Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think the constitutionality has much to do with what I'm arguing. If you're saying that this change in public opinion was imposed top down then you have to explain how, in a democratic society, people holding those views got to the top in order to impose them in the first place. The Supreme Court you can play the 'activist judges' card but legislation and presidential actions are harder to explain that way.
I'm totally fine with the old fashioned arguments that this is a sort of tyranny of the majority unconstitutionally trampling regional peculiarities and freedom of assembly. That's well trod ground. I just think it's shit social history to explain massive changes in social attitudes as top down action of a mysterious elite.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The state put its thumb on a scale by making sure it was an all-white jury in a majority black area.
Yeah, there is a general stance from the left that if black people commit racially charges crime it's best not to comment but if white people do that is worth commenting on. I don't think this is based on belief in a racial caste system where black people have a socially understood right to kill white people without punishment. I think it's the belief that state can be trusted to punish black criminals who kill white people but might let white people off the hook. The black shooter in that case is in custody while white shooter in Missouri went free on bail. I think this is an outdated assumption and they'll both be punished but this historical distrust of the state to punish white perpetrators is why Biden called and not a belief that the shooter had a social right to kill black people. If you want to make a wager about whether that shooter will serve more jail time than Emmett Till's killers I'd be interested.
The statement you pointed to as evidence of individual leniency for killers of an Asian child previously turned out to be a blanket statement about treatment of non murder/sex crime felonies. Where is the explicit statement of preference of lesser charges for black kids rather than general soft on crime liberalism?
I don't know what the fuck is going on in Chicago and SF generally and I think they're being way too soft on people. But the examples of leniency you've brought up are a white on white homeless guy and gang violence in Chicago which I presume is black on black. This is all bad, but it does not amount to a racial caste system.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The Civil Rights Act was passed by democratically elected legislature, the 101st was deployed by a democratically elected president. People have had fifty years to organize a majority to overturn the civil rights act and it remains broadly popular. It was legally imposed by the majority of the country on the South for sure, but why did the rest of the country support it?
It's interesting we've switched from 'politics is downstream of culture' to 'culture is downstream of politics' and politics is just whatever elites decide.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Legislation in a democracy is somewhat downstream of public opinion as well. How did the majority that enacted the civil rights act get elected?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I know that you want to believe this, but the evidence seems to suggest the opposite. They were immediately arrested, suggesting that kidnapping was not acceptable.
They were acquitted by an all white Jury suggesting they correctly predicted that they did not need to hide their identities because it was acceptable to the people who would be in the jury. They were not punished.
In the case of the Fire Chief they dropped charges because he claims to have used pepper spray in self defense on the man who beat him, but there's video of someone who looks like him using bear spray on a sleeping homeless person. The fire chief also won't testify in court, so the local prosecutor thinks they'll lose since the homeless person will claim self defence after being pepper sprayed on a public sidewalk. Both he and the transient appear white in the video. I'd like to see the local prosecutor be more aggressive but this doesn't seem like much of a case of a racial caste system.
There was a manhunt for the black man who fired at the white child grazing her cheek and police obtained warrants for counts of attempted murder first degree. He is in custody now. The white guy who shot the black teen and sent him to the hospital was allowed to go free on bail and has been charged with first degree assault. The legal system seems to have acted appropriately. Biden commented on the controversial case where someone was seriously injured and not on the uncontroversial case where someone was grazed.
The Alameda County DA issued a blanket memo (not benefiting any particular race) saying that prosecutors should not use sentence enhancements and seek the lowest available prison term, with an exception for sex crimes against children and murder. Jasper Wu's killers all have been charged with murder, shooting at an occupied vehicle, possession of a firearm and two of them with conspiracy to commit a crime and "criminal street gang conspiracy". Google says the penalty for murder in CA is 25 years to life, so not exactly non-carceral.
The second paragraph of your 'mutual conflict' story says three charges were brought on one of the individuals involved and the State's Attorney says that the didn't invoke mutual conflict and CPD mischaracterized them. I'm don't know much about how self defense rights work in the case of large gun battles but it seems complicated to resolve who is the aggressor and who is legally defending themselves without video footage.
These are generic soft on crime stuff and not evidence of a contemporary racial caste system.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's a common left wing historian talking point that government support for civil rights wasn't pure benevolence but part of a propaganda war to win over African and Asian countries during the cold war. America became the global hegemon but its allies in Europe have all these colonial empires. Instead of strong arming Europe into giving up their colonies we'll just advance an ideology of racially egalitarian national determination where the emerging third world should be free to partake in a rules based international trade system that conveniently enough, we get to make the rules for.
If you read a left wing historian like Judith Stein her account of American deindustrialization is that foreign policy elites fucked over the American working class in order to build up allied economies so that they could resist communism. We let Japan and Korea dump steel in the American market while having massive tariff barriers so that they could build their own economies to ward off China. The seminal 'The Deindustrialization of America' by Bluestone and Harrison is full of examples of how tax and trade policy encouraged American companies to build factories in Europe rather than build them in America and export to Europe.
It's not just virtue signaling it was part of a broader strategy to win the cold war.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I suppose there are hypothetical populations of uniformly idiotic demon spawn where that would be the case. In really existing America early desegregation of industry took place to increase defense production not because of widespread adoption of egalitarian views. In general reallocating labor from agriculture to industry was a winning strategy in the 20th century and segregation was an impediment to this reallocation of labor.
If you think that markets are generally better at allocating labor than governments then you might predict that de jure segregation would generally have high costs.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They were arrested for kidnapping but they weren't charged with it.
You've brought up two examples where arguments escalated into impulsive shootings where the people were caught immediately and plead guilty. That's not indicative of a belief that you have a socially agreed upon right to do this violence without punishment. Your third example is a drive by with no details of how the shooter was caught. A drive by may be a poor attempt to conceal identity but it's still an attempt.
Bryant and Milam acted days after Till's alleged whistling and in a premeditated fashion and still took no action to conceal their identities from Mose Wright when they knocked on his door (except for threatening him) and asked him to identify Till. Till's family did not resist except to offer a bribe, because they knew resisting would bring greater punishment and because they expected Till to be whipped but not killed, as the prosecutor suggested was the appropriate punishment for Till.
Yes men across different cultures do violence to restore honor. The difference is that this was a caste system where there was a socially understood right for white men to restore their honor with violence against a black child without resistance from that child's family and go unpunished by the state or society. That's nothing like two guys shooting each other in the club over a girl and then pleading guilty and being sentenced to 25 years.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Pre Urbanization
I want to fuck men
Don't be gay pervert
Die in 300 person village like my ancestors
After Urbanization
I want to fuck men
Move to city
Find semi-secret urban gay community
Get death penalty for sodomy
Relatedly the new Missouri law on gender affirming care requires a comprehensive screening for autism and for all mental health comorbidities to be resolved even for adults. Given that many people live their entire lives with depression or anxiety requiring those conditions to be resolved is a high barrier to receiving care.
My expectation is that this will be the future of trans healthcare in red states. There's lots of debate between the left and the center left about how to handle trans kids and trans women's access to spaces and sports for women, but the Republican base largely doesn't believe transition should be allowed. I don't think there will be explicit bans on adult care but there will be a lot of 'abortion clinic hallway width' regulation tricks that are nominally about patient safety but really about limiting access.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think Emett Till's murder is comparable to contemporary murder by a jealous husband. Roy Bryant did not make an attempt to conceal his identity when he abducted Hill, and the people Till was staying with did not resist his abduction. My guess is that they did not believe that Till would be killed, that he would be abducted and whipped but let live. That is what J.W. Milam would tell a journalist their intentions were afterwards in his published confession in Look Magazine (though the FBI doesn't think the timeline he laid out there works given the distances he would have had to travel) It is also what the lawyer for the prosecution in Till's trial would say was the appropriate punishment for his transgression. Bryant and Milam were not even indicted for kidnapping even though they had confessed to it before the trial.
This suggests that there was a social convention that white men could abduct and non-lethally punish black men and boys. If they had just kidnapped and whipped him they would likely not even have been charged. Murder crossed a line such that they were tried, but an all white jury would still acquit them.
There's a lot of reasons but I'll focus on a crude materialist explanation; Industrialized societies are are less zero sum than agricultural societies. Agricultural societies under malthusian conditions are very zero sum. Any land that your group isn't farming is a limit on the population of your group. If you look at the Free Soil Party in the United States, the concern of Midwestern whites about slavery is not that it is unjust oppression. It's that white plantation owners are going to use black labor to take land in the west that could go to white yeomen farmers (it's not just that but that is part of it).
Some of the earliest anti-discrimination measures(Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee) come out of world War II and the need to utilize black labor in the American defense industry. When the pressures to be efficient get turned up you can't afford a luxury belief like segregation. Don't confuse discussions of the costs of wokeness' and affirmative action with the idea that total segregation is somehow more productive.
There are some places where there is really intense zero sum competition in industrialized societies. Unions had a complicated history with segregation I don't have time to get into here. But overall in an industrial society there's a lot of mutual benefit in economic growth and moving people from picking cotton in a feudal system to making steel in some of the world's most efficient factories is a good way to increase growth.
South Africa is the one society that kept segregation intact through industrialization and whites there are obviously in a different position from other anglo colonies in being the minority of the population.
It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.
I think FanFic writing rates make a strong case that this is pretty organic. If you look at the video game modding community and it's 80% male and then you look at video game developers and they're 80% male do we need some big hiring practices conspiracy to explain it? There aren't institutional barriers to putting your Skyrim mod up on the Nexus or Steam Workshop or putting your fiction on AO3 or fanfiction.net. This survey of AO3 Users says they're 80% female, this study of fanfiction.net says people who joined in 2010 were 76% female. Goodreads has a 76% female userbase, though that's book reviews not fanfiction.
This NBER paper has a graph of share of books authored by women. It bounced around 10% for the 19th century and then begins a steady linear increase starting in the 1970's breaking 50% around 2020.
Are there many media forms where if the consumers and amateur practitioners are primarily one gender the producers remain the other gender? It seems like once most readers are women, then probably most writers will be women, and eventually, most editors and publishers will be as well and this generational overturn is to be expected. These spaces are woke because they're women-dominated not women dominated because they're woke.
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways.
I'd put slightly better odds on women understanding men than vice versa. This is some weak back-of-the-envelope evo-psych but generally, I'd expect there to be stronger selection pressure for women to be able to predict and manipulate male behavior then vice versa, since they are physically weaker, calorically dependent, and extremely vulnerable during pregnancy. If early men wants something from early woman (say monogamy) violent coercion is an option, whereas early woman can't really coerce her partner unless she can get the whole group to do that for her.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I'm sure that's what he will say I just don't think the public will buy it. 'I think abortion is baby murder but you can trust me not to do anything about it' isn't particularly trustworthy after the 'Roe is settled law' judges went mask off with Dobbs.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
An election with DeSantis it becomes about the issues.
And one of those issues is the six week Abortion ban he signed into law. If DeSantis had held the line at 15 weeks he would have had a really good shot but this will be the first post-Dobbs presidential election and there's no way for DeSantis to occupy a more popular middle ground position on abortion with any credibility after that.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The 'evidence in proportion to how inflammatory your claim is' rule has been de-facto replaced with 'amount of text in proportion to how inflammatory your claim is'. It's good that people can't just post uncompressed 'boo outgroup' statements, but the expansion of the statement would theoretically involve lots of evidence that can be discussed and litigated rather than idle speculation.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
She's accurately identifying the state of play. The right isn't gonna accept trans people no matter what at this point, when you start calling people pedophiles the conversation is kind of over.
I don't think the tactics of trans activists matter that much electorally. Us political obsessives can fight all we want about trans people but electorally it's all gonna get swamped by abortion/inflation among normies.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
So people can't rationally argue for things that are in their own interest? I grant that it's true that Natalie is unlikely to be persuaded to the belief that she is a man, but does that mean we should automatically disregard her arguments for why she is a woman? Can we disregard any arguments about the existence of God from religious people? Arguments about why cancel culture is bad from people who have been cancelled?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The very online trans community has been mad at her for insufficient zealotry since she started. She did a paywalled video on the subject of 'Groomers' and said she didn't feel there was much room for persuading people who think you're a pedophile. The center cannot hold, cycles of escalation gonna escalate, etc etc
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think that has much to do with what I wrote. Death threats aren't the same thing as boycotts and I don't support them.
Yes, self righteous people saying edgy things to signal ingroup loyalty is a lot of internet content.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Leaning on the owner is usually a second degree boycott though. We can't directly boycott x because we aren't its consumer base, but we are the consumer base for company y that works with x and we can threaten to boycott y if they don't boycott x. It's still a sort of social shunning rather than a direct censorship.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The cancel culture debate isn't about whether people can have private conversations it's about people's rights to speak from various platforms. Speaking from a platform isn't a private transaction between person A & B, it involves the approval of whoever owns the platform. Consumers and employees play a role, as they can boycott or stop working for platform owners who use the platform to promote things they think are harmful. That's not physically preventing person A from Person B, it's just creating an incentive structure for the platform owner to deny person A from using their private platform to talk to Person B.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
For most of the professors I know teaching the youth, or at least Freshman and Sophomores, is their least favorite part. I'm sure they'd be happy to lead senior seminars forever.
I think the causality flows the other way, when you're losing the idea that the whole game is rigged is really attractive. People see their values/aesthetic preferences losing popularity and their group losing status and want to find reasons to declare this illegitimate. The elite conspiracy position then becomes appealing. Fixation on elite-imposed values and manufactured consent as proof the game is rigged and there's no point in playing it is naturally the domain of the fringes who need to rationalize not moderating to gain popularity.
I think it's mistaken to conflate the broad idea of an external locus of control with elite control. There are lots of external forces that you can point to that influence individual or group behavior that aren't completely subject to elite control, market forces, and technological progress for example. You're setting up an internal vs. external locus of control axis, but there's also a separate tendency (cough cough The Paranoid Tendency) to view this external influence as the highly coordinated outcome of decisions made by a small set of human agents rather than as an uncoordinated cross-product of technological, environmental, and economic forces with some human agency acting at pivot points where path dependency is influential.
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