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Notes -
Can I just take a moment to say:
Racists do not describe themselves as racists. They always have beliefs that re perfectly reasonable and normal from their own perspective, and generally have either sources of evidence they consider authoritative or arguments they consider persuasive to validate those beliefs.
That being said: are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
And if not, who in the world could we call a racist, then?
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
But in many cases, it's pretty easy to tell when that stuff is all happening above someone's bottom line. This also relates to epistemic learned helplessness, with people being rightly skeptical of arguments and citations that seem persuasive but are highly optimized to seem that way by lots of distributed effort in some cases, but being more amenable to those types of arguments when they come from certain people/groups or support certain things they're disposed towards.
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
I just think racism as a moral failing is just not that important. I think there are probably a lot of truly shitty people that aren’t racists and some nice people who are racists.
Generally, I’d care more about whether someone is generally nice to other people, are they hospitable, do they actively create harm for others, are they a narcissist, etc compared to racism.
Well, famously, racism has led to a lot of “actively create[d] harm for others”, so stances like this seem poorly thought out when latent racism at an individual level can and does turn into actual discrimination and much worse at a societal level.
To invoke Godwin, there were so many “generally nice” Germans in 1936. They just were specifically not as nice to a certain minority, widely persecuted for some centuries such that it was considered normal in polite society (and still today on certain college campuses).
Why is discrimination an issue?
Making decisions on what kind of people you are interested in associating with is an everyday thing.
Do you immediately give your banking details to the 'IRS agent' with an Indian accent who randomly calls you?
That's discrimination right here. You used available information to you to make a snap judgment that you would not interact with a certain individual, and you are selectively deciding not to let them accomplish their goals.
There is no civilization without discrimination. Trust is only possible on a local level where you are not interacting with strangers but with people with a known history and known ties to your community, skin-in-the-game.
You’re employing a sense of the word “discrimination” not particularly relevant to the sense of “X race need not apply” or “separate but equal” and other race-based discrimination that was done at scale and often enshrined in law.
It is completely relevant since "disparate impact" considers discrimination in that sense discrimination in the sense you are referring to.
I don’t consider “disparate impact” to be a well-developed concept that is actually relevant to distinguishing between “discrimination” of an individual vs. “discrimination at scale” because intentionality matters for the types of discrimination I’m trying to discriminate between, and disparate impact is indiscriminate about intent, or any actual causal chain really.
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I'm simply making the case that discrimination is essential.
In situations where you need to urgently determine whether somebody is trustworthy or not, you will use all available information for this decision, physical markers of age, sex, race, class, employment, attitude, smell...
If your child disappeared suddenly and you were told a female cashier saw somebody take them away, do you go ask the bearded cashier to give you more information?
What's wrong with having rules? Nobody is entitled to interaction with anybody else.
Just because you think your kids would do better surrounded by Brahmins than by inner-city Irish kids, doesn't mean you can just force Brahmin families to sign up to your schools. If Brahmins decided that within their own school inner-city Irish 'need not apply', who are you to change that?
It would suck if all the businesses around me suddenly decided that they no longer wanted my business for whatever reason, but that is unlikely.
And perhaps if they did, it would have something to do with my behavior.
You are right that Freedom of Association is tricky because it goes both ways and resolving such tensions is difficult.
You’re still wrong about conflating different senses of “discrimination”.
I have no argument against “noticing patterns” or “stereotype accuracy” or simply having any given preference, in a way that many in today’s society consider to be racism (in my view overextending the concept).
But that is distinct from say Jim Crow or the Final Solution.
Your last line is exactly the issue: blunt discrimination at scale gets away from treating individuals as individuals. In a free society, there will always be tension about the state needing to intervene in any given case.
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At the corporate society/government level? Moral hazard. The people making the rules and the people bearing the costs of those rules are almost never the same people (the universal example being "child" vs. "adult").
You yourself buried the lede: "something to do with my behavior", yet... it obviously doesn't, should you be an above-average member of that group we're judging by. By keeping formal groupings like this out of law, we ensure that said above-average members have the opportunity to keep more of what their surplus of virtue/intelligence/time preference inherently provides them; the fact that this isn't having the eugenic effect we're hoping (above-average examples of a below-average group prosper -> should reproduce more, and vice versa) is due to a different societal failure mode that has yet to be addressed.
And sure, most of that is only on paper, but those words being there gives some social cover to defectors should they choose to skip the tax (i.e. a restaurant that seats blacks with the other customers in a cultural milieu where society at large doesn't like that- having to sit in the back is effectively a tax, since you'll have to spend more money just to get the same experience that whites get just by walking in the front door).
One solution to this problem is to say that there isn't enough discrimination, and reach for intersectionality- where the amount of tax you should be charged is proportional to the inherent costs of your immutable characteristics (and thus the sum of tax you owe or are owed). One look at how the gynosupremacists (and the PMC in Covid times) use this should tell you all you need to know about the success of this approach- they always exempt themselves from the taxes. It's very hard to guarantee fairness when you're trying to levy taxes this way; that's why the compromise for the last 60 years has been "well then, don't", and why attempts to change this, universally have all been/are all in bad faith.
By contrast, the ability to "have rules" (in the sense that you mean it there) means that now you not only have a dysgenic effect on the people you'd want to elevate, but a eugenic effect on people that you don't- in this case, below-average Brahmins who otherwise lost the genetic lottery that shouldn't be in that school anyway. So you'll get better results by being able to exclude them, and if you're going to exclude them for the same reasons you'd exclude the Irish... why the extra rule?
Of course, the inability to have rules directly leads to two problems. The first is concern trolls being rewarded for taking "is it because I'm black?" seriously- charitably, they don't fully appreciate/understand that eliminating the tax also has the side-effect that most people who get caught by the more objective standards of behavior are going to be members of a group with below-average ability to follow it.
This is why the justification for the tax eliminations is "immutable characteristics"- we're lying about the fact that behavior isn't actually fully mutable downstream of group membership. The side effects of that lie mean that the compromise is now vulnerable to a society taking concern trolls/"is it because I'm black?" seriously- and can back it up by saying "well, it's mostly group X in the statistics" with nobody else having the context or ability to say "that's exactly what we should expect given purely behavior-based standards are statistically rarer to meet for people of group X".
It also breaks down when you run into biological specialization between groups- specifically, between men and women- because each have a different set of anti-social behaviors, are done with the same evil intent, and have the exact same results as far as community finances and stability are concerned. (In a society where the words of women have equal power to the fists of men, misuse of the former should obviously be taken as seriously as the latter.)
The second is deadweight loss caused by levels of indirect signalling. Take the example of "good schools"- the deadweight loss, in this case the difference between how much it actually costs and how much it has to cost to exclude the people who would break the school, is instead captured by a bunch of different actors (the ability to afford a home in the suburbs, the ability to get your kid there and back, the ability to afford the school in the first place). Sure, these things are in and of themselves desirable, but the ability to signal that you can afford it is baked into everything you buy to do that and adds up- if you simply had a "no IQ under 110" policy, or (less efficiently) a "no group whose membership predicts lower intelligence", that loss wouldn't have to be as large.
That's a good thing if you've ever talked to a child, you would understand why you don't want to put them in charge.
That's only a problem for a minority of a minority. By definition, not the concern of the majority of the majority (that is the people who make laws).
I'm not hoping for eugenic effects. Perhaps if we're hoping for eugenic effects for a minority group, we would hope that excluding them would incentive the above-average members to break away and lead their group to success... somewhere else.
I don't see the issue with that. If they are above-average, then paying that tax shouldn't be a problem to them. They should also be able to understand that the experience they're coveting is a product of the work of a group they do not belong to, that they may not be able to obtain from their own group, and value that accordingly. If they can obtain the same experience from their own group, then what a great bargain for them!
A very simple question of logistics. If you're looking for 10 workers who can lift 50 lbs and you can hire somebody to test 50 candidates for the job, do you have them test 25 women and 25 men, or instead test 30-40 men until you get 9-10 workers and perhaps spend the remaining time looking at a few abnormally large women?
Nothing prevents you from excluding both the Irish and the lower-achieving Brahmins. If the Irish are significantly under-performing and also causing additional problems (disorder, violence, social inadequacy) then you're just saving money in admissions, discipline, remedial programs...
Answer: yes - instead of having a whole ChatGPT-like paragraph of non-committed denial hoping not to get sued.
It seems that we do already agree as you point out that the Western society we live in already has discrimination, just not the 'right' type of discrimination.
The compromise has been 'don't discriminate against groups that the post-WW2 globalist consensus has deemed to be special', not really 'don't discriminate' in general. Is there really somebody living who with a straight-face can say that they do not support one form of discrimination or another?
Any progressive not supporting 'safespaces' for queers, POC or women, 'my body my choice' for aborting mothers not antivaxxers?
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Sure. It can. But so can people who believe in the government control of the means of production or people who believe in say Islam.
And right-thinking people/societies should also frown upon those things. We can even agree that racism (even the 1995 version) is overrated as a terrible thing, compared to say Marxism, in Western culture.
I’m just pointing out you can’t defend “individual cases of racism aren’t so bad really” very well without ignoring the piles of skulls, ancient and modern.
Many people in this thread are proving the point that the Left torturing and drastically overextending “racism” as a term wielded as The Worst Argument in the World has largely backfired as far as improving racial issues. Some in this thread go so far as to say Classic Racism is/was fine actually, and some of us are pushing back on that.
I’m not saying it “was fine actually.” I’m saying if someone is classically racist, they are pushed out of polite society in a way that wouldn’t be the case if they had larger moral failings. See for example Michal Richards v. Mike Tyson. One said “nigger” and was pushed out of polite society. The other is celebrated whilst being a rapist. I think we have our priorities mixed up.
Fair.
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