This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Happy Birthday Question
in which I write about HBD
The Rogue Fishermen
Back in my early public defender days, one of the niche misdemeanors I'd be periodically appointed to was for unlawful fishing. Typically the offense took place at a beach, involving someone harvesting dozens and dozens of shellfish beyond the allowable amount while a Fish & Wildlife officer hides in the trees with binoculars meticulously counting how many individual clams went into what particular bag. Out of the dozen or so cases I've handled, every single defendant —100%— was a Cambodian man.
Since the general population is not 100% Cambodian (let alone Cambodian men), a class of criminal defendants that is exclusively Cambodian is an undeniable example of a disparate outcome. We're missing a ton of vocabulary precision on this issue, so please bear with me but when I say race, I'm using it broadly to include ethnicity and basically any related phenotype. And when I say racial discrimination, I'm using it to mean discrimination based on race itself rather than discrimination on a collateral trait that may end up with a racial correlation.
Now if you want to pull a Kendi here, the only explanation for racial disparate outcomes is racial discrimination. This is always patently facile logic because 1) it doesn't do the work[1] in ruling out alternative explanations and 2) often requires accepting some questionable premises. For unlawful fishing you have to first assume that members of every race breaking fishing laws at exactly the same rate [citation needed], but racist officers use their binoculars not just to count clams but to ascertain who to single out for arrest. Or maybe it's racist prosecutors writing up indictments who scan through the police reports and dump any with non-Cambodian names into the wastebasket. Or maybe a combination of both.
I cannot accept the "because racism" conclusion unless I see strong evidence supporting the above premises, and because I haven't seen this evidence, I have no reason to accept the conclusion. See how easy it was? But if I reject this proposed explanation, does that mean I have my own explanation for the disparity? Nope! And crucially, I don't need one. Some of the contraband shellfish quantities involved seem way too high for just personal consumption, and so we wondered if the motivation was selling their haul to some less-than-scrutinizing restaurants. Maybe word spread among the Cambodian community that this was an easy scheme with lagging enforcement. Maybe they lacked the cultural understanding that a government would ever be interested in stopping you from picking up natural bounty off the ground. Or maybe individuals within the O-M122 haplogroup carried a particular genetic mutation which made them unable to resist the siren song of free clams on the beach.
I can't imagine anyone would ever endorse that last explanation, it's deliberately absurdist. The point stands; I don't need to hitch my wagon to any particular alternative explanation to reject the "because of racism" one, all I need to reject a theory is its own lack of supporting evidence.
Genetic Destiny
Genetics are extremely consequential. Our chromosomes hold an unyielding and elaborate blueprint that govern not just an overwhelming of who we are, but also of who our lineage could be eons into the future. Humans certainly exhibit a remarkable adaptability across a dizzying spectrum of environments and circumstances, and our infinitely more malleable cultural memetic evolution deserves credit for turbocharging our advancement beyond the confines of our languorous flesh and blood. But this demonstrable flexibility can never refute the harsh unyielding control our DNA commands over certain domains. If your assembly instructions includes a third copy of chromosome 21, you will have Down syndrome and, however much we might wish otherwise, no amount of nurture will ever reverse that nature. Such is life.
Just like any other organism subject to natural selection, humans exhibit differences from each other on a multitude of heritable traits. Evolution cannot occur without variability after all, and sometimes you end up with agglomerated clusters. For example, the sickle cell gene is highly prevalent among populations from Sub-Saharan Africa because it provided a protective advantage against malaria, which just so happens to be best transmitted by mosquitos, which just so happens to favor tropical regions, which just so happens to advantage higher melanin levels for UV protection in humans. Through this complex chain of coincidental correlations, you end up with the fact that having black skin is highly predictive of sickle cell anemia risk.
That humans exhibit physical differences, across both short and long timescales (whether lactose tolerance within 10 thousand years or bipedalism across 4 million years), is tediously and trivially true. But there's absolutely no reason to believe that the same natural selection process that created such physical diversity would somehow treat mental traits as untouchable. Or as they say, evolution is not relegated to only from the neck down.
The Pretextual Charade
Acknowledging the undeniable reality that humans exhibit biological diversity is the weakest and least controversial definition of what is euphemistically called human biological diversity, or HBD for short. There's nothing ever wrong — neither in principle nor in practice — with studying the kaleidoscope that is the human genome and documenting any apparent patterns. The problem is that the HBD label attracts roughly two different camps of devotees with wildly divergent aims.
One camp is best exemplified by my old economics professor and friend Bryan Caplan. Caplan is a principled libertarian and an earnest academic who believes that IQ is highly heritable and enormously consequential, beliefs that I myself hold just as fervently. Setting aside how amorphous and arbitrary racial categories are, I also believe there's likely some relationship between certain racial groups and average [insert your favorite cognitive trait].[2] The other camp is best described by Caplan himself:
Go down deep enough the HBD rabbit hole and you'll easily encounter extended mythology about how members of the white race on average are genetically predisposed towards everything from being on time to meetings, to democracy. Start with an arbitrarily-designated geographic line that is putatively about female nuptiality, but also more-or-less fits your list of favored European stock (sorry Ireland) and there's no shortage of just-so stories that you can assemble by spotting associations through Vaseline-smeared spectacles.[3]
But let's assume the truth of the most extreme version of the above: white people on average are better on every relevant conceivable metric that is conducive to a thriving society. Now what? The fixation on group averages rather than individual merit remains baffling.
Consider how the average male is undeniably significantly stronger than the average female. But while sex is indeed highly predictive of physical strength, it isn't determinative and inevitably some females will be stronger than some males. If you were screening for a job that required the ability to lift 100lbs, screening for "men only" would for sure be better than picking candidates at random, but it also means turning down the female powerlifter and ending up with a guy with cerebral palsy.
The closest I've come to encountering a coherent proposal from "group average aficionados" is on immigration policy, generally taking the form of blanket/severe prohibitions against immigrants from countries with low average IQ (or whatever). But if IQ is of such vital importance, why not just test for it directly rather than relying on a crude circuitous heuristic? I took an IQ test myself and scored extremely high,[4] so what do you gain by overlooking that in favor of the purported average of ~37 million people? The biggest practical point in favor of testing IQ directly is that while it no doubt remains politically unpopular within certain circles, there's no universe where "let's just ban countries with low average IQ" isn't even more unpopular. Setting that aside, could the blanket prohibition option potentially be justified on cost concerns? The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is the most widely used IQ test and costs around $100-$400 and takes 2 hours to administer. Meanwhile, the cheapest and most straightforward legal immigration pathway to the US is the K-1 Fiancé visa, which costs $675 just to submit an application. So I've seen nothing to substantiate this cost excuse.
Anytime anyone insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits compared to a high-resolution filter, you can conclude an unspoken motivation is at play. HBD offers a convenient mantle to don for any bog standard textbook racists looking for pretextual (read: fake) justification to hide what is fundamentally an aesthetic disgust they're too timid to be honest about.
The Omnipresent Allergy
If racial group averages shouldn't ever be used as the basis for policies, can raising their salience serve any other purpose? Nathan Cofnas is another "IQ realist" who openly acknowledges HBD's tarnished association:[5]
Despite that, Cofnas argues the race & IQ chorus needs to be amplified because he thinks it's the only way to refute the Blank Slate ideology that has been the foundation of "because racism" progressive ideology. Dickie Hanania — definitely no stranger to the HBD arena — pointed out several problems with Cofnas's mission which I echo completely, but I'll add an even bigger hurdle: Progressives are already viciously allergic to accepting the conclusions that naturally flow from their own worldview. I'll explain.
If you accept the institutional racism framework, various downstream effects must inevitably follow. If you believe that black mothers are systematically denied adequate prenatal medical care (because of doctors' unreceptiveness to complaints from black patients, geographic disparities in healthcare facility locations, implicit bias in medical training, and general economic barriers to accessing care) then wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems? If you believe that black families are disproportionally impacted by environmental racism (because polluting industrial facilities and toxic waste dumps are predominantly located near black neighborhoods due to historical zoning and discriminatory policies) then same question, wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems?
I don't know about you guys but in my naive understanding of the world, I would fully expect pollution and poor medical care to Cause Bad Things™️, including any number of lifelong intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders. You would think that acknowledging the problems that your proposed policy would solve would be the easiest thing in the world, but progressives consistently exhibit a very bizarre combination of presenting racial minorities as both uniquely victimized and materially unaffected. Freddie deBoer observed the same dynamic on the other side with affirmative action:
If institutional racism doesn't create any material disadvantages to minorities...what does it do? If you can't get progressives to admit that the thing they hate the most causes problems, in what world would you think they'll be more receptive to messengers uncomfortably associated with reviving the Fourth Reich?
IQ is real, genetics matter, and progressives are not going to be reasoned out of an ideology they didn't reason into. The way to jettison the Blank Slate fallacy isn't to dust off the racial group averages stats that are pretextually obsessed about by bona fide racists. Theories that lack evidence should die for exactly that, lacking evidence. To the extent there is a taboo against asking the "because racism" crowd to show receipts, break it.
[1] How ironic.
[2] I even hold the rare honor of literally having been physically assaulted by a particularly deranged heckler in public, who was furious that I expressed this belief in response to a question. Those who know know.
[3] The "woke" identarian left makes identical claims but uses an oppression framework as the scaffolding rather than genetics, and is the other side of the exact same coin.
[4] Ok in fairness it was a Buzzfeed quiz and the result I got was Jasmine, but we all can read between the lines and know what it really meant.
[5] Cofnas is still a soft collectivist about racial affinity, writing in the same piece: "That does not mean that I advocate colorblindness or multiculturalism, or say that race is politically irrelevant. A race is like an extended family (although you'll probably be disappointed if you expect your racial brethren to treat you that way), and it's natural to care about the fate of your people. Our physical and psychological nature reflects our racial heritage, and for partly biological reasons we may feel a connection to our cultural traditions."
Do people not go harvesting shellfish as a commercial operation on Canadian beaches? It's fallen out of favour here now, but in my own town there used to be people going out on the harbour or out to the beaches when the tide went out so they could gather mussels etc. for sale.
The big deal here is salmon fishing, which is a perennial (though again, died down in recent years) tussle between the holder of the fishing rights on the river (who is selling them as part of the package of tourism to overseas fishermen for the whole experience) and the local guys fishing the river (poaching) and selling on the salmon.
Nobody round here is Cambodian (yet) so yeah, I think you can take it they're selling the shellfish on, well unless they're planning a multi-generational get-together of an enormous clam bake 😁
I'm going to go out on the opposite limb here and claim that Western (which is what we are really talking about re: whiteness) success is down to Christianity. A set of moral, ethical and cultural values that were imposed society-wide across a particular region for centuries shaped the mindsets and expectations of the inhabitants around things like the common good (keep the rules about over-fishing, and don't over fish because everyone should get their fair share, and a fair share is due because 'who is my neighbour/love your enemy/we are all children of God' etc.)
Asians and illegal fishing seems to be a predictable pattern anywhere there’s a large Asian diaspora population- commercial fish poaching on the gulf coast is a mostly Vietnamese crime and buying carp fished out of the trinity river(fish from this river is banned for human consumption due to water contamination) is, according to local legend, how Chinese buffets in Dallas get their fish.
More options
Context Copy link
It wasn't always clear. The personal limit was something like 20 clams, and the guy who collected 789 clams was definitely selling them somewhere, but the guy who collected 64 above the limit? He told the officer it was indeed for a family feast but who knows.
64 does sound realistically like "we're having a big family get-together". My childhood to early teens was spent living in the country beside the sea, in an area where both my parents had grown up, and if some official popped up while we were walking on the strand and said "Oi! You can't pick those barnacles, there's a law about that!", we'd have felt "what the hell are you on about, my dad's family did this when he was a kid, when was there a law, besides it's the strand, it's open for everyone, nobody owns it".
I can get why your Cambodian clients would think "well this is some weird-ass Western nonsense" about that. We, ahem, may or may not have been in receipt of some mysteriously acquired salmon that was definitely not poached out of the duke's river from a friend of a friend in my youth 😉
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is a reason why the UK will send you to jail for 2 years for handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances.
More options
Context Copy link
Molly Malone?
Not that part of the country, but yeah - certainly in my father's time people went picking shellfish on the beaches and shores, and up to my teen years I used to see them doing so even in the town harbour. It was always sort of "poor people food source" and not highly regarded, and with fears about pollution and big producers selling those kinds of items in supermarkets etc. it went out of style.
But your Cambodian friends doing it are not acting weird, they probably think the Canadians are the weird ones for "what do you mean you can't dig for clams?"
That's my best guess. I had a similar experience with dumbfounded Mexicans arrested for DUIs who seemed genuine in their bafflement "what do you mean you can't drink and drive?"
Re: drinking and driving, while that has finally become socially unacceptable here in Ireland - though people continue to do it, and now have added 'driving while high/stoned/under the influence of drugs' to the repertoire since now we're a modern, urbanised country - we'd have some local politicians defending it on the basis that (1) rural people don't have access to buses and taxis like town people and (2) it's often the only means for social outing for those guys to go to the pub once a week. Also, claims that such crackdowns would mean small pubs in rural areas would have to shut down.
Some of those chancer politicians' efforts from 2013 and 2019.
Drink driving impacts rural areas, drug driving impacts town/city areas.
Amazing
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link