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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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So long as that bastion remains unconquered, the armies of the left will continue to sally forth to attack western institutions by claiming “disparate impact means injustice”. I was talking to a friend and complaining about diversity quotas. He dismissed it as “probably worth it — after all how many black men work in the city’s CBD?” Such an argument can still not be rebutted in public because the answer remains beyond the pale.

Yeah. Sunny Hostin is broadly considered to be a partisan hack and not a particularly smart one, but I felt I was talking crazy pills when I saw people acting like Coleman Hughes schooled her on colorblindness.

I didn't think Hughes was convincing in answering her question: what if a colorblind system ended up with racial inequities?

Hughes doesn't really have a good response because, in practice, it'll play out as it has: when "something special for the Negro" doesn't work something more special will have to be done. Under the inertial theory of racism you clearly didn't act enough on the object to change its path.

It usually doesn't go much better. I remember Yarvin being stymied by Ben Burgis just straight up refusing to grant that there was any reason Scandinavian politics wouldn't work in Haiti. Very little in what I've heard from Burgis impressed me, but he beat Yarvin cause he could state his position and Yarvin was clearly scared to.

This attempt to row back to a colorblindness that doesn't have to answer these questions simply cannot work when it can't deal with this basic challenge besides sputtering platitudes. In fact, precisely because everyone has gotten so good at cataloguing racial progress in the hopes that the various gaps will close and they can get the good news out first. You'll always be subject to the charge that there are clearly places were race has more explanatory power than class

So you have to pick a side: woke or the racists.

(This, I suspect, is why Ayaan Hirsi Ali accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into her heart. Some people seem the problem coming as the right gets more anti-woke and many of the right wingers outside the center just bite the bullet.)