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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Barring the emergency exits is a plausible framing for deBoer’s strategy. At the least, it fits neatly in with stereotypes about socialists, which I guess makes it good enough for this board. I doubt that it was the motivation for soft-on-crime DAs, and I am confident that it is not, and never has been, the modus operandi for desegregation.

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority? Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end? Who’s coordinating this gambit, anyway?

Here’s a simpler explanation: people opposed segregation because they thought it was bad. Evil, pernicious, self-perpetuating. And people oppose harsh sentences, or racial profiling, or whatever triggered the campaigns of 2018—they oppose these things because they think they are wrong. Not because they’re playing 5D chess with recidivism. Not because they want their opponents to suffer. Because they expect the benefits outweigh any costs.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Barring the emergency exits is a plausible framing for deBoer’s strategy.

It's not novel to De Boer.

It's not novel to education.

Ditto for discipline caps in schooling, which is the same logic again.

Ditto for affirmative action and other diversity quotas.

This is absolutely a thing people on the Left do. It's absolutely a thing people on the Right do, probably in the same way, though no examples leap readily to mind. It's a very human and highly recognizable tendency in contentious politics. If you squint and tilt your head, you can see something of the same pattern in Trump supporters' current and continued support for Trump, or in debt ceiling brinksmanship, or in dozens of other patterns of behavior. It does seem to me that leftists do it more with actual institutions, though, possibly because they run more institutions.

Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority?

Because they believe that unwilling majority is ultimately to blame for the problem, and they are tired of waiting for a solution. Re-read that Kline article, it's all there in black and white. People see a problem, and they get angry at the people causing the problem. But then those people and their defenders say it's not them, it's actually a systemic thing. Spokespersons for the system blame individuals, and after a while the people worried about the problem get sick of the buck-passing, and insist on a solution now, even if the solution is lossy or dire. They reason that even if they can't identify exactly where the problem is, they can narrow it down to a general area and carpet-bomb, writing off the collateral damage as a cost of doing business. It's a reasonable strategy if you're correct about the general location and severity of the problem. If you aren't, it's just a disaster.

I think the issue is that the people you’re trapping have so little power to actually fix the problems that essentially it’s locking the top deck of the titanic and then telling the passengers that the only way they live is if they manage to fix the leak — without any tools or training. Trapping kids in the public schools essentially means that everybody’s kids fail unless the parents can tutor alongside the school. Lock the school board’s kids in might work, locking in the teachers kids, maybe, lock in the kids of the people elected to government? Sure, I can see it.

Hmm. A civil service that requires employees to send their kids to public schools. Work for the government, no dodging the system you create.

It’s got a certain appeal.

I rather strongly suspect that most civil servants do send their kids to public schools. They tend to live in higher CoL areas and aren't paid particularly well. Likewise for teachers, school board members, etc...

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated ...

I feel like we read different things.

Here’s a simpler explanation: people opposed segregation because they thought it was bad.

I agree and I agree that segregation is bad. The issue here is the side effects to the solutions proposed. There's a lot of people who greatly benefited from segregation that are now proposing solutions that will mainly effect other people. I'm not saying this is done maliciously but refusing to acknowledge this helps no one (and fuels the idea of 5d-chess).

I’m talking about

Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.

And

But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?

I don’t object to OP’s argument about skin in the game. I think assessing the cost-benefit of a policy (such as busing, soft-on-crime, or general segregation) is a legitimate discussion to have. The unreasonable bit is asserting that progressives are doing this as 5D chess. That they aren’t removing the thing because the thing is bad, but because it will make other people actually fix it. That’s convoluted and uncharitable.

As @anti_dan pointed out, place enough value on fairness, and you’ll come up with something like the soft-on-crime DAs. If you’re enough of a utopian, maybe you really do think the problems will go away when you remove a discriminatory pressure. These are more realistic explanations!

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious.

I don’t object to OP’s argument about skin in the game.

I'm confused. I think I misunderstood your tone.

As @anti_dan pointed out, place enough value on fairness, and you’ll come up with something like the soft-on-crime DAs... If you’re enough of a utopian, maybe you really do think the problems will go away when you remove a discriminatory pressure.

Right, this is my point. A lot of people have utopian ideas but ignore the unintended consequences of those ideas. This gets galling when the people calling the shots (with those ideals) don't live in the area and don't have to deal with the consequences. Screaming racism because they don't want to deal with that criticism is disgusting.

If you OK a homeless encampment in the park, you don't get to ignore the girl who gets raped.

Aye. No objections to that.

Argument from side effects is legitimate. Claiming that opponents overlooked something, undervalued something, and so on—perfectly fine. Asserting that they were actually choosing policies because they wanted to force the majority to reckon with a problem? Now he’s starting to get uncharitable, not to mention convoluted.

Because they expect the benefits outweigh any costs.

I disagree. The OP's list of institutions and reforms are highly associated with a set of people who really don't believe in or acknowledge tradeoffs (as a group). Largely those sorts of reforms are caused by an overactive sense of fairness and a Utopian vision. Maybe FDB thinks in the terms of "skin in the game" but mostly public school advocates think in terms of it being unfair if kids dont get the same education, and that if only we could get everyone into "good schools" most of societies ills would be solved. And, in addition, that if we didn't have public schools, all the poor kids would languish in illiteracy.

I don’t think we disagree.

Placing that much value on “fairness” is saying that it would be a huge benefit. Thinking public school ought to be good enough for the elite is assuming away the costs. For someone who thinks access to opportunity really is the only thing holding a kid back, providing that access is really supposed to fix the problem!

I think that’s a reasonable way to interpret progressive policy around education. My problem with the OP is modeling increasing access as a progressive psyop. It’s not—that Utopianism and fairness is enough.

OP is modelling the progressives as percieving and understanding the problem and its solutions the same way as he does, so is confused and left scrambling to find an explanation as to why they chose bad solutions, coming to the conclusion that bad solutions must be a deliberate part of a plan to force people to find good solutions. Progressives do the same thing when they claim that their ideological opponents must be evil or selfish for refusing to fix whatever social ill is their current project.

As you point out, most progressives likely see the issue differently, and their solutions don't seem bad to them.

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority?

Because then the majority has skin in the game and has to deal with the problem. It's naive and usually doesn't work, but if you totally expect it from deBoer, why not from other activists?

Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end?

I never said or implied that. But you're conflating two very different things: all the stuff that MLK mentioned, let's call it "negative desegregation", meaning that black people are no longer prevented from being in white spaces, and "positive desegregation" that actively tries to mix up communities, such as busing (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing btw, it was an unmitigated disaster opposed by everyone involved expect the actual rich and affluent whites). Can you give me your best pro-busing steelman? Because I'd put making whites have skin in the game wrt education quality on the first place, tolerance through familiarity on the second, and aesthetic preference for de facto desegregation as a sort of a strawman (though no doubt real) justification.

Same for the Soros DAs. I'm not saying that there were devious conspirators planning to have a crime wave, I'm sure that they hoped that there wouldn't be a crime wave! But don't you think that it was very weird to do things in the opposite order to what I proposed? Like, first you figure how to prevent criminals from reoffending, then you go soft on reoffenders because they won't reoffend yet again? If you go soft on reoffenders first, what exactly do you expect? Is "uh I hope someone also figures how to prevent recidivism now that they are forced to" painting my enemies as more stupid and evil than "idk I don't give a fuck lol"?

Then you weren’t very clear when you claimed

Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess).

You glossed over the part where people thought the segregation itself was bad and had obvious, object-level effects. Is that not a more obvious motivation for desegregation? Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing. It’s not people trying to psyop the oppressors into caring about a problem. It’s people believing their remedy is just.

I said:

Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them

And again, steelman going above and beyond letting anyone to go to any school they want and forcing them to go to a racially diverse school.

Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing.

You will have to spell it out for me, I don't have none.

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