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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23837 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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France bans statistics

There are some clever ways to figure out the demographics, like looking at the names of newborns and calculating the name-origin frequencies; 30% of births in Paris have a Muslim or African name. If you combine this with a study on the likelihood of immigrants choosing a typical European name, you could probably arrive at a decent prediction of demographics among Parisians.

I think part of the reason the Pelicot gang-rape case didn't get as much attention as it perhaps should have was that, going by their names, at least 24% of the perpetrators were of Arab extraction; in other words they were 3.5x overrepresented relative to their share of the French population.

In Germany Pelicot seemed to stay first-page news for months. Also, the ethnic extraction of the perpetrators was never mentioned, and if it was just 24% this seems like child's play for the media to sweep under the table.

To begin with, a lot of the diversity stuff works psychologically by exploiting some nonmathematical sense that equality means equal numbers for every class. So if anything, "24% Arabs" naturally spins into "majority native", and comparing to baseline population figures can be framed as "racist weirdo math, just trying to follow along with the reasoning will morally taint you" or "are you trying to exploit the injustice that Arabs have less than 50% in some other aspect to also slander them".

and comparing to baseline population figures can be framed as "racist weirdo math..."

Not that you're wrong, I'm starting to think you can brainwash people into believing anything if you have a strong enough control over mass media, but what drives me nuts about this is that the same "racist weirdo math" was used for half a century to determine whether institutions are racist. The "understanding per capita" meme was supposed to be an uncharitable strawman to get a few chuckles out of people, not a literal description of reality.

Yeah, it's weird that people can assert "relative to their share of the population, black people are underrepresented in Ivy League universities, and this is evidence of racism" and in the next breath assert "the majority of murders in the UK are perpetrated by white Britons".

I would reflexively accuse these people of doublethink, of holding two obviously contradictory ideas in their head at the same time. But actually, I think a lot of these people literally don't understand the meaning of "relative to their share of the population, X group is underrepresented in Y industry". They use it as an empty slogan, a more sophisticated-sounding way of saying "there should be more X people in Y industry". If I were to point out to them that black Britons are in fact overrepresented in British telly, that wouldn't give them pause, they wouldn't think "oh, mission accomplished". They weren't demanding that the demographics of British telly reflect the real demographics of the UK: they just want there to be more black people on the TV. They don't necessarily even understand the idea that "fairness" means that you should see a black character in a TV show set in Britain about as often as you would in real life.

I think part of the reason the Pelicot gang-rape case didn't get as much attention as it perhaps should have

Huh? How much more attention could something have gotten?

I think it got significantly less attention than the Cornell 7, for instance.

Pelicot was front page on e.g. The Guardian, FT, etc. where the Cornell 7 were not. She also got a NYT magazine cover story.

Looking at Google Trends, Cornell 7's peak visibility was 19x that of the Pelicot case.

They go by first name which undercounts things since plenty of Christian French Africans have French names.

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