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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so. In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

Can anyone think of such a country to use as a test case?

I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws, but also that they don't collect data on race, so it might not be possible to use them as a comparison.

Why shouldn't I discriminate in housing against groups less likely to pay rent?

Universalisability principle! If everyone did that, members of certain groups, finding themselves unable to put a roof over their heads, might be less inclined to co-operate with society.

So, follow up question

What percentage of those minority groups currently find themselves disinclined to cooperate with society?

Fewer than if they were openly discriminated against, I suspect.

Checking credit scores is already legal and carries a more accurate version of that information. Yes, blacks have lower credit scores on average.

France has laws against racial discrimination

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT000006070719/LEGISCTA000006165298/

Discrimination as defined in articles 225-1 to 225-1-2, committed against a natural or legal person, is punishable by three years' imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros when it consists in:

1° Refusing to supply a good or service;

2° Obstructing the normal exercise of any economic activity;

3° Refusing to hire, punishing or dismissing a person;

4° to subordinate the supply of a good or service to a condition based on one of the elements referred to in article 225-1 or provided for in articles 225-1-1 or 225-1-2;

5° To make an offer of employment, a request for an internship or a period of training in a company subject to a condition based on one of the elements referred to in article 225-1 or provided for in articles 225-1-1 or 225-1-2;

6° To refuse to accept a person for one of the internships referred to in 2° of article L. 412-8 of the Social Security Code.

Where the discriminatory refusal referred to in 1° is committed in a place open to the public or with the aim of preventing access to it, the penalties are increased to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Interesting. But do they have doctrines that are equivalent to disparate impact or hostile workplace environment?

I don't really know. I don't think there is any disparate impact law, you'd have to prove the disparate impact is intentionnal and thus that it falls in the scope of the anti discrimination law.

You don’t actually need another country for the comparison. You need to look at anti-discrimination cases under the civil rights act and see if they’re ridiculous or if they’re actual discrimination.

I don't think that works, because the actual practice of the law deters people from doing certain things.

IOW. if there is significant practice and precedent of punishing X such that its very well known and established, you can't look at the rate of X within current cases to estimate the predisposition to do X without the law.

(In economics, this is essentially the Lucas Critique).

I'm not sure why another country is necessary for this comparison. It's not like the Civil Rights Act is some long-defunct law under which no one actually brings suit. To the best of my understanding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, various Department of Justice entities, and private plaintiffs all still bring suit under it and win. This suggests that, by the terms of the law, racial discrimination is happening in America today. Surely there are some people on the margin who would discriminate if it was legal but won't discriminate if it isn't. This seems at least empirically true. The amount of racial discrimination today is almost surely lower now than it was before the Civil Rights Act.

There are two main components of civil rights law that the online right dislikes. There's the nondiscrimination part of the Civil Rights Act (which is interpreted to mean that pro-black or other progressive-favored group discrimination is OK even if it discriminates against other groups) and there's the disparate impact standard, which makes everything from enforcing laws against murder to MIT open courseware illegal depending on your interpretation. The disparate impact part is indefensible IMO, it's just a poorly thought out law that shouldn't exist. The nondiscrimination part would be perceived very differently if it was simply interpreted the way it was written, but it isn't.

Disparate impact is not, notably, part of the law itself.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2 under (k) as Nybbler said.

Griggs was enshrined into law in 1991.

The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so.

What is the main argument in favor of repealing the Civil Rights Act?

In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

I can guarantee you the general population has absolutely zero interest in this fact. Maybe it would help you win some arguments on the internet. That's likely why this isn't a priority for Libertarian think tanks, and if it is, is probably symptomatic of their general ineffectiveness.

Hanania doesn't argue for an outright repeal (he thinks it's better politically to only repeal some portions and some executive orders and have SCOTUS fix some bad interpretations), but his book's quite good, and not very long. A shorter version of the same thesis can be found here.

What is the main argument in favor of repealing the Civil Rights Act?

While it had a defensible original merit, it's since mutated into everything from a civility code to a dress code to floor wax and dessert topping, near-universally favoring a single perspective happens to dominate the regulatory offices enforcing it and the business administrative groups 'advising' responses to it. These ad-hoc modifications have turned the law into a direct threat to even after-hours and out-of-office speech not directed to coworkers or employees, as well as enforcing norms that aren't shared (or even clearly known) for a wide majority of the American populace, and providing a level of administrative overhead that restricts a large variety of classical parts of community-forming that it 'officially' isn't even supposed to touch.

At the same time, the EEOC and courts have little interest or even ability to find truth or act within the law's clear bounds, such that bringing even meritful CRA actions against clear abusers risks blacklisting one's own future career for little compensation. To avoid or at least reduce unintended friendly fire, they've had to smoother the not-quite-rules with further unofficial patches and unstated expectations of behavior, which further make them incomprehensible and unusable for the very people they are most heavily meant to support.

I'm not convinced that this requires repeal, or even that it's better than the best-alternative-to-negotiated-agreement, but there's a reason that the HR admin to corporate jobs is the equivalent of the Karen in the service sector.

The reason to repeal it is that the use of "disparate impact" and "hostile work environment" in discrimination investigations have been disastrous for society, as Richard Hanania's book argues. Repealing the CRA would be the quickest way to fix the problem, and it'll be the only way if the Supreme Court reaffirms disparate impact.

Suppose we found such a country, and it had worse outcomes for black people than occur in the US.

Couldn't it still be the case that the removal of affirmative action, etc. caused that effect?

When the current standard is to discriminate in their favor, it'll be harder to distinguish neutrality from discrimination against them.

This means that your result, if we found one, would only be conclusive if it found no effect, or maybe a negative effect so strong that there's no way it could be due to the current preferential hiring etc.

It would never be conclusive. Countries are not electrons, you can't just compare them to each other and expect it to be perfectly valid.

The elite networks and organizations of today discriminate in favor of minorities and the philosophy associated with civil rights act and how it has applied in practice does not take sufficiently seriously any even handed aspects to the law as written.

At such, not only repealing civil rights act but empathising that it is racism and illegal to screw over the non progressive associated identity groups would be necessary.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to entertain the framework of historically oppressed protected groups, as a valid framework. In fact, to the extend discrimination is illegal, or comes with fines, such framework would end up costing for those who apply it.

The arguement that civil rights act might no longer be necessary as the minimum arguement might had made more sense in the past, but if the arguement of civil rights act has been about pervasive influence or conspiracy of groups like KKK, today we can observe a different pervasive ideology. Saying that there isn't racism today would be inaccurate and adopt the framework of progressive idea of racism where they don't count the racism in favor of minorities and against say whites.

You are basically fighting the old war. I also don't see why we need to face these questions in such an indirect way, instead of directly observing whether current American society is favoring, trying to be neutral towards, or mistreating X or Y group. So we will directly reach the truth of the matter you want to investigate, by investigating it directly. I sincerely do not buy into this idea that such things are such as inherently complex mystery that is hard to ascertain. It is convenient politically to be a mystery for one side that their side has a weak case based on the evidence. Actually, who a society favor is going to be reflected in the rhetoric of elites, the dominant NGO groups, the laws and how they are enforced, and so on, and so forth. If you do know that groups that can be favored can even perform worse due to HBD for example, although there are differences in behavior that aren't just HBD and other factors that can also lead to groups that are favored to do worse on some metrics of success, there isn't really a mystery here about what is happening.

Some issues are not actual debates where both sides have a valid case, just because there are two sides that are unwilling to compromise. Although, there is some compromise, well sort of. When you see the celebration paralax that is telling enough. The opposite side to what I argue will sometimes admit that it is true but "what you are going to do about it" i.e. might makes right, or use an arguement like its karma, revenge, and celebrate it basically.

Some of the rhetoric of progressives about protecting groups from discrimination does have a validity today. But it is about protecting from progressive racist "antiracist" movement, including "conservative" politicians that have aligned with it and such ethnic lobbies.

However, obviously, if you are to use power to oppose a cartel that screws X to benefit Z, you ought to be very careful about overcorrection if the goal is to oppose discrimination and be willing to reverse things if they have gone too far. And actually take seriously even handed applications of the law if anti discrimination is the goal. Contrary to the assertion that I have seen that even conservatives shouldn't reverse things, lest they become reactionaries, reversal of bad policy is a preresequite of wise governance in general.

Since anti-discrimination laws end up applying in intent of many involved with bringing them in fruition and practice as a manner of screwing over the progressive and their ethnic and other identity groups it comprise as permanent outroups, that negative precedent should be empathized as part of revoking not only civil rights act but Britain's and other country's equality act, hate speech laws, etc, etc, and to pass laws in favor of removing from influence and prosecuting with high prison time people who under the pretense of anti racism violate the civil rights of any group progressives dislike. Especially goverment officials but big business too and also industry wide regulations, or cartels. People behind trying to make this into reality or making this into reality should not just be excluded from influence but find themselves in legal trouble.

We need to be explicit about the betrayal of anti discrimination promise into discrimination towards natives, Christians, europeans, right wingers and associated groups, men, etc, etc. However a motte and bailey between antidscrimination and for discrimination for protected groups, against oppressors, have been a key part of these civil rights movements and their protagonists. So, we should be clear about the nature of it, and denounce it like Stalin has been denounced. We need to aknowledge the problems with such unwise and unjust policy and movement which was an overcorection and has become a very unjust monstrosity at this point.

The situation we are at is that good and moral policy is to enforce this at this stage. Considering how they have succeded in infiltrating the goverment and large corporations and be influential even with FBI with ADL as the worse, based on the ideology of the people who captured institutions. NGO's whose political influence is to do this discrimination activity which would be correctly considered a crime should become illegal, or at minimum fined and excluded to the level that KKK was. But power should be used to minimize the influence of the worst influential NGOs of this type and those who collaborate with them in power.

Like with civil rights act, fines can also be used for organizations for whose reason of existence can be more neutral like a social media, or media platform, where they are incentivized to remove the kind of leadership that is slanted in such direction. A correction against the excesses of our progressive dominated age is the correct way to analyze the current situation. It isn't 1960s where we have to predict how things will turn up. We can see how they did.

I kind of agree here. I’m very firmly in favor of weak affirmative action, which is more of a tie-goes-to-the runner version of AA. What that means is that if I have two candidates equally good for the role I’m hiring for, I should choose the minority. The issue most people seem to have with AA is not “they’re hiring black people, women, gays, etc.” but the fact that minority status is trumping other qualifications for the position. In short, the position that you don’t have to be nearly as good at the position, or as qualified for school is what people seem most upset about.

Weak AA doesn’t actually do that. It might require looking for more minorities to apply for the job, which isn’t that hard. It doesn’t forgo requiring relevant qualifications and skills and even testing for them. It simply means that once you have that pool, you should hire the most qualified and if two are equal, then give the nod to the minority.

'Weak affirmative action' as you describe it, doesn't exist. It can't exist, because, outside of academic studies with fake resumes, there is no such thing as two equally qualified candidates. Equally qualified candidates would have to be literally identical, and real candidates obviously differ in terms of their work experience, academic background and interview quality.

In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination. I've seen this first hand. I had to shortlist candidates for an academic programme, giving each one a score. This list then went to the higher-ups, who simply removed the five lowest scoring male candidates, even if they had higher scores than the female candidates. The remainder were given offers. Although the official guidance said preference should be given to the 'minority gender' when deciding between two equally qualified candidates, in practice they just penalised the male candidates.

In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination.

It shames me that as a kid I actually believed that this kind of phrase was anything other than obfuscation for the sake of reducing cognitive dissonance. But what I'd actually love to see is a true "tie-goes-to-the-runner" affirmative action implemented in real areas where true "equally qualified candidates" can and do exist. Such as baseball, which is what that phrase alludes to. No need to have extra innings, if the game is tied at the end of 9, then the team with more aggregate oppressed identities on the team wins. If the Super Bowl is a tie at the end of regulation, then give the Lombardi Trophy to the team that has more oppressed identities in aggregate. If two Jeopardy contestants have the same score at the end, then the person who is more oppressed gets to stay on and the other guy gets kicked off like any other loser.

If we truly believe in "tie-goes-to-the-runner" as a proper way to fix problems in society, then let's walk the walk.

It would be too small of sample size and hopelessly confounded.

  1. American blacks were tribes that lost wars and without filtering brought to America so I would assume we got those tribes elites and peasants. Versus say perhaps there is a country with really high performing Africans but their filtered from the top 1% of say a country like Nigeria with 200 million plus people. Some arguments have been made that we see this with Indians in America where Indians have a very strong position in big tech but India has overall been a low performing country.

  2. Conservatives do argue that liberalism has been bad for the black community and led to more single parent families. Civil Rights, sexual Revolution, marriage meaning forever, etc all occurred at roughly the same time. Perhaps Jim Crow disappearing was good but a changing culture on the nuclear family was a negative.

If we lived in a world of parallel universes where you just changed one historically thing we might always see civil rights correlating with the family issues so you could never truly differentiate between whether civil rights are good or bad.

  1. This also would sort of remind me of masks mandated and many observational studies showing a big effect. But the places that implemented masks mandates often did them after a surge of cases. So a masks mandate would show a correlation with cases falling. Perhaps places that would hypothetical pass civil rights laws already developed anti-discrimination beliefs so the effects of the laws might be meaningless. Or maybe it’s vice versa.

America, 1963.

One can argue that in current year the demand for racism outstrips the supply, and maybe you think that modern society's anti-racism is robust enough that we no longer need laws to make everyone behave... But it is trivially true that America did need those laws, Americans were (and to a lesser extent, still are) willing to discriminate against people based on race. It is also probably true that such laws have played a major role in America becoming a society that shunned racism.

I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws

This didn't seem right to me, a quick google search turned this up. maybe you are thinking of 'positive discrimination', which it appears France does not have.

Which characteristics are protected by [discrimination in the workplace] laws?

The characteristics protected are numerous: origin, sex, morals, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family situation or pregnancy, genetic characteristics, particular vulnerability resulting from economic hardship, true or supposed belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or an alleged race, political opinions, trade union activities, religion, last name, physical appearance, place of residence, ability to speak in a language other than French, bank domicile, health and loss of physical ability.

How did France avoid "position discrimination" if we got saddled with it? Do they not have a Supreme Court powerful enough to do the equivalent of the Griggs v. Duke ruling?

I'm not sure what you mean by "position discrimination", I said "positive discrimination" i.e. affirmative action, intentionally discriminating in favor of ethnic minorities. This does not appear to be legal in France.

Griggs v. Duke

Not familiar, but having looked at the Wikipedia page, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with positive discrimination. But, it would not surprise me if France had something similar Griggs v. Duke, in legislation or case law. It could also be that French employment law has protections which would make a Griggs v. Duke unnecessary; France has some of the strongest employee protections in the developed world, and America some of the weakest. Comparing this or that aspect of French law to this or that aspect of US law is all well and good, but you have to bear in mind that these laws are holistically connected to very different structures. A 1-on-1 comparison probably won't show much.

Autocorrect is a bitch. I meant positive discrimination, i.e. going out of your way to hire people from protected groups. Griggs brought affirmative action into the private sector by making it potentially illegal to have any hiring standard that created a disparate impact. I say "potentially" because you could still prove your standards were necessary after being dragged to court to pay legal fees.

New York recently had to pay out insane amounts of money because they were demanding unnecessarily high reading and writing skills from public school teachers.

Finding a place with a similar racial mix to America is challenging enough by itself, but your best bet is probably somewhere in Latin America like Brazil (which does now have affirmative action, but I believe it was implemented more recently than in the US) or simply a comparison of data from before/after the Civil Rights Act was passed. The presence of large nonwhite populations in Europe (gypsies aside) is so recent that I doubt you can infer anything meaningful from their situation and other possibilities like apartheid South Africa had laws that leaned way too far in the opposite direction.

In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

Finding such a country would be suggestive, but it kind of assumes you're going to be comparing apples to apples when you find such a country, and I'm not sure that that would be the case. There might be additional factors you'd want to control for, like: wealth, Protestant Christian majority, former anglo majority, representative liberal democracy, etc.

If you don't control for some of those, I fear that any comparison you make is going to be pointless. And unfortunately, I think you're unlikely to find a good peer to compare America to in this regard. If you want more data points, maybe try comparing cities, and controlling for as many of these as you can? At the very least it would give you more data points than the 200 or so countries there are in the world.

I have no idea how to do this, but it should be the top priority of any libertarian think tank.

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