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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4527 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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This is a post that's been floating around in my head for a while that I finally wanted to get out. Apologies if this is a little rambling.

There's a phenomenon I observe on both the left and right that is a little mysterious to me and I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on it. There seems to be a tendency to take the actions of particular individuals and ascribe some kind of moral responsibility for those actions to demographic groups the perpetrator is a part of. Such and such man/woman/white/black/migrant/christian/etc did a bad thing and, actually, all men/women/whites/blacks/migrants/christians/etc are in some sense responsible for it. Such that it is reasonable to think less of or perhaps take retribution against all members of whatever the relevant demographic group is.

I don't think it's too hard to come up with examples. I'm confident a lot of innocent Jews or Palestinians have caught strays from people mad at the Israeli government or Hamas. There was that unrest in the UK after a Sikh Northern Ireland after an African man stabbed a guy to death. Go to probably any dating forum and you can find men and women generalizing about the evils of the other gender based on their dating experiences.

I think of myself as having an essentially liberal individualist view of moral responsibility. People are morally responsible for the things they actually do and not the things that other people who happen to share demographic characteristics with them do. This makes arguments or actions of the above kind feel alien to me. I don't see the logic, the reason, that connects "Person A of X demographic did a Bad Thing" to "Therefore it is justified for me to do a Bad Thing to Person B of demographic X." I also observe deployment of arguments of this type seem to have a whiff of hypocrisy. People who deploy these kinds of arguments about demographic X they are not a part of would ~never accept similar generalizations about demographic Y that they are a part of.

I should also mention that I sometimes see a reverse of this. People of a particular demographic want credit for the good things other members of their demographic have done, regardless of what they themselves have done. The examples that come to mind here are all right-coded to me ("men built society so I, as a man, should get credit for what those other men did regardless of what I personally have done". s/men/whites) but that is probably just my bubble.

I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?

People have mentioned the epistemic reasons for doing this (stereotypes as heuristics), but separately there is also the game-theoretic (contractualist) reason: Individualism is a social contract that has both costs and benefits. In order for a social contract to work, you can't let people get away with getting the benefits without also incurring the costs. Here, the benefit of individualism is that you don't have to get blamed for the actions of other people just because they share some characteristic with you. The cost is that you have to reject any preferential treatment you may receive from others who share that characteristic on that basis.

Therefore, if you see that members of a certain group treat each other with special preference (most of their friends or marriage partners are fellow [X]s, they tend to hire each other, they refrain from "snitching" when one has broken the law, etc.), then it makes sense to collectivize blame onto them, even as you might prefer that they join the individualist social contract instead.

This seems to be a well-known psychological bias. However most psychological biases have evolutionary benefits. Group differences do exists. If you import a lot of Central American natives you likely do get a permanent underclass. So stereotyping has very important macro implications.

Realizing this is why people become post-liberal and the libertarian to fascists pipeline.

You do not get a permanent underclass, you get a browner local working class, they intermarry with natives.

That’s the same thing, a new permanent underclass. And if tfr is constant between classes you’ve now increased your working class relative to other capabilities.

Depends on the welfare situation I think.

Someone's already linked to a Scott post on Weakmanning, but Scott also gives examples of this in Ethnic Tensions (search "mccain"). It's mostly about associating positive things with the ingroup and negative things with the outgroup.

Reading this immediately reminded me of the Goomba Fallacy, which is an example of the Association Fallacy that you're broadly speaking to. I'm not normally one to bandy around fallacies, but it fits here.

To discuss the rationality of it requires specific examples. In some cases, the association is utterly ridiculous, like in the Goomba Fallacy. Another example that comes to mind is the notion that people in "red states" or "blue states" ought to suffer or experience material consequences as penance for the sins of their political leaders. Wine moms in North Carolina should not be denied natural disaster relief as penance for their sin of voting for Trump, not to mention the countless Democrats living there. On the other hand, some associations are quite viscous and difficult to overlook. The common pop-feminist idea — I've been victimized by a man, therefore I should act aloof and oppositional toward most men — may legitimately have protective value. Sure, #notallmen, but I think a young woman keeping her distance from young men she hasn't personally vetted may be protective, even if it is irrational. And, of course, plenty of associations are pre-rational, made entirely on the basis of in-group identification or out-group animosity.

The question that remains for me is how to distinguish between counterproductive, over-fitted associations vs. ultimately helpful ones. I think perhaps the solution is trying not to rely on just one demographic variable. Instead of screening against "men" as a category, perhaps it's best to screen against men of certain backgrounds, men who appear impoverished, men who have drinking problems, etc. so the associations can get more granular and actionable.

I think there’s a few things going on here, some more justifiable than others. Sure pure collective guilt is wrong and pre-rational. But that’s not all that’s happening.

I don’t think it’s crazy to say that society leaned too hard into blank slatist atomic liberalism and that some updating back is actually very rational.

You’ve got a spectrum of what you’re describing that goes from “irrational guilt by association” to “observing stereotypes” to “actual acting in collective interest”.

If I blame all people who wear sneakers because I got assaulted by someone wearing sneakers, I’m acting irrationally. If I blame people who dress like homeless bums for drug needles on the streets, I’m generalizing a stereotype and acting semi rationally even if I end up placing blame on individuals who aren’t users. If I blame Democrats for the outcomes of a Democratic policy implementation. I’m acting rationally.

What we’re seeing is that a lot of things we wanted to be entirely in camp 1, turn out to belong in camp 2 and 3.

It’s not just actually racial stereotypes are true sometimes and you’re not a bad person for noticing and acting on probabilities. Because this, while rational, still does have the problem of assigning collective guilt in your frame which I agree isn’t right.

No it’s observing that actually a lot of affinity groups do act in group interest. We want things like race or place or origin or gender or religion to be neutral associations, but we do see that in some cases it is much more like “democrats” than “people wearing sneakers”. So when you have groups collectively acting in group interest, you can rationally and morally place group blame on them, while withholding individual judgement.

I am not saying I always agree with this but it’s not dismissable as “pre-rational”. Regardless of being factually or morally correct, it’s coherent to claim that say, X group seems to act in their groups self interest over their neighbors, and blame them for it, even while giving any 1:1 interaction with an Xian the benefit of being treated like an individual

There was that unrest in the UK after a Sikh man stabbed a guy to death

But that unrest had nothing to do with the proposition that Sikhs are all/mostly stabby.

The issue was that the police, who are ostensibly supposed to facilitate justice, handcuffed a dying man who'd just been stabbed. He told them he'd been stabbed, and they said: "don't think you have, mate".

The issue was that they allowed an innocent man to bleed out, while treating his killer as a victim, based on their race. This was not an isolated incident; this is in the context of the police systematically siding with people based on the colour of their skin, rather than whether they need immediate medical attention due to having been stabbed.

I appreciate that you're making a general point. But the specific examples need to support it. So this might go some way to dissolving how mysterious you find the phenomenon: sometimes, the thing you perceive as people blaming an entire group for individual actions isn't actually what's happening. It's a convenient cudgel for people to be able to dismiss the outrage over Henry Nowak's murder as "oh, that's just a bunch of racists who are blaming sikhs", but that doesn't make it true.

This is my fault. I inadvertently conflated the Henry Nowak murder with a different stabbing that did lead to more general anti-migrant violence in Northern Ireland.

Pitbull Twitter. Which is its own issue as society has more pitbulls. But pit bulls do seem to statistically be much more likely to just randomly go on killing sprees. Personally I would rather just ban pitbulls from my neighborhood.

But I’ve always had an instinct that pitbull Twitter was a way to talk about race without using any human races. The idea being different human “breeds” have much different rates of doing antisocial things.

A large part of what makes humans so successful is extrapolating or generalizing from very small amounts of data. Because the actions of an individual and of a group to which they belong may be correlated, I think that group identity => group agency => group responsibility is a pretty natural leap.

And it is true that groups often coordinate (I say this as an individualist). But I think it's more likely you will accurately describe a group as coordinating if it is small, and groups today are considerably larger than they have been historically.

It’s not treating strangers as individuals. Which is the psychological norm.

People think ‘Christians are bad, because some are homophobes’ or ‘Christians are good, because they run charitable endeavors’. In practice, neither of these people has met very many religious Christians.

I don't think these behaviors make sense when you model people as individuals who are trying to maximize fairness, but they do make sense when you think of people as members of groups that are in competition (whether they wish to be or not, we are all members of some recognizable group). Scott has a good post about these sorts of dynamics called Weak Men Are Superweapons.

I think most people exhibiting these behaviors (hypocrisy, unfairness) are using pre-rational heuristics, albeit heuristics that are rational when the goal is for you and your group to win.

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