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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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But I think there are lessons for the “anti-woke” too. That is, relative age effects are a proof-of-concept for significant arbitrary privilege being a real thing. A fair amount of anti-woke arguments claim that gender and racial disparities may disappear entirely when controlling for confounding variables (e.g. the gender wage gap or the racial policing gap).

My objections have been always on the meta-level: I don't doubt that there are some structural isms, but can we have an honest discussion about how much of inequality of outcomes is due to them and how better to approach that? We can't, and that's bad because I'm pretty sure that in several important aspects the pendulum has swung too far a long time ago and this hurts the supposed beneficiaries of anti-ism discriminatory policies as well, in unexpected ways even. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae#1990s left a lot of black and poor people homeless and with a destroyed credit rating, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_States#Race_and_gender put the majority of educated blacks in the US into a sort of indefinite indentured servitude, and having a 60:40 college+ educated female to male ratio makes dating not very fun for those women. This is what you get if you shut down open discussion because you think that the only problem is evil ciswhitemales and nothing could possibly go wrong if you shut them off and follow the road paved with good intentions.