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Without black people, the success of modern day America would not have been possible
Downthread there is a comment from @RandomRanger where he talks about how high income blacks are still just as criminal as low income whites, using this to argue that we shouldn't treat poor people of all races the same and that the negative effects of the black population today are so bad that putting them in the USA leads to social dysfunction as bad as that in modern day Russia.
It's quite heavily implied that blacks are a problem and their presence leads to a worse USA compared to a hypothetical counterfactual where they weren't there. I don't think this is quite right, I actually think an even stronger argument can be made for the exact opposite belief, namely that it is a direct consequence of having so many blacks that the USA is as advanced and developed as it is today and that a USA which never had them would be one where everyone (including whites) was much poorer today.
The argument itself is simple. Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK. This comparative lack of "democratic socialism" and a much lighter touch of the government on private enterprise has paid off in spades for the US which has gone from being only slightly more prosperous than the UK/France/Germany etc. to being significantly more so over the last few decades.
One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy, which consequently lead to it becoming significantly richer per capita as the virtuous cycle paid off. My answer is simple: the US had too many black people for this sort of redistribution to be palatable to the ruling white classes. Hence the US escaped the economic havoc and destruction (compared to the counterfactual) such policies lead to in the long term and was able to grow and expand unshackled which eventually lead to everyone's living standards improving massively. Indeed as the tastes of the ruling class have changed and become more accepting of the sorts of behaviours displayed by low class black Americans so too have we heard louder and louder calls to redirect more and more money to the poor from those who might do something useful with it.
By now it's very well established empirically (just look at Europe) that when white people as a class get governmental power and there aren't too many lower class people around who have a very dissimilar modus vivendi that your average high status white would find disagreeable to fund they introduce "democratic socialism" and start taxing people/companies/transactions (discouraging innovation and hard work) and use the money to set up a welfare state (discouraging innovation and hard work). This predictably leads to less innovation and growth, which leads to large scale economic welfare loss for the population as a whole. The final result of this is that everyone ends up poorer and worse off, little different from the purported negative impact blacks have of the population as a whole.
Just like how blacks (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their elevated crime rate etc. wherever they are, whites (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their very high propensity to introduce "democratic socialism" wherever they are. Now of course there are lots of whites that don't think this way and are honest to goodness capitalists, but equally lots of blacks never steal or otherwise commit crimes. Just like the existance of such blacks doesn't mean blacks as a class don't cause large scale social damage through elevated crime incidences, the existance of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage through promoting bad economic policy.
Indeed because economic growth is contagious and spreads its boons all over the world, it's not just Americans who would be worse off if there were no blacks and consequently American whites had fallen to their instinctive impulses of taxing the productive to give to the unproductive. A lot of the high living standards around Europe and the rest of the world are due to techonologies that were developed and matured and brought to market due to substantial efffort from Americans safe in the knowledge that they would stand to personally benefit from its successes. Without this engine of growth and productivity in America it is well possible that the developed world in this alternate universe 2024 would still have living standards no higher than our world managed in the 1960s.
Many white nationalists are perfectly at home with noticing the bad consequences of black people as a class on the sum economic welfare of the USA. However they fail to notice the more pernicious but potentially even worse consequences of letting white people with their "lets minimise harm, even if it scuttles the economy" approach run rampant over the country like it would have done had there not been a large class of black people 100 years ago the whites were less happy to redistribute money towards.
I've been meaning to compose a small questions Sunday post on this topic but haven't really gotten my thoughts in order on it. But I think it fits here, so I'll try: does concentrating wealth in the "innovators" at the expense of the lower classes to generate wealth on the "a rising tide lifts all boats" theory actually work? My particular concern is that "technology level" is not a scalar; just because a civilization puts more effort towards developing technology doesn't mean they're developing the right technologies. And what are the "right" technologies is always going to vary based on who you ask, and in an unequal society, who you're asking is whoever has the money (relative weighting here; obviously no real society is going to be 100% exactly equal in wealth across its population).
We see this in the pre-Civil-War South where there was no economic incentive to automate labor that could be done by slaves, probably hurting them economically in the long-term. Did/do we have a similar lack of emphasis on labor-saving devices for domestic work because that was seen as the domain of women, or did things like the washing machine and various kitchen tools really get invented more or less as early as they reasonably could have? Another angle on this is the general tendency of tech companies to make their products in a way that makes money for VCs, not to be useful to consumers (see "enshittification"). I've seen this proposed as a fully general argument against capitalism: innovations that solve problems are greatly disfavored over innovations that allow for rent-seeking / produce profit.
... as you can see, this isn't a top-level Culture War Roundup post because my thoughts on the matter are not well-organized.
I haven't read it yet, but this is much the argument of Acemoglu's new book "Power and Progress," that it's perfectly possible for technological innovation to not spill over into benefits for normal people.
Before him, the tech history Joel Mokyr argued that the middle ages were more technologically innovative than classical Rome, but of course quality of life was very low.
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That's easily disproven by the widespread adoption of the cotton gin and sawmill.
This is a fascinating question. There were washing machine designs which didn't reduce the amount of work involved to where it is today but were a significant improvement over a washing board in... wait, really, the 1790s(https://infogalactic.com/info/Washing_machine)? Yep, massively labor-saving devices for laundry were first patented in the 1790s and there was an electric version in 1904. But it seems like washing machines caught on about as quickly as people could afford them- infogalactic says 60% by 1940.
Now I want to put a pin in it there, because permanent press fabric(another innovation that greatly reduced women's household work dramatically) wasn't a thing yet, and before it you had to iron everything extensively. And I don't know if anyone here has extensive experience ironing but it's not a quick process and I'm given to understand that before electric irons it took much longer. Of course infogalactic says(https://infogalactic.com/info/Clothes_iron) that the first popular electric iron was introduced in 1938 and became widespread over the course of the 40's and fifties, so we're talking about roughly the same timescale.
Back to the pin, I don't think that to a middle class or richer family(and poorer ones wouldn't have been early adopters of washing machines for obvious reasons) would have avoided buying a washing machine because "eh, the Mrs. stays at home, and I don't care how hard she has to work", but that labour saving devices, if they caught on slower than was reasonable to expect(although it doesn't seem like they did), did so largely because, well, generally high income inequality made servants cheap for anyone who could afford one. And IIRC most middle class families in the era before washing machines hired out their laundry for poor women to take home and bring back cleaned and ironed; that's why washerwomen are such a cliche in older literature. Middle class families had servants at least part time because that's pretty doable when income inequality is extremely high. Poor women obviously worked much more under this system, but, uh, so did their husbands, I think the balance of the evidence suggests that being poor in the past just involved a lot more work.
That points to a different hypothesis, that husbands love their wives and are willing to spend a reasonable portion of the household budget to make their lives easier, but that they prefer to do so in ways which make economic sense.
So, I think what we have here is evidence that income inequality has clear net negatives and people in the past weren't pointlessly evil or oppressive. But we already knew that.
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Even if black presence lead to some opposition to welfare, it is anachronistic now to praise it since blacks have used their influence to promote more redistribution and have gotten a decent % of whites to go along with it, in addition to groups like Jews being supportive.
And then to add to those blacks and that share of whites have supported the party of mass migration and redistribution. We also had black nonwhites migrants who also support more redistribution and quotas.
The leftists who want mass migration for their goals are strategically smarter than a libertarian which believes it would benefit their political goals. Of course, the leftists are also wrong if they want certain societal metrics to improve. But in terms of more % of redistribution, then that is more likely to happen with more diversity. Maybe at best a small amount might lead to situations of limited welfare, but the coalition in favor of the specific diverse groups, did not only push for more goodies for their side, but also for changing the demographics as we have seen.
Plus, a right that tries to appeal to multiracial groups might become less anti welfare. And moreover, in a situation where such programs become entrenched and goverment is accustomed to high spending, who is to say that the eventual evolution of conservative establishment isn't to support more spending but with less racial criteria. Or at worst, to become the left as the Torries have done in Britain.
They are not increasing diversity -- they are increasing demographic groups which promote redistribution, the effect that in current USA it increases diversity is purely coincidental. For countries which already have demographics which promotes redistribution, they don't want to change demographics.
I disagree. Biden outright promotes as a good thing to reduce white %. Racial ethnic animosity is part of it. It is also about the left winning politically.
It is true that the goal isn't diversity per se. It is about groups that are desirable vs undesirable group. If a place is say 100% black, there wouldn't be calls to make it more white, for example.
I'm sorry, I don't get the part on which we disagree, I do agree with this your comment.
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Depends on what you mean by it. If you consider homicide ratios, US areas with Black population are much, much worse than modern Russia and similar to impoverished, hungry Russia in 1990ths.
Strong wellfare state is relatively recent phenomenon. And USA was already rich compared to Europe in mid-19 th century, almost certainly even before that.
I would agree on the point, thought, that many white nationalists would want to build "socialism for whites only" and make ruinous decisions regarding economy, and, not mentioned in your post, ignore dysgenics in white community.
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Why do you assume the US would have similar politics to European powers?
Everywhere where whites are a large enough contingent and wield power and there is no smaller group they really dislike ends up with these sorts of politics. Canada is just north of you guys and has a large welfare state. Aus and NZ aren't that different either.
Of course, Canada”s elite were quite famously loyalist who hated the American experiment.
Is your contention that all white people are the same?
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Canada has a much larger native population than the USA, about 5% of the total population now, who have similar life outcomes to america's blacks. They also receive a huge amount of bespoke welfare. So I think that's some evidence against your theory.
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I think this can be better explained by the Constitution, which heavily values individual rights, specially property rights . America has always been an ownership society first, not a redistributive one or egalitarian one, and even to this day despite wokeness, such differences persist between the US and Western Europe . Also, white rulers in Europe are perfectly fine with high taxes and redistribution to help migrants even if the money is wasted.
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Black people of course played an important part in America's success. But leaving that aside, the rest of your post assumes without making an argument that welfare and redistribution has a strong, negative impact on growth and innovation, which is far from clear cut. America has been richer than Europe for a while, but significant divergence is pretty recent and didn't happen at the height of European statism / redistribution, but rather in the past few decades, a period during which many European countries passed (some extent of) liberal reforms and America correspondingly increased its own welfare state and involvement in the economy. Likewise, highly redistributionist countries like the Scandinavian nations still top charts for most innovative in the world, have robust growth, etc.
It we're going to compare small, high-iq, high trust populations, if silicon valley, seattle, or nyc were its own country, it would surpass it.
Notably these are the highest tax areas in the United States. My point is redistribution has a pretty questionable impact on innovation and growth.
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The US does have a Europe level welfare state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending
We just choose to fund this through deficit spending, but that's how Americans pay for everything, both individually and collectively.
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Based on my very layman understanding of the relevant research, this is entirely plausible.
And many more I don’t bother to quote now.
Increased ethnic diversity is ruinous for popular support of redistributive social programs.
I'd say the point of your post is a reasonable extrapolation from relevant recent publications.
I really think the key here is cultural diversity rather than racial/ethnic (though of course the two correlate strongly).
If we imagine Protestants and Catholics, or assistance going to the Irish or Italians (yes, different ethnicity, but still pretty white), or French and Spaniards, or squares and potheads, or broad-brush USA history and "approved work ethic" Jesús-loving Asians, I think only the last group is gonna get the government cheese.
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Blacks have nothing to do with avoiding the perils of 'social democracy'. It was Anglos who refined and upheld the ideas of limited government and laissez faire faire economics. That's why Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK and the US did very well, even without diversity. The US is simply the best endowed with natural resources - of course a country the size of Europe is going to do well, given centuries to build up in peace. They had enormous amounts of farmland, coal, oil, two ocean access, great river networks and no strong enemies in their entire hemisphere - an absurdly good base for a country. And then there's demographics: majority-black countries do poorly. Countries like Brazil that got even more diversity than the US are mediocre at best. All the richest and strongest countries in the world stem from European or East Asian roots, including America.
The obvious conclusion is 'Europeans and East Asians are the best at running civilizations' not 'a certain proportion of blacks make the country more functional by constantly stressing its economic-political immune system'. Especially when there's huge evidence to the contrary for the second theory! One of America's most prestigious institutions just fired a black president for plagiarism - the harm to meritocracy is clearly severe. Enormous amounts of welfare and affirmative action go into propping up a dysfunctional group, lest they launch massive riots like in 2020. The cores of American cities are blighted and too dangerous for useful work, Americans don't feel comfortable taking public transport (which is normal in countries with less diversity). If America had no blacks, it would be a stronger, richer country.
Just look at the US right now - there is no shortage of redistribution! There's a huge amount of redistribution of both wealth and status flowing to blacks. Consider the discussion about 'reparations' or how Trump of all people promoted this half-trillion dollar platinum plan to give blacks more, better jobs and businesses. The thesis that 'blacks prevent redistribution' is clearly wrong.
And if you want to blame whites for this admittedly significant problem, India does just as badly if not worse. It's absolutely mired in ethnic spoils politics, as self-made-human has pointed out in the past. You can't say "the existence of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage" when whites have made the strongest and most functional civilizations in all history. Maybe if you were Chinese, you could get away with it, though I'd point out that China has its fair share of social problems and can at best be considered a peer of the Western, European world. China runs rings around India in all aspects of competence - manufacturing, development, military strength, safety, research, quality of life and so on.
Whites invented capitalism and industrialism. The Amsterdam stock exchange is the oldest in the world. Complaining that whites aren't pro-capitalist enough is ridiculous.
Also worth noting that the US had a national minimum wage long before many countries in Europe (e.g. the UK or Germany) and some European countries (I think Sweden and Denmark?) don't have national minimum wages.
The US beats Western Europe in many aspects of regulation, which is partly why the US economy does better, but there are exceptions.
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I'm not sure I buy this line of thinking.
The argument is that less distribution of resources (aka high wealth gaps) leads to a more productive society, yet if you look at the countries with the greatest gini coefficients there's a large overlap/correlation with the poorest countries and the countries with the largest wealth gaps.
There is also an argument to be made that slavery actually hampered the economic growth of the South. It may have made a few individuals very wealthy, but the reliance on slave labor in agricultural production led to a slower growth in industry and the development of cities. There is also a dispute that farms with slaves outproduced cotton relative to if those regions did not have slaves. So the economic condition of the South may have been better off if there was no slavery (and thus much less blacks).
Also, the USA's economic strength relative to Europe was already well ahead by the late 1800s, fueled by America's abundant natural resources, the development of railroads, increases in population and industry, and the development of new patents and technologies. Two world wars devastated Europe while the United States was left largely alone, putting the USA in a prime position to become even more dominant on the world stage.
Many modern technologies such as computers and nuclear power were developed/accelerated during the United State's rivalry with the Soviet Union. The space arms race during the late 1950s accelerated the growth of Silicon Valley. When the Soviet Union got an early lead in the space race with Sputnik, President Eisenhower created both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA would fund nearly 70% of computer technology research in the US in the early 1960s. NASA had huge demands for integrated circuits, which led to the explosion and growth of Silicon Valley. ARPANET was also developed as a way to mitigate the threats of Nuclear war by allowing a nationwide communications network, which would eventually lead to the creation of the Internet. In other words, the technologies that enabled the United States to greatly surpass its European counterparts were developed and created in response to the Soviet Union and had nothing to do with the fact that there were some black people in the United States.
In terms of attitudes against redistribution hampered by the existence of a black population, what was stopping them from making a system of welfare just for whites? The more likely answer is that America's culture of individualism played a bigger role in slowing the growth of the welfare state relative to their European counterparts rather than racist attitudes against specific groups of people. I'd also like to point out that the richest cities and states in the United States also tend to have the greatest amount of welfare. Yes, you could argue that they would be even richer without the welfare, or that the welfare came after economic growth, but GDP per capita continues to grow in the US even with the vast expansion of welfare programs, while Europe has seen a stagnation since the early 2008s.
Here are some more likely explanations for the growing wealth differences between Europe and the United States. Americans also work more hours on average compared to Europeans (US: 1811 hours, France: 1511 hours, Germany 1341 hours per year). Furthermore, Americans are more entrepreneurial compared to Europeans. Here is a Gallup poll showing the difference in attitudes. A greater percentage of Americans start their own businesses, and an even greater proportion of Americans build billion dollar businesses compared to Europeans.
Maybe attitudes on race might play a factor, but it's insignificant compared to other factors.
This is very, very false equivalence. Wealth gaps are product of both policies and qualities of population. If you add low IQ permanent underclass to a country, keeping its economic policies same, then GDP per capita does down and Gini up. If everyone has same ability, then very intense competition doesn't create major difference in wealth. It's competition, not wealth gaps per se, creates economic growth.
I dont see strong correlation of what you claim on 2d plot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-vs-gdp-per-capita-pip Very low GINI index doesn't help Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia grow economically. It's just a reflection that these countries quite homogenous in regard to IQ.
Also obesity and number of HIV+ people in US continues to grow. Probably obesity is not harmful and even good for economic growth.
I'm not claiming this, this was my summary of BurdensomeCount's argument. If it's an uncharitable summary of his view then fair enough but he literally said "Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK." A distribution of resources would lower the wealth gap.
Also, I don't see any reason to believe the bell curve of IQ distribution has significant differences between countries. The only statistics I've ever seen was on median/average IQs by country/race, not on the IQ distributions in each country. If you have any studies on this I'd be interested in seeing it, as I could not find anything. Regardless, there are literally 0 countries in the world where everyone has the same or similar amounts of ability. I don't see any reason to believe that Ukraine, Belarus, or Armenia is quite homogenous in regards to IQ. If you look at any IQ bell curve charts on race, you'll see that there is a common bell curve pattern. The best example of one bell curve being thinner or flatter on the tails is in regards to gender (women being more clustered around the mean) but even that gender difference still has gaps between the smartest and dumbest. You're claiming the bell curve of IQ in a place like Ukraine is extremely tight around the median but I see no evidence for it.
That's a logarithmic scale on the X-axis, most of the countries with a high Gini coefficient are quite poor. You can see the richer countries are clustered to the bottom right with the United States being the exception. I'll admit I didn't do a great analysis writing from my bed late at night and only spot-checked the map chart in my link, which showed that the countries with the largest Gini coefficients were mostly in Africa/South America which are poorer 2nd/3rd world countries. I took the data from your link and organized it by the most recent data for each country sorted by highest to lowest Gini coefficients (which you can see in the table below) and you can see the years vary, so doing any actual statistically valid analysis on this is quite difficult. A quick correlation on this data shows -0.36 which admittedly is a weak correlation, but this is by weighting each country equally regardless of population, and this is a univariate analysis which is not a good analysis for something as complex as this topic. As I pointed out earlier the dates aren't even the same, ranging from 1992 to 2021.
Anyway, I'm not making any claims in terms of the impact inequality has on economic growth as a whole, I'm providing some counter-evidence to BurdensomeCount's claim, which is that the lack of a redistributive welfare state leads to economic prosperity. I doubt any of the top 20 (or even top 50 except the United States) in the table below have a strong welfare system, yet these countries are not economic powerhouses. My rebuttal of BurdensomeCount's argument does not mean I believe a low Gini coefficient leads to economic growth. It should be clear from my points further down in my previous post that I believe there are other factors other than inequality that better explain economic growth and development.
In retrospect using the Gini coefficient alone is not a good analysis as it doesn't reveal much about welfare, and you'd want to look at changes in GDP per capita over time, but at this point to properly do a statistical analysis is a lot of effort for what is a rebuttal of an argument which in of itself doesn't even have statistical backing. I still think my general point here stands, which is that BurdensomeCount's argument is wrong.
What are you trying to say here? My point is that wealth redistribution is not a major factor in the economic growth of the United States compared to Europe and I'm not sure what your statement here either refutes or adds to the discussion.
If you actually believe obesity is good for economic growth then I'm genuinely curious as to why you think so.
Edit: Reworded my last point to be less antagonistic, I just assumed you were being sarcastic but I realized I don't know if that's true.
Table of Gini Coefficient Data
/images/17044029569390996.webp
This is correct, but I do not think BurdensomeCount's thinks redistributive welfare state and gini index are interchangeable (I don't). This is my main objection.
There are lots of countries with large percent of GDP in wellfare system having very high Gini index regardless.
adding individual bell curves with averages far apart does not look like bell curve.
Fair enough. But see my point on the correlation between welfare spending and Gini below.
I have organized and sorted the data for you in my previous post, can you pick out a few countries (other than the US) that are high on the list and has a large percentage of GDP in welfare system?
I've also tried to add some stats on welfare spending, there isn't much, so I put togther a new table below using what sources I could find. Newly added data in new columns is from here: https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm
If the country is missing that means there was no data on the percentage of GDP spent on public spending.
The correlation between Gini and % spending is -0.61, the correlation between % spending and GDP per capita is 0.36. Again, the same caveats as the previous analysis, except this time we also don't have much data on the highest gini coefficient countries so any analysis here shouldn't be used for any serious argument, but we now see a medium/strong negative correlation between public spending and gini coefficient. I mean is that such a surprise? If you don't like the use of gini coefficient then look at the correlation between GDP per capita and welfare spending and you see a small positive correlation. You could correctly point out that correlation != causation and the more likely explanation is that richer countries distribute after getting their wealth (to do a more appropriate analysis on this we would have to look at changes in GDP per capita over time) but my point is that welfare distribution is not a major factor in economic growth/development and there are more likely answers.
The populations are likely weighed heavily in one race or the other, not like those populations have equal distributions, and again this reveals very little about the tail end of the IQ distributions which is more important when we consider your argument on large gaps in ability leading to higher wealth gaps. Do any of the countries below have significant amounts of populations with differing means of IQ to properly explain the inequality outcome? I'm not saying your argument has no value, if we were looking at specific countries such as the United States there's definitely some merit, but as a general trend across all the countries, I don't think IQ gaps are the main or primary explanation for the higher Gini coefficient in these countries.
List of countries with high Gini index: Namibia Zambia Central African Republic Eswatini Colombia Mozambique Botswana Belize Angola Saint Lucia Zimbabwe
That is such an arbitrary cutoff that conveniently cuts off all the high gini coefficient countries, don't do this.
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obese people have slightly shorter life expectancy compared to non-obese ppl but spend more on food and other services . Govt. spending on obese ppl good for healthcare sector but makes society worse and is misallocation of resources.
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The timing of this narrative isn't correct. By 1950, the United States was already much richer than Europe. Furthermore, the United States does have a massive redistributist state across multiple levels of governments. I don't think your premises are even in the ballpark of correct analysis.
Bombed to rubble Europe was presumably poorer than recent WW2 victor America in 1950.
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There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
Right, my point isn't that Europe is catching up, it's that it was already behind before either side of the pond had much welfare spending. We can even see that going back another 50 years. The United States has been more productive than Europe for a long time, shows no signs of that changing, and doesn't require welfare spending as a determinant to explain it.
And sure, the spending isn't as bad as it is in France, but it is comparable to Switzerland, Ireland, and Norway. Also of note is that in actual dollars rather than percentage of GDP, the United States is spending just as much on transfer programs, it simply has a larger economy. The United States shovels piles of free housing, medicine, food, and cash at its poor. In any case, the deviation between American and European productivity started way before this became a problem.
There were reasons for the US to be ahead back then that no longer apply, though. The two World Wars. The greater importance of land and natural resources to GDP back then. The US having a large internal free trade zone.
Currently the US operates with a pretty significant human capital disadvantage from the high black and indigenous population.
There's also a straightforward theoretical explanation for high taxation and welfare spending to reduce GDP level path: Diversion of resources away from investment and towards consumption, plus deadweight loss from high taxes. Why knock yourself out if it's only going to make a small difference in after-tax pay?
I'm not sure it's true that the US spends as much on welfare as Western Europe. I've looked into this before, and IIRC several of those countries spend more. But even if it does, this doesn't contradict the claim that the US is richer because it spends a smaller percentage of GDP on subsidizing consumption.
Consider that if I consistently spend 50% of my income on consumption and invest the rest, eventually I will end up spending more on consumption than my coworker who has the same salary and consistently spends 90% and saves 10%, precisely because limiting my consumption spending to a smaller share of my income has enabled my income to grow faster.
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Also, there have been times when the Western European GDP-per-capita has been closer to US and times when it has been farther away, with the current day having the greatest gap during, at least, the postwar times, starting from 2008, even though the welfare state has at least not gone through extensive further development during that time (considering the ACA and the Biden admin projects, the US has probably been more active in welfare state development than Europe as a whole, during this period).
I think the argument is that the welfare state's consequences are more apparent in the long run, as you get e.g. intergenerational welfare dependency, people not saving enough for their own retirement, people choosing safe careers rather than taking risks (and getting taxed heavily on the rewards), people not having kids because they trust in the state to look after them in their retirement etc.
True, the US has some of these incentives, but arguably not to the same degree as Western Europe.
There's also the argument that the rising dependency ratio with an ageing population is when the welfare state really becomes a drag, and the developed world is facing a rising dependeyc ratio due to demographics. Most welfare states were created for completely different population structures. That's why, despite rising taxes, cuts to services, and reforms, the fiscal outlook in most of Western Europe is still bleak: no matter how you walk, it's going to be uncomfortable to walk in shoes that are too small.
I don't know exactly how I'd calculate it, but I'm curious what fraction of increasing worker productivity (or perhaps GDP) is effectively getting thrown at balancing (for now) the changing costs of the welfare state.
People talk a lot about what fraction of wealth generated goes to workers, but I've never seen what fraction over time goes to recipients of the welfare state (pensioners, disability, housing assistance, Medicare/Medicaid).
The data is there to be combined, I think, because data on levels of transfers/taxes is available due to this debate: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/measuring-income-inequality-a-primer-on-the-debate/
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The black population of the Union states was negligible in the late 1800s, but it was there that the U.S.'s great agricultural and industrial innovations were born and took root. The "Great Migration" of southern agricultural black laborers north to the booming industrial cities occurred after the great gilded age of American lassiez-faire capitalism, and well into the urban progressive movement (which itself smoothly transitioned, after flirtations with fascism and communism, into the FDR welfarist coalition that dominated the mid-20th century, and whose institutional bones we're still building).
This is a very doubtful proposition. The U.S. is several times larger than the other major industrial powers in the world (Germany, UK, France, Japan), significantly more diversified in resources, and - these are the big doozy - didn't get bombed flat or invaded during WWII, and didn't lose an entire generation of elite young men in WWI. Instead, WWI put America in the position of having the allies mortgage their empires to us in exchange for food, war materiel, and ultimately intervention (WWI debts to the US weren't fully cleared in the UK until I think 2003?), and then the physical destruction of Eurasia in WWII put us in a massive comparative industrial advantage.
We tried to. It led to the stagnation of the 70's and early 80's. We then elected Reagan (as the Brits elected Thatcher) to try and shake the system loose, to varying degrees of success.
And then also sucking up all the cognitive capital from the rest of world, which contributed to the creation of the tech and financial industries.
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You will find very few places in the world that don't follow this "empirically established model" despite having negligible white populations; in fact, this sort of thing is ubiquitous in the third world, just with much worse outcomes. Ghana cratered its own economy by abandoning the successful model left to them by the British and transitioning to a centrally-controlled, price-fixing regime set up in the name of social justice and wealth distribution; that decision was made by third-worldist hero Kwame Nkrumah, and persisted for decades until it was partially abolished by the coincidentally half-white Jerry Rawlings. India has a welfare state and affirmative action system that no Western state can match for its all-consuming presence in the lives of ordinary people. No one on Earth loves redistributionist politics more than black and brown people do. Europe is certainly more socialist than America, but relative to the rest of the world, not so much.
Affirmative Action? Sure, India Numba Wan 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳
Welfare? I don't really see that being the case. Both the quality and breadth of amenities available to many Western welfare states I can name, such as the UK, utterly dwarfs the kind of coverage an Indian can expect.
We have free public healthcare. It is not terrible, it manages to provide maybe 50% the care, if not the comfort, of say, the NHS. Medicine, in both senses of the word, has strong power laws. The easy and cheap (free) availability of say, the WHO's top 100 list of essential medications means maybe 90% of patients presenting with a disease can get curative treatment.
But healthcare isn't the only part of a welfare state. There's housing, and India doesn't have anything like free/extremely subsidized public housing, along the lines of council flats and so on.
Food? Well, if you really like rice and lentils. You might even stave off most of the obvious nutritional deficiencies.
The welfare system in India is, of necessity, the bare minimum needed to ensure nobody starves to death or dies without at least one disinterested, overworked and underequipped doctor laying hands on them. Maybe you get cheap electricity and water. Subsidized public transport. Education, and quality at that once you're past high school, IITs and AIIMS (or most government run medical colleges) are far more prestigious than their private, for-profit counterparts.
I can't think of any aspect that makes the welfare state here more all-encompassing, and not just in terms of how much it can offer the average person. Western welfare states almost all offer better and more.
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Counter example: Much of Latin America has had leaders far to the left of what the US has ever had, despite far more diversity.
Looking at IMFs map of government spending as a percent of GDP it is difficult to see a trend. Homogeneous Asian countries are low in government spending. Brazil is high in government spending.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND
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Is this supposed to be a top-level post? If so, I would advise against it, if you're going to make one of those we do expect more effort put into it.
If this was meant to be a comment to the discussion below, then it's fine, but in that case you should delete and repost it.
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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.
Forget it jake it's China Town.
That's been my position for a while now, but I thought I'd test the waters and see if anything had changed. I'm actually slightly heartened by the replies so far, people seem less touchy about specific labels and more interested in discussing object-level stuff than they were during the 'cancel culture' craze a few years ago.
Now, if you can just keep up and admit when progressives are racist...
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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.
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.
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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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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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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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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I really don’t think people in this space grapple with this question, and questions like it, nearly enough.
Many of my complaints about how this “IDW-ish slice” of the Internet discusses racism would be addressed if, after reading someone’s comments about how leftists have used the word “racism” into meaninglessness, I got the impression that they had proactively, introspectively, honestly asked themselves the following questions:
I agree that a lot of left-wing people abuse the term “racism”! But that’s, like, step negative one of an actually introspective conversation. I don’t see many people here actually grapple with “what do I think racism is?”, instead only arguing the negative.
For example, imagine if I did this with something that was more of a sacred cow of these parts — imagine if I argued “right-wing people have abused the term free speech into complete meaninglessness because almost all of them invoke the first amendment in response to private actors criticizing them or banning them from a forum etc”. You can’t really deny that a large number of people actually do this all the time, but this is a terrible comment, right? What I need to do is actually engage with the idea — “what do these people mean when they say free speech? What restrictions do I think should be put on private platforms to honor free speech? What social norms should surround censorship of unpopular statements by private actors?” and so on.
So responding to a right-wing person complaining about free speech with “right-wing people have used this term so loosely I genuinely have no idea what they mean anymore” would be unbelievably lazy. It’s fundamentally my job to understand what they mean, and all my comment shows is that I’ve blatantly refused to do that, and chosen to believe that they mean nothing.
And in terms of my actual statements, this makes me completely indistinguishable from someone who actually doesn’t believe in free speech at all, and would have no objections to the government passing a law to ban spoken racism, doesn’t it?
In the same way, imagine the perspective of someone like me, a person with the opposite view to the prevailing zeitgeist around these parts when it comes to racism. Try to remember that if all you do is make this negative argument (“leftists have abused the term racism so much it’s meaningless now”), I have absolutely no idea if you are someone whose beliefs are closer to “the thing that most young Americans in 1995 would have called racism is in fact bad, but it barely exists and leftists exaggerate it” or whose beliefs are closer to “the thing that most young Americans would have called racism in 1995 is in fact good and more people should do it”, and those are completely different arguments to have. And the process of trying to get to the point where I know which of these you’re actually saying is exhausting and 90% of the time I fail. Many of you I uncharitably suspect of switching between the two whenever it’s convenient for you to do so.
TL;DR: What I really want is for you to be proactive in telling me which you mean, rather than just talking about what you don’t consider to be racism. If this is not racism, what would I consider racism? Did the majority of people who supported segregation do so for racist reasons, or not? And so on.
It's a tar baby. Grappling with it at all is a fool's game. If I won't consider calling someone "racist" a superweapon, why is it so important to know who deserves the label and who doesn't?
There are weapons below superweapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're a murderer isn't a superweapon, it's a normal weapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're gotten an abortion is a superweapon.
Similarly, if people are racist, calling them racist isn't a superweapon. It's a superweapon when you try to apply it to non-racists, but that doesn't mean the original term doesn't have a true and important context.
Calling someone "racist" is a superweapon; it's a superweapon even if it would have happened to be justified under some previous reasonable definition of "racist". As soon as someone who is not aligned with current progressive thought accepts the validity of "racist" being a super-evil thing, it will be used against them; they will find themselves in interminable arguments trying and failing to defend themselves against accusations of "racism" for doing such things as using the term "tar baby". Part of the reason it's a superweapon is that trying to defend yourself against such accusations is in itself considered proof of them.
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This seems like a masked way of saying “that thing you call racism, I don’t consider bad”, but with some strawmanning and the pointless jargon of “super weapon” thrown in.
I didn’t say you must consider racism a “super weapon”. I said I’d like you to tell me whether you think racism in any form exists and whether you think it’s bad.
I think you’ve just said you either think it doesn’t exist or it isn’t bad, but again, I absolutely do not know for sure, and it’s exhausting to try to tease this shit out from people who really seem like they’re trying as hard to conceal it as they can.
If you start posting in a form, you should learn some of the forum's jargon. If you don't, and you encounter some, you should at least not criticize someone else's forum for using jargon that you, a newbie, don't understand, especially when you go on to ignore the point made with the jargon. A superweapon is an accusation which automatically makes the targets out to be in the wrong because of generalizations about a group.
You didn't say he should call it one. He figured out it was one all on his own!
That's a trick question, because the next question will be a gotcha which takes his answer but substitutes racism as you define it for racism as he defines it. If he says that racism is bad, you can then act as though he agrees that some progressive bugaboo that's commonly called racist is bad.
Can you describe some examples of this abuse?
And assuming you do describe them, can you then understand that Nybbler might necome vulnerable to this abuse if he said "sure, racism exists and is bad"?
Guy, I know exactly what the term is being used to mean; that’s precisely why I said it’s pointless jargon. I appreciate the gatekeeping, though. Extremely normal behaviour to unofficially require everyone posting be familiar with the collected works of one specific blogger, even to the point of constantly referencing some of the stuff from a decade ago that he’d probably rather you forgot about. (This last bit is a reference to the “paranoid rant” from way back when, by the way, in case it wasn’t clear.)
Highly good-faith argumentation on display here. Do I get to write fanfic about the various dishonest and hypocritical things you’re going to say to me and then assert my fanfic as indisputable fact, or do only you and nyb get to do that for me?
It makes sense to guard against this sort of tactic even if it's just a possibility. Nobody actually needs to be able to read your mind in order to realize "maybe I shouldn't say something that's vulnerable to tricks". If you personally weren't going to use any such tricks, blame the left-wing abusers you describe, for messing things up for honest people like you.
If you don’t care at all about speaking in good faith, then yes, it does make perfect sense.
So your rules appear to be “many left-wing people are bad because they argue in bad faith, but when I do that, it’s actually still the left’s fault because they made me do it”.
For the millionth time, I have to argue - why don’t they get this excuse? Why isn’t their bad-faith argumentation justified by yours?
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You're about a decade too late for this sort of thing to work.
What it means is that the term "racist" is used to indicate "ultra-bad-person-you-should-hate", that the criteria for "racist" are loose and variable, and that any attempt to pin it down is fruitless; no matter what criteria you can come up with to separate "the real racists who deserve the ultra-bad treatment" from those who don't will immediately be widened by those using the term in bad faith to cover people who shouldn't be.
I’ve been round these parts long enough to know that you wouldn’t have accepted it eight or so years ago either, and were saying much the same thing then.
To put you both on the same page rather than anonymously calling Nybbler out for things he said 8 years ago, you are reddit.com/user/895158, yes?
I have no idea if @papardus is /u/895158, but this sort of call-out serves no purpose but antagonism. There is no requirement that Motte users announce their other Internet identities. Yes, that means even a known troll and troublemaker from reddit would be allowed to post anew here under a new name and be given a fresh slate. (As has, in fact, happened, and in many cases, such people unsurprisingly immediately revert to their previous behavior and get banned.) There are circumstances where you could politely ask someone directly if they are someone you think you recognize from elsewhere, but "I just want to put you on the same page" ain't it.
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Incorrect. I am some other wrongthinker who must be rooted out and destroyed as quickly as possible. (Not nearly as notorious as that one; I only ever posted very occasionally.)
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Eight years is less than a decade, indeed.
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Why would that be absurd? Why do you believe the term is useful at all? Why do you believe that “racism” indicates a real and important phenomenon worth caring about? What if the word was never anything other than a boo light, intentionally devised as a way to pathologize what is actually a totally normal and healthy outlook?
There is nobody on earth who, upon honest reflection, would agree that “Yes, I just hate minorities because they’re ugly and stinky and it’s bad to look different from the way I look.” That is a caricature which exists only in the heads of racial egalitarians and “anti-racists”. In reality, even the least introspective, most unreflective “bigot” has actual specific reasons - even if it’s at the level of anecdotal examples and life experience - to believe that there are important differences between the traits and the history of various groups, and/or that limiting the interpersonal interaction of those groups is optimal. I don’t care if they wouldn’t put it in those high-falutin’ terms. Even if you gave them truth serum and ample opportunity to freely articulate the contents of their own minds, they wouldn’t commit to “just don’t like ‘em, simple as” as an honest reflection of their internal mental state.
Racism isn’t real. Believing in important racial differences is certainly real; I believe it, as do probably a plurality of commenters here. Believing that an optimal society ought to achieve some level of separation/segregation between groups is also real, and is a far more controversial position even in this community; I advocate for the managed and non-coercive separation of black Americans from non-blacks over time, but it’s not because “I just hate the darkies and want them to die”. I have (what I think are) sophisticated reasons for believing what I do; I reasoned myself into this position over time, and did not start from a simple visceral aversion to people who look different from me.
A small number of people today even still believe that some races ought to rule over others, or even that some racial and ethnic groups should be exterminated! I don’t believe that, and I’ve never interacted with anyone who does (I suspect that the vast majority of people who do say these things are simply LARPing or doing a bit) but I don’t deny that such people are real. However, they are still not “racist”. They have actual reasons for believing that the conditions of the world are such that extreme measures genuinely are necessary for the preservation and improvement of mankind.
I could turn this around on you and ask: “Do you own pets? You do? Oh, so you irrationally hate animals? You want them enslaved in your home, rather than free to rule themselves?” And you would rightly respond, “No, I just don’t think humans and animals are precisely equal, and that the natural order of things is for humans to domesticate certain animals and to use them for our benefit, as long as we’re not overly cruel to those animals. I love my cat, but I wouldn’t let him drive a car, or vote in a presidential election.” But if I was absolutely committed to the proposition that speciesism is a useful and important concept, it would be easy for me to distort your beliefs to make them fit into a model that pathologizes them.
This is essentially what I believe that you’re doing with the term “racism”. Let the term go. It was never valuable to begin with. Nobody here cares if you think we’re racist or not. The term has become fully disenchanted. You might as well call us all heretics. Or “enemies of the Emperor of Assyria”. Engage with our ideas on the object level, and stop worrying about whether or not they fall afoul of your made-up boo word.
Well, it would certainly be convenient for you if we'd stop using a "made-up boo word" to describe the beliefs of racists, and I am (to a limited degree) sympathetic to your argument (put forward with more good faith than @The_Nybbler does) that "Racism has become so weaponized as to get my hackles up as soon as I hear it."
However, it looks to me like you basically want to argue for policies and an ideology that would, under any reasonable definition, be considered "racist" - you would just prefer we not use that word, because it now has a negative connotation, and you believe that your policies and ideologies are actually good and reasonable and therefore should not be besmirched with negative connotations. It reminds me of David Duke, back in the day, who did the same dance you and nybbler do, but less elaborately (and less convincingly, because you could practically see the wink and the smirk when he did it): "I'm not a racist, I'm a racialist. I don't hate black people, I just love white people!"
Yes, of course you're correct that hardly anyone hates other races because "they're ugly and stinky" or "just because." The most unreflective might simply hate them because they've always been taught to hate them, or because they have had mostly negative interactions with them. The more reflective will advance more sophisticated arguments like you do about IQ and HBD and how we should agree to an amicable separation so they can peacefully flourish in their own ethnostate and reach their full potential yadda yadda.
But I think insisting that "We should accept the reality that black people are dumber and more criminal and we should bring back segregation, but don't call that racism, because that's made up" is a nonsense argument and you're engaging in it for purely rhetorical reasons. Racism clearly does exist; we're just disagreeing over whether or not it's a bad thing. Would you argue that the many black people who hate white people are not racists? Are @BurdensomeCount's triumphalist screeds about how white people deserve to be made to lick the boots of his folk not racist?
This is precisely what I am disputing! I have to believe that you are not actually this dim and mendacious. My entire point is that it is not in fact reasonable to consider my ideas “racist”. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s reasonable! You’re simply appealing nakedly to consensus and pretending like you’ve made an argument.
No, it doesn’t!
Yes! Obviously, yes! I am explicitly saying that these people are not racist. I have never said anything otherwise. Have you ever once seen me complain about “anti-white racism” or “reverse racism” or anything like that? No! They are anti-white, and I dislike them for that reason. Their beliefs are bad for my people, which is why I oppose them. But in many cases they are based on completely sensible, well-reasoned motivations. I don’t oppose them because they’re “racist” in some abstract sense of “it’s bad to prefer one group over another and to advocate in favor of that group, even when such advocacy negatively impacts another group” or “it’s bad not to like people because of their group identity”. It’s perfectly fine to do either! I just don’t want it done against my group, because that would be bad for my group. What about this is difficult for you to understand? Why do you keep acting like you’ve exposed some secret ulterior motive of mine?
Again, as both I and @SecureSignals noted, your argument here is structurally identical to an accusation of heresy. “Well, clearly you recognize that God is real, and the Bible is true - you just hate them!” And we are responding with “No, actually we reject your whole frame.” Again, just because a lot of people believe something does not mean it’s reasonable, or that people who reject it are doing so dishonestly.
What do you think I mean when I use the word racist? What do you think most people mean?
So your argument is "Racism is completely sensible and well-reasoned, so please don't use that word because it's a boo-word."
Exactly. This is the point you are missing. I understand that you are arguing that beliefs that are conventionally called "racist" are actually perfectly fine and reasonable beliefs. Go ahead and argue that.
I reject your objection to the word itself, not because I disagree with your ideology, but because I refuse to stop using a word just because you would prefer it not be used because it has negative associations. If I say your beliefs are racist, and you feel like that's a boo-word and I'm saying you're just like the KKK (which I am not btw), you are entitled to point out how your beliefs are different from the KKK's.But you are not entitled to tell me "Yes, I believe in racial discrimination and segregation, but don't call that racism because racism doesn't exist." You would like us to use some more politic, less pejorative word, but "racist," whether you like it or not, is an actual word that describes actual beliefs. The dispute is not over whether those beliefs exist, but what we should think about them.
Absolutely not. It's more akin to you saying "I do not believe in God and I think religion is fake and gay - but don't call me an atheist, that's a boo-word."
Let’s take a step back and check the extent to which you and I actually disagree.
Do you believe that there is such a thing as a slur? By this, I mean a word which is inherently designed to contain within it the implication that the thing being indicated is bad? And such that there would be no way to use the word in a value-neutral way?
Take the word “faggot”, for example. If I call a gay man - let’s call him Travis - a faggot and he protests by asking me to stop using that word, I can defend my usage of it in two ways. One of those ways - riffing, perhaps, off of the famous Chris Rock bit, is, “I’m not calling you a faggot because you fuck guys. I’m calling you a faggot because you’re mincing all over the place, acting all effeminate, and a man shouldn’t act like that. A straight guy can be a faggot too, if he acts faggy. Nothing specifically gay about it.” But of course, Travis is well aware of the history of this word, and that it was always designed and intended to target gay men, and simultaneously to conglomerate a number of behaviors commonly associated with specifically gay men and to anathematize those behaviors. So Travis understands that I am either mistaken or (more probably) lying.
The second way I can defend my usage of the word is to say, “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be a faggot! Being faggy is a totally normal and reasonable thing for a person to be.” Travis would likely respond, entirely reasonably, “Then why didn’t you use a word that doesn’t carry an insulting connotation? Why not call me, I don’t know, a queen? It’s not something everyone likes to be called, but at least it’s not a word that someone has only ever used to insult me.” If I were to reply, “No, I’m going to continue to say faggot. Everyone knows what it means, and yes, the vast majority of people who use it and/or have ever used it meant it insultingly. But I don’t think it is, so I’ll keep using it.” Do you think Travis would believe that I am being fully up-front with him?
By tabooing the word “faggot” and forcing me to describe him in a more value-neutral way, or at least to disaggregate the various assumptions contained within the word, Travis can at least get me to try and explicitly demonstrate that the various aspects of a supposed “faggot” are, independently, things worth caring about or drawing attention to. I would also need to demonstrate that such aspects do, in fact, typically come together in a particular package, and that the person whom I’m currently calling a faggot possesses all of those aspects.
What I’m saying is that “racist” has always been a slur. That it was coined by someone who intended it to refer to a cluster of things he thought were bad, and that it was popularized exclusively by people who all agreed that being racist was a bad thing. And that it is impossible to use in a value-neutral way due to its history. With which parts of this do you disagree?
Doesn't all of this apply to words like "wrong", "selfish", or "boring" as well? Sometimes people create words to refer to things that they think other people shouldn't do. Not all of those are slurs.
I continue to believe that the word "racist" is perhaps the best one-word description for the policies you've said you'd like to pursue. You see racial divisions between people as extremely important and would like to completely restructure society along its lines; I consider the extent to which you care about this, the extent to which you think racial division is important, to be extremely irrational - so irrational that the only way I can really try to understand it, though I would keep this to myself normally, is to start postulating things like trauma, depression, a ridiculously sheltered upbringing, and so on, to explain to myself how someone can get to where it seems like you are. I don't say those things as insults, I'm just trying to really make it clear that "that is racist" to me is not "you hate black people", it's kind of a statement in the epistemic universe of "you are depressed"; it's my own observation that you probably have a certain bias.
Setting the prescriptive stuff aside, at least descriptively, basically every American, including almost every attendee in the crowd at CPAC, would agree that the policies you're calling for can be accurately called "racist". The crowd at CPAC would immediately, reflexively jump to your defence once they saw that I was a left-wing person calling someone racist, but if you honestly explained your beliefs in front of the crowd in the way that you did above, there would be much clearing of throats, embarrassed murmurs, and rapid changing of subjects coming from the crowd.
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I agree that racist has inherently negative connotations for historical reasons. ("Racists" in the past wouldn't have used the word to describe themselves because it was essentially a universal belief. Segregationists in the 50s did not call themselves "racists" but they probably would not have shied away from the label either.) I do not agree it is a "slur." You compared it to calling someone a "faggot," but I think it would be more comparable to calling someone a "homosexual." A term that is both descriptive and at one time had very strong negative connotations, and still does with some people. If I call someone a homosexual because he's mincing around acting effeminate, it would still reasonably be understood as an insult. But if I describe people who engage in same-sex relations as "homosexuals" and am told that I shouldn't use that word because it's a slur, I'm going to ask them who decided that.
You advocate racial discrimination and segregation as reasonable and desirable, and you would like to taboo the word "racist" because to most people, "racist" has very negative connotations. I can understand why you would like to persuade people to use words without that baggage to describe your beliefs, but that does not mean anyone should feel obligated to accommodate you. Even here on the Motte, if someone just dismissed you with "Wow, you are such a racist," they would likely get modded, but describing your beliefs as "racist" is accurate. You may object to it, just as there are in fact gay people who now object to "homosexuals." Maybe you will be as successful as the "queer" community is at pushing for linguistic shifts. Or maybe you can rehabilitate the word "racist." But you are not the sole determiner of what a word means and how it is used, and just because it would suit your agenda to taboo the word or claim it "isn't a real thing" doesn't mean it does not, in fact, describe a real thing.
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As long as you cop to the fact that your beef is not fundamentally with some recent progressive redefinition of the word “racism”, but with the entire idea that racism, including old-school “I don’t trust the blacks” racism, is actually bad, which it seems to me like you have, then I respect your honesty but will do everything I can to prevent people who think like you from ever (re-)gaining political power.
Basically, I’m specifically annoyed by people who masquerade as your classic anti-woke Classical Liberals but who actually have white-nationalist sympathies, or who are mindkilled enough about politics that they don’t even know or care themselves what their beliefs are as long as they’re on the other side as the wokes, and I don’t think you’re masquerading or hiding anything.
I think many of your beliefs are wrong on the object level about human societies and psychology, I think your beliefs are still unbelievably unpopular in normie right-wing circles, and I hope to God they don’t gain traction there.
Edit:
I completely agree with you here, except that I actually think many left-wing anti-racists understand well that this is not how racism works. To me, it’s precisely the right-wing anti-woke contingent who don’t understand that people who actually supported segregation had a more complex internal narrative than “minorities are bad and I don’t like them”. To me, I’m the last person on this forum who needs to be told this (in fact, I just said it myself over the course of many more words, but in service of an argument whose conclusion was in the opposite political direction).
My impression is that the dance seems to be: right-wing Classical Liberals and I think that old-school pro-segregation racism is wrong, and you don’t. You and I think that old-school racism (though you wouldn’t call it that) was always more complex than people who deep-down believed “I just don’t like the minorities”, and right-wing classical liberals think “no, the idea of racism actually was that simple, and described most supporters of this ideology, until the progressives changed the definition and now it’s meaningless”. You and right-wing classical liberals oppose describing those “more complex reasons”, if indeed they do exist, as “racism”, while I think that the reasons are at once more complex than “I don’t like the blacks”, but will also call them “racist” (though I’m not a fan of the one-word description and will explain over and over again with many many words that the way I am using the word “racism” allows for more complex reasons - it’s not the conscious reasons that word is pointing at when I say it).
I have no evidence to support me, but I don't think that's constrained to right-wing anti-woke—I think that's pretty conventionally usual. (Consider how much people are taught that it was due to prejudice?)
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I think a good comparison is the word heretic. Imagine you are an atheist and a puritan accuses you of being a heretic. Do you say "yes, you are right I am indeed a heretic." Only if you are trying to be provocative, but really you would just dismiss the entire frame of that question. No, I'm not going to admit to you that I am a heretic, I'm not going to accept your frame of the world by embracing that label, I dismiss the label altogether.
I don't have to imagine I'm an atheist, I am, and I'd happily confirm that I'm a heretic relative to any particular religion's dogma that defines me as such. I know that I meet that definition and don't have any problem with the word because it is has no moral worth to me.
The way that example is different from the one we're talking about here is that the people who meet a standard definition of racism don't want to be called racists. You imagine an atheist wouldn't want to be called a heretic, but why should we care? We've actively rejected that frame, so we're not embarrassed about being accurately labeled.
Whereas most racists have not actually rejected the social frame that gives rise to definitions and accusations of racism. They still want to be an upstanding member of that society, and they still want to think of themselves as morally correct within that society. So they want that society to drop it's own labels and definitions in order to accommodate them.
That's very brave of you, you could write "I am le heretic!" all day long and get updoots on Reddit.
If someone though is sincerely accusing you of being an infidel or heretic and you confirm their accusation you are accepting their frame of reference.
When you say you will "happily confirm you are a heretic" it's a "what are you going to do about it?" play. But if you actually lived in a society where that accusation had weight and social consequences, and you opposed the conventional wisdom for what entailed heresy, you would not accept that label for yourself or use it to describe your beliefs.
In a society where it’s illegal to be a heretic, one has to hide one’s atheism to avoid prosecution and the points here about wordplay are irrelevant.
If I’m an atheist in say Iran, then the label is not the problem, it’s that my deconversion from Islam is a tad illegal.
Even in the US the label of apostate or heretic doesn’t matter in terms of “accepting their frame of reference”; what mattered is how my family/friends/society responded to my deconversion. It’s the object level, not the label.
Similarly, if say one has clear racial animosity, many people can find that abhorrent without ever needing to invoke the word “racism.” That term has been abused, but the 1995 version was much less so.
The hard bit is that certain facts about reality do seem to be “racist” or “sexist” and the toxicity of these labels keeps polite society from understanding reality in certain policy areas, inconveniently. That doesn’t make it better for those who really just dislike a given race or sex and/or want to discriminate against them and want those labels to disappear.
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As a factual statement, a non-believer is an infidel. That's what infidel means. As a factual statement, someone who believes in racial discrimination and segregation is a racist.
You can reject the religion that labels nonbelievers infidels, and you can reject a society that abhors racism, but the words still have meanings that accurately describe a set of beliefs or lack thereof.
Yes, there are social consequences for being a racist, as there were at one time harsher social consequences for being an infidel. I understand why you would like to remove the social consequences for being a racist. That does not, however, change the factual meaning of the word or your beliefs. You and @hoffmeister are trying to argue that "racism doesn't exist," when what you're actually claiming is "racism is good and shouldn't be stigmatized." Those are not the same arguments, and the objection to the word "racist" is one of tactical semantics, because of the negative weight "racism" has today. You would prefer a less freighted term - like, say, "racialist" - but that doesn't mean "racist" is not an accurate label. You might not like someone calling you a racist. I would not like someone flinging "infidel" at me as an insult, especially if it potentially carried more serious consequences. But I cannot honestly say I'm not an "infidel."
Yes, this is my exact point. If I reject a religion that labels me an infidel or heretic, I am not going to accept that label to describe myself or my own beliefs. This is really basic stuff, nobody does this, except for farming upvotes on /r/atheism which falls under the "intentionally provocative" mode of embracing that label only as a power flex.
I reject the religion that frames the entire concept of racism which, by the way, relative to world history is a brand new concept tightly coupled with our own post-WWII civic religion which is exactly what we reject. "Words have meaning", exactly, which is why it is stupid for you to demand that I accept the framing of a religion that I reject by embracing that word to describe myself. Words have meaning, so I refuse to play along with that garbage and humor a religious fanaticism that I oppose.
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Yeah, that's how communication works.
Words have meaning, and have meaning in context. Just because you disagree with an opponent's worldview doesn't mean that words within the context of that worldview stop having discrete and coherent meanings.
There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be a heretic to Christians even if I don't believe in Christianity, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question. There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be (for example) a racist under the utilitarian definition of racism, even if you reject the empirical racism as a politically meaningful concept, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question.
It makes sense that you would want to 'reject the frame' if you think you can evade social sanctions thereby. That's a pretty normal thing to do, especially if you think the social sanctions are unjust.
But my point is,. just acknowledge the fact that by doing so, you are running from the truth and trying to muddy the waters. There's a true matter of fact that you're denying because you think people will react to hearing it badly/unjustly.
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But could you be so blasé about labels like heretic or infidel if they carried with it serious social repression? If you couldn’t get a job, or lost all your friends or contact with your children if people knew you were an infidel, would you still happily accept the label? Racist is a label that still carries those kinds of consequences for those so labeled. Heretic and infidel really don’t outside of heavily religious communities.
Right, that was the point of my last paragraph.
People who meet society's current definition of racist just want society to change its beliefs or norms so that they're not punished. The idea that 'racist' is an incoherent or meaningless category is primarily a rationalization to justify that effort.
Saying that the social sanctions for being racist are too extreme and should be mollified is a real position that can be argued.
Saying that people are using 'the worst argument in the world' or 'labels as superweapons' to apply those sanctions to people who don't actually deserve them under the original purpose and intent of those sanctions is a real position that can be argued.
I don't think 'that word doesn't mean anything because I don't want it to' is a real argument, here. I think it's mostly a rationalization to try to dodge the issue, and society won't accept it.
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Isn't a heretic 'a believer who practices some heresy' -- which lets atheists specifically off the hook on that charge? (and puts Puritans in jeopardy, incidentally)
So the right response would be something about glass houses I suppose.
“Apostate” is what we atheists get.
Still no go:
The term apostasy comes from the Greek word apostasia ("ἀποστασία") meaning "rebellion", "state of apostasy", "abandonment", or "defection". It has been described as "a willful falling away from, or rebellion against, Christianity. Apostasy is the rejection of Christ by one who has been a Christian.
So long as you never did believe, you are in the clear on that one. Although the Papists do feel that fallen Rationalists merit a shout-out, amusingly:
Apostasy a fide, or perfidiæ: Perfidiæ is the complete and voluntary abandonment of the Christian religion, whether the apostate embraces another religion such as Paganism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, etc., or merely makes profession of Naturalism, Rationalism, etc.
Rationalism has a specific technical meaning along the line of "denying the role of faith in holding beliefs".
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An atheist is specifically not a heretic, and in puritan society atheism would in fact be a valid defense against charges of heresy.
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This complaint only makes sense if you think of words as having intrinsic or "correct" meanings. If you instead treat words as just vehicles for conveying ideas, then you could just answer "who in the world could we call a racist, then?" with "nobody, using it to describe people is pointless because it doesn't mean anything". And I think that's a reasonable answer if you're not going around calling people racist. If the word "racist" doesn't have to mean anything, then you can just not use it if you think it wouldn't help people understand the idea you're trying to convey.
No it isn't. It's the speaker's job to convey their idea in an easy-to-understand fashion. If there was an argument on this site where people were conflating the philosophical concept of free speech with the first amendment, then when I make a post in next week's thread about the philosophical concept it's my responsibility to clearly indicate that I'm not talking about the first amendment. If there were posts saying that the concept of "free speech" is incoherent and meaningless, then it's contingent on me to specify what exactly I mean by free speech. If enough people are confused, then it's probably better for me to not use the phrase "free speech" at all, and replace it with something like "the right to not be punished for conveying my opinion about the election".
So to answer your object-level question, you could (and should) directly say that you think "BAP has an unconscious bias against black people, regardless of their individual intelligence or behavior". If you want to know how a poster compares with the average 1995 American, you could ask "Do you think the average American in 1995 would agree with that statement? Do you agree with that statement?". You don't have to specifically use the word "racist", especially when you know it won't help people understand your point.
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You look at what they say and do, and build an argument that regardless of whether they're willing to admit it, they're biased.
Applying negative or positive modifiers to your interactions or judgements of people based not on their individual actions, but on their stated or perceived racial identity.
The statements you listed seem like obvious examples of racism, so your definition seems like a poor one. Why personal animus? Why not impersonal animus? Why rely on animus at all; how you treat people is relative, and if you treat some people better because of their race, that's racism, just as if you treated other people worse because of their race.
Do you honestly think most of the regulars here would disagree with the above in principle? Of the ones who would disagree, do you honestly think they'd claim not to be racist? There's varying degrees of actual WNs here, and seeing them explicitly argue that racism is good, actually is hardly an unknown occurrence.
I don't see why that is supposed to be a bad argument. I can see I disagree with it, since "free speech" was commonly understood to be about much more than the strict text of the First Amendment, but the First Amendment does not, in fact, constrain censorship by private actors in general, right wingers do, in fact, sometimes get sloppy with their arguments and imply it does, and this does, in fact, muddy the waters of the conversation. It is not unreasonable to conclude that a term has been so misused as to no longer be useful, in which case the proper thing to do is to taboo the term and agree on another that better communicates ones' ideas.
And in fact, arguments more or less identical to the one you've presented as clearly bad have been a common part of the debate here since the community's formation. I've engaged in a large number of productive discussions that started with a comment very similar to "the right-wing conception of free speech is incoherent", and those discussions have shaped my thinking on the nature of rights and government.
Questions like these are the obvious next-step in the discussion, but registering disagreement is still the first step. Ideally, one does more than one step per comment, but life is often less than ideal, and it seems to me that a clear statement of disagreement is often a good first step.
Sure. Then one can attempt to discuss free speech with you, ideally more than once and from a variety of different angles, and build a model over time of the nature of your worldview and values. One can ask questions and contemplate the answers, note which arguments you make and which positions you commit to over time, and note whether these appear to be motivated by principle or convenience. One can note how you engage with those who disagree, whether you argue in good faith, and so on. In this way we come to know each other over time, and when we find a sharp mind, much can be learned even if agreement is never achieved.
I offered some definitions above; would those satisfy your request? If, as I believe, the large majority of regulars here share approximately that same definition, as evidenced by their previous comments, why would stating it each time be necessary? If you were a newcomer and were unfamiliar, why not just start asking questions?
...But then, of course, we get to the flipside.
It's always nice to see common ground. But the question is, what follows? Where does this apparent agreement lead? If the term has been abused, what consequences result, and how should we think about them? If the common way of talking about race is in fact fraught, how do we talk about it instead?
Here's a recent conversation I engaged in with someone who seemed to be, at least by my definition above, a racist. Your argument is that people here have something of a blind-spot toward actual racism, that we've just handwaved the question away rather than taking it seriously. Do you think that critique applies to my arguments in that exchange? If so, how? I'm up for continuing the conversation if you are.
You say:
I would not endorse either of those statements, though I'm much closer to the former than the later. I do not think young people in 1995 had a good understanding of the problem of racism, because they failed to anticipate the results of their actions and the consensus they rallied behind. I do think most of the things they considered racist were in fact racist, but some of them were not, and some of those were intentional lies sold to them. It seems to me that the opposition to racism typical of the 90s simply failed on its own terms, and any serious conversation on the subject needs to engage with that fact front and center. If you'd like a more in-depth elaboration of this idea, you can find one starting here, with the meat being the arguments from exhaustion, blindness, dementia, sociopathy, and senescence laid out here. If you have thoughts or disagreements with the arguments outlined there, I'm again up for it if you are. More generally, I'd be interested to know if you think that discussion grapples sufficiently with the question of racism and race relations, and if not, what you think it missed.
In any case, I think I am a pretty good example of someone who rejects Progressive discourse on and definitions of racism, while still considering actual racism to be a problem that needs to be addressed, in one's own reasoning most of all. I hardly think I'm alone in this position, and I think there would be even more joining me if there remained any real hope for positive-sum solutions in the near-term.
More generally, I think you severely underestimate the credibility problem inherent to this subject from the perspective of many of the people commonly posting here. There's a reply to you from @Nybbler, below, that basically amounts to "the term 'racism' is actively counterproductive". If you disagree, why not outline your view of how the term and the discourse employing it has delivered net-positive outcomes for our society or subsets thereof? If you are disinclined to engage with Nybbler, I'd be happy to take up his side of the argument; I certainly do not believe that either the term or the general discourse have been positive-sum across our society in recent years. For an example, see the discussion some years back of Progressive attempts to address racial gaps in discipline in the public school system. Stuff like that is where a lot of the pitch-black cynicism over the discourse surrounding "racism" comes from, and that was before BLM and the riots and the murder wave, and hard data about the intentional social interventions that brought those things about.
Does any of the above shift your priors that the question of racism isn't seeing thoughtful engagement here? If not, I'm interested in your further critique, either of the above or of other specifics you find relevant.
That … was my point, yes? The point was that “clearly and consistently stated personal animus” is trivially a bad definition for “racism” in that it fits basically none of the actual examples that nearly everyone agrees to be racist, and yet many here consider the idea that racism can include unconscious bias to be some recent redefinition of the term that makes it meaningless.
Again, that’s precisely my point! The discussions start there, not finish! Almost everyone here who wants to argue “leftists have abused the term ‘racism’ into meaninglessness” are specifically saying that because they do not want to have a conversation about what racism is; they are trying to end the discussion there. The equivalent for free speech would be, if a right-wing person started talking about any more nuanced idea of what free-speech is than some ridiculous strawman, and I responded with “this entire discussion is a trap and I refuse to engage”. The moment a right-wing person says “free speech”, I get to assert that they can only mean the dumbest and most incoherent version of that concept, and when they try to explain that they don’t, I plug my ears and say that what’s coming is a deliberate trap.
As I’ve said, there’s something very honest about the open white nationalists, as much as I disagree with everything they stand for. Frankly I don't consider them reachable; I'll be cordial enough but I don't think there's realistically any chance I could change their minds or they mine; the worlds we see and our values are just too far apart. What frustrates me more are the Classical Liberals who will tell me that racism has been abused into meaninglessness by the Left and so what does it even mean anymore, who can possibly know, I guess we’ll just have to ditch this entire memeplex completely because it’s corrupted, when they’re surrounded by white nationalists.
(Seriously, guys, your “like, what even is racism anyway, man? Is it even, like, a thing?” comment does not feel very genuine to me when you have to have scrolled past the white nationalists responding to me to make it in the first place. Imagine being a libertarian in a left-wing space where your responses were three-fourths "Conservatives and neolibs will call absolutely anything Communism these days, they've turned that word into complete meaninglessness, like are there even any actual communists left? Whenever a right-winger says something is Communist I just ignore them" and one-fourth "Stalin did nothing wrong and we must immediately enact a worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat and seize the means of production". I know it's cringe but the only word that I can think of to describe the effect of this is "gaslighting".)
What frustrates me more is suspecting that the Classical Liberal in question is not that classically liberal at all.
I do think that most of the regulars here, excluding the white nationalists, will resolutely refuse to engage the question of whether “racism-as-unconscious-bias” is a meaningful concept or not in that it points to an actually existing thing in the world that is useful to point out, yes, doing their absolute best to derail that conversation at every stage. I think that they will argue that because the Left has abused that term into meaninglessness, we can’t have any discussion at all about this, and so I guess if a leftist wants to call them racist, then it just do be like that sometimes. I think they will temporarily adopt definitions of racism that require conscious and explicit bias without noting that this trivially doesn’t work for almost all of the standard cases. I think that they will talk about how Ibram X Kendi is dumb, or liken anti-racism to a religion, or talk about superweapons and cancel culture and free speech and thoughtcrime, and generally do anything possible to avoid the question I’m trying to drive towards.
That’s just … been my experience, at least, as I remember it.
You asked for peoples' definitions of racism, and I offered: "Applying negative or positive modifiers to your interactions or judgements of people based not on their individual actions, but on their stated or perceived racial identity." Do you recognize a difference between that definition and "clearly and consistently stated personal animus"? I think my definition covers all of the examples you gave for racism the local norms miss. If so, would you agree that I at least am not exhibiting the tendency your critique is aimed at? If not, what is my definition missing?
In that first link I offered, would you say that the guy I was arguing against was displaying "clearly and consistently stated personal animus"? His claims seem pretty similar to several of the ones you claim are missed by the local understanding, and yet I recognize his arguments as clearly racist, and argued against them. Would this be more evidence against your thesis? If not, again, what am I missing?
At this point, I've offered a definition, per your request, and an example of that definition being applied. Does this seem useful to you?
I think you are mistaken in two ways. First, I think while there are some people who are not interested in the conversation, there are more who will take it if offered. I am certainly one of them. Second, I think you are misunderstanding how conversation works here. I straightforwardly believe that "leftists have abused the term "racism" into meaninglessness". That is my best understanding of reality, and so it is my starting position if you wish to discuss the term with me. I have what seems to me to be a fairly clear model of how and when the term was eroded, which I've already taken the liberty of offering up, and which I'm more than happy to elaborate further on if you'd like. And of course, if you disagree, I'd greatly enjoy hearing your best arguments and evidence of how the term is meaningful, together with examples of how it has been usefully employed in recent years, and which positive outcomes resulted, and how those positive outcomes outweigh the negative outcomes associated with those uses. Would you agree that I, at least, don't appear to be trying to end a conversation by that statement? And if conversation is what you're looking for, by all means, let's commence!
In fact, you and @guesswho have gotten a fair number of replies in this thread, and in addition to being willing to argue my own position, I'd be happy to defend those of others that I do not myself consider racist. You argue that the white supremacy contingent is at least honest, but it's the "classical liberals" equivocating that you really object to. Well, can you point to that sort of equivocation in this thread? Arguments that aren't obvious WN talking points, but are playing with ambiguities? You seem to have called out @The_Nybbler for exactly this based on his tar-baby comment. I'd be happy to argue the other side of that one, if you like, since I think "racism" is, in the current era at least, a tar-baby.
...None of this happens, though, if you demand that people agree with you from the start as a precondition to conversation. I argue a number of controversial positions here on a fairly regular basis, and I always go in assuming that most people here are going to not only strongly disagree, but start from the position that my argument is straightforwardly stupid. That's half the fun of it, and I can't think of a time when it prevented me from finding good discussion. But if you aren't willing to actually make an argument, I can't very well make you, can I? All I can do in that case would be to point out that you complain that people aren't looking for conversations, and then refused the conversation when it was offered in good faith. And in fact, that has been my experience of how these conversations generally go, much to my displeasure.
It seems to me the response there is to argue that it is not a trap, perhaps by giving some examples of how and why the question genuinely matters. Alternatively, ask them why they believe it is a trap, and ask them what evidence could change their mind. This can't stop a person from stonewalling you, but it also can't stop you from making it very obvious that they are stonewalling and acting in bad faith, which is frowned on quite strongly here.
I straightforwardly believe the above, and yet I continue to argue vociferously with WNs. Since I think the term racism is useless, I don't bother accusing them of doing a racism, I just straightforwardly argue that their positions are obviously wrong on the merits, based on easily-available evidence. This has the added benefit that when they say something that would usually be judged racism but is in fact accurate, like citing Black crime statistics, I don't have to pretend they've committed a mortal sin by saying true things. Nor am I required to recognize solidarity or fraternity with them; they aren't on my side, and if by some miracle they were to achieve significant power in the future, well, Second Amendment Solutions work on WNs too.
The arguments you describe have frequently been present on the previous incarnations of this space, and are ubiquitous most other places, so I don't have to imagine anything. It never stopped me from making my case. Don't let it stop you from making yours.
Is it "derailing the conversation" to offer evidence of how the term and the people employing it have caused repeated, large-scale disaster far out of proportion to any concrete benefit they've delivered, especially in recent years?
Put another way, if someone genuinely disagrees with you about the usefulness of the term "racism", how should they go about making their case to you?
Well, I can easily promise not to make any of those arguments. And while I am pretty sure I disagree strongly with the point you're driving toward, I do want you to make it as clearly and cleanly as possible. How am I doing so far?
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I'm ok with calling both you and BAP racists. After all, isn't everyone?
Thanks for commenting, Ibram X Kendi.
Edit: meant as a positive acknowledgement of posting I like, not some sort of spiteful barb.
I don't think that this was a particularly-well-aimed barb; JTarrou is not someone who frequently Body-Snatchers-screams at people claiming them to be racists. I'm not 100% sure whether his comment is mocking "everyone is racist" or at least semi-seriously saying that "everyone is racist and that's fine", but TTBOMK neither of those are positions in common with Ibram Rogers.
I don't mean it as a barb. I support pointing out that of course almost everyone is a racist according to prominent commentators. So let's correctly (?) call almost everyone a racist all the time.
To the degree this word is a weapon, it loses effectiveness when the broad Kendi-style definition is repeated.
I see.
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A note of advice, when I write comments like this I say 'I'm fine with calling him, you, and myself that; after all, isn't everyone?'
It gives a bit more plausible deniability.