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 -
How can you prevent segregation and why would you do it?
I was spurred to ask this question by this article and especially this paragraph where author builds logical sequence connecting segregation with various social ills:
"These segregated schools ruined children's educational and economic opportunities. They achieved much less academically. Because of this segregation, many more dropped out. Many fewer went to colleges. Those that did were disproportionately likely to enroll in less rigorous institutions, like for-profit community colleges. Because of this segregation, they earned lower incomes as adults. They were more likely to end up in jail. Their health was worse. In the end, these 100,000 are much more likely than their peers to emerge as the most economically disadvantaged members of society — whereupon the cycle will likely repeat with their own children."
Author doesn't spell out what is the main cause here but we can guess. It can't be money related issues, because they could be solved without integration with a different tax scheme. It can't be some institutional racism cause he does provide examples of black charter and views them as failures. No, in my understanding the single most useful benefit that black children lose out here is diversity in itself. Obviously there is a question of white and asian kids faring pretty fine without it and also the counterargument along the lines of DR slogan "you don't have right to a white people", but let's accept their premise as true. There are after all many instrumental benefits to your populace not being concentrated into the ethnic enclaves, assimilation is useful and if Romans could do it with the Gauls why Americans can't. What you can do to integrate schools once and for all?
The solution preferred by author - the repeat of the policies of forced integration doesn't work in the context of liberal democracy with freedom of movement and widespread desire to avoid "bad" schools i.e. schools with poor black people in them. 60s policies just kicked the can down the road and led to the white flight. Modern one that tries to do the same will end up similarly, maybe with much stark division in the end.
Successful desegregation should make resegregation not illegal but not desirable or simple. In the search of the solution, I think it's wise to try to emulate post-soviet conditions, because despite large immigration from much poorer countries generally Russian cities were resistant to segregation, the most ethnic districts in Moscow range from 20 to 50 percent of immigrants and not for the lack of them. What causes this? Multi floor apartments/soviet block housing allows for diverse quality and quantity of housing at the same place. Poor migrants often rent or buy small one bedroom flat to retrofit it into something more fitting for the Hong Kong, working class citizen or a student will live in similar one if alone or slightly bigger when married and/or with kids, middle class can afford to have good amount of square meters per person and each child will always have their own room, upper class will have can easily have double the space of a middle one and has option of uniting several flats into one. And all of them can live in the one building, use the same parking space and their children will go into the same school(private schools that cater to rich people exist but not everybody cares enough to opt for them).
Then we have widespread public transport that by existing devalues personal car infrastructure and makes getting into the city from some suburb much harder even in the smaller towns. And what maybe considered the most important part by people here is the law enforcement that while far from perfect for example both in Poland and in Russia(still much worse in the latter) does work at keeping streets safe, public transit clean and gangs non-existent(apart from the ones that get in with the government but that's a different story). I think democratic politicians can achieve this kind of integration and they have reason to do it, YIMBY i.e. urbanist faction becomes more powerful by the day in the local elections and I can see some of the people affiliated with it succeeding in the desegregation maybe without even make it a goal. But ideological solutions from people who do make it a goal can sink it all again.
Of course Democrats could do this. But they won't. In Poland and Russia, if some minorities are caught up more in these sorts of QOL policing policies, c'est la vie.
The entire reason Democrats have experimented with ruinous crime "reform" that has ruined some cities (against the very self-interest you appeal to) is that they consider this fundamentally delegitimizing. Their natural response to seeing some people fall below standards is to try to destroy the standard
So, yes. The urbanists could have their good transit and clean and safe downtowns and it could be a mocha paradise where all of the prosocial people of all races gather, but this would require simply slicing off the bits of each demographic that can't hack it. And they have gone down a radicalization rabbit hole that renders them ideologically (and maybe even legally) incapable of doing it when it appears those slices won' be equal. The people admiring Netherlands' bikes and trains and Tokyo's policies are the same sorts of people that cannot abide what that would cost, even if we posit that it'd only have to be short term
So segregation will persist, as people with wherewithal flee this chaos.
More options
Context Copy link
The author doesn't build any connections, he just asserts them. To that extent there is no reason to make any assumptions based on what he writes as being true. It could all just as well fall under the umbrella of baseline brown inferiority and white supremacy when it comes to the gaps between the groups.
More to your question: There is no world in which parents accept placing their children into worse education facilities than they have to. The only way 'desegregation' is done is through direct or indirect coercion. It has long been the case that the poorest and worst off whites have to suffer living with the browns. Nothing about this will change. It's only now, as is evident in the comment section of the article, that the white middle class is feeling the heat it once left the white lower class to sweat in.
There is certainly justice involved in the disintegration of the white middle class in America. But it's not to anyone's benefit. Schools will still have to segregate the bad browns from the good. And for every brown that might be uplifted by white excellence, there might just as well be a white child dragged down by brown inferiority.
On a final note, something about this topic always strikes me as disturbing. Maybe it's a personal problem but I find it hard to tease out some cosmic righteousness through the suffering of children. If the fine folks in favor of these policies want to volunteer theirs to make things right, so be it. But if they want to volunteer other peoples children for this sort of endeavor I would find it more right those same people be thrown off a cliff. Because there is an inevitable increase in suffering coming the way of children that would otherwise be free of it, if not saddled with browns. I don't feel like anyone owes society their children in an effort to facilitate some devils bargain to differently distribute suffering amongst children. But considering the support for desegregation across the board, I'm not surprised the discussion crops up from time to time. People accept the suffering in the name of social justice.
The argument from on high is that this forced integration will ensure skin in the game. By forcing rich parents with the means to affect the institutions to have their kids attend dysfunctional schools, they'll have no choice but to address the root causes of the dysfunction.
Except what actually happens is the middle class gets punished and has hardly any more recourse than the poor, while the rich do as they do and find ways to escape the consequences of their luxury beliefs.
More options
Context Copy link
Counterpoint: I have been thinking about the parable of the polygons recently which is a math-backed claim (dunno if it breaks down for more than bipolar groupings) that to avoid natural-process segregation from those who are okay being a minority as long as the minority is not excessively small in a given area, actually all we need to do is add in a parallel insistence that too much homogeneity is equally unacceptable. In other words, a manipulation of priorities can result in gradual re-integration without extreme policy interventions. That feels a lot more achievable than what many antisegregation people sometimes throw around, which as you correctly note, is often a hard pill to swallow.
In the context of education, that means even if parents are hyper-focused on getting the "best" for their kid, as long as you 1) extoll and encourage minimum levels of diversity 2) at least somewhat smooth out imbalances in different schools and 3) probably one other thing that escapes me for now; everything can still turn out relatively okay.
So yeah, I think a fundamental part of this is a deliberate cultivation of the values of diversity (which are real, if sometimes overstated or sliced too finely!) It's sadly not quite what modern liberals are doing, which have very self-evidently gotten lost in the trees, but at least the general thrust is praiseworthy, IMO.
Counterpoint: Your neighbors child(A smiley square) got its head stomped on repeatedly by schoolmates(smiley triangles). Its head bounced off the pavement again and again and now its braindead in a hospital bed. Are you happy with your child(a smiley square) attending that school knowing the persons responsible are going to attend it again in a year?
To make my point clear: I am not against social interventions. I don't understand why you would think that. I am against putting innocent children in harms way for the sake of some ethno-sadomasochistic ideology. The squares and the triangles are not equal in the real world. We can abstract the real world to a point where we don't see the relevant details. But basing our arguments on those abstractions is no different from lying.
To further elaborate, maybe if this particular act of triangle on square violence was an isolated abnormality, we could excuse it as such. But it's not. It just so happens that smiley triangles, despite being 13 percent of the population, commit over half of all violent crime. It just so happens that smiley triangles are more likely to engage in bullying. More worryingly, smiley triangles are more likely to view bullying activities as high status, unlike smiley squares.
So yeah, we can pretend that our extreme child-sacrifice based interventions are not actually that by using smiley faces. But I am not going to pretend with you. I will, as politely as I can, point out that you are intentionally throwing children into a chain of causality that has many more bad outcomes than they otherwise would have had. This is evil and you should be punished for it.
Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.
I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering. Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem. I think there's a high amount of overlap with poverty, of course, but sure. But this doesn't happen on every level. I would concede, of course, that changing school administration away from a "forgive everything" paradigm might be needed to make this work of course.
I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do? It's very well established that exposing kids to people different than them is by and large very effective at helping them understand that different is not necessarily bad. And it's not even all about race. Kids can very, very easily fall into bubbles far more easily than adults. My younger sister, for example, went through a phase in middle school where she was upset that our family vacations were only in-country because "everyone" was going to France or Hawaii or the Carribean or such. Which blew my mind because (at the time parents were upper-middle class and still are) at least part of my upbringing was in lower-middle class areas where I was quite aware that many families don't actually take family vacations hardly at all! That's just a small and trivial example. There are far more serious ones. Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.
So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child. And yes, that means that once in a while, a parent should go "I don't think my child has enough perspective and will be a more kind, well-rounded person if I break them out of their bubble a bit". This goes for many aspects of parenting. What you're proposing is exactly the same worldview as helicopter/lawnmower/bulldozer parenting and shares the exact same issues! Kids need to confront some sucky parts of life at some point, you can't coddle them forever! Learning interventions are best done young, just like how we now tell kids up-front they were adopted and that's fine rather than try and hide it until some future teenage moment.
Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.
Wouldn't you love a world where we don't have this 13% for half the violence stuff? We can get that world. America's violence problem is an aberration world-wide, which should be a clue that it's fixable. We aren't somehow doomed or powerless to simply attempt to live our lives in fear of radical violence. We are the architects of our own fate.
The kid may or may not get literally stomped out, but the more black the school is, the worse it will be on pretty much every axis. Just like cities, just like countries, just like continents, and for generations now the high-minded folk telling me we can somehow rectify this have done nothing but fail miserably at every single turn.
Imagine actually staking your child's wellbeing on the idea that pie-in-the-sky intervention #8742 will be the one that finally works, much less believing that the attempt will somehow be good for them. Unthinkable. Laughable.
It's not like we've spent forever trying and failing. Brown v Board was in 1954 and rollout took a really long time -- major wide-scale efforts didn't start until over 10 to 15 years later and took over a decade to truly kick in. And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up. Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)
So basically, the data suggests that for one decade, we tried to desegregate schools exactly ONCE. This is a far cry from "pie in the sky intervention 8742". And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?
"Twenty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Forty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
And all the while, generation after generation, we're supposed to avoid noticing that no ground is ever actually made up.
Efforts stalled out because white people decided they would abandon their cities and move as far away as required in order to get the hell away from what they were experiencing.
Liberal anti-racist orthodoxy holds that whites uprooted their communities and fled for no good reason because they just couldn't deal with seeing people with different colored skin, but I consider this nothing but a laughable cope from a social movement discredited by sixty-odd years of abject failure
I'm not dogwhistling, I'm just saying it out loud. The more black a system is, the more of a dysfunctional pile of shit it is. There's always an anti-racist liberal standing around somewhere telling us it doesn't have to be this way. That the cities don't have to be cesspits, that the schools don't have to be disasters, that the countries don't have to be starving shitholes, if only we'll enact whatever policies they're pushing this year.
It doesn't work, it never works, it never gets better at any level, anywhere, ever, and the rest of us are expected pretend we have amnesia about it. We're just supposed to repeat this every few years forever without acknowledging the pattern.
Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. Eighty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. A hundred years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. So on and so forth for eternity.
It's a farce. It's our society's version of Lysenkoism or believing in fairies or burying our treasure in pyramids. I can't really do anything about it, but I'll be goddamned if I'll sacrifice my kids to it.
Almost literally no historian who has documented white flight ever claimed it was for "no good reason", and the level of historical ignorance overall in this comment is shocking. The old adage that history doesn't ever repeat but often rhymes bears mentioning here -- while surely some strong parallels exist, you can't seriously tell me with a straight face that literal slavery vs heavy Jim Crow vs segregation and redlining vs our modern setup are at all similar states of being. Things are an absolute fuckton better than they used to be for Black people in the US. On top of the whole notion of "blackness" which doesn't make genetic sense, it doesn't make historical sense, it doesn't generalize to the world, and can only be understood in a US context. And at the end of the day people are just, ya know, people! They behave like people, and we should treat them like people too.
I'm sure some people get sucked into some liberal ideological trap of extremes, it happens all the time to all sorts of movements, but at its core I think there's at least a significant number of people who want to, you know, just be kind. Is that so bad? Is that so evil? Is that so nefarious? Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream? Jesus fucking christ dude, get some perspective.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Brown v. Board of Ed SPECIFICALLY said otherwise about the case in question
Most historians have found that although separate but equal does indeed sound like a workable (though ultimately unconstitutional) fair-ish principle, it was rarely true. Especially in the South, where most Blacks lived (and still do). Like, just to use a trivial example, a separate but equal bus scheme would be like, left vs right side -- not front vs back. You'd go to church, and the white people would get better seats near the front and get Communion first. You'd go to a public water fountain, and one would be broken and one would be working fine. If you went and applied to medical school, you'd be denied because no "separate but equal" faculty group existed, therefore could not be accommodated. All of these are real examples. I could go on. In education, already unequal facilities were made even more unequal by geographic school funding on top of already unequal treatement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where was this "acknowledgement" made? Also, where does this language come from? "Acknowledge"? Am I hiding something or doing things in a way you are not?
Not a "significant" chance. A greater chance. You clearly do not understand the argument. You can stop being glad.
Then there is no need to pretend there is a "fearmongering" part at play. Parents choosing to go to a safer school are doing what is best for their children if they value safety highly. We both agree which schools and which communities are safer.
If your only move is using other people's children, you need a new something.
Homogenous schools do just fine with their students and they, generally, have much better outcomes.
This is an extremely racist statement that has no basis in reality. White children that come from homogenous environments are some of the happiest, healthiest and smartest in the world. There is nothing bad, comparatively, about them or their education to be found. If there was any benefit to be had from studying with lower income blacks, then those lower income blacks would surely have found it. Instead the first thing they find is delinquency, illiteracy and worse.
That is based on the assumption that white children can somehow fix black kids through their white supremacy via proximity. Considering that this is obviously not true, you have nothing outside of fancy game theory that looks great in an interactive blog post to defend your, frankly, vile and racist ideologically driven social intervention that would see children suffer in the name of ending racism or whatever.
We accept marginal risk increases and marginal decreases in quantifiable outcomes for otherwise beneficial results or moral principles all the time. For children this is no different. To conclude otherwise about kids is emotional, not logical, reasoning.
These other beneficial results, which are not always easily quantifiable, are often still important. There are more values in play than simple material prosperity. For example, I'd trade a .1 decrease in GPA for my child any day of the week if it means they turn out to be a better-quality, more tolerant, open-minded person. Something I think your claim of "much better outcomes" fails to capture. While sending them to a school with significant minority presence isn't a perfect way of acquiring this mindset, there are some perspectives only lived experience can provide, no matter how good a parent or lecturer you are. That's partly why I illustrated the point about wealth and expected vacations -- she was living in a bubble that no amount of verbal expression could pop.
I also believe that some vague sense of diversity exposure (beyond simple racial categories too, as mentioned) is long-term beneficial. Researchers have found, for example, that increased corporate diversity probably leads to higher profits (this is debated) but much more certainly leads to better decision-making, job satisfaction, and higher quality work -- see here as an example from Harvard Business Review that talks about how diversity is no panacea but in the proper context definitely does help corporations.
Plus, though I don't buy into it to the extent some people do (the whole performative white guilt thing is bullshit), there IS certainly a moral evil in saying "oh my particular in-group is happy and prosperous" and thus let's not do anything to help other, suffering groups. Especially when, you know, broadly speaking your in-group was directly responsible for those poor outcomes of other groups. That's literally dystopian. When it comes to education, to some extent there's a zero-sum pot of resources available. To say "oh well it's working out for my group personally so it's fine" is not a holistic nor accurate way of viewing the situation. You want to talk evil? That's pretty close!
There are plenty of mechanisms for which Black kids can have better outcomes other than some vague notion of proximity or magic, you are correct. I haven't listed them explicitly, but I could if you doubt they exist. Put briefly, part of the problem with US primary and secondary education has to do with the funding and geographical schemes used.
Overall, though, it's still so bizarre to me that you outright accuse me of racism. You blocked out a quote of mine and I fail to see anything racist there.
There is no 'we' here. There are vile people bargaining with the lives of innocent children and there are parents trying to protect them. Most people do not accept marginal risk for their children for no benefit if they can help it. Yes, people make these choices all the time and they are telling you in this case: No. You do not respect their autonomy or value the wellbeing of their children so you refuse the answer.
And the point I'm making is that this isn't in your control. Every single example and assumption you make is not based on the factor parents are using to decide where to send their children: Risk. You don't get to decide if its .1 decrease in GPA or bullying that scars them for life.
You create hypotheticals and make generalized assumptions based on irrelevant research to draw up a concrete picture when the reality is that you don't know. You just hold to an ideological firmament like a zealous crusader. Parents do not have this luxury as they have to accurately assess real world risk to the best of their ability. Since their primary focus is not ideology but the welfare of their children.
More diverse schools have increased rates of bullying. Whatever benefit you think you are getting, you are not counting the negatives.
White people do more to help brown people than any people on the planet have ever done. They are drawing the line at sacrificing their own children for an effort that defies any logic and reason.
The assumption of your argument is that the problems browns face can be fixed by whites. You also hold to a moral and ideological imperative that white people owe brown people. Neither of these things are true. It's just a classic example of a rape and revenge narrative. Regardless of anything else, no white person should ever listen to a person like you on anything relating to the welfare of their children, given how racially charged your ahistorical ideological viewpoint is.
If the problem is money, which its not, you could just argue to give these schools more money without punishing white children. Yet that is not your argued course of action.
The assumption that white children turn out intolerant, ignorant or sheltered if not raised in proximity to browns is racist. I explained this to you in the reply to that paragraph of yours. As I said then, white people raised in their homogenous societies produce the best people the world knows who drive the best societies. The only reason you would assume that they are somehow turning out evil is if you were making a baseless racist assumption. Which is exactly what you were doing.
No, I agree, white people don't owe brown people that much. Personally I subscribe to a school of thought that injustices older than, say, 40-50 years belong to the past and not the present; we can do more good focusing on the present. For example the idea of reparations for slavery is absurd and also not practical. If an injustice is obvious and inflicted within, say, 20 years, I think there should always be some sort of reckoning. I bring up the longer-past to more criticize the general idea that if your group is happy, it's okay to ignore others who are suffering. And to mention that success of one group is rarely some sort of idealist world where they did it all by themselves. It's not uncommon, at least, for some exploitation to be going on as the cost. (I'm not saying this is always the case!)
What I do believe is that yes, successful people and successful groups and successful societies alike have a moral, religious, and human imperative to not just like in their own bubbles of prosperity, but to uplift others, be they less fortunate or even in some cases undeserving. I also think that to strive for the elusive goal of equality is admirable. Perhaps we do not share those values. But I think they are human values, not some luxury. Humankind as a species only got where it did due to networks of mutual trust rather than pure unadulterated selfishness, which allowed "greater than the sum of its parts" effects, so I would argue these values are actually fairly universal.
White childrenALL kids turn outintolerant, ignorant or shelteredignorant in practical terms, and sheltered in many termsif not raised in proximity to brownsif not deliberately exposed to other "cultures" (ill-defined I know), races, income levels, ability levels, religion, to name a few. Simply being told about how these things exist is not enough for true, meaningful, and ultimately helpful understanding (to the kid for their future and being a well-rounded, high-quality, moral human being) . I'll admit that careful parenting and good influences, etc. can get you probably 75% of the way there for some of these, but not all. That's an important point. Fish being unaware of water and all that. That's the context here. I'm not saying that you need to deliberately sacrifice your child's well-being for social justice as a broad concept. I'm advocating for parents to carefully consider the unseen costs of homogeneity, to think about their child's whole future, and to point out that if enough people think this way we can obtain greater "justice and equity" without doing anything particularly controversial.Success in school is an admixture of teacher quality, parental support, extracurricular support, teaching approaches, appropriate disciplinary schemes; the backgrounds of the attendees is a big factor but harder to directly control. Generally speaking, it's downstream of economic and geographical trends. Weighing these factors and coming up with a better way to achieve fairness is still a tricky question I don't yet have a full answer to. But objecting to the relatively banal original idea I proposed, which was simply that inequality might lessen if people valued diversity more in selection of where to live, and attacking it as the underpinnings of some sort of nefarious liberal plan to stuff apparently perfect, innocent, destined for success white kids into inner city schools where they are doomed to a life of bullying and misfortune is a complete mischaracterization of so many things it's hard to know where to start. I hope this clarifies some.
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
You are intentionally throwing children into a chain of causality that has many more bad outcomes than they otherwise would have had by allowing them to attend school at all (homeschooling has, I would assume, close to a 100% record of being bullying-free). This is evil and you should be punished for it.
Should boys be prevented from attending school with girls, since men commit the vast majority of violent crime despite only comprising 50% of the population?
I am in favor of homeschooling and sex segregated schools.
On a different note, the school system in general serves a purpose. I.e. daycare for kids. Desegregation does not serve a purpose, as there is no magic dust sprinkled on white kids that can make the brown children behave better via proximity. All you're doing is drowning out the statistics that would otherwise be very noticeable.
Putting your children in school is a risk, but the assumption being made is that it's something you must do if you want what is best for your child. The assumption is not 'if I sacrifice the potential wellbeing of my child some brown people some other place might become more literate'.
You’re ignoring the obvious counter point, which is “it is useful for children to learn to interact productively with people that neither look, act, nor think like them, lest they become unemployable social outcasts.”
If your child is the smartest person in their school, then it is likely they will continue to be one of the smartest people wherever they go. Learning to interact with 100 IQ “subhumans” is essential to becoming anything more than a white collar grunt who takes orders for a living.
This is a counter point to what? Homeschooling works great, sex segregated schools work great. Highly homogenous schools work great. Where are you getting the impression kids from these backgrounds are growing up to be social outcasts?
I highly doubt that. Maybe if they're in a very big school, but even then there are a lot of smart cookies in the world.
What even is this... Like, I don't know where you are coming from but you don't need to go to school with brown people to learn how to interact with people who have lower IQ's than you.
But this is all very much besides the point, which is that the people proposing these changes, like the one in the article, are not proposing we do this for the benefit of the white children. Your attempts to tease out some necessitated benefit after this has been pointed out are bizarre to a point of self refutation.
And the best schools on Earth, as well as the ones most people choose to attend, are none of those things. So I suppose desegregated schools also work great, and your objection to them is rooted less in reason than you seem to think.
I suppose you can bend the rules to say that children raised in bubbles grow up to be well-liked and sociable in their bubbles. But that presumes life in a bubble is man’s greatest aspiration.
Have you interacted with homeschooled children turned adults? Or people who went to private school? They are, generally speaking, socially stunted and awkward.
You highly doubt that someone who graduates valedictorian and places in the top 3 of their class at the SAT will continue to be smarter than most of the people around them? Very smart people still have to employ and work with normal people and idiots.
We’re not talking about historical geniuses here. Just normal working professionals.
Yes, but it certainly helps. Homeschooled children are weird, unsociable misfits who become predisposed to blindly trusting authority figures and struggle to wake up for work on time. Women who never go to school with men become sexually repressed fetishists who chase cock in their 20s and 30s instead of starting families. To say nothing of the men who grow up to be incels because they never learned heterosocial customs.
Uncharitable generalizations cut both ways.
Become too insulated in a hyper intelligent bubble, and you become the kind of person who genuinely wonders why no one likes your plan to sterilize or segregate vast swathes of the population because a black boy bullied a white boy once.
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
More options
Context Copy link
This seems deeply incorrect to me. Warsaw (and also the rest of Poland for that matter) doesn’t have stricter policing than London, and I’ve never witnessed any police take action on litterers. The one possibility I can imagine to explain this is that maybe littering is contagious and we have few homeless who get the ball rolling. Otherwise my explanation is that Polish people are just more hightrust+ pro social than the British.
I think both anti-littering and casual-littering are highly socially enforced more than anything the government does, and also have strong status-quo reinforcing mechanisms.
More options
Context Copy link
More high trust and pro social than the current inhabitants of London, which of course is mostly not British.
Per the most recent census, 59.3% of the population of London were born in the United Kingdom. The vast majority of these people are British, unless you are using "British" in some non-standard way which does not reflect the laws, customs, or practices of the United Kingdom.
British (as opposed to English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish) national identity was always civic and political from when it first became a thing in the 18th century. There is a reason why "I feel more British than English" is associated with left-establishment politics and "I feel more English than British" is associated with right-populist politics - it is the only question that predicted how people voted on Brexit better than age. (See https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-and-english-identity/ for poll results)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I doubt we even have any good data to disprove or approve on whether segregation is good. In part because of how much our housing market filters for school quality and prevents income level mixing. You would have data where the blacks in a 3% black school perform extremely well but their parents are paying $20k a year in property taxes so relatively high income. And then you would look at a 90% black school in West Baltimore and see that those kids do awful academically. The human brain just can’t process that much information especially when there will be academics promoting bad data that constantly needs refuted.
Relatedly I always wander if there is anything positive in the Florida school system which has very high Hispanic test scores. Are Florida Hispanics just filtered better for high income? In one sense they did get a huge amount of Cubans though that likely tilts heavily upper class though such a large percent it does include a lot of people. On the other end Miami is the capital of Latin America and draws the upper class in huge numbers.
For my tribe I want to say everyone should just copy Miami’s school system, but I am guessing a large amount of it is filtering.
That's not really true, we just have so much data on schools. There have been many programs to mix school districts in cities over the past 60 years, so we have a lot of data. Plenty of recent data too, for instance NYC adjusted school boundaries and implemented race quotas in it's elite schools just a few years ago.
A lot of Florida's hispanics are basically just Spanish speaking Europeans who lived in Cuba. James Franco got a lot of flack from hispanic actors for getting cast as Castro, but Castro had no non-European ancestry. In fact Castro's father and Franco's grandfather probably grew up less than 100 miles from each other.
Compare that to California which is getting a lot of Oaxaca natives these days who speak Spanish as a second language and are illiterate on prose literacy scores.
Red state back to basics education actually does very well at educating new arrivals. Texas does quite well once you control for ethnic makeup. Meanwhile the largest black - white disparity in student performance is in ultra blue Berkley. Teaching black students they can't ever succeed due to institutional racism is damaging.
More options
Context Copy link
Hispanic is also a loose and fuzzy category, so there might be some definitional games too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If your conclusion is "I think it's wise to try to emulate post-soviet [Moscow] conditions", it's time to go back and check your reasoning. Because just about any non-Russian (and not a few Russians) who didn't have the US government after them would prefer New York City at any time since WWII (including the 1980s) to post-Soviet Moscow.
Modern NYC? Maybe? The 80s NYC? Fuck no.
Moscow needs bigger and cheaper apartments, but is fine otherwise.
More options
Context Copy link
Many non-Russian people do live in Moscow and pass opportunities to immigrate, but it's mostly because of cultural and familial factors than anything else. Moscow before the retarded SMO had basically European level of living for the middle class and while it's still lags behind US like all the rest of Europe, you can choose to live there for the same reasons people chose to live in the latter and not the former.
More options
Context Copy link
If you gave me equal income opportunities I would rather live in
MoscowSankt Petersburg. Your argument proves too much, just because New York provides better opportunities does not mean all local policies there are better than in Moscow. In fact, New York can probably get away with much worse given the income disparity.But you can't get equal income opportunities, even by PPP. There's not even any support in the OP that the Moscow policies are better, only assertions.
It was a hypothetical. I am trying to say that a city can provide worse career opportunities while still having better policing policies. Providing the best opportunities and being the most attractive city does not imply that all policies are the best.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
AFAIK contemporary research has trouble actually showing advantages for the worst students, while there seem to be moderate negative effects for the best students. I have the impression that in a "strong" society, you can improve some of the worst performing groups by giving them help and good examples to follow while simultaneously harshly punishing, up to kicking out, troublemakers. On the other hand, if the troublemakers are not punished, they can drag down everyone so much that it overwhelms any advantage of exemplary behaviour or help from better students. But in the current climate this is not really investigable, so the research base is pretty bad, and the researchers are also far too biased to be trustworthy. There is also the "issue" that the current level of segregation isn't actually hard to overcome for a competent immigrant parent (in fact, highly educated immigrants basically end up in good schools by default without any effort, at least here), so the number of students that would improve in a better school is pretty low. Even low-education high-conscientiousness immigrants will leave bad schools quite fast.
More options
Context Copy link
Singapore does this by having housing so unaffordable that ~80% of people live in government subsidized housing, then setting approximately-proportional-to-general-population racial quotas in every housing block. For example, if you're looking to sell your apartment, but your building ownership is already >80% Chinese, then you're limited to non-Chinese buyers.
Interestingly, they also have quotas on permanent residents, presumably to encourage integration with citizens.
It's called the "Ethnic Integration Policy" and it's an interesting approach that obviously achieves its desired metric. I don't know enough to say if it manages to achieve anything beyond that.
Probably politically infeasible in most other countries.
With Singaporean integration, everyone had to integrate. The Anglo-Singaporean culture represented by LKY, S. Rajaratnam, etc, was foreign to the Chinese as the Malays and Indians. Now, Anglo-Singaporeanism is primarily a creation of the Chinese elite, sure, but housing was part of a package of military service, language and education reform, so on, that deserves to be analyzed as a type of internal colonization. The plan was cooked up by an elite intentionally seeking to suppress racial conflict and that had used questionably-legal means to suppress opposition and other civil society. Politically infeasible in other countries? Today's Singapore couldn't even do it - in today's politics you can see other technocratic, hard-headed but unpopular policies like open immigration and explicitly pro-corporate liberalism are starting to bend and buckle under public pressure. Specific to housing, Singapore has always sold property as 99-year leaseholds with rights reverting back to the government. This is a ticking time bomb under the government as the first generation of housing blocks start nearing that date, and the buildings are wearing out earlier than then - the next decade or two is going to have a large wave of these repossessions. We'll see how the government deals with that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was extremely populist compared to past policy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The things that cause this are low property taxes, much lower levels of affluence among Russian middle class and the lack of support for suburban-style living: the state has well-established plans for building districts of housing blocks along with the required infrastructure, including financing solutions for real estate developers and mortgage offers to potential buyers.
Despite that, people have been building single-family homes. When a few years ago mortgages for single family homes became a thing, the demand for them SURGED, it is so high that there simply aren't enough real estate developers to build all these houses. And all this without schools, clinics and malls.
Yeah it's true and I'm writing this from one of those recently built single-family houses. But I think this development isn't major enough, will be limited because of the lack of infrastructure and can be stopped by various government policies. Like mandating different flat plans and sizes, reinvigorating public transit in smaller cities and making personal houses even more expensive tax wise. I'm not necessarily advocating for this, but that and many other things can be done to keep people in cities(despite the growing uselessness of living close to work when everything can be done distantly).
Yeah, good luck convincing everyone that Euro-4 is the correct flat plan for a family with two children and not this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link