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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2680 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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When did anti-racism become incorporated into a person's character after Civil Rights in the US? Talking to boomers, even liberal ones, it seems their attitude is mostly that personal prejudice is, while not encouraged, also not a big deal so long as you don't let it cloud your judgement in an official capacity (such as discriminating while hiring). Even many boomerlibs I know talk in racially disparaging terms about people they don't like (i.e. a black driver who cut them off). I'm around 30, and growing up in Houston with an ethnically diverse social group it seems that ideologically everyone was on board with equal opportunities, but if someone was personally racist it was more of a personal quirk than a major character flaw unless they were, like, in a criminal organization or something. I'm PMC, and grew up PMC going to public schools, so I may have been in a bubble.

To give a tongue in cheek quote from my dad, "When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?" It seems that there was a gap in between when everyone agreed the nation as a whole should act in a race-blind or even anti-racist way and when people decided that it's imperative that people as individuals abandon racist feelings/beliefs.

I'd also be interested in if/when this happened in other nations as well, such as the nations of Western Europe.

The other day, I was telling herself about the spree killer who targeted massage therapists in Atlanta. Being that most of the victims were Asian women, initial reports understandably characterised it as a hate crime targeting Asian people. But when the perpetrator was arrested, he went to great pains to explain that he didn't murder those women because they were Asian, but because they were vile whores leading him (and other men like him) into temptation.

There's something darkly amusing about a man who will freely admit to being a sex addict, to deliberately targeting physically and economically vulnerable women for violence, to blaming women for his inability to control his own sexual appetites, to despising prostitutes and sex workers, to being a murderer – but I'm not racist, guys!

The process in the 2010s went something like this:

  • The mainstream media, and sub-mainstream outlets, would craft an emotionally-poignant faux-tragedy out of an event related to race, eg Michael Brown.

  • Political operatives would boost these stories by sharing and responding to them online, treating these events as an intimate and civic tragedy of totalizing emotional importance. Some of these operatives just wanted Democrats to win, some of them wanted to grow their account. And some of them were actual die-hard antiracists (a tiny minority with a distinct origin in academia, coming out of Soviet anti-American Marxist tactics to weaken America).

  • Normal youth in America, absolutely starved of any civic or collective-religious ritual or belongingness, and not understanding anything, would imitate the operatives in mourning the faux-tragedies. This is something that seems important to do unless you know the game being played, and it is also cathartic in the same way watching true crime or a tragic drama is cathartic. This also brought them attention.

  • Because the faux-tragedies targetted the empathetic, the mourners were often young women, which means that young men would engage in it driven by pure desire to have sex with them.

  • With each additional sequence of catastrophizing an event, the grievance seems bigger and bigger and more legitimate and pressing, and the operatives etc were racing to develop the most “sticky” narrative because by making your message stickier you get more attention online, then your message was imitated, etc.

If you do this enough, “antiracist” becomes a desirable thing to signal within the cohort affected by this messaging. If you totalize the importance of racism, then you are also totalizing the importance of anti-racism. And it feels good to put that identity label in your bio.

It’s fun to draw a comparison between BLM-era ritual mourning and the Khameneist ritual mourning in Iran, and indeed there have even been cross-over episodes. They both have the intended aim of recruiting political allegiance by lazer-focusing on an ostensibly sorrowful, unjust, dramatic death, identifying with the suffering victim, and then embodying a sort of repented or amended spirit which comes out of it, especially within a space for collective effervescence.

When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?

One of Jesus' two crucifixion mates accepting him as his Lord and savior and getting into heaven might qualify as the ur-example. Since wokism is a secular mirror of Christianity, accepting its core tenet should also qualify you for redemption even if you have been eating kids.

Part of the point of st dismas is that he didn’t get out of his earthly death sentence.

  1. That doesn’t say anything about Earthly forgiveness.
  2. No, it isn’t. Any mapping of modern progressive idpol to Christianity proves way too much. You might as well say that Lean Six Sigma is a secular mirror. Or multi-level marketing. Or the normal criminal justice system.

LSS is a fucking cult.

But not a particularly Christian one.

I thought it was fairly explicitly tied into Japanese spirituality via martial arts, so presumably some mix of Shinto and Buddhism.

Does it import anything other than calling its ranks “belts”?

I certainly didn’t spend the money to get inducted into its higher mysteries.

I'm equally unfamiliar, but the origins are definitely Japanese - it claims to be selling the insights that underlie Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System. The question of how much the TPS is a native Japanese thing and how much it is just W Edwards Deming's ideas being applied in a country where all the vested interests that could sabotage them had been nuked into oblivion is controversial in the process improvement world.

I remember listening to a podcast where two (older, white, liberal) hosts were talking about the movie, In Bruges, and they both discussed how the movie can be tough to watch these days because the protagonist, who is supposed to be likeable and sympathetic, says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things. And then one of the hosts had a moment of clarity and verbalized that the protagonist is also a literal hitman who murdered a child, which is substantially morally worse than making a joke about fat black women.

says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things

Ironically, the director had real difficulty in getting Colin Farrel to use the word 'retard', because his daughter has Downs Syndrome.

Isn't that just a matter of what's presently controversial?

In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad. It is not controversial. The film In Bruges expects you to understand that murder is bad. It is, in a sense, already priced in. Add in that fictional violence is often treated symbolically, and not as seriously as real violence, and it does not occasion any cognitive dissonance for you to sympathise with the hitman. Child murder is presented as a flaw, and hating child murder does not position you on either side of a contemporary partisan conflict.

On the other hand, saying nasty things about a fat black woman does position you on this or that side of a present divide. Attitudes to fat people or mentally disabled people or whatever do code as left-wing or right-wing or the like.

Compare the way that, for example, in Mass Effect 3 (2012) you can carry out the genocide of entire species, but you cannot disapprove of gay marriage. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) you can lobotomise people, control people through their drug addictions, and so on, but you cannot misgender Krem. Capital-E Evil choices are fine, as long as everyone knows they're evil, but being on the wrong side of a subject of present controversy, which codes political, is not fine. The low-stakes issues matter more than the high-stakes ones, not because they're more important, but because they sort people.

In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad.

Gangster movies are almost always written with an implied moral framework where murder is not bad if done in a way which complies with the unwritten rules of gangsterism - with the paradigmatic example being the various killing Michael Corleone is involved with in The Godfather.

The child murder in In Bruges was bad because Colin Farrell's character killed (a) the wrong person by mistake and (b) a child. A clean hit on the priest he had been paid to kill would not have been a problem in gangster movie world. Although I agree with other posters that In Bruges is not actually written in this moral framework, and is arguably satirising it.

I think that's possibly an accurate description of the innerworkings of progressives, but I also think that's an excessively Culture War-brained perspective.

In Bruges isn't about whether murder or prejudice are morally permissible. At its core, the film is about guilt and the potential for redemption through a dual character study of Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson). I think the main questions the audience is supposed to struggle with is whether Ray can be redeemed and try to find happiness after living an evil life which culminated in him accidentally shooting and killing a child while shooting and killing a priest, for money.

Ray's racism and fatphobia are played for laughs and fill out his characterization. They indicate that he is gruff, prickly, generally uncaring of others, and he likely comes from a lower class background where such beliefs are normal and tolerated. The film implicitly acknowledges that Ray's prejudices are morally wrong while also casting them as very minor sins against his more serious crimes. A small part of his redemption arc is apologizing to a dwarf who he carelessly insulted earlier in the film.

Or to put it in your terms, pricing Ray's history of murder and penchant for racism is the point of the film. The viewer (and Ray for that matter) are trying to price them in relation to his potential for redemption.

What my prior post was mocking is the idea than a modern culturally left-leaning American finds it more difficult to sympathize with someone who makes casually racist statements for fun than someone who kills people for money and murdered a child. Both of those factors are presented as flaws in Ray's character in the movie, but the film clearly intends for the latter to be much worse than the former, as I think any ethically sane person would. The podcast hosts inverted their moral focuses because they, IMO, have broken progressive values that raise the evilness of bigotry to the stratosphere. Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.

And I get that if I actually sat down with the hosts of Unspooled and asked them, "do you think that saying 'nigger' is worse than murdering a child?" they would come to the same conclusion as me, but that only further highlights how far their progressive values take them from ethnical reality.

EDIT - Also, the idea that being against racism against fat black women is taking a stand in the modern culture is extremely culture war brained and kind of nuts. Vanishingly few people in the US are anti-fat black women qua fat black women, and the few that are have no political power and don't listen to podcasts co-hosted by the head film critic at the Los Angeles Times. If the hosts talked about In Bruges in this way to signal their contemporary cultural war position, then that is a sad condemnation of their world views and I wished they would just get back to understanding the film on its own terms (which, to their credit, they eventually do).

Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.

NOOOOOO. You just gave me a brainworm about trying to develop a market risk or counterparty credit model downstream of such a terrible pricing model and now I want to drink a pitcher of sulphuric acid or zip all my confidential e-mails and leak them to FT Alphaville or something similarly stupid.

See also shows like The Blacklist and its main protagonist, Raymond Reddington. Described as an extremely ruthless individual with no qualms about killing or torture, Raymond ran a vast criminal empire that was surely responsible for untold suffering. Yet the viewer is meant to find him sympathetic because he rails against environmental destruction or white supremacists. He has the "correct opinions" on the "politically correct" side, so ultimately it's acceptable to root for him and be invested in his story.

If you go far back enough, anti-racism was a controversial position and so was a poor proxy for how socialized someone is. At some point, when Civil Rights and proto-wokeness started to become the official civil religion (that is, taught in schools etc), it became a pretty good proxy for good socialization. Afterwards, only dysfunctional people act racist. I couldn't give you the exact year.

That makes me think of how subculture based this change is. In the media and public PMC culture open expressions of racism against protected groups are socially radioactive. At the same time, almost all boomers, including the PMC ones, I have met and most younger men either are casually racist or don't consider it a huge negative in a person. The culture of the younger men I suspect is partially an oppositional culture against PMC culture. I bet different subcultures have different values and different dates for when this became a value of them.

Yes. The boomer attitude about personal prejudice is that it is a cognitive barrier to rational thinking (it will make your hiring less meritocratic and your company make less money). It is a-moral because boomers were not brought up in PMC culture, just around for early Civil Rights.

Casually Racist Young Man (as opposed to young man with boomer tendencies) is probably similar to Satanists. As a reaction to Christianity, they are still a slave to its moral frame, just inverting it. This is essentially Curtis Yarvin's primary objection to some of the online right, I think. So the young man is racist because he is rebelling against mom, basically.

Another way this is stated is that a lot (though maybe not all) of online right types are Blue Tribe apostates -- not Red Tribers. If we start to see casually racist Red Tribers, it would be weird. It would probably indicate that Red Tribe is really losing cultural ground to the Blue. I don't mean in the "is lower status than Blue Tribe" way. I mean Blue becoming so hegemonic that Red Tribers start to identify themselves with it at a level enough to be apostates and become enslaved to its moral frame.

"When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?"

Given that Jeffery Dahmer spent a good part of his police interrogation trying to make it very clear that his victim typology was just co-incidental because of where he lived and that he was not a racist, I would say 1991.

And he was killed, apparently, by a black inmate who didn’t believe him. So in a meaningful sense Dahmer was killed for being a racist and not for being a serial killer.

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