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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.

To satisfy the second and third preconditions—politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority—the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation, showing that voters engage in racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.

In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.

Why are Southern black voters so uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party? Did something happen? I was led to understand that race relations in the South were actually great and reports of interracial discord were Yankee propaganda.

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HBD can completely explain this. If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution. The prior system could be 100% fair in a meritocratic way, but because you have less human capital you would prefer more free stuff from the government even if it means more taxes (which you largely don’t pay).

It’s mostly just because they are poor and compete poorly in a free market/meritocratic environment. You don’t need racism to explain this result.

No?

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”? Okay, maybe angsty channers. But it’s really not the normal mindset.

Also, this would predict that poor Appalachian whites should vote Dem, which does not appear to have been true for some time.

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”?

Of course they don't phrase it like that, in much the same way approximately no one considers themselves evil, but yeah I do think resentment about relative value does play a significant role in the expectation of welfare.

this would predict that poor Appalachian whites should vote Dem, which does not appear to have been true for some time.

But it was true for a long time before that, before Dem stances on gun control and other social issues, combined with weakening union influence, caused them to flip. And one could fairly argue there's a certain... hmm... something akin to hypocrisy in regards to what kinds of welfare should be allowed, and why, and who gets it. Consider attitudes on disability versus, perhaps, Section 8.

Other cultural factors presumably explain why blacks stayed Dem despite being overwhelmingly more conservative than the average white Dem.

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”? Okay, maybe angsty channers. But it’s really not the normal mindset.

No! The best part about black scam culture is they think they are geniuses and we are all the idiots for working regular jobs while they can lie and scheme and the only real consequences ever are a low credit score or a felony conviction here or there. And they don't even really internalize thinking about the felony, "oh that was uncle Thad, I'm smarter than him and wont get caught."

Are you trying to imply that this sort of attitude is somehow unique to the black underclass? In my experience it is endemic.

Unique, no. Overrepresented, likely. PPP loan scams would be one of the notable, recent examples.

Though I think "don't be the chump" scam culture has increased in other social and racial classes, like with getting various diagnoses for extra time on college tests and assignments cuts across those lines.

And "why am I a fucking chump" perception of, say, net taxpayers continues to generate a lot of resentment as we burn the stored goodwill.

"Don't be the chump" is downstream of cheaters prospering.

It is certainly not endemic, or at least was not until recently. I went to a majority white, mostly middle class, some high some low, high school with a sizeable Mexican minority population. The activities you describe would never have occurred in any of the classes amongst the white students. And since our school was intellectually segregated, it was also functionally racially segregated, so I don't know what the Mexicans were doing. I did experience some "cheating culture" as I got to engineering school and the racial makeup included more Asians. Cheating culture is bad, but is different from scam culture. None of the engineering students were ever shoplifting with abandon. Perhaps from time to time someone games the food court by bringing a laptop and working there from 9am to 10pm only swiping in once, thats like the biggest scam.

And going back to my hometown, if you were caught by a neighbor using EBT you'd be socially ostracized, the rare section 8 housing person would not be invited to block parties. There were no Learing centers. If you did that you'd be charged with felonies. Heck, the police spent like 6 months investigating a "meth ring" where their seizure was 5 grams hidden under a table at a bar. Where I currently live, 5 grams is barely considered chargeable unless the fellow was picked up doing something else WORSE and the meth charge is just a kicker to get a plea deal.

And the opposite is true in the full on scam culture. These people make facebook videos and tutorials on scamming. The Learing centers all follow a business model propagated from some grey market scam culture NGOs. People sell EBT cards for booze. Its all very different from the normal world of 2000, and scam culture (unlike cheating culture) isn't new. It goes way back to before I was borne. Welfare queens wasn't Reagan slander, it was real life.

Hell, I just was in court. As I was waiting for my order from the clerk the next case was called. Child support case. Male, 20, convicted felon, on pretrial release for domestic violence, somehow drives a Tesla despite no documented employment. On EBT and S8. Female, 19, mother of one (alleged father is the male), currently pregnant (allegedly also his). No documented employment. Lives in a neighborhood where average rents are 3k a month with just herself and the baby. Then I get to leave before things finish. But still. Scam culture is its whole own level.

And going back to my hometown, if you were caught by a neighbor using EBT you'd be socially ostracized, the rare section 8 housing person would not be invited to block parties.

Maybe I am dumb, so these people are on SNAP or something and they're poor so it's automatically assumed they are leeches on society and must be shun?

Maybe I am dumb, so these people are on SNAP or something and they're poor so it's automatically assumed they are leeches on society and must be shun?

Why wouldn't you come to that conclusion. Not only are they objectively leeches on society, their move when being poor was not to build a social network that would help support them, instead they went and got other people's money through forcible taxation so they can buy chips and soda.

More that if you can't or won't support yourself, and your friends, family, and church are unwilling to help you, you're almost certainly some kind of fuckup likely to cause problems for others.

If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution.

Not necessarily. As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it. Whether your odds are actually good is an entirely different matter. People who are poorly off don't necessarily run on cold logic, and even if they do, they may be unable to see how redistribution helps them more than it hurts.

As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it.

Why would you believe this when you see your group failing more in the market?

It occurs to me that smart people often can't even imagine what it's like to be dumb.

Once you see it, it's impossible to miss how much internet discourse is dominated by people who never interact with the bottom quintile/decile and have zero idea how those groups think or act.

Because hope is not rational, and it is easy to believe yourself better than your peers. Even if said belief is an illusion.

Yeah, that's a pretty hard sell given that manifestly it is considered a problem in the community and even rich blacks line up behind Democrats as a result.

If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution.

Support for socialism increases with education and SES, no?

Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?

Currently the demographic most likely to say US national spending on welfare is "too little" is people with "less than high school" education (vs high school graduates and college graduates), and this is the case far more often than not, although the correlation with education seems surprisingly weak in general - high school graduates' and college graduates' responses are pretty much neck-and-neck.

That's not an apples-to-apples question, I admit. Might there be people who think we should overthrow capitalism altogether and perfect the New Soviet Man or whatever but who also don't want any more money going to today's lumpenproles? It still seems like a good indicator.

Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?

Zohran Mandami argues otherwise.

Yeah, "handful" was grossly wrong. 30% for "more welfare", geographically non-uniform, means there's probably going to be somewhere you can get a plurality to vote for seizing the means of production ... grocery retail? really? ...

But my point is just that, if loud vocal support for more welfare seems to be coming disproportionally from college students, that's because of a disproportionality in "loud" and "vocal", not in "support".

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