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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I don’t really oppose all progressivism. I oppose modern progressivism. I think they’ve ran out of ideas to make the world a better place so we get narrative progressivism.

I don’t think BLM ever had any good ideas. There’s no data cops were more violent to blacks than whites and data that contradicts it. I’ve never seen a black person treated worse than an equivalent white person. The only thing they have is differences in outcomes but that’s explainable by HBD. And we have tried a lot of things to close those gaps and nothing works. We’ve done affirmative action and spent more to black schools and given preferential job access and the gaps don’t close. So then since we’ve tried a bunch of things progressives went to structural racism but are never able to point to what’s causing the issue. When a lot of obvious data to me seems like hbd. If you deny reality then you end up trying to force thru policy which is worse than the status quo.

And trans right seems like a social contagion they’ve created to me. And they are actively causing mental illness in a lot of young people. 30 years ago we had a very small trans population. There was probably some hidden but it feels like their turning the old goths and tomboys going thru confused adolescents into confused trans. Unless there is some toxic polluting messing with hormones it just doesn’t make sense for the differing percent of trans people in different regions/ages other than social contagion. And giving kids gender confusion is a mental illness and bad for them.

So in short I think there ideas are just bad. Now these are not really conservative views. Church every week types. They are just anti-program views. I don’t think today we have many things for progs to attack and improve.

I agree the right doesn’t have activists. The right is filled with mind your own business people that just want to see their community do well, have a family, and be nice to their neighbors. That why it does seem to me that the culture wars from the right are a reactionary move to the activision in the left. A realization that something bad is going on. Normally they would just stay home but at some point you have to defend good things.

I think they’ve ran out of ideas to make the world a better place so we get narrative progressivism.

Worse, they refuse to acknowledge when their ideas aren't working or have made things worse and are thus in need of change, ironically.

They seem stuck in a mode that assumes that if a given policy hasn't succeeded, that is only evidence that they haven't applied it aggressively or universally enough.

Nuclear energy being a huge one there. Maybe they could notice that we haven't had any truly horrible nuclear meltdown incidents since Chernobyl, that safety has improved, and that nuclear is far more reliable than almost any other option we have, and we've got the nuclear waste problem mostly squared away.

But no. because some subset of the left is still aggressively anti-nuke they quadruple down on other 'green energy' approaches that are naturally subpar.

And let's leave aside that progressivism is basically ruining the one thing that gave it the actual edge: Effective and rigorous academic sciences that were free to explore any idea that seemed potentially useful.

I’ve never seen a black person treated worse than an equivalent white person.

My brother and 3 of his friends/roommates got pulled over for a traffic violation a couple years ago. It was a major interstate in the U.S. about an hour from a large metro area. There was a white guy driving and a white guy in the passenger seat and two black guys in the back seat. Culturally, they were all middle-class college kids. The cop/trooper asked for the driver’s ID and the ID of the two black guys, not the white passenger.

I’m cherry-picking a bit of your post that’s beside the point you’re trying to make, but it’s fair to say that sometimes people (including law enforcement) let stereotypes drive their actions.

It's also fair to say that sometimes stereotypes are more reflective of reality than of individual bias.

(not refuting your point, tho)

This does relate to story I told though. You could argue that because black people in the U.S. are statistically more likely to be criminals or have been convicted of a crime the extra scrutiny was warranted. While that may be true, that wasn't relevant in this case, and I believe that none of the passengers should have received extra scrutiny.

Can you provide examples of stereotypes that are "more reflective of reality than individual bias?" I'm especially interested in stereotypes that are accurate enough that individuals should be treated differently based on the stereotype.

Like one stereotype that comes to mind is "Tiger moms" or asian parents that are super invested in their kids' success. It's a good stereotype to make jokes about, but should communities/governments make specific policies around it other than just enforcing existing child-welfare policies?

I would agree that the culture war movements in the right are largely just a reaction to the left.