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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30597 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Public transit is ground zero for race realism. I don’t understand how anyone in NYC can ride the subway without, as they say, “noticing”. I lived in New York for a few years and still visit now and then and you would have to have seriously impaired pattern recognition ability to not come out of the experience extremely racist. The guy is obviously in the wrong, I don’t even need to click the link to know. MTA allows all kinds of insanely degenerate behavior from certain groups. To actually end up cuffed he really had to be asking for it

No, race realism is also wrong, the actual reason is class/subculture for which you are using skin colour as a proxy, due to the US having a underclass primarily composed of black people. I live in a European country and there is a social class that behaves in identically disruptive ways on public transport, despite being as white as the rest of the population.

I get the historical and current issues with racism in the US, but I do think it blinds both the left and right to the possibility that culture is the biggest issue.

When a lower class white behaves in an antisocial way, an upperclass white corrects him.

When a lower class black behaves in an antisocial way, everyone stares at their shoes and tries not to get in trouble or get hurt.

Two quick anecdotes. When I lived in SF, I biked to the Caltrain to commute down to the South Bay. The last hundred feet or so you have to walk your bike on the sidewalk to the train station building. I was feeling lazy and rushed, and there was little foot traffic that day. So I decided to ride my bike on the sidewalk for a bit. An older white man said to me sternly "no riding bikes on the sidewalk!", and I apologized and dismounted.

Still in SF, I was taking the subway at rush hour. The norm on the escalators is that you stand on the right and walk on the left, so that people who want to move faster can move faster. Some of these escalators are long, some people are connecting to other transit, there are reasons for wanting to move quickly. Two young black teenagers, pants sagged, stood side by side on the escalator, blocking the whole thing. They were playing rap out of a bluetooth speaker. Lines of hundreds of professionals stood behind them, unable to move, saying nothing. They seemed to be enjoying the display of dominance.

Do you present as a lower-class white, assuming you're white?

There are far more indicators beyond race involved here. You even mentioned their attire, which is a big clue. I'm originally from Portland, and when visiting again I often run into deranged people on local transit. You can usually tell they are deranged or criminals by the following clues: talking abnormally loudly, excessive swearing, talking about unpleasant subjects, staring at people aggressively, poor personal hygiene, terrible teeth, ragged clothes, large backpacks or similar stuff. Race is virtually never the front-line, first alert kind of thing.

The true test is all other things being equal, how are people treated? I think there's a difference, but the big question is the magnitude, and that's hard to answer.

When a lower class white behaves in an antisocial way, an upperclass white corrects him.

No they don't. When was the last time a wigger got corrected by his social superior? Or any other kind of obvious trailer trash.

I'm guessing in your example that you gave off a middle class vibe. If you'd been wearing a wife beater and had a neck tattoo, no one would've said anything.

The fact that certain ethnic groups behave just as badly as black Americans doesn't prove that black Americans don't behave badly.

No, race realism is also wrong, the actual reason is class/subculture for which you are using skin colour as a proxy, due to the US having a underclass primarily composed of black people. I live in a European country

Respectfully, I have never met a European native who properly groks US white-black race relations, nor the class structure in the US. They both differ in very significant ways from the European experience. Suffice to say, no, its not a class thing, it is a race thing.

there is a social class that behaves in identically disruptive ways on public transport, despite being as white as the rest of the population.

We have those in the US too. They are pretty much universally despised and regarded as being the source of their own problems. The fact that the judgement comes so easily against those with white skin, and yet any level of mental gymnastics will be done to excuse sinilar actions from those with non-white skin... is interesting. (BTW our current Vice President comes from that class, and wrote a very interesting book about his childhood and escaping the destructive cycle. He is quite forthcoming that most of the harms are self-inflicted.)

Suffice to say, no, its not a class thing, it is a race thing.

So you think the behavior is genetically hardwired?

To the extent that genetics (and epigenetic phenomena) express themselves in our behavior, yes.

This is not a condemnation of any individual person, but blank-slateism has been rather conclusively debunked. We are all, to a certain extent, products of our genetics.

I'm not him but I think it's both, there's a genetic predisposition that's reinforced by culture.

I live in a European country and there is a social class that behaves in identically disruptive ways on public transport, despite being as white as the rest of the population.

Absolutely, yes, that exists. And most of the blacks, arabs, turks etc. one sees behave that same way, even more so than the relatively smaller percentage of the whites that do so. This doesn't necessarily make race rather than culture the cause - but damn is race a good proxy for culture here!

Those anti-social underclass whites exist in America too, but they're not as anti-social per capita as blacks of the same class. For pretty much every class, education, income level, blacks commit more crimes. Infamously, low income whites have lower murder rates than high income blacks. There really does seem to be a general ancestry effect independent of other social factors.

Of course, this does not mean there are not sensible policies that could not reduce these discrepencies, including reversing counterproductive progressive attempts to solve the problem.

However, it seems to me that parity between whites and blacks in anti-social behavior could only be achieved under circumstances where blacks were significantly less free than whites. I value freedom highly, so I am disinclined to take that trade-off. But that means accepting large discrepancies that fuel racial prejudice and discrimination and make it difficult for diverse cultural groups to coexist and share the same public and political institutions.

I see no solutions to this quandary except perhaps widespread use of advanced genetic engineering or embryo screening to breed out these differences over a few generations.

Beyond general freedom as an argument - if you start restricting the rights of individuals based on their genetic predispositions, why stop at black vs white?

The crime rate difference between whites and asians is even greater than between whites and blacks. Left handed people are more likely to be criminals as well. And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.

Despite that, I highly doubt @ArjinFerman and the other race realists here are sexist against men and racist against all ethnicities other than East Asian.

Despite that, I highly doubt @ArjinFerman and the other race realists here are sexist against men and racist against all ethnicities other than East Asian.

Of course I am. Of course lower-class German men are more suspicious than middle-class Turkish women.

Asians, dunno. Not enough of them here to form proper prejudice.

And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.

This seems like a modus ponens/modus tollens situation. If you ask people this hypothetical:

you're traveling alone in a strange city. The only way you know how to get home is by taking a metro. Would you rather take a metro filled exclusively with:

A) young male people

B) young female people

is there any demographic in the entire world for which the majority wouldn't answer B? Young men, young women, old men, old women, black men, white men, black women, white women, gay men, gay women, straight men, straight women - if traveling by themselves, everyone feels safer in a train full of young female people than a train full of young male people.

Does this imply that 100% of young male people are violent and dangerous, or that no one has ever been stabbed for their wallet by a young female person? No, of course not. But everyone understands the risk calculus, and as far as I understand it, "race realists" are simply arguing that the risk calculus is comparably true of certain other salient identity characteristics besides sex. More than that - they are arguing that everyone (whether liberal or conservative) is already using this risk calculus and adjusting their behaviour accordingly, even if they've been trained to believe it's wrong to do so, even if they claim that's not what they're doing (but their revealed preferences say otherwise).

if you start restricting the rights of individuals based on their genetic predispositions, why stop at black vs white?

While I will not speak for anyone else, I would much prefer to stop at "take legal colorblindness both seriously and literally."

I won't argue to restrict rights of individuals based on genetic predispositions. Can we agree to not grant people additional privileges based on genetic predispositions in terms of interacting with law and ignoring reality?

And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.

There are plenty of ways in which The System™ very much accounts for this. I've never seen anyone in-ernest complaining that disparate conviction rates on the basis of gender being a sign of "Systemic Sexism". We got rid of all the exclusively-male spaces, but still allow women's-specific institutions: see the fervor on both sides of the trans issue, but the takes aren't typically "eliminate the women's restroom completely" or "repeal Title IX to have a single sports league again".

And honestly I think I'm okay with it that way.

FYI, the person you're replying to identifies as a trans woman, and hence has a lot of skin in this particular game.

I am somewhat critical of the entire gender movement, but also generally okay with consenting adults doing consenting adult things without bothering the rest of us, but I don't think it really matters too much to the example here: the remaining generally-agreed-upon systemic sexism that does exist goes mostly in one direction, which is why there isn't much drama about accepting trans men (not perceived as dangerous), but lots about trans women.

I've never seen anyone in-ernest complaining that disparate conviction rates on the basis of gender being a sign of "Systemic Sexism".

Even though that is, of course, exactly what's happening. We more often do that for conviction terms since it's more measurable there.

Female anti-sociality takes a lot more work to root out and is a lot more plausibly deniable than male anti-social behavior, due to a variety of factors (some evolutionary, some not). So a legal system that only sees on bright lines only punishes them when they act out in ways that match male anti-social behavior, which is called that because men function more along those lines.

The ways in we used to tamp down on this behavior in an equal way is what feminists mean when they say "sexism": fuzzy social laws designed to deal with the gender whose anti-social behavior is inherently harder to police in an equitable way compared to the way we punish male anti-social behavior (which we can at least gather evidence for).

Just because you aren't looking for it, or don't have the words to describe it (because they have perhaps been erased) doesn't mean the intent isn't there. Defining rape in a way only men can commit it doesn't magically make women incapable of it.

but the takes aren't typically "eliminate the women's restroom completely" or "repeal Title IX to have a single sports league again".

What's good for the gander is good for the goose.

Obviously yes, I agree that we shouldn’t get into DNA screening people and preemptively punishing them. However when it comes to men I actually do favor some sexist restrictions against men. For example I think men should have probably have more firearm purchase restrictions than women. Maybe even requiring 2 adult women to testify to a man’s good character to purchase a firearm seems reasonable, while such a restriction on women would be unnecessary

Then when a woman purchases the firearms that are used in a capital crime due to this restriction we can give them honorary doctorates.

You joke, but firearms purchases by gangsters girlfriends are already a major problem that democrats won't address because it isn't posturing at lawful gun owners and republicans won't address because it admits gun violence is a problem.

Make the guns women are allowed to buy pink. Make unpinking a gun a felony. Hell, make the bullet casings pink too.

I've seen Republican congressmen go after multiple DOJ officials including FBI directors for not going after the straw purchasers. The fact is that the DOJ and FBI are all filled with strivers (and more and more left of center strivers these days) that don't care about cases that won't get them in the news. They would rather spend 22 months building a shaky case against a state senator for taking a $5k gift from a friend who is also a donor who also might have benefited from some legislation the state senator was going to vote for based on ideology anyways than spend 2 months rolling up a crew of armed robbers who hit 7/11s in 5 states. Plus the arresting black women thing is a problem for many ideologically.

republicans won't address because it admits gun violence is a problem.

The federal agencies in question refuse to prosecute. How would you suggest Republicans force them to start prosecuting? Should we make it double illegal, so that they can decline to prosecute two federal felonies rather than one?

Pointing out the ways in which the Federal Bureaucracy make a complete hash out of rule of law is something we've been fighting aggressively to get into the overton window for some time now. "Stop trying to pass new gun regulations and simply enforce the ones we already have" has been a foundational part of Republican argumentation on the gun issue for the last thirty years at least.

The federal agencies in question refuse to prosecute. How would you suggest Republicans force them to start prosecuting?

My suggestion — personnel is policy. Purge the people who work for those agencies, and replace them with people who will prosecute. It's the same advice I give when it comes to every way in which the Federal bureaucracy are being Leftists who #Resist when Republicans win elections. (Note, I didn't say "when Republicans are in charge" because merely winning elections and taking charge are two different things.)

Despite that, I highly doubt @ArjinFerman and the other race realists here are sexist against men and racist against all ethnicities other than East Asian.

I absolutely am sexist against men as far violence is concerned, my views on the necessity of women-only spaces re: trans issues are informed by that. As far as racism goes, I prefer not to do it at all, actually, and I appreciate it if things I say, like "I'm perfectly happy leaving well enough alone when it comes to race" and "I don't want to become Steve Sailer", aren't ignored in the future.

Alternate solution, charge more young murderers as adults, and enforce the death penalty. If you, say, stab someone completely unprovoked while you are in highschool in front of a dozen people and murder them, you just get put to death. Fucking done, don't need you in society, don't need to give you a chance to have more congenital felons.

Supposedly Europe pretty regularly executed the most antisocial among them for about 1000 years. Took them from illiterate looting and pillaging barbarians to the masters of the world with more intellectual achievements than any other group in history.

And then they committed civilizational suicide, so maybe I don't know exactly what the moral is supposed to be. But more death penalty is probably good?

I think I'd be a little more suspicious of the causality there if I were you. I can name a number of ancient societies that were quite harsh and proactive about punishment of crime, and prosperity doesn't always automatically follow. Unless you think the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, and Iranian theocracy are the up-and-comers on the world stage.

From a data optimization perspective I actually think some kind of three-strikes system is actually not half bad, but complex systems are complex so easy solutions don't always work as expected.

And then they committed civilizational suicide, so maybe I don't know exactly what the moral is supposed to be.

Perhaps that a society can domesticate themselves too much.

Right, what is the optimal level of anti-social behavior in a society? The downsides of too much are obvious and well-understood, but the downsides of too little are perhaps obscure and pernicious in their own way.

I really don't much like the idea of forcing all groups into some kind of equity in murder rates. Real diversity demands diverse outcomes, or it doesn't mean anything, but large differences between people in the same polity are clearly an issue.

Reminds me of those people complaining that they don't like cops because they're so aggressive, scary and intimidating.

Well, duh. That's not by accident, it's by design. Given the nature of their jobs, cops have to be a credible threat to people who deal drugs and murder people for a living. If they aren't scary to those people, they can't do their jobs properly, which inevitably means they're going to come off as a bit scary to people to whom they don't know whether or not they're violent drug dealers i.e. you when they pull you over in a routine traffic stop.

why stop at black vs white?

Because that's where the biggest gains are to made at the lowest cost.

I don't actually advocate for doing it, but it's obvious why someone would focus on that first.

You cannot move from an "ought-not" to an "is-not", any more than you can move from an "is" to an "ought".

This hypothesis is now quite conclusively disproven by a study using within-family African admixture and then separating out the genes responsible for skin color. The great cremieuxrecueil on x last week:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1967752858251469117

Individuals who derive more of their ancestry from Africa tend to be less intelligent. Between persons, this could be due to things like people who look more like Africans being subjected to discrimination, or people who have more African ancestry somehow ending up with worse family environments. So, we have to go within-family.

This means testing to see if one or another sibling who has more African ancestry (because they'll inherit different amounts from their parents due to random chance) is more or less intelligent. Why does this work? Because siblings with different amounts of African ancestry have the same family background and their appearances (in terms of looking more or less African) are unrelated to how much they differ in African ancestry. So, my friend ran the test. It came back that the relationship we see in the general population is the same as the one we see comparing siblings, and even when comparing other types of relatives. That is, the sibling with less African ancestry tends to be more intelligent.

The "IQ per unit of admixture" is statistically indistinguishable between the population and within-family results, and yes, it explains most of the Black-White difference in IQ. I just wanted comparably-scaled results for all the traits here, so you're seeing r's. It's pleasant that the within-family variance reductions aren't enormous for siblings, which is what we expect even with quite high heritabilities given their genetic relatedness. It's the same result we've seen with American data, and it's also nice to see that in the case of this trait, the global admixture result can be interpreted like the within-family one. Presumably this only holds with measurement invariance, as we see in the U.K. when comparing Whites and Blacks there. Since we see this in the U.S. too, it's likely that the previous, already-published within-family null—which had a sizable effect in the correct direction which also could not be distinguished from the global r—was just a false-negative.

In general, within-sibling skin color analysis shows no significant effect

This should make us happy, because it means that White people are not incredibly evil senseless folks constantly putting lther groups down and thereby making them dumber through mysterious processes. Rather, White people are so selflessly kind that they are willing to forego their own intuition and self-benefit at the civilizational scale in the errant pursuit of universal justice. (As an aside, that trannyporn0 theory is certain in my mind, because I once messaged him on the old site and he mentioned that he was looking into IQ-by-%AA admixture data.)

This should make us happy, because it means that White people are not incredibly evil senseless folks constantly putting lther groups down and thereby making them dumber through mysterious processes.

I think there's an argument to be made that it shouldn't make us happy. I vaguely remember reading (though once again, I don't remember who, when or where) someone arguing online against Scott's position of IQ realism to combat anti-Semitism — that elite overrepresentation of Jews is due to their higher IQ, and thus they are not "incredibly evil senseless folks" engaged in ethnic conspiracy against the Gentiles. I vaguely recall the person I read quoting a couple of things from Turkheimer to support his argument, which is that this explanation will, if made widely known, will likely make anti-Semitism worse — not worse in quantity, but worse in quality.

Because maybe you have a few anti-Semites who only dislike Jewish overrepresentation because they think it's a product of "cheating" and ethnic conspiring, and if you convince them it's not, then they'll become okay with the statistical disparities. But, the argument goes, that's not most anti-Semites. No, it's the elite overrepresentation itself that's the core problem, and they care about Jewish "cheating" because they think it's the cause of that. And being falsely accused of something you're not doing — conspiring to keep other ethnic groups down — is very bad, and having people demand you stop doing the thing you aren't doing is very much a problem.

But it's better than the "IQ realism" alternative. Because it's one thing to have the people unhappy with elite overrepresentation think it's something the Jews are choosing to do — and thus could, theoretically, choose not to do. It's another to convince them that Jewish elite overrepresentation is a product of higher Jewish IQs, a hereditary trait they simply can't help; that it's not something the Jews are doing, it's an inevitable product of their nature. Because if you want to get rid of Jewish elite overrepresentation (whatever the cause), and Jewish elite overrepresentation is an inevitable product of the existence and presence of Jews in your society, then the only solution can be…. (Hence, the person argued, the only way to deal with anti-Semites is to censor and suppress them.)

The analogy to black-white race relations is rather straightforward. I've effortposted here before on the Kendian academic model of "racism" as synonymous with "disparate impact" (and while I tend to reference Kendi, he didn't actually say anything new, he merely said in plainer, more outsider-accessible language what previous academics had been expressing in more subtle jargon for decades prior). It doesn't matter that "White people are not incredibly evil senseless folks constantly putting other groups down and thereby making them dumber through mysterious processes" — all that matters is that we've made a society in which success correlates with IQ; that this means an ethnic group with an mean IQ of 85 will be less successful in the statistical aggregate than one of mean IQ 100 is just the way in which our society has "white supremacism" and "systemic racism" baked in. "Anti-racism" means reordering society to remove this IQ-success correlation, at least in racial aggregates.

And if you answer like many people do — especially "gray tribe" sorts — that the correlation of IQ with outcomes is because intelligence is deeply important to outcomes, particularly in a modern high-tech society like ours, and strongly correlated to competence; so that in basically any moderately-functional society, all things held equal, IQ is always going to positively correlate with good outcomes… well, then you're just arguing that no amount of (plausible) rejiggering of society will eliminate "systemic racism," and that the problem as the academics above define it — white (and Jewish and Asian) elite overrepresentation is an inevitable product of the existence of white people. And thus, the talk of "eliminating whiteness" takes on a whole new tone if you accept IQ realism.

(This is a part of a much bigger discussion on how the "liberal consensus" worldview seems to hold that peaceful coexistence requires a certain level of cognitive and genetic homogeneity, that humans be mostly fungible and most differences "skin-deep"; and that any large, hereditary gaps in things like IQ — whether currently extant, or a product of future genetic modification — would make genocide inevitable; that either the high-IQ must cleanse the world of those less intelligent, or that the low-IQ must rise up and slaughter their more-intelligent would-be overlords. Malcolm Collins touched on this point, with references to Star Trek's position on genetic enhancement, in a recent Based Camp podcast episode.)

Thing is, we've been trying the experiment of suppressing "IQ Realism", pretending all groups are the same, and rejiggering things so it's not as obvious they aren't. It has led us to some nasty bits of the Culture War, resentment among whites discriminated against, doctors who couldn't pass the MCAT if they were white, possibly the Jackson water crises, etc. Chirugh's maxim applies: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

The lighter version -- "IQ Realism" is suppressed and the disparate outcomes allowed to exist but waved away for various other reasons -- worked better in some senses, but it was not stable. Perhaps it could be re-established somehow, but I suspect the conspiracy required would be too difficult to maintain.

For Jews, I suspect there's less of a problem. Outbreeding among the Ashkenazi is reducing their IQ advantage, and this is probably good (overall, not for IQ specifically) for the hybrid generations as well, as the Ashkenazi show a number of genetic diseases resulting from a small inbred population.

siblings with different amounts of African ancestry have the same family background and their appearances (in terms of looking more or less African) are unrelated to how much they differ in African ancestry.

Surely this proves too much. Either Cremieux thinks percentage of African ancestry is entirely unrelated to how African anyone looks (in which case, uh…), or he needs some sort of convoluted “threshold” model in which percentage of African ancestry determines how African someone looks in general, but between-siblings differences are always too small to result in a visibly-distinct degree of African appearance (though somehow they aren’t too small to produce a noticeable difference in intelligence?)

Either Cremieux thinks percentage of African ancestry is entirely unrelated to how African anyone looks (in which case, uh…),

As someone who actually studied (independently, there's no way I could get a degree in it) HBD the actual answer to this is that while how African someone looks isn't entirely unrelated to their ancestry it isn't completely dependent upon it either. There's a wide variety of environmental (including the uterine environment) causes which can impact physical appearance, and social recognition of race (i.e. "they look somalian") can be dramatically altered by personal choice - if you clone an african and let one of them grow up in a tribe of bushmen while the other grows up as a member of the British aristocracy there'll be a noticeable difference in appearance despite identical genetics.

Either Cremieux thinks percentage of African ancestry is entirely unrelated to how African anyone looks (in which case, uh…)

Delicious horseshoe theory if Cremieux is indeed arguing "(observed) race is just a social construct, sweety"...

If there are is a genetic component in some African ancestry (although which part of Africa, as there is a huge amount of genetic diversity even within single countries?) that is correlated with lower IQ, it would still be one of many factors involved, and does not mean culture and discrimination is not a factor.

What are you or @ArjinFerman suggesting we do with that information?

What are you or @ArjinFerman suggesting we do with that information?

To the extent I'm interested in bringing up the subject at all, it's only as a trump card against any future attempt to resurrect "white privilege" and "systemic racism" arguments, and as happened in this case, to refute bad "purely socio-economic factors, of course" arguments.

If you're interested in my solutions to the problem, they boil down to the equal application of the rule of law, regardless of race, swiftly, and harshly. I've long advocated for the Bukele Option / Salvador Solution over the application of genetics to the problem of crime (which is mostly a liberal idea - see "abortions caused a drop in the crime rate"). If that's too spicy, I can maybe be persuaded to go as soft as Thomas Sowell.

I think the logical suggestion would be to enforce the law, accepting that racial disparities in enforcement may be unavoidable.

Nothing crazy: cancel affirmative action, restrict immigration accordingly, do away with guilt narratives about disparate outcomes. I feel like progressives think that the worst case scenario of affirmative action is slightly slower progress, at a pace which doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. If only! The worst case scenario is that the Chinese gain global hegemony and completely control the trajectory of the mankind because the pace of technological change all but prevents new competitors from arising. So we’re in the midst of a life of death struggle against a different civilization for world domination. And the Han are pretty cool and peaceful, maybe their foreign policy decisions even justify their victory, but I’d rather not have a Total Han Victory over the rest of history.

Because siblings with different amounts of African ancestry have the same family background

Is the claim this data was studied between siblings of the same parents? Because with enough genes at play this sounds like trying to divide by coinflips by heads count: easy for single-coin games (eye color, etc), but if you're flipping thousands of coins you're going to end up with about the same number every time.

But I'm not a geneticist, so feel free to tell me where I'm wrong.

'Black' and 'White' are not proxies for class but for ancestry, and there are plenty of people with light or dark skin who are not from the same ancestral groups as the central cases of those categories, in this case Northwestern European or Sub-Saharan African.

Our language is seriously out of date. Skin color is an increasingly-bad proxy for these things in our increasingly-admixed world, but concluding that race is simply a proxy for class or culture would be a major mistake.

The underclass is not primarily black, although in NYC I guess it might be. It’s probably 40-50% black, which is a massive overrepresentation, yes, but you’re about as likely to see someone white or Hispanic behaving in similarly antisocial ways. We call some of them ‘wiggers’.

This was my biggest culture shock moving to the city. Where I grew up the working class was mostly white, the diner waitress and the customer had about equal odds of being white or black. Moving to NYC, lower end retail has entirely black employees serving mostly white customers.

The discrepancy in DC was so stark it was disconcerting. 100% of service workers were black, while the service-enjoyers were a diverse array of non-black. The only exception was hipster restaurant waitstaff, who were mostly white.

It was like visiting a plantation theme park.

It's not hard to see that (some of) the "most progressive" areas are the most segregated in the country. Or sometimes just the whitest (Portland, Boulder). It's a weird dynamic that, say, Jackson isn't known for that.

I don't know about Jackson, but as you move down I-95 (until you get to Florida) the retail employees get blacker (both proportionally and individually) but at some point there's more black customers as well.

No, race realism is also wrong, the actual reason is class/subculture for which you are using skin colour as a proxy, due to the US having a underclass primarily composed of black people.

Why do you guys have to keep doing this? I'm perfectly happy leaving well enough alone when it comes to race, but then someone just has to post something like this. I don't want to become Steve Sailer, I've lost count of how many times I bit my tongue or scrolled past arguments like this, but every time is that much harder.

Do you really think this is true? Would statistics showing that rich black Americans commit more crime than poor white Americans change your mind at all? If not, in what sense is it a proxy?

The past month or so has made me suspect that Europeans(in general) are obsessively attuned to class in a way that America(in general) isn't.

So they default to class, whereas we default to stereotypes.

It's a subtle distinction, but I think it's very telling, and results in monstrously different assumptions and outcomes.

Firstly, social class is not really about money. Social class is about culture. A mechanic or a plumber can make more money than a university lecturer with two PhDs. How many rich black American are from stable, two parent households in high income areas and have the same cultural values as their white counterparts? Are they engineers, doctors, businesspeople, or are they in the stereotypical high earning occupations available to black people? And can they avoid social pressures and expectations - including that from the black community itself - for their own kids as well, who might look to role models that look like them?

But in any case, if you look at the statistics, the incarceration rate for black men still sharply decreases with income. That means if you want to decrease the black crime rate, facilitating their upward mobility is still the most effective way.

Firstly, social class is not really about money. Social class is about culture. A mechanic or a plumber can make more money than a university lecturer with two PhDs. How many rich black American are from stable, two parent households in high income areas and have the same cultural values as their white counterparts? Are they engineers, doctors, businesspeople, or are they in the stereotypical high earning occupations available to black people? And can they avoid social pressures and expectations - including that from the black community itself - for their own kids as well, who might look to role models that look like them?

If we're owning the race realists by channeling Thomas Sowell, I can only cheer for that, but I'm not exactly amused by hearing these arguments after being called racist for about 20 years for believing them. I'd also like some indication that the cultural parts are as well defined and measured as you'd demand of race realists before accepting their arguments.

But in any case, if you look at the statistics, the incarceration rate for black men still sharply decreases with income.

There's still a gap between blacks and whites at any income level, it's so big that blacks have to reach something like the 70th 60th percentile of income before crossing the incarceration rate of 1st percentile whites, and the gap actually increases in relative terms as income grows.

Blacks are massively underrepresented in low-education high-pay occupations except trucking and sex work. The oil rigs are pretty much all white and Hispanic.

High income blacks are probably more likely to be doctors than high income whites, because there’s not a lot of black master plumbers and the like.

High income blacks are probably more likely to be doctors than high income whites, because there’s not a lot of black master plumbers and the like.

Because affirmative action has rarely been a driving force in hiring/education decisions in those occupations. If you are a shit doctor they just assign you the flu patients, if you are a shit plumber you get covered in shit and then your company never gets hired for another job.

Getting a job as a plumber is so easy that affirmative action doesn’t make much difference. Granted it takes a few years to become a well paying job, but still.

Getting a job as a plumber is easy if you consider being a minimum wage plumber's apprentice to be "being a plumber". Keeping it and building yourself into one that makes money is not, years invested or not.

But in any case, if you look at the statistics, the incarceration rate for black men still sharply decreases with income. That means if you want to decrease the black crime rate, facilitating their upward mobility is still the most effective way.

That doesn't follow if the difference is caused by selection, the same traits that lead people to have higher incomes also leading them to commit less crimes. (Not to mention criminal convictions and prison time decreasing income.) If criminal income disparities were primarily due to lower income causing criminality, they would be much more affected by factors like economic growth. Per this random search result the median African-American income (in 2021 dollars) steadily grew from $9,034 in 1948 to $30,968 in 2021, yet their homicide rate did not have a corresponding steady decrease and indeed had several decades that were both higher income and more criminal.

That doesn't follow if the difference is caused by selection, the same traits that lead people to have higher incomes also leading them to commit less crimes. (Not to mention criminal convictions and prison time decreasing income.) If criminal income disparities were primarily due to lower income causing criminality, they would be much more affected by factors like economic growth

Thank you. As a genuine poor person, I've always hated "poverty causes crime" arguments.

I think the steel-man of the class/subculture argument here would be to point out that clothes and posturing are also doing a lot of work here: we're talking about someone putting their feet on the seats (not a 'proper' behavior). These cases are never about someone in a suit, or even a collared shirt, or about someone quietly reading a book or using headphones. It's always about someone swaggering around like they own the place.

I will absolutely concede that this correlates pretty strongly with race, and I won't take a side here on whether there is causation and in which direction. You can try to do so in a colorblind fashion, but I think it'll look pretty similar to an outside observer regardless.

I will absolutely concede that this correlates pretty strongly with race

It's the "black" vs "nigga" thing again combined with black culture having serious issues that make many people end up as niggas (sometimes irrespective of skin color). As you said, middle class black guys on their way to office are never the ones that cause these problems.

I'm reminded of when I visited San Francisco as a young guy 25 years ago and had my first proper encounter with a beggar. That guy was obviously black instead of "nigga" as he was reasonably well dressed, very polite and all "Excuse me sir, would you have any spare change" and very thankful when I gave him all the small coins I had wanted to get rid of anyway. The complete opposite of what I hear things are like these days.

If someone wants to say "well, it's not so clear, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, etc , etc." I don't have anything against that. It's the waltzing in, declaring one theory wrong, and proposing a wronger one as the true explanation, triggers my 'tism.

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