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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Okay, Steven Pinker! The liberal project isn't the one I'm worried about failing on every count; it's the progressive one, and the way that those two are separating.

Then by what metrics would you like to judge the success or failure of the progressive project? Female GDP per capita is outstripping that of men, as is their education level. The number of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies has gone up 15 fold in the last quarter century. Fraction of Asian and Hispanic CEOs have both roughly doubled in the same time. Difficult to measure things like inclusion, awareness, so on and so forth, but I imagine many kinds of speech not deemed 'progressive' are absent from the workplace relative to 2000. Congress is much more representative than it was. We have minor improvements like wellness/pumping rooms, changing stations, improved accessibility for disabled people, so on and so forth.

Until the pipeline problem is fixed from kindergarten on up, AA is going to keep failing and reinforcing its opponents' opinions that the results aren't the point. It's convenient, because college admissions have minimal oversight until you're Harvard-levels of egregious, but it's not effective.

I'm not convinced this is the case. I could be completely missing the mark here, but my impression is that China is much more matter-of-fact about differences in ability between individuals. They nevertheless straight up give bonus points on the gaokao to minorities among other things. I'm not well versed enough in Chinese culture to confidently say this is true rather that government propaganda, but I think it's an interesting model nonetheless. I don't think affirmative action is necessarily rooted in or dependent on blank slatism, nor do I think it's success should necessarily be measured by equality of outcomes (as I assume you mean when you say AA is failing).

And this is true in podunk coalfields and in minority-majority urban/suburban neighborhoods, but only one of those gets the attention of AA advocates.

I'd support and prefer class-based affirmative action.

And I don't really know how you're drawing the connection, or where you'd draw the separation, between them in a way that would make this conversation go better.

Some people here want me to defend the liberal project starting with FDR, others with Carter, still others with Obama. FCfromSSC likes to bring up an ex-domestic terrorist who was blowing up mailboxes in the 70s only to be hired as a professor in the 90s, and my man, I'm sorry but those bombs were going off long before I was born.

Like, where can I get the movement that says let's house the poor, let's treat drug addiction in a way that ends it, let's improve schooling any way possible, but also, whiteness is not a disease and maybe some activities are best left behind closed doors? Maybe you think the whiteness thing is an acceptable overreaction, or that it's not serious enough to be concerned about, but I think it's both easily avoided and incredibly dangerous to ignore.

Why don't you found it? I find people more receptive when they're convinced you care about the same outcomes as them, and just think you have a better way to achieve them.

I don't think it's serious enough to be concerned about insofar as I doubt I need to worry about mobs invading my neighborhood to lynch white people. I think the real problem is that it doesn't seem to be particularly useful for improving the outcomes of minorities, while simultaneously making significant fractions of the populace hostile to any kind of diversity/equity talk.

Edit to add: I think Alan Jacobs is being an uncharitable, obnoxious jackass in that linked post, but I also think that because of that, he might be the kind of conservative you might want to check in on occasionally

Thanks, I'll try to take a look. Stuff can get lost in the shuffle, particularly if it's not a substack sending me regular emails (I gave up on my RSS feed about a decade ago, but maybe the blog is undergoing a renaissance and I should reevaluate).

When a kid ends up graduating barely able to read or do basic math, what are they going to do from there?

Likely not much. But it sounds like you're asking about what to do with the lowest strata of society rather than two overlapping normal distributions of academic achievement, no? Nudge the scores of one distribution as the Chinese do on the Gaokao and you're closer to 'equity,' per the progressive goals.

Graduating a bunch of unprepared students, giving them bonus points on applications so they can go to college unprepared and jobs unprepared, hardly seems like doing them a favor. Unless we're going whole-hog on a social signaling explanation?

You're asking me to step fairly far outside my areas of expertise so what follows is likely rooted in my biases rather than reality, but I'll try.

Probably half-hog. The receptionists at my company have college degrees. How is that anything other than welfare for white people who can afford to go to college and get bullshit degrees?

Then there is another (albeit small) class of jobs where I think accurate representation of the racial diversity of the population is inherently important for stability: federal, state and local politicians would all fall under this umbrella. Likely police and bureaucrats. I'm very hesitant to include positions like judges, but I think the argument could be made.

But even if you're correct and forcing diversity quotas on these positions would make our society significantly less efficient, ask yourself: is it worse for society to reduce the average MCAT/GRE/LSAT/???? scores of doctors/engineers/whatever by some number of points, or to have a group of chronic, racially segregated undercasts that periodically riot and defect on society because they feel like it's abandoned them? m

It's remarkable how most of what I wrote applies to both African Americans and poor rural whites, yet the right and left favor one or the other. Point to /r/stupidpol I guess.

I'm pretty sure radio broadcasts about cockroaches came well before Rwanda got seriously bad (though that built on decades and centuries of tribal conflict), and Hitler had several years of power and propaganda before Kristallnacht.

Both are instances of much larger majorities showing violent tendencies to much smaller minority populations, which is the inverse of the situation in America. Genocide is much less of a concern to me (in America, of course) than politically-motivated sectarian violence, which is why I get twitchy when people start hinting about all the guns they have or AR-15 wielding proud boys start convoying around Seattle or antifa members start shooting rando conservatives.