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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16411 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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A new Jussie Smollet case? Another Nurse Karen versus black kids on rental bikes?

Former 'The Bear' writer handcuffed on train after alleged complaint from white woman

Alex O'Keefe is a writer for FX's The Bear and a former speechwriter for Elizabeth Warren. He's also black. On September 18 he was apparently arrested and taken off an MTA train when a white woman told him to correct his posture and he refused.

At least, that's how it's reported on Black Enterprise, which obviously has the most inflammatory version. Most other news sites, such ABC (above) and Newsweek ('The Bear' Writer Arrested on Train After Complaint From White Woman) also seem to be describing what at first glance is a pretty egregious case of "White Karen sics cops on a black man for being uppity." So egregious that I was immediately suspicious. I mean, really? A white woman just points her finger and has a black man arrested for his "posture"? In 2025, in the Bronx?

Well, reading the ABC and Newsweek articles, there are a few additional details.

Police responded to a complaint of a 31-year-old "disorderly passenger" on a train at Fordham Metro-North station in the Bronx when "a conductor reported a passenger occupying two seats had refused to remove his feet from one of the seats," according to authorities.

According to the MTA rules of conduct stated on its website, riders are subject to a $50 fine for occupying more than one seat by lying down or placing their feet up. If a rider ignores a violation notice from an officer, they are subject to being ejected, the rules state.

"When he continued to refuse to exit, delaying service for several hundred other riders for six minutes, the passenger involved was handcuffed and removed from the train, where he was issued a summons for disorderly conduct, a violation, without further incident at approximately 1048 hours, and allowed to board the next train to complete his trip." MTA police told ABC News in a statement.

So he was not actually arrested - he was cuffed and "detained," then allowed to board the next train.

Supposedly one of the woman's friends said "You’re not the minority anymore.”

There is plenty here to make this another scissors incident. I have watched enough bodycam footage on YouTube to imagine it going several ways. Maybe Karen really was being a bitch and didn't like seeing a black guy "manspreading." The cops arrive in authoritarian asshole mode, O'Keefe protests, winds up cuffed and taken off the train.

Alternatively, O'Keefe was spreading himself across two seats, the old lady wanted to sit in one of them, O'Keefe decides no white lady is going to make him move, and when the cops arrive and ask him to please move his feet, he goes into Aggrieved Asshole mode.

Or something in-between. I have seen variations of both these scenarios play out. I doubt this will blow up into a huge story since O'Keefe wasn't actually arrested, but I have definitely seen it in several places now, in some cases described as a near-lynching and something something Trump.

The woman's friend saying "You’re not the minority anymore” is one of those details that strikes me as so on the nose (remember "This is MAGA country"?) that I just don't know what to think. Is it fabricated? Did someone really decide to offer up the perfect soundbite like that? Or was it in the context of a longer exchange between her and O'Keefe (a context conveniently omitted in all reporting)?

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.

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.)

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?

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

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