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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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I can't imagine why African Americans occasionally feel unwelcome in the country of their birth.

They feel unwelcome in the country of their birth because they are, collectively speaking, an underclass with significantly worse outcomes by every single measure we have available, and by some important measures their position is getting significantly worse over time. Murder rates, for instance.

Destroying this statue is not going to change that one iota. what it is going to do is cement just a little more firmly the idea that racism is the cause of all Black America's ills, a completely unsupportable claim whose promotion has all but precluded a positive resolution to any of Black America's problems.

This conversation is about a statue, because no one wants to talk about how Blue Tribe lying to the black community for decades has resulted in a couple thousand extra dead black people per year for the last three years and likely for the next decade or more, as a consequence of the largest increase in the violent crime rate ever recorded. When all the statues are gone, the crime and dysfunction will remain, and the social cohesion needed to actually engage the problem productively will be absent because it was all burned on blame-the-outgroup purity spirals like this one.

Destroying this statue improves nothing, achieves nothing, accomplishes nothing. It burns social cohesion for no benefit, locks us further into a fundamentally adversarial view of our history, feeds a culture of grievance that can never, ever be satisfied. It's shortsighted and stupid and suicidal, but what else is new?