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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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For a similar example to the body cam discussion, see blind auditions. It's a nice view into the mind of the left - the way blind auditions were pushed, they most likely genuinely thought they would be good. And it's hard to argue that blind auditions aren't the most fair and meritocratic approach, which was a common primary justification. But when (racial) inequality stubbornly refused to budge, it revealed that the latter was merely instrumental, and they are actually perfectly willing to sacrifice fairness and meritocracy for equality.

On the 10 demands, without the democrats giving clear, legally binding proclamations of cooperation on being willing to enforce immigration law and to crackdown on the anti-ICE "protestors" (btw, what's a good word here? "terrorist" is too harsh a word, but "protestor" too weak, since they actively block and interfere with basic government work. Very few would call a pro-lifer trying to physically interfere with abortions merely a "protestor", not even the right), I really don't see how this can possibly work out in a way that doesn't kill any and all immigration enforcement in blue strongholds.

it revealed that the latter was merely instrumental, and they are actually perfectly willing to sacrifice fairness and meritocracy for equality.

I think you're failing to properly model DEI proponents' minds, here. They still want fairness and meritocracy, but they start from the unassailable premise that there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew, therefore showing that the outcome of a process is racially or gender-skewed proves that it wasn't actually fair and meritocratic. This is not sophistry, this is what a large amount of people actually believe.

Yes/No. I believe that many believe that they want fairness/meritocracy. But if you measure a process purely by getting the outcome you want, claiming that this somehow makes you process-oriented is, in my view, sophistry. And progressives have shown a noticeable incuriosity, often even marked hostility, towards a detailed investigation of the processes itself and how/why some groups tend to disproportionately fail; it always boils down only to getting the correct outcomes. See Ivy student acceptance rates; Merely just investigating the acceptance process is allegedly racist, since it gets the correct outcome, and that's what matters. Unless the outcome isn't correct, in which case you also don't investigate the why, you just change the process until you get the correct outcome.

Secondly, a decent number of progressives have in fact even fully moved on from claiming to want meritocracy, and outright use entirely different justifications, such as representativeness of a community, racial/social justice or equity over equality of chance. In many circles, meritocracy has become negatively connotated.

Secondly, a decent number of progressives have in fact even fully moved on from claiming to want meritocracy, and outright use entirely different justifications, such as representativeness of a community, racial/social justice or equity over equality of chance. In many circles, meritocracy has become negatively connotated.

I think that they still have a point. The liberal ethos was all about equal access to opportunity to achieve American dream of happiness and success. Except that we have a problem - if you believe in liberal tabula rasa, then there is no other way to measure equal access to opportunity other than outcome. Unequal outcome means unequal opportunity and thus DEI is good. The only liberal defense was that we did not achieve true socialism meritocracy. We need more education or welfare etc. and we will see the meritocratic utopia maybe next generation. In a sense DEI people claim the same - except that they want to accelerate these gains by redistribution now on grounds that we will achieve true meritocracy maybe even sooner by magic of representation and other DEI effects.

Or you do not believe in tabula rasa and you believe that some differences in opportunity are inevitable or ingrained etc. But then you are no longer believing in the same meaning of the word "merit", which than catches too medieval of a flavor of having certain classes or people who are inherently more meritorious as opposed to common uneducated plebeian caste. This is too right coded and in fact plays toward lefties sensibilities as they see this obviously as hated ancien régime which needs to be fought at every step for true progress.

start from the unassailable premise that there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew, therefore showing that the outcome of a process is racially or gender-skewed proves that it wasn't actually fair and meritocratic.

I've heard people say this and I'm hesitant to claim they don't really believe it... but do they really believe it?

The same people absolutely believe discrimination occurs in culture/education/training/etc. If I cited an article showing that e.g. childhood participation in private music lessons for orchestral instruments had a race skew (which it does), would they be surprised? I really don't think so. Do they believe that lessons and practice just... don't matter? That's the only way I can think of to justify the notion that a fair meritocratic test of orchestra applicants wouldn't show a similar skew even assuming uniform innate capacity and interest.

How about in a different context? It's no secret that, say, chess grandmasters are not uniformly distributed across race and gender. Would this hypothetical DEI proponent truly claim that chess is not a fair and meritocratic measure of chess ability? It's also no secret that just about everyone who gets to that level has played a lot of chess, almost always from a young age, and that that's not uniformly distributed across race and gender. Would they claim that that experience doesn't actually make someone better at chess?

The (slightly different, much rarer) explanation I sometimes encounter is that, while applicants from disadvantaged groups are in fact less capable at the time of application, they'll quickly 'catch up' once placed in a position congruent with their innate ability. I find that claim dubious -- if nothing else, it suggests that a 30-year-old who's played chess four hours a day since the age of five shouldn't be expected to be better than a 30-year-old who's done so since the age of 29 and a half -- but I have no trouble believing someone actually could believe it.

The thing is, I wouldn't want to be the person in the meeting saying 'applicants from disadvantaged groups are in fact less capable at the time of application' regardless of how I follow up on it. I could see myself choosing to say the former, clearly untrue statement instead to avoid the possibility of hostile misinterpretation. But maybe I'm just being cynical and people actually do believe it?

They really believe it in the sense that they've been taught to always presume discrimination and have never really thought through specific cases.

The same people absolutely believe discrimination occurs in culture/education/training/etc. If I cited an article showing that e.g. childhood participation in private music lessons for orchestral instruments had a race skew (which it does), would they be surprised? I really don't think so. Do they believe that lessons and practice just... don't matter? That's the only way I can think of to justify the notion that a fair meritocratic test of orchestra applicants wouldn't show a similar skew even assuming uniform innate capacity and interest.

The usual justification I hear is something you're brushing briefly against here: interest. What DEI proponents think is that the underrepresented minorities are not taking private music lessons for orchestral instruments because they don't feel welcome or invited in those fields. They feel it's a white or asian thing, not for them. Culturally, it's less of a thing they're likely to be introduced to.

So to steelman the DEI side here (which I must state I disagree with, but it still deserves steelmanning), minority enrollement in these activities requires bootstrapping; get a generation of these under-represented minorities in there or two by putting your thumb on the scale if necessary, hype the fuck out of them, and hopefully the next generation of the under-represented minority will be inspired by the DEI hires, will get on the pipeline early and the minority will not be under-represented anymore and you won't need to put your thumb on the scale.

I don't think it has ever worked, but I think that's the general idea.

*EDIT: To clarify why I don't think it ever works, is because it's extremely conceited. You have to assume that people are dumb and won't notice that your thumb is on the scale, and won't notice that the DEI hires are worse than the meritocratic ones. Which has a tendancy to backfire, if all the pro/famous under-represented minority athletes of a specific sport, or orchestral musicians are noticeably worse, it's likely to reinforce the idea that there is something innate with the group that makes them worse at that activity. Which would be worse than having only a few less-than-representative numbers but at least they perform to the same standard as others, which doesn't damage the "interest gap" potential explanation and won't discourage the people who do have the interest.

Sure, this is a sane position, whether or not it's true. But someone who believed this wouldn't (truthfully) say

there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew, therefore showing that the outcome of a process is racially or gender-skewed proves that it wasn't actually fair and meritocratic

Where, in context, the 'process' is a means of assessing applicants for a job, e.g. blind auditions to an orchestra. This argument admits that until the interest gap is closed, there will in fact be a skew in qualified applicants. It argues that you should hire the less meritorious applicants from certain groups anyway, but it doesn't claim that a test saying members of those groups are less meritorious is proof per se the test is biased. Which I agree with @WandererintheWilderness is something people sometimes say.

but they start from the unassailable premise that there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew

Only when it's a skew that affects groups they care about.

If we went solely by disparate impact, based on the numbers we would need to assume that cops are several orders of magnitude more sexist (against men) than they are racist (against blacks). But I haven't seen a single DEI proponent arguing that we need to eradicate female privilege in arrests/prison sentencing/etc. The right has no problem with saying that men are inherently more likely to engage in criminal behavior than women, the DEI/blank slatist/etc. camp doesn't really have an answer to this.

Also Native Americans per capita commit more crime than blacks in certain categories, with similarly high arrest/imprisonment rates. And while the DEI crowd will argue that Natives are discriminated against, I don't see it claimed that the discrimination is to a greater extent than that faced by blacks. Discrimination against blacks actually gets almost all of the airtime.

Only when it's a skew that affects groups they care about.

They aren't optimizing for explanatory power but for political power; they still earnestly believe everything they say. Accusing them of inconsistency is like accusing a tiger of not fighting fair--it's just a misunderstanding of what you are dealing with. They are not playing the "game" of mutual pursuit of truth by rational discussion, and so they are not bound by the rules of that game. When they appeal to those rules in an argument, it is merely for a strategic advantage. They do not apply those rules because they believe in them, but because you do.

Sure, but as fun as going "On the Demons and Their Lies by Frieren the Slayer" might be, my side still needs to win elections.

For a similar example to the body cam discussion, see blind auditions. It's a nice view into the mind of the left - the way blind auditions were pushed, they most likely genuinely thought they would be good. And it's hard to argue that blind auditions aren't the most fair and meritocratic approach, which was a common primary justification.

Didn't blind auditions essentially succeed at what they were meant to do, ie. eliminate gender bias in classical musician auditions?

As I understand it, it seemed to solve a gender bias, but it certainly failed to solve a racial bias. The latter was the reason it fell out of favor for progressives.

They surely eliminated gender bias. But the claim that they helped women (I.e. that bias against women existed without them) is not really supported by the original study on it.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/

Apparently disputed. I'd guess the large change in hiring of women was mostly a matter of attitudes changing so that it was perfectly acceptable for women to be in classical orchestras, and blind auditions came along because of that too.

IIRC they were supposed to ensure a perfectly blended mishmash of all races, genders etcetera and then they didn't actually lead to that

btw, what's a good word here? "terrorist" is too harsh a word, but "protestor" too weak, since they actively block and interfere with basic government work.

"Obstructor"?

Pro-life direct action(entering abortion clinics to be enough of a nuisance to stop operations without actually hurting anyone) prefers the term 'activist'. Perhaps a polite euphemism, but more accurate than 'terrorist', which should be reserved for people who actually get violent.

More to the point, "terrorist" should be reserved for people who are actually trying to create a climate of terror in order to have an outsized effect relative to the amount of firepower they've got. That's what terrorism means. Random mayhem, however violent, is not terrorism if that is not its aim.

The George Floyd riots certainly count as terrorism in my book. I, personally, was terrified. They blocked off the main highways going through downtown that I used everyday and burned buildings.

The Don Lemon stunt also looks like terrorism to me. But it was done with intimidation, rather than violence itself. So some kind of terrorism lite. The point is, if they weren't charged, there would be nothing to stop them from shutting down that church every week.

I would be happy with calling some of the BLM stuff terrorism, yes!

Not all of it, mind. I think blocking roads is fairly normal protest stuff that doesn't really serve to create a climate of terror in any straightforward sense - not sure how it could terrorize you, would honestly appreciate elaboration. Were the Canadian truckers terrorists? If anything, blocking roads looks to me it's a straightforward show of strength. The protesters demonstrate the ability to actually impede everyday life and the local economy on a meaningful scale if they don't get their way. That's not really the same kind of strategy as the archetypal terrorist attacks - small-scale acts of extreme violence which the terrorists couldn't scale up to a strategically meaningful extent, but which they leverage to frighten people into getting what they want anyway.

(Maybe 9/11 confuses the issue because it's intuitively "big"? But as I see it, what makes it a terrorist rather than merely military act is still the fact that the people who did it could not have repeated it enough times to actually defeat the US militarily. They merely hoped that taking out one or two high-profile targets would freak the enemy out to an irrational degree. Which, alas, it did.)

But certainly, a lot of it was terrorist in nature. Burning buildings is a very good example.

"Terror" is just shorthand for "anti-Establishment activity", because 'the state of being terrorized' is trivially gamed.

Everything $political_opponent does is terrorism- always has been, and it always will be.

Were the Canadian truckers terrorists?

Under this definition, yes. The reaction to it (freezing bank accounts) was also an act of terrorism for reasons I don't think I really have to explain.

I mean, I was afraid. They were damaging property downtown and I lived a mile away. They were blockading the major thoroughfares that I used every day and I saw videos of people being ripped from their vehicles. They were establishing physical dominance and scaring people to make a political point (that we better reduce police funding... or else). And that is what my city did.

Interestingly I had just asked chatgpt and it proposed "obstructionist" as the top option, and a lot of lesser options including "interferer", "disruptor" and "agitator". "Obstructor" is probably a good choice.

"Agitator" was on the tip of my tongue.

Yeah, I see it commonly used, but it has a bit of a different connotation imo. On the one hand, you can be an agitator without doing any obstructing or interference, just purely based on your rhetoric, and in that sense it's actually still a lesser word. On the other hand, it usually implies agitating for violence, and as much as I dislike the obstructors, they generally stop short of that.

Vigilante is closer to the right meaning, though in this case it's not so much trying to take the law into your own hands than it is trying to take the law out of the police's hands.

Yeah, that is an important distinction.

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