This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
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.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Grift Upon Grift
A white woman named Shiloh Hendrix took her child to the park.
What happened next is not totally clear. This is the only direct video evidence I could find, since so-called journalists are apparently allergic to providing direct links to original sources for direct evaluation (God forbid they should create a hyperlink to a source containing uncensored slurs I guess). In this video a man accuses Shiloh (who is holding her young child) of calling a black child a racial slur. She tells him that the black child was stealing from her son, and, uh, firmly invites the videographer to go away. Instead, he demands that she say the slur to his face. So she does, several times, and he tells her that the word is "hate speech." In some other places I have seen the video continue as he follows her to her car while continuing to berate her. (If there is actual video of her saying anything at all to the black child, I have not been able to find it.)
According to Shiloh's GiveSendGo,
As I write this, she has received $735,837 in donations, prompting some commentary. She hasn't been charged with any crime yet, but someone is considering it.
The "other side" of the story has been told... inconsistently, I guess. Also from the Yahoo writeup:
Several stories (but not all) mention the supposed autism; some add that the black child had three siblings keeping his parents busy at the time and was therefore unsupervised, explaining his reported misconduct as mere childish curiosity.
Well, hopefully Omar knows the boy's parents; after all, according to another news report Omar is the black child's uncle. Or is this a folksy "every man from Somalia is my uncle" sort of thing? Unclear! Incidentally, Omar was recently charged with felonious sexual misconduct, only to have those charges dropped for unclear reasons. Well, "in the interests of justice," whatever that means in this context:
In fact this doesn't actually state that the charges against Sharmake have been dropped, but everyone seems to think so. Presumably just one more piece of relevant information denied to me by the transformation of facts into culture war ammunition.EDIT: This link shows the documents dropping the charges.In response to Hendrix's GiveSendGo, the Rochester branch of the NAACP opened a GoFundMe and raised about $350,000 before closing it down (apparently at the behest of the black boy's family).
It's difficult to know how much to read between the lines, here, in part because the lines themselves are so blurry. Omar is apparently a single man and possible child sex offender who was filming at least one otherwise-unsupervised child at a public park. His story about how he is connected to the child is inconsistent. Given the current state of American politics with regard to immigration law, a family of Somalians deliberately avoiding the public eye seems well advised, but also raises further questions about broader demographic trends and the impacts of those trends. Meanwhile, Ms. Hendrix's unapologetic utterance of the killing curse has turned into a bit of a financial bonanza for all involved (except, apparently, Omar...).
Of course the culture war angles are attention-grabbing, and the toxoplasma of rage ever present. But at the risk of going full "boo outgroup," can I just say--I really, really hate crowdfunding? It seems like a horrible mistake, a metastasized version of the cancer of social media, virtue signaling with literal dollars that feed nothing but further grift. Regardless of their reasons, I'm thankful to the Somali family for shutting down the NAACP's grifting fundraiser as quickly as they did. I'm gobsmacked that Shiloh has managed to milk three quarters of a million dollars (and counting!) out of being accosted over a minor literal playground scuffle.
I mean, I get it--the money is tempting, and if you aren't getting yours, someone else will be more than happy to scoop it up "on your behalf." Racism is big business, for which the demand vastly outstrips the supply, and overtly slur-slinging white moms are... well, usually they're rapping or something, not dropping the honest-to-God Hard R. And on a child!
...for $750,000, though?
To be completely honest--I was irritated earlier this week because one of my social feeds was inundated with requests for money for some kid who was super sick and then died. Did he not have health insurance? Oh, no, he was insured. Why did he need $50,000 then? Well, his parents had to take some time off work, you know. Didn't they have paid family medical leave? Oh, well, yes, but you know how "incidentals pile up." Burials ain't cheap! And everyone was so heartbroken, because kids are so great! And this kid was great. Just brightened the room and everyone's lives. Obviously $50,000 isn't going to bring him back, or help his parents heal, but at least we can all show our sympathy and support... better than "thoughts and prayers," eh?
So probably I was kind of sensitized to this when I ran across the story of Shiloh and her anonymous (autistic?) antagonist. How many humans live out their lives by, ultimately, convincing lots of other humans to just bankroll them? How much of my frustration with these people boils down to a kind of deep-rooted envy, that I must labor while others take their ease, simply because I do not have a gift for grift?
As a matter of principle, I do not give money via crowdfunding. I don't even use Patreon, much less GoFundMe or GiveSendGo or whatever. I regard it as a moral failing when I see others do so, no matter how apparently worthy the cause. I am prejudiced against the entire enterprise, but I cannot rule out the possibility that it is because I have no expectation of ever benefiting from it--even though this is at least in part because I would feel like a charlatan if I did.
Seldom have I heard a story where I had so little sympathy for any side. It makes the characters in the alligator river story seem like paragons of morality by comparison.
Like, if a kid tries to steal from your sons bag, perhaps don't call him a racial slur? Unless he is like 14, even calling him a "little shit" would probably be in bad taste.
And if you observe some Karen calling a kid a racial slur after he has just tried to steal from her kid's bag, perhaps leave it at a "shut the fuck up, you racist bitch", and don't escalate to social media?
And if you repeat racial slurs while someone is pointing a camera on you, and you are not already openly a KKK member, nor are Donald Trump, don't be surprised if the shitstorm hits you.
Right?
A shitstorm and somehow, between the various parties, a million dollars in crowdsourced donations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
She isn’t receiving the money for insulting a child (with a word he is likely to use 1000 times in his life against other Africans, often with prejudice attached). She is receiving the money as reparations for an unjust system of oppression that permeates the fabric of America, where a small racial infraction while White leaves you reputationally and financially destitute. There is a huge difference here. It’s not for congratulations, it’s a sympathetic safety net for a mother who has to deal with institutional racism against her people in America, in a state which her forefathers braved the cold to build from nothing.
Two other things to note:
Somalians are statistically horrifying, with low intelligence and high cousin marriage, with a TFR greater than 5 and a grizzly Islamic culture resistant to Western civilization, plus a history of scams in Minnesota eg autism clinics. There are 100,000 in the state and growing. If calling every Somalian the N-word got them out of the state, it is arguably a moral obligation incumbent on every fairer resident to do this, in terms of securing utility. Shiloh is on the Right Side of History, if there exist future Whites in the state to write it in Deseret.
The funds have the secondary effect of deterring the antisocials from filming grievances that they instigate. If white people get money for their low willpower replies irl (colloquially called n-word fatigue), then we will have fewer White / Karen shaming in America. This is for the utilitarian good.
Does it count as reparations if the donors are almost certainly all white?
Not to be trite, but America has to get very, very, almost unfathomably bad for someone to move back to Somalia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The amount of fakery and grifting I'm seeing on, for instance, Tumblr is sickening. Copy-paste plaints about "I am X, a mother in Gaza, we are dying" (insert the same photos of bombed buildings and rubble) "please find it in your heart to support me" appeals for money.
You can tell these are grifters, but people still take them on face value and boost them and encourage "help this poor woman out". I'm constantly blocking and reporting them, but Tumblr bots which were so active on cracking down on "female-presenting nipples" seemingly do nothing to stop fraudulent appeals for money.
This reminds me that I have an effort post to write about some people I have known...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Respect for that!
More options
Context Copy link
One thing to note that I believe is true - the NAACP's fundraiser used this incident as an issue, but the funding was just for them. None of it was going to the family, so I'm not sure they lost anything by turning it down.
Honestly at this point if someone started a crowdfunding thing for me - whatever it was - and it tipped over probably around $50k I would not turn it down. I wouldn't care if it was people doing it to send a signal or whatever. I just can't believe this many people are stupid enough to donate. Being part of a CW flashpoint basically means people win the lottery, which is completely unfair. 90% of the people involved somehow turn out to be pieces of shit!
This is actually a kind of interesting question--the reports I read initially said that the NAACP fundraiser was intended to cover presumed legal expenses for the family to pursue justice. Crowdfunding "to cover legal expenses" does seem to actually just be enterprising lawyers doing lawyer things--a very Chicago moment, if you've seen that musical.
However the NAACP GoFundMe page now claims that 100% of the money is going into a trust for the kid and his family. Be that as it may, trusts have operating fees, so there's still a grifting angle.
Are you saying this whole thing was orchestrated by the (((trustees))) to make a few thousand a year?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a proxy war, and the donations are foreign military aid.
No one thinks Ukraine "deserves" billions worth of military equipment on their own merits. Western supporters believe that they deserve their independence or Russia's invasion deserves to be opposed (either idealistically, to take a stand against offensive wars, or pragmatically, to weaken the geopolitical rival Russia) and weapons shipments are the way to achieve this.
Shiloh Hendrix isn't being given $750,000 as a reward for saying a bad word, she is being given money to defend against the attack on her, which is perceived as unjust and/or as the frontline of a war between tribes. This is both practical ("if we give her money, they can't ruin her life") and symbolic (actual money is a credible signal of support against the moral accusation on her.)
The previous fundraiser for Karmelo Anthony is also revelant here as an initial escalation. If the Evil Empire sends weapons to the Evilist regime in Proxystan, the Coalition of Good needs to match that in support for the Goodist rebels.
Your explanation is certainly the steelman for fundraising in such cases, but to expand your (kinda) Cold War metaphor, there is such a thing as geostrategy. If crying "help, we are fighting commie rebels" leads to being drowned in US$, then a lot of countries will find commie rebels to fight.
Is the marginal dollar of the 750k$ sum really more helpfully spent on her than on the next person in a similar situation? How do you prevent the people to get into similar situations just for the payout?
For Ukraine, the case is different. No country in the world thinks "Look at Ukraine, getting all that sweet NATO gear. I wish we would get invaded by Putin so we can benefit from international aid like Ukraine has, perhaps we should try a border provocation or two." The thing is that even with the military aid, getting invaded by Russia is still horribly net-negative for Ukraine, and nobody envies them at all.
My impression is that the median donor is not thinking "spending 10$ here is the best way I can use disposable income to bolster my preferred groups, this is the hill it makes most sense to fortify". Instead, it is likely all emotive. "This story makes me feel enraged. The only impact I care about is to make my outgroup feel enraged in turn, and I am getting my emotive worth for my donation here."
I wasn't really intending it as a steelman. I was trying to describe what I think are the actual motivations and mindsets of the donators.
Yes, it's emotive. They want to defend someone who's being attacked and stand up to "bullies". If my post gave you the idea it was a coordinated strategy motivated by cold calculations about cost-effective activism, that wasn't my intention.
Imagine them less like western leaders approving budgets and shipments and more like the people who donated to ukrainian forces to get custom messages written on grenades. (Notice the similarity to people leaving spicy messages with their donations?) It's about wanting to support the fight.
The desired outcome for the donators is that leftists see that trying to cancel people as racists no longer destroys them when the victim instead get lots of money, stop doing so, and therefore no one gets into those situations anymore (i.e. no viral shitstorm happens when people say "nigger"). Similar to how, althouth it strains the comparison, the West is hoping that Putin realizes that invading another country is not worth it because of the support they'll be getting.
Whether that outcome is achievable is of course a different question.
I do not think that this will work. The left can cause shitstorms a lot easier than the right can cough up money.
And even if that was not true, the non-exploitable equilibrium would be if the left stopped trying to cancel people because they realized that the minute they focused their anger on someone, they would be showered in money by their opponents. I am not holding my breath for that. It would require playing politics on level two, and most people play level one. I mean, the single most important asset Trump had for winning the primaries was the left-leaning press, which loved to hate him. "You won't believe what the horrible racist has done now" etc. They never stopped to consider that the median R primary voter would be rather unsympathetic to them, and might consider "Trump really riles up the liberals" a point in his favor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think your analysis is roughly correct, but the framing is bizarre.
Is my job proxy war? Im pretty sure my employer doesn’t believe I “deserve” wages for nothing.
No, you "deserve" wages for doing your job. Which is roughly ("deserve" still hides a lot of complexity here) the modal case for giving money to someone: You pay them for something you want.
My point is that this is a different situation: Hendrix isn't being paid to say this, she is being supported against an attack.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Really? You've never benefitted from someone's freely accessible work and considered giving them a donation? What about this website? I am not paying to keep the servers up because I think I'm poorer than the average user and there is enough money in the pot but I don't think it's morally wrong for those who do! There are 20 people who are paying so the rest of us can enjoy something for free.
https://www.patreon.com/themotte/about
And in the general case, how is crowdfunding bad? Some are scammers but some are deserving. How are poor/niche games or webnovels supposed to be paid for? Just stick up a paywall?
Nope. I'm a total Internet freeloader. (My lived experience is that the World Wide Web was much better when it consisted entirely of research, passion projects, and skills-based gatekeeping.)
Sweat equity... so to speak.
This is fair, I should have thought more carefully about how I said that. Let me walk back my assertion. I don't have anything against crowdfunding in the general sense of, essentially, microtransactions or patron models for goods and services. It is the crowdsourcing of "charity," political or otherwise, that rubs me wrong. This is presumably related to my general distrust of "charities" generally; I am definitely of the view that most "charitable" organizations are in fact enormous grifts, too.
Your sentiment seems very defensible. Such "charity" is the polar opposite of EA, in fact. All about tugging on people's heartstrings. Now I wonder if there is also the signaling aspect of it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
About 24%; we call these people “wives”.
Is what Shiloh is doing really all that different to what any non-breadwinner does? Making themselves out to be sufficiently sympathetic and weak that a nice man (or in this case, crowd) pay for her life? Is her present shameless willingness to get money for doing nothing any more shameless than what she was already doing: chilling with her kid on a playdate at the park while (presumably) her husband (or child support provider) is wagie-slaving away in his cubicle?
Your post title is more accurate than it might at first appear: grift upon grift indeed, and it ever was thus since separate X and Y chromosomes evolved.
If you think raising the kids is chilling, you might be single for a long time…
Oh come on. The “if you have this opinion you’re an incel” implication is the most trite of Twitter-tier ad hominems.
Alright, alright.
If you think raising the kids is chilling, you’re going to consistently undervalue potential partners and mock their contributions, so you might be single for a long time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am in the top 10% of individual earners and have a cubicle in a building in a low rise industrial park fortunately I'm only in the cubicle one or two days a week. The remainder of the week I wage slave from home.
My wife homemakes, caring for me and our four children. I don't know that I would describe what she does most days as 'chilling'. Nor do I think this arrangement is a particularly pecuniarily rewarding one for her. Our household income percentile ranking was significantly higher as DINK.
I feel fortunate that through some trick of biology she experiences 'love' for me and a desire to bear my children. I have a 90th percentile head, it was no small task.
More options
Context Copy link
Raising children is valuable to society. We're already seeing, in various ways, what bad effects we get when people don't want to do it anymore. And someone has to do the household work. Also, someone has to bring in money.
I would not call it grift. That's the same kind of take that radical feminists have when they say family life is nothing but oppression to women, just the other way around.
For all the political debates about who should do what, what cannot change is that it is ultimately a team effort, and what also cannot change (except through technological progress) is the list of things that need doing.
Sure, childcare and housework is necessary, but I'd contend that it actually isn't all that valuable in an economic sense, nor is it really that hard. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that a near-majority of housewives aren't earning their keep:
From a quick google search, the median cost of daycare in the US is $12.5k/yr and the median salary of a maid is $27.5k/yr. Housewives only need to maintain one house/a few children and don't need to adhere to professional standards for cleaning/childcare, so let's halve the sum and add maybe $10k/yr for other miscellaneous responsibilities, coming out to a $30k/yr equivalent salary for the responsibilities of a housewife. The average male salary in the US is ~70k, so if the median man is spending >40% of his income on supporting his wife, it could be said that she's got a bit of a grift going for her, with the scale of the grift increasing with greater male earnings and investment.
It's crass to lay such things bare, but I think it's an important point to be made, and to note alongside it that it wasn't always this way. Good housekeeping used to include responsibilities such as practical crafts, tending to the hearth, spinning wool, etc. that made women far more economically valuable, if not as primary providers. As the functional value of home economics has been hollowed out by technology, the expected role of women ought to adapt to the circumstances.
I mean, it has? Women's labour force participation is nearly 80% in the 25-54 bracket.
More options
Context Copy link
One could argue that the expected role of the woman has changed, and now they are all out of the house doing labor (and “labor”) elsewhere. This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children, because young children really do need a mother around most of the time.
I’ve never met a daycare provider or a maid who is even half as good as a half-decent stay-at-home mom. And there are many decent stay-at-home moms out there, women who love their homes and their kids. They just don’t get noticed because of mal-oriented societal norms, and because they aren’t and never can be influencers, and because they understand that they don’t have to become like men or compete with men to be more precious than rubies.
Most of the Western fertility decline was justified and needed. Infant mortality rates approaching 50% were near-universal before the 19th century; the average woman doesn't need to and shouldn't have 4+ children anymore, lest we tempt the spectre of Malthus. (The demographic argument for pro-natalism still applies, but in the long run fertility still needs to converge on replacement.)
Mothers can't be "more precious than rubies" when the job prerequisite is the bare biological minimum expected of a mammalian female. I've seen such pro-natalist exhortations to value motherhood more before, but since status (especially female status) is a zero-sum game, the end result of such efforts is going to look much more like shaming barren women rather than celebrating mothers. It only makes sense for women to branch out into the male realm when the need for their singular area of expertise has been significantly obviated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am not a stay at home wife, but both husband and I have tried it out, and it is not significantly easier than paid work, and we're both more prone to depression when house parenting than most jobs we've had.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are about 25,000 GoFundMe fundraisers created per day. My best estimate from scraping GoFundMe is that about half of fundraisers earn exactly $0, and among the remaining half there's a very long tail - perhaps 2,000 fundraisers per year earning $100k+ and 300 per year earning $500k+. Most of those are "little 8 year old Timmy has cancer" not "CW grifting".
Do you also have a deep-rooted envy of lottery winners, because you do not have a gift for sheer dumb luck? Because I'd estimate about 10x as many people make $100k from lotteries than from GoFundMe virality.
It's on the news because it's rare.
I regard both of these as examples of grifting.
Oh, it's much worse than that. I know a lot of people who make a lot of money doing fuck-all. Often, they are active hindrances to things getting done. "Bullshit jobs" and the like--but also many people in education, government, large corporations, et cetera. I'm not even sure "envy" is the right word, exactly, but I'm trying to be open to the possibility that it is just a kind of envy. Except that I don't actually want to be them--I just can't help but wonder why I so often feel the need to work when so many of my fellow humans seem to get by just fine without it.
...so? I'm not sure what conclusion I should draw from that. This may be an extreme case of grifting, but that just makes it helpfully illustrative; I'm annoyed by smaller, more common examples, too.
I think I feel the same frustration - at some point I think I internalized some voice which says that I am obligated to do the optimal thing in every situation to accomplish whatever goals I have set for myself. I thrive when I have the ability to work hard at something which will bring about some good thing I care about in the world - but if hard work is not the best way to accomplish that thing, the little voice in my head says I have to take the shorter path instead. And so when I see evidence that the way to accomplish things is to grift or fake or even just do shoddy work, I feel bad about it and come to resent that source of evidence.
Is that similar to what you experience, or does your dislike of "grifting" stem from something else?
Yes, that does sound somewhat relatable to me. I'm not sure I resonate with the idea of my actions being "optimal," though, so much as... meaningful, I guess? I try to act when I have good reason to act, rather than just signaling my virtues. But I think maybe many people, maybe most people, exist primarily (if never quite wholly) in a support network of sending and receiving signals. As someone who is quintessentially "bad with people" it seems like that option is not open to me. I have to get by on competence--or at least I imagine it must be so. This does not appear to be true of others. It might be easier for me to accept this if those others were not so frequently active hindrances to my own projects.
I recognize that this is to some extent just the human condition.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Does that include the cases in which they actually do need the money to pay Timmy's medical bills? (Edit: and he has a 1% chance of survival without treatment and a 99% chance with)
If so, what, in your opinion, is the ethical path for Timmy's parents?
Being hard-hearted, the ethical path is to accept as members of their community that little children with cancer cannot and should not be the recipient of vast amounts of community support. People of my grandmother’s generation could and did accept that.
The existence of organisations like NICE in the UK also tacitly accepts this fact. One might say, “I’m not going to accept socialist government telling me what care I can obtain for my child,” but one might also say that telling parents that if they raise 500,000 dollars it will increase their child’s survival rate slightly is both futile and cruel, and preventing them from doing so is a mercy.
Now, God knows I understand why the parents don’t bite the bullet, but it’s basically the case.
And people of her grandmother's generation accepted that women would have to toil endlessly hand-washing clothes.
Her grandmother's generation accepted that childbirth would be a pit of suffering.
Just because our ancestors endured something does not mean that we must or should.
They could support more people if the government hadn't underfunded the NHS!
In some cases it is a lot more than 'slightly'. There are reliable treatments for many cancers which would have been considered terminal 40 years ago; however, these can be expensive.
Thus, my question is "There is a medical treatment which, if given to Timmy, means that he is almost certain to live; without it, he is almost certain to die. His parents can not afford to pay for this treatment, and do not have insurance that will cover it. What is the right thing for them to do?".
Let me know how that works out for you.
You asked, and I answered. In the world as it is, it is not possible for everyone to have everything that one might ideally wish them to have. In another age technology may change the specifics of cancer funding but that fundamental truth will remain the same.
More options
Context Copy link
It will never cease amusing me that in 1945, C.S. Lewis, one of England’s most successful authors, named an organization of scientific depravity “N.I.C.E.,” and then 54 years later, England just goes ahead and creates something of a very similar nature, with the same name and everything.
Who could have realized Torment Nexus jokes were already stale before the turn of the millennium.
British people are already taxed up to their eyeballs, and the NHS is better funded and staffed than ever. In 2018 it already made up 30% of all of England’s services spending, so I’m not sure from where you’re going to get more funding. Despite all that the A&E’s are, morning noon and night, hugely overcrowded every time I’ve been in one, full of very un-British looking people, horribly slow and incapable of triage. There’s only so much blood left in the British stone and it can’t fix those problems.
The actual alternative for Brits is to kick out their unproductive, non-British population, tighten their belts, and spend a decade or two training up new doctors and nurses from the natives. That would drive down costs and reduce wait times in the long run, but no one in a democracy is ever willing to suffer short term unpleasantness, so the NHS will just keep being a money pit until Britain cracks up. It might also help to cut the bureaucracy that infests all Western service providers. I am willing to give credit where even minimal credit is due and it looks like Starmer is willing to do that so maybe there will be some gains from that which stave off disaster for a while.
Alternatively, they could privatize it, which would at least let the companies involved ration care more sensibly.
Hard-heartedness works out surprisingly well for God’s people, sometimes, as it turns out.
To be fair, it’s generally acknowledged that NICE is the part of the system that actually works, and it genuinely does a pretty good job of deciding what forms of treatment are sane and worth the money and what forms are just utility monsters.
More options
Context Copy link
What is the mechanism by which replacing foreign-trained doctors with native British doctors is supposed to make healthcare more affordable for patients?
My naïve assumption is that doctors from, say, the Indian subcontinent are willing to accept lower pay and less favorable conditions than comparable Brits, simply because the opportunity to live and work in Britain is worth so much more to them than it is to a native Brit who takes that opportunity for granted. This is, as far as I can tell, pretty uniformly the story of nearly all immigrant labor, skilled or unskilled, throughout the developed world. And presumably the ability to furnish such doctors lower wages and less benefits would in turn redound to the patient in terms of lower costs.
I’m extremely sympathetic to many of the arguments for deporting foreign laborers — even doctors — and thereby clearing the field for natives to move into their remunerative positions; however, the argument that it will make things cheaper for the end users of those services seems to be quite dubious. Perhaps I’m missing something. Am I wrong that Indian doctors accept lower pay and that this causes healthcare costs, ceteris paribus, to decrease relative to the counterfactual in which all doctors are white Brits?
I think there’s a lot of friction that arises from doctors of all nations attempting to minister to patients of all nations.
Supposedly there are stringent language tests and of course we have examples on this board that show some foreign doctors pass these tests with flying colours, but I’ve also heard lots of stories from close family of doctors just being completely unable to speak or comprehend basic English. And of course now half the patients don’t speak English, so all paper has to be massively duplicated in every language and then presumably translated for the docs. Likewise stories of doctors just repeatedly not turning up for appointments that they themselves booked with the patient.
Would an all English population of doctors be better? I don’t know but I’m pretty sure that replacing say the bottom 50% would help.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What's the evidence he was filming children or did he just pull out the phone to put Hendrix on blast?
While I haven't likely accounted for all reasons this would be a bad idea, I'd be pretty well in support of a strong self-defense statue that includes reacting against, and destroying the phone of, anyone that does this kind of thing.
More options
Context Copy link
This is unclear to me--some of the articles I read seemed to suggest that he had a video of the woman chiding the black boy, but the only video I can find is after the fact, when he decided he wanted to be a social media hero. Just as it is unclear what he was doing at the park in the first place--one report suggests he was the boy's uncle, but another suggests the boy was unsupervised.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think, respectfully, that the time to take a principled stance against online crowdfunding was what, 10 years ago? The cat seems very much out of the bag on that one...
On top of that, this event as a whole, as @corman puts it, is part of an ongoing conflict. With a whole host of new technologies. For instance, having a camera shoved into your face by a brown person isn't as much of a neutral event as your child getting sick and dying. It's a deliberate act of hostility fueled and maintained by other people. Fighting against that is not the same as fighting against, say, cancer.
I don't think there is a conflict averse highroad for people to take here. The causal chain that drives white people towards group solidarity is initiated by hostile actors. White people organizing and rebelling against these emergent aggressors and using whatever tools they have at their disposal is noble, just and good. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to justify why and through what mechanism white people should fight against this unjust circumstance as an alternative.
Ambivalence is not a morally neutral act.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the dollars make crowdfunding less prone to cheap virtue signals as it requires more from the giver than a simple post. You have to put up cash to the cause. If I believe in something, that’s not a problem. If I believe in DEI, then giving $25 to support such causes or to someone wronged by the lack thereof is at least skin into the game. Simple posts are not the same and therefore people are probably signaling things that the person isn’t committed to but says because it’s “the right thing to say.” But would you be willing to actually donate to that cause?
And it’s a revealed preference. If people didn’t agree with the woman’s cause, nobody would give money to it. In that sense it’s like an opinion version of a prediction market — unlike polling or social media posts, you can’t just opine without putting some actual money down behind it. What meaning you take from this particular case, im not sure. Is it because this woman was threatened, because it’s expanded to her family? Because the thing was filmed? Because people want to say “nigger”? That’s a bit harder to gage. But there’s a signal there that doesn’t exist with mere posts. Every person who donated has has done so at cost to themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
You know, a while ago, I remember Matt Yglesias noticing that elected Republican officials (this was pre-Trump) were MUCH more sensitive to conservatives being called "racists" than they were to conservatives being "racist". He said it in a way that made it clear the thought he was being cute, of course.
But the observation has stuck with me, because it's actually fully general. And I think there actually really serious consequences.
To a first approximation (and I'm aiming here to use the no-no word to good effect), by the end of the 70s, the more radical side of liberals came out of the civil rights movement with a stance that was something like, "It is your own racist standards and worldview that make you think you can put certain people in the category of "nigger", and the word "nigger" exists to keep people down, and to the extent that there are people actually behaving in bad ways that might make you want to label them as "nigger", that's actually a result of pre-existing systemic racist forces that produce the "nigger" in the first place. All of this is a stain on you, not them. That word is your original sin."
And then, at about the same time, the Reagan coalition and Reagan detente settled on something like, "Obviously there are a whole bunch of people that it would be reasonable to call "nigger", clearly they are incompatible with civilization, but it's rude and unhelpful to use that explicit language about the topic, and much more to the point, there are a bunch of American black people who can be trusted to live up to high standards like the rest of us, we don't need to lower our standards, and it would be a grave injustice to treat those Americans as though they were just "niggers" who, by the way, totally exist, but we're just going to throw up our hands and corral those types in inner city ghettos and then massive prisons and turn our heads and avoid acknowledging it because, honestly, there really is nothing to be done, and we're more interested in integrating the more upstanding black citizens anyway, which is a much more happy project that we'd like to have our names attached to". Which is to say, the conservatives of that era might well have said, "You know what's much, much worse that calling someone "nigger"? It's choosing to be a civilization destroying "nigger", obviously, or choosing to coddle and elevate such people like liberals insist on doing. Incentives matter, and you're making sure you get a lot more of that". There's actually some interesting personal anecdote from Glenn Loury, talking about a private conversation he had with William F Buckley during the heyday of the Reagan administration in the mid 80s, and the summary of what Buckley had to say was very much in that ballpark - do what you can for the redeemable half, throw your hands up and move on for the other half.
And then Obama came along, and he and his movement (and the collapse of George W. Bush conservatism) destroyed the Reagan detente, and we've been living with that liberal story about racism every since. But I think this has probably been a great example of arson being applied to Chesterton's fence - the older Reagan-era norm, with its insistence that "of course you can expect plenty of black people to live up to high standards" played a really important social role in encouraging everyone else to go along with integration. Despite all the word policing, the Emperors New Clothes is real, and I have to believe that anyone who has ever lived around a large enough variety of black people has some contact with some uniquely frustrating (or likely much, much worse) behavior. It's certainly been the case in every city I've ever lived in, and every good white liberal I know, if you can steer the conversation sensitively, will more or less acknowledge it and have their own stories, often said in sadness not anger. Just going off of basic human psychology, it would be the most natural thing in the world for lots of non-black people, given their actual life experiences, to hold significant grudges about black people in a tribal way. It really is, or I think it is, an act of civic virtue when someone says, "While all of that is obviously true, it is both wrong and unhelpful to tar other members of the larger group for the behavior of these particular people..." But that impulse really only works when you can follow that by saying "...because I know lots of people in this group both CAN and ARE living up to our high standards, and we are collectively capable of validating and affirming those high standards". Ever since the Obama years, this is no longer the narrative frame we exist in, I don't think.
I think this is why, at least for someone people, Chris Rock's old "Black People vs. Niggers" stand up bit feels so cathartic. Because the rules of the game, post-1980 was, you can behave as though you acknowledge those facts, you can vote with your feet and where you buy property, but you absolutely can't actually name those facts with your mouth. That was the trade off, the detente. And so hearing someone touch that nerve by actually naming it was electric at the time.
I've long expected that the Obama-era blowing up of those older norms, especially after a lot of the insane cancel culture language policing, was eventually going to force a deeper re-evaluation of these topics. In important ways, the Reagan-era settlement was a kind of social compromise between a bunch of different groups that had a lot of tension with each other, with different parties each getting half a loaf. The Obama era shift was not like that. I think it's always had a deep instability buried in its heart. A lot of groups didn't actually sign off on it, they just had it shoved down their throats while they were weak. And its norms (which have been unstable and have often been caught up in purity spirals) have proven to be simply way too far from reality to be stable, too.
All of this has been very much in the back of my mind as I watch the current kerfuffle about this crowdsourcing money stuff. I don't enjoy rudeness, but a lot of the progressive McCarthyism of the last 8 years or whatever has more or less guaranteed that we're going to see some new norms renegotiated, and it's bound to be messy and probably often unpleasant and shocking as it happens. But I don't think there's any switch we can hit that will just take us right back to 2008.
Another way to frame this is from the Black perspective, as I understand it:
Blacks agreed to largely stop calling people racist, and whites agreed to end the legacy of racism. That is, Black Culture never understood the deal to be that the underclass was incorrigible and would be written off, but rather than education and social policy would dissolve the underclass and uplift all blacks together. They were willing to tolerate a considerable amount of write-off in the short term, but the public agreement (and it was a very public agreement in the late 90s - early 2000s) was that this uplift was happening and would continue until the problem went away.
From my own perspective, the fact that this agreement was based on a lie does not strike me as the fault of Black Culture; they mostly weren't the ones who built the ideological foundations of the Church of the Blank Slate. It's not their fault either for noticing that decade after decade, the results they were promised never materialize. They aren't the ones who bet the full faith and credit of our entire society on "social science" that turned out to be ideologically-motivated fictions. They are at fault, it seems to me, for many of their own pathologies; even accepting their framing that America as constituted was, is and likely will continue to be innately hostile to their culture, there's much better ways to handle such a reality than the strategies they've collectively defaulted to. But this doesn't change the fundamental nature of the situation: the problem isn't the blacks demanding impossible solutions, it's the whites who spent decades promising those impossible solutions, and are now desperate to skip out on the checks they've written and cannot cash. I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
I share your skepticism that any of this can be meaningfully rolled back to some more congenial prior state. We burned unbelievably vast and irreplaceable resources on a scam perpetrated by a specific band of ideologues, leaving us in a strictly-worse position.
To be clear, my experience with ordinary, working-class-in-the-sense-of-actually-works and middle class blacks has been that they know there's an issue with their culture, are often frustrated with African American Community Leaders and democrats for not addressing or acknowledging it, and don't really like or want their kids around 'niggers'. Black women wish their pastors would do something about poor male behavior being endemic in their communities, everyone wants something done about (hard)drugs, black men wish working hard and staying married was more incentivized by their cultural taste-makers, and even the outright black supremacists are usually surprisingly chill with whites(not Jews though) in practice. Yes, many of them believe racism gets in the way, many of them think shitty schools can be fixed by shoveling money at the problem so more black kids can go to college, lots of them think jail isn't the right way to deal with drug problems, lots of them think rap music is fine instead of the root of half the cultural issues they complain about, etc, etc. Yes, they're often offended by white conservatives who answer 'well why do our schools have to suck?' with 'because your culture does', but you would be too- Vivek Ramaswamy may not have been right that American kids should be shoved into a South Korea type grind but a lot of the objections to it were based on offense rather than discussion of the data(for the record, I think the South Korean rat race is just pure pointless suffering and if I was dictator of South Korea I would legally limit school and study hours).
A data point: 71% of black Americans think hip hop has a negative influence on the culture.
Thought hip-hop has a negative influence. 2008 is basically an eternity ago for the purpose of those discussions.
That's true. I thought Pew were meant to conduct surveys repeatedly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've had similar direct experiences. Unfortunately, I've also had direct experiences where individual blacks I knew bought the progressive racism/white-supremacy message hook line and sinker. There's a large section of the community that knows that at least a considerable portion of the problems are in-house. Aaron McGruder made a career out of shouting that message through a megaphone. But when push comes to shove, my observation is that the race-baiters win. Blue Tribe tells blacks that their problems are the fault of Red Tribe. Blue Tribe gets political power, Blacks get cheap hope and the avoidance of some really deeply unpleasant conversations. Until Red Tribe figures out how to make a better offer, it seems unlikely that this will change. And again, why should it? Red Tribe signed off on the promises too. Red Tribe politicians made all the same speeches about how education would fix everything. Red Tribe really does largely support and run the systems that coordinate meanness against individual blacks, at least if you're speaking in general terms. And crucially, Reds fundamentally do not have a better offer, at least from the black perspective, and at least in the short term. "we don't know how to solve this, and much of it is your own fault" is never going to beat "it's all their fault, help us beat them and we'll make you whole."
Adding to this, reds don't even have a better offer to the write-offs within white America than "At least we don't blame you for minorities' problems.". The present Trump administration is flailing at a solution for high school educated male wages being stagnant at best for the last 50 years (This fucks over black men harder, BTW, given their lower level of college education.) and probably isn't going to find one.
For better or worse, IMO Trump's rise was fueled by a creeping sense within white America that the "writeoff" portion was being expanded from "high school dropouts" (who barely exist) to "high school educated". Nobody cares about this guy, but people get mad when their nice but unexceptional kid with an IT degree struggles to find well-compensated employment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there are good aspects to Asian schools that we could bring in, though perhaps not to the extreme that those schools go to.
I think first of all, as a culture, we must start taking academic achievement much more seriously. America doesn’t take education seriously, and instead tends to be rather casual about tge project. And the result is that almost half of all American adults cannot read on an eighth grade level. Mathematics and science fair no better. Because of this, we’re generally stuck when it comes to innovative ideas and deep thinking in philosophy or the arts. If we took school and education as seriously as we take sports, with high achievement being celebrated and rewarded.
But the other thing that makes it work is the tracking. Not every kid who graduates goes to tge same “university to office job” track. If you haven’t earned the grades and done the work, you will go to lower colleges, trade schools, or vocational programs. This not only reduces the competition for entry level positions for college graduates, but ensures that every group ends up with a skil they can use to support themselves.
Most of the actual problems come from taking the system to extremes. Over competing in sports leads to 13 year old kids needing Tommy John’s surgery. To much competition in academics makes people miserable. Neither is an indictment of those activities or those who take them seriously. If rules are put in place to keep the competition sane, competition is generally good for people and drives them to do better. The alternative is underachieving with all the problems that come from that.
‘Half of Americans can’t read on an eighth grade level’ is one of those statistics which sounds bad, but using the same definition how does it compare to other countries with ‘deep’ orthographies such as Australia, France, etc.
English is legitimately harder to read than Finnish, Spanish, and in fact most of the rest of the world’s languages. Add to that that the American education system just absolutely loves terrible teaching methods. An oriental grindset probably isn’t the solution compared to phonics and maybe spelling reform.
‘But the US has lower reading scores than Italy’ is just not a fair comparison. I would guess that, keeping the standard constant, the USA teaches reading about as well as Australia and France and only slightly worse than China and Japan. I could be wrong. But ‘making everyone so miserable that we have a .7 TFR’ isn’t the solution.
More options
Context Copy link
The US is anything but stuck when it comes to innovative ideas. And no, they're not ALL from immigrants (and some of the immigrants were educated here). As for deep thinking in philosophy, if that means we have neither Foucault nor Derrida.... uh, good? The arts (assuming you mean non-commercial) everywhere in the First World seem to have disappeared into either pure self-referential naval-gazing or been eaten by lefty activism.
We definitely don't need more Asian-style schooling. We don't need to break intelligent kids and turn mediocre kids into grinds.
More options
Context Copy link
Most of this doesn't sound right.
I'm not completely sure what this is supposed to mean. PMC Americans and aspirants take it very seriously. Others take it pretty seriously, but from what I've heard there are a lot more PhD graduates or MA graduates than positions that really need that level of education. The government takes it seriously and pours enormous amounts of money into the project. Teachers generally take it pretty seriously, roughly proportional to how much they can get their students to do. Perhaps lower class blacks and hispanics and trailer type whites don't take it seriously enough. America and the various states keeps trying to push at these groups, inspire them, prod them into loving books and whatnot, but it mostly doesn't take. There have been a lot of educational reform movements. It is perhaps not very effective in terms of value for money.
What would greater seriousness look like? Perhaps more removal of disruptive children from classrooms? That is, of course, very political.
It is. People are very happy when their kids do well in school. They get awards, congratulations, eventually scholarships. Lots of kids are not involved in sports.
That is a description of current reality.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Presumably I am one of the individuals you have in mind. I can understand why you find it baffling: your hatred of “the Blue Tribe” — a fictitious construct which, I maintain, exists more in your head than it does in the real world — verges at times on the atavistic. I don’t expect that a fully-committed partisan such as yourself will be able to put aside your grudges and live in comity with true-Blue progressives.
My perception is that the vast majority of Americans, though, are nowhere near as committed to hatred of those who vote for a different party, nor would they be so thoroughly filled with hatred and distrust of the other side in the event that the extremely live-wire issue of pervasive black criminality were removed from the everyday lifestyle calculations of so many people. In no way do I believe that issues related to crime and racial grievance are the sole motivating reason for political polarization in America; I simply believe that these issues have a far stronger valence than most others — at least for urban (and, increasingly, suburban) voters — given their intractability, the web of obfuscation and lies characterizing discourse about them, and the way that these issues reveal some vexing contradictions at the heart of the American individualist/liberal framework.
Perhaps I am the pot calling the kettle black, and that in fact it is I who am wildly overestimating the salience and centrality of my pet issue. No doubt I am, to some extent. But I truly do believe that most non-black Americans can return, with not insurmountable difficult, to the relative comity of the 90’s, if and only if there is a significant marginalization of blacks as a cultural and political entity.
As a non-American familiar with American history, I am inclined to agree with this take.
Even if you don't think that the Civil War was caused by slavery, it is very obvious from soldiers' accounts that the necessary hatred for Americans to cheerfully put themselves through four years of danger and material deprivation for the primary purpose of shooting other Americans had a lot to do with slavery. And of course most of the pre-Civil War political violence was explicitly about slavery.
And then post Civil War you still see ongoing white-on-white political violence driven by the Negro Question (the Lincoln assassination, Reconstruction and the 1st Klan, Redemption and the Red Shirts etc.) There is a lull after the anti-racist side gives up and cuts a deal to tolerate Jim Crow, but the Civil Rights Movement sees more than a little actual white-on-white political violence, and a lot of credible threats which end up getting walked back when it becomes clear that the Feds are not backing down. The fact that the Kennedy assassination turned out to have nothing to do with race surprised Americans so much that you seem to have had a collective head explosion.
In our generation, the George Floyd et al riots seem to involve a lot of white-on-white political violence nominally driven by concern for blacks. Rittenhouse vs the idiots is just the specific case that got put under a microscope.
I'm not aware of any other issue where white Americans are willing to kill each other and think they are serving the common good by doing so.
More options
Context Copy link
My tribe- 'the church crowd' in vernacular parlance- does not want European style mass conformity, though. We'd rather the good, the bad, and the ugly with blacks than deal with that, at least as long as social progressives get to set the terms of it. You're way overestimating the solidarity across different social groups of whites in the USA.
I want to make sure I actually understand what you’re claiming here.
Is the claim something like: blacks, by being an unassimilable block and a thorn in the side of any project aiming toward American political/cultural reconciliation, are actually performing a positive service. They’re what’s preventing non-black Americans from coming together to form some sort of cultural consensus, and this is a good thing, because the rise of such a consensus — at least, if it were to arise under current ideological conditions — would be shaped largely by progressives. Therefore, blacks should be encouraged to continue to be a pain in the ass (or at least no active steps should be taken to force them not to be) because if they were marginalized or mollified, white people might start forming a “mass conformist” culture like the ones in Europe.
Am I getting this right? I don’t want to misinterpret or misrepresent your view.
Yes. I would rather the commons be shit up than used as a weapon against me and mine. I know you’re not a social conservative but surely you can see why I would hold this view.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Communism was pretty clearly a thing, and there's a reason it remains so disproportionately popular, even in America, given its history. That reason has pretty much nothing to do with Black people or America's racial history. More generally, I'm curious what you would consider an existence-proof of Blue Tribe as you perceive me to understand it. We've been in the middle of a steadily-escalating tribal war for several years now. This war routinely results in very public political violence, frequently of a highly organized nature, and this violence observably receives broad-based institutional and public support in large volumes. It's obvious that large percentages of the population actively sort their social context along the lines of the Red/Blue tribal split. The number of norms and institutions that have collapsed under the tectonic force of the Red/Blue faultline is quite long and rapidly growing, and most of the rest are visibly shaking.
You've got me on the atavistic hatred, though.
The vast majority of Americans have no significant commitments, to hatred or to any other ideological construct. They simply follow the crowd, as humans always have and always will. Most Russians in 1920 were not "committed" in any meaningful sense to the Communist project, nor most Germans to the Nazi project in 1938. Most Democrat-voting Americans didn't support rioting and defunding of police in 2016, and probably weren't all that comfortable with it even when it was happening post-Floyd.
The model you seem to be applying is that there's a problem, and conflict over how to fix the problem is driving the split, and so if the problem were removed the split would heal. You don't seem to recognize a values-level split between Reds and Blues, which is presumably why you think the categories the split demarcates are in my head.
The model I'm applying is that tribes exist to coordinate and control power, as is necessary and proper for all large-scale populations of humans. Power exists to solve problems, and if one specific object-level problem goes away, another will take its place. Unfortunately, values-incompatibility is a meta-level problem, and past some level of divergence, solutions are not compatible with cooperation across the divide. Object-level problems, which is what our society previously perceived race to be, do not directly create values-level conflict, but rather are drawn into them as the tribes grope for leverage against each other. It seems entirely possible for race to rise to a values-level problem itself; maybe it already is one for our society, and certainly it is one for many individuals. Maybe that's the way we'll go. The fact remains that from my perspective, Blacks and their dysfunction is far less of a problem for me and mine than their white Blue-Tribe patrons. Blacks do not rule me, and I see no plausible path by which they could rule me in the foreseeable future, so the threat of their hatred is manageable. Blues can and have ruled me, and intend to do so again; their hatred is a much more serious problem, and it's hard for me to see how that would change regardless of the disposition of the race question.
I have 2/3rds of a reply to your comment on religion sitting in the hopper, btw. Always a pleasure.
I think the idea is more that the conflict over that problem creates far more day-to-day strife and personal animus than value differences do, in line with Scott's memorable post about people's shocking ability to get along even when they have, on paper, deep and irreconcilable value differences.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On the one hand, after they can agree that rules are rules, and it doesn't matter what "disproportionate" amount of blacks end up in jail, what is there left to argue about? The central plank of blue tribe ideology seems to be rooted in the inherent evil of western white civilization, and exhibit A is blacks as a permanent underclass globally.
On the one hand, yeah, old habits die hard. It is hard to imagine the average blue triber going "Ok, yeah, I admit it, more blacks are in jail because they commit more crime" but then being ok with gun ownership, recklessness towards the climate, or free speech. But I also, simply, have a very difficult time imagining the blue tribe mind without that aforementioned central plank of their ideology.
I guess the difference is that I'm skeptical that black victimhood really is a central plank to Blue ideology. My perception is that the central plank in Blue ideology is the belief that they are capable of an arbitrary level of control over material reality, that they have the power to make the world as they wish it to be. "We know how to solve all our problems; if a problem isn't solved, it's the fault of someone with a name and an address."
It seems to me that the American Blue Tribe has existed since the founding, and they coexisted with explicit, legally-codified racism for a very long time without much of an issue. It likewise seems to me that many of their foreign analogues coexisted with deep cultural racism for even longer, and in some cases continue to do so right down to the present day. Blue Tribe's commitment to the racial justice narrative seems just as contingent to me as their commitment to Christianity or Bodily Autonomy. Blue ideology is explicitly built around facilitating rapid, fundamental social change; appeals to history and tradition seem to me to be rather badly missing the point.
What justifies the violations of freedom that allow that material control?
America has a liberal counter-narrative to totalitarian optimism, in theory. It's supposed to have much stronger protections than even many other liberal nations. One wedge that allows the defeat of defense mechanisms like freedom of association or federalism and hell, just even entry level noticing about transgender athletes is the condition of African Americans, to an actively uncomfortable degree ("black women would suffer more from attempting to police femininity" is a take that would be considered Stormfront-tier by SJWs if it wasn't SJWs saying it).
The Civil Rights movement is still considered an important enough pillar to base all of these arguments on (or the laws extending these protections to more and more people) and any modern attack on freedom is justified on the grounds that those values were already attacked during the CRM, and this is universally considered to be the right thing.
And the more that gets stacked on it, the harder to default.
It's the wedge they have, and it's been very effective.
They've observably gotten a lot of mileage out of material inequality and various flavors of materialist apocalypse.
The question isn't whether race is their biggest, best wedge in the American context. It certainly is. The question is whether the giant hammering that wedge ceases if the wedge were to be taken away. I'm pretty confident it does not. They will find their next-best alternative, and continue swinging.
The question is actually whether the wedge itself helped the giant grow.
American socialists continually lament the lack of class consciousness even on the left. The identity politics-obsessed left that has power has based their entire movement on America's second founding. Maybe the next weapon is just significantly worse.
Their power comes from the fact that there is - was - a bipartisan consensus on some things. Many things that expanded their power were justified explicitly by special pleading on race and either allowed or ignored by mainstream Republicans for fear of being on the wrong side again. Would they be equally sanguine for other things?
It took till Trump to even fight on the AA issue. Things like the trans activist craze are building off laws and ideas that started with race. In a different time it would be inconceivable how fast it's spread and even been mandated. But you can't actually deny the left the tools that do this, because they can always point out where they come from.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Based on the actual history of the progressive movement, in its many forms, I'd actually say that the central plank of progressivism is fertility control, not utopianism.
how does that match with the Enlightenment, French Revolution, and Communist revolutions? Some of those were pretty pro-natal at some points. I guess China's a pretty stand-out example for fertility control, though...
The French Revolution actually saw a large fertility decline. Communism generally saw the same thing, albeit with totalitarian back and forth.
The enlightenment was an intellectual movement that didn’t filter to the masses for so long it’s impossible to separate from confounders.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Remember the Zebra killings? The ones so deprioritised from history that back on Reddit Motte when I mentioned them that people raised in the San Francisco area had no clue ~20 to several scores of whites were killed in a sustained campaign of race murder?
These people -violent black nationalists haven't gone away. They still exist.
Insane random killings of white people are still a thing, of course the DoJ makes a point of making sure no one investigates 'senseless' violence too closely. What would be the point? There's nothing you can do thus ignorance is bliss.
This one, a double murder by rifle followed by a shootout involving an armored car made the local headlines briefly. How many cases won't because it looks like just another robbery gone awry?
It's practically certain that that video has led to her featuring in sadistic rape / murder fantasies of hundreds of black bigots and likely also some leftist activist ones - as I'm unaware of any data that indicates that sexual sadism does not occur in black men, or that they do not have a subpopulation that is itching for some violence.
And while yes, they're not the mob, the odds of someone availing themselves of an opportunity to rape or kill someone who truly deserves it are quite real.
More options
Context Copy link
The most under discussed part of the saga seems to be that America has its own incipient Rotherham scandal where Somalis are given carte-blanche to rape at-risk American teenagers due to the authorities turning a blind eye to these crimes.
What happened in Rotherham occurred and occurs in every single Western country that experienced mass immigration. The only difference is that the peculiar ownership dynamics of the British tabloid press meant it achieved a degree of media attention it didn’t elsewhere, except to a much lesser extent in the Low Countries.
Are there any non-muslim immigrants doing this at scale? You don’t hear about the vietnamese or mexican rape gangs. You need the islamic peculiarities of :
Anyway, looks like germany will close the border so this insanity can finally end, or at least, not get worse.
Yes, I could have clarified ‘from the Islamic world’, but pretty much every Western country that has experienced mass immigration has experienced it from there too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Uh, what percentage of teenage girls in foster care do you think get raped regardless of race? It's not just 'foster care is bad' level, it's 'a girl in foster care is unusually lucky if she's not sexually abused' level.
Probably a decent amount
How many are random kidnappings where the kidnapper invites a friend over so they can both rape the victim and then after police collect physical evidence of the rapes the DA drops the case?
Probably a lot lower…
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes. I clicked on the court documents and that's all the reason given: "In the interest of justice." No subject, no verb, just that phrase, which could mean anything.
Perhaps overly charitably: I wouldn't expect the DA to write "The victim recanted and we have no physical evidence", "We no longer believe the crime occurred", or even "We think the officer lied in their report" or anything like that which would disparage their case or work generally. I could imagine "In the interest of justice" could be a euphemism for cases that aren't exclusively covering up crimes that would raise a politically-charged rabble. But the less charitable reading seems viable as well.
I agree, for me it's just an example of frustrating wording, in a situation where a considerably more concrete reason seems appropriate.
If I had to guess what actually happened, it's that a teenage girl in foster care(and let's be clear here- she was a sixteen year old in foster care) ran away from her placement(and it was probably actually legitimately shitty), encountered this guy(who it seems like she already knew) who offered to let her stay at his place for a while after she complained and she accepted with full knowledge that that meant having sex with him(if we have any teenage girls reading this- an older male acquaintance who's willing to let you sleep over because you're mad at your guardians absolutely expects that), and she either got mad at him for whatever reason or wanted to get out of trouble for running away so she said he raped her.
Yes, survival sex with teenage runaways is bad behavior. But rape charges over it getting dropped doesn't require any other explanation.
It would still be rape to do it with a sixteen year old in a coercive situation.
More options
Context Copy link
Good God, I hope not.
Worry not. Teenage girls have other things to do.
Charge they phone, eat hot chip and lie, I assume.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm going to push back on this posited scenario slightly, although your guess could be spot-on. My guess: Runaway teen 16 year old girl, dude is himself somewhat aggressively flirty with her. She, having been perhaps exposed to unwanted attention at home (or expelled because whatever authority figure in the house found her too promiscuous, or whatever) is nevertheless not used to attention from non family males, and is thus receptive to a degree. He portrays himself as earnest, helpful, promises she'll be fine, come on, it's a few nights. Perhaps gives her a drink. Or something else. In the course of the evening he asserts himself physically, and of course she is now helpless and once again at the mercy of a shitty adult. Sex occurs, and because she is 16 and not particularly confident to refuse she lets it happen. The dismissive way he treats her after this encounter then reinforces in her mind that she has been used and manipulated.
She goes to the authorities. They hear her case but realize the can of worms that would be opened, and, short of anything but circumstantial evidence, her word against his, and faced with a shitshow where race will be a factor, they quietly gull her into dropping the whole thing. Maybe her family gets wind of it all, wishes to have no scandal (a raped daughter is hardly a trophy to be put on the mantle) and drop it.
In the interest of justice.
Or sure, maybe she was just a roller who he caught and kicked out and she tried to have him arrested. We don't know.
You can read the complaint here:
https://x.com/doctorretardphd/status/1918460928104006119
I think the original procurer / kidnapper / rapist inviting over his friend immediately so the friend can join the raping is probably what makes this a weird case especially since she didn’t know them prior. Plus there was a rape kit done plus physical evidence!
It is possible it’s just some poor runaway who just had a he said / she said situation but… I don’t think so given this is exactly how it went down in Rotherham et al.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
from my understanding via previous discussion here, "in the interest of justice" is stock language, and the dismissal of charges were announced by officials well before this viral incident occurred. I share concern that we're looking at the Rotherham pattern here, but if there's solid evidence for it, I haven't seen it yet.
One swallow doesn’t make a spring but it is a little interesting how you can pick up a teenager, rape her with your buddy, attempt to prevent her from leaving your rape den, have physical evidence support the victim’s story and then after three years the DA will drop the charges.
Like this is pretty much a slamdunk case if prosecuted swiftly… unless you’re pulling a Rotherham and ignoring rape cases where the perpetrators are Muslim.
https://x.com/doctorretardphd/status/1918460928104006119
Using the word "swallow" in the same sentence as one in which the word "rape" appears twice makes me uncomfortable for some reason.
More options
Context Copy link
I would describe that as pretty solid evidence for the Rotherham pattern. I'm now very interested in why they decided to drop the case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This brings up a bigger point about commercialization of society- people give money as a substitute for attention. Back in the day was she would have had to make appearances for her grift and the NAACP would have had to do some kind of in person activity to ‘raise awareness of hate speech’ or whatever. But you see it more and more, that investments of time and personal care get displaced by forking over cash.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think people are giving money to her because she called someone nigger. I certainly don't get money when I do that. I think people are giving her money because she was put into the crosshairs of the Low Orbit Cancellation Cannon.
That is to say, the child isn't the antagonist, that would be Omar. I almost included a sentence here condemning what she did, but I realized that it would be off-topic.
Yes, mine is in fact a one-dimensional analysis that eschews any kind of nuance in favor of a simple protagonist-antagonist narrative. I am just following their lead!
More options
Context Copy link
Shiloh is receiving money from whites (and some others) as a rebuke to the Karmelo fundraiser, because of a legitimate need for physical and legal security (check out tiktok or X for any number of posts/videos of blacks calling for, among other things, Shiloh's child to be beaten to brain damage), and as a form of populist protest against black's use of the word to psychologically dominate whites.
She herself is the smallest part of the story, a convenient flashpoint for whites to vent racial grievances. Crowdfunding is a new populist front in the proxy race war previously refereed by the elites through the courts.
That's an interesting way to frame it. So it's the vigilantism equivalent of financial punishment/reward: "I don't trust the institutions to deal with this properly so I will financially reward the side I believe should be winning here".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve seen limited real-world reporting of either this or the Karmelo case. The articles are there, but they’re not headline news at least for me in the usual places I read news online. I think that’s a good thing.
In general, I abhor rudeness. If I ran a country, I’d have the policy of this subreddit’s moderation; say what you want, but say it politely, and with some respect for who you’re saying it to.
The thing about this grift is that it solves itself. There are not enough identitarians on either side for more than a handful of people to raise this kind of money. Now, it’s a novelty, but it wouldn’t be and perhaps won’t be for very long.
I doubt this was just unprompted rudeness, unless it's some 5000 IQ daring scam she lost it after the twentieth repetition of something incredibly tiresome. Somalis are not the world's most charismatic and easy to get along with people.
e.g. this thread from reddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1e5last/a_somaliamerican_former_investigator_why_youre/
Somalis are not liked much in Minnesota. If, on a non-niche reddit someone saying "They won't behave better" gets +15 upvotes that's quite strange.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link