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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 9, 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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There’s probably a leftist out there who would endorse the racist paternalism you describe, but that person is not an “average person.”

True, prosecutors and judges tend not to be average people. In that case, you have 2 possibilities: either the true belief is limited to them, or it's politically advantageous for them to act in a way indistinguishable from believing it [in which case we need to ask why that is, and we can assume that, because some of these are elected positions, that the charge of racist paternalism can be said to extend to a significant portion of the population, or at the very least it doesn't bother them].

they're just the most insanely racist people on Earth.

I think most of the moral sentiment that caused racism in the first place is absolutely alive and well (in that some people have a psychological need for an enemy outgroup categorized by simple observable markers like skin color and gender, and furthermore that people who do this are inferior themselves), and I even believe Progressives when they claim it's [relatively] uniquely a problem with whites. Perhaps ironically, I think this is an HBD thing.

Naturally, I am highly suspect of a race of people who then seem to exempt themselves because they say "look we're maximally discriminatory against ourselves on the basis of race", because the intent is the crime, not the fact it was ever done (which is also the problem with other X-supremacy groups, most notably feminists/gynosupremacists). The correct lesson, and one the classical-liberals tried to teach in the '70s, is that the correct way to not be discriminatory on the basis of race is to not be discriminatory on the basis of race; their folly is that this discriminatory behavior is, in fact, innate to white people (and cannot be trained out of them), and they were just laying the grounds for the (overwhelmingly white) daughters of the Confederacy to roll right back over them with their new racism after classical-liberalism reached its high water mark that decade.

Which also explains the related phenomenon where a non-trivial number of [assuming/acting in the progressive framing] "white supremacists" are black or hispanic (or married to one). That inconsistency is resolved if you assume Progressives are more guilty of the discriminatory-intent-mind-crime (which is what non-progressives actually mean by "racism") than those who they accuse of it.

It doesn't need to be if you accept the progressive framing that "white supremacy" means "being of a mental state that opposes the progressive power structure", but at that point "white supremacy" is not the actual crime.

some people have a psychological need for an enemy outgroup categorized by simple observable markers like skin color and gender, and furthermore that people who do this are inferior themselves

It occurs to me that there is a funny counter factual out there where people of different skin colors are really all nearly identical on all the measurable things that are supposed to matter (intelligence, crime, education, financial outcomes, hygiene, health, inhabiting clean a tidy communities, etc.) and then you have the racists making enemies of certain pigments. But then they would struggle to come up with any reason why they don’t like group besides the mere color of their skin. It would be rather ludicrous. I suppose there are a lot of people who do think that’s our current situation.

Is it really the skin color that people object to when they think about immigrants?

It occurs to me that there is a funny counter factual out there where people of different skin colors are really all nearly identical on all the measurable things that are supposed to matter (intelligence, crime, education, financial outcomes, hygiene, health, inhabiting clean a tidy communities, etc.) and then you have the racists making enemies of certain pigments

Once you control for class filter bubbles (i.e. if you believe the only people who exist are middle or upper class, and in that case/context, what you have stated is literally true) this is exactly how progressives behave (the pigments they hate are white and yellow). It's not ludicrous, it's personally advantageous- those classes are shrinking, so as any good whore rational actor would do they sell their dignity and do stupid things like "be racist against themselves" (the upper class that pays them loves a good self-hating worker who tells their fellow workers they deserve lower wages because of their pigment). That is how they defect against everyone else, by signalling that a lower [sociofinancial] salary will be acceptable to them, and the other workers who won't do the same thing should be fired (or killed).

It's the exact equivalent to a scab working behind a picket line, just using an expanded sociofinancial sense of salary, not just the financial one most are used to. Rational, yes; but the union response to that sends goons to their homes to extract a little rent of their own, and so far that clearly hasn't been happening for a bunch of reasons that are out of scope of this response.