site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In my neck of the woods, black doctors, especially those who've come onto the scene recently enough for this to potentially matter, are almost invariably relative newcomers from Nigeria (and often Irish-trained). They seem as competent as anyone - in any case I've been quite happy with mine.

They're thus unlikely to be affected much by lowered standards, actual or perceived, in the North American continent. Now you have me wondering if this might also be part of the answer to your question - clinics consciously avoiding potentially less qualified candidates from nearer to home, in a way that still makes them look "diverse".

Now you have me wondering if this might also be part of the answer to your question - clinics consciously avoiding potentially less qualified candidates from nearer to home, in a way that still makes them look "diverse".

This is the Harvard method. Supposedly, Harvard is like 20% black. The bad news is these are all rich international students, children of recent immigrants, and people with heavy European admixture.

It's been speculated that there are actually no Harvard students who have 4 ADS (American descendants of slaves) grandparents.

Hey, Google actually found it. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/

Within Harvard’s GAA population today, O’Sullivan has noticed a seemingly large percentage of biracial students and students who come from socioeconomically-privileged backgrounds. “If we were to count the number of GAA students at Harvard who were descended from enslaved people, came from low income backgrounds, first generation, four grandparents descended from enslaved people, I feel like that number would be so low — like, maybe one person. It’s just so, so, so low,” she says.

Harvard is completely shutting out disadvantaged black people in America. Instead, Harvard pads its stats with people whose only connection with ADS people is the same skin color (and sometimes barely even that).

Ultimately, Harvard and the KKK share the same belief about race: That the color of your skin matters more than the content of your character.

I mean, if the steelman position for AA is that black unequal outcomes could at least to some extent be due to lack of ingroup role models (the "studying = acting white" thing) and therefore black role models should be created even if they are promoted above their station - making this generation fake it so the next can make it, so to speak - then it doesn't really matter if the Nigerians that Harvard fills its quotas with are disadvantaged, or have or want anything to do with African-Americans at all, as long as African-Americans unilaterally believe that the Nigerians are just like them and therefore are valid role models to follow. The last part at least seems plausible - X-Americans imagining that they are actually X even as real X laugh at them is a recurrent trope even for instances of X like Asian or Norwegian.

The TV show "The Wire" had two black kids in what one black parent referred to as the "pediatric neurosurgeon phase", where a young black kid, who hadn't been ground down yet, picked as a role model one of the most intelligent and successful black men in the area. Apparently this was a real thing, at least in Baltimore, and it was due to Ben Carson being the director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center (in Baltimore).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson

But ‘I went to Harvard because my daddy took advantage of corruption in Nigerian oil production’ is not actually a good example of upward mobility for American blacks(or anyone else except a small number of nigerians). Most people have normal workaday lives doing normal workaday jobs and went to not-that-prestigious schools to train for them.

Hispanics seem to have achieved substantially upward mobility by acknowledging that lots of them are going to have job titles like ‘Secretary’ and ‘accountant’ and go to schools like podunk state, bumfuck nowhere campus.

This is a really interesting thought experiment: if the African AA do turn out to be stellar examples of pure black competence and the reputation of blacks as an aggregate increases on means and medians, yet 4ADS-grandparented blacks remain a perenniel underclass, will AA cease their bitching? Off the top of my head my own experiences suggest a strong no, given what my african compatriots tell me about dealing with blacks, as well as seeing how the extremely few 4ADS largely treated Africans in college. US afronationalists use Wakandanized pre-white africa as a tale of white perfidy, not African solidarity. Blacks are perfectly capable of immense in-group strife now without introducing nigerian, rwandan, kenyan or botswanan ultrachads, there is no reason they will cease their bitching. The question remains whether the white DEI champions will not play with blacks anymore if they are too successful. Perhaps the natives will FINALLY be the chosen pets for whites eager to show their good hearts.

Is this a fairly recent thing with Harvard? And is there a big gap between Harvard and 10-20 ranked American schools? I can’t think of people I know who went to the second tier of schools and one who went to Stanford who were ADOS. This article sounds like there are basically none. I think they said perhaps 17.

I think it is fair to say if ADOS at Harvard basically do not exists then all of DEI is just a grift. If your concern is structural racism then Harvard shouldn’t just be recruiting in Nigeria if they are extremely concerned about structural racism. If you believe the issue is structural racism as oppose to lack of ability admitting a ton of ADOS would be an obvious solution and something Harvard has the ability to fix (training plus credentialing) a ton of Nigerians and no ADOS would be a refusal to do the hard thing for laziness or tacit admission that ADOS are just too dumb to be at Harvard.

Also there is a big difference between padding the stats and the article sounding like there are a dozen or two ADOS at Harvard.

Is this a fairly recent thing with Harvard?

No, Harvard has been shutting out ADOS students for at least 20 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more-blacks-but-which-ones.html

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

were West Indian

This really boggles the mind. They are as much DOS as ADOS are, the vast majority of them were worked to death so the survivors weren't chosen for their working ethic or intelligence, why aren't they as dysfunctional as ADOS?

  • It can't be their genes, unless you subscribe to the idea that it's the white trash admixture that is responsible for low ADOS performance
  • It can't be their socioeconomic circumstances, Jamaican GDP PPP per capita is $13543, according to IMF, while Mississippi's is $49911

Selective immigration, probably. We're not getting random Jamaicans.

The English-speaking Caribbean is roughly as messed-up as black America. Jamaica is by far the largest country, and has the highest murder rate in the world at 53/100k (vs about 21 for black Americans). Trinidad (40), the Bahamas (31) and Belize (28) are all worse as well and Barbados (15) is not much better. I think this is the best indicator because most other indicators of ADOS dysfunction are improved by fiscal transfers from white Americans. The islands which remain colonies seem to be better off.

Windrush-era immigration from the British Caribbean to the UK was not selective, and British Jamaicans are the most dysfunctional subgroup in the UK that is large enough to have good statistics. (Gypsies are probably worse). But the DOS crime problem is eminently fixable with competent policing - the black British murder rate is about the same as the white American murder rate at 4.

Jamaica is by far the largest country, and has the highest murder rate in the world at 53/100k

Holy shit. That really is higher than even Haiti and that place is as failed state as they come.

You have to wonder how accurate a record they have of murders in Haiti though. One part of the murder rate is just the ability of the state to gather accurate statistics and discern murders from accidents etc.

But if America is getting the right tail of the West Indies DOS, shouldn't there also be a corresponding right tail for native ADOS? ADOS are about 42m as of 2020, while Wikipedia says that the entire West Indies is 44m, and a quarter of that is Cuba, and that's the entire population including whites and all other races.

I mean, unless AADOS culture is so uniquely shitty(plausible; I don't think it's quite as bad as gypsies, but it's pretty bad) that it prevents the right tail from making anything of itself.

I think we have evidence of AADOS culture being pretty bad and maladaptive in any circumstance, far more constraining than HBD. I don't know if it's 'literally no right tail, it's that bad' tier.

As @2D3D points out, the right tail bails on the culture. They're all (well, OK, not all) in my neighborhood, complaining about property taxes and traffic like their white and Asian neighbors.

The corresponding right tail for ADOS presents identically to the black families of progressive dreams. Suburban 2 parented households with no crime. These blacks just refuse to identify with their failed brethren, like how suburban whites do not identify with kensington fent zombies.

I agree, although I think "refuse to identify" is too strong - there seems to be a "there but for the grace of God go I" attitude, from what I've heard. But yes, from what I can tell, a lot of racial disparities seem to be mediated by class rather than coming directly from race.

Anyway, looking back at the original quote, those with four American DOS grandparents make up 33%, so there's 66% who have at least one grandparent who is from Africa or the West Indies, or who is non-black. Put that way, the numbers make a lot more sense. It could easily be the long-hoped-for cultural assimilation at work, where once people make it into the upper-middle-class (this being Harvard), they identify more and more with their class peers, regardless of geographical background and sometimes regardless of skin color. And so their children and grandchildren still count as "black" in America's racial classification, but they aren't the sort of "black" that intelligent progressives want to focus on.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats