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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Clothing, tattoos, general level of fitness, and other features are much better indicators now

I was surpised by this, but tattoos now correlate (page 9) with party but not income.

Today in trying to interpret survey results: 22% answered "No" to "Do you think tattoos can ever be attractive on a man?". But when asked "How do you think tattoos generally look on a man?" only 19% answered "Bad" or "Terrible". This implies at least 3% who thinks tattoos can't ever be attractive but think they generally look "OK" or better, and also a severe lack of people who think the average tattoo looks bad but that some small minority of tattoos can look good. I assume they are not answering the questions literally, but the result is sufficiently far from the questions that it is difficult to guess what they are actually trying to convey.

Skimming ahead, in the next table I check out 51% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Assume someone with tattoos is more likely to commit a crime" but only 45% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Deport immigrants based on their tattoos". So at least 6% think that if someone has a gang tattoo it's unacceptable to think he's 1% more likely to commit a crime, but acceptable to kick him out of the country for it. (Well, unless there's some sort of non-criminal-associated tattoos they want to deport people for? Like if there were a bunch of people who thought of swastika tattoos but just associated them with "political beliefs" rather than "being in a prison gang"?) I guess what's happening here is that ironically the very severity of "deport" makes people imagine worse tattoos, even when the language of "always" should make that a non-factor?

Normal people don't count 1% as more likely in most contexts. They interpret it to mean "significantly more likely".

Being fair, the second question doesn’t actually specify the tattoos are gang tattoos. The question says “on the basis of their tattoos.” They could think the question means that a guy with a Hello Kitty tattoo on his butt.

That’s even more deportable than the gang tattoos.

Fair.