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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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The real question we are interested in: "we can have an intervention that would make this black man a productive member of society that you don't even have to pay for, or you can pay $30k/year for decades until he grows too old to do crime".

I don't follow. What exactly is that no-cost intervention? Or is the point just that the question is: "Would he still hate black people if they are productive members of society?"

Honestly asking. I don't get what you're saying.

Edit: never mind, I get it now upon re-reading. Leaving this to mark my shame.

Can you please explain for the rest of us? Because I don't entirely understand what that particular example was supposed to demonstrate.

By intervention I meant that hypothetical Soros-funded anti-recidivism experiment that funds all sorts of activists trying various ideas.

The alternative to that is the current situation when violent recidivists are in fact locked up for a long time on taxpayer's dime.

My point is that I'm sure that pretty much nobody, including KKK Grand Dragons, hates black people in a sense that they would actively pay to harm them. So we shouldn't worry that our hypothetical program would receive a pushback from the nonexistent group of people that prefers more black criminals around.

This feels more like a D&D scenario than it does political analysis. You're taking a bunch of groups of people, writing a few-sentence description of why they act a way they do, then pitting the groups against each other based solely on that description to achieve an outcome in a tortured way.

Like, """Soros DAs""" (or, more accurately, progressive city-level politicians) are currently a problem because they hold political power and set policy in ways that don't reduce crime as much as they should. If you had the power to set policy, you could set up a complicated incentive game where you trick your political enemies into solving your problem for you. Or you could just have the police aggressively investigate and arrest criminals, using modern technology, and there'd be much less of a recidivism problem because crime would be swiftly punished and no longer be rewarding. Police departments have lists of habitual offenders, gangs, gang members - just take action against them! There's no scenario where setting up the tortured game is actually worth anything - if you have the power to set the rules under which Soros and his 'activists' play, you can just ignore them. And if you don't have that

And there are a ton of people who actively hate black people in the sense they would pay to harm them. Internet nazis, virulent racists, white supremacist gang members, etc. People who advocate for mass deportation of nonwhites. They're currently, no matter how you count it, less than a few percent of the US population, but they absolutely exist. I'm not sure rebutting that point matters though, it feels like poking a hole in some complicated talmudic argument that's already ten thousand feet above reality.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.