site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

15
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There's no "tap dancing" going on here.

Do you think we should reimpose racial segregation or not?

Segregation and "unequal treatment" (we have equal treatment now?

Yes.

you sure?)

Yes.

aren't "the only practical way to avoid" [ethnic cleansing and people getting pushed in front of subway trains by "serial random assaulters"] but they are a way of doing so - certainly one that produced demonstrably better results.

There is no "ethnic cleansing" happening in the United States. As for people getting pushed in front of subway trains, yes, we do have demonstrably better ways of preventing that than segregation: law enforcement.

Sure, all those things are true technically.

In other words, all of those things are true.

Yes, we care about stopping rape and murder and terrorism and drug trafficking, but we also care how we stop those things, and just as we do not give the government infinite power to stop those things by any means necessary, we also do not endorse every solution that might, in theory, reduce or eliminate those things. What you're getting at is that black people commit more crimes (true) and what you're darkly hinting at is that we should segregate them or Do Something else to lower the black crime rate. Even accepting the first premise (higher black crime rate) it does not follow that a just solution is to to impose racial segregation or whatever else you have in mind.

There are no laws in existence - there's only who / whom.

That sounds like a catchy expression untethered to the legal reality in which you live.

Segregation and "unequal treatment" (we have equal treatment now?

Yes.

Lets play dueling anecdotes.

My turn: black attacker, elderly asian victim, racial slurs used, charges dropped.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-Bayview-attack-Second-suspect-surrenders-to-15098296.php

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9437615/Two-teenage-girls-accused-car-jacking-killing-Uber-Eats-driver-reach-plea-deal.html

Your turn: white attacker, elderly black victim, racial slurs used, charges dropped.

My turn: black attacker, elderly asian victim, racial slurs used, charges dropped.

Did you read the actual articles or just go off the headlines?

In the first case Grayson (the person whose charges were dropped, but did not touch the victim) was the person videoing and the DA claims the victim expressed an interest in restorative justice for him and the charges were dropped, while the actual attacker WAS charged with robbery and elder abuse, his case is still pending. Charges were not dropped against the actual attacker. So this does not meet your own expressed criteria. Grayson was a racist asshole I would suggest but did not attack the victim. So we have black attacker, elderly asian victim, racial slurs used (though not by the attacker), charges not dropped (against the attacker).

**"According to the District Attorney's Office spokesman Alex Bastian, Grayson is not being charged for now and will instead be placed in a restorative justice program, at the victim's request.

Jonathan Amerson, 56, appeared in court Tuesday on charges of robbery and elderly abuse in connection with the attack on the unidentified 68-year-old man in front of a housing complex on Osceola Lane who was hauling large bags of recycled material."**

Charges were not dropped in the second case, as pointed out in the article and indeed the title(!). A Plea deal is not the same as charges being dropped. Indeed they both received the maximum sentences as noted below given they were juveniles.

**"A 15-year-old girl will be held in a youth detention facility until she turns 21 for a D.C. carjacking with another girl that left a Virginia man dead.

The girl received the maximum sentence in juvenile court Friday after pleading guilty last month to felony murder in the death of Mohammad Anwar, a Virginia man who was working as a delivery driver.

The second perpetrator, a 13-year-old girl, pleaded guilty Thursday to second-degree murder. Under the maximum sentence, she also would be released once she turns 21. "**

So given the charges were NOT dropped in your examples we just have to find a single case where a white attacker, racially motivated attacked an old black man and then charged to establish equal treatment by YOUR own standard, no?

Timothy Caughman 66 was killed by James Jackson 28 in New York because:

"Jackson also stated that the killing was intended to start a race war in a manifesto written by him: "The racial World War starts today. This political terrorist attack is a formal declaration of a global total war on the Negro races."

To be fair we don't know if he used a racial slur at the time given no witnesses, but the motivation seems clear.

If I can suggest that the lesson here is to pick your examples so that they actually match your contention? Because here, if nowhere else someone is likely to actually check.

Just to point out I am not condoning the behavior in the articles here, but if you are going to use dueling anecdotes (and this is a good example of why we probably shouldn't), you should at least make sure you are well armed. Check and clean your pistols carefully, before you consider issuing the challenge.

Murdering a black man: life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Murder while black: receive the maximum sentences for a lesser crime that the prosecutors gave them the option of pleading guilty to. No possibility of prison time but a few years in "youth care".

If you think that's comparable, I don't know what to tell you.

if you think that's comparable, I don't know what to tell you.

I don't (though of course neither are the specifics of each crime as in one was a premeditated murder, the other was felony murder by juveniles while trying to steal a car) but that wasn't the claim you made. You said charges dropped. If you want to pivot to a different argument then feel free. But if your evidence does not support your specific claim then do better at writing your claims or picking your evidence.

Dueling anecdotes is a bad debating technique for a number of reasons, but if you are going to use it, you have to be very very tight on making sure your examples match your claims. Otherwise you will get bogged down in defending the specifics of each case. It can be rhetorically powerful but it is very difficult to use correctly. If you don't use it properly it hurts your argument because it looks like you are either over-claiming on what your evidence shows, or were just googling headlines that kind of matched your thesis. You should then expect to get called out on that. Or you can be aware of that in advance and construct better arguments, which leads to better engagement.

Lets play dueling anecdotes.

No. Also, you've been told to change your username. Do it. The only reason I am not banning you right now is so you don't whine that I did it in the middle of a thread where I was a participant, but the next time you post with this username, you will be.

Yes, this nic was apparently bad only after I called the mods out on tolerating ilovenonasianminorities69, but banning bigdickpepe1488. I missed it because your message was sent on thanksgiving. Sorry about that.

Noted that you are unable to find a single comparable case of prosecutors letting white criminals get away with the kind of thing they routinely let black criminals get away with. But we definitely have "equal treatment".

What you can note is that I'm not interested in playing bad faith games like "dueling anecdotes."

I do not think that you claimed that we had factual equality in good faith. I do not think that you actually believe that hate crimes committed by black people are given the same degree of attention and seriousness as hate crimes committed against black people (despite the relative numbers and severity of these two categories), and I think that you are dismissing this claim as being in bad faith in bad faith yourself.

Can you tell us what would convince you that there is not, in fact, equal treatment of black and nonblack criminal behavior? If you were given another similar incident, or another five, or another dozen? How about if you were shown a statistical gap between the amount black people were prosecuted as a group and the amount of crimes that they committed?

I went into some detail on this in other posts where I addressed the fact that prosecution is often politically motivated and that some prosecutors do in fact go easy on certain classes of criminals (including, sometimes, black people).

There is a vast gulf between "Sometimes people receive unequal treatment, depending on the circumstances of the case," and "Laws don't apply equally to black people and white people," let alone "Laws don't apply to black people." If the argument was simply the former, I would say "Yes, that's true, it shouldn't be the case, but our legal system is too political for it not to be." But the argument you are making is the latter. "Dueling anecdotes" is not how you prove that one way or the other, it's just a bad faith game played by people who will move the goalposts (as has happened several times in the course of this thread).

What's bad faith about asking for a simple existence proof?

The Chinese Robber Fallacy wouldn't be a fallacy if you could literally not find a single non-Chinese robber.

Proof of what? Proof that there are non-Chinese robbers? Proof that Chinese people who rob are frequently convicted? Proof that the law does not treat Chinese robbers and non-Chinese robbers differently? Note that we've gone from "Black people are criminal by nature, thus Jim Crow laws are justified" to "Well, see, sometimes black people aren't prosecuted for hate crimes, this proves hate crimes only ever apply to white people."

"A Chinese robber robbed an elderly white person using a crowbar and their charges were dismissed. To disprove this, you must not only find a non-Chinese robber, you must find a non-Chinese robber who robbed an elderly Chinese person with a crowbar and their charges were dismissed. Details of the case don't matter, but if you don't find a non-Chinese robber who robbed an elderly Chinese person with a crowbar and got their charges dismissed, it proves that Chinese people are robbers and also laws don't apply to them. If you do waste your time looking for a non-Chinese robber who robbed an elderly Chinese person with a crowbar and got their charges dismissed, I'll pull out the next example of Chinese robbers I've collected and demand another one-for-one match."

Here's the original definition of the Chinese Robber Fallacy, from Alyssa Vance:

The Chinese Robber Fallacy is where you use a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even though other groups have the problem just as much (or even more so).

[...editing a bit out, which you can find via above link...]

“But don’t non-Chinese rob people too?”

“Maybe, but if so, that doesn’t make the Chinese any less guilty, does it? First we should deal with the Chinese criminal problem, and then if we’re successful, maybe we can move on to other types of theft.”

My steelman of the Jim Crow position (and note I'm not a Jim Crow supporter!) is that they are making this argument instead:

“But don’t prosecutors let white people get away with murdering vulnerable people while using racial slurs too?”

“Nope, not even once. At least not since the globohomo cuck regime took over. RETVRN!" (Since this is a steelman, I'm assuming they know about Bombingham, Emmet Till and the 2'nd klan and are restricting their claims to the past decade or two.)

To prove them wrong you could provide a single example of a white guy filming himself doing a hate crime and then prosecutors dropping charges for restorative justice.

The OP specified "elderly black victim" but in my view you'd certainly prove your point if the black victim was a pregnant woman, in a wheelchair or whatever. I would not consider you to have proved your point if the victim was a fit young man in a gang or if it was some crazy situation like that Jewish guy with a brain tumor who faked 100 antisemitic bomb threats, however.

I am not aware of any such incidents but I'm also not all that interested in the WN stuff.

To prove them wrong you could provide a single example of a white guy filming himself doing a hate crime and then prosecutors dropping charges for restorative justice.

Here is where the moving goalposts happened:

The OP argued that "we do not live in an equal society."

Now, that's a rather vague statement. On the face of it, it's obviously true (no society has or could ever be "equal" in any absolute sense), but what the OP was clearly implying (in the context of his other posts, as he's stated as much) is that laws basically don't apply to black people. Black people can commit crimes, white people can't. Black people commit almost all the crimes and are not prosecuted for it. (If forced to steelman this, I'm sure he would say obviously it does in fact happen that black people are prosecuted for crimes, as this obviously happens every day, but the position he's taking is essentially that we live in a dual legal system where black people are prosecuted much less frequently and much more lightly.)

That is the argument I rejected.

Then the second OP came in with a demand for "dueling anecdotes" and the specific case of a black person who committed a hate crime and wasn't prosecuted.

If we started out with a specific assertion like "Hate crimes are politicized and more often applied to white people committing alleged hate crimes on black people than the other way around," I would probably have agreed. But that wasn't the starting point. So pointing at an example of a black person committing a particular crime and not being prosecuted isn't refuting what I was arguing.

That's without even digging into the details of the specific case, which I'm not going to, because there are always a lot of variables in cases like this that make good ClownWorld/LibsOfTikTok-style outrage-fodder. What exactly was the crime, why was the decision made not to prosecute? Charges get dropped or reduced all the time, for a lot of reasons; without any evidence or actual stats beyond "The defendant was a black person," an anecdote has no weight or meaning. Am I sufficiently motivated to go read up on this one item just to "rebut" a point I wasn't arguing against in the first place? Supposedly to prove my case I then have to find an exactly equal and opposite anecdote. So just finding black people charged with hate crimes won't be sufficient, I have to find an exactly equivalent opposite case.

That's not a serious attempt to support the much stronger original assertion, that's just playing games. No, I will trade anecdotes with the person who has a long list of terrible crimes committed by black people to "prove" that black people are terrible.

Do you think we should reimpose racial segregation or not?

We have racial segregation and it's ever more competitive as the legal system more and more reflects the progressive view that blacks are not subject to anything as mundane as "law".

Legal segregation would be an improvement over that system; do I think that's what should be imposed? Not necessarily - an Ottoman-style millet system would work as well as would Singaporean style legal environment - loads of workable options but they have to begin with the clear reality about the vastly different evolutionary backgrounds of the different species involved.

Segregation and "unequal treatment" (we have equal treatment now?

Yes.

you sure?)

Yes.

This does not match up with reality. The sheer volume of evidence that there's an entirely separate legal system for blacks where cops are sent out to arrest them when they make too much trouble but then they're let out vs the legal system for non-blacks where there are massive penalties for criminal conduct and downright glee on the part of prosecutors for getting to finally prosecute someone who isn't the usual was old enough to be described by Tom Wolfe in the 80s as the "hunt for the great white defendant". Almost every crime story you read about on the New York Post's twitter feed includes lines about how the latest perpetrator of a horrible crime had been "arrested 37 times before on felony charges". There are dozens of whites murdered by blacks every month with no spectacular media coverage and in fact, often times no charges filed in totally egregious cases like a firefighter defending a woman in a convenience store who gets executed by the attacking woman's boyfriend and wasn't charged - or the gas station robber in California who killed a clerk and wasn't charged because it was self defense when the clerk shot at him. Contrast that case to...

We have racial segregation and it's ever more competitive as the legal system more and more reflects the progressive view that blacks are not subject to anything as mundane as "law".

For this to be true, you would have to explain why so many blacks are in prison. You can't have it both ways and claim that the black incarceration rate demonstrates that blacks are more criminal but also they aren't subject to laws.

Legal segregation would be an improvement over that system; do I think that's what should be imposed? Not necessarily - an Ottoman-style millet system would work as well as would Singaporean style legal environment - loads of workable options but they have to begin with the clear reality about the vastly different evolutionary backgrounds of the different species involved.

I'm not that familiar with the Singaporean legal environment, but do they actually assign people legally subordinate status based on their race? As for patterning our society after the Ottomans, I can think of many reasons besides my objections to your racialism why that seems like a terrible idea.

This does not match up with reality.

It does, actually. The argument you could credibly make is that law enforcement is often politically motivated and influenced by politicians, so in present times there is undue sensitivity about being perceived as racist, which results in minorities often being prosecuted less harshly. While this is true, it's certainly not some sort of carte blanche for black people to commit crimes (see above re: the high black criminal incarceration rate.) Moreover, we've discussed many times in this sub cases like San Francisco and Portland, where there are open air drug markets and homeless people basically allowed to do anything short of murder without prosecution. Most of those people are white.

There are dozens of whites murdered by blacks every month with no spectacular media coverage

There are many more whites murdered by whites and even more blacks murdered by blacks with no spectacular media coverage.

and in fact, often times no charges filed in totally egregious cases like a firefighter defending a woman in a convenience store who gets executed by the attacking woman's boyfriend and wasn't charged - or the gas station robber in California who killed a clerk and wasn't charged because it was self defense when the clerk shot at him. Contrast that case to...

I don't know which specific cases you're referring and don't care, since almost inevitably when one digs into these one finds details that don't quite fit the picture the person offering them is trying to portray. But sure, there are are daily horrors committed by black people - granted. Scott wrote an article about this that is still valid.

But sure, there are are daily horrors committed by black people - granted. Scott wrote an article about this that is still valid.

It's not necessary to restrict the argument to specific cases though. We have statistics. While most murder is intraracial, blacks commit a disproportionate amount of it and they also commit a disproportionate amount of inter-racial murder. This isn't just Chinese people being smeared as robbers because the media is focusing on Chinese robbers in particular.

I am not disputing the 13/57 statistic, and if we were having a longer discussion about that, my views are less progressive and closer to the median Motte view. What I am disputing is that because a disproportionate number of blacks are criminals, we should treat them as criminals as a race and reimpose segregation or Bantustans or whatever.

What I am disputing is that because a disproportionate number of blacks are criminals, we should treat them as criminals as a race and reimpose segregation or Bantustans or whatever.

I agree that this is a principle worth sticking to regardless of the outcomes. Whatever the answer to our problems might be, racial subjugation isn't it.

On the other hand, it's beyond apparent that the old plan, the one we came out of the civil war with and actually tried implementing post-64, did not work and probably never will. We don't know how to fix our race problem via education or social engineering, and it is actually a pretty big problem that hits everybody in ways difficult to ignore. We've promised blacks a better life, and we've largely failed to deliver. We've promised everyone else a solution to the social ills spilling out of the Black community, and we've failed to deliver on that as well.

I've mainly stayed out of this thread, because on the one hand there's evident racists suggesting maybe we try Jim Crow again, and that is fundamentally repulsive, but then on the other hand there's people acting like the Civil Rights movement actually achieved its stated aims, and that's absurd. It's maddening.

Yeah, sadly I agree. As I said, I am not really "progressive" or optimistic in my view of current race relations. I just don't see white nationalists offering a solution that isn't pure blood and violence.

For this to be true, you would have to explain why so many blacks are in prison. You can't have it both ways and claim that the black incarceration rate demonstrates that blacks are more criminal but also they aren't subject to laws.

Because they commit an absurd amount of crime - most of which is "unsolved", a good portion of which is unreported. The famous 13/57 understates it because that only counts solved murders and there are massive numbers of unsolved murders in places where every single unsolved murder is committed by a black person.

The rest of your post is progressive nonsense.

Scott wrote an article about this that is still valid.

Scott is a conscious, aware liar and has never written an article that is "still valid" - much less one which fell to a very simple rebuttal in the comments.

If we’re really concerned about media bias, we need to think about Chinese Robber Fallacy as one of the media’s strongest weapons. There are lots of people – 300 million in America alone. No matter what point the media wants to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples. No matter how low-probability their outcome of interest is, they will never have to stop covering it if they don’t want to.

You can use this same logic to disprove the narrative on a bunch of issues.

If every campus rape case that gets publicized is a hoax or a fraud, then the campus rape narrative is a lie.

If every time a black man is killed by a white man it turns out the black guy was in the middle of committing a felony and had a track record of committing felonies then the “racist whites murder black bodies” narrative is a lie.

After all, since it’s such a large country if the phenomena were real then real examples could be found, right?

He knows his argument is demolished here so he backs into "toxoplasmosa of rage - they pick bad cases on purpose because it's a better loyalty test" - which doesn't fit at all (which he almost certainly knows) because there are simply no cases where the progressive narrative fits. You can see every day blacks getting away with crimes, you simply never see that with whites. Turns out it's actually really easy to catch criminals but the justice system doesn't do it for blacks because we don't have "equal protection".

The rest of your post is progressive nonsense.

Most of your post is assertions without evidence. You just "know" this is how it is because it fits your worldview, and you carefully stick to your 13/57 talking points and avoid addressing any of the counterarguments I and others have made.

and avoid addressing any of the counterarguments I and others have made.

Blatantly false.

An example - your argument:

For this to be true, you would have to explain why so many blacks are in prison.

Addressed here:

Because they commit an absurd amount of crime - most of which is "unsolved", a good portion of which is unreported.

If you want to ask for evidence for this then you run right into progressive "manipulation of procedural outcomes" - progressive academics straight up lie so you have to go to anecdotal evidence that nonetheless contains valuable statistical information and that shows that, yes, blacks are basically immune to the law. An example elsewhere in this thread was a black guy who killed a few people in a home invasion who served 4 years of an 8 year sentence then killed someone else when released. You can find dozens of examples on the NY Post twitter feed of "this person was arrested 47 times on felony charges previously". To which you rebut "Chinese robber" but the argument implied there is one that assumes the conclusion. "You can find examples of anything because there are a lot of people" is the general argument but it's simply impossible to find examples "arrested 47 times, committed a newsworthy crime" where the perp wasn't black - certainly you can't find dozens of examples of this. You can't find videos of whites behaving the way blacks do such that there's a joke "new Street Fighter level just dropped" when you can watch a new video on a daily basis of blacks having mass brawls in public.

Hang on, pretty sure the home invasion guy was white, or at least off-white. I was trying to figure out the ethnicities of everyone involved and realized I can't tell the difference between Italians and Puerto Ricans

Link?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fj-g2UFWYAIy2gz?format=jpg&name=orig Shooter is "Samuel Parsons-Salas." Think it was a mexican party, but a lot of the people involved were mixed. Nobody I'd feel comfortable calling a racial slur without having their 23@me results handy.

More comments

For this to be true, you would have to explain why so many blacks are in prison. You can't have it both ways and claim that the black incarceration rate demonstrates that blacks are more criminal but also they aren't subject to laws.

There ought to be a lag time in this. What does the racial breakdown of carceration look like since, say, May 2020?