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What makes sexism more tolerable than racism?
So I was watching a video the other day about being a woman in NYC. And something this women said stuck out to me, and this something I notice In liberal/Progressive circles when it comes to Men specifically:
There is often deep talk in many feminist circles, and society, generally, about how scary it is to be a women, and how fearful women are of Men. Im not here to argue that this fear is unjustified - I understand it fully, but here is what I think is a bigger problem with this: It is, by definition, prejudice. Thats honestly not the problem I have with it, the problem is a perceived double standard between prejudices.
Im sure everyone here is aware of the not so secret that Men as a group commit more violent crime than women - Mass Shootings, Rape, ect. As a response people are more fearful and more cautious of men as a whole. And for the most part, it seems that we consider this prejudice justifiable. No one would really refer to this as "Sexism"
Yet, with race & religion (and fascinatingly enough, this young women herself, despite being very liberal, is prejudice against her own race) we would reject this very reasoning. For example, according to the Global Terrorism Index, at least 75% of global terrorism comes from Islamic Groups. Yet, if some one says that they fear Muslims, or don't think they should be able to migrate into the country, many of these liberal types would revere this as a form of "racism", after all, not all Muslims are terrorist. Same for Black Men, they have a disproportionate amount of criminality, yet if you said what this young lady said as police officer, and that you profile Black Men more often because they are more likely to do it, you'd be cooked alive.
The obvious intuitive response someone could give here is that, Men & Women are obviously different in a way that people of different races and religions are not (unless you are a race realist). We know biologically that males are more aggressive, so them engaging in more criminality and being the scarier sex overall should be no surprise, thus, this prejudice isn't wrong. But the issue here is that this is obviously not a very progressive explanation, as these progressives typically believe that differences between the sexes are due to the social construct of gender, and that society is largely responsible for this difference. But this merely mirrors the same beliefs about differences we see between races and religious groups, no? If all these differences were indeed, socially constructed, and a product of patriarchy - white supremacy, etc, Than why wouldnt it follow that this prejudice is wrong too? Is it not sexist to believe that someone is inherently more likely to kill and rape you due to a immutable and arbitrary characteristic, like gender, in the same way believing that black people are Muslims are more likely to kill and rape others because of their faith & skin color, and treat individuals within these groups accordingly based on that? Its not something inherent about men (or muslims, black people) that make them more likely to be violent, society is to blame!
So the question here is this: Why is prejudice based on sex tolerable, but prejudice based on race & religion, not?
The seething reactions to the "black man or black bear" reverse uno card for the "man or bear" question gave the game away.
If a woman believes she's safer with a bear than a man, it should be even more of a slam dunk to be safer with the type of bear least likely to randomly attack her than the type of man most likely to randomly attack her.
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What made you come up with that observation?
Prejudice based on race and religion is not only accepted, but encouraged.
This is downstream of (I'd argue a direct result of) prejudice based on sex, which is accepted even more than prejudice on race or religion.
And that's just downstream of the fact that Cain's rights and responsibilities are fundamentally different than Abel's- so whenever you have an easily-divisible dichotomy where one side is lesser than the other, that dynamic re-emerges. Man vs. woman maps onto that pretty well (especially in the age of mechanization, and especially if Abel isn't paying attention to the downstream social effects), as does white vs. other and Christian vs. other to lesser degrees.
The Abel side has to pay attention in a way the Cain side does not. Abel doesn't need an in-group bias because he'll generally succeed wherever he goes (and developing one would be corrosive to Abel-ness); but in-group membership is life or death for Cain.
Ironically, encouraging the side of a population perceived as more likely to contain Abels to develop that in-group bias is the main thing that would destroy that perception, but the problem is only an Abel could do that.
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The problem of our modern age is that even very smart people are not very good at divorcing the “group dynamics” from the “individual dynamics”. Motte and Baileys specifically also don’t help here.
There are stereotypes, and many of them are rooted in truth. You may justifiably take some actions that reflect these stereotypes and that’s fine. What’s not fine is the small subset of people who seem to have no sense of tradeoffs - they turbocharge stereotypes with seemingly no upper bound to how powerful these stereotypes are.
Then there are your actions on a personal, individualized level. Meaning usually the recipient of these actions and attitudes. This is the crux of the disconnect. It might be fine for me as a salesperson to avoid marketing to, say, Hispanics. But if a specific Hispanic customer comes in, I shouldn’t treat them differently. Why? Well the most powerful piece is that I consider their identity as a human being to trump their identity as a Hispanic by at least an order of magnitude if not more. The second piece is that we want to live in a society that treats people fairly and sometimes it requires locally suboptimal choices to achieve a globally optimal result. This requires a degree of personal ethics.
If my neighbor goes on a rant about how Black people are bringing in all kinds of crime to the area, I might think it’s uncharitable, or maybe factually incorrect, and I might even think a little less of them… these are societal tensions that are understandable though, in the general sense. I’m not going to treat my neighbor way different based only on that. But it’s a degree of magnitude worse (or maybe two) if my neighbor then deliberately gives the cold shoulder to a Black family that moves in on our block.
Do you see what happened? He crossed the boundary line from stereotyping to personal racism. Which has a word: discrimination. This is a serious moral failing. Whereas the act of stereotyping is relatively speaking vastly more neutral. Discrimination is an action. Sure it might be sourced from an attitude, but there’s a big step there.
The waters get muddied because bad actors (and also overly defensive otherwise good people!) often retreat to the Bailey here. Some might assume that a stereotyper will also discriminate based purely on the presence of a stereotypical belief they hold. This is, well, understandable but bad, a lesser form of the same pattern of discrimination. It also provokes hard feelings because words like “racist” or “sexist” are pretty charged. On the other side of the coin sometimes a discriminator will defend their behavior by pointing to the stereotype as truth. I wish to call this out as bullshit. They are different things with different moral stakes.
And then you have a small handful of people who react to approbation with extremism. Not only are all these stereotypes true, they think, they are strong, they are universally applicable, and individualized discrimination is sometimes not even just a necessary evil but somehow good or wise. There are a few of them on this forum. Only IRL experience can pull them back from the brink, so words can’t really reach them. Usually this is a race thing, but you see the same pattern with the most notorious of incels. Think Elliot Rodger. They take some (maybe rooted in truth!) belief about women but then apply it with such a broad brush to individuals in their lives that it creates a cycle of unhappiness (on top of being unethical).
Anyways, your particular case is a classic. I would argue the woman on the street is fundamentally in a group-dynamic, stereotype paradigm. She is not levying an individualized discrimination. She’s being realistic about a mostly-true stereotype. If she were to follow up her statement with “and so as a rule I don’t date Black guys” then we have a problem. That’s discrimination because it ignores the humanity of individuals (and also creates hard feelings that are often counterproductive on a societal level). I realize this is not always cut and dry (what if she says “and so I’m reluctant to date Black guys?”) but I strongly believe we should save the vast majority of the moral approbation for this kind of specific individualized behavior. Kindness is a bit of a skill.
We (as a society, but particularly this is directed at liberals and moderates) need to (relative to current effort) speak up stronger against discrimination and not so strongly against garden variety stereotypes. It may be true that one leads to the other by tendency and in chronological order, but the focus should be on weakening the link. Conservatives by the same token (relative to current effort) need to call out those individuals that cross the line away from “mere” stereotypes and into outright discrimination better and not hide them behind a shield of persecution, victimhood, circling the wagons, or playing the Bailey card.
Why is gender “better” at avoiding discrimination? Because the link between stereotypes and individual behavior is weaker, as it should be. Women who spout off frustration at “men” as a category are one thing (common), women who treat specific men in their life like dirt because of those frustrations are another thing (thankfully less common and less accepted as morally fine). Simple as that. We should learn from this model and apply it to other areas where discrimination is problematic.
I feel that at the point where we're throwing moral rebukes at people for their dating choices we're dancing very close to "here lies all of France" - this is not how you avoid societally-counterproductive hard feelings. It's no secret that African-descended women do substantially worse on dating sites (and presumably, other forms of dating) than others, almost certainly because an extremely-large slice of men find them ugly. Now, those women's appearance is certainly not their choice, but the men's conceptions of beauty are also not their choice. The only possible compromise here would be literal arranged marriages; if we don't want that, and we insist on making this a moral issue, then we're going to be fighting ourselves forever for no conceivable gain.
The bright line of "nobody gets to tell you you're evil for your dating choices" sounds like a good one to me.
I'd say that someone's appearance and attraction is, mostly, uncontrollably subjective (and likely unchanging), so yeah it's a good instinct to be cautious of gatekeeping there. But part of the context of the conversation here is about personality and other stereotypes, so refusing to consider dating someone because you think their personality is probably a certain way is almost certainly discrimination.
Dating is a bit of a side quest though compared to most everyday interactions, since it's also not like people are entitled to a certain level of dating interest, and so I think it's reasonable to think that different aspects and phases of romance might need to be treated separately. Plus we all know opinions about 'checklists' for finding a partner are all over the place. Even with all these caveats, exempting dating entirely (as you seem to suggest?) from conversations about discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping feels fundamentally wrong.
I'm not entirely sure what you're driving at.
The main thing I think you might be driving at is that you might be thinking I'm trying to shush discussions like this. As you can likely tell from reading that link, I'm not. But I stuck to descriptive objections and acknowledged the Bayesian evidence; I didn't call @self_made_human evil.
Could be barking up the wrong tree, though.
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True, but remember what this is actually litigating. Because the worth of woman-as-class (statistical aggregate and instinctual behavior, not a value judgment) is specifically beauty, this is an attempt to make it so that women who provide much beauty and those who have little are equalized in political power. That's the moral [redistributionist, communist, equality, "equity"] angle.
This is why it's most salient for the ugliest ones, and why the ugliest women tend to be the most feminist- they have the most to lose. (Of course, the ultimate extension/expression of the power to equalize this is demonstrated by the ability to force other women to treat men-dressed-as-women as women, including when it comes to dating, which is why you only hear about this in women's spaces, never men's.)
It's not actually about men-as-class here other than the inescapable fact that they are the arbiters of who is beautiful and who is not (in the same way women are for success in men). Women must solve this for women.
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It’s late at night. You are looking for a street parking spot. Nearby an open spot, there are a group of young black men loitering. Is it wrong for you to avoid that spot and try to find another spot?
If it is wrong, then I question why being moral is even worthwhile.
I think this you're missing @EverythingIsFine 's whole point because you present this situation as a counterargument to his "we should care more about discrimination than stereotyping" spiel, but in your situation no one is actually being discriminated against. Is having a car parked next to you a public good?
If you were interviewing for a job and trashed their resumes in the basis if their race, then there would be something to talk about. But while having a particular negative attitude about some identifiable group is not necessarily a good thing (and indeed may in fact be a bad thing), the OP was very specifically saying that society should be less concerned about that than it is.
... And in any case, I think "black" is far from the most predictive factor here. "Young" and "men" are hugely predictive, and treating people differently based on their age and gender is good, actually (🇻🇦). But what decides my perception of (other) young men as safe is primarily their presentation of class status and upbringing. I would feel plenty safe around any group of young men wearing suits, carrying college textbooks, holding hobby objects (e.g. skateboards, cameras, basketballs), engaging in a church event, etcetera. I would feel about equally unsafe regardless of race around a group of young men that are drunk, smoking pot in public, blasting loud music, wearing excessively baggy clothes, etcetera. If you pressed me, I would admit that I probably felt slightly more unsafe around a low-class afroamerican group than a low class white or latino group, but race genuinely does not rank very high in my factor analysis.
By that reasoning being forced to use a segregated water fountain isn't discrimination either, as long as the water quality isn't different between the fountains.
This is the Internet autist argument. "They're just showing social disdain for black people. Social disdain causes them no material problems, so it isn't discrimination and doesn't harm them. It's just feelings! Who cares about feelings?" Avoiding people partly based on their race is race-based harm. It may be necessary under some circumstances, but don't kid yourself about what it has become necessary to do.
... Do you seriously not see the difference between a measure that restricts the volition of others, versus a measure that doesn't?
Anyways, you're still missing the point. Just address the OPs thesis that we should be spending more effort holding people accountable for acts of bigotry and less effort for holding people accountable for feelings of bigotry. Do you disagree with that premise? I'm not going to be pulled into the orthogonal argument you clearly want to have until you at least admit that it is orthogonal. Good faith debate is one person claims "A" and the other person claims "Not A." You are claiming B. Arguing against A will not establish B. Arguing for B will not defeat A.
It isn't "restricting the volition of others" in the sense meant by libertarians, to fail to allow you to use someone else's property, and to use force when you attempt to do so anyway.
I think that like a lot of advice, some people need it more and some people need it less. People on social media (or regular media) probably need to care about feelings of bigotry less. People here probably need to care about it more. Hurting someone's feelings is actually important. Yes, sometimes people's feelings get hurt too easily, but I deny that having someone avoid you because of your race is such a case.
Okay I can tell we're getting into bravery debate territory here (not your fault, I think even OP was aware of the doodoo they were stepping in.) Trying to phrase this neutrally though... If you were the racism tsar (but otherwise kept your values) and could magically alter all government-sponsored antiracism messaging within the united states to one of the following options, which would you choose?
I think OPs argument is in line with point two, assuming limited anti-bigltry resources.
I don't know how libertarians use it. I'm using it in the sense that I would be a lot more offended by someone refusing to let me use a waterfountain than refusing to park their car near me. I would still be sad about the car thing, but I would rather more resources be spent fighting the waterfountain thing.
Hurting people feelings isn't not important, but I think OPs point (which I agree with), is that we are weighing the prevention of hurt feeling too highly relative to other antiracist goals.
By definition I'd be aiming the messaging at the public, not the people here, and the public needs different advice than the people here. Furthermore, I pointed out that avoiding black people because of crime might be necessary and racist at the same time and I wouldn't message people to avoid necessary things. It also raises the question of what counts as "bigoted acts", since most people would think that avoiding a group of people based on race is a bigoted act.
So my answer is "probably the first option, but it's completely irrelevant".
There's a famous joke I could invoke here, but I'll just say that "we" is made of different groups that need different advice. I'm sure there are people on tumblir who are weighing hurt feelings too highly. I don't think people on themotte are weighing them anywhere near that much.
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No. There is a massive difference between a group of young Asian guys and black guys hanging out. Basic stats will tell you this.
Yes there are other indicators (eg if they were all wearing suits you’d feel more comfortable). But if you understand crime stats, being black is highly predictive in the same way being male is.
Advanced stats will tell you otherwise. Do you not know what a factor analysis is?
It literally isn't though. If you keep everything constant except sex, male vs female is still HUGELY predictive of criminality. If you keep everything constant except race, the relationship is much, much weaker. Your counterargument is going to be that things are not, on average, kept constant-- but that's still not a convincing reason to look at mostly proxy factors for criminality (like race) rather than much more causitice factors like SES.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11868975/
Black women murder at a rate higher than Asian men. Black women murder rate similar to white male rate.
> Poster specifically mentions factor analysis
> Blithely replies with yet another topline aggregate statistic
That's a statistical non-sequitur.
That’s just silly. Untangling which factor is causing what is incredibly challenging since you can’t really run a natural experiment. But the stats are so extreme that dismissing race because it makes OO uncomfortable is irrational.
That is, both posters make a claim on what causes crime. I respond with stats that show facially a pretty strong issue for OP’s claim. OP cannot simply cite factor analysis without simply privileging his hypothesis.
This is also an area where publishing anything that supports my hypothesis is career suicide (eg see what happened when academics published results showing police killing was not racial predicted). Therefore, you would expect no one in the academy to attempt to prove my hypothesis—it is verboten to even consider it.
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Are you sure? I don't have a link, but I remember saying breakdowns by sex, age, and race, where the criminality statistics for blacks looked pretty dismal (black women coming out worse than white men).
Again, I'm pretty sure SES is also just a proxy, and actually a poorer one than race.
So I went out and tried to find a study about this and found a reddit comment that links to a study you might be interested in:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/4957dc/are_there_studies_comparing_us_crime_rates_by/d0p7aqn/
I can see the outline for a counterargument that goes, "race is causative of ethnicity (meaning: race linked culture), which is causative of marital status of parents, immigrant status, etcetera, which are causative of violence." Again, though... You can just filter on the direct causes instead. Fatherless behavior looks similar regardless of race, and regardless of race I would discriminate against young men engaged in it.
Just think about base rates here. People are very unlikely to commit violent crimes in general, regardless of race. But there are particular adjectives that you can apply to people that significantly raise their threat level. Imagine you have a database of every person (on earth/in your country/in your city/whatever), and a query that filters that database to only the subset that matches all adjectives in a list. Your goal is to minimize the average likelyhood of the people returned by that query committing a crime against you. In which order would you prioritize removing adjectives from the following list?
[Black fatherless poor druggie young male]
I would go for either "druggie" or "male" first, then after those two are gone "poor", then either "young" or "fatherless".
Plausibly there are some co-correlations, where the intersection of two adjectives interact to make things particularly bad... But I'd guess that in most of the cases where that happens with "Black", that's more attributable to discrimination than to afroamerican culture.
Sure, I'm quite inclined to see fatherlessness as causative, but doesn't it give you pause that we were just talking about SES, sex, and age as causative, and we're moving on to fatherlessness without skipping a beat?
Look at the numbers from zeke. I don't see how you can put either sex or age before race. You can find similar results for SES.
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Do you see young Asian guys loitering in the hood often?
I wasn’t in the hood
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...Yes? Asians are tightwads, so they live in the hood, and they stay up real late and like to go out and about.
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Another race discussion, another of a slight variant on the same, very contrived "dark road at night" scenario. At some point you start to wonder if it's just a lack of originality, or there really aren't any other similar 'gotcha' scenarios out there. I welcome more substantive comments, if you have them. And I know for a fact there was more you could have responded to there.
Obviously a new spot, fine. No one is pretending that tradeoffs don't exist. Even Jesus, the super (mostly) pacifist, didn't advocate for being an idiot:
Safety tradeoffs are especially significant. Groups of men alone on the street at night is not a normal innocent thing either, that's somewhat race-independent. And it's also a group-level dynamic, at least mostly. The question is really only tangentially related to morality, and is a straw man. As the scripture says, it's possible to be wise, and also maintain an ethical purity that reveals itself in other situations. Also, we often have more than binary choices available to us, and I think people often underestimate the presence of these third-way options that leave everyone happier.
I actually ran into this in real life. Not contrived. I was dropping my then fiancé off in NYC at our apartment when I was having to drive somewhere else. I was going to drop her off on one end of the block since I would’ve had to drive around a few blocks given the one way nature of streets.
I noticed a group of young black men and re calibrated. My then fiancé asked me why I hadn’t drop her off at that end of the street. When I explained, she thought it was racist. I explained it was Bayesian and in any event did no harm to the young black men.
I’m curious if my now wife would have the same attitude today.
Based. #CoupleGoals: The couple that dapper-man-at-gas-stations together stays together. Protecting your and your wife's safety matters more than protecting the feelings of blacks and progressives.
I've long had a hypothesis that part of the reason why women generally prefer boyfriends/husbands who are chuddier than themselves is because, consciously or not, women like being able to outsource the Emotional Labor of wrongthinking so they don't have to be the bad person.
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Suppose one is simply walking down the sidewalk at night, hears footsteps, turns around, and is relieved to see a white person? Is that moral?
I don't think it has a strong moral valence either way.
Part of the modern discourse disconnect I didn't really mention is also how we mentally model feelings. I think some progressives believe (and this isn't actually all that unreasonable) that your feelings are so strongly interconnected with each other across scenarios. In that model, it would be bad, because this emotion of "danger" would inevitably bleed over to other innocuous situations (for example, maybe you then innately also feel even a Black coworker in a white collar workplace to be somehow more 'dangerous' than other colleagues, all else equal).
I disagree on two fronts with this progressive logic. First I think context is pretty strong in these situations. Second I think progressives often are very guilty of assuming all emotions are equally valid and real (and thus by implication must be sourced in some internalized attitude). Flatly speaking this is just wrong. Humans do not actually have amazing control over their emotions, and it's not uncommon for emotions to show up that aren't even all that deeply connected to the fabric of our existence and attitudes. They just show up. Rather than judge the emotion, we should judge the reaction to them, and feel free to discard them at times. Obviously we aren't like, ignorant or unaware of emotions - sometimes we do need to process them - but they shouldn't dominate our lives in every single regard, and we can generate emotions too to some extent (not just be dominated by them).
Progressives are correct that emotions can be data worthy of self-reflection (if I see a Black guy and feel uncomfortable, why might that be?), but they've messed up the scale of the matter pretty badly (it's absolutely not something automatically worthy of a moral panic).
Perhaps, but some emotions are very easy to judge this way (anger leading to violence), and some emotions are very difficult to judge this way (fear leading to sabotage).
It's extraordinarily difficult to judge sabotage, both in that it happened, as well as what impact it actually had. And some forms of sabotage are known by other names, like "prudent business practice" or "protecting women and girls", where society at large can't even decide what is/isn't, and that's not even getting into the associated moral hazards from each group that would benefit from the laws against that kind of sabotage being stricter or looser. Oh yeah, and some elements of sabotage are personally profitable for whoever's doing them, and some people care less or more about that, and...
True, but see above, so the saboteurs are far more likely to get away with failing to control themselves. It's pretty easy to judge people who generate within themselves anger and then go out and get in a fight (hard to hide bruises or broken limbs). It's very hard to judge people who generate within themselves anger (or fear) and then go out and sabotage their domestic enemy with -ism or drowning them in an ocean of what-if. There's just no hard evidence that [progressives and the emotions they're responsible for] are harmful in any way, and since our system is set up for benefit-of-the-doubt, you can't catch them without going full RICO (which, it's worth noting, is exactly how laws mandating discrimination already work against their targets: a progressive would argue that law discriminates against Italians and be correct).
It is very likely that a panopticon society would be capable of prosecuting this, but the nature of/reasons such a society arises means it could only ever target the innocent. Ancient societies squared the circle by pre-emptively convicting [the gender of person more likely to cause sabotage by emotion] of that sabotage and limiting their opportunities to do that, but that filter punished most those who could control their emotions (and if we're going by contribution to economy, men and women are pretty equal in an age of automation so a more granular system is needed anyway).
Difficult to get a wo/man to understand something when her/his salary depends on her/him not understanding it.
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Really, this is what the entire edifice of anti-racism boils down to. Living in a white society is a daily humiliation ritual for any non-white person (east asians mostly excluded) with even a moderate sense of racial identity, especially blacks. The psychological harm from Noticing all the ways in which your people don't stack up is real1, and insofar as you place the combined moral value of non-whites above that of whites, it is in fact immoral to perpetuate the behaviors/institutions that cause such unfavorable comparisons. Hence, Woke.
1 N.B: This is why the popularization of HBD ideas will simply never happen in any non-racially exclusionary society. With the context of HBD, the message from conservatives to blacks (and other underperforming minorites) goes from "your community has serious problems, but with some elbow grease you might just be able to fix them" to "your dysfunction is congenital, your people are fundamentally lesser, and there's no way of fixing it without either Deus Ex Machina technology or centuries of strict and likely externally-imposed breeding control.2"
2 The unspoken third (and IMO most likely) scenario is that whites simply don't bother with any kind of uplift and instead resume the course of history that was set in motion in 1492 and put on pause circa the mid 20th century, as described by Teddy Roosevelt:
But as far as I know, the rampant criminality of the black lumpenproletariat, as alluded to by Rev Jackson, was largely the combined consequence of various policies and reforms initiated during the Great Society project of the ‘60s. And it wasn’t until the emergence of the narrative about ‘super predators’ that it turned into a relevant political issue in the US, and that was in the early ‘90s. I know the War on Drugs played into all of it, but the idea that it was all just a veiled exercise of intentionally pandering to racist whites is pretty much a case of retcon on the part of Blue Tribe culture warriors.
Historically speaking, this is a rather recent development, so I doubt you can draw such sweeping conclusions about American society based on this.
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Would it still be wrong to give them the cold shoulder if they were blasting loud rap music at all hours, street racing, and selling drugs? If they actually live up to the stereotypes, is it wrong to treat them differently?
Like it's one thing to give the cold shoulder to a black family that, for lack of a better descriptor, acts white. But if they actually match several of the stereotypes then I don't see the issue.
That would fall under 'the content of their character'.
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Differently from whom? Neighbors who don't do any of those things? That's it's not really about race. Unless they are/would be nice to white neighbors who "act black", there isn't necessarily a racism issue here (although someone might suspect that there is.)
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See? Again with the "them". (Genuinely not trying to be nitpicky and you didn't mean it that way - a family is a plural noun - but hopefully you'll allow the point.) I'm not talking about "them". I'm talking about specific people. I'm saying that if you see the new black family and then expect them to act per negative stereotypes and then that comes across even when you first meet them and say hi, that's bad. It's true that humans and especially modern Americans aren't super great at "firewalling" the two things, which the whole 'microaggressions' thing was a somewhat deluded and misplaced crusade at affecting, but it does take effort to extend some charity especially at first.
And of course you did list purely and universally negative stereotypes. The family could equally as well bring humor, food, a neighborly sense of watching out for the kids, hospitality, a deep faith, etc. Of course, there are some "culture-clash" values or practices that are a bit more value-neutral than selling drugs/blaring music at 2am/street racing that cause friction, sure. I'm not going to claim that all cultures and practices are of equal value either. But you have to admit starting out with "white = universally good" is not a great building block. I'll still stand by what I said though. It's really not all that bad if that's the true belief you have, but you have to be honest with yourself about whether it might bleed through or not. Only God will judge us by the contents of our heart, for everyone else in society, we have to make do with actual behaviors.
If you get right down to it most of us agree about this, but I think it's really easy to let the politically charged parts distract from it. And it tends to be a more prosperous and mentally healthy mindset to boot, when you default to trust rather than default to suspicion. That's the secret sauce of humanity's success and I don't think tech has changed it too much.
I’m just not convinced racism is the big bad. Treating a black family coldly just because violates hospitality which is its own sin.
If for any "racist" action you'd find it bad anyway through some other means, you're still opposing racism only covertly.
To add, hospitality is orthogonal to racism.
Let’s say you as a policy never welcome new neighbors. I think that is bad. The woke person would think it’s bad if you only didn’t welcome the black family (or perhaps didn’t welcome the black family regardless of your normal behavior).
My view is that hospitality is virtue and therefore is agnostic as to race. Racism ethics are value neutral and are concerned about fairness (or favoritism). It has nothing to say about hospitality but only about your level of hospitality between races.
You're claiming hospitality is race-blind, which is already being against racism. A racist doesn't (from their own perspective) treat a black family coldly "just because"; they do it because the black family is black.
One need not be a racist to find obsession with policing alleged racism silly
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Well no. I actually would not want to send my kids to a school with a lot of minorities even if it were a “good” school. I think the cost to diversity is frequently higher than the benefit
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If it's woke to be against bad actions towards black people that are also bad when done towards anyone else, then I'm proud to be woke.
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I mean, if you watch the video, she basically admits to to most of her boyfriends being white, partially for stereotypical reasons. She actually has a whole video in depth talking about the issue dating black men as a black women.
I breezed through a rough transcript, but found it pretty interesting. Insofar as an internet dude can pass judgement, I think I'm actually going to declare her very much "not guilty" of the charge of discrimination. That's the opposite of her message. I ended up quoting a bit from it because I think there are some interesting nuggets of discussion inside. (I should also note that this video you linked is not the OP's video about NYC guys)
I'll say first of all, she talks about how Black women used to think about Black-Black relationships as "loyalty" but that's by the wayside - good! There's enough problems trying to find a lifelong marriage partner to have to restrict yourself to an eighth of the population (or less) out of some vague, ill-defined sense of loyalty. I think Black Power and the associated feelings were super important to the Black community for a few decades, but no longer serve their best interests so to speak.
And yes, she gets very frank with the statistics. But that's exactly where statistics should be used, yes? At least when assessing what we might call "dating strategy".
She also talks about how Black men have internalized some of the double standards that hit Black women especially hard, and you know what? That's true. I absolutely, positively cannot stand Jasmine Crockett. But I will say that the notion that, as she says, "we are never enough: we're too dark, or we're too loud, we're too demanding, we're ghetto, we're ratchet, we are all of these things" is probably tough - (especially Black) women DO need to walk a bit of a tightrope without any traits that are too "extreme". (Men actually DO have a parallel to this as well, especially when it comes to sexuality, but that's another conversation for another time). And media representation of Black women is an exercise in true whiplash (and yes, Black creators are partially to blame). The problems of race, both "self" inflicted and otherwise, are real, even if they aren't defining. Then we get I think the heart of the rant (apologies for poor formatting but I don't want to spend forever correcting the auto-generated transcript):
So basically she's saying that Black women in particular are tired of having a victim mindset. Great! I agree that's a very exhausting place to be, at the very least on a permanent basis. Does that come with some judgement for the men? Yes. But to me this is still speaking to group-level dynamics, with a dash of normal sexist-like expectations.
This makes me wonder how much of her rant is itself stereotypes, or media consumption, vs how much might be personal experience. I think that would change a bit about how I feel about what she's saying! But alas, we don't really get any extra information here. Her next complaint is, I'm going to be honest, this is just a man thing. It's not a Black man thing:
So yeah. Standard complaints with a racial undertone. She's got this aside that's a theory about the specific pairing of white women and Black men:
Honestly? Interesting theory. Maybe even true? I'm a bit skeptical still. But I think when it comes down to her main message it's pretty clear:
Love it. Treat people like people. Endorsed. With maybe a little note of you know, it takes two to tango and put investment in the relationship, but time and place and all that.
IME black men and women seem to really hate each other in a way that's kinda foreign to my (white)experience, and the hip-hop political incorrectness mentality that lots of black men have is a big part of it. Women, justifiably, don't like it very much, and mainstream white/hispanic culture is much much better about sexism coming with responsibility.
I think we also paint things with a pretty broad brush. It's true there's really significant clustering geographically, but the Black community in Texas vs Alabama vs Virginia vs New Jersey seem to have some variations in how the culture presents, at least as far as I can tell. It's also in my actual experience a bit hard to disambiguate racial angles from economic angles - truth be told a lot of white women and white men who are poor also don't really seem to get along all that well. When life is hard, you have more complaints.
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She assumes women face oppression qua women. She assumes blacks face discrimination qua black.
Why isn’t that victimhood mentality
Victimhood mentality requires far more than the mere allegation of inequality or oppression or whatever word you want to use (or is in vogue). "True" victimhood (the most problematic kind) is when you've over-corrected into a type of learned helplessness, and when victimhood begins to take shape as a defining and incredibly prominent trait, rather than just something you happen to experience once in a while. Merely claiming that oppression exists is not victimhood. Even claiming that oppression is near-universal is not victimhood. Victimhood is when it infects identity and behavior to an unhealthy degree.
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I mean yeah that might be her message overall, but I cant help but feel, intuitively, that there would be a deliberate avoidance to dating black men on her part, just based on the 1st NYC video, even if she wouldnt encourage her audience to think in this way directly. It is harder to date black men as a black women, she knows this, and she very likely avoids dating black men because of it. I think that this is ok for what its worth. But I dont think she is entirely free of non-discrimination. Besides that, sexual selection is the one aspect of life that is always discriminatory, and people have the right to do it, based on race or whatever characteristics, because someone has a right to decide who they want to sleep with, period.
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To reiterate what you said because I typed all this out before my reading comprehension kicked in,
Because race isn't real, you can always draw a different line. "Oh, it's not muslims, it's Wahabis Salafi muslims. It's not B, it's A where A is a subset of B, B is not a subset of A."
This on top of race being a set of categories that is defined by exclusion rather than inclusion means that race is always fuzzy logic social bullshit.
On the other hand, sex IS real; even if it is spectrummy. You can fuck with sex by eg. cutting certain organs off or messing with hormones, but those things are actual existing structures that actually determine lots of shit about you; the transmascs among us are doing good citizen science by dosing androgens and going "Holly shit I want to fight people for standing in an annoying way now".
So: Racism is a fake and gay, but sexism (specifically against men) is based and real; so it's more respectable. Because of Woke we have to pretend that men aren't more likely in every category than women, but everyone knows that 9 out of 10 times the individual standing over the body when the cops show up has a lot more T than E.
ALSO: I want to type set runes, give me set runes, I don't actually care that much, do whatever
HTML character references work in Markdown.
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Broke: plaintext
Woke: markdown
Ascended: LaTeX
Sites need to have specific support for LaTeX. Doesn't seem like ours does.
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I think the simplest most elegant answer is that in-group bias simply doesn't work the same way for sex vs race. Almost all races have strong in-group bias. Women have strong in-group bias. Men do not. Men are more prone to liking women then men. So when women want to throw men as a group under the bus, almost every man is happy to oblige, thinking that he himself is one of the rare good ones, and that the fact that he's respecting a woman throwing men under the bus just proves how good he is.
This in turn likely comes out of the fact that men were evolutionarily in conflict with other men for resources but entirely dependent on women for reproduction. The men who had strong psychological reasons to love cherish and value women and therefore protect them and feed them, instead of hoarding their own resources for themselves, were the ones who reproduced more.
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Remember "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman" [Reddit threads] and then the pushback when people realized almost all the cat callers were men of color?
I remember this distinctly. The glee that women had in a recorded example of their experiences, followed by a wave of deletions when the real message was realised.
It's a good example of what the OP is talking about. It's socially acceptable to criticise men for statistically backed stereotypes. It's not socially acceptable to criticise minorities for statistically backed stereotypes.
Similarly, the quick death of #StopAsianHate as it became too undeniable who was actually committing the acts of Asian hatred.
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I think it’s context. Intraracial relationships are contextualized by the fact that a person of the opposite gender but the same race is part of the same community. I am much more likely to have a brother or spouse or husband who is male than I am to have a strong relationship with someone of a different race or religion. So there’s a sense of this being friendly fire rather than othering. You are talking about your own tribe, not someone who out there. It’s not a threat because every black woman complaining about a black man or white woman complaining about white men are in some relationship with those men.
I think the flaw with this explanation specifically is that pretty much everyone on the planet has a close relationship with the opposite sex by default, due to the fact that everyone has a mother and father, and has had at lease one romantic relationship. Plenty of men have close relationships with other women like a sister or a mom, that doesnt mean that anything a particular man is saying wouldnt be called misogyny, just because they have those connections. Andrew Tate probably has had his fair share of girlfriends and has a mother, lots of people think he is a misogynistic douche. Its not like he is just telling the truth about women because he has had personal relationships with them.
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I think there's a few things going on, personally.
One is that men aren't really a group, in a sense that they defend themselves or have social legitimisation to fall back on, qua being men. Even when "the patriarchy" was a thing, "men" weren't a group, "old powerful fathers" were. Young men have historically always been shafted. Because men don't really constitute a group (in the sense of banding together or defending each other's interests, purely based on their sex), they don't and can't defend themselves very well (or at all) against being tarred like that. Women are a group, women see each other as a (weak) collective, they advocate for group interests and repudiate attacks against women-as-identity. Even when masculinity was more of a thing it was never really a thing for men for themselves (rather for family, nation, etc.)
Also, women are better at advocating their positions through appealing to social consensus. That's again because they form a meaningful group but also because they are better at some interpersonal stuff (not all of it). So they are better at making "men suck" be a social consensus thing.
Black people very much are a group. I think the study showing that black people show great in-group solidarity, greater than other ethnicities, has been shared a lot here. Black identity is something that's cared about, it's high status, it has social legitimisation, etc. Black people argue as a collective, men don't.
Muslims also are a group that strongly defends its honour, sometimes to the point of violence (cf. Quran burning). And, well, sadly that works. Politicians would rather introduce blasphemy laws than piss them off.
But black men aren't a group qua being men - only qua being black. So black women saying men suck being OK is not surprising.
Of course this all pre-supposes you don't buy into the tenets of modern liberalism at face value - that it's about people being treated equally rather than power between people (the often repeated "Who, whom?"). But I think at this point even ardent liberals don't pretend the movement is about actual equality anymore.
Notably, since then there has been a pretty effective campaign that has largely eliminated, reoriented, or discredited male-specific spaces. There are a few around still, but there were prominent men's colleges and other groups last century. Many have adapted to allow women (and I'm not sure I'm personally upset by this), but women's specific spaces (women's colleges, Girl Scouts) are still allowed.
Similar, but even more aggressively for race-specific spaces.
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This is a weird filter bubble effect. If it had been mostly white men(and there are groups of mostly white men who catcall, albeit fewer than other races), she would have had no trouble saying ‘white people’. She would have no trouble saying ‘Christians’(or more likely ‘fundies’). But conversely she’s not going to complain about women qua women.
Likewise many on the other side of the aisle would have no trouble criticizing Muslims, gays, etc. The taboo against racism is a taboo against criticizing certain specific groups, not one against ethnic prejudice more broadly.
Progressives will criticize whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, etc, but not their opposites, is a thing thats been discussed to death.
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Because that's the historical dispensation of the modern left. There is a conservation of tribalism, people just move the groups around and emphasize identities to fit the current fashion. There is the exact same tension in the discussion of "white people's" wealth and the disparities between average whites and asians, jews, indians etc. All the structural advantages that supposedly keep the black man down in favor of the white man wind up disproportionately benefitting nonwhite or marginally white groups?
It's all just a conspiracy theory, essentially.
When faced with inequality of criminality, condemn "men" and guns. But not the most violent subset of men, and definitely don't enforce the current firearm laws harshly against that group specifically. Then, complain about different men and different guns to the ones causing the problem.
When faced with inequality of income, condemn whites and men. But not the most disproportionately wealthy groups which are no white supremacist's idea of a good time. Also no one can define "men".
It's all just a grand unified theory of white male christian hatred that explains all differential outcomes for everyone else, but only when the comparison is negative. It shifts blame from the political ingroup to the outgroup.
All this despite the obvious logical problems and the messiness of all the categories involved. This is the theology that holds the modern left together, the unified hatred of the modern global economy ("capitalism"), Realpolitik, Western civilization broadly, white people specifically, and of course men.
The progressive stack is always topped by whatever is fashionably considered the biggest opponent of these general categories. Global Warming, No Kings, Free Palestine, Pussy hats, BLM, NAFTA, MeToo, Nuclear Power, the Soviet Union, Iran etc.
The right has all the same things in places, but due to the class gap it's more drunk tradesmen and internet edgelords than senators and ivy league college presidents.
Assuming you mean Jews, they get condemned by the left and the left's allies all the time. You can bet that Trump finding antisemitism in universities isn't due to them being conservatives or white supremacists. And diversity requirements have driven Jews out of Hollywood because Jews do in fact count as white there.
I don't see this as the important part, but I mean all the various minority groups that outperform the white average. Jews are a central example, but east asians, indians, nigerians, arabs etc.
Equivocation between whether jews are the oppressed victims of the holocaust or the perpetrators of a current one is a perennial favorite. It's different things. The left doesn't like right-wing nationalistic jews (Israelis), but they do like western communist jews who never went to Israel to try their stupid ideas. Often the second group are protesting the first. Meanwhile the right understands a nationalistic western-oriented regional ally, but isn't that fond of the "jooos" in NYC and Berkeley. It's just politics, and the requisite belief systems thereof.
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Indians edge out Jews for the wealthiest group in America per capita.
Given that Jews have been here a lot longer and thus are not benefiting from as much selection effect I strongly expect that Indians will lose that edge soon enough.
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The previous paragraph says "condemn "men" and guns. But not the most violent subset of men".
By parallelism, the next paragraph implies condemning whites and men but not the most disproportionately wealthy groups of whites, even though it doesn't include the words "of whites". So I don't think it's referring to Indians.
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I’d also add that much of what is considered to be racial prejudice is actually driven by sexism or sex-based angst and insecurity, and people generally would rather profess to be racists in private than to admit to any of this. It’s a common argument, and not just among SJWs, that white-on-black racism in the American South was mostly just a result of white men’s suspicion that many of their women are susceptible to getting seduced and boned by big black studs. To the extent that such fears really were there, I’m guessing they were overblown, because we know that white women are the social group least likely to engage in exogamy. I’ve also seen the claim that many white men felt conflicted about their attraction to young black women who, unlike white women, had an allure as sexually available and lascivious vixens. (Obesity was notably not much of an issue back then, I should add.)
There’s also the case of the widespread antipathy among black women, especially young single ones, towards white and Asian women that are so-called mudsharks or coal burners i.e. driven to mate with black men. The ‘yellow fever’ of many white men is also frowned upon by women in general, the same as how the willingness of Asian women to mate with white men is reviled among Asian men.
This doesn't actually require you to believe that white women would broadly be willing. (Though people also didn't like the willing ones).
The closest modern analogue is the fear of refugees in Europe, the claim is not actually that they're especially attractive to Western women but that they won't let that stop them.
"We need to violently check these people who're prone to rape" would probably be categorized as racism rather than sex-based insecurity by most. If anything, the claim is that the inferiority complex is on the other side.
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One aspect of this is that it's plausible that men are fundamentally more violent and prone to criminal behaviour than women, outside of extraordinarily unusual cultural circumstances. Whereas it seems more likely that Islam is not fundamentally violent insofar as it can over time evolve to be less violent than other religions. It's a cultural superstructure of a type that can change radically over the centuries – we see this with religions across history in a way we don't really with gender differences.
This distinction can be hotly debated of course but one of the thoughts at play is that suspending prejudice helps allow what can improve to improve, whereas if there's not much chance of improvement, there is less motivation to suspend prejudice.
I think this is it: nobody today, even the most self-described feminist really believes in a blank slate between the sexes in areas like physical strength and capacity for violence and criminality. There was a moment where a few feminists argued against, say, Title IX sex-separated sports leagues, but realistically the consensus is that they are necessary if we want women to play sports. It's more controversial to observe differences in non-physical realms, spanning a gamut from women's chess leagues (in my observation, uncontroversial), noticing gender attendance at the local train museum (probably no complaints), and STEM jobs (controversial: see Damore).
Racial differences seem drastically smaller in most categories than sex differences, so it's easier to argue for a blank-slate null hypothesis. Even then, in areas where differences are particularly obvious, you probably won't get too much grief: "Black people have darker skin" probably has a few objectors, but likely isn't getting tarred as racism.
Many of the self described feminist, and many leftist i ran into quite literally believe this. Maybe its just been my experience, but I've ran into people both online an personally who think that men and women are essentially the same at birth, & that patriarchy makes us different. I agree this is not the case, but as I've addressed in the original post, this fact is rejected by many within our society, perhaps my experience with such people differ from yours.
A lot of the resistance to these facts probably come down to the fact that they: 1 - basically prove gender essentiallism to an extent 2 - Can be used to argue for gendered treatment of individuals. I dont think either of those are wrong, but a lot of theses types do.
Yes, but I'm not sure what information you get by noticing that, other than "people believe what is obviously self-serving/in their sociofinancial interest to believe". Which is true for everyone, including classical liberals.
No, it's avoided because it provides an alternative (or rather, the logical/unselfish conclusion) to "
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Oh boy, you haven't seen the controversy?
My sense of the story is basically this. The big question hanging over the game is, "Why do we not see more women at the very top tier of chess?" Interestingly, my sense has been that almost everyone involved in this conversation is actually perfectly fine in saying that physical sports are different (this does not hold for the general population, but it seems to hold within the community of folks who are involved in the conversation about top-level chess), but obviously, the question still lingers for what is mostly understood as an almost entirely cognitive game. "Sure, it makes sense that you're going to have differences in powerlifting, but what is the nature of the underlying cause of the observed difference in chess?"
Of course, folks consider the possible counter-examples, like Judit Polgar, who peaked at #8 in the world, and there is usually some debate as to whether she stands for the proposition that it is generally possible to have a higher proportion of women at the very top or whether she is just an outlier among outliers, the Bobby Fisher of women's chess, but that even the Bobby Fisher of women's chess couldn't reach the very top of the men. There is obviously no clear answer here, but it is a question that is absolutely discussed every time the controversy appears.
The immediate domain of the actual controversy is the question, "Should there be women-only events/sections?" On the one hand, if there aren't women-only events/sections, then folks worry that women will be mostly shut out of top-tier competitions (not due to active discrimination, but because their rating levels simply won't qualify them for many qualification criteria for open sections of closed events.
Aside, because I just said "open sections of closed events", and that sounds weird. Often times, the word "open" is used in two senses. In the first sense, it is that the tournament is generally open to all participants. This would be like "the US Open", where anyone, regardless of chess level or achievement, can just decide to sign up and play. This is contrasted to "closed" or "invitational" tournaments, which generally have a set of qualification criteria or are perhaps even more directly just a set of hand-picked competitors that are invited to play. The second sense is that many tournaments, whether "open" or "closed" will often have a women's section. However, like many other sports, they won't have a "men's" section; they'll have "women's" and "open", so that a female competitor can choose to play the open section if she'd like (and for cases with qualification criteria, if she qualifies), but is also able to choose to play the women's section.
If an event has a women's section, there's usually a side question about whether the prize funds in the women's section is as high as for the open, but that's usually a side question for the main question. Generally, one of the arguments for having a women's section is that if an event doesn't have a women's section, then with the current ratings of the populations of men/women at the highest level, most women would not likely be able to compete for a significant amount of prize money... or they'll be shut out entirely from closed/invitational tournaments because they're less likely to meet the qualification criteria. With less chance of winning substantial prize money, it would be more difficult for them to continue making a career out of chess, and the thought goes that not having women's only sections, with separate prize pools, will cause more women to leave competitive chess, which would either make the disparity worse or at least sort of lock in the disparity.
On the other hand, there's a competing theory concerning the reason why there aren't more women at the highest levels. The theory goes like this. In order to improve at chess, even all the way to the top level, you must have a lot of experience playing against top-tier competition. It is by having these experiences, seeing how they best attack your weaknesses, and learning from it, that you improve your own game. If you don't keep going at it against the best, you're less likely to figure out how you can be better. On this view, having women-only events/sessions might seem like a good idea in that it makes it more likely that they'll be able to partake in a prize pool, but you run the risk of 'quarantining' the women. Perhaps someone is currently good enough to consistently win good prizes in women's sections, but if she started playing open sections, she'd likely struggle. One might argue that she should, nevertheless, play open sections in the interest of her long-term improvement, gaining the experience of playing against the absolute best players. However, her direct financial incentive is to play in the women's section, where she's more likely to make more money now. This has been argued by some number of top female players, and a few have even eschewed women's events entirely, choosing to play only opens. So far, none have made it to the top top with the men, but a few are at least putting their money where their mouth is, in a sense, and playing only open sections in accordance with this line of thinking.
So, the controversy is a bit of a trap. Both having women's sections and not having women's sections can be 'problematic', depending on how you view it. The debate is still unsettled in the community for whether there is an underlying theory that can explain the current disparity or whether that disparity can, in theory, be 'fixed'. It's not the most public controversy of controversies, but within the small community of top-level chess, it's absolutely a controversy.
I'm confused by the quarantine idea. It seems obvious to me that the best way to grind hours of experience playing chess is by playing online, which is not gender segregated. Perhaps even more valuable is playing against an engine and doing analysis of games. Do people really think that lack of tournament play in open divisions is what's holding women back, or is this just an excuse/cover to try to get rid of the women's divisions?
I'm going to add another Hikaru video, one just released today, because he went on a mini rant about this exact topic. It starts here with another GM asking him about a possible computer line from the game he had just played (he had a smile on his face, because he knows). The mini rant ends with, "This is the problem with these games, it's that, it's like whenever you use a computer program, you really lose the human feel, because some of these moves are just not human, or they just don't feel right. They just don't feel right at all."
How to effectively use engines to improve your ability to play human over-the-board games is genuinely hard/controversial.
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There is a huge debate about playing online or against engines, and this could certainly come up in a conversation about the controversy. This requires another digression into some background on chess.
One major perennial discussion in the chess world is about time controls. That is, how much time do players have to think about their moves? There are a lot of different time controls out there that people use, and I'm certainly not going to cover the entire debate here. The most prestigious chess events are still 'classical' time control. This already gets confusing, because there's not just one single time control for classical, but there is somewhat of a range of possibilities that people generally view as 'classical'. For example, right now, both the open/women's candidates tournaments are happening. The open is using a time control of two hours with no increment for the first 40 moves, then an additional 30 minutes plus a 30 second increment added to your time for every move you made thereafter. The women's section is instead using 90 minutes plus a 30 second increment from the beginning through move 40, then an additional 30 minutes (still with increment) thereafter. But both of these time controls are still generally considered 'classical'.
Time controls are enough of a controversy that it is often cited as one of the issues that has driven a wedge between Magnus Carlsen (viewed by many as still the best player in the world) and FIDE, with Magnus giving up his title of classical world champion, participating in fewer FIDE events, and possibly(?) building groundwork for a competing organization to challenge FIDE. But that's an aside. All to say, they're a big deal.
Second is online vs. 'over-the-board'. Online chess has enabled a lot of people to play casually or even competitively. However, the online community is generally very skewed toward much faster time controls. I haven't checked the stats, but my sense is that online, blitz (approx 3-5min) is the most popular, followed by rapid (approx 10-25min) and bullet (approx 1min) in some order. There just aren't that many good players playing classical online (or honestly, that many players in general). There is huge controversy as to what extent playing much faster chess translates to success in slower chess. You can try out more ideas more quickly; you can train your instinctual or short-calculation skills; it may genuinely improve your play if you get into a time crunch in a classical game. But you don't get the experience of really sinking into a position and calculating deeply. It has not been uncommon in the current candidates tournament for players to invest 30-60 minutes on a single move that they think is critical. Recognizing when to use that sort of time and using it effectively is a skill that you simply cannot build playing blitz. But we've also seen some players get really really good at blitz first, and then eventually transition into playing quite good slow chess, so it's still a pretty open question of controversy concerning the relationship between them.
Moreover, there is a perception that cheaters (using engines) are much more prevalent online than at over-the-board events. It's already hard to find many people playing classical online; but if a bunch of them just sort of give up and start using engines anyway, are you really getting much that you wouldn't be getting by playing an engine? In fact, some people think that it's even worse if you're worried that your opponent is cheating. It's harder to stay focused; you're more likely to waste clock cycles thinking about whether they're using an engine or not rather than on the game.
That, then, brings us to engines. Engines are super super good. Much better than any human. Sometimes there are ways that you can play anti-computer chess, but even that is pretty hard. And they do not "think like humans". Top players certainly use engines to help come up with opening ideas, or they'll use them to help them improve some of their calculations, but there's somewhat of a fine line between looking at something the engine says and thinking, "Oh, that makes sense; I can maybe try to incorporate that idea into my thinking in some way in the future," and, "No dawg; even if you gave me an additional hour in a game, I am either not going to come up with that idea or not going to be able to calculate enough of it accurately to ever feel comfortable trying such a thing." Engines can help, but it is hotly contested concerning how they can help, what level players can get what kind of help from them, etc. The current classical world champion famously was not allowed to use engines at all for the first however many years of his development (I don't remember the exact number).
How to effectively use engines to prepare for human tournaments is difficult. Aside from using them sometimes for tactics or other ideas, they're probably most used in "prep", where a person makes some plans ahead of time for what they want to do in the opening phases of the game. This is notoriously difficult, even at the highest level. In this very candidates tournament, one of the most well-known players (because he's also a streamer) got into a situation where he had played his computer-driven prep, and at one point, his opponent played a move that wasn't in his prep. His next decision was a critical one, but the position was quite complicated. He spent like an hour and then played the wrong move. After the game he blamed himself and his team for not looking at that move in preparation. He thought that the position was "impossible to play" as a human, and this is one of those pitfalls that make working with engines hard. You can't download everything from the engine into your brain; you have to stop somewhere. Where do you stop? You have to be a highly skilled player with a sense of, "This is a position that I can probably figure out over-the-board," versus, "This position is absolute madness, and so if I'm not able to just memorize what the engine says, I probably won't be able to figure it out, and I may end up just lost."
All of this is very controversial on its own, and I get no sense whatsoever that these controversies are being propped up in some way to support a position on women's chess.
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Online games are faster and more casual, and typically don't involve both players analysing the game afterwards (a crucial part of chess improvement). The best way to gain experience is generally to play OTB (over the board) games at classical time controls (>=1 hour per player).
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My intuition as a complete outsider to chess is that hours of grinding online could get you from low to mid or mid to high, but to reach the truly elite levels of top-10-in-the-world, you really need to spend lots of time competing against people at or near that level. I don't think a billion reps against little leaguers would be as valuable as a thousand against minor leaguers for someone aiming for the MLB. That said, I do wonder if chess engines, given their clear superiority over any and all humans, might enable the best of both worlds, but also, as an outsider, I could be missing some important distinctions.
I'd guess it's a genuine belief in the former, for the purpose of something like the latter, but rather than to try to get rid of the women's divisions, it's to try to land at a societally mediated conclusion for elite women's evident underperformance in chess compared to elite men's.
Chess engines are simply too strong to be used as sparring partners. People improve most when they have the chance to play consistently against players at their own level or a bit higher. The main benefit of chess engines is their use as analysis tools.
Is it not possible or practical to gimp chess engines to play at a level and style equivalent to elite human players? I would have thought that lowering a super-capable tool to human level capability would be possible, but, of course, with something as complicated as chess, it's not just a matter of scaling some number down by 50% or whatever.
That's basically the issue.
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Level, yes. You can actually do an okay-ish enough job by just dialing down some numbers. The great thing about the ELO system is that you can just use results to figure out how to 'rate' a bot. Just create a gimped bot, let it play a bunch of people online, see what rating range it ends up in, and poof, you've got a bot that plays "at that level". Want it a bit higher/lower? Turn it up/down a smidge. You'd need a lot of top-level players to play along with the scheme to dial it in decently at the elite level, though. Your estimate of its level gets better as it plays more, so this is likely practical for someone like chess.com for very short games. It's harder for elite-level and longer games, just because it's going to be hard to get enough data.
Style? Not a chance. At least not right now. This is an area where a lot of folks are investing significant efforts. The hope is that rather than just using traditional engines, you can take gigantic databases of human moves, sprinkle in some ML magic, and get something that plays more like humans. My sense is that no one has been really successful in doing so yet. I haven't even heard any rumors of any top-level players finding someone who has managed to do this and then proceeding to use it. Maybe someone has, and they're keeping it top secret for a competitive edge, but if so, it's very secret, and I haven't heard a peep.
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Hm, are you pretty knowledgeable about competitive chess, and, if so, do you know if there's any controversy about transwomen competing in the women's division? I wonder if it would create a videogame speedrunner-like situation where basically every last one of the top "woman" speedrunners are male (I'm sure high correlation with autism would play a part, as well as the sex, though I'd also guess that high level chess or speedrunning tends to be disproportionately autistic, both male and female).
I've heard off-hand that men also dominate "sports" like darts or billiards/pool/snooker, despite there being minimal advantage from physical strength in those sports. If that's true, I wonder how much of that's biological in terms of men being innately better at geometry versus biological in terms of men having greater penchant for obsessing over some meaningless task until they achieve mastery versus biological in terms of men having greater incentive to become known for being great at something.
Unsurprisingly, there was some controversy.
First, some organization. The primary international organization that is involved in many of the highest-level chess tournaments is FIDE. Since I know the most about US concerns and TheMotte is still somewhat heavily US, I'll also discuss the US Chess Federation, which operates, unsurprisingly, within the US. Some international events are directly organized by FIDE. Many times, FIDE will 'rate' an event run by some other organization. USCF also does their own rating system for their own events, but FIDE may rate them, too. That is, USCF hosts a variety of events, and some of them are not FIDE rated, while others are. What it means to be 'rated' is that the organization will take the results of the event and use them to update their list of ratings for players (which is meant to be a measure of how good they are). USCF may host an event that is not FIDE rated, and just your USCF rating will update. USCF may also host an event that is FIDE rated, and then both USCF and FIDE ratings change.
The perception of FIDE is that it has many institutional connections to Russia and similar countries. The Soviet Union used to be a powerhouse in international chess, and they still have a fair amount of pull in the organization. The current president of FIDE is Russian. This is not strictly determinative of what they will choose to do (for example, at least one top-level Russian player who was an outspoken supporter of the Ukraine war was banned, and other Russians have been playing "without a flag" since the war started), but FIDE does not necessarily lean in the direction of US politics. In 2023, FIDE enacted a policy on transgender players. It was controversial, and I'll just let chess.com describe the controversy. USCF, on the other hand, had enacted a much more permissive policy that simply accepted self-identification. My understanding is that if USCF runs an event that is FIDE rated, the FIDE rules control.
There is, of course, controversy, but I think there are at least a couple factors that make it less likely to come up as much. First is that the people who are most likely to be upset about it are in the US (or perhaps in other countries that have more US-levels of pro-trans, and perhaps their own national federations have taken similar stances to USCF), and there's very little point in complaining about/to USCF, since USCF has enacted their own, more permissive policy. They would have to complain about/to FIDE. And, well, everyone seems to have something to complain about with FIDE, so it's hard to have this one move very far up the list. FIDE is also viewed as being pretty hard to influence, and so especially with such significant Russia/Russia-like connections, many folks probably think that it would be basically shouting into the void. They're probably not going to change FIDE's mind. The best chance would be to prop up a competing organization, and if that's going to happen, it's probably going to be primarily because of other grievances, so a pro-trans person may just not bother emphasizing the trans thing and just latch on to other criticisms/reasons to split, but holding hopes that if such an effort is successful, maybe there's a chance that whatever replacement organization would be more likely to be more pro-trans.
The second factor is, frankly, the vibe shift, where it seems like trans stuff has just been getting less sway in general. It's not that there's no controversy, just that it doesn't seem to be getting quite as much attention.
I'm not really aware of any high-rated male players transitioning and then winning some or a bunch of highly-respected women's events.
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You need men, you don’t need ethnic diversity. Lesbian separatism is a weird punchline, a trivia question, something from the ‘70s. Ethnic nationalism is real and has had many successful exclusionary movements execute substantial, genuine ethnic cleansing in the last century alone, if you look at tribal wars of extermination historically it’s even more common.
Women disliking men, really, is socially meaningless. What, is the kingdom of women going to enslave all men? Even legendary homosexual misogynist BAP thinks that some form of female control of men can only be achieved by way of complex psychological conditioning process called “the longhouse”, arguably a metaphor for civilization itself, not martially (obviously). Women love men and men love women, that’s biology. Patriarchy waxes and wanes as a function of technological development, primarily.
Biology has much less to say amount a society of diverse people who (at least initially) look very different getting along together forever. It doesn’t preclude it, but it doesn’t endorse it either. And the historic example suggests real, bloody conflict between ethnic groups is very much commonplace. That is why people take it more seriously, probably.
You also need women for society to function, more so, in fact, than you need men. And yet not only is men disliking women not considered socially meaningless, it’s widely considered to be as contemptible as jihadi terrorism or white supremacism. Even though there has also never been a kingdom of men enslaving all women. (Please don’t give me all the usual feminist BS.)
Some muslim societies could be argued to fall into this category as can some other places. With an extended definition of slavery I don't think that's even controversial.
Yeah, in 21st century WEIRD countries.
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There are many very successful all male societies- they need to recruit to keep their numbers up, but militaries have historically been very good at getting stuff done at the cutting edge of their society. Men enslaving women is, correct, not how patriarchy usually works- but as IS shows, it can work in a pinch as a substitute for genuine intersexual cooperation.
I think this depends on your definition of 'society'.
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Broadly speaking, I think the failure mods of prejudice against women (or indeed men) are less bad than prejudice against an ethnic, religious or economic group. The worst outcome we've seen for the former is the Taliban, the worst outcome we've seen for the latter is genocide. Not even the most he-man woman-haters social regime is going to kill all the women, but killing all the Jews/Tutsis/Kulaks can and does happen sometimes.
At least until we have access to artificial wombs.
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That is merely a difference in magnitude, and I would argue that it is not that large.
Personally, I would rather have one year as a woman in freedom than ten years as a woman married to some Taliban. If this attitude is typical, being enslaved by the Taliban robs a woman of 90% of her remaining QALYs, while being killed on the spot robs her of 100%.
My Western attitude might not be entirely representative, there is probably a woman somewhere in Afghanistan whose kink it is to get raped and bred by her Taliban husband, and whose utility would decrease under a more liberal system, and some probably get lucky in that they have a husband who is not maximally terrible, but by and large we can assume that if some alien placed these women in an enlightened state and asked them if they wanted to spend their live in Afghanistan or in a fictional version in which the Taliban believe in gender equality, they would prefer the latter by a lot.
Well, do women in Afghanistan all kill themselves? They do at elevated rates, but apparently life is still worth living for them.
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The taliban sucks for women, but I’m skeptical that maximally terrible stupid evil is a good description of the average taliban husband- most people aren’t going to go out of their way to be maximally terrible stupid evil, after all.
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Your "based on sex" is too broad: Prejudice against men is tolerated, but prejudice against women isn't. Same with race and religion: Prejudice against white people and Christians is tolerated, prejudice against black people and Muslims isn't.
I'd add that, in fact, prejudice against black men is also less tolerated than prejudice against white women.
Central Park Karen found that out the hard way.
Similar deal with Arab Muslims and women, especially white women, which is why the statement "Islam is right about women" cooks so hard.
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This is all very obvious. They are politically relevant classes from which the regime draws support. So they get special class status.
If you were to say any of this to someone in China they would say "Yes, obviously" and struggle to have a conversation about it for 30 seconds.
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You can look for, and even find, logical reasons. But they aren't the true reason, which is plain old who/whom politics. Which becomes clear when you dig a little deeper and realize it's not true that prejudice based on sex is tolerable; rather, prejudice against men is tolerable and prejudice against women is intolerable. Nor is prejudice based on race always intolerable; prejudice against white people (especially white men) is acceptable. The old liberal order of "no prejudice based on those things" was never really implemented, and what part of it was has fallen apart in the Culture War.
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I think that to an extent you are comparing applies and oranges: Prejudice against men versus prejudice against Muslims. The reason for this is that the progressive culture which is still quite influential in popular discourse treats sexism very differently depending on whether it's against men or women. The same thing with racism against blacks versus racism against whites. And the same thing for bias against Muslims versus bias against, say, Christians.
So I think a better question is whether bias against women as a group more tolerated than bias against, say, Muslims as a group. Which is a much closer call. If you are a university professor, saying something unflattering about women as a group is arguably just as dangerous for your career as saying something unflattering about Muslims as a group. By contrast, saying something unflattering about men as a group or saying something unflattering about Christians as a group.
I'll concede that possibly sexism is more tolerated than bias on the basis of race or religion (I believe that's consistent with American Constitutional concepts of "equal protection") but I don't think the difference is huge.
I am intentionally comparing prejudice against men to prejudice against Muslims because both often stem from fear-based logic.
My critique focuses on the specific progressive argument that prejudice against men is "valid" because women’s fear is backed by the reality of male-driven misogyny and violence. By accepting this "valid reason" as a justification for sexism, one inadvertently creates a logical pathway to justify prejudice against specific racial or religious groups based on similar statistical or anecdotal fears. Afterall this is the reasoning given for the different treatment of sexisms that you suggest.
The core of my point is this: if we validate differential treatment of men based on their collective actions, we undermine the fundamental argument against racial or religious profiling, as the same logic of "justifiable prejudice" could then be applied to any group.
I understand. I think that as other people have pointed out, most of the difference between societal attitudes towards bias against Muslims versus bias against men does not stem from differing attitudes between racial and sexist bias, but rather due to the fact that Muslims are a favored group and men are not.
For the most part, these things aren't based on logical application of neutral principles, but rather based on "who/whom"
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There's a joke I've seen before that is along the lines of "women be shopping = bigoted, white women be shopping = woke" so it doesn't seem to be strictly true that sexism is tolerable while racism and religionism isn't. It seems more to just be directional from minority and "oppressed" groups in the English speaking world to majority groups. That being said, it actually doesn't seem to matter too much regardless and mostly depends on the areas you traffic in. In some circles, saying women shouldn't vote is actually the correct social signal to send. In other circles, something like that would get you instantly excommunicated.
I don't think it's sexist or racist to believe that men are more likely to be violent or that Muslims are more likely to be violent. I think prejudice occurs when you go from the real statistical understanding to collective blame and group punishment, treating every man or black person or Muslim or whatever else as if they aren't an individual who holds responsibility only to themselves and not to others who they have an attribute of theirs in common with. Just because men are more violent on average doesn't make it fair to some random office worker Joe if he's treated like a violent criminal, he is an individual and if he is peaceful he should be accepted that way. Especially when there's basically no group where violent people make up the majority. Even with the worst American group, black men, most of them you come across are still gonna be generally peaceful. And just like most male violent crime, even that is pretty much just towards other black men.
Essentially it's just useful to remember. Men are more violent on average, but the average man is not violent. The average man is peaceful, the baseline of men is nonviolence and non crime.
Replace "violent" with "at the highest end of STEM aptitude" and you just got fired from the presidency of Harvard. These are somewhat overloaded words but the revealed descriptivist definition seems to include any belief in inherent differences that have clear moral valence, at least if the direction of some of those perceived differences can be interpreted as "punching down" the progressive stack.
Well, this one's straightforwardly not racism because "Muslim" isn't a race, but it is classic "Islamophobia".
It's kind of weird that we don't have a general "-ism" word to refer to religious prejudice or religious intolerance, but I guess religion is the point at which the "everybody's the same regardless" theory breaks down so badly that nobody wants to say religious prejudice is always unwarranted? You may believe Islam in particular isn't inherently more violent (it tried to be more resistant to the "evolution" that @Rosencrantz2 points out is common to religions, yet in practice Muslims' attitudes toward violence do vary greatly from century to century and place to place) But, are you going to extend that charity to every religion ever? That's a good way to find yourself visiting the People's Temple for a free glass of Flavor Aid.
Well I never said that, my belief is that individuals deserve to be treated as individuals and not purely as statistics. Muslims are definitely more likely to be violent, but there are also tons of peaceful non violent ones too. The same way we shouldn't say "this Muslim terrorist is a great person because Muhammad Ali is", we shouldn't say "Muhammad Ali is a terrible person because this Muslim terrorist is". I think individualism like that is a fundamental part of human dignity. Humanity is not a hive mind species.
That was supposed to be the generic you in context; sorry for the misleading ambiguity.
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No, see, this is exactly what they were talking about, and my comment above as well. You jumped straight to a factual debate about the stereotypes but that’s not the point. The point is, you have these beliefs about Muslims, fine. You think your views are more accurate, fine. Are you following it up by treating individual Muslims as dangerous and potentially violent as a baseline belief?
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I think this is more or less the correct explanation. It really is just who/whom in its fundamental essence, and trying to make it make sense logically is a fool's errand.
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This isn't so much a joke as it is an accurate representation of how much modern feminists have "lost the plot" so to speak and gotten subsumed into the broader (pun half intended) realm of woke racial politics. You can see this clearly with the widespread proliferation of the term "Karen", which as far as I can tell, feminists never really pushed back on, and often embrace and use themselves, despite being blatantly misogynistic. Calling a woman a bitch = misogynist, calling a white woman a bitch = a ok.
It's sort of the inverse of the term "thug", which is woke from a gender politics angle (men are thugs), but un-woke from a racial politics angle, and therefore no bueno.
In a way, this observation does support OP's claim, no? "Directionally wrong" sexual prejudice is redeemed by a "directionally correct" racial component, but "bad" racial prejudice is not made acceptable by introducing a "good" sex component; ergo the racial dimension empirically matters more.
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This is actually what I meant to critique. Ill modify the post accordingly! (Although many people do think that simply believing this is wrong) Im trying to talk more about treating people within a given group differently based on these general facts. (Treating an individual man as if he would rape you, and profiling him, for example, because the majority of rape is men.)
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