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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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It really doesn't seem like this is true, outside of specific contexts. Roe is dead. AA is gone. DEI is declining. Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign and nobody really cares (although maybe people realize he's just full of shit at this point). Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions. Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

AA is gone.

The Harvard admission statistics for 2024-5 strongly suggest otherwise.

DEI is declining.

  • The Democratic nominee for president brags about tripling federal government loans specifically to non-whites.
  • Her Vice Presidential nominee, as Governor of Minnesota, signed into law mandatory racial quotas for bodies disbursing state health and community welfare grants. (e.g. MN Statutes secs. 145.9285, Subd. 3; 145.987, Subd. 1). Of course, this already builds on existing "Ethnic Councils" established in 2017, explicitly charged to "work for the implementation of economic, social, legal, and political equality for its constituency" by lobbying the governor and legislature for set-asides, exercising oversight over proposed legislative and administrative changes, promoting racially-affiliated interest groups, and disbursing contracts. (MN Statutes sec. 15.0145)
  • Approximately one in five academic jobs requires an ideological litmus test of allegiance to DEI.
  • The Department of Education (pdf warning) spends a significant amount of effort on collecting detailed statistics on the racial and gendered breakdown of suspensions, expulsions, and law-enforcement referrals in schools, heavily-hinting that this is racial discrimination...but then tucks the tables with student offenses at the very end, and doesn't provide any details on who's actually doing the offending. In that report, by the way, the Department cites a 2014 "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened loss of federal funding if schools didn't punish black and brown kids less, regardless of their actual behavior, which is apparently still active.
  • The Department of Agriculture just doled out over a billion dollars in reparations-style payments to black farmers specifically.

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions.

Ah yes, Matt "I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing to do" Yglesias. Clearly he is being fully open and honest about his views, which have changed based on evidence which has convinced him to foreswear his most recent book, "One Billion Americans." (I am being sarcastic; I do not believe for a second that Matt is being honest).

Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

Ahhh, but remember - "her values have not changed."

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Plus there's the big one that you didn't even mention- that Harris was pretty obviously picked for DEI reasons. EG: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/875000650/pressure-grows-on-joe-biden-to-pick-a-black-woman-as-his-running-mate

No one has been willing to publicly push back on that at all, except for Trump (kinda) when he questioned her blackness. It's insane.

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Why just one case?

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

(Hopefully one that doesn’t fall into the base rate fallacy..)

Why just one case?

At least I provided a case, unlike the original, completely unsupported assertion.

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

Respectfully, no. Societal cohesion and solidarity is a fragile, fickle thing that we barely understand and do not know how to sustain across lengthy periods. Slapping a number on something doesn't necessarily mean that you're using the right statistic, or that the thing you're trying to measure is even actually legible with the methods and information at hand.

Statistics around illegal immigrants are notoriously unreliable, because many jurisdictions do not cooperate with federal immigration efforts, and illegal immigrants (for completely understandable reasons) are disproportionately likely to use falsified identity documents and avoid getting involved with state agencies, including law enforcement. We don't even actually know how many there are in the country - the media has been using the same number for appx. thirty years, across high and low migration periods alike.

Reasoning from examples has flaws, but at least we can draw direct lines from immigration to particular incidents, like that one.

Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.

As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.

Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me

“Oh, you don’t want your nation flooded with Haitian refugees? Got a source on why that’s bad? A peer reviewed, published government source?”

In fact, I’ll go further and say that this is an isolated demand for lack of rigor.

In a forum of people who read rationalists, in a subculture directly descended from blogs with names like “Less Wrong” and people who write long winded posts on logical fallacies,

That we should totally disregard an obvious day 1 of class example of a logical fallacy. Because hey, it’s against a group we tend not to like around here.

Isolated demand to let the fallacy against Haitans slide! We all know they’re bad anyway, it doesn’t really matter if we can prove it or not.

If I were to use the same tactic (one news article about a killer?) to show that conservatives are categorically dangerous, I’d get laughed out of the forum and for good reason. That’d just be ridiculous on the face of it.

Maybe one or two very patient mottizens would explain to me some of the very basics of how logical fallacies work. A few Scott Alexander posts and I’d be on my way having been educated.

Hooray for rigor! But, eh … here it’s about immigrants, and that’s kind of our thing around here. Why bring rigor to something we already know is bad? That’d be a total buzzkill.

Haiti scores 338 on the World Bank’s measure of Harmonised Test Scores, which is more than 1.8 standard deviations below the UK – the equivalent of 27 IQ points. So if Britain has an IQ of 100, Haiti has an IQ of 73.1, although other measures peg it at 67. I think that should be sufficient data then?

Ah, cool, that’s right about the estimated size of the Flynn effect

Roughly 30 IQ points

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Not at all isolated.

“Group X coming here has been a blood soaked affair!”

Um… source?

Does group X kill people at a higher rate than group Y, Z, A, B, or C?

Or are we just engaging in hysterics because it’s an out group?

If the data isn't published and accessible to the public in an easily parsable format, it's a bit disingenuous to do the "um... source?" thing.

So how do you know immigration is such a blood soaked affair?

Just going off preconceived ideas? You liked the vibe of how it sounds?

And does nowhere collect data on this? Just a complete black hole?

Meanwhile I’m able to find that the places that do report data on undocumented immigrant crime seem to typically report lower rates of crime than citizens.

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate

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From her campaign website:

Protect Civil Rights and Freedoms

Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe many fundamental freedoms are at stake in this election. They will fight to ensure that Americans have the opportunity to participate in our democracy by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts — laws that will enshrine voting rights protections, expand vote-by-mail and early voting, and more. Her Administration will also continue to protect Americans from discrimination, building on her work to secure $2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government. And as President, she’ll always defend the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. In 2004, she officiated some of the nation’s first same-sex marriages and as Attorney General, she refused to defend California’s anti-marriage equality statewide referendum. As President, she’ll fight to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.

The Equality Act explicitly adds protection against discrimination based on gender identity to existing federal anti-discrimination laws (titles II, III, IV, VI, VII, IX). That hardly seems like "sprinting away as fast as she can".

This mostly just seems to be about gay marriage, which even most Republicans are on board with by this stage.