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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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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.