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Only a small fraction would have no dislike for it. But a much much broader class of people, actually the majority, would suck it up and do it anyway. Part of being a civilized adult is the ability to set aside your instincts and short-term desires and impulses in favor of the rational, long-term concerns. When I was a child and my brothers would annoy me I would hit them to make them stop. After getting in trouble enough times I learned not to do that. I don't enjoy obnoxious and annoying behavior any more than I used to, and if possible will seek non-violent solutions to end it such as politely asking, or avoiding people who do it. But at the end of the day if I am near someone being deliberately obnoxious and I can't extricate myself from the situation then I will suck it up and deal with it instead of violently attacking them. Because I am an adult and I have the emotional maturity to do that.
Every middle class white child is taught to be respectful and defer to the police. Because your natural instinct is to fight people who oppose you, especially when they're in the wrong, and this instinct leads to predictably bad results, so it requires being taught the correct behavior in this scenario so that you know when to suppress your instincts instead of following them. I am not black, I did not grow up as a black child in a black household, so I don't know first hand what they are taught. But it seems to be some combination of "the police are dangerous and will shoot you, they are your enemy" and "a real man fights their enemies instead of submitting to them like a weakling." Which even if taught as separate messages, and the latter is implicit in the culture rather than explicit, combine to create this sort of behavior.
Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!" When this is the obvious and easiest solution to the issue. It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else..
Chris Rock: "How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police"
Of course it's a comedy, and some of the advice either blames the police and/or suggests mutual blame in some cases, but it's mostly comedy built around a kernel of just what you're suggesting.
But if you're trying to reduce your bafflement: note that the genre and source and date of that video are probably not a coincidence. It's long enough after the Rodney King incident that it wasn't going to start another riot, long enough before cancel culture that it was relatively safe there, it's from a comedian, and the comedian is African-American. Rock wouldn't have come up with the routine in the first place unless he was capable of intelligent nuanced thought, sure, but if he wasn't also relatively immune to racism and victim-blaming allegations then I don't think he would have gotten HBO to okay it.
Fun fact: showing this video during police training was considered by an appellate court to be evidence of that police department's "city’s custom surrounding use of force" in an excessive-force lawsuit, leading to a half-million-dollar settlement.
It's fascinating that, long before all the stuff about the raping came out, Bill Cosby was considered a traitor to the black community for arguing (in the form of his famous "pound cake" speech) that many of the African-American community's problems are of its own making, and nurturing the politics of racial grievance is doing them no favours. And yet, Chris Rock has consistently made the same point for decades (most notably in "black folks vs. niggas", but this sketch too), but to the best of my knowledge no one considers him a race traitor. It is really as simple as his including the obvious fig leaf of "if you're a black guy driving with a white guy in the passenger seat, the police are less likely to beat you up" that allows him to get away with the fact that most of this sketch boils down to "if you don't break the law and are polite and deferential to police officers, they will have no cause to assault you (ergo, most black Americans who were assaulted by police officers have only themselves to blame)"?
Rock stopped performing that joke
That might be the difference. Rock was able to publicly acknowledge the issues making these sorts of jokes and how others could use them and toe the line of offering well-meaning criticism instead of validating racists
Cosby was apparently unapologetic, and was constantly lecturing black Americans despite the mother of logs in his own eye up until he was cancelled.
Rock didn't really get in any hot water over the bit in a way that compelled such a response, though. Even before his public acknowledgement about these potential issues, his bit was considered an absolute banger in the "funny because it's true" sort of way, and I recall his acknowledgement being a footnote, an interesting piece of trivia, in terms of how well publicized it was, so I don't think that had much of a factor.
I think the main difference was that Rock's thing was purely a comedy bit. He didn't have any extra messages before, after, or surrounding his stand-up act berating the black community or whatever. Cosby probably incorporated plenty of comedy to his messaging, but he was perceived as actually trying to push ideological and cultural messages as a comedian, putting himself into an oppressive patriarchal role. Rock was trying to make you laugh by hitting on a shared truth about culture that is taboo to say, which feels almost like the archetype of a stand-up comic - "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you" - "only one who's allowed to tell the truth in the king's court is the jester."
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That was probably a fig leaf to HBO, but I think to Chris Rock it was just another instance of trying to wrap comedy around a kernel of truth!
When he was doing "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" with Seinfeld and their Lamborghini got pulled over (with Seinfeld speeding), Rock ad-libbed "It’d be such a better episode if he pulled me to the side and beat the shit out of me, don’t you think?" and "Now here’s the crazy thing: If you weren’t here, I’d be scared. ... I’m famous, still black. ... Right now, I’m looking for my license right now." pretty readily. Seinfeld is fucking around a bit with his answers to the cop's questions, and Rock is giving pure strait-laced advice. He's laughing, but it's a nervous laugh, and when he laughs later after "I was worried the whole time. I'm still worried." I think he's laughing as much at how the line made Seinfeld crack up as he is at his exaggeration. I don't think he believes cops are all overly eager to harass black people any more than he believes that everyone who gets beaten by the cops had it coming, but I think he's serious in suggesting that both situations can and do occur sometimes.
Personally, I (white guy) have only had respectful interactions with the police, but I'm not the one they'd be profiling the hardest, right? I do think it might not be a coincidence that I've gotten one speeding ticket in my life, while driving alone, and two "pulled over for speeding and let off with a warning" incidents while my wife or I were driving with our kids in the back.
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You just need to view enough police cams of random stops with black drivers to see the pattern, it's either exits the car and flails about, refuses to give information, acts strange and reaches for a gun, or doesn't follow lawful orders. I'm sure there is some selection bias, like the normal interactions don't have a reason to be uploaded to the interweb, but it's absolutely baffling watching them interact that way with the cops. Even the ones who have nothing wrong going on still act like the cops are out to get them, and even thinking that instead of doing their best to give the cop an excuse they agitate the situation instead.
Yeah, lawful orders. Tell me, what does it mean to you when a man puts his hand on his club and orders you to turn around?
It means you're about to have a bad time
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Its all about respectability politics. Cosby had the misfortune of being Wayne Brady without cool factor, a white persons idea of a safe black man. Chris Rock had that edge, the look of a man who if he said the N word wouldn't immediately look askance for white girls gasping at the offence. Its not like Jesse Jackson didn't have the same comments about sighing in relief when it was a white man behind him when walking down the street late at night. Black baptist churches are very open and vocal about the scourge of fatherlessness and crime. Its only white antiracism book clubs that refuse to acknowledge problems in the black community.
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Is this really that baffling? The last several decades have seen the continual rise of an ideology that is based on dividing populations into groups, declaring some of them "oppressed" and others "oppressor" and declaring that the former has zero responsibility to improve things and the latter has full responsibility to improve things. A prominent example of this phenomenon in a different topic (with mostly the same players) is "rape culture," where even advising a woman against putting herself in a position of vulnerability around strange/potentially malicious men with alcohol or other drugs involved is considered full-throated justification for her being raped. Heck, even pointing out the fact (citation needed) that this raises one's odds of being sexually assaulted has been equated with explicit condoning of rape.
As such, any sort of recommendation that black people adjust their culture such that the rates of violent or otherwise troublesome encounters with police go down is verboten. That's condoning White Supremacy which we can always invoke as blame-worthy (of course, abstract concepts like White Supremacy can't really catch blame - people that you think of when you think of White Supremacy, such as white people, or brown people who disagree with you, OTOH...) in any troublesome encounter between any black person and any cop for any reason. Whatever culture that black people have, it's either innate - and good and to be supported in and of themselves, because everyone (that we've deemed sufficiently oppressed) deserves to be not just tolerated, but celebrated, intrinsically for who they are - or an adaptation that they had to take on just so that they could survive in this oppressive White Supremacist world they were unjustly thrust into, and so it's 100% the responsibility of White Supremacists to modify the policing system such that black people have to spend zero effort to change their culture and the rate of troublesome police incidents involving black people goes down to zero.
I think the simple but effective filter for "is this the bad kind of victim blaming?" boils down to:
Is victim blaming the only significant, or always first reaction? If so, it's at best tactless and at worst racist/sexist/callous/lowers freedom/etc.
Is victim blaming accompanied by other sympathy, solutions, or blame? If so, it's at worst tactless and at best good advice.
That's probably oversimplifying a bit, but I don't think the idea that "victim blaming can be bad" is wrong per se, just misapplied.
Indeed, absolutely. The key thing here, though, is that "victim blaming can be bad" was already the default state of modern culture, heck even BEFORE the 1st 2 waves of feminism. The idea that "X can be bad" no matter what X is is a pretty good default that almost everyone has about anything, and the idea that blaming someone for something can be bad had already been built into society for centuries, as evidenced by legal justice systems.
The part that progressive idpol added was the enforced misapplication.
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Lately I have been reflecting on the strange parallels between this and the recent cancellations for improper reactions to Charlie Kirk's assassination. I have to admit I have maybe found a bit of hypocrisy in myself and I'm unsure how to feel about it.
When I was perusing Reddit in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, I saw a lot of reactions along the lines of "Well if you're spreading hate and antagonizing people you can't be surprised when somebody snaps and kills you shrug." And to be honest, yes, at the time this seemed to me to be a justification for his assassination and an expression of implied support for it.
But truthfully, this isn't that different from responding to news of a woman being raped by saying "Well if you're going out doing XYZ you can't be surprised if somebody rapes you shrug." I was never viscerally angered by people offering such rape commentary the way I was by the Kirk commentary I saw last week. Obviously, there are object-level objections that could be made here, Was Charlie Kirk really "spreading hate"? and so forth.
I think it has caused me to have greater sympathy for the feminist side. While I won't go so far as to say that well-meaning advice on avoiding rape is never appropriate, I think, like comments on Kirk's death, it should be done with exceeding care and sensitivity which I myself lacked in the past.
To be fair, there are/were indeed a handful of rightist/alt-right hardliners who dismissed Kirk as a cuckservative Zionist shill and did/do advocate for political violence and spread hate; if it were any of them who got assassinated, this sort of leftist reasoning would at least have some legs to stand on. But in this case, it really doesn't.
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One thing that caused me to have more sympathy for women in particular is getting punched in the face.
No, really. Some crazy and/or homeless person, in the middle of an otherwise decent suburb, punched me in the face as he walked past me in a crosswalk in the middle of a street between the bus stop and my student housing half a block away. No, they didn't find him. Yes, it hurt like hell, but didn't break my nose thankfully. No, I didn't do anything to provoke him, I was looking down at my phone reading, surprised me completely.
I knew that this happening again was realistically highly improbable and irrational. But I couldn't help but feel vaguely nervous and vulnerable at the bus stop for a month or two afterward. And so I thought, "do women feel this way all the time?" Maybe? I still don't know. I'm sure some do, though, and it sucks, so my sympathy-meter got a minor tune-up that day.
There are political parties advocating for cracking down on such violent men but curiously single young women are precisely the demographic least likely to support them.
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You're right, but also, this just fits more into the pattern of "They say lots of things, but anything that's good isn't new, and anything that's new isn't good." The idea that saying "Well if you're going out doing XYZ you can't be surprised if somebody rapes you shrug" to someone who's been raped is rude or bad doesn't come from progressive idpol, it was already baked in to the existing system as just a form of manners that much of American culture already bought into. The innovation that progressive idpol added is that even neutrally stating that, empirically and physically, certain behaviors can influence one's vulnerability to being raped, in any context even without any specific or hypothetical rape or rape survivor involved, is still exactly the same as explicitly saying that rape victims deserved it because they were asking for it.
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Former moderator @ymeskhout pointed out that, 100% of the time when someone complains about their bike having been stolen, the first question everyone asks is invariably "did you lock it?"
Pointing out that the manner in which the victim of a crime comported themselves may have made them more vulnerable to being the victim of said crime is considered a perfectly legitimate thing to do, except when it comes to a woman being sexually assaulted after getting blackout drunk at a party full of men she doesn't know, or when a black man aggressively resists arrest and the officers attempting to subdue him unsurprisingly assault him - in which cases it becomes "victim-blaming" and beyond the pale. It's a bizarre identitarian carve-out.
I'm rather confident that there's virtually not one cyclist anywhere in the world who leaves the bike unlocked in any town or city with a known reputation for having bike thefts.
Not for long, anyway. Either they're pedestrians in very short order, or they no longer leave their replacement bike unlocked.
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Or if they answer the question "did you lock it?" in the affirmative, the follow-up question will be "how good of a lock did you use?"
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Not to disagree with your main point but I’ve never seen anyone get asked that after having a bike stolen. They might be asked how heavy duty lock and cable they used to lock it to a concrete holder etc but half the time this would be just to find out exactly how thick steel is niwadays vulnerable to cutters.
Yes, bike theft is a major problem over here and has been for years.
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Rape is an unavoidable danger. Political assassinations are novel. Most men are suitably anti-rape already. Redditors are neutral to positive on assassinations.
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It's also just that government officials are easy to blame while parents are at least technically your customers. On schooling this flips and the liberals are the ones defending schoolteachers and their unions from criticism for failing kids. You get it on both sides.
There is a significant difference in the degree of difficulty in avoiding misconduct. One person's job is legalized kidnapping, it is within the nature of mistakes that someone could be seriously injured or killed. Teacher misconduct is almost always intentional actions. I dont think any teacher has ever been giving a lecture, slipped on a banana and fell serendipitously getting impregnated by one of her lonely male students.
Cops are not just blamed for cases where there's misconduct. People of a certain ideological stripe assume there is misconduct in situations like the OP because of cops' failure to maintain equitable arrest records or to fix the underlying problems of those they police.
Teachers similarly get criticism for the state of students despite not having control of their lives for the majority of their time. The school might get leaned on for disciplinary gaps (as Obama did) or apparent bias, teachers might get blamed for being lazy or unmotivated due to the outcomes of some group of students and so on.
Most of those issues for teachers are self-inflicted wounds. If they stopped pretending school can solve social problems as part of their demands for ever increasing funding such expectations wouldn't be imposed on them
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You know, I feel like I haven't heard this one in a while now. Odd how fixations on these things fade, sometimes surprisingly quickly.
Feminism was previously a class interest group for college educated women- that is, young women living away from the protections of their families. This is the demographic most likely to get raped(although feminists were generally not very concerned about the most vulnerable members of that demographic, such as enlisted women in the military- only college educated ones).
Feminism is now mostly concerned with 'women' whose rapists give up and switch to beatings instead when they discover the truth.
Oh, come on. This is a pretty lazy sneer, and it's barely even coherent. Do you think #MeToo was about college?
And I could have sworn I'd seen you arguing trans violence stats were fake. It's not happening, but they're fixated on it anyway?
Metoo was about professional women in high status settings. This skews educated even if the examples that are highest profile mostly arent.
I have not, to my knowledge, argued that ‘trans panic’ wasn’t a thing that ever happened(although I have argued that it has not applied to murder). I have argued that it’s less common and less random than trans activists like to portray. But MTFs getting beaten up/attacked by a potential partner is a very plausible thing.
My apologies, then.
I think if you’re rounding off Metoo’s most visible examples in favor of the modal supporter, the same standard should apply today. There just aren’t enough trans people to move the needle.
More broadly, I don’t believe you can gloss something as a class interest group just because its biggest support comes from that class. The demographics of soccer fans aren’t enough to make it a Hispanic interest group. They’re showing up for something else. College-educated women are disproportionately likely to be feminists because they’re wealthier, more independent, and better-informed. That doesn’t prevent them from having a broader interest. Feminism has a long history of backing women in different conditions. I don’t believe that’s changed.
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What? A decent number of self-described feminists I know disliked the military primarily because they viewed most of them as potential or likely rapist douchebags. That's such a strange accusation to make. I'm sure feminist activists devoted less energy to enlisted women, but that's partly because there aren't many of them, it's not relatable, and a decent number were probably conservative anyways, so that's not really all that strange.
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That's largely because trans subverted and devoured feminism wholesale
Whale cancer.
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It's baffling that this progressive idealogy has been allowed to persist within the black community and survive contact with deadly consequences. Luxury beliefs are ones that privileged people can hold because someone else has to pay the costs. It does not baffle me that lefty white people believe that black people are oppressed and should fight back against the oppressive beliefs, because this doesn't cause lefty white people to get killed. It does not baffle me that college educated black people believe that they are oppressed and their lower class brothers should fight the police, because the college educated black people are much less likely to get themselves killed. It does not baffle me that black people believe that white people owe them and they should be given free handouts from the government or are morally blameless when they steal things, because this benefits them.
It does baffle me that lower class black people who get are at risk of being killed by police believe they should fight the police. This is not a luxury belief, this has deadly consequences. This is the kind of thing where skin in the game usually causes people to set aside their silly biases and obviously false platitudes and go "oh crap, this is wrong, something needs to change." Even if they verbally adhere to the same ideology, people at least turn hypocrite to avoid the consequences themselves. Someone who claims that homeless people should be given free homes balks at the thought of actually sharing their own home or neighborhood. People who want more government spending even if this requires higher taxes almost always want the taxes raised on someone else. The ideologies mutate into the most consistent and coherent form that just so happens to be compatible with avoiding negative consequences for the believer. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors but you shouldn't physically fight them because they'll kill you. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors that you should fight, and then not actually fighting them and hoping someone else will do it. I am baffled at them actually fighting the police in non-negligible numbers. The ideology, at least the version of it held and professed by black people, should have mutated to avoid this outcome the majority of the time. But it hasn't.
Most deadly police encounters are men and boys, young adults and teenagers. You know, the demographic group least likely to use their prefrontal cortex, most concerned about appearances, and least concerned with potential benefits of police help. It's totally skewed. It's not like their mothers and (non-criminal) fathers are telling them to confront police, and hell they probably tell them the opposite regularly. I hesitate to call it a broader problem because the people most likely to constitute the problem are also the least likely to heed said beliefs.
For example you can notice a bump in preference for decreased police spending in the 18-49 demographic. Now, they don't break out a figure of "among Blacks, what percentage of the 15-25 demographic prefer lowered police spending" but I bet it's an even bigger bump.
The people talking the biggest game on police oppression game are largely white knights, and are certainly not the people directly producing violence directly, much less those who are most affected (middle aged to older adults and women)
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It's worth noting that lower/underclass black culture is just all about being confrontational and loud, and not doing this puts a young black man at a severe social disadvantage. I'm pretty sure that all of these people have more contact with their fellow lower class blacks than the police, and young males are really bad at backing down out of risk aversion.
Furthermore, I don't think it's actually the majority who get extra aggressive and confrontational with police. Most of them who get arrested get arrested peaceably.
I'm pretty sure the underclass is normally confrontational and loud everywhere it lives.
The difference is that white rural underclass lives in areas with low enough population density that the police learn their faces and treat them as neighbors, like the "I know my rights" guy.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1C58B3C1E08108CF
Good point. Now that I think of it, the white underclass is rarely seen on public transit or in inner cities.
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I don't think it's directly downstream of progressive ideology, and is instead actually a consequence of the honour culture that many lower class black people seem to have grown up with in the hood. Honour cultures form in places where a strong central authority either doesn't exist, is unwiling or unable to enforce order, or is so resented by those subject to it that they're reluctant to call upon it and will punish any of their peers who do. This situation has occurred in many times and places historically, but today it often shows up in prisons, and everyone has experienced a kiddie version of it on the playground. It also seems to be common in black American ghettos.
Since people in these environments can't call upon a central authority to defend them, they have to defend themselves, and one method they use is to dissuade aggressors by signalling that they'll strongly retaliate against any attack. This is why they escalate to confrontations, threats or violence in response to minor, even unintentional slights. If they didn't they might look soft and be intentionally targeted for abuse or exploitation.
This is a potentially adaptive behaviour for people in such environments when dealing with their peers, but is at times maladaptive when dealing with authority figures. However, they can't simply choose not to behave this way towards authority figures like cops, because if they did then they would look like a bitch and a collaborator and be subject to ostracisation by their community, which would again endanger them. Besides, it's not as if this is necessarily a rational strategy they knowingly apply, it's often just a subconscious attitude they've learned and cannot simply unlearn at will.
TL;DR they fight the police because they fight everyone who challenges them to preserve their honour and reputation, even when it might have negative immediate consequences for their physical health or legal standing, and because they really don't want to look like a collaborator any more than a prisoner, a concentration camp detainee, or a middle schooler does.
Also it bears mentioning that for all the talk about US police brutality or discrimination, I'm pretty sure American police beat people up less on average than say an Eastern European cop. In other words, some other countries have police that directly participate in said honor culture directly, within the norms of such. Possibly, the normal expectation that American cops are more rule-abiding and lawful backfires in this kind of culture, where following rules is (mis)interpreted as weakness. Assuming your thesis is true, of course.
I don't know. EE cops probably beat more people on average inside the precincts ("what other flats have you burgled? Tell us! smack 69 Freedom street, that was you, wasn't it?! smack come on, heartfelt confession means lenient sentence! smack").
But there's no such culture of individual defiance. If a Polish cop honks at a dres walking down the middle of the street and yells "move your ass, fuckface", the dude won't attack him to defend his honor if he's sober.
There must be, though, a LOT of cases where the dude isn't sober.
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It can look like a luxury belief to you, but a better way to look at it is low time preference. Sure, tomorrow you might be better off if everyone was more complaint with police, but today you has a gun or drugs or both and doesn't want to be arrested.
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Seems like there're three groups we discuss here when one of these cases pop off: simply mentally ill people who can't help themselves, underclass blacks who seem to have a reckless attitude towards what they may rightly see as their enemies if they're caught up in crime, and well-off blacks who fear being harmed less, despite all of the stuff about "The Talk", and so feel justified in making it an issue then and there. I suppose we can say the general PMC/celebrity disdain for being told what to do by a working class rando mixing explosively with the general sense that authority is racist.
I don't think these groups are the same or have the same motives. Henry Louis Gates and Tyreek Hill are closer to Karens than someone like Michael Brown.
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There's a rather larger fraction who claim they have no dislike for it and you shouldn't either.
Sure; the argument from the nightstick is a powerful one.
For certain minorities, there's strong cultural aversion to such submissiveness. I rather doubt this particular thing is genetic, since its source is so obvious.
I absolutely agree. I think the vast majority of discrepancies in racial outcomes and behavior are cultural, even if genes probably play some non-zero component (my personal estimate is somewhere around 80% culture 20% genes). Such that, even if cultural interventions couldn't completely solve every issue entirely, they could solve most of them and should be paid attention to more.
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