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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct. That's the only way I can see to explain the seeming unanimity of the response here vs the contrary unanimity at e.g. Uvalde and Broward County. We're not looking at two different models of human, right? There have to be at least a few potential heroes and a few potential cowards in all places? But if you want to be a hero and yet your peers and/or your boss are dithering about "establishing a perimeter", maybe that's enough to keep you from advancing on a gun-toting murderer by yourself; conversely, if your peers are charging forward, even someone who'd rather be elsewhere might not want to be the only coward who doesn't have his friends' backs.

You might be interested in ACoUP’s blogging on military psychology, specifically Total Generalship

morale will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven ‘the cause’ far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.

…

Actual responsiveness to evolving conditions didn’t come from the general at all, but was an emergent property of junior officers empowered to make independent decisions combined with armies that had sufficient training and discipline to act on those decisions in the moment. Such armies could be very effective, but they were also difficult to produce (as were the capable junior officers) and so a relative rarity.

Basically, hunkering down and waiting for a change is a really common historical response, the natural combination of bystander effect and mortal fear. Armies rely on officers and training to try and get around this, and it’s part of the reason a disciplined military tends to steamroll larger ones. The Metro police appear to have had their training and personal initiative kick in, while the Uvalde cops congealed at the perimeter.

The Metro police appear to have had their training and personal initiative kick in, while the Uvalde cops congealed at the perimeter.

Even if we grant this as excusable, they were completely willing to prevent others from going in and doing the job. So that really lays the insult of comparing them to these guys thick.

So yeah, whatever training the Uvalde guys had, it clearly isn't ideal.

Oh yeah. I’m not trying to excuse their behavior. Out of all the possible options they defaulted to a pretty awful one.

There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct

The most plausible explanation I've seen for Uvalde is that the bystander effect took hold as soon as the first few officers didn't charge in. When there are already half a dozen guys with guns standing by the door, there's no rush for the next responders to do something different, then you start calling leadership asking for explicit direction to go in, and the next thing you know it's dozens of minutes later.

I'm not saying it exonerates their behavior, but I can see how it could have happened -- or indeed, gone quite differently with a few minor changes. If so, it's probably reducible with explicit training points about initial response.

As I recall, they actively prevented anyone else from acting and entering the school, which is where it really crosses over into inexcusability.

There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct. That's the only way I can see to explain the seeming unanimity of the response here vs the contrary unanimity at e.g. Uvalde and Broward County.

It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino (visibly so), while up to 50% of the US Border Patrol is Hispanic or latino.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/06/26/fact-check-are-half-of-all-border-patrol-agents-hispanic/

  • -16

Dude, come on. Hispanic cultures have their flaws, but cowardice is not one of them.

On its own, this would just be a bad comment I'd probably ding for booing your outgroup and not speaking clearly.

However, you now have a very lengthy record of warnings and bans for these kind of low-effort insinuations made without any kind of substantiation, just a curled upper lip and metaphorical wiggling of eyebrows.

We don't ban criticism of Jews, Chinese, blacks, women, Hispanics, and whichever group you hate today. That doesn't mean this is a place where you can just drop your edgiest hot take about the Racial Outgroup of the day. If you wanted to elaborate on why its "relevant to note" that a mostly Hispanic police force performed poorly compared to a mostly white one, you could have done that, if you'd put enough effort into it for it not to be just like your last few manifestos about Chinese robbers or low-effort sneers about the lower breeds.

But you didn't. You're just doing the same thing, over and over, and degrading the quality of the conversation, and certainly not contributing anything interesting or intelligent in the way of racial theorizing.

@naraburns just told you to stop doing this, and he explicitly told you you were looking at a longer ban. I'm making it two weeks this time. Next time will be months if not permanent.

It was a Hispanic bortac agent who took the guy down.

Shh you weren't supposed to notice that, you were supposed to mindlessly parrot the rationalist consensus. ;-)

Eh, what consensus? I don’t even see anything about the unknowable female mindset.

Are you equating "rationalist" with "white supremacist" now?

Not "white supremacist" so much as "bio determinist".

Edit to elaborate/be less inflametory: Let's be blunt the willingness to argue that things like culture, upbringing, economic background, might matter more than one's skin color has already marked guys like facelesscraven and I as outliers here. The rationalist consensus is that "it's all genetics". As much as this particular user may get downvoted, takes like that of @Lepidus' above are the norm here rather than the exception and far more representative of what "rationalism" as a movement stands for than anything I might write.

Funny, I was reaching for that same link to argue that any consensus is pretty weak. Look at all those posters adding caveats. The sort which would argue with Lepidus over his assumptions, not just his wink-wink-nudge-nudge rhetoric.

I know it's not proof. At the very least other people have a similar impression about the existence of a consensus. How much of that is loud, single issue posters? How much is an unusual willingness to grant assumptions or play devil's advocate? I think the baseline for Internet discussion of HBD is "kill it with fire," so entertaining the idea, even if you think it's wrong, marks you as a witch.

I think "bio-determinist" is a particular point along the "HBD" spectrum. I think you're right that most rationalists believe HBD is true to some degree, but I do not think you're correct that "things like culture, upbringing, economic background, might matter more than one's skin color" is a fringe position, even here. (And here is, at most, rationalist-adjacent.)

I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.

It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino

I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.

It looked like "making a business decision" to me, not poor planning. As @faceh just posted upthread, they were afraid that the shooter had an AR-15 and knew they'd take casualities. It's unfortunate they weren't equipped to respond to the situation safely. But in any functional non-decadent society, armed men are expected to charge into danger when the community's children are being slaughtered.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

This is partially downstream of immigration and ethnic diversity weakening the country's civic bonds, though I don't draw a straight line between the ethnic makeup of the police and their business decision.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

It's their fundamental responsibility as cops: willingly going into danger on behalf of the larger community. At those tho haven't forgotten they "protect and serve" the people by upholding the law.

While Texas has gotten more Hispanic over the past years, uvalde has, uh, not been a magnet for immigrants. It’s a fairly homogenously Hispanic town that can plausibly claim to have been homogenously Mexican-American Hispanic since 1848 if not before.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

Not a fan of this 'as men' line. Try 'as police officers', or as 'a good person'. I really don't think women should be absolved of such costly responsibilities when they clamor for equality. 'Women can be heroes too'. No, they have to be. Else, the kitchen.

Just because feminism wins in some arenas with its unsustainable social ideas doesn't mean we should cater to all of its delusions. Asymmetry is sometimes better than equality. If we start insisting lady teachers storm doors to stop terrorists, we will get more dead children and teachers. And that will have the disastrous downstream affect of legitimizing more gun control.

Quite a fanciful chain of consequences you've got there. One could hypothesize that a few armed female teachers could curb the problem far more effectively, thereby delegitimizing gun control, if that's what you care about. As Timur nearly said, “It is better to be on hand with one woman than absent with ten men.” Do people who stop school shooters die all that often?

If I trusted the competency of the women in your theoretical plan I might endorse it. I do not.

I believe men's lives as expendable in the defense of women and children is a satisfactory social arrangement, possibly the only sustainable one*, extremely honorable, and probably encoded somewhere in our genes. Has there been any culture in history that demanded something like "Return with your shield or on it" of women? I believe that's probably impossible.

* With the ALOHMNBIDTAI proviso ("All Lessons of History May Now Be Irrelevant Due to AI")

Don't do the 'and children' gambit. Children are innocent, and they've got more QALYs.

This is about the social contract between men and women. I personnally do not care to sacrifice myself for women. Not instinctively, not rationally, not morally. If some 50 year-old stranger with a vagina wants my seat on the lifeboat she better bring more than 'time-honored traditions'.

It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino (visibly so)

So were the students. Not exactly an argument that supports a racial solidarity angle.

At least one of the Uvalde cops, if I remember correctly, had a child inside the school and was restrained from entering. Still trying to get my head around the videos of all that beyond a dismissive 'people get weird in weird situations'

Why is that supposed to matter?

40% percent of Americans say that most people can be trusted while only 11% of Mexicans feel the same way. That demographics that differ in social trust people might show differing levels of willingness to take on risks for strangers --- matters.

https://ourworldindata.org/trust

Upvoted for bringing data, but come on: your support for "trust is genetic, not cultural" includes a graph showing levels of trust in Mexico dropping by two thirds in barely a single generation. Did Mexico just finally get colonized by untrusting Mexican people? Or have there been environmental changes (cartel violence) that didn't reflect in America? The Ciudad Juarez homicide rate went from "3x the USA" to "50x the USA" and back (briefly; it's gotten worse again) in just one decade, while on the other side of a river (and wall, and freeways...) the city of El Paso (14% non-Hispanic white, 80% Hispanic) was untouched at "1/2 the USA". It would be entirely reasonable for Hispanics on just one side of the river to get really skeptical about "trust".

Were any of the Uvalde responders not Americans?

If you’re suggesting a mixed-race Latino police force implies a Mexican national’s level of trust implies lower risk-tolerance for strangers explains their terrible response…that seems pretty tenuous.

Why would it be? Garrett Jones makes a compelling case that even European immigrants only assimilate about half-way, generations after they've forgotten even their original language. There is a considerable IQ gap between mestizos and white europeans. Why shouldn't our prior be an absence of complete integration?

Also, the idea that American citizenship means much when you can obtain it without knowing the language is prima-facie absurd. Even if you are a Civ Nat it should be obvious that we are a long way away from anything resembling integration conducive conditions.

I don’t know who that is. The economist?

Your 40% vs 11% is divided by country, not by race. I’d assume the Mexican distrust has something to do with its cartel hellscape. The Uvalde police are, as far as I know, Americans living and working in America. Why would they line up with the Mexico statistic rather than the USA one? Because they’re (half-?) Latino?

And that’s before asking if 40% vs 11% chance of trust could actually make the difference. I can think of a lot of other reasons a man might do his job—or fail to do it.

Yes. Here's the review: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/just-like-home/.

The Uvalde police actually appear to be entirely latino, of varying levels of distinctly visible native admixture. It's border patrol that is half-non latino.

And that’s before asking if 40% vs 11% chance of trust could actually make the difference. I can think of a lot of other reasons a man might do his job—or fail to do it.

I really don't know how to bridge the inferential gap here. If anyone else can, please be my guest.

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