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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I don’t know if this is too post worthy, but many black activists have called the cancellation of Jason Arday and the resulting suicide a lynching. It makes me believe they don’t understand why many people found lynching to be bad.

The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t. Less people would be worried about the irregular justice of lynch mobs if they accurately hung rapists and Till wouldn’t be martyr if he actually raped the white woman. It was his innocence that really made the lynching galling.

In the Arday context, no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges. Instead, they claim accurately castigating Arday repeatedly for his crime is a modern day lynching. So either they believe any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate and blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions or they are trying to use powerful iconography to prevent criticism of blacks. But that’s destroying their seed capital.

Emmet Till

Even back then, the media would selectively highlight certain events to make the public pattern-match for a narrative that doesn’t exist. They arbitrarily created a negative valence around “White racism”, which naturally resulted in negative valence around White people and their civilization. This is the sort of thing you can easily prove in a lab: gather a bunch of people to read something every day for a week, and variably present them with stories such that when they see the word X it is often immediately associated with something aversive or else it predicts something aversive. The former is called evaluative conditioning and it’s resilient to counter-conditioning; when the progressive college student in 2020 would scroll headlines and quickly read “White cop shoots Black woman in Chicago”, “why White privilege is worse than you think”, I mean the headlines were so over-the-top I can’t even recreate them with skill, they were essentially being brainwashed in a scientifically predictable fashion. Staats & Staats (1958) trivially conditioned positive and negative emotions onto nationality words in this way (which probably used evaluative conditioning more than Pavlovian conditioning). The problem was heightened when people trusted the news and entered a trance state when consuming the news. It’s simply that the wrong people were in charge of the media, which is effectively a conditioning device for the masses, and whoever was controlling the media really wanted to instill a reflexive dislike of White people and their things. Virtually all of the problems are downstream from media conditioning (academics also really like absorbing media and are perhaps a bit more gullible than the average bear).

[Just regarding Till specifically: if you were to go into the hood and grab the hand of someone’s girlfriend (not even wife), and then chase her to grab her waist, there’s a good chance you will be shot and killed. This was always a non-story, and note that the media would never report on the phenomena that nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim. This is because they’re not interested in telling you a horrible fact of reality, they are trying to condition you in a certain manner.]

note that the media would never report on the phenomena that nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim.

The perpetrator chooses the victim. If the perpetrator chooses randomly, it is much more likely that a perpetrator in a small group would choose someone from a large group than a perpetrator in a large group would choose someone from a small group. And whites are a larger group. So it is statistically expected that cross-race rapes usually involve black perpetrators, and it does not mean that black people are more violent or more prone to rape the other race. It just means that since there are more whites, they have more oppopsite race targets.

and it does not mean that black people are more violent or more prone to rape the other race.

Yes, it does.

Imagine a 80:20 split with equal propensity. The small group does 16 cross-group offenses and 4 in-group offenses. The large group does 16 cross-group offenses and 64 in-group offenses. The smaller target pool is perfectly balanced by the smaller perpetrator pool.

If that balance isn't maintained in reality, then why not?

I read "nearly all" to be a statement about ratios, not absolute numbers. What you (and Sloot above) said applies to absolute numbers.

I'm missing something. My model showed 16:16 total, or a 1:1 ratio. What did you mean?