Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
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User ID: 2188
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
This is a spectacularly non-central example.
We don't appoint leaders by lot any more, either.
But to answer the question, monastics do.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I also suspect that due to selection effects (or lack thereof) for the last several generations the average quality of young men qua young men is simply lower.
People also go on about testosterone but didn't Scott write something questioning that?
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.
Finally, I'd like to point out that it's the existence of a genetic/cultural subclass which has high costs. Those costs can either be borne in common (as in segregation, border enforcement, etc.) or externalized to the individual. When de jure segregation ended the cost of it didn't go down -- it was simply transferred to the families who found that suddenly the wife needed a full-time job so they could afford a house in 'a good neighborhood with good schools'.
Modern Americans pay through the nose for segregation! Only it's much messier and more expensive because instead of coordinating to make it cost-effective, we're if anything coordinating to fight it. This serves the wealthy who can display status and power by being unconcerned about the rising cost of segregation. Good luck to everyone else, I guess.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I suppose there are hypothetical populations of uniformly idiotic demon spawn where that would be the case.
Also, I think it's dishonest to stipulate that they have to be uniform. You telling me that a population of 99% idiotic demon spawn and 1% normal people wouldn't be worth keeping at a distance? Where's the line? Isn't there a debate to be had here?
Besides which the question starts to come down to why we have nations, or borders, or militaries, or law enforcement, or locks to begin with.
The Central Asian steppe nomads didn't have to be 100% idiotic demon spawn for it to still be very much worthwhile for China to build a giant wall.
Given any polity, there are groups which would probably be net-negative to have integrate on equal terms. There are many layers of defense against this happening. What to do when they're already next door, already citizens? Shrug and give up? Watch your communities unravel, your institutions collapse, your cities decay?
The only reason we can even pretend (for peacocking status reasons) that this might be acceptable is that fossil fuels have given us this staggering amount of wealth. Wish we wouldn't have squandered it, but especially I wish we weren't squandering it on this in particular.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I think it'd be fun to play a game where people are shown pictures of doctors and decide whether to trust them or GPT based on physiognomy.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Well, terminating segregation in the US seems to have been more a symptom than a cause of the disease which is now killing us, so I don't think that it'd have made much of a difference. Perhaps, as a step on the road, it would have been better to delay it longer? But it was already inevitable by that point. And who knows, maybe keeping it around longer would actually have antagonized the leninists into going even farther even faster.
But if I lived in one of the communities destroyed by integration, I think a pro-segregation position would be obvious. If I'd lost social cohesion, property, and possibly even loved ones. I don't live in such a community, because I'm blessed to be able to live in a community with almost none of that sort of problem. It's expensive, but hey, segregation is. Revealed preferences would seem to indicate that everyone who can afford it finds the price tag worthwhile.
In fact they are fairly genetically different. Came from different ancestral populations. See Albion's Seed.
At least several centuries of divergent evolution helped along by different levels of state capacity to, e.g., punish defectors.
EDIT: Here's Scott's review of the book. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
Also to be clear when I say 'the tendency is mainly genetic' I'm not arguing that people can't be trained either way -- only that, absent training or enforcement, some will have a stronger instinct to cooperate, and others to defect, and there's no way this isn't deeply genetically rooted.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
As I say, I don't think ending segregation was per se the problem.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Without that threat, nobody would follow the rules.
Some people will return shopping carts. Others will block spaces with them. I think the tendency is mainly genetic, and that some peoples can get pretty far without threatening each other into decent behavior.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I believe he is referencing this thread from Kulak.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Is this where disparate impact comes in?
"This housing isn't exclusively for whites, just for people who happen to check all these extremely white-coded boxes" wouldn't fly, would it?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
If we want to understand the mechanism behind the massive decrease in discrimination against non-Whites, we would do well to notice that it has coincided with a massive increase in discrimination against Whites.
Seems to me that most of the people I hear pointing this out at all immediately blame 'the Jews'. But I think this is a poor proxy for whatever is actually going on. Just wish I knew what it was.
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.
You have a point here -- my distrust of integration lies rather in that I don't expect the market to be allowed to sort things out.
EDIT: To be clear, integration plus forced (at gunpoint) 'equity' is just directionally toward Harrison Bergeron and I think we can agree there are major costs there.
Yes, I'd like (actual) equality under the law and the market and individuals and communities to be allowed to find their own level, and for those who sink to not be massively subsidized by those who swim. Compassion, I think, does not extend to perpetuating dysfunction.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Don't confuse discussions of the costs of wokeness' and affirmative action with the idea that total segregation is somehow more productive.
This seems to presuppose that segregation is always a net negative, which doesn't seem warranted to me.
Contingent on some hypothetical populations themselves being a net negative, doesn't it seem likely that integration could itself carry enormous costs?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
And if it could see me in fewer than four hours spent in the company of diseased individuals with a blank check of damocles hanging over my head.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
On the other hand, actual discrimination has taken a steep nosedive even if most people still harbor some racial prejudices and attitudes, so clearly something changed.
I take issue with the notion that actual discrimination has taken a steep nosedive.
I've lost contracts, both public and private, due to my race and my sex ("sorry, you've been fantastic, but we have a big push to switch to all woman-owned vendors"). And while I didn't choose to go to university, my children may as well not even apply to many elite institutions for the penalties held against them due to their skin color, their academic merit notwithstanding.
My town was hit hard by its own self-imposed lockdown, so they decided to subsidize new businesses in the downtown area by paying for much of the first year's rent, renovation costs, etc. Except, whoops, only for women and 'minorities' (which incidentally whites are in my state of California, but I guess that doesn't count). I've seen scarce medical care withheld from whites in favor of prioritizing members of 'marginalized communities'.
I've seen white men lie about being Chinese women to get their writing published. I've seen others agree that persons of their race should stop making creative content because "we've had our time and it's their turn now." I've seen major media producers explicitly announce that it is now against policy to make shows and movies about white families and communities for not being 'representative' enough.
I've seen white women express that it would be wrong for them to reproduce, and instead wax lyrical about adopting 'brown babies'. I've seen judges decide that Christians shouldn't be allowed to adopt children for their failure to conform to modern gender ideology.
I've seen schoolchildren emotionally destroyed over the guilt and hatred heaped upon them due to what 'their' ancestors purportedly did. I've seen gifted kids lose access to advanced education because the demographics of those who qualified weren't equitable enough and this might disadvantage the children who really matter. I've seen teachers penalized or forced into resignation for disciplining too many of the wrong type of children. I've seen whole fields of study at every level of education, some quite venerable and august; some, I would say, absolutely vital to our society; neutered or destroyed because they are too thoroughly associated with the wrong kind of ethnicity.
I've seen the media lynch white (and, actually, Asian) people for self-defense because the presumption of guilt can only run one way. I've seen police officers crucified for defending themselves and others against armed, dangerous, and aggressive blacks who sometimes were in the literal act of attempting to murder others. I've seen whites refuse to report crimes, even those which did them great damage, because they've been so brainwashed into thinking that it is somehow morally correct for them to do so by the education system, the media, and the state. I've seen communities burned, laid to waste, and seen this called justice because it was done in the name of the 'oppressed'.
I've seen governments refuse to hamper heinous criminal activity, from property crime to mass organized rape of children, because the perpetrators have what our old friend Autistic Thinker might have called 'Tropical privilege'.
I could keep going on, for quite some time, and we all know it.
Discrimination is pervasive, overt, systemic, and often explicitly codified.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Almost as though there were an obvious implication that, according to common understanding, serial killers ought to be exceptional in some sort of way that other celebrities are not.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Good luck with your white whale.
Nailed my own a few years ago. When I was 15 or so, I downloaded this demo of a game called "Atomic Superball (The Chicken Edition)" and played the heck out of that thing. No idea how many hours. And then when I was 20 or so, it occurred to me: I could buy the actual game now.
Of course almost all traces of it had vanished. The website was still up but payment/delivery was non-functional, and no one ever responded to the email address.
More than a decade passed.
Still I thought about that game from time to time, and occasionally went digging for it. At long last, I found a couple of videos on vimeo or something of a dude playing with it. Commented asking if there were any chance he might still have his copy. Shared the story of how much I loved it and so on.
Surprise surprise, the actual creator of the game saw this and reached out to me. We talked about it back and forth over email for a while, and he was gracious enough to send me a copy.
It was... okay. The parts I liked from the demo were still awesome, but the rest of it, the levels, the unlockables, all that stuff, was kind of meh. After some soul-searching I decided to be honest with the guy about how I felt.
"Yeah," he said. "That's why we put that stuff in the demo."
(To viewer) "Do you buckle your child up when you put them in the car? Of course you do. You care about them, and car accidents are all too common. But did you know that your 6 - 17 year old is more likely to be 'diagnosed' trans than to die in a fatal car accident? Don't you think you might wanna do something about that, too?"
Not sure who would pay for this ad or even who the target audience would be but it was a funny thought.
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