

Could I have a definition of religion here? I think I could agree with some and disagree with others.

But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world.

Secular liberal states are relatively young and for most of their history held strong religious assumptions. Truly irreligious societies are especially young and are already facing evolutionary challenges (more religious people have more kids).

I hope you're right but I'm not gonna raise the banner of victory yet. As long-lived as Islam, secularism and liberalism are not.

If a modern secular country were to become deeply religious, there may be consequences in the level of their decision making which puts them at a disadvantage relative to other countries.

This would imply that strongly religious modern countries are irrational (or rather: more irrational than secular states), which is debatable.

Also: secular societies also make bad decisions due to being bad at understanding religious societies - which are still the majority. American social engineering difficulties in Afghanistan come to mind (one minor example was a well-meaning American putting an ecumenical selection of religious verses on a football...that devout Muslims were then expected to kick*).

Or hell, they can make bad (or at least costly) decisions due to their own ideological concerns.

Even if I were to grant that secularism (and liberalism) was a good solution to the internal problems facing religiously divided European states, I do wonder if it is a good idea for more homogeneous states to abandon their cultural core, for a variety of reasons. If a nation is already strongly religious, how much does it gain?

* Keep in mind: devout Muslims will not even hold the Qur'an without performing ritual cleansing first.

So it looks like our long-term users have mostly already said what needs to be said, but I'm basically going to say it again with a mod-hat.

This is essentially a long boo-outgroup post. You start with:

How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic?

and that's nothing more than an accusation that woke people don't understand basic logic. That's a hell of an accusation.

So, a few rules to note:

Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

If the goal of the community is to promote discussion, then we ask that people keep this in mind when posting. Avoid being dismissive of your political opponents, relying too much on injokes at someone else's expense, or anything that discourages people from participating in the discussion. This is one of the vaguest rules and one of the rules least likely to be enforced, since any real violation is likely to fall under another category. But please keep it in mind. Discussion is a group effort; be part of the group, and invite others into the group.

And from the intro post:

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:

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.

(This isn't technically a link, but I'm calling this close enough.)

The tl;dr is that this isn't a place for attacking people you don't like, and if you want to write something that looks even vaguely like "why are my political opponents so dumb", you really need to phrase it better.

More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding

These were atheists of the noughties, breed nearly extinct by now.

Modern wokes see science and secularism as parts of white system of oppression and do not appreciate them in the slightest. The wokes love religions and traditions of BIPOC, they reject white oppressive religions and traditions.

Your arguments about social utility of religion were said many times before

https://i.imgur.com/v5zUuAl.jpg

and might persuade rationalist atheist (especially atheist with big house and portfolio), but would not impress the woke.

It's incidental to your claims, but Wikiquote thinks the quote at your link was misattributed.

As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences.

In the case of race, it's useful to disambiguate between the social attitudes and labels that developed around the area of ancestral origin and the actual underlying genetics. How so? See, for instance, how Asians and whites are increasingly being treated as having a similar social role; if you look at how people use the term "non-white" nowadays, it often implicitly excludes Asians. And racial labels and boundaries have always fluctuated.

Recognizing that there's a social process overlaid on top of physical reality doesn't necessitate rejecting that there is an underlying physical reality.

Recognizing that there's a social process overlaid on top of physical reality doesn't necessitate rejecting that there is an underlying physical reality.

Perhaps I did not make this clear - I'm not saying it necessitates it, per se. I'm referring to instances where "There is a social process overlaid on top of physical reality" and other such rhetoric is used to dismiss discussion about the underlying physical reality (more broadly, it is often used to imply that thinking about race using racial classifications as a heuristic should not be engaged in, which makes meaningful thought or discussion about it impossible).

In any case "race is a social construct" seriously muddies the waters, and is about as insightful as stating that any continuous phenomenon that we try to classify discretely like colour, or time, or temperature, or even something like baldness, is socially constructed because the dividing lines drawn for the purposes of classification are necessarily imposed. The wording they've picked for race specifically completely fails to distinguish between the categories used to classify the phenomenon and the phenomenon itself (the misleading nature of which I think is intentional, since it allows them to motte-and-bailey between the two).

This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there).

Woke has successfully borrowed from religion. It has appropriated the Christian concept of original sin (people have privilege assigned to them at birth due to immutable characteristics that they must strive for the rest of their life to redress), and other shared religious concepts like blasphemy (only certain people can say certain words, even in a neutral, journalistic, or academic context; only certain people may make certain foods, wear certain hairstyles, sell certain foods, perform certain music), atonement (restorative justice, public apology, doing the work), ritual (land acknowledgments, exchange of personal pronouns) and excommunication (canceling).

Sounds fully general, or close to it. Especially when the OP is arguing for such a broad usage of religion.

You could make all the same arguments about anti-woke rhetoric. Race realism is vaguely like original sin. Asking for pronouns becomes blasphemy. Cultural appropriation has nothing on the importance of gender roles. Any sufficiently broad social stance is comparable to religion.

See also Number 1.

I think that’s fair criticism.

Perhaps because of the large city in which I live, and the impact it has had even on center-left people and vaguely progressive-aligned non-political institutions, the old line that new converts to a religion are often-the most pious, has been pinging around in my head.

If I spent time at suburban school board meetings in the Bible belt, I might well have the same take on anti-woke, as opposed to it being something I see online and elsewhere.

As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.

This is basically correct: Races are categories, and while it is absolutely true that the categories (ie, where the lines are drawn) are socially constructed rather than given by nature, that does not mean that they are arbitrary, and it certainly does not mean that there are no average genetic differences between populations which we call Race A and Race B -- Eg: sickle cell anemia is far more common among the race we in the USA call "black" than the one we call "white." But it seems to me that you weaken your argument a bity when you refer to "the concept of race itself as a biological entity" rather than sticking with the argument that there are some actual average genetic difference between races, even if they are not "biological entities" but are socially constructed. The socially constructed argument is actually irrelevant; there is no need to refute it.

Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.

What successful religions really have in common is a message that they are not a threat to elites: Christianity: Your reward will be in heaven, so if you are at the bottom, just chill a while. And, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Hinduism: Follow the rules, and stay in your place. Buddhism: The source of suffering is desire. So, to be happy, give up wanting to move up.

What successful religions really have in common is a message that they are not a threat to elites

Islam doesn't seem to like the others in this regard. Its founder denounced non-Islamic rulers and waged wars of aggression against them.

In his traditional biography Mohammed pissed off the elites of Mecca so much he had to leave to keep his life.

In Medina, he sponsored a more ecumenical document - the Constitution of Medina - that gave rights to the Jews and tribes living there as well as the new Muslims.

Of course, once he'd gathered up sufficient power to ignore it, he destroyed the Jews and seized Mecca. But that took a while.

In his traditional biography Mohammed pissed off the elites of Mecca so much he had to leave to save his life.

A pretty straight putt modification to @Gdanning's conjecture should be "successful religions (eventually) deliver a message that isn't threatening to (their) elites." Christianity was also extremely threatening the status quo at the start, which is why Diocletion and other Roman emperors tried so hard to stamp it out. But when a revolutionary new Christian elite under Constatine took their place, we get the Council of Niceaea, and all the inconvenient or threatening parts of the religion get sandpapered over. Eventually, the religion that said all rich people are literally going to hell morphs into something telling serfs to stay in their place and the duke gets to live in a palace because God wills it.

Eventually, the religion that said all rich people are literally going to hell morphs into something telling serfs to stay in their place and the duke gets to live in a palace because God wills it.

Note that even "rich people are going to hell" is not a threat to the status of the rich in the temporal world, but rather the opposite: It tells the poor that the rich will get theirs eventually, so there is no need to try to take them down now.

Those were more akin to external wars, were they not? As I understand it, in Medina, the success of Islam was via conversion of elites rather than by force.

I am referring to what successful religion tells those at the bottom of society how to act. I don't know a huge amount about the teachings of Islam about this, but the verse of righteousness does say that those are righteous who "are patient in poverty", and then there is this discussion

And, of course, this is distinct from what religions say about rulers who are apostates or who do not adhere to the religion at issue. Looking at this through a Darwinian lens, a religion that teaches that rulers must adhere to its teachings is likely to grow more than one that doesn't, at least once the religion gets large enough that the ruler can't simply crush it.

Seconding much of what @07mk said. First and foremost that “my outgroup is stupid, pls explain” ought to be a nonstarter, especially in this community. Adding 8,000 words about natural selection does not detract from the foundational booing.

I’ll also sign on to 07mk’s thesis that the average person of any political inclination is not constructing theory from first principles. We instead start from intuitions, then try and adopt or build out an ideology. This can be the natural human tendency to make patterns, or a rhetorical strategy, or an attempt to reason beyond those intuitions. Regardless, “based” usually comes first, with “...on facts and logic” as an afterthought.

Oh, I guess there’s an is-ought problem too. No one likes dealing with those, so the gap between “races have (in)significant intellectual differences” and “races should(n’t) be treated differently” gets skipped over as an axiom. That probably accounts for some of the contradictions.

First and foremost that “my outgroup is stupid, pls explain” ought to be a nonstarter, especially in this community. Adding 8,000 words about natural selection does not detract from the foundational booing.

Fair enough. It was a genuine attempt to source opinions (about how they reconcile certain beliefs which simply seem completely and utterly incompatible to me) from people who do not subscribe to the ideology, since attempting to understand the mindset of its adherents from people who do subscribe to it has so far been an unsuccessful endeavour that has left a very sour taste in my mouth, but I understand the optics isn't fantastic. I suspect if I'd posted it in the small-scale question thread instead of the main CW thread it wouldn't have gotten quite such a negative response (and that's initially what I wanted to do), but I didn't expect anyone to see it since that thread was so far down.

Either way, I've gotten some interesting responses (not all of which I entirely agree with, but which do merit more consideration).

There is a good article on Everything Studies with a nice graph showing how let's say rationalist view reality and how some more humanities inclined people view it. If one accepts the latter framework, then saying reality is socially constructed means the social order is socially shaped as opposed to the physical universe is socially conjured.

To further muddle the waters, many people say that social construction does not mean things are not real. Often used example is money: value of otherwise worthless physical pieces of paper stems from other people giving it value. Money undoubtedly is "socially shaped" but it does not make it unreal meaning that pieces of green paper are an illusion or somehow physically not existing. In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.

This really is often confusing and even well meaning people may talk past each other. As an example I will use the term science. For somebody it may mean body of knowledge gathered by scientific method. For somebody else it means more philosophy and sociology of science meaning ways how grants are awarded, social processes that steer researchers into certain fields of research more than other fields and so forth. So saying that science is social construct is obviously true as science is done by people and they are working in socially shaped organizations using socially shaped processes. It does not mean that scientific body of knowledge is just some arbitrarily made up stuff. But then again it can be if let's say scientific social processes were driven by racism or whatnot.

Now to be frank, even if I do somewhat understand where social constructionists come from I think their insight has limited value. It would be better to define special terms for what they actually mean so if one says "science" we know if we are talking about scientific body of knowledge or something else. These discussions often take form of sophistry spreading confusion and they paradoxically contribute to the whole social constructivist premise. Which in a sense may be ultimate level of trolling: see, we made scientists say stupid things by sophistry and social pressure. We were right all along except in the past the social pressure was based on racism and misogyny and homophobia!

There are a lot of ways that things can be "real," for some value of real. The Statue of Liberty is a real thing, as it is a actual object in the physical world--reality in the most trivial and literal sense. But there are other legitimate senses of "real"--the US national debt, the number 2, Frodo Baggins, and Alexander Hamilton are all real on various different levels. As you say, the value of a dollar has a legitimate, socially-constructed reality, but so does something like "Donald Trump's reputation"--its exact parameters are highly contested, but no one doubts that "Donald Trump" is real, and that he has a reputation, which is socially constructed from the aggregate of perspectives on his character.

(I would describe "science" as a tool/process/methodology, rather than a body of knowledge.)

Coincidentally Everythingstudies also have a very good article about what real can mean and also how it creates confusion. But here I think is that the distinction is a little bit different: even taking Sherlock Holmes that exists as a fictional character, somebody can say that he also has some other aspects that were socially shaped or that this character himself impacts society in certain way. So if somebody says let's say Sherlock Holmes is racist this can have multitudes of meanings and it is not apparent which one is relevant in context of the discussion: is the character in the novel racist to other characters? Were the novels featuring this character some way perpetuating racism later down the road? Of course it also has to be noted that by playing with words in this way it opens large space of various rhetorical tactics and sophistry.

It is also often a feature, especially if the target of discussion is something else such as social transformation. For instance you can use these words with multiple meanings in order to fish for some hooks that are relevant to your discussion partner, thus finding out which context connects with the other person the best personally - for instance so called Freierian "generative themes". Then you can use other examples and connect it back to the original context, the original theme in a process of recontextualization in order to achieve some other end outside of just discussing ideas. In this sense this vagueness is a feature and not a bug.

Thanks for sharing that article; I thought it was insightful. "X exists" is a particularly slippery phrase, but it's one piece of a larger issue with communication--ultimately, there's a tradeoff between efficiency and precision, and the various aspects of language exist to manage that balance.

Indeed, in fine detail, various languages manage specific micro-equilibria differently, due to local conceptions of where efficiency can be sacrificed to precision, or vice versa.

English pronouns traditionally distinguish among first/second/third person, singular/plural, sex in the third person singular but not elsewhere, subject/object/possessive/reflexive, and so forth. Sometimes combinations of distinctions exist, and sometimes not: "you" is clearly second person, but ambiguously singular or plural--or subject/object, for that matter, it's all context-determined --whereas "I/we/me/us" retains both the singular/plural and subject/object distinctions.

There's a language--I forget exactly where, but I want to say Southeast Asia or Australia?--that has a distinction in its pronouns that English lacks: two different senses of "we," each with its own pronoun. In one sense, "we" includes the person or people being spoken to, in that "you and I" are part of "we." In the other sense, it does not, in that "you" are not part of "we."

"Are we in agreement?" includes the people being spoken to. "We are going to the store; do you want to come with us?" does not, but English uses the same word. The people using this language felt that there was a valuable distinction that justified maintaining two words here; English speakers generally don't even notice the same ambiguity.

Indonesian has that, and I always thought it was a super-useful concept.

In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.

That's the motte.

The bailey is that because race is socially constructed and not scientifically real, we can therefore assume any policy with disparate impact ("class starts at 10AM so show up before 10AM", "math questions have objective answers" or "don't beat up other children") is racist.

That, or it may be genuine discussion of what should be considered racism and racist. To go for more benign example take claim like "psychology is science". It is at the same time a claim about what is psychology but also a claim of what properties science should have. Somebody saying "psychology is not science" can disagree with you about properties of psychology and/or properties of science.

And of course as said previously, this can be used as sophistry. You can use word games to become parasitic on some pre-existing meaning or valence of certain word (e.g. racism is bad) in order to either make the new thing (like disparate impact) seem a little bit like the original category (racism), or to change the meaning of the word (racism) a bit - or both at the same time.

While I'm aware of the redefinition of "racism", the bailey I describe isn't that. Lets roll with your psychology example:

  1. Psychological studies have little predictive value and people in the field don't seem very worried about replication or correctness.

  2. Psychology is a science, and science tells us that if you don't do gender affirming care/body positivity/etc, people will do suicides and such.

Now, (1) is just an empirical claim. Point (2) may have some embedded prescriptive linguistics about what "science" should means (I guess not predictions that tend toward accuracy, or correction of errors based on empirics coming out the wrong way).

However, if you noticed, (2) actually has an embedded implicit assumption: namely that science makes predictions which are generally true, unlike critical theory or english literature. And in the psychology case, people don't bring out (2) when folks complain about (1).

We can similarly decompose discussions of racism and HBD:

  1. The reason black people are underrepresented in technology is because black people for biological reasons lack the ability to write code, not race-influenced choices by people in technology.

  2. It is racism to require the ability to code in order to hire someone as a programmer because of the disparate impact.

(1) is an empirical claim, (2) may be a claim about the prescriptive linguistics of "racism". But unlike the psychology case, people do bring out the prescriptive linguistics as if it somehow is relevant to (and refutes) the empirical claim (1). That's the bailey.

Do people really trot (2) out to refute (1) in the racism example? I would expect many people to refute (1) by just saying, "that is racist" and not really even talk about disparate impact or business hiring practices.

No, they trot out "socially constructed" to refute (1). It's crazy to suggest a socially constructed identity would have biological effects, after all.

I think you have it backwards. The motte is the defensible part

Fixed, thank you.

There's an industrial grade motte-and-bailey around the 'race is a social construct'. I encountered a medical doctor talking about how race was really just a social construct as opposed to biological, how there were really just populations with different distributions of alleles. The very next sentence she talked about how Ashkenazi jews are predisposed to have more of various kinds of illnesses. It seems that race is indeed biological! The argument is very much reliant on authority - I wasn't going to ask a pointed question about how those two ideas could be reconciled in a crowded room.

"Wealth is just a social construct - there are all kinds of complexities with debt, income, currency, liquid/illiquid assets and cost of living. Therefore progressive income tax is unfair and we should have a flat tax system!"

Nobody would accept this - wealth is a real thing and it's clearly a self-serving argument.

"Race is just a social construct - there are just populations with different distributions of alleles. But these different distributions of alleles don't have any substantive impact on intelligence or personality. Differences of outcome are a result of social institutions and/or oppression - these must be reduced by affirmative action."

I'm not woke, but I do think "Race is a social construct" has some merit. It's a terminological disagreement rather than a scientific one.

Someone who has one white parent and one black parent is often considered black, despite the genetic make-up being 50/50. National demographics on race also largely come from self-reported data in surveys, which have a famously growing list of races you can pick from.

As for intelligence differences between races, I think most people are simply ignorant rather than cognitively dissonant. It's not obvious to everyone that racial groups have different mean IQs, it's not something you learn from mainstream sources. Even once this fact is known, it's not crazy to think achievement disparities can be explained by culture and social institutions. We would all be a lot less economically productive if we moved to Haiti. Oppression isn't even a necessary factor.

Oh there are obviously issues with institutions, history and so on - but the sheer biologicality of it! Those very black-white mixed-race children have issues getting bone marrow because their parents often can't be donors. It was subtle discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury that doomed Newtonian physics. Above bone marrow issues alone would be enough to disqualify the 'race is not biological' argument if we were working purely quantitatively. A quick trip to the Olympics shows that African/blacks dominate sprinting but there's not a single black weightlifter to be found at the very top.

Race may be a social construct in a certain sense, but it's a very strong, useful social construct. The distinction between green and blue is arbitrary and continuous - but it's still there. There are such things as turquoise but green and blue are still real and useful. If the sky was green one day I'd be pretty shocked, if my apple was blue I'd know not to eat it!

But wealth is a social construct. You could give a monkey a hundred bananas and he may lord it over his peers, using it to coerce sexual favors and social position - but he couldn't imagine having a million bananas, more than he could ever eat, or create a system of classes dependent on banana-ownership, or leverage his bananas into purchasing banana plantations in El Salvador.

If wealth is real, it has a quality of subjective realness that only exist in human societies.

IIRC there've been a few experiments with teaching monkeys to use vending machines and they cottoned onto wealth very quickly.

I'll agree that it can be really hard to talk about complicated things in public. If I was asked the question implied above I would say it was more the case that race genuinely is a social construct, but that ethnicity shows human variation from shared history and genetics. So, 'Black' is a racial category but is never going to be an ethnic grouping, because there are dozens or hundreds of ethnicities with wildly differing histories and genetics that are lumped into that category; but Ashkenazi Jews are in contrast an ethnicity with a shared history and gene pool, as are say Telugu Hindus. So there is biology of ethnicity, but it's more difficult to have biological facts about the broader categories referred to as race.

An example of this that I can think of is health outcomes of South Asians or people from the Indian subcontinent, in Britain. There are high rates of predicted genetic problems if you're of South Asian descent, which can affect how likely a woman is to be referred for certain tests in pregnancy or a child for certain tests in infancy, because some South Asian groups have favoured kinship relations such as cousin marriage for cultural reasons. Other sub-populations within the South Asian heritage groups favour exogamy and are hence very much less likely to have the same rate of birth defects. But it's less acceptable for your midwife to sit down and enquire, "So, is the dad a first cousin of yours, are your mum and dad first cousins to each other?" than it is to have you check a 'race identity' box where you indicate you have heritage from the Indian subcontinent and they then refer you for additional tests on the basis of that racial category even though it's a broad category amongst whom many will not have any elevated risk.

I've noticed what you observe constantly. It's this bizarre phenomena of unidirectional knowledge I've almost singularly encountered in those that are woke and "educated". There are other forms of disordered thinking I've encounters among the religious right. But this particular form of disordered thinking I've only encountered there.

When I say unidirectional knowledge, I'm talking about bring up a fact, but you are only allowed to acknowledge the truth of that fact when you are using it to point in an approved direction. Otherwise you must deny it. So in your case, the fact is "race is a biological fact". If you use that fact to say anything unapproved, it's false. Like pointing out large measured IQ differences between African Americans and everyone else. But if you use that fact to help target funding towards neoliberal client populations, say African American's with sickle cell anemia or Jews in the New York media with other special health needs, then it's true.

Or maybe to take a less charged example. I'm tall. That's the fact. If it's pointed out I'm stronger and can reach high places, I will admit I'm tall. If it's pointed out I cost more to feed, and I'm awkward in confined spaces, I will deny until my dying breath that I'm tall.

A lot of this double think is facilitated by academia churning out split definitions. They will cleave "tall" into "good tall" and "bad tall". And they'll force all of society to adopt those terms, so you can't even think coherently about the topic anymore. I mean look what they did to sex and gender.

IIRC the measured IQ differences aren't "between African Americans and everyone else", they're between Africans and Whites/Asians, with other groups somewhere in the middle.

More on unidirectional knowledge, which is a nice phrase that crystalizes what I've observed for years:

The answer to ‘How do they square the circle’ is always ‘epicycles’ for the intelligent and ‘they don’t’ for the not. That’s not specific to woke, it’s just a rule of life.

What are epicycles (in this context)?

Additional explanations which make the model clunky overall, but solve a specific problem that would render it untenable compared to the observed world.

How do wokes

You should, sincerely, find a better place to ask. Nobody here self-identifies as woke, preciously few people are even adjacent, and people who hate them, despise them, are numerous as they get. You'd get a better and more honest answer just-about anywhere that isn't here and, additionally, I think you kind've know it. That this is not a place for the woke to be is no grand secret.

As much as I find these questions a little boring now (likely because I’ve spent too much time reading themotte), this is a good place to ask because posters are genuinely interested in understanding the nature of wokism. Even though no one subscribes to the ideology, you might still find informative or interesting replies.

I disagree. To use an analogy, the best people to ask about Christianity and the bible may be atheists, especially "converted" ones that spent years studying all there is in order to come to certain conclusion. Asking the question in your cookie cutter christian forum may often lead to incredulity, suspicion and even hostility of people who feel that their faith is threatened. I often see the same in woke spaces. Discussions often quickly devolve into some version of sneerclub and are ultimately useless.

When people want to learn about rightist totalitarianism they read Eco Umberto and Arendt Hannah, not Gentile Giovanni and Rosenberg Alfred.

Thus if for other ideologies, external perception is favoured over internal one, why shouldn't it be for social justice?

Back in high school, we absolutely read the things fascists wrote to learn about that ideology. When I went on to study history in university, we did much the same. None of this happened all that long ago, and it seems to have worked out pretty well, so I don't know why I'd even agree with your base assumptions here.

Also - why are you flipping first names and surnames? What is that all about?

I apologize for typical minding then. It is just that my local public library has books regarding fascism by Arendt and Eco, but not by Hitler, Rosenberg or Gentile.

Also - why are you flipping first names and surnames? What is that all about?

previous poster is Hungarian? ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_names#Hungarian_surnames

I came here specifically for a principled anti-woke perspective. I do already engage in quite a bit of conversation with wokes, which is actually what kick-started this thread of mine. I'm currently in a server full of them, and sometimes the topic of politics comes up, and I often try to offer up some casual prompting and disagreement and see if they can clarify their positions to me a bit more. I am still no closer to thinking that their worldview is consistent with rational thought, and I think all I've actually managed to do is slowly drive myself crazy and make them slightly uncomfortable with me (despite me having offered up my most anodyne opinions).

If I were to come to a conclusion based on my interactions with woke leftists, I'd say a very good portion of their worldview is empty consequentialism, with any contradictions smoothed out by a mental barrier that goes something like "well it looks good and can be used to justify 'good' social policy, and our detractors who can muster up the energy to contradict us so fervently are more likely than not motivated by some underlying prejudice". Outside of the most vapid mockery of people and things they don't like, few actual arguments are put forward, and the ones that are put forward when I speak to them are not particularly strong and clearly fly in the face of any kind of rational realistic worldview. Many of the people who believe it possess a worldview that has everything to do with optics and nothing to do with reason or logic.

So yeah, I've talked to them quite a bit, and now I want ideas from here before I solidify this conclusion even further.

I'm curious, actually. Have you talked to anyone in particular, in private, outside the 'public' sphere that is such a server? Or are the conclusions you draw the sorts of conclusions you made from seeing them engage among themselves without further prodding?

Woke ideology is the space busybodies, the permanently aggrieved, social strivers, and grifters flock to; it appeals to these sorts of people very much. If you want to bully people for believing unpopular things, if you want to scold your neighbours for falling out of line, if you want to get power and status for little real effort, joining up with team woke is really really helpful. This isn't even a criticism of the ideology: humanity has always had people like these, we will always have them, and they will always be nuisant antisocial bastards dragging the rest of us down.

The problem, then, is figuring out who genuinely has reasoned themselves into a woke space, and who's there for the community instead. What proportion there is I cannot say, but there will absolutely be people with good arguments to make for whatever we might call woke. And insofar those people are around, asking them to reveal their power level in SocJus spaces and asking them to risk their own standing before people they know well just to entertain a heretic just isn't the way to go. Your curiosity about their ideology isn't worth all that much, and they rightly aren't going to give you a genuine answer out in the open like that.

Finally, as a parting thought..

I came here specifically for a principled anti-woke perspective.

Here as elsewhere, you'll mostly find people whose guiding anti-woke principle is that they really hate funko pops. It is what it is.

Have you talked to anyone in particular, in private, outside the 'public' sphere that is such a server?

Yes, I have had many one-on-one verbal conversations with the people there in voice-chat. The most common person I do this with is the user who seems the most reasoned, the most willing to listen to points, and who will at least make an attempt to steelman them. I remain very unconvinced, but regardless I have made an attempt to engage in many different social contexts.

Of course you have to be careful with how you say anything, since if they view you as an unprincipled member of their out-group any debate from there on is not going to be very productive.

A place full of wokies wouldn't be any better either though, because wokies mostly don't believe in critical reflection on their ideology.

This isn't a simple "boo outgroup!" sneer either, just a fact. Wokeism is the ideology of "Listen and believe!", of objectivity, rationality, logic, etc. being periodically accused of existing merely as servants of their great oppressors and excuses for their various *isms, and so on. Going "Akshually, what about genetics?" to wokies and expecting a productive response is like waltzing into a Soviet-era Politburo and trying to explain basic economic theory to them, or describing the Rule of Three to a Christian inquisitor and why it means that witchcraft is actually just as moral as Christianity.

Of course this kind of answers OP's question. "Scrupulously adheres to and agrees with empirically-observable reality, including the latest advances in genetics, etc." is not a basic tenet of woke ideology. "Anti-racism is always good and racism is always bad" is. You might as well ask how Christians can really believe that some guy walked on water given all that we know about physics, density, buoyancy, etc. It won't make a difference.

If you have faith, and if there's a sufficient distance between your personal circumstances and the negative consequences of that faith (and sometimes even if there's not if you're particularly adept at maniacal, masochistic self-delusion), then you can believe whatever you want. If you really think about it, in the vast majority of cases and not even just about woke stuff, reality (or at least acknowledging it) is optional, at least temporarily. But "temporarily" can last a heck of a long time in human terms, as the old saying about markets staying irrational longer than you can stay solvent highlights. Similarly, wokies can deny reality longer than your sanity can stay solvent.

For what it's worth, I do agree that posting what he did in a woke place would do him no good either. In general, posts such as these are going to generate more heat than light: you'll get people accusing you of badthink and people with an axe to grind regarding woke ideology much more than you will find people interested in coming up with a good answer. OP is better off finding someone to ask personally, without fifty hyper-online people staring at him and waiting to judge his virtue. The social dynamics to figure out good-faith believes plain and simply aren't there in the sort of wide-open online forum you can easily post such questions.

I get your point, and I agree with it, but I think a lot of users here lack anyone to ask personally, and that's partly why they are here. I can see the booo outgroup angle of the op, but I viewed it primarily as exasperation - it's the op saying "hey I'm not stupid, but this doesn't make sense to me, you guys are smart, do you understand it?"

And that's one of the points of this place I thought, it's a place you can ask questions you can't ask elsewhere. This place becomes kinda worthless if there are questions that you shouldn't ask here, but also can't ask anywhere else, doesn't it? (not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't see a good solution to this problem.)

How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic?

Simply and effectively: they deny it.

Just like literal six days creationists see geology and paleontology as satanic lie, wokes see genetics and evolutionary science as racist lie.

They know nothing about "actual state of scientific knowledge" and proudly refuse to learn anything it - why waste your time with some fascist garbage?

Try to show genetic data, IQ tables and bell curve graphs in any woke place and see how fast you get banned, regardless how many impeccable scientific citations your stuff gets.

Well no, literal six day creationists believe in geology and dinosaur digs. They have a variety of hour long YouTube videos about how the conclusions of those fields really support six days of creation 6,000 years ago.

I suspect that the woke are similar, but it’s possible I’m wrong.

I second @Nantafiria in admonishing you to take this question to a forum which is not so unanimously “anti-woke” as this one; it’s not that you’re not going to get any insightful answers at all here, but rather that you’re not going to get any insight into what wokeness feels like from the inside, which seems to be what you’re asking for.

That being said, I’m going to give you my best attempt to describe what an actual “woke” (fair warning, I’m going to continue to put this word in scare quotes, because I believe that it’s intentionally under-defined and contains several motte-and-bailey imprecisions which are designed to be exploited) person thinks about when pondering the kinds of issues you’re asking about. Depending on which definition of “woke” you have in mind, I would have qualified as “woke” when I was in college a decade ago. I was exposed to many of these ideas several years before they exploded onto the mainstream, so I feel like I was exposed to a purer version of them, less adulterated and packaged for consumption by the general public than the strains of “wokeness” we see now.

The most important through-line connecting the various strains of “wokeness” is a belief in the centrality of power relations to every aspect of human life and society in a post-agricultural world. In the Marxist-Hegelian telling, the primordial state of humanity - what we would call the hunter-gatherer model of society - was profoundly egalitarian and non-hierarchical; every person was expected to contribute to the collective good in an amount commensurate with his or her ability to do so, and everyone understood the importance of providing for those members of society who could not “pull their own weight” - children, the elderly, the infirm/disabled, etc.

It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture that human societies began to be plagued by the twin evils of surplus and centralized political institutions, which produced a class of rent-seeking parasitic elites who could hoard surplus resources for themselves. This class had to overcome the perception of their own illegitimacy which would have been viscerally felt by all of the vast majority of people who were not members of that class; in order to defuse and redirect that resentment, that class of rent-seekers must have been incredibly adept at narrative-weaving - in creating powerful narratives which legitimated their privileged position. Priest-craft was certainly integral to that narrative-weaving, as was a sophisticated network of power-brokerage in which the privileged class could utilize leverage and patronage to play various factions of society against each other.

Why else would the mass of society, dispossessed by these rent-seekers, and having a vague pre-conscious ancestral memory of the idyllic egalitarian before-times, not simply rise up against these pathetic elites and reclaim their birthright? The fact that they didn’t is a powerful testament to the centrality and potency of narrative - specifically, elite-crafted narratives which legitimate hierarchy, inequality, and state power - in human society.

Hegel even talks explicitly in strangely religious, post-Christian terms about this. He references the metaphor of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, and he subverts this metaphor by saying that there is no literal god or Eden, but that this allegory actually represents the way that humanity was robbed of its idyllic anarcho-primitivist birthright by the advent of inegalitarian states. For Hegel, and subsequently for Marx in an attenuated and less explicitly religious sense, the teleological goal of humanity is to reclaim that birthright: to rebuild Eden, to dismantle the unjust structures who took it from us against our will by weaving webs of lies and cynical narratives.

So, you have an ideology to which the following axioms are central: 1. Hierarchical and unequal power relations are a (contingent) fact of human society; 2. The inherent injustice of those power relations is masked by self-serving narratives created and propagated by the class of individuals who benefit from those unequal power relations; 3. Some of those individuals may be intentionally creating and manipulating those narratives, but the majority of the individuals in the privileged class simply imbibe and repeat those narratives without investigating the truth value of those narratives, since to do so would be to risk delegitimizing the structures that allow their lifestyle to persist; 4. The only way to dismantle these unjust structural power relations - short of mass revolutionary violence, anyway - is to rhetorically deconstruct, attack, dismantle, and replace the legitimating narratives. You must first identify what those narratives are, which means you must constantly be vigilant against them. This vigilance sometimes requires a great deal of sophistication, because the narratives themselves are so sophisticated and are protected by a network of legitimating institutions which grant the narratives the armor of their support.

So, let’s look at discussions about race through that lens. First off, we have a clear example of a form of social capital which some people have and others don’t; those who have it enjoy a position of rent-seeking privilege, while those who don’t are barred from the privileged class and suffer accordingly. The social currency in question is whiteness. (Or, if you want to get even more sophisticated and up-to-date, you might even say “not-blackness”, as many black post-Marxists - see Charles Blow’s recent op-ed about the Nury Martinez debacle in Los Angeles for an example - predict the rise of a form of “lite supremacy” in which the racially privileged caste will continue to expand to encompass Asians, Latinos without significant African ancestry, and any other group that isn’t Black.)

Now that you’ve identified the vector along which this particular dynamic of unequal hierarchy is constructed, you then have to ferret out the narrative that people have internalized in order to legitimate that narrative. Remember: the default primordial state of humanity is egalitarian and does not recognize hierarchical distinctions between individuals, so any time you identify a hierarchy, there must, by definition, be a narrative preventing people from seeing it and instinctively revolting against it. So, what’s the narrative legitimating racial inequality? And, more importantly, what are the institutions that are propping that narrative up by granting it the imprimatur of their support?

The narrative, of course, is that this inequality is inevitable due to some inherent difference between classes of people, and any attempts to rectify this inequality will fail because it’s built-in. Big surprise there - this is the exact same form that every other hierarchy-legitimating narrative takes. The convenience of this narrative for the class of people benefiting from it is manifestly obvious and impossible to miss. How wonderful for you, the possessor of the social capital whiteness, that you just happen to be in the “biologically superior” caste, and there’s nothing we can ever do to change that, because the subaltern caste is just inherently worse than you. Nothing more to see here, folks, now get back to toiling and suffering while whitey hoards the fruit of your misery.

What’s the legitimating institution that protects this narrative? Well, it used to be the church. Their narrative was something like “God cursed Noah’s son Ham for looking upon his father’s nakedness, and now the descendants of Ham carry that ancestral curse which has made them natural slaves to the descendants of Japheth and Shem. It is God’s will, nothing we can do about it.” Or, at other times, instead of the descendants of Ham, blacks were said to bear the Mark of Cain, but the effect was the same. Well, we eventually deconstructed and delegitimated that particular narrative, and the institution which legitimated it now bears only a fraction of the power it once held; very few people uncritically internalize narratives propagated by churches anymore, at least not ones that contradict egalitarianism. So, the privileged caste needed to find a replacement institution to pass the narrative baton to, and they needed to do it in a hurry. Well, conveniently, the institution of Science™️ was there to step into the breach.

Science™️ is a very slick and effective power-legitimating institution, partly because it superficially seems to act in opposition to the old, defeated institutions such as the Church, and partially because it is so good at presenting itself as Objective and Narrative-Free. Once the proto-Marxists (the Enlightenment thinkers) showed up and dealt a knock-out blow to the Church, they had to then be co-opted by a narrative that allowed them to enter the privileged caste! Good lord, power-legitimating narratives are memetically powerful and infinitely-malleable, which is why we have to work so damn hard to relentlessly sniff them out. Now, the practitioners of Science™️ had obtained a form of social capital called Knowledge, and this allowed them to speak authoritatively and to, once again, intimidate the disempowered masses into submission. Do what you’re told, plebs, the Knowers have decreed that inequality is inevitable because some people are naturally worse than others. Conveniently, we the Knowers look and sound very similar to the guys who previously told you that their privilege is natural. Hell, in many cases they’re literally the same guys! But, nothing we can do about it. God - er, sorry, Science - made it this way. Get back to work!

Even if some of what the scientists are saying has some factual basis, that doesn’t excuse the fact that they are helping to once again lend legitimacy to the eternal narrative that powerful privileged people deserve their power. Our most important goal is to defeat that narrative. Everything else is secondary.

How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level.

Among woke-lite groups, AKA the gestalt that creates the Reddit frontpage, you're forgetting that they don't have the information you do. There's a lot of organic social infrastructure to prevent people from learning about group differences and the heritability of behavioural traits; you have to learn about them separately and then correlate the two sets of knowledge on your own. When I first read an internet comment saying the average black american's IQ was one standard deviation below average, my reaction was "Who did the study, the Klu Klux Klan?" For any academic who speaks about the topic openly, their reputations get dragged through the mud. Who wastes time investigating the claims of flat earthers?

Well, me. I investigated flat earth. I also investigated racist pseudoscience. And I didn't bail off any spurious offramps like iron deficiency in childhood or IQ tests being a measure of cultural knowledge that late aughts Google was eager to throw in my face.

For those who never investigate the problem to begin with, or get off one of the offramps, they "reconcile" it because there's nothing to reconcile. There's a reason why your side tends to be much better at passing ideological turing tests then theirs. They just don't know.

Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research. Could there be group differences? Maybe. Is there a genetic component? Maybe. Did Islam propogate through the world because it justified systemic violence against non-muslims, unlike other religions? Maybe.

But the impressionable average idiot has to be protected from fascists preaching radical ideology with oversimplified and deceptive statistics.

Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research.

This reminded me Sam Harris and Ezra Klein debate around Murray's Bell Curve book, race, IQ and all that with Harris defending existence of IQ gap. At one point Klein did use the argument that even if true (which he argued against), it would be bad for it to get out there. The discussion then derailed when Harris said he is interested in facts and what is true, for which Klein responded that Harris also has biases that prevent him from finding truth. When Harris denied such biases, Klein threw at Harris accusation that he did not have enough people of color on his podcast and the discussion got quite heated from there and turned into shit.

I absolutely lost any faith in Klein as an intellectual from there on. Anything he claims that is true or that he believes should automatically be suspicious as he may just lie for moral or political reasons. What was interesting is that Klein is fully aware of him engaging in this Conflict Theory thinking, his defense as I understand it is assuming that everybody is Conflict Theorist, some people just deny it. Another interesting notion to me is that Ezra knowing that he is a Conflict Theorist puts him on a moral high ground compared to misguided naive people like Harris who just delude themselves and do not have moral power to do what's right. To use an analogy, it is like CDC experts lying about efficacy of masks early on in order to prevent panic buying from general public. And they kind of admit it in similar fashion - people should have known that we lie and in fact it was a fantastic thing we did and we would do it again. Grow up and cough up some money so our good work can continue. I do not quite have my finger on what is going on here but I think this is very important phenomenon to understand.

Two explanations. One: elites of every age and culture have engaged in a healthy dose of noble lying as it served them. (Sometimes noble, usually self-interested.) Two: divine command as an ethical framework has fallen off a cliff. A hundred years ago good christians took the Ninth Commandment rather seriously. Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.

I'd guess it's a mix. Explanation one is true for decision-makers at the top, who have always been mercenary liars; but the conflict theorification of the lower ruling class like Klein feels new. Using the Gervais Principle and Straussian language respectively, the sociopaths/wise are the same as always. The clueless/gentlemen have lost scripture and only hear from their God through prayer, and sometimes he tells them to lie, or importantly, to not seek that fruit.

Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.

I agree, however another point is how proud these people are for openly standing on one side of the conflict. It is seen as a moral and just thing to lie and decieve in order to "win". Or to be more precise and trying to walk in their shoes- in their minds it is not lying and decieving, nato really. They are doing the good work. In the past I had a thought experiment of insane Christian who decided to kill babies right after they were baptized. In mind of this Christian he is on a mission to fill the heaven with innocent souls and he is the only willing to pay the price of eternal damnation. He was the only "true" Christian who has the guts and moral chutzpah to pay the price unlike those other weakling wannabe Christians. He was willing to pay the ultimate price of his immortal soul to "do good". Of course the question is if he really is in the right or hopelessly in the wrong. For me it takes huge heaps of arrogance, narcissism and and of course also psychopathy to pull something like that off. Additionally it is a strategy that brings huge cost to oneself which makes it very hard to correct due to sunk cost fallacy coupled with consistency fallacy.

Only we now live in a society where instead of condemnation of similar despicable practices and as you say, willingness to throw away the whole game by failing to process ones behaviour through categorical imperative - we now have some new morality praising such destructive behavior. There are definitely some psychological, social and moral angles to process here and as I say I am not quite there yet to have some stable opinion on it.

if you believe the christian religion then why would sending young children to heaven before they have a chance to do something that damns themselves to hell be despicable. the afterlife is eternal, this life is nothing compared to it. The real despicable thing is the religion which set up an afterlife system with the unjust consequences that make that behavior make sense.

Another interesting notion to me is that Ezra knowing that he is Conflict Theorist thinks this puts him on moral high ground compared to misguided naive people like Harris who just delude themselves and do not have moral power to do what's right.

This is an odd fact about the Left's Nietzsche-inspired standpoint view: if we really take the stance that the values of the Enlightenment (objectivity, universality and so on) are a lie to secure the position of one party, why should we care about the standpoint of the Left (i.e. the standpoint of the victims they claim to represent)?

If it's all just conflict and lies told to facilitate conflict then the minorities are "lying" too - this is exactly what Nietzsche lays out as slave morality. Which makes sense for them but why should anyone else care?

First of all, I do think this post is pretty much just "why is my idiotic outgroup so idiotic as to believe in idiotic things?" and not the kind of thing I like seeing here, personally.

Second, I think the things you describe about biology-denial is common not just in "wokes" but in much of the general population as well. The wokes certainly are the most fervent believers in it and also one of the primary driving forces that push it onto the general populace, but they're by far not the only ones to buy into the denialism hook-line-sinker.

Third, I think the answer to your question is just that most people don't actually care to do the research into this stuff. Most people, wokes included, follow a sort of cargo-cult version of principles that happen to be convenient for them in the moment, not principles themselves. An example that comes to mind - because it was one of the first I noticed back in my SJW days - was wokes (perhaps proto-wokes? "Woke" wasn't nearly as common a term back then as it is now, and they were usually called SJWs) calling opinions they disagreed with "gross" as a way to denigrate them. It came as a shock to me, because those same individuals had spent the past decade denigrating the notion of objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust in the fight for gay rights and gay marriage. Yet there they were, objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust. It made me realize that they mistakenly believed they were principled; it wasn't that they believed in the principle of non-judgment on the basis of disgust while their conservative opponents didn't, it was that they just didn't find gay marriage disgusting and so had no issue with using such a principle as a convenient momentary tool with which to beat down their conservative opponents.

So when it comes to science and specifically the evolution of the human brain and human societies, they don't actually follow the principles of science to do the research into figuring out truths about the universe, they just think cheering really loudly for the banner that says "science" on it while pushing all the same ideas they already believe in is what it takes for them to be pro-science.

I don't think this is unique to wokes. It's perhaps particularly worse in them than many other ideologies, because woke-ism specifically has concepts designed to turn off critical thinking. But then again, that's not exactly unique to woke-ism either. It just happens to be the one that is acceptable to people who consider themselves pro-science through optimizing itself to have the most convincing, shiniest pseudo-academic/pseudoscientific veneer that hides the fact that it's all made of cardboard.

It's perhaps particularly worse in them than many other ideologies, because woke-ism specifically has concepts designed to turn off critical thinking

What do you mean by this? Do you have any examples?

The concept of "lived experience" being that, when someone belonging to a demographic group that has been deemed oppressed claims something, it is to be believed without skepticism. Any sort of good-faith questioning or checking is deemed to be a form of oppression. This concept is repeated in many places, such as the "microaggression," which is, by definition, a behavior that the "microaggressor" doesn't perceive as being an aggression and is entirely up to the judgment of the "microaggressed upon" but which is still something that the potential "microaggressor" has the responsibility to avoid doing. There's also "believe women" and "believe all women," which are slogans designed specifically to push people away from applying basic good-faith skepticism to claims of fact when women make claims of specific sexual assault against individuals.

Of course, in practice it's impossible to apply this sort of thing in a consistent manner; if 2 different black people claim contradictory things to each other, then what do you do? In practice, it just means you have license to believe whoever is more convenient for your own social status and comfort while dismissing the other through various means (e.g. "internalized white supremacy"). And this sort of thing can lead to self-reinforcement, because by believing the right people, you can lead yourself to the conclusion that concepts like logical consistency and empirical science are themselves merely tools of the white supremacist patriarchy designed for the purpose of oppressing minorities; and it doesn't get much more anti-critical thinking than that.

There's also the attacking of free speech as a principle, the mockery of "Well Akshually", the attacking of "just asking questions" or playing devils advocate (you're derailing!). So there's a whole bunch of anti-heresy mechanisms in place.

I assume a fair share of you have played competitive multiplayer games, and in those games, have been surprised at the amount of "toxicity" and "inting" that is present in these games. Most people find these behaviours annoying and consider them to be universally wrong. Instead, I will present an argument for why in some cases making these decisions is not only amoral, but justified using League of Legends games as an example.

When you make decisions in League of Legends, you are doing things that can be classified as cooperating or cheating. Cooperating would be playing the game to win like any other, while cheating would be doing things such as spam pinging, flaming, inting, playing overly selfishly, and voting to not surrender a clearly lost game. How much these actions annoy me or other people is context dependent; inting in a clearly lost game and inting a game you would have otherwise won are obviously different in scale. Similarly, a fed jungler smiting the red buff away from an ADC who is out of the game is obviously different from a jungler that is behind smiting it away from a fed ADC. In fact, we have a word for collectively inting a game that is lost, and that is called "opening", which is standard practice in Korea if a game is lost.

Another time where I would consider "cheating" acceptable if it is done in retaliation to other behaviours that you find unacceptable, done in proportion of course. For example, lets say you are playing Lee Sin and you are ganking for your Syndra, he stuns the enemy mid and you miss the q, he starts spam pinging you. While he is being a dick by pinging you for making an honest mistake, throwing the whole game by feeding the enemy mid would not be acceptable. A more proportional form of retaliation would be to steal away his cannon minion or blue buff, which will make him mad but wouldn't meaningfully change the course of the game. This kind of proportional retaliation would likely reduce the amount of "cheating" in the game because people would be less likely to cheat in the first place if they received some sort of punishment for it.

In my experience, in League of Legends, no game is ever 100% lost until the nexus is destroyed. The enemy team can always throw the game and make dumb ass mistakes. Even more so in recent seasons with come back bounties. You even occasionally see it in professional play, where mistakes are relatively rare compared to low elo play, where mistakes are constant. So ever choosing to aim to make teammates upset instead of trying to win is irrational, assuming your goal is trying to win. If your goal by punishing your teammates is to make them behave better in the future, I think that's also irrational, because if someone's at the point where they're punishing you, punishing them back isn't going to start making them decide to go back to trying to win.

The only thing it makes sense for is saving time instead of trying to maximize victory/loss ratio. If you only have 1 hour of play, and a game can take a maximum of 40 minutes, better to surrender your first game at 20 minutes if you think there's a 90% chance you'll lose, so at least you can get another game in.

In a more sane universe, match making would take into account your past behavior and everyone would "get the teammates they deserve".

What is "inting?"

Why is this in the culture war thread?

"Inting" is "intentionally feeding" (i.e. intentionally dying to the enemy team to give them gold). Though I've also heard "inting" used to refer to intentional game-throwing of any kind.

Also fwiw "opening" is when you stop defending and let the enemy invade your base uncontested ("open the gates", "leave your lane open", etc).

This kind of proportional retaliation would likely reduce the amount of "cheating" in the game because people would be less likely to cheat in the first place if they received some sort of punishment for it.

My own experience and reading on this subject leads me to believe that this is an absurdly wrong conclusion. Retaliation tends to be disproportional, because people tend to underestimate harm caused to the other in doing so. This is the reason behind the common saying, "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind".

There’s a lot of discussion on this board about Human Biodiversity (HBD), with particular attention devoted to the possibility of racial differences in intelligence.

In practice, these conversations seem to generate more heat than light. One obstacle is that intelligence is an exceedingly complex/sensitive topic in its own right, even before race is introduced.

With this in mind, I’m wondering about the state of HBD discussion as restricted to potential non-cognitive, phenotype-level differences across races.

For example, is there an academic/cultural consensus that genetic factors explain (at least partly) the recent dominance of African-heritage athletes in “sprint” events in international track & field competitions? If so, is this something that can be discussed in polite company, or is the topic considered taboo?

I raise these questions because it seems strictly easier to make progress in the domain of physical differences than cognitive differences (cognitive differences are harder to operationalize, potentially easier to influence through culture, and tend to be more entangled with our values systems). Additionally, it seems like understanding the state of (potential) non-cognitive differences should provide some of the groundwork for discussions of (potential) cognitive differences across races.

Another phenotype difference which is tabooed is penis size.

...Your question about taboo attracted so few answers. Maybe the topic itself is tabooed...

Is this the gender difference thread?

Edit: Oh, wait, my mistake.

also, smell

Crossposted at https://medicalstory.substack.com/p/none-dare-call-it-domestic-violence since I've decided to keep a list of my long posts there.

This is an essay whose intended audience is people who are already against abortion.

We are losing. We lost an election in Kansas by 18 percentage points. Right-wing radio seems to have decided the talking point is that it will still be easy to travel for abortions post-Roe.

The argument we are losing to is the “none of the government’s business” argument. This argument is the same one that kept the government mostly out of domestic violence situations until less than a half century ago. (There is a book – a very good book for those who like biographies - “A Private Family Matter: A Memoir” by Victor Rivas Rivers about growing up with a violent and abusive father. The title derives from what the cops told Rivers to dismiss him when, as a teenager, he finally got the courage to go to them for rescue for his situation.)

Abortion is literally domestic violence – it is intra-family and it is violent. So the pro-choice side is using the domestic violence defense for literal domestic violence.

It works for them because our side doesn’t call it out as such – there is already a meme, even among libertarians, that the government should protect domestic violence victims. We avoid accessing the meme because we are afraid our opponents will run away screaming (which is bad when there’s an imminent election) or, worse, run towards us screaming (and bring the Eye of Sauron Cancel Culture upon us). I think this is true even, perhaps especially, for the professional political marketing class.

Epistemic status: I am both more confident than I should be given the evidence, but less confident than the tone that comes across as a re-read this. While the desirability of fighting abortion is beyond the scope of this essay, I very much want to be as effective as possible in fighting abortion, so I want to hear from people in the intended audience who disagree.

Some justification:

I’ve been on and off active in the pro-life movement during my life. Through this, I’ve had a fair number of discussions with the general public about their views on abortion, especially those that disagree with me. Some people argue that the fetus isn’t an entity with moral standing and right, so killing one is fine. I understand where these people are coming from. I disagree, but I understand. I don’t think this is a winning argument for the pro-choice side, or else they wouldn’t have abandoned its use a couple decades ago.

A few argue that the fetus is an entity with moral standing but having pregnancy or baby is such an imposition on the mother that abortion is ok. I still understand where these people are coming from. I absolutely don’t agree (although I do think we should work on making life easier for the mother), but I still understand. I am quite sure that this argument would never take with the general public, despite its attraction in academic settings.

But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.

A few argue that the fetus is an entity with moral standing but having pregnancy or baby is such an imposition on the mother that abortion is ok. I still understand where these people are coming from. I absolutely don’t agree (although I do think we should work on making life easier for the mother), but I still understand. I am quite sure that this argument would never take with the general public, despite its attraction in academic settings.

But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.

This is essentially the same argument isn’t it? Abortion may or may not be morally wrong, but forcing a particular choice would violate the mother’s bodily autonomy, so we think it’s for her to decide.

This is essentially the same argument isn’t it? Abortion may or may not be morally wrong, but forcing a particular choice would violate the mother’s bodily autonomy, so we think it’s for her to decide.

So it is murder in the first degree after ~22 weeks/viability?

… maybe?

If at some point the baby can be "aborted" via C-section, I don’t have any objections to mandating it be done that way.

The first is a question of moral good, either utilitarian or deontological argument in nature. Either the imposition on the mother causes greater moral harm in the utilitarian calculus than the moral harm of killing the fetus, or it deontologically takes a higher precendence than the fetus' life.

The second is a question of jurisdiction. The claim is that it doesn't matter whether you believe the abortion itself is morally right or wrong, it's not you or the government's job to impose your view of morality on someone else.

So it's sort of a distinction on meta levels. Claim 1 is that both abortion and not-abortion are morally acceptable in some semi-objective sense, so the woman to have the object level choice of abortion as people do in any choice when both options are acceptable. Claim 2 is that morality is subjective, so each woman can decide for herself whether abortion is wrong or not, and then decide to do it or not based on her own internal morality.

Abortion may or may not be morally wrong, but forcing a particular choice would violate the mother’s bodily autonomy, so we think it’s for her to decide.

Can't reduce it down to be quite that simple, as there are enough possible variations that might be relevant.

Because you can make an argument that the woman already 'decided' when she agreed to and participated in unprotected sex with a guy.

Or we argue that women don't understand that pregnancy is a risk of sex, which is pretty demeaning in it's own way.

And obviously if she did not agree to it, she was raped, and that DOES violate her bodily autonomy.

And, going further, if the argument is about bodily autonomy, should a woman be allowed to agree to unprotected sex for the purpose of procreation, take affirmative steps to increase the odds of pregnancy, get pregnant, willingly carry the fetus with the stated intent of giving birth, then around 3 months (12 weeks) or so into it just changes her mind and decides "nope, my body my choice. Disregard the fact that I made a different choice several times before now" and get an abortion?

And in that scenario, does the father's interest come into play at all, since he was relying on her to carry her end of the 'bargain' and bring the fetus to term?

I'm not trying to engineer 'gotchas,' I'm just pointing out that reducing it to bodily autonomy does not settle the full moral question here, unless you bit the bullet and say abortion should be available 'on demand and without apology' in all cases.

Which almost nobody actually believes.

But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.

It isn't exactly my position, but closest to it out of three you outline. Basically, it builds on observation that sometimes one genuinely must choose between some evil or another, and the government action to ban another doesn't necessarily help. Abortions are bad, so people cry that the state must do something; banning abortions is something, but what are its consequences?

On the topic of "domestic violence defense": I would say that most of time in Western history, a government action against domestic violence could have been detrimental for the core purpose of family (material conditions of upbringing or children; managing the household; transmission of property to the next generation), because legal proceedings would have removed an important adult from the family. Only with a bunch of other modern solutions to social fabric, the government action and prosecution of domestic violence makes sense. Incidentally it makes families less important and fundamental. (And frankly, sometimes the modern system can be abused by one party by casting as abuse or violence many things that are not.)

Abortion once came up in presence of my grandmother when she still was lucid. I had previously never discussed anything sexuality-related topics with her because of sort of decorum and religious upbringing. I was gobsmacked when she very matter-of-factually started recalling ages-old gossip about a neighbor who died from home attempted abortion related to infidelity case during the aftermath of WW2.

But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.

Could you describe more what you found baffling about it? My impression is the underlying sentiment ("X is morally bad but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X") is quite common, though people will fill in disparate things for X. Is it just that "killing an innocent baby" is so obviously wrong, in your evaluation?

"X is morally bad but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X" is common and I believe it in certain contexts.

"X is killing an innocent person but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X" is more like the framing that baffles me, and doesn't seem to be used in any other setting (except war, now that I think of it - but it doesn't seem correct to me that these people are bringing up the same meme that applies to war). My point was not about my morality, it's about what other people's morality is on other issues.

Abortion is literally domestic violence – it is intra-family and it is violent. So the pro-choice side is using the domestic violence defense for literal domestic violence.

Imagine if I said "spanking is domestic violence", or "Forced schooling is domestic violence", or "vaccinating children is domestic violence". Are these also, therefore, bad? None of these have anything to do with the reason people dislike domestic violence, which is "men beating women, which is very bad, women are vulnerable and easy to abuse because mumbles, feminism, etc". Non-central fallacy, worst argument in the world, abusing taboo ideas! <X right wing issue> isn't actually the same thing as <Y left-wing issue against vulerable minority victims>. Transitioning isn't child abuse. Gun rights aren't critical for black people fighting cop racism. Capitalism isn't good because it uplifts poor people. Please defend your claims on their own terms, in ways that make sense, instead of picking a vaguely related idea that everyone gets mad about and saying they're the same. It doesn't even work - you're just playing on the same 'we must help the oppressed omg!!' approach that you're losing to anyway.

Spanking (of children as punishment, not the other kind) is domestic violence.

The almost-perfect negative correlation between support for legal abortion and support for legal spanking of children strongly suggests that the "abortion is domestic violence" argument is not being made in good faith. To be fair to MedicalStory, I don't think he is suggesting making the argument in good faith - I think he is suggesting it as a way of arguing in the opponent's language in order to persuade across a cultural barrier.

Are these also, therefore, bad?

The first one is, and for the same reasons. (Except between consenting adults.)

The variety of examples is so anyone will disagree with some of them - a 'conservative anti-vaxxer' would object to the first but agree with the third, for instance.

The point is - spanking is 'domestic violence' if spanking is bad. Forced schooling is bad if school is bad. Giving a child a vaccine is violence if ... vaccines are bad. Saying it's 'domestic violence' doesn't add anything beyond a strong signal that 'this isn't okay' and 'you are abusing your power to hurt people', but you can only do that if the action itself is bad.

I don't know why you would weaken the argument against abortion by calling it domestic violence instead of murder.

It's murder, a mother is killing her own helpless baby. You don't need to get more complicated than that about it.

But then why are there so many people who believe the mother is killing her helpless baby, but still think the government should stay out of it?

I don't think we should contradict anyone who says it's murder. My point is that accessing the domestic violence meme is a way of getting across to these people why the government should get involved, even though it's intuitively personal on some level.

In fairness there is also an amazingly high degree of sympathy for mothers who murder their children after birth too, to the extent that they're often portrayed as tragic victims themselves. The "women cannot fail, only be failed by society" thing is incredibly strong, and causes all kinds of weird distortions to the usual moral calculus.

This feels like it's just calling someone a baby killer with extra steps. I don't see how this would be more persuasive for people that already think abortion is baby killing than just straightforwardly saying that it's killing a baby. Likewise, it's obviously not going to persuade very many pro-choicers because they have already demonstrated that they're not buying the baby killing claim.

I'm sorry, but reading this my first thought is (as another put it) "just calling someone baby-killer with extra steps".

My second thought is that this argument has a very "checkmate atheists" type vibe to it that having been one of those guys in a previous life just feels really juvenile to me now.

You say "we are losing", but I am skeptical. It certainly doesn't feel like we are losing.

But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.

The abortion debate in my opinion is the single noisiest debate there is. I feel overwhelmed when I think of the magnitude of the gap in inferential distance between the two sides and that there are so many edge cases and irreconcilable moral/semantic distinctions across multiple layers of the debate. Its like;

  • Level 0: Does God exist?

  • Level 1: What does it mean to be alive?

  • Level n: Can we agree that abortion is killing a baby or not?

  • Level TANGENT: Is killing wrong all the time?

  • Level >n: Can we agree that abortion is right/wrong in some circumstances?

  • Level >>n: Can we agree that abortion is good/bad on net?

  • Level >>>>n: What should the government do with that conundrum?

Most people are not armed with the IQ, the clarity of mind, the understanding of logic, ethics, philosophy, etc. To even flesh out their own points let alone their opponents points. And have those points not only be consistent across the levels of inference, but be consistent with other beliefs and moral intuitions they hold.

The sentiment you are describing above is one such instance of that. People being made to have an opinion on something they have no business having an opinion on. It's all noise and no signal.

And I say this not because I disagree, but that statement is just about incompatible with any set of moral intuitions just about anywhere. Either killing babies is wrong and we don't do it, or killing babies is okay and its okay to kill children too under the consent of the mother, or its not killing babies because its okay and killing babies is not okay?

This is a debate that only Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed can solve. Not the debate 101 class (even if they're from Harvard) and least of all policy makers.

I'm just waiting for technology that can sustain a baby at any point of development outside of the womb to become viable, cheap and widespread. The only other option is to resurrect God, playing God might be the next best thing.

I'm just waiting for technology that can sustain a baby at any point of development outside of the womb to become viable, cheap and widespread.

I'm skeptical that this would change the contours of the debate much. Most of the on-the-ground pro-choice arguments are about the negative effects of raising a child on the woman. If all of a sudden would-be mothers weren't obligated to carry the child, there'd still be a bunch of salt about being responsible for the post-fetal child (see: legal paternity surrender/paper abortions). And the principled bodily autonomy argument would still stand: extracting the fetus for the incubation chamber would still be invasive of the childbearer's body (though perhaps no more so than an abortion itself).

Extracting a first trimester fetus would presumably be a lot less invasive than giving birth, though. I agree that artificial wombs would not settle the abortion debate, but I do think they'd settle several of the arguments that motivate the debate -- although certainly not all of them.

Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.

I'm pro abortion and I've never understood people who say this either. I think the best explanation is that people who say this are being disingenuous. I think it's more likely that they don't really view the fetus as morally equivalent to a baby but they know that's a tricky thing to convince someone of and it's hard to draw precise moral lines so they try to sidestep the argument, personally I view this as cowardly, dishonest and detestable. So although we're on different sides of the abortion debate we're on the same page about people who make this specific argument.

It's both a little trick that's selectively used in cases where they agree with the conclusion and something they actually believe in a vague sense - vaguely like "this is a woman, i am a man, i am privilege, i cannot disagree with her , because it's socially unacceptable and hurts oppressed person". It's usually not knowingly or intentionally disingenuous.

I don't make that argument, but a more sympathetic rendering might be something like "Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think the government should investigate and prosecute abortions." Someone saying that would still have to make the argument about why the government should be able to investigate and prosecute some violent crimes and not others, but it's not insane to say either that establishing facts about an abortion are harder than other killings; that abortion investigations are more traumatic to the target than other types of investigations; or that pre-birth children have a lower moral worth than post-birth children (despite still having moral worth) such that the costs now outweigh the benefits.

I find it difficult to take the Lovecraftian take on reproduction seriously when you compare modern, first-world procedures and outcomes to the universal norms just a few hundred years ago. Hundreds of generations of women went through far worse.

Indeed, the horror that we might be forcing a woman to endure a terrible situation is awful, indeed. On the other hand, the horror that we're slaughtering innocent babies is awful, too. I don't think anti-abortion activists are "innocent to potential horrors", they're in fact very aware of a different horror.

"I should be non-judgmental when it comes to the behavior of oppressed/vulnerable people"?

This is not a rationale that I endorse, but it seems plausible to explain that argument.

I'm skeptical of this because I rarely see anyone extend such charity to an actual baby killer (ie a mother who smothers her newborn). No matter how vulnerable of a situation she was in.

It might not be intentional deception though. Someone else made a point that the abortion debate is complicated enough that most people simply can't grok the nuances enough to even have a well thought out position.

Abortion is not domestic violence. Abortion is abortion. It is a unique issue with unique circumstances. So it will required a tailored set of policies to satisfy enough the stakeholders.

But you're just using the way in which domestic violence is "very bad", which is something about how women are vulnerable and get really hurt, but that doesn't apply at all to abortion. Also, murder is worse than domestic violence, and abortion is domestic violence 'only because' aortion is murder, so how can this help?

Yelling at a child when they're about to put a fork in an electrical outlet and you're 100 feet away from them is literally hurting a child's feelings. But - it isn't ... bad.

So it tree logging. So I guess performing abortion is like chopping down a tree. Or mowing a grass.

By the logic in your last sentence a lot of things not typically considered violence would fit the definition. Let's say you have surgery to destroy a tumor. The tumor is "something" and the surgery is a behavior that destroys it, is that violence? if you say yes your definition is broken, thats not how people use the term

I think it's not unreasonable to call surgery violence toward a tumor. Certainly more reasonable than "silence is violence" woke type usage.

Why do people keep making this argument? "My enemies, who I also think are lying hypocrites, made <ridiculous and unjustifiable claim>. And my claim is slightly better than theirs, so I get to make it, and you can't object it's nonsense."

...Because it's a straightforward appeal to justice? If the bar for accepting claims is low, then why should I volunteer for a higher bar than is generally applicable?

"Those other guys are jumping off of bridges. Why shouldn't I be able to do that too?"

Because the point of 'accepting claims', in this context, is to actually figure out if abortion is good or bad, what relevance that has to law, and use that knowledge and the way one comes to it in other areas as well. "Abortion is domestic violence" doesn't mean anything other than "i don't like abortion for some other reason", and throwing terrible justifications at each other is pointless. Believing it makes you dumber, and less able to figure out the right approach to abortion, and anything else. What about children transitioning? Domestic violence! AI art? Theft from the WORKING CLASS. Banning affirmative action is LITERALLY jim crow. TheMotte isn't a TV ad for a state senate race, and the latter shouldn't even exist.

"Abortion is domestic violence" doesn't mean anything other than "i don't like abortion for some other reason",

I'm not saying the domestic violence argument is the best ever, but your claim here is flatly untrue. The basis of the analogy is the claim that abortion, like domestic violence, is violence within a context where there is a special duty of not committing violence, specifically, within the family. You may disagree with this claim for any number of reasons, but it is not contentless.

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You can make a good case that a bit of further nuance is needed, but here's a different example: an amputation. Cutting off Joe's foot would be very violent in some contexts (assault/maiming), but not generally considered violent in others (surgical removal of a gangrenous foot).

In the case of surgery, you could view it as "intending to hurt Joe's foot" or "intending to help Joe." In the case of maiming, there is clearly an intent to hurt, regardless of whether you're looking at Joe or Joe's foot.

But wouldn't that apply to abortion as well? The way I see it is if you count the fetus as an agent abortion is violence if you don't it's not so just calling abortion violence is assuming the conclusion. It's perhaps good rhetoric to rally people who are already pro life but it's not really an argument.

I think there are three problems here.

First, argument-by-analogy is a poor strategy generally, because analogies often work as an attempt to explain a position, but not as an attempt to persuade. If you're trying to persuade, the other person can always point out differences between the object case and the analogy (there are always differences, otherwise it's not an analogy), and then you're just arguing over whether a given difference is material.

Second, abortion is an unusually distinct object case. In most cases, you can say "this is really close to that, so we should treat them similarly" and objections concern whether you're jumping an important line in the process. But there aren't other object cases that are "pretty close" to abortion; when you're comparing it to a different thing, it's not hard to come up with multiple distinctions that might justify different treatment.

Third, the fundamental values involved in any given position in the abortion context are right there. There just aren't many inferential steps from values to policy for mistake theory to have room to maneuver; it's all conflict of values. At that point, it's down to persuasion that one set of values is preferable to another, and appeals to, say, emotion or aesthetics are perfectly valid argument types.

because analogies often work as an attempt to explain a position, but not as an attempt to persuade

Huh? How are these different? If you listen to political speeches or debates, both often attempts to persuade, there are tons of analogies.

Let's say I'm making an argument, and the other person doesn't understand what I'm getting at. Quite often, I could use some shared reference point as an analogy to make my line of argument more clear.

Alternatively, I'm making an argument, and the other person firmly disagrees. I could use an analogy, but it usually won't be persuasive, because analogies are never perfect 1:1 matches to the original subject, and the other person can just say, "oh, your analogy is different here and that's a material difference, so your analogy is flawed and not good support for your position."

it's rare for someone to disagree, hear an analogy, and respond, "oh, I was wrong the whole time, but now I agree." If the other person was on the fence beforehand, and not committed to disagreeing? Might work.

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Female circumcision: domestic violence or not? Is a baby more similar to healthy tissue or to a tumor?

I think most people who are conflicted about abortion can imagine any number of horrible situations in which an abortion feels like the lesser of two evils, or at least where one can empathize with someone for deciding that it is. And I think a lot of people recognize that horrible situations like this are best left to the people involved directly, rather than having the state interfere with a one-size-fits-all rule that cannot possibly take into account the nuances of the situation. All happy pregnancies are alike; each unhappy pregnancy is unhappy in its own way.

Reproduction is fraught and messy. There are serious risks to the mother, serious risks to the baby, potential for lifelong disability or death for either or both of them. There are babies born with severe birth defects, babies who are born already doomed to die in the days or weeks that follow, babies that leave behind a tiny corpse and a gaping hole in their parents' souls even before their mother has finished recovering from the physical trauma in the hospital. Parenting is a long-term all-consuming physical and financial commitment unlike any other, and there is raw horror at the prospect of being dragged into that kind of a commitment. Adoption is possible, but it carries all of the physical risks of childbirth plus extreme short-term and long-term emotional trauma. Horrible complications of all kinds can arise: a spontaneous twin or triplet pregnancy; one twin or triplet beginning to absorb another; the uniquely agonizing prospect of extreme pre-term birth; a late diagnosis of trisomy; preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, complications from drug or alcohol use while pregnant; developmental defects like micro-, hydro-, an-, or any other type of -encephaly. Even mid to late term miscarriages, which are a dime a dozen really, are the source of intense familial pain that never fully heals.

There's deep and raw horror to the human condition, plenty of times when the veil of abstraction breaks and biology becomes abomination, and the veil is thinnest at the start and end of life. People who are into or beyond normal parenting age will have friends who have experienced all manners of horror and speak of it reluctantly and only with those who are very close, and can only speculate how many more have experienced similar, or how bad it really was.

When I see posts like yours -- "but abortion is murder, so therefore..." -- I disagree, but my most salient emotional reaction is one of recognition... specifically, recognition of innocence, innocence of the potential horrors. The power of the message of not coming between a woman and her doctor is explained by the segment of the electorate who has had a glimpse of these horrors. It is a sizable segment, bigger than you might think.


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