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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10855 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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So I just read Lev Grossman's (of the Magicians fame) new book, The Bright Sword, and it was absolutely awful.

I absolutely loved The Magicians trilogy, and The Magicians itself is probably on my top ten all-time list. The Magicians worked extremely well as a post-modern critique of the magic-boarding school genre: turns out grinding at getting good at magic might suck just as much as other forms of school, especially when do you stuff like skip grades. The existentialism and angst that worked so well in the modern setting of the Magicians really doesn't fit in the King Arthur setting. I think part of this is because the two stories are not archetypally aligned: The Magicians is a story about overcoming decadence and hedonism in a society that's transitioning from adulthood to old age, King Arthur is a story about a traditional hero fighting back against the darkness is a society that's just starting to know itself (child to orphan transition). The beats that worked so well in The Magicians about ennui and meaninglessness just don't fit here: there's PLENTY to do, and the narration's suggestion otherwise is grating.

I think this archetypal misalignment kind of dooms the book, but The Bright Sword also has other serious problems. The plot is a mess: there is no clear arc, the characters just do stuff. Which was perhaps a deliberate attempt by Grossman to capture the disorganization (personally and politically) following the death of a great king. This unfortunately fell flat for me: the conclusion of every mini-arc felt random, unearned, and irrelevant as we moved on to the next adventure out of nowhere. Interspersed between these arcs we get some flashback chapters which I quite liked, but also messed with the pacing of the story.

I also really did not appreciate the insertion of "current political issue" into the themes of the book. The trans member of the round table was actually fine, although I wish the focus had been more on the conflicting gender roles rather than gender identity (our society's obsession with labels rather than actions/roles is a continual frustration for me). What was not fine was the rebranding of the Saxon invaders as "refugees", and the implication that the britons should have just let them in and embraced the resulting melting pot (with obvious implications for Current Year). This bourgeois attitude towards immigration misses all the suffering brought about by two groups of very different people competing for the same land, and implies that current worries about immigration are totally unfounded because it has happened so many times before. Yes it has, but it wasn't very fun for the native Britons (who basically no longer exist, and have not since the Norman conquest of Wales).

In contrast to my post last month about George R. R. Martin, I think understand the critique of post-modernism much better when it comes to this book. You can't just deconstruct a myth/legend layered with many generations of meaning from many different cultures and institute platitudes about current-year and expect it to deeply move peole.

I think that the Afghanistan war/occupation is not discussed enough. Perhaps we are all so used to government failure that we just nod our heads and ignore what happened over there.

The US occupied that entire country for 20 years. It spent an estimated $2.3 trillion. When the US went in there, the place was controlled by authoritarian Islamists who oppress women. Today, the place is controlled by authoritarian Islamists who oppress women.

People's sense of what is important is so delusional sometimes. Here in the US, people often argue over minor issues like who gets to go into what bathroom, or whether there are enough strong women in television shows. Meanwhile, the US taxpayer spent $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan, there was a major opportunity to actually do some real feminism, to actually reshape Afghan culture to make it more liberal, and it just didn't happen. I'm not sure how much it was even attempted.

I get that the original reason for occupying Afghanistan was 9/11, but the US was in there for 20 years. There is no way you can tell me that you can't reshape a society of just 40 million people when you're there for 20 years, you spend $2.3 trillion, and you have overwhelming military force. Societies have been forcefully reshaped in the past and they will be in the future. Take Germany or Japan for example.

Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets? People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works". It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing. Neutralizing Al Qaeda did not use up 20 years and $2.3 trillion. One can argue about whether foreign interventionism and nation building is good or bad, and there are good cases to be made for both sides, but that's not really my subject matter. My point is that since there was a supposed attempt at nation building over there, we at least should have gotten something out of it. If the taxpayer supports you to the tune of $2.3 trillion, and you achieve no nation building after 20 years despite having overwhelming military force, then it seems to me that the taxpayer has been massively ripped off.

Nobody discusses it anymore because it 's widely understood to have been a bad decision - there's no friction. The problems of Afghanistan and Iraq didn't disappear from US domestic politics. Obama arguably ran because he was untainted by Iraq, Hillary suffered because her selling point was foreign policy experience ("bad experience" as Trump said) when the entire US populace was angry or tired of dealing with these adventures and the lies their own governments spun about them for no gain.

Remember the GOP foreign policy establishment bashing their heads against Trump and being the ones who were dismissed by their voters? What do you think all of that was about? Both sides had challengers to the establishment on this but the GOP was utterly unable to fend them off because it was seen as the most guilty.

Societies have been forcefully reshaped in the past and they will be in the future. Take Germany or Japan for example.

These were advanced modern nations that had already done most of the work to build state capacity and a national identity (and the Soviets were around to play bad cop). We're talking about Afghanistan.

Did the US even try over there?

Yes. The Afghanistan Papers goes through the omnishambles that was the attempted development. Turns out, ancient problems of legibility and legitimacy don't disappear, even for the most powerful nation on Earth. There's a reason empires just didn't bother trying for effective control of some regions.

The US was dealing with a poor and alien culture with a weak central government and a limited view into things. There's all sorts of weird stories of money or the US military's efforts being wasted because the US government just had limited visibility (especially early on) into Afghanistan and its politics. No amount of money can help if it isn't being directly properly or the new institutions aren't accepted by the people.

We should expect this no? We see all sorts of corrupt countries being showered with oil or aid money and failing - even when they make real efforts - to reach developed world status. This hurts even major nations like Russia with an autochthonous elite that isn't living thousands of miles away. Rampant lying and corruption gave the central government a false view of its military readiness.

There's also probably just unavoidable tradeoffs between beating the Taliban and building a minimally viable state and attempting massive social engineering you wouldn't dare pull on your own people (like having a quota for female legislators). The US was at war with an apparently ineradicable insurgency and was trying to prop up a weak state and give it legitimacy but was also offending people and providing an incentive for corruption and nepotism in the name of feminism. Even America can't do everything at the same time.

I’ve always said this about the approach: we never wanted to act like we were in control or had any right to be in control. This is in contrast to the occupation of Japan in the aftermath of WWII. In Japan, we took control of everything: the media, schools, government, banned weapons, etc. we even banned aspects of culture that we decided were too militaristic. We almost banned Shogi which is a Japanese form of chess, but the arguments that it was pro democracy was convincing so it wasn’t banned. After a generation, Japan went from a militaristic dictatorship and empire to a parliamentary democracy in which the emperor hides in his palace and gives a couple of speeches a year. It went from being the land of Samurai and death before dishonor that didn’t believe in human rights to a country that is only recently considering rebuilding a serious military in response to China. It went from military to kawaii, from swords to anime.

Why? We had the will to do so. We decided to be in charge, we decided we had the right to dictate what parts of their culture they could keep and what had to change. We decided to take over the schools and decide what they learned. We decided how things would change. And after a generation, they did. In Afghanistan, we did no such thing. We didn’t ban child brides, we didn’t mandate a modern secular education system, we didn’t ban head coverings for women. We allowed girls to attend the same schools as the boys. That seems to be about it. Everything else stayed the same. And so it’s not really that surprising that a country that was never forced to accept the ideas of liberal democracy, secular education, human rights, or a de-Islam-ified culture went right back to the Taliban. They had no ideals to fight for, no model of justice and democracy that they thought worth the effort.

In short, we were too liberal and culturally sensitive to win the occupation. Too multicultural to believe that our own ideas were superior to those of medieval Muslims who saw women as property to be covered head to toe and not allowed any agency in their own lives. Too multicultural to believe in modern secular democracy as superior to rule by theocracy. As such imposing on them, even when their ideas are primitive and frankly horrifying was not allowed. They went for the Takiban because the Taliban was willing to create order by imposing its ideals.

The US was concerned about the Soviets and global communism when it got elbows deep in Japan. The US had no similar rival to fear to justify staying in Afghanistan.

It wasn't just a lack of will born out of some anti-colonial impulse; there was no interest. Americans would have been totally satisfied with a Germanicus-style punitive campaign.

This whole thing seems to have just been mission creep. If America had managed to corner and kill Bin Laden early on , would the US have insisted on bringing feminism and all that good shit?

Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets?

Morally, no; de facto, yes.

See, the way to make a great business in #currentyear isn’t to sell a product to consumers. That’s hard, and risky, and requires a lot of work. Instead, make a moral crisis and sell it to the government via social activism! Now, your endeavor is freed from annoying constraints like grounding in economic reality.

Note that it is entirely possible—and perhaps even optimal!—for participants in this myopic charade to not realize they are just engaging in parasitism with extra steps.

Did the US even try over there?

Yes.

Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets?

No.

People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works".

The only people I've personally met who would nod and smile at that characterization were not supporters of the ISAF coalition.

It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.

Why? The level of weirdness would be consistent with the weirdness of your preceeding three questions.

Ultimately, outrage is not an inherent response to policy failure. Outrage is not the same as anger, but even anger is not only response- disappointment, shame, disgust, contempt, mockery, and more are additional options, and there was (and still is) plenty of that to be found.

We did though... we had this debate for the entire 20 years. It went and on, it was miserable and depressing and no one seemed to offer any good solution until finally Biden pulled the plug on the whole ordeal.

No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.

Unfortunately, in doing so we also removed their government and created a power vacuum in one of the most violent and unstable countries in the world. Everyone kind of felt bad about that, as well as worried that this would lead to more recruitment of terrorists in the future, so there was a great deal of effort expended to try and keep the country peaceful and stable.

Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture! The people there are really, really religious, so a religious government like the Taliban had a lot of popular support. They're also very poor, so often there were no good options for local allies. If you shut down their money from Pakistan and bin Laden, that pretty much leaves Opium as their only source of money, which was controlled by the Taliban.

On the plus side, after retaking power the Taliban has started to act a little bit more like a real government and less like a terrorist organization. They're doing formal diplomacy with other countries, fighting the Islamic State, and seem to be cracking down on Opium production.

No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.

Occupying a country to find one person or even a handfull of Saudis and Egyptians is absurd overkill. Besides, the taliban were willing to cooperate to hand them over.

The issue is neocons and globalists can't really accept that there isn't a part of the world without feminism, hollywood movies and American imperialism. They rather spend 20 years bombing a meaningless plot of land than accept that there is a realm outside of the liberal paradigm.

Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture!

They managed to make the west woke. Admittedly it took a century but they assumed they could speed up the process with more advanced tech and military superiority. What was underestimated was the resolve and bravery of the Afghan people, who put up a 20 year long heroic defence.

no one seemed to offer any good solution

No, it's that the establishment was fanatically devoted to really bad ideas and refused to try anything different, @Dean outlined some of it. The bar was so low it was lying on the ground, they failed at literally the first step of nation building - have an army that will defend your nation. If they succeeded at that, none of what is happening would be happening, and the culture would be completely different relative to what the Taliban is imposing.

No, it's that the establishment was fanatically devoted to really bad ideas and refused to try anything different, @Dean outlined some of it.

Huh. I didn't even remember that post. Did you save it, or just go hunting for it?

I went hunting. When a post makes an impression I tend to remember some turn of phrase that helps me find it later, though in this case it was luck. Where you kept repeating "choice" I remembered you saying "decision", but luckily it popped up anyway on the second page of search results.

Rhetorical repetition theory works again!

Thanks for answering. I sometimes do that for the effect, and it's good to know it worked / was appreciated.

There is no way you can tell me that you can't reshape a society of just 40 million people when you're there for 20 years, you spend $2.3 trillion, and you have overwhelming military force. Societies have been forcefully reshaped in the past and they will be in the future. Take Germany or Japan for example.

Yes you can. There is a pretty big difference between forcing a country to change it's foreign policy and (and in Germany's case roll back internal politics by 15 years) and changing pretty fundamental parts of 1400+ of years of culture.

Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide, which i doubt Pakistan would have agreed to act as a staging ground for.

Consider how long it took for islam to really take hold in the middle east.

Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide, which i doubt Pakistan would have agreed to act as a staging ground for.

At the very least, it would have required taking over the education system by both controlling the curriculum and forcing children to attend it, to which your point still applies.

As a 'rule', you can force significant culture change in as little as a generation, but that also doesn't mean that you make the changes you intended to / wanted.

(A campaign of forced schooling under western tutelage would have likely both significantly negatively impacted the rural farmers who depended on their children for labor, causing major economic issues, and would have led to the Taliban/insurgents deliberately targetting schools for mass casualty attacks, with all the cultural impacts that normalized / endured school bombings might have.)

(A campaign of forced schooling under western tutelage would have likely both significantly negatively impacted the rural farmers who depended on their children for labor, causing major economic issues, and would have led to the Taliban/insurgents deliberately targetting schools for mass casualty attacks, with all the cultural impacts that normalized / endured school bombings might have.)

There's ways to do that on the cheap and ensure safety. Literally pay families to send young boys to military boarding schools as the first step.

There is a pretty big difference between forcing a country to change it's foreign policy and (and in Germany's case roll back internal politics by 15 years) and changing pretty fundamental parts of 1400+ of years of culture.

I'm not sure that Japan only got rolled back 15 years.

Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide.

Why would inculcating some semblance of patriotism, such that the Afghan army doesn't immediately collapse, require genocide?

I'm not sure that Japan only got rolled back 15 years.

It's been discussed before, but Japan had been modernising rapidly since the Meiji era. They wanted what the Americans had. Not all of it, but enough of it, and the Americans were careful to leave enough of Japanese culture intact that they could spin it as reform with American aid rather than straightforward subjugation.

Why would inculcating some semblance of patriotism, such that the Afghan army doesn't immediately collapse, require genocide?

At a guess, because the area called 'Afghanistan' is made up of different tribal groups who hate each other, and are only prevented from doing anything about it by tyrants with sufficient ruthlessness and firepower. Making Afghans pretend to be a country requires you to act like a Taliban warlord; making them actually patriotic would require ethnic cleansing of all the groups except the ones you've decided to support.

Making Afghans pretend to be a country requires you to act like a Taliban warlord; making them actually patriotic would require ethnic cleansing of all the groups except the ones you've decided to support.

I doubt it. Americans had control over the education system for 20 years, that's a whole generation, and we're not talking about implanting some galaxy-brained fourth-wave feminism, just basic nationalism that most other countries managed to move on to by similar means. Not to mention that you don't even need to do this to the entire country, you just need enough young men to hold the line against a bunch of angry goat herders.

If there was evidence that the US actually gave that an honest try, I might consider tribalism running in Afghan blood, but as it stands it looks like pure cope.

Americans had control over the education system for 20 years

What's even "the education system" in a notoriously poor and fractured country? It's not like everyone was going to some full K12 thing paid for by the US.

The US could totally win over everyone in a large circle around Kabul and still end up losing the war.

What's even "the education system" in a notoriously poor and fractured country?

When you've pushed 2 trillion dollars into it? It's whatever you want it to be.

"Money = outcomes" isn't even true in the American educational system. Not sure why it would be true in Afghanistan.

I think that fits better with my argument than yours. The reason money doesn't translate into results in America is because the elites are following terrible ideas. The reason why it didn't translate into result in Afghanistan is because the American elites in charge of it were following terrible ideas.

I thought you brought up Afghanistan's poverty to point out some material limit to what they could to, my point was that with the amount of resources that the US actually pulled there, there were no such material limits.

you just need enough young men to hold the line against a bunch of angry goat herders

Don't forget that the 'angry goat herders' i.e. the Taliban are the last group of young men that the US armed, organised and trained (to fight Russia).

I'll grant that it's possible to get, say, all the French or all the Germans to act like one country most of the time, but it's very difficult, especially when you have genocidal religious hatred and no history of deference to a state. Bismark managed it eventually, but it took a while and the Germans mostly got on all right already, and same with the French. The Brits and Americans managed it, but only at the cost of a very destructive civil war in each country, and both countries were at least somewhat used to accepting the existence of a central authority (I know the Confederacy were trying to leave, but they still accepted Federal government as real and relevant).

If there was evidence that the US actually gave that an honest try, I might consider tribalism running in Afghan blood, but as it stands it looks like pure cope.

Split the difference? I think the US strategy was bonkers from the start, but I also think it would be very difficult to do even if you tried properly.

Don't forget that the 'angry goat herders' i.e. the Taliban are the last group of young men that the US armed, organised and trained (to fight Russia).

So? As you say they were armed to fight the Soviets, and they were trained to fight as well - not trained to hold a western belief system.

Bismark managed it eventually, but it took a while and the Germans mostly got on all right already, and same with the French

Sure, but I'll repeat, it was 20 years, and with the amount of money that was spent, they could literally start buying young boys to propagandize them 24/7 in boarding schools.

Split the difference? I think the US strategy was bonkers from the start, but I also think it would be very difficult to do even if you tried properly.

Sure, that seems fair.

New Year, Same Old Culture War

At least 10 killed in New Orleans after driver ‘intentionally’ rams into crowd on Bourbon Street (CNN)

Apparently, "FBI Special Agent Aletha Duncan said the Bourbon Street attack is 'not a terrorist attack' in comments delivered after the mayor spoke." But then, later:

New Orleans mayor declares 'terrorist attack' on Bourbon Street, FBI confirms investigation (Fox)

Coulter's Law appears to be in force. As a reminder:

The longer we go without being told the race of the shooters, the less likely it is to be white men.

And indeed, this was a shooter, who died in a gunfight with cops... but so far it appears the ten deaths and dozens of injuries were vehicular, not firearm-related. Over on 8chankun (warning: images of death) it's claimed that "FBI Director Kash Patel states killer was 'Middle Eastern Descent'" but I don't see a link to direct evidence of that. I will be interested to learn whether it is a disinformation thing, or whether 8chankun is just better at reporting news than multiple multi-million dollar corporate news media outlets. Can a failed shooting preceded by successful vehicular homicide be used as ammunition (hah) in Second Amendment debates? Probably! Apparently at least one "explosive device" was also found?

There is something to be said for "wait and see," and indeed I expect to hear much more about this attack in the near future (unless, of course, we simply don't). Though clearly Special Agent Aletha Duncan did not seem to think there was any reason to "wait and see" when declaring, contra the mayor, that this was not a terrorist attack.

In unrelated news, Stocks just did something they haven’t done in nearly three decades--and in case you are unimpressed with CNN's clickbait headline,

back-to-back gains of over 20% is the best performance for the benchmark index since 1997 and 1998

Everything old is new again.

I went into the shop this morning and rolled my eyes when the front page of the Irish Independent referred to the perpetrator as a "Texas man". But later in the sub-heading he was mentioned by name. The online version of the article even refers to him as an "Islamic State-inspired killer". Perhaps, in Irish journalism, nature is healing?

It's time to start telling people to trust Trump's appointed law enforcement and national security experts. Sometimes you need to put civil liberties aside and trust the experts.

Low effort sarcasm communicates nothing but disdain and is not appreciated here.

I assume there's some joke I'm missing here, but you're aware that Trump is not the President at the moment, right? Personally, I think it would be good if we appeared to actually have a President at the moment, but we don't.

I think that was specifically in reference to Kash Patel

The FBI is now saying they don’t believe the driver acted alone; IEDs have been found in multiple other locations in the French Quarter; the FBI is searching for 3-4 additional suspects that were seen on security camera footage placing explosive devices.

This has been unconfirmed AFAIK

Is there any news on whether the explosion at Trump Tower in Las Vegas is connected, or is that just a regular electric car fire?

Edit: I’m seeing new footage that seems to indicate that the Tesla Cybertruck explosion was an intentional suicide attack.

Edit: ABC News says that authorities are investigating the Trump Tower explosion as “a possible act of terror”

Edit: Massive police response to reported hostage situation in Las Vegas

Cybertrucks are expensive, aren't they? Whoever the bomber was, they had money, they weren't some broke lowlife or refugee.

It was a rental, pretty clearly chosen for the political salience. The news is reporting that they loaded it with gas canisters and large firework-type mortar shells. Amusingly enough, I'm reading reports that the stainless steel panel construction of the truck contained and directed the blast, greatly minimizing the harm that might otherwise have been caused. It's notable in the "after" photos how little damage the truck's body sustained; I guess that's also evidence that firework mortars and gas canisters aren't that effective as car-bomb filler.

It is truly dark days we are living in if the average American (or Jihadi for that matter) doesn't know how to build a proper IED. The quality of education has clearly fallen off a cliff. What are we even teaching kids these days? 😉

I wonder if maybe the national response to Timothy McVeigh's bombing actually made it significantly harder to build an IED in the US. I wouldn't know though, I don't know much about weapons.

Yes, though it's less about weapons than regulation affecting coordination.

Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb was made with large amounts of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other elements, many of which would normally be seen together. It also occurred in 1995, where the internet was reaching a point to facilitate cross-country and cross-agency coordination, which is how an 'untraceable' purchase- the anomalous cash purchase of his vehicle- became the investigation's cue that he was a primary suspect (as opposed to someone whose vehicle might have been stolen for the plot).

This applies to other examples and cases, including drug processing. As a result, it's a pretty common practice internationally that stores that carry regulated materials of interest (ie truck bomb or illegal drug precursor inputs) have to maintain and report transactions of even legal/unrestricted items at certain thresholds. When certain thresholds or combinations are met- say you start buying tons of agricultural fertilizer when you aren't in the business of farming- then a system flag registers and later a regulator and/or investigator comes to ask a few questions, possibly with a warrant if you aren't feeling cooperative.

What this means for terrorism is that would-be terrorists have to resort to less and less capable alternatives to avoid automated detection thresholds, as the things more capable are also more regulated and easier to detect. Hence our fireworks car bomb rather than a fertilizer car bomb, or Britain facing knife-attacks rather than gun attacks. But these alternatives are less regulated precisely because they are less dangerous, and you get to a point where even actual IEDs- like to pressure cooker bombs used in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 kill fewer people (3) than just driving a vehicle into a crowd.

This is a similar effect from the role of domestic surveillance technologies used to limit the ability of terrorist cells, and leading to lone wolf terrorism.

If you can monitor mass communications, you can pick up the coordination messaging between group members.

If group members can't coordinate, either they find more secure forms of communication- losing the benefits of the higher-tech comms (such as coordination over distances, access to experts/advisors)- or they decrease the number of members in a group (fewer members = fewer potential comms).

Since the lowest number of members is 1- who by definition has no need to actively coordinate with anyone else- this makes that person very hard to detect in the coordination phase. Typically reports of found would-be lone wolfs either find them in the radicalization phase (where you watch whose talking with radicalizers), or in the preparation phase (where they get caught due to poor tradecraft due to not having the coordination with advisors on what to do and how).

Start stacking these effects together, and gradually you go from 'a group of middle eastern terrorists coordinating how to hijack a series of airplanes simultaneously' to 'guy rents truck.'

Oh, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Amusingly enough, I'm reading reports that the stainless steel panel construction of the truck contained and directed the blast, greatly minimizing the harm that might otherwise have been caused. It's notable in the "after" photos how little damage the truck's body sustained

Perhaps that makes up for the time the window smashed during the initial showcase. I don’t know how you could market it though.

That's the cybertruck that also appeared to have been filled with fireworks, right?

Video of the incident

Looks like fireworks. Some commenters wonder if this is the way exploded car batteries burn.

Some commenters wonder if this is the way exploded car batteries burn

No. Lithium-ion cells tend to "vent with flame" -- that is, the burning electrolyte shoots out of an engineered weak spot (or a damaged spot) in the case, with flames and a lot of white smoke. More like a rocket than a bomb. There are lots of videos on YouTube, and I've accidentally lit one off myself.

If the latest news from the past few minutes is accurate, the driver indeed turns out to have a Muslim-sounding name, and online Noticers were correct in identifying the wrapped up flag as an ISIS one:

The suspect accused of plowing a truck through a crowd on Bourbon Street is 42-year-old Shamsud Din Jabbar, according to a law enforcement source.

The source said he was carrying an ISIS flag in the truck.

There’s also at least one photo of the man lying dead in the street, and he does appear brown (or black American convert, as some commenters claim?) and bearded.

Right on cue is a Reddit comment to the tune of “that’s what upsets me most about an Islamic truck-ramming, backlash against peaceful Muslims”:

Damn. My heart to all middle-eastern/south-asian folks today who will bear the racist fall-out of this mad man’s evil move.

Roughly +15 net upvotes. A pesky wrongthinker asks:

I mean shouldn't you heart be with the victims?

Someone else replies:

Some people have enough heart to go around.

I’m not sure I can figuratively roll my eyes any harder.

And, of course, lots of seething about Trump, Vance, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, MAGA, Fox News, etc. in that thread.

To quote myself:

I distinctly recall seeing, on the same day of the stabbing [in November 2022 which precipitated the Dublin riots], a commenter on the /r/ireland subreddit saying something to the effect of: "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?

Rather amazing that after supporting jihadism since 2003 the US hasn't been hit harder than it has. The US meddling in Syria and the war in Iraq are directly to blame for ISIS, especially combined with operation timber sycamore with the US arming jihadists.

These terrorist attacks have nothing to do with middle eastern conflicts, although I know leftists are desperate to draw connections between the two in order to say Americans deserve it somehow

Seriously, how does some guy driving a car into a crowd end up being connected to some resistance groups being given guns? If anything the jihadists would be grateful to America, if they weren’t under the influence of a monomaniacal death cult

There have been almost no Islamic terrorist attacks in the United States since 2017 compared to the 20 years before that. It could be a coincidence that we get the biggest one in 10 years immediately after Assad's Syria falls, but I have suspicions.

I mean, the jihadists(or at least their western followers) are clearly batshit crazy, so maybe stop trying to ascribe logical and rational motives.

Islamism is internally consistent, not crazy, it's just evil.

Western blacks who convert to Islam in prison (not sure if this is the case here, but it seems quite likely) generally didn't pick up the internally consistent version of Islam. Batshit crazy is a better model than smart-evil or intellectually-coherent-but-wrong for that group.

IIRC their hostility to America started with an Egyptian named Qutb who came to America on scholarship, and basically was an incel who hated that Americans dated and danced and listened to jazz music.

All of these things are arguably or not so arguably literally condemned by Islam, though.

And thus he could have simply concluded that Muslims shouldn’t be in the West and banned his followers from using Western media or visiting the west. I mean a lot of the Woke stuff is anti-Christian as well, and most serious Christians avoid exposure to that kind of media and so on. They don’t drive through crowds.

I mean a lot of the Woke stuff is anti-Christian as well, and most serious Christians avoid exposure to that kind of media and so on. They don’t drive through crowds.

Christianity also gets pissed on and blasphemed in its home countries a million times a day in media and culture, nobly turning the other cheek year after year as it shrinks. I'm not religious myself, I'm just saying it's not totally inscrutable why a fanatical Muslim might not consider it an example to emulate.

These terrorist attacks have nothing to do with middle eastern conflicts

How would fighting multiple wars in the middle east not be connected to blow back? Having large well organized and well equipped jihadist groups can very well cause terrorism in other countries. 9/11 wouldn't have happened without the CIA-asset Bin Ladin, multiple attacks in Europe have been conducted by people trained in the middle east. The ideological inspiration, propaganda and connections between jihadists in the middle east and the west do exist. Terrorism increased markedly in Europe during ISIS hay day in Syria.

The neo-con project, mass immigration and terrorism are intertwined.

There is quite literally a direct line of causality between deBaathification in Iraq and ISIS. Purging the Iraqi military and public service resulted in thousands of professional soldiers and officers as well as otherwise peaceful professionals like graphic designers, accountants, intelligence analysts, etc being unemployable overnight and so they joined up with fledgling ISIS and that's how it became such a competent organization so fast. This was even predicted by US analysts and foreign policy writers at the time, but Rumsfeld et al proceeded any way and only rescinded after most of the damage was done.

So "otherwise peaceful" but now unemployable Baathist graphic designers, accountants and intelligence analysts just naturally sign up with ISIS because, well, what else would they do?

Shouldn't we be thinking of people like this in similar terms as we might view southern Confederate sympathizers during and after the American Civil War?

just naturally sign up with ISIS because, well, what else would they do?

Why don't you try to consider it from their perspective? Almost overnight, their careers are ended and are made unable to support themselves and their families and their own government and fellow people subjected to tremendous violence and destabilization more or less for no good reason. Why wouldn't that radicalize a person?

This was both the anticipated and actual outcome of deBaathification.

Shouldn't we be thinking of people like this in similar terms as we might view southern Confederate sympathizers during and after the American Civil War?

You mean we should have extended them a blanket pardon conditional on an oath of loyalty? Yes, I think that would have been the ideal outcome and may have stopped Iraq from sliding toward Iran puppet-state status by having continuity and more robustness in its institutions.

Some people have enough heart to go around

Of course redditors would immediately understand the problem with this if after Dylan Roof’s shooting you had said “Damn. My heart to all White men today who will bear the racist fall-out of this mad man’s evil move” Most people just lack any self awareness or non-object level reasoning ability.

Edit: I know this is a lame boomerism “Imagine if the situations were reversed” but I can’t help it

"Another mass shooting, law-abiding gun owners hardest hit" is something that you do kind of hear in the right spaces, and is also pretty true...

“Ban cars” or the like is indeed a common in-joke among crimethink corners of interweb whenever some Truck of Peace makes incidental contact with pedestrians.

For much of today, the top thread (other than stickied ones) on the New Orleans subreddit was calling for cars to be banned from the French Quarter.

To the extent it's lame, it's only lame because progressives insist it's lame, nor do they have a counter for it beyond "it isn't the same... because it just isn't, okay?!" and just-so explanations. A related example would be "one joke."

Even for chronic Problematic wrong-thinkers like me who are well-initiated and relatively inured to this stuff, it can be jarring to see what sentences look like when they get "find and replace"'d for Who? and/or Whom?

Here's another one:

To add, in light of this I hope that people will be kind to their Arab and Muslim neighbors in the NOLA area.

If the Dylann Roof incident had happened recently, without prompting it wouldn't occur to me to make Norm-pilled jokes along the lines of:

in light of this I hope that people will be kind to their White neighbors in the Charleston, SC area.

Yet people say this kind of feel-good, hugboxxy shit in earnest. Reality defeats parody.

A major problem with this madlib is that the second one about being nice to "white neighbors" is somewhat nonsensical because it is now unclear who exactly "people" are. In the one about Muslims, "people" is clearly everyone non-Muslim (probably mostly presumed to be white); but in the one about whites, it is exactly these whites who are the main target audience, i.e., normal "people". A better madlib might be regarding Republicans in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riots or police officers in the aftermath of some shooting controversy. For me, it is ultimately glib rather than pithy.

As I wrote, the second one would be a joke, but even if playing both statements straight I find your quibbling to be unconvincing.

A major problem with this madlib is that the second one about being nice to "white neighbors" is somewhat nonsensical because it is now unclear who exactly "people" are

Sounds like an isolated demand for gerrymandering. Why not "people" being everyone, or at least "people" being presumably white Americans as in your non-Muslim specification? I suppose it may indeed be too tall an ask for black or latino Americans to be "nice" to white Americans when it comes to crime, rhetoric, etiquette, net-tax transfers.

There are tons of self-hating white Americans who simp for non-Asian minorities, or at least those who exhibit racial out-group preferences.

To the extent it's lame, it's only lame because progressives insist it's lame, nor do they have a counter for it beyond "it isn't the same... because it just isn't, okay?!" and just-so explanations. A related example would be "one joke."

I have felt a bit "yeah yeah, same old hypocrisy as always" when encountering one of these situations in the past, but a) I agree that the complete neutering of it as a meme feels astroturfed, in the sense that I question the loyalties of those who are most vocally opposed to it and b) I have come to the conclusion that if I have to notice this shit, so does everyone else.

The reason "imagine if the situations were reversed" is lame is that it's impotent, not that it's wrong.

A dose of reality is never "impotent".

No, it’s useful to occasionally shake one back into objectivity and away from the prevailing frame.

There is a Youtube channel under that name and he does seem to be a black American convert, rather than an immigrant.

Thanks; found it. It’s a beehive of activity in the comments section of his one video.

Top comment:

Who’s watching in 2025?

🤣

Other amusing comments:

0 comments in 4 years. 1000 comments in 30 minutes. Gotta love the internet.

Fastest growing YouTube channel of 2025.

just subscribed can’t wait to see your future content!

Yo Shamsud, why haven’t you returned the truck yet?

“Fierce negotiator”

I find the finger-pointing about who called it what kind of attack and how quickly certain details when out in the several hours immediately following a shooting like this profoundly petty and mean. Once people are actually awake and have had a little while to sift through some reports, there is often plenty to criticize, but it's tautologically true that you would always be able to criticize the first few reports for being incorrect about some details and/or too reticent.

You right that when something like this happens, people rush out their hot takes and are frequently wrong, and it would behoove everyone to wait and see what the facts are.

That said, it's hard not to Notice which facts are very hastily suppressed. I mean, the people on the scene presumably saw the guy who did it. It appears the authorities quickly wrapped up the ISIS flag so it couldn't be photographed. And the FBI hastily issued it "Not terrorism" report without, apparently, waiting to see if this was accurate. I can kind of understand this - if it turns out the guy was an American convert with no actual connection to ISIS, for example, we don't want everyone screaming "ISIS attacked us!" But it sure does feed the Coulter's Law narrative.

It appears the authorities quickly wrapped up the ISIS flag so it couldn't be photographed.

Alternatively, the guy himself covered his flag to conceal his intentions on the way in, and then neglected to unfurl it in the heat of the moment.

it's tautologically true that you would always be able to criticize the first few reports for being incorrect about some details and/or too reticent

I'm less interested in the incorrectness per se, than in the directionality of it, and what that tells us about the people involved in supposedly reporting "facts." Time can lend clarity to matters like this, but it also gives people opportunities to seize the narrative, sanitize it, build consensus, etc. I don't see any clear way to get the benefits of immediate versus eventual reporting both, without also taking on some of the drawbacks of both.

Indepedent of the race split, we would also get a huge gender split which I find interesting. (And would we possibly get an overrepresentation of nonbinary individuals?)

Let's assume a complete meritocracy based on SAT scores. According to this, the admitted students in Yale have an average SAT score of 1540. Since we disregard anything else now though, it will probably be even higher. However, at the 1400–1600 SAT range we already have 6% women and 9% men. Since we know the tail end of the IQ distribution is longer for men, and 1540 is almost in the upper quartile of 1400 to 1600, we would probably get a distribution of less than 30% women.

As a side note, according to this the average SAT of someone putting "Another/ No Response" as gender is 1067 in comparison to 1029 for men and 1018 for women. Huh, I wonder why that is. Few explanations that come to my mind are politically correct.

Part of the answer is probably that being smart is correlated with thinking that being asked for your gender on a test is stupid and irrelevant. I'm not necessarily saying that it is stupid and irrelevant, but I could easily imagine the teenage me putting "Another / No Response" instead of "Male" on the question just because my attitude to the question would likely have been "Fuck you, why do you give a shit?". Also, some people might just put that answer as a joke. There are very many smart people who are annoyed by schooling and SAT tests and would enjoy giving the whole thing a middle finger.

We can conclude that there are a lot of white and Asian men who are not getting the academic degrees they would get in a meritocracy. Then the question becomes where do these men end up and how to invest in these sectors. Typically high status low paying jobs such as author, human rights lawyer, journalist, professor etc are being ethnically cleansed of white men while other elite institutions are having an under representation of white men. These men are probably not all giving up on life just because they didn't get into Yale.

They go to some other university and are later working professionals.

People are saying the trades but that's delusional. People who apply to Yale are going to go to a safety school, not drop out of college all together.

Men just in general have a lot of options that don’t depend on college available to them. Middle class Americans tend to discourage their daughters from military enlistment(reasonably in my view), and women don’t make it in the trades.

It’s no tragedy to be making bare six figures(that’s still what, top five percent) with a house and a family.

Men just in general have a lot of options that don’t depend on college available to them. Middle class Americans tend to discourage their daughters from military enlistment(reasonably in my view), and women don’t make it in the trades.

Well, women have a lot of options men don't have, such as merely existing and Meeting Someone who makes any financial concerns go away for them. College can aid in finding such a man, but it's hardly a necessary nor sufficient condition.

It’s no tragedy to be making bare six figures(that’s still what, top five percent) with a house and a family.

Chael Sonnen describes here the horrors of coming from a family where, in some years, his father barely made six figures.

Well, women have a lot of options men don't have, such as merely existing and Meeting Someone who makes any financial concerns go away for them.

Many men also have that option, it's just that, like the women in question, they have to be willing to have sex with women whom they are not very attracted to, or not attracted to at all. One of the most common types of drama stories from low-income communities, for example, is "I pay the bills of this guy I'm fucking and he doesn't even commit to me".

These men are probably not all giving up on life just because they didn't get into Yale.

My guess is that many of them go into professions with higher pay but lower status, skilled trades, HVAC, property and construction (all roles), B2B sales, corporate roles at medium to large companies that aren’t Fortune 500s with woke hiring programs, many go into tech.

A guy who has a 1500+ and doesn't get into Yale doesn't go into trades, he goes to U of either in his own state or with the state adjacent to his waiving out of state tuition. I know, I am such a person. I got rejected by Ivies and went on full ride to an out of state, state school. Then I got a full ride to a different law school.

I am in an industry without many H1Bs, but people a half or quarter std below me are exactly the sort of people the recent H1B kerfuffle was about. Maybe they merely got a half scholarship to engineering school and merely graduated with a 3.7 instead of a full ride and 3.9. Those Americans are perfectly capable of doing the job. I worked with them on many projects.

Not that such kids can't go into HVAC. But that is kinda silly long term. Unless you figure out how to run a business, HVAC blows out your back at 55 almost guaranteed. Then where are you?

Trades pay gets massively exaggerated- we get teacher money for the most part, except the guys who work 100 hour weeks.

That being said, teachers definitely make a living wage, and ‘living wage, plus dating opportunities with dumber than you women, plus the ability to live in a shitty neighborhood with no problems’ is an appealing pitch for more men than women by a long shot.

a shitty neighborhood with no problems

?

An artifact of the audience, to live in a clean well ordered suburb in a southern or midwestern city is considered "shitty" by most of of the users here because it is naturally "lower status" than living in a condo in New York or LA. That the latter is far more likely encounter litteral shit/feces on the sidewalk than the former is just a fun bit of irony.

The difference between a "shitty" nieghborhood, and a shit nieghborhood.

I recall reading the observation on this forum and on Reddit that such suburban living combines all the disadvantages of urban and rural living. Maybe that’s what these users have in mind? The lack of walkable neighborhoods and third places, your neighbors being boorish and boring etc?

A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values because these two qualities work in tandem with intelligence to produce meritorious results. I doubt Alex Berenson was the smartest person at Yale by testing, but his temperament enabled him to confront the establishment on COVID, making him more valuable than his peers. The reporter who pressed on the Epstein story, Julie Brown, is an old woman and attended Temple University, but for some reason was the only one of her journalistic peers to pursue something which many of them hid. Edward Snowden went to community college. Andrew Norfolk, who uncovered the grooming gang scandal, went to Durham University.

With every job there are moral decisions that require certain values and temperamental qualities. If these are lacking then there are huge civilizational costs. I don’t know if a Vivek Ramaswamy has these optimal qualities. I don’t know if Asian students are temperamentally or culturally disposed to risk their reputation to fight against a corrupt power structure or official. I would argue that their culture is too credential-oriented, results-oriented, and conformist for that. There should be more studies so that we are absolutely sure that “relatively new” immigrant groups have the inner qualities that are required for influential positions in society. Maybe the studies will show that Asian students are actually more likely to have these qualities, I have no idea, but I’m sure the SAT doesn’t measure them.

A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values

That is by definition not a meritocracy.

Nothing in the definition of meritocracy says that the only merit to be considered is standardized test scores.

No, of course not. But temperament and cultural values are not part of academic merit, and therefore have no place in a meritocracy for academia.

Standardized test scores are also not really a part of academic merit, they are just a proxy for academic merit. The only actual metric for academic merit would be one that measures the extent to which someone produces actual academic results like innovating new historical approaches or proving a math theorem, etc.

But that's true only if you think of academia as solely focused on raw intelligence -- and it isn't. Even restricting ourselves to traits that provide success in raw academic pursuits, it's totally necessary to evaluate someone's conscientiousness, grit, and mental stability. In fact, I would argue evaluating these things is the whole point of college, in addition to helping meritorious students learn something.

I know no shortage of incredibly smart people with high test scores who underachieve, in both academic and professional pursuits, because of low conscientiousness or mental health problems. Any definition of academic merit that doesn't account for them in some way is of little value.

a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit

Merit:

a praiseworthy quality

character or conduct deserving reward, honor, or esteem

I would also argue that a demonstrably non-corrupt disposition would fall under ability’s “competence in doing something”.

This is just sophistry. The criteria for merit in an academic institution does not include culture and the like. Meritocracy in college admissions can include academic merit besides SAT scores, but it cannot include the criteria you are asking for.

Not necessarily; it depends on your definition of merit.

By way of analogy (which sadly is no longer on the SAT), we can say highest-SAT-score-ism : meritocracy :: utilitarianism : consequentialism

Consequentialism says that one should act so that the consequences/outcomes of one’s actions are maximally good, but does not itself define what it means for an outcome to be “good”. Utilitarianism is one specific form of consequentialism in which “good” is defined as “utility (of all people in the world, e.g.)”

You know that you sound exactly like the woke left when you're making excuses for why we shouldn't just use SAT scores in admitting people. It's the whole "Asians have bad personality" thing again. With a few rounds of find/replace we can turn your post into something only a highly woke left winger would agree with.

Are you familiar with the studies on why East Asians are less likely to be CEOs, and that the prevailing theories involve personality? Who is your favorite Asian comedian? Asians should be overrepresented among comedians because of their high IQ, unless, of course, there are personality differences and comedy revolves around challenging social convention in novel ways. If I were to say that certain African ancestry populations commit more crimes because they have a MAOA gene linked to aggression which then influences their temperament, would you consider me “woke left” because it doesn’t show up on an SAT?

If you believe in human biodiversity then it is reasonable to assume that different populations have different temperaments, because temperaments are simply general behavioral tendencies informed by genes x culture. East Asian conformist-collectivist culture, for instance, developed alongside rice cultivation and collective waterway management which induced different genes and cultural values than wheat cultures:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44770-w

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292121001318

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8371358/

This is a generally unexplored area. India is corrupt as hell, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that it is corrupt because the people there are corrupt. If the people are corrupt then this indicates temperamental or cultural value differences. Just from the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India

A study conducted by Transparency International in 2005 recorded that more than 62% of Indians had at some point or another paid a bribe to a public official to get a job done.[2][3] In 2008, another report showed that about 50% of Indians had first hand experience of paying bribes or using contacts to get services performed by public offices

In the absence of any good studies on this topic (or that I simply don’t know about them), for now I’ll trust my instincts for determining people that I think are trustworthy and virtuous. Someone like Tristan Harris has facial expressions, gestures, and intonation which immediately convey trust to me. I can feel that he genuinely feels for others, and it’s no surprise to me that he was our best whistleblower for social media algorithms despite most employees at FAANG being Asian. Patrick Bet David, Ramaswamy, and Siriam Krishnam… not so much.

I mean, normie upper middle class women are also underrepresented among successful comedians. Entirely possible this is just culture(no coincidence the first really successful woman comedian was Ellen, not exactly a proper lady).

I don't follow how pointing out to a difference between men and women lends itself to the argument "it's just culture".

I guess you're not familiar with Phyllis Diller... or any number of others.

Entirely possible this is just culture(no coincidence the first really successful woman comedian was Ellen, not exactly a proper lady).

Carol Burnett and Joan Rivers both have her beat by decades. (Whoopi Goldberg also found massive success several years before Ellen did.)

Lucille Ball's zombie waves hello. Although she never did standup.

Right, I was sticking to standups. If we’re expanding it to women who got famous doing comedic acting, I’m sure there were others before Lucy. I’m not super familiar with the big stars of vaudeville and radio, but I imagine there were women among them. (Gracie Allen comes to mind.)

East Asians and South Asians are on opposite ends of the verbal IQ spectrum. For example, South Asians are overrepresented among comedians and in Hollywood, increasingly in journalism and literature too. The higher castes appear to have very high verbal IQ, as @BurdensomeCount suggests.

Speaking as an East Asian - in my experience our verbal abilities as a group are so strikingly poor that I sometimes wonder that people don't generally think that we are kinda dumb. All the more so since verbal intelligence is the most apparent form of intelligence; you generally aren't going to be able to judge someone's math skills in casual conversation. In the workplace, among friends, at school, I find it hard not to notice the general inability of otherwise competent Asians (including myself) to put together coherent, grammatical sentences on the fly like everyone else does. Sometimes one has the pleasure of meeting startlingly articulate people. They are never East Asian. I'm not sure I can name a single very articulate East Asian. Even writers I enjoy, like Dan Wang, turn out to be not great at speaking. On the other hand there are plenty of very articulate black public intellectuals, for instance (and I say that not in a condescending way).

I'm not sure I can name a single very articulate East Asian.

Francis Fukuyama and John Yoo come immediately to mind.

But (returning to the object-level) a genius verbal IQ is only meritorious if the person who has it also has prosocial genes and cultural values. As a thought experiment, we can imagine that a sociopath with a high verbal IQ can do a lot of damage to a country, and on the other end a person with a lot of empathy and a high verbal IQ can do a lot of good. The latter person is probably doing groundbreaking journalism, or explaining science to the masses, or taking corporations to court pro-bono, or is an incredible psychiatrist or Scott Alexander type. The former people are doing, I don’t know, political propaganda and “thank you for smoking” stuff and purposely not helping his psychoanalytic clients.

In between the extremes of “sociopath” and “the aunt you have who cried when looking at photos of refugees” (to pick a personal example) there’s probably an amount of prosociality which is greater than some quantity of IQ. I have no idea what the breakdown is, but thinking about it a little bit more, the emotional dimension to prosociality probably necessitates guilt. A person who is apt to feel guilt at their actions is more apt to behave prosocially, because guilt comes in regardless of external surveillance, and shame only comes in when there’s a risk of being caught. Although this wouldn’t explain Japan, which is presumably a shame culture, so maybe back to the drawing board…

I don't think you need to go back to the drawing board, I'd say you have nailed the prerequisite prosocial emotion of an honour culture and it necessarily works differently in a shame culture, where shame takes the top spot. It doesn't fully align, but honour cultures tend to privilege internal locus of control, while shame cultures privilege external locus of control.

But consider —

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200114-why-japan-is-so-successful-at-returning-lost-property

In a study comparing dropped phones and wallets in New York and Tokyo, 88% of phones “lost” by the researchers were handed into the police by Tokyo residents, compared to 6% of the ones “lost” in New York. Likewise, 80% of Tokyo wallets were handed in compared to 10% in New York

The study occurred in 2002, so before the surveillance state. The actions could not be purely motivated from the threat of social judgment. This seems to indicate that the Japanese internalize their shame/honor to such a high degree that it’s intrinsically motivated. But if shame can be so intrinsically motivated, then there are limited practical consequences to a guilt/shame distinction.

Cultural differences are real and meaningful, but in this case I wonder if the difference in honesty looks bigger due to a difference in norms about how to return lost property. Unless I were in a small town, handing a lost wallet in to the police probably wouldn't occur to me, and then it would likely be option two or three.

Asian Comedian? Romesh Ranganathan fits the bill pretty well. The same reasons you give for why East Asians are less likely to be CEOs also apply to explain why high caste South Asians are more likely to be CEOs than whites, but the nativists don't then turn around and accept that as proof of their inferiority, even though they freely apply that logic to why East Asians are inferior.

Someone like Tristan Harris has facial expressions, gestures, and intonation which immediately convey trust to me.

Really? The first thing I thought of after seeing his oversized pointy ears and nose and those large round brown fully circular eyes was a partially shaved Macaque monkey, someone who's basically completely harmless. Now he's very intelligent based on the way he speaks, but I think you may be conflating intelligent + harmless for trustworthy which isn't the same thing. I don't get a trustworthiness reading either way (positive or negative) from the first few minutes of your linked clip beyond the fact that in the 5th minute he namedrops Marc Andreessen who is someone I'm positively predisposed to which makes me more likely to trust Tristan Harris.

This is exactly why I think the term "woke right" has value. It perfectly describes the sort of person who'll make standard progressive arguments with one or two ethnicities swapped around.

See also people who are super hbd-based when it comes to explaining why black americans perform worse than white, but who immediately reinvent some form of systemic racism against whites when it comes to explaining the higher performances of asians/Jews (i.e. talking about "rote learning" or "in-group preferences").

Sure, for example it's easy to find Nazis who think that Jews aren't actually smarter than non-Jewish whites on average despite the overwhelming evidence for the fact that Jews actually are smarter than non-Jewish whites on average.

That said, I don't think talking about "rote learning" or "in-group preferences" of East Asians is necessarily the same phenomenon. With some commenters, it is, but not with all. There is a real phenomenon to be explained of why it is that East Asians are not more successful than whites despite testing higher on various measures of intelligence. Jews, clearly, are more successful than non-Jewish whites on average, so in their case there is no phenomenon to explain. The idea that standardized tests make East Asians seem smarter than they actually are in the real world seems like a plausible explanation to me. It's not necessarily just some systemic racism theory.

Quelle surprise, just as everyone remotely intelligent predicted, the SCOTUS case did nothing.

It is well past time to end the tax exempt status for these universities. If anything, I want to see a higher tax rate…

With Trump coming into office, won’t he now have ammunition for his justice dept to go after them? Will he? Maybe we need to send in the National Guard so that Ivy leagues will respect Civil Rights if whites and Asian students

On what basis? The ruling said they can’t nakedly discriminate against Asians on the basis of race, it didn’t demand that they only consider meritocracy (in any case they still clearly have legacies, athletes etc). If Harvard wants admission to be dependent upon some nebulous character assessment that is completely legal unless there is recorded evidence that the assessors involved openly and explicitly discriminate, which there certainly won’t be from now on.

To stop it congress would have to pass a law mandating (for example) that all colleges that receive federal funding must use solely x meritocratic test to determine admissions. I have my doubts that would pass in any event, regardless of what happens with the filibuster.

it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok. its even more messed up because i'm pretty sure i've seen them make statements into the public record saying this was exactly what they were planning to do.

Disparate impact is very powerful in Title VII cases that govern employment issues (hence why justice can sue police departments for using IQ tests to hire cops). When it comes to colleges it’s more vague, because the ‘purpose’ of admitting a student isn’t clear (is it to have a diverse class, is it to create the most successful professionals, to produce the highest quality academics, to have a good time and make friends).

it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok.

No, this isn't the case. The court in Griggs explicitly accepted that Duke Power was NOT using proxies to derive their desired racial preference. That would have been illegal without accepting "disparate impact" as being a violation in itself.

The Court of Appeals held that the Company had adopted the diploma and test requirements without any 'intention to discriminate against Negro employees.' 420 F.2d, at 1232. We do not suggest that either the District Court or the Court of Appeals erred in examining the employer's intent; but good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as 'built-in headwinds' for minority groups and are unrelated to measuring job capability.](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Company/Opinion_of_the_Court)

The court in Griggs explicitly accepted that Duke Power was NOT using proxies to derive their desired racial preference

"If the court accepts that, than the court is a ass — a idiot."¹

The Wonderlic test was first written in 1939; Duke Power Co. only adopted it as a requirement on the same day they could no longer legally discriminate directly on the basis of race.

The case should have fallen under the doctrine of noli meiere in cruro et dicere pluviam.

¹Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.

The Wonderlic test was first written in 1939; Duke Power Co. only adopted it as a requirement on the same day they could no longer legally discriminate directly on the basis of race.

...So on the day the law said they could no longer screen by race, they stopped screening by race and started screening by IQ test. And this proves to you that they were still screening by race, because they... complied with the law to stop discriminating by race?

What screening method should they have switched to, in your view?

...So on the day the law said they could no longer screen by race, they stopped screening by race and started screening by IQ test. And this proves to you that they were still screening by race, because they... complied with the law to stop discriminating by race?

The fact that they explicitly discriminated by race as long as they could legally do so indicates mens rea; that they sought to exclude Black Americans for being Black Americans.

What screening method should they have switched to, in your view?

The same method they used to screen white people prior to the Civil Rights Act.

@The_Nybbler:

Ass or not, the court accepted it. Perhaps they felt Duke Power was not using the Wonderlic as a proxy for race, but had been using race as a proxy for what the Wonderlic measures.

That would have been somewhere in the vicinity of a plausible conclusion if, sometime between 1939 and 1964, Duke Power Co. had started requiring an IQ test for all applicants and stopped considering their race. The fact that they made the change not when the Wonderlic test was introduced, not when overt racial discrimination was becoming frowned upon, not when the Civil Rights Act passed Congress, but at the very last moment they thought they could get away with, points toward the grown-up equivalent of hovering one's finger 5 mm from someone's face while saying "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!".

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Ass or not, the court accepted it. Perhaps they felt Duke Power was not using the Wonderlic as a proxy for race, but had been using race as a proxy for what the Wonderlic measures.

What I would give to see the president of Harvard standing in the schoolhouse door to block qualified Asians from enrolling

Makes me wonder- if you just show up at university classes, what would happen?

Nothing. You are fundamentally misunderstanding what universities do. The classes themselves are borderline useless. You are paying in time and money for a credential, which they will deny you in this scenario.

Generally you can just show up and attend most classes. A lot of the time they even upload lectures online so you can go through them at your own pace as you wish. Very good way to learn a new topic you were always interested in (this is how I learned about optics).

This was the premise of the 1965 TV comedy Hank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_(1965_TV_series)

(This was one of my favorite shows that year.) (Yes, I'm old.)

If there's space for another person to sit and you give the professor a head's up that you wish to attend because of your interest in the material, he or she will likely be thrilled that you may very well be increasing the population of such attendees in the class by a factor of infinity.

In a big lecture? Almost certainly nothing, assuming you can get into the building without a student ID. In a small class? You’d probably get found out because your name wouldn’t be on the attendance sheet. But even then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a passionate instructor turned a blind eye out of respect for your dedication to learning for its own sake.

The reason why approximately no one does this is that you don’t get a diploma out of it at the end.

More accurately, some schools are openly defying SCOTUS, others not as much.

At MIT, black admissions dropped from 13% to 5%. This is still evidence of a significant thumb on the scale, but it's not nothing.

More accurately, some schools are openly defying SCOTUS, others not as much.

It’s like some kind of... “Massive Resistance”

I think bringing back standardized test score requirements also played a role

Hmm, what was the black percentage before they went test-optional (which was of course also pre-SFFA v. Harvard)?

It worked on MIT though, they went down to like 5% black. Yale just needs some federal encouragement.

Harvard's law school made more of an effort to appear to comply as well, although they still seem to be discriminating.

The LSAT is a near-pure verbal IQ test, their options after the ruling were limited but I imagine it will still creep in more over time.

Black people don't do much, if at all, better on the SAT than on the LSAT. Harvard undergrad made an explicit choice to continue discriminating enough to get a class that's 14% black, but their law school has not. This is an HLS thing, not a general law school thing: Yale Law school is clearly discriminating as hard as ever.

Logic games involve some non verbal thinking. I miss the lsats.

I heard they abolished the logic games?

They did? That’s disappointing. It’s been a long time since I took the LSAT.

Someone on Reddit said it was because it was impossible/unreasonably difficult for blind candidates.

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Logic games were the best part of the LSAT, distinguishing the truly smart from those who merely had very good reading comprehension. This is just the general miasma of enshittification seeping into where ever it can get to.

Logic games were easy and consistently the section where the better candidates were most likely to score 100%. Much like the GMAT, it’s the verbal section that captured the tails of the IQ range, as befits a test to determine who would be a good lawyer, rather than a good accountant. It’s actually hard to design g-loaded non-verbal tests that don’t merely devolve into tests of mathematical knowledge, which isn’t really the same thing. Reading comprehension and the word substitution questions (ie verbal IQ tests) are smarts, and it’s increasingly clear that the most successful people are luckier on the verbal IQ front than on the spatial one.

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The test I took had a ridiculously hard logic game that I am convinced was an unscored test question. It wasn't hard in an absolute sense, I think most people with decent intelligence given infinite time could eventually solve all the questions. But it had way more rules than any of my practice questions. I think I got most of them right because I accurately recognized it as very time consuming and skipped the question section, then went back at the end. And I usually finish standardized tests with 50% of the time to spare, give or take 10%. So I basically spent 50% on this silly figurines on a bookshelf subset, and aced the logic section (but I still think I could have scored zero and gotten that score because I dont think that section counted).

Anyways, I agree that the logic games were a good part of the LSAT, much like analogies on the SAT. As is par for the course, modern DEI is bad for quality.

Nothing is fair except double-blind lottery by SAT cutoff. It would be interesting to see the student mix that creates, but it won't happen.

So do you believe the rest of the application like the motivation texts and maybe some smaller questions (depends on the university, it's been a little while since I used Common App) should not matter at all? Even though there can be tremendous differences personality-wise in students with equal SAT scores, and assuming we are aiming to train America's future elite in the top universities, those can have a significant effect?

For example leadership, agreeableness, emotional intelligence, and discipline come to mind. I would strongly prefer a disagreeable charismatic student getting the spot over someone who is essentially a drone and exclusively studying all day. Of course, those skills are barely quantifiable in general and probably hard to determine based on a thousand words, but it should be a good estimate already.

In other words, is "fair" referring to the fact that SAT correlates strongly with IQ and we just want the highest IQ individuals, which is a point I can see, or a moral judgment differentiating by what we could call "aptitude", in which case my text applies?

I agree with you that many of those characteristics could potentially be important. The disagreement is that obviously college admissions professors are unqualified, or even anti-qualified, to make such evaluations.

Modern SAT is too easy that a single silly oversight like filling in the wrong bubble for a question on the MATH section leads to you not getting 800, and then you're screwed. We need something like STEP Mathematics to truly distinguish the great from the merely very good.

I'd expect the winning distribution would be something like 70% Asian (of all types), 25% white and 5% other. Most importantly it would create volcanic eruption levels of seethe both on the left and the right.

I'd expect the winning distribution would be something like 70% Asian (of all types), 25% white and 5% other

Wouldn't that depend on where you set the cut-off?

I can confirm that STEP is hard (I had to take it, had a bad time and barely squeezed in), but in general I'm not convinced that the Anglo-style maths exams are quite testing for the right of thing. Compared to what you get in other countries, in all of them the test-taker is bottlenecked on speed - if you are faced with a question where you do not immediately recognise the structure and have memorized a solution algorithm, it is always advantageous to skip it and jump to another one where you have rather than spend any time on problem-solving to create a strategy rather than recall it. Of course performance on such a test is correlated with intelligence to a fair extent (after all, you need to build a good mental data structure to pattern-match the problems and remember all the different solution algorithms, and to execute a possibly quite complex algorithm which might involve symbol-pushing or spatial imagination quickly), but it is correlated with discipline and commitment even more (since the person who sat down and drilled example questions will have a tremendous advantage), and in my view there is in fact a principal component contributing to "speed" that is independent of "intelligence", which naturally matters as well.

Now you could argue that testing for discipline and commitment over intelligence is actually the test working as intended and part of the required notion of "merit", and perhaps all of the above is me coping and seething because I'm a lazy and undisciplined bum and almost got humbled by this type of exam (I can't fully deny), but the question is if you really want to have something as life-changing as university admissions hinge on a metric that is so trainable and even attainable by coercion. Sure, you could say that it is good that the gifted-but-lazy kid is sidelined by the kid who, due to natural discipline, sat down for three hours every day of his last two years of school and practiced past SAT/STEP questions. What if the latter kid then is sidelined by the kid whose parents locked him up and made him practice the questions for every waking hour since he turned 12, not allowing him to socialise and withholding food if he slacks off? As college becomes more of a prerequisite for success and discipline-based exams become more of a prerequisite for college, the dominant strategy becomes something like the South Korean childhood on steroids. Sure, in the limit of everyone having to play along with this equilibrium strategy the test once again becomes the reflection of 60% discipline plus 30% intelligence plus X or whatever it was in a state of nature, but what is the cost to society?

(Then of course there are the more common objections that some last-minute transfers from other life paths, gifted-but-lazy types and "slow but deep thinkers" are in fact also beneficial for the intellectual ecosystem and need a path to admission, which is of course also more cope.)

(Then of course there are the more common objections that some last-minute transfers from other life paths, gifted-but-lazy types and "slow but deep thinkers" are in fact also beneficial for the intellectual ecosystem and need a path to admission, which is of course also more cope.)

I agree with all of this except the jab at “slow but deep thinkers”. I think that with regard to mathematical talent specifically, there really is a pool of talented/high-IQ individuals who punch below their weight in math competitions where speed is important, like the AMC and AIME. This is a shame, because the USAMO and IMO are much more “slow but deep”-loaded, but you can’t qualify for them unless you get past the AIME. The USAMTS (a proof-based exam taken over the course of multiple weeks) helps alleviate this disadvantage somewhat, but it still only helps you skip the AMC level; I wish there were a second round of USAMTS for skipping the AIME and advancing to USAMO.

To be completely fair, I think the absolute cream of the crop in mathematical talent are both fast and deep, and hence the current system of contests will correctly identify them. We are certainly not at risk of being unable to field a competitive IMO team, or of failing to identify those who are most likely to become HYPSM math faculty in a decade or so.

But the “second string” of talent tends to be underserved until their strengths shine through in late undergrad/early grad school—assuming they stick with math that long, which sadly many don’t because they incorrectly think (on the basis of math contests) that they’re not good enough for graduate-level math research.

The specific mechanism by which being “deep” helps with research is having a holistic understanding of how different concepts in math relate to one another, and having a greater ability to perceive similarities/analogies between disparate things, which is important when bringing techniques from vastly different subfields of mathematics to bear on unsolved problems; this happens all the time in number theory, for instance, and it’s also what Grothendieck did when he revolutionized algebraic geometry. See also: the Langlands program.

“Fast but shallow” thinkers, on the other hand, are good at quickly pattern-matching problems to known solution techniques, which is also important: you won’t get anywhere in math without a well-developed, organized, and quickly-accessible stock of knowledge in your noodle. But they tend to be unable to generalize/extend/apply those techniques to very different domains.

Full disclosure: I was a “slow but deep” thinker with regard to math when I was in school and I may be just a little bit salty about my lackluster performance in time-constrained math contests.

what Grothendieck did when he revolutionized algebraic geometry

This brings back bad memories.

Full disclosure: I've always been a "fast but relatively superficial" thinker with regards to basically everything. As you can expect I did very well at Olympiads until the questions got to about IMO level, and yes my performance was better in earlier years of undergrad vs later (though still extremely good even in the later years).

55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split

Would you be OK with 80% Asian, 16% white (mostly Jewish) and 4% other if that's what meritocracy says? There are lots of people who scream meritocracy but then when it turns out they lose out to people even smarter than them they want to restrict things so that they stay on top. That's the true criteria for supporting meritocracy (assuming you're white here, I personally wouldn't mind 1% Asian, 99% white as long as those whites were some super race of 200IQ genetically modified geniuses, that's meritocracy and completely fair).

I'm sorry, but knowing your cultivated persona and giving you full credit, I'd assume that if meritocracy didn't include you, you would do all you could to subvert it.

Nah, as long as I have a passenger seat in the story of Humanity I'd be happy. Even now I realize I'll never be truly Great and have to content myself with merely being above the vast majority of people. I'm happy here and honestly would be happy working a 80th percentile pay job too if in return the low end scroungers got their just deserts (or rather, had their taxpayer funded desserts taken away). I'm not one to rebel against my superiors, that's more of a low human capital thing to do.

I'm not one to rebel against my superiors, that's more of a low human capital thing to do.

failed rebellions are this but successful ones are not. If the superiors are defeated in the only arena that really matters they were, evidently, not superior.

The French revolution led to the removal of the monarchy by the proles. Does this mean the proles were superior to the aristocrats?

Within twenty five years the house of Bourbon had been restored to the French throne. Does this mean the proles weren't really superior because the royal family had managed to regain power?

Since superiority/inferiority isn't something which changes at single generation level timescales we can't have the proles being superior first and then the royals, one of them were always superior, even though they both got defeated in the arena shortly after the other. So which is it?

Btw, the current Spanish Royal Family is descended from the House of Bourbon. The Spanish weren't able to permanently throw off their royals in the way the French were. So does that mean French proles were superior to the royals while Spanish proles were inferior? Even though both of the groups, being proles, have very little differentiating them?

Within twenty five years the house of Bourbon had been restored to the French throne.

What of it?

You do realize that the last Monarch of France (and the guy who effectively codified the current french model of government) was a Boneparte rather than a Bourbon don't you?

The house of Bourbon coming back was a dead cat bounce. The aristocracy IE the feudal bloodline rule way of life was dealt a mortal wound when the French monarchy fell it just took a couple of decades to bleed out in the West.

If you have a caveat for happiness that relies on a vast restructuring of society to punish people who are inferior to you then you have zero chance at happiness. Every child should learn that pinning your happiness on an external force punishing others is a fool's game anyway. You might as well say I'd be happy if all of my enemies died at my hands and their women submitted willingly to me. That's all it would take?

What's more, your obsession with race puts the lie to your belief in meritocracy. You wouldn't mind 1% 'Asian' if the 99% whites were 200 iq ubermensch? That is the same position as the one you are mocking - nobody has an issue with the idea of being ruled over by a pack of certified geniuses, they just don't believe the civilisation that is currently gooning it's way into extinction/the civilisation that couldn't figure out toilets in 2000 years is that. They think, quite rightly, that no matter how selfless and high minded anyone claims to be they will promote their in group first - and if that in group is defined ethnically meritocracy will be supplanted by racial spoils. Meritocracy by necessity requires a lack of curiosity about iq distribution, at least until it is managed by our ai overlords, because humans are not to be trusted.

A pure meritocracy would be good, but it would be myopic to judge candidates for the American elite solely on academic performance.

I would add a judged (can be behind a curtain / audio recorded to avoid accusations of bias) debate segment - Westminster/Oxford Union style, not what passes for debate competitions in the US - to measure public speaking ability, bravado and charisma.

Then two essay questions, again judged by senior faculty. One on classical western civilization, sat in person, written in (fountain) pen, with substantial bonus points for answers in Latin or Greek. A second brief essay on philosophy (or rather ethics or logical thinking), in the mould of oxbridge philosophy entrance exam essays. This measures the ability to write, sorely lacking among many shape rotators.

I would also require a letter of approval from a sitting US senator, who (a) could have no financial relationship with anyone in the applicant’s immediate or extended family and (b) could nominate fewer than 50 students per year. This is also meritocratic in a way, since true meritocracy is familial rather than individual, and a well-connected family has enmeshed themselves in the fabric of American life well, which speaks to likely success in life.

You can add all the additional requirements that you want, provided you understand that they aren't any less subject to gamification than whatever is currently in place. So add a debate requirement and you get Oxford Union debate clubs replacing whatever other extracurricular is the hot thing to get into a good school. Give bonus points for answering in Greek and Latin and you get a bunch of kids taking Greek and Latin not because they want to but because you get bonus points. I suspect a large part of the reason that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation is because so many of them came out of a Tiger Mom culture where their dad played by Vivek Ramaswamy gave them a list of things they needed to do to get into Harvard and made damn sure they spent every available moment of their childhood ticking off the boxes. I mean, if you had two applicants to an engineering program with identical academic credentials, which one do you choose? The one who spends his spare time tinkering with radios and other electronic devices, or the one who can do integrals in his head but can't change a tire on his car? Who do you think actually wants to be an engineer and who is just doing it because it's a good job that will make his parents proud? You can't sort this out without a non-standardized personal interview.

I would also require a letter of approval from a sitting US senator, who (a) could have no financial relationship with anyone in the applicant’s immediate or extended family and (b) could nominate fewer than 50 students per year. This is also meritocratic in a way, since true meritocracy is familial rather than individual, and a well-connected family has enmeshed themselves in the fabric of American life well, which speaks to likely success in life.

There's already a college that requires this. Actually several colleges, though congressmen are also included and nominations are limited to ten apiece. They're the service academies, and they are extremely difficult to get into. Who gets these nominations has fuck all to do with how connected an applicant or his family is because you don't get them by knowing the Senator or whoever but by applying on their website, at which point someone from their office looks through the same paperwork admissions does. And what makes you think Senators even give a shit who gets into Harvard or wherever? Out of 100, 12 went there at all, and only 4 for undergrad. Anyway, this isn't England, and Senators don't give a shit about gatekeeping access to the "American elite". Do you really think John Fetterman is going to nominate the kind of prigs who can answer philosophical essay questions in ancient Greek?

I suspect a large part of the reason that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation is because so many of them came out of a Tiger Mom culture where their dad played by Vivek Ramaswamy gave them a list of things they needed to do to get into Harvard and made damn sure they spent every available moment of their childhood ticking off the boxes.

I echo @Jiro's suspicion that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation because Harvard wanted and needed them to do poorly in the quest for racial balancing. One could make the opposite argument ex-ante, that kids from Tiger Mom cultures would be expected to have "better" personalities, as their greater likelihood in having experiences at being (multi-instrument) musicians, (multi-sport) athletes, multilingual, and exposure to different cultures gives them greater depth and worldliness than someone from a non-Tiger Mom culture who maybe plays one instrument or a sport or two, while speaking one language (maybe two if they're latino) and spends their increased spare time dicking around, browsing TikTok and Instagram.

And furthermore, alumni interviewers rated the personalities of Asian candidates similarly as they did white candidates. It was the admissions office, which often didn't meet the candidates, that would give Asians the worst personality scores among any racial group. Harvard's attempt at jiu-jitsuing their way out was to imply It Just So Happens it must be the case that Asians have worse essays and recommendations:

Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono.

Harvard said that while admissions officers may not meet the applicants, they can judge their personal qualities based on factors like personal essays and letters of recommendation.

I suspect a large part of the reason that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation is because so many of them came out of a Tiger Mom culture where their dad played by Vivek Ramaswamy gave them a list of things they needed to do to get into Harvard and made damn sure they spent every available moment of their childhood ticking off the boxes.

I suspect that 100% of the reason is that Harvard just didn't want many Asians. Even if you're correct, that doesn't mean that Asians would have done any better if they had avoided that. It just means that Harvard would have picked something else where Asians were different. And if Asians avoided that too, Harvard would have picked yet something else. Even if Asians were identical to whites in all measures, Harvard would have just said they had bad personality anyway, because you can't measure personality, so there'd be no way to prove that Harvard was wrong.

So add a debate requirement and you get Oxford Union debate clubs replacing whatever other extracurricular is the hot thing to get into a good school. Give bonus points for answering in Greek and Latin and you get a bunch of kids taking Greek and Latin not because they want to but because you get bonus points.

Yeah, and all that stuff…would be good.

Going by PISA scores this is very doubtful how it would go under a genuine meritocracy

You are by far my favorite poster here

Wow, thank you for that, I genuinely appreciate it.

the class was 99% BurdensomeCount's

Ooo, back during university my degree was full of people who thought like me. Fun times no doubt, but we do have our faults and 99% BC concentration is well beyond safe limits.

The burden can only be so high.

LMAO

Ahaha love this interaction. I can't count such a heavy burden.

You are by far my favorite poster here, so if the class was 99% BurdensomeCount's, darling, I'd be OK with that

There's a country full of them that you can move to, if you like the idea so much.

This is news to me. Outside the most rarefied mathematics departments and associated spaces I've found that the BC density is basically negligible. I don't think there are any country sized structures with non-trivial levels of BC concentration.

So when you were using the first person plural here you were talking about mathematicians? I somehow doubt you'll be able to get enough of them together to conquer Ukraine.

Nah, over there I meant something different. That was more me and my ethnicity, but I am a very non-central member of my ethnicity and just because someone likes my style doesn't particularly mean they'll like being around people of my ethnicity and anyways you won't get the true BC experience with them. You're more likely to get (a facimile of) the experience with a mathematician but even then it won't be completely the same. For that your only option is to go with the OG...

I distinctly remember you saying we'd gave an even more enhanced BC experience from your coethnics, you're not exactly talking our ears off about math when you post here...

You could settle in Vancouver, Canada, which is certainly 100% BC. Or you could build a Time Machine and travel 2025+ years into the past.

(Aside: if you’re in the UK, wouldn’t you be a BurdensomeEarl?)

(Aside: if you’re in the UK, wouldn’t you be a BurdensomeEarl?)

Indeed. However I've never liked the term Earl personally, I even prefer the Geman Graf to the Scandi Jarl which is where the term Earl comes from (coincidentally my favourite stationery comes from Graf-von-Faber-Castell - their new pen of the year though is very garish, normally they are much more refined). Count though is so much better, the french Comte is so much a nicer word to my ears.

Also, the term Count was used by the Byzantines to denote a military leader in command of two centuries, so 200 people (yes yes I know the Roman century had only 80 soldiers, what they neglect to mention is that a century typically also had 20 slaves associated with it to take care of the 80 fighting men). Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), 1-in-200 is roughly how highly I value myself in the Great Human Hierarchy in comparison to the ordinary man...

My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.

How is it “fair” that 1950s Chinese communists who despised America, get to send their grandchildren to occupy (and profit from) the top 0.1% of prestige occupations in America, which is the patrimony of the very 1950s Americans they despised?

Yes, communists and their immediate descendants should be actively discriminated against unless they can demonstrate a full and genuine change of heart. Communism is the most destructive and dangerous ideology in the whole world and those too close to it should be kept from influence.

How is it fair that 1950s whites who had their country built at least partially on the backs of exploited Black labour (both slave and later, free) get to have their grandchildren benefit at the advantage of the descendants of those who were made to suffer as western Dalits just by dint of their skin colour?

If we're going by your rules rather than merit whites should be disbarred from prestige institutions entirely.

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Because that tale is ridiculous.

King Cotton is not a very convincing story. Phillip Magness (sp?) did great work discrediting it and the 1619 project.

Black people are benefiting from it too right now, so where's the issue?

They are benefiting from it, but presumably less than their rightful due for the work they (were forced to) put in. Imagine I enslaved you to build a bridge in your city. At the end I let you go and when you complained that you have been exploited I said "you benefit from the bridge too now that it has been built". Nobody would seriously consider that as a justified response.

The real question is can you kidnap someone from some “shit hole” and put them in terrible conditions that on the margins help build society. Then do their descendants 160 years later get to claim some amount due? Isn’t the appropriate calculation for the descendant are there better off in your society or the “shit hole” from whence their forefather was stolen?

That is, I think the forefather had a clear claim to restitution. I think the current generation has actually benefited from slavery.

At the end I let you go and when you complained that you have been exploited I said "you benefit from the bridge too now that it has been built".

No, it's more like my great great great... grandchild was told that, after they became an equal under the law, and after an ever-expanding system of inequality correction was set up that specifically benefits them.

They contributed exactly nothing to the bridge and benefit from it exactly as much as the descendants of the people that enslaved me. So again, where's the issue?

Now hold on, surely the counter is that some of them were Republic Chinese instead, who lost out to the Communists.

That's the counter to "not all whites benefited from the exploitation of Blacks, so you shouldn't bar all of them".

My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.

Whats merit though? Standardized test scores? if you go that route, you might get a class completely filled with international Chinese students.

Whats merit though? Standardized test scores? if you go that route, you might get a class completely filled with international Chinese students.

Hyperbole aside, how realistic a possibility is this?

It has actually happened multiple times in Australia, but that's more due to corruption than to test scores.

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/student-at-top-australian-university-claims-classes-taught-in-chinese/news-story/b0e21f920299c71a794aa5c2b58c86d5

At least by numbers, it's absolutely possible.

There's 37 universities in the top tier in China, which used to be known as project 985. It's super competitive to get into them, you need an extremely high score on the Gaokao national exam, which is like a series of AP/IB tests on crack. Top student basically devote their teen years to cramming for it. I don't know the precise score breakdown, but this comment: https://www.quora.com/In-China-what-percentage-of-students-get-admitted-to-tier-1-universities-and-how-hard-is-it says you need to be roughly in the top 1% of the general population to make it in there. This comment https://qr.ae/pYvrbd is in agreement, saying that 0.79% make it in there, which is 150,000 students per year.

By way of comparison, most ivy league schools are a little under 2000 students in each class. I'm not sure what you want to define as a top school, but let's say there's 20 of them each with 2000 students average. That's only 40,000 students in total. So you could easily fill every single spot at top American schools with Chinese kids, and it wouldn't even shrink the Chinese universities very much.

In the UK there's simply a cap on international places for many courses. I know the relationship between higher education and the state is different in the US, but I imagine there'd be some way to legally enforce that a certain % of places are reserved for domestic students. It's not something I see being hugely politically polarised either.

Only really for Medicine. For most other courses at non Oxbridge they prefer international students because of the much higher fees they pay.

The US can completely cripple Chinese youth talent by skimming off their top 20,000 scoring high school graduates each year and stapling a green card to their Ivy+ diplomas. This is probably the most effective weapon they have against the CCP. Sure it'll take like a decade and a half to have significant impact but when it does it'll by extremely good at keeping China down and let the US continue its hegemony.

There's the old joke: "Don't worry about China leapfrogging us technologically, our Chinese are smarter than their Chinese", it should be made a reality.

I think if we actually started doing that en masse, we'd end up with a lot of youths much more loyal to China than to the US, and in some cases outright agents of the CCP.

Our current system gives us a lot of students more loyal to Hamas than to the US.

Both are bad methinks

Sure, I'm sure you'll get some CCP agents. Just forbid them from working on sensitive things. The question is whether the damage the agents do to us will be more than the benefit we get from slicing away their highest potential humans each year and the damage that will do to them. Even it we pay them to literally sit at home playing video games for the rest of their lives it still benefits the US because now they aren't helping China.

"49%- speak a language other than English at home or as a first language"

Given an 11% international share that's genuinely pretty fucking weird.

Not that weird, plenty of citizens speak a different language at home (I'm one and I grew up with a bunch of others).

Given how many people are probably lying about being Hispanic, I'm pretty sure that a big chunk of that is lies.

Adding Asian and Hispanic numbers to International would get you over 50%, assuming they all claim to speak a language other than English at home. Sounds like the kind of thing that might net you extra Diversity Points on your application?


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!


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