This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Until five seconds later when someone accuses you of being the Grand Wizard because the people you locked up were disproportionately black. C'mon now, I know you didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
You are saying "I must be racist because other people are racist, so I need to be exactly like them, but with different sign". No, you don't. You missed all of my point exactly. The people that would accuse you would be racists, but you do not need to build your own racism to defend against them. I just showed you the correct way, and you treat it as some kind of weird nonsense. That's the problem.
Oh okay, when a bunch of wokies paint me as Hitler and try to terminate my career because I colorblindly arrested six times as many black guys, or whatever, I'll just pass them a copy of your post. It'll fill their hearts with a sense of civic virtue and society as a whole will decide that actually it doesn't really want the answer to that question after all. Then, finally, at last, no one will "need" the actual answer and you can quit hearing about HBD.
I'm not sure how this even computes. OK, I understand you are pissed off at the wokes. I am too. They are totally wrong. But then something bizarre happens. I am saying "yes, we should ignore the wokes and arrest as many black guys as commit crimes. And as many white guys as commit crimes". But you say - no, that's not gonna work. You see, the wokes are in the way, so the only way to solve it is to build this theory that treats black people as low quality humans, and somehow introduce it it into all the society, and obsess about wide-populational statistical differences. And when I am asking - well, how exactly that is going to help with arresting the actual criminals and keeping them in jail? You tell me - but the wokes! The wokes!!! The wokes!!! Yes, I know, the wokes. The wokes are bad. The wokes are racist. They are making everything worse. I got that. The part I didn't get is how exactly HBD is helping you here? I am saying the practical way to solve the crime is to put criminals in jail. You are saying it's impossible because the wokes would interfere and thus we need HBD. But how HBD is helping you? Sure, you could start despising black people for their supposed statistical inferiority... and? How that solves anything?
The wokes get their justification by claiming that disparate sentencing alone proves that law enforcement is racist and illegitimate, and having wide public agreement for this because HBD arguments are taboo and can't be uttered in polite society. If HBD became common knowledge, this would stop working.
Yes, I know, they lie. And it's easy to prove - you just need to establish a principle of "do crime - go to jail" - which is obviously blind to the race, and enforce it diligently without regard to the race. Once you start talking about race, proving that you operate in racially blind framework becomes much harder.
No, not because of this. You don't need to sell the public that 50 millions of US citizens are subhuman (not sure what you'd do with Ashkenazi Jews btw - does every Jew automatically gets PhD at birth? I mean, if you do the negative side, you have to do the positive side too... if you advocated for somehow suppressing supposedly low-IQ populations, you necessarily would have to advocate to promote high-IQ populations... not sure how that's supposed to work?) to sell them the idea of punishment following the crime. I know a lot of people that agree to the latter while not agreeing to the former, and I do not think HBD is the only way to combat racism. Especially given that it's the same racism, only with variables substituted. I mean "we are both racists, but we think we are actually the good guys, and so do they, but you can trust us!" does not sound as a particularly overwhelming argument.
How? The wokes would just switch from "you can't jail criminals because it's racist" to "you can't jail criminals because life's hard for them anyway, so you can not ask them to not be criminals, it's just cruel". In fact, many already do it anyway right now - the white progressive left is racist as hell, and many of them internalize a version of HBD very deeply, they just make different political conclusions from it. Attacking them on essentially agreeing with them is not going to be very effective. If you want to win over them, you need to reject their racist framework.
Like, okay, let's just focus on the problem then. We want a society where you go to jail if you do a crime and where you get a PhD if you write a thesis, with the same criteria for a crime and a thesis for everyone. Every time we set something like this up, we see outcomes differ by race. People will then use the outcome differences as a pretext to try to destroy the jail institution and the PhD institution and eventually dismantle any system of society setting up formalized expectations for behavior and rigorous standards to aspire to. How do we fix this and go back to being able to have standards that apply equally to everyone?
More options
Context Copy link
Wasn't this pretty much what people said you were supposed to do from 1980 to 2010 or so? And then it fell apart in a concentrated program to dismantle it that most everyone just went along with for whatever reason where people started saying no, that's not what you are supposed to do, you're not allowed to do that. The system is fully tainted by structural racism, which you can infer from the different outcomes it produces, therefore it must be demolished and the structural racism (which we don't know how to fix because it's inferred from outcomes, not causes) be fixed before anything else. Before 2010, there was a tacit agreement not to talk about race. Then the wokes showed up, realized this lets them go wild with the disparate impact fallacy and started putting race front and center all the time to attack the system, and people couldn't respond to the criticism without arguments that were not permitted in polite society. So what's the next move?
I'm not really sure why you keep pulling things this way. We want a society where you go to jail if you do crime and you get a PhD if you submit a thesis that makes an original contribution to your field. But also one where people won't succeed with campaigns that jails must be abolished because too many black people end up there and PhD programs must be abolished because too many Jews end up there.
Progressives have been doing this a hundred years, people dealt with it fine. The difference here is that now everyone agrees that the criminal did the crime and the criminal justice system is working as it's described. People can and will argue that we should have an entirely different stated purpose for the justice system, but then they need to make a case for that first. They don't have an option of campaigning for closing down the current system right now, because they're successfully making a fallacious claim that the system is fully corrupt, egregiously failing to work according to its stated mandate, and who knows the whole crime problem might just be made up because of structural racism everywhere.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And I'm saying you'll never get to just do that, and that the suggestion is so detached from reality that I wonder why you would bother making it.
Like what, for the rest of eternity whenever someone brings up disparate outcomes in whatever as evidence that the system is racist, we're supposed to keep the actual reason secret? Because what, it makes some people sad? Just stand around and hope that everyone calling the system racist and using that as a political lever just loses power and goes away?
No thanks.
More options
Context Copy link
What is the HBD argument that would defeat "the cops are racist to black men so they police and sentence them harsher in the same situations"?
Now the argument hinges on "cops police and sentence them harsher in the same situations" which you need to demonstrate as true without just pointing to the higher rate of black criminal convictions as direct evidence. This sounds like a much better situation than the one where you can't have an outcome disparity that makes minorities look bad without being blamed of racism. If you can prove that's true then sure, whatever actual thing you dug up is something we can look at as a problem to fix. If you end up getting nothing, then it's back to just arresting people who do crimes.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know about sentencing, but when it comes to policing you sound a little behind the times, considering we're already well into the era of progressives deeply regretting body cameras.
Sounds like the progressive arguments are being defeated by a tool that has nothing to do with HBD and everything to do with your interlocutor's "just arrest people who do crimes".
Sounds more like you brought up subjects (police brutality and sentencing disparity) that had no direct bearing on the topic of HBD in the first place, and are now congratulating yourself for the fact that they are indeed not especially relevant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link