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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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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.