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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2865 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 9, 2026

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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.

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