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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Someone is dealing opioids, and that someone elides the calls for law and order most of the time. Whether those neighborhoods are peaceful, orderly idylls where now and then someone dies quietly in a bedroom is a question that I can't answer without trying to dig into county-by-county crime statistics. I doubt it's as bad as inner cities, but I'm also skeptical of the rosy picture you're painting.
You frequently make unsupported arguments and force me to do the legwork for you.
I'm far from an expert, but Google trends shows that discussion about the opioid epidemic really took off around 2016 when fentanyl started flooding the market; this tracks pretty well with figures 2, 3 and 5 that I linked you previously. It seems like overdoses caused by prescription opioids don't elicit much discussion, but they also don't contribute much to the overall toll of overdoses in the US, so...maybe that makes sense?
Of course this ignores regional trends in overdoses, socially erosive drug habits that didn't end in overdoses until fentanyl hit the scene, etc etc but it seems to me that you've overfitted on 'nobody cares about white people problems.'
The feds spent $3.3B and $7.4B on the opioid crisis in 2017 and 2018 respectively (table 2). It disproportionately went to red states (Figure 5 and 6) outside of Vermont, NH and Maine for some reason. It's confusing to me why the south was ignored, and I'm too lazy to try and overlay it with overdoses per capita to see if it matches the funding levels. Looks like $7.6B in spending in 2019. I can't find data on how much the government spends on crack cocaine which makes me think it isn't much. The majority of federal spending seems to go towards dealing with the health consequences of drug abuse. Untangling whether there's bias in that system towards black people at the expense of rural whites is, I think, a bit beyond what I can be expected to do.
They did want police and prisons back in the 80s and 90s, no? The law and order approach didn't seem to work out that great either.
Poverty rates have more or less steadily improved since the 1960s and throughout the civil rights era. Maybe you could attribute the drop from 1994-2000 to this, but it seems like that argument would take a lot more support than anything you provided.
But what do you mean, nothing reds can do will help them? You've split control of the federal government for about as long as I've been alive. You control the governorships of places like Mississippi, Iowa and Arkansas which have some of the worst poverty rates among blacks even after normalizing for the slightly higher white poverty levels. Maryland, Washington, Virginia and New Jersey have some of the lowest (intentionally omitting states like Vermont and Utah which have negligible black populations). Your best argument is that local government is the most important for combating poverty, which is an argument of the gaps that you failed to proactively provide evidence for, and is incongruent with conventionally blue states having lower poverty rates.
This argument of Dems as neo-plantation owners is largely bullshit. There are ugly things like white elites who lecture us on multiculturalism, equity and climate change while flying their children to the Alps on private jets while on holiday from their boarding schools. I get that. But extrapolating that to the median Democrat is just as silly as assuming that you're anything like Lindsay Graham or the Koch brothers or something. If you're going to tell me that Republicans have this One Neat Trick to address poverty and social ills that the wicked Democrats don't want you to know about, tell me what that is and provide some data showing me that it works when the data I've seen largely points towards the opposite.
It's not pessimistic, but it's fundamentally an emotional argument. You're angry, because you feel like you and your tribe aren't in control but you're being blamed for problems you haven't created and you feel like you don't have much of a say in addressing. I don't think it's entirely false, but it does seem to be far from the truth in places. But I also don't think pointing out the ways in which you're wrong is the goal, nor is it likely to be productive, is it?
At some point I feel like people around here want 1) affirmation of their feelings of alienation and frustration by ingroupers with similar biases to them, 2) a free therapy session or 3) a chance to rail against what they see as their oppressor (me?). Usually I just say I'm sorry you feel that way man, I can commiserate, I think we have more in common than the media would have us believe. Indeed, that would normally be my response to your post rather than picking holes in it, but lately I've been accused of being smarmy, concern trolling and disingenuous. Asking how I'm supposed to converse with You (not you personally, the royal You) is often ignored. So tell me, how do you want me to reply to what you've written? I could easily write such a screed with the script flipped about how the Evil Republicans block all our bills that would have led to a post-scarcity utopia with equality between the races and sexes, we could both get angry at each other and move on with our lives hating the outgroup a little bit more, but that strikes me as the worst outcome.
1/2 (Goddammit.)
If you disagree with a claim, you can state your disagreement simply and I'll be happy to go digging for the supporting data. No need to take legwork upon yourself. On the other hand, on questions this wide-ranging, I think it's a better idea on both ends to simply state one's understanding, and then focus on the questions of fact that emerge from the clashing perspectives.
I'm certainly emotional about it, furious, in fact, but that does not make it an emotional argument. It is the bare facts, as best as I understand them, based on a considerable amount of evidence assessed over decades. This is my best understanding of a particular slice of the reality we all live in, as best as I can express it in a short post at 3am.
By all means, point them out and let's try to discuss them.
Over time, it has grown increasingly difficult for me to take conversations across the isle at all seriously. The "national conversation" about race, like most culture war issues, necessarily involves a number of fairly nebulous ideas, like "white supremacy" and "implicit bias" and "structural racism" and so on. These terms frequently have uncertain and changeable definitions, weak supporting evidence, extremely poor predictive value, and a considerable history of falsification, but any conversation more or less demands that I accept them as the null hypothesis unless I can marshal strong evidence to the contrary.
the BLM movement was one of the most sudden and intense political campaigns in living memory. I have never seen a political issue pushed harder, more political capital spent, more extreme demands made, more people mobilized, conformity enforced more zealously, ever in my life. The current murder spike appears to be blatantly correlated with BLM's efforts, and was predicted well in advance.
We try to discuss things using evidence and reason. It seems to me that there is more evidence and more reason, by orders of magnitude, to blame the current murder spike directly and solely on Blue Tribe than for any Blue Tribe social theory we've ever discussed here. The consequences have been more dire, by orders of magnitude, than any social issue we've ever discussed here. BLM was based on a fictitious epidemic of murdered black men. We now have an actual epidemic of murdered black men. If causation can be deduced, if reason can extract meaning from the chaos of events, this is it.
And blues, you among them, appear to me to be completely blind to this momentous event, and seem to expect us to all go back to discussing theories about implicit bias from names on resumes. It's as though we're expected to simply grant a mulligan, and pretend the awkward events of the last two years didn't happen. But then, what's the point in any of this? Why go on pretending we're even attempting to engage with reality?
And sure, perhaps I'm wrong in my assessment above. Perhaps I'm blinded by my own biases and bigotries. But I've noticed that this never actually gets argued, despite this being one of the most significant political events of the last fifty years. It just... doesn't pierce the fog, somehow. I have my theories as to why, mainly involving the effects of media bias, but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
I think there's a fair bit of that going around, sure. On the other hand, and I say this with what I sincerely hope is all possible charity, you seem to want to talk about the Culture War, but only from a perspective where conflict is simply ruled irrational as an axiom. That is not a perspective that I, or indeed many reds here, can actually share in good faith.
Suppose for a moment that I'm right. Suppose Blue Tribe did actually engage in a propaganda campaign to convince people of a fictitious murder epidemic of innocent black men by the police, that this did in fact lead to a massive, coordinated attack on our system of policing, and that this attack successfully collapsed large parts of our law enforcement apparatus, that the result has been an unprecedented increase in the murder rate, and that Blues stand to derive significant political gains from this sequence of events. If all that were true, when you ask why we can't find common ground, what am I supposed to say to you?
Tell me I'm dead wrong, and why. I don't mind being contradicted, and I am readily willing to admit error or fault when the evidence goes against me. Alternatively, tell me that these conversations seem unproductive, and I'll make a good-faith effort to avoid engaging on this general topic in the future, and go back to that nice conversation we were having about values and the good things in life. I liked that one a lot.
I don't want to paint a rosy picture, but I think we can at least agree that this is a factual question where the evidence should be reasonably clear, yes? If one looks at the data and rural/white/opioid areas see significantly less violent crime than the inner-city/black/crack areas per-capita, then it seems that the disparity in treatment is founded on factual differences rather than bias, yes? If they're pretty similar per-capita, then I'd happily stand corrected, withdraw my claims, and endeavor to modify my understanding of the world to match the available evidence.
Quick googling results, with excerpts:
10 US counties with the highest murder rate
Data from 2017, but since this conversation is about long-term attitudes, I'm not sure that matters.
So the regional divide lines up fairly well with the demographic prevalence of blacks.
Sure.
...And there you go.
Orleans Parish, New Orleans - urban
Coahoma County, Mississippi - rural
Philips County, Arkansas - urban
St Louis City, Missouri - urban
Baltimore City, Maryland - urban
Petersburg City, Virginia - urban, but small.
Macon Country, Alabama - rural
District of Columbia - urban
Washington county, Mississippi - urban?
Dallas County, Alabama - urban?
Four of the ten are major urban centers. Most of the rest are urban as well. All are heavily black.
Here's a paper on the opioid crisis; I have no idea if it's good or not,it's the first relevant result I came across. from the abstract:
Emphasis mine.
1/2
2/2
The evidence I've seen is that the "opioid epidemic" is a distinct social problem from other forms of narcotics use, that it involves different drugs, different users, different dealers, and a different culture overall with minimal attendant violent crime. My understanding is that one of the differences is racial, where the "opioid epidemic" mostly involves rural whites and very few blacks, while traditional drug and gang culture features very heavy (but by no means exclusive) black involvement, and a whole lot more violent crime. Your original claim appeared to be that such differences didn't exist or were incidental. I think the above goes a fair way to establishing that this is not the case.
Where are you getting the conclusion that they didn't contribute much to the overall toll? The orange line in fig 2 appears to diverge rapidly and significantly, and between '99 and '07 the OD rates roughly double. "Significant" is a nebulous term, but unless I'm reading the charts wrong, it looks like by 2009 prescription opioids are killing more people than all other drugs combined. Am I missing something?
I'm looking at a chart that appears to show that (predominantly white, based on the previous links) people ODing on prescription meds came to dominate total drug fatalities, total fatalities doubled, and no one cared. I'm not particularly dedicated to phrasing this as "nobody cares about white people problems", but neither am I willing to accede to your original accusations of bias. Black drug problems come with a heap of violence, and get massive social interventions. Peculiarly white drug problems do not involve similar levels of violence, and were in fact ignored for more than a decade, even as they came to dominate an issue that is never far from the public eye.
If I'm reading the charts wrong, please let me know.
Probably because those are the states hardest hit by this specific drug problem, which by 2017 had gone parabolic. We're coming up on a fivefold increase in the OD rate over the last two decades, and almost all of that increase appears to be prescription opioids before the transition into into fentanyl. One imagines it might have been a good idea to try and get a handle on things before the fent arrived in quantity, but our leaders apparently had other priorities.
From a look at the counties by OD rate, it's because the south, and particularly the deep south, didn't have as much of this specific problem. Again, this isn't generic war on drugs stuff, it's a fairly unique pattern, albeit a quite large one.
I do not think it is proper to attempt to sum this up through the lens of federal spending on crack in particular. We care as much as we do about crack because it hits black Americans unusually hard, and we care about black Americans quite a bit. A huge percentage of the war on drugs has been aimed at Black communities, often at the explicit request of those communities, in an attempt to protect them from the harmful effects of drugs and the violent gangs dealing them. Education, housing systems, both projects and section 8, affirmative action... the list goes on at some length. I'll readily concede that much of this quickly escapes the bounds of the present discussion, though.
The law and order approach got the murder rate back under some semblance of control, at great cost and through grueling effort, with bipartisan cooperation being a necessity. The term "superpredator", explicitly in reference to Black criminals, was of course coined by none other than Bill Clinton. This effort never succeeded in closing the racial gaps, but it did manage to bring the overall murder rate down for blacks and whites both. It was the best we could do, and now it appears to have been undone.
The gap in poverty in particular went from 30% to 20% in forty years. This actually is surprising to me, as I'm used to a very consistent narrative that these gaps simply aren't closing. On the one hand, this indicates that closing the gap completely might in fact be possible, perhaps even in less than a century. On the other hand, Blacks and Blues don't seem to see this as acceptable progress, and are evidently willing to flip the table if a better deal is not offered.
I mean that I have no hope that any practically-achievable intervention I can imagine will actually close these gaps within the foreseeable future. That is to say, I have no hope that armistice is possible on the racial front of the culture war, even if my side had enough social and political dominance to enforce our policy preferences, at least under anything like present conditions. I don't think we have the tools necessary to fix this problem, so it's just going to get worse. We do not actually know how to eliminate poverty or its effects. We don't know how to educate black kids so they get the same outcomes as white kids, much less Asians. We don't know how to prevent black people from committing disproportionate amounts of crime, or using drugs at disproportionate rates. I'm highly confident that Blues can't solve these problems either, not even with total dominance, but they have shown that they can effectively scapegoat Reds for them, and that Blacks will play along even at the cost of their own futures.
That isn't my argument; I have no idea where you're even getting it from. I have no idea how to solve poverty, and I certainly don't think that local government can do so unilaterally. I am, in general, skeptical that the problems that face us can be solved under anything approaching current conditions. My wife spent a good chunk of time living in a midwest state with a predominantly white population and a fairly red-dominant political system. She worked six part-time jobs trying to make a living, before moving away because there simply wasn't any work. Detroit collapsed, despite all efforts to the contrary. Offshoring our industrial capacity seems to have been a bad move, but even there I can't refute the economists, other than to note their predictions and try to judge the outcomes.
I disagree. Blacks have bad outcomes. Blues occasionally make those outcomes significantly worse; the legalization of no-fault divorce, along with the rest of the sexual revolution, seems to be one of those cases, and BLM is another. Neither Blues nor Reds have much power to make them significantly better, and most of the largest concentrations of black misery exist in the seats of blue power. That drill video you linked, those unfortunate souls have been living in deep-blue country for generations, roaches and piss-soaked elevators and multiple friends murdered and all. The people who speak for them blame Reds for their misfortunes, and those among them who can vote reliably vote blue. The misfortunes don't change, the resentments don't change, and the political allegiances don't change. How are these facts "largely bullshit"?
2/2
Most of what you write doesn't register to me as 'facts,' particularly if you're drawing on personal experience. When you say things like so-and-so was involved in a leftist terrorist group in the 70s and is now a university professor it comes across as an unsupported fact but one that I can easily check by wikipedia. When you say Blues are responsible for the plight of black Americans with no supporting data, it strikes me as an opinion that may or may not be true and is complex enough that even if superficially true is the tip of an iceberg. It contains about as much information as me saying that Reds are responsible for the plight of black Americans, no? My response could easily have been that, we both likely would have been wrong and could have gone in circles eating our own tails. It reminds me of mock debates in high school classes where nobody could ever win and indeed determining the truth of the matter wasn't even the point.
But then, maybe that's just my pathological obsession with data.
And I could point out sacred cows on the right that are just as nebulous. You talk to me about the value of "Christian Morals," "patriotism," "respect for the military." Yet I try to take you seriously nonetheless, and avoid things that I know would trigger you.
I think you're right about the BLM protests. As far as I can tell, the consequences have not been good. The crime wave in America, although still historically not that bad (things were worse in the 80s and early 90s), was not shared by Canada, Mexico or the EU as far as I can tell. I'm fairly confident I've said as much to you before, although maybe it was gattsuru or someone else, I'm not sure. From my perspective, every debate inevitably makes it way to the BLM protests because the easily available evidence around increases in crime is on your side and you want to just keep scoring the same point over and over again.
So, at least so far as your conversations with me go, how do you want to handle that? I can sympathize with your perspective and it seems like it has been self-destructive.
That being said, there are some problems with your narrative. Namely, the increase in violent crime and murders weren't restricted to black or urban neighborhoods. How do you draw a line between urban BLM protests and people in almost completely white rural counties murdering each other more often? I don't think the data is available yet, but I'm curious to see if there was a proportional increase in white and black perpetrators, suggesting some other factor.
Insofar as you insinuate that the BLM protests were orchestrated by democrats, I'm less on board. They were certainly involved, white liberals were definitely present at the riots, democratic politicians sympathized with the protesters. At the same time, I'm skeptical that a counterfactual world where white liberals said 'Hey, I know that cop killed your boy but he was on drugs and actually police help you on net' or facebook, twitter and the NYT actively censored stories about George Floyd would have stopped black Americans from rioting.
It's not clear to me hat you mean by this. Are you suggesting that from your perspective, conflict is rational and desirable? And what do you mean by conflict?
I agreed that the inner cities were likely worse, but I disagree with your characterization of opioid addicts peacefully dying in their bedrooms without any crime or damage to society. That's largely based on discussions I've had with friends from these areas, although I can't find any actual data supporting that, so who knows. Maybe you're right and these people studiously follow the law and are good members of society right up until they overdose on fentanyl. Maybe their drug dealers scrupulously stop at red lights, and people suffering withdrawal who can't afford a score are too morally righteous to rob that house down the road to buy more drugs.
From 1999-2006 prescription ODs went up 3x (3500-10,000) while total ODs slightly less than doubled (19k-30k). From 2014-2016 synthetic ODs went up 5x (4000-20,000) while total ODs went from 52,000-60,000. I'm not surprised that the latter got more attention.
Whether the former got any attention I suppose is hard to say since google trends only goes back to 2004, and is unfortunately relative. I could search for news articles from the time, but that's not very quantitative either. I'm not sure how we'd settle that question.
You're right that prescription opioids were a big issue in the mid 2000s though, I was thrown by the different y-axis scales.
There's a reason China affirmative actions the fuck out of their minorities. Having a permanent underclass, along racial lines or otherwise, does not seem like a particularly stable social structure to me. Nor a desirable one. I'm willing to trade some inefficiencies in the economy for welfare.
You said:
You also go on to say:
I pointed out that black Americans are doing better in states with blue governance than red governance. So relatively speaking, if Blues fucked the Blacks, did Red politicians in Mississippi and Arkansas and Missouri double fuck the Blacks? You're not responsible for Chicago, but it's also pretty clear that if we elected Republican leaders in Illinois and they enacted similar policies to other Red states the outcomes for Blacks would get worse. So...the conditions are not good on an absolute scale, but it's rich to criticize Chicago when states that you control are doing significantly worse. You skated past this argument in your response.
Missed this:
I'm not sure either. I first heard of the opioid crisis in 2016, and my strong impression is that's when most other people heard about it too. That's about when J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Ellegy came out, and Trump's campaign brought a lot of issues into the spotlight that had previously been pretty thoroughly ignored. I agree that there's probably no way to prove it, beyond an exhaustive trawl through the media's treatment of the drug issue.
I'm not claiming anything of the kind. My understanding is that the mainly-white opioid epidemic areas have all sorts of crime problems, theft, burglary, property crime, assaults, public intoxication, DUIs, fraud, looting, and so on. What they don't have is anywhere near the same level of violent crime, and especially murder. Like it or not, the evidence is quite clear. You can look up the counties with the highest murder rates, and they're predominantly black. Then you can look up the counties with the worst prescription opioid abuse, and they're predominantly white, and while their crime rates are generally pretty bad, they don't have super-high murder or violent-crime rates. That is a difference that matters for a lot of reasons, not an artifact of arbitrary bias.
More options
Context Copy link
1/2 (the first step is admitting you have a problem.)
It is certainly the tip of the iceberg, and I despair of fitting that iceberg down this 10k-character soda straw. I can't claim to even be doing a good job, only the best I can figure given the constraints.
Start with blind axioms: Progressivism as an ideology aims to transform our society and culture. Progressivism as an ideology has succeeded in this aim to a considerable extent over the last fifty years. If I asked you which of those large-scale changes Progressives generally believe to have been net-negative with the benefit of hindsight, could you confidently name even a single one? It seems to me that the standard Progressive narrative is that their movement, as a movement, has never been significantly wrong.
Maybe my impression of Progressivism's self-assessment is wrong. But if it were accurate, leaving aside statistics, evidence, any specifics at all for a moment: how plausible is it that any ideology ever could make a claim like that?
Moving beyond the axioms, I'm attempting to show that Progressivism has been very badly wrong, in at least one instance. Then I can move on to showing that it's been badly wrong in multiple instances. Then I can move on to showing that it's been wrong in a whole lot of instances, and those instances chain together into a woeful pattern of behavior stretching back decades and even centuries, and that these failures follow basic patterns due to fundamental flaws and blind spots baked into the ideology itself. But even the first step of that chain is quite a task, and patience fails, and in any case it seems a reasonable start is to simply register the general shape of the disagreement.
Alternatively, you could point out that treating these ideals as sacred cows has serious consequences in the real world, that Toby Kieth is fun and all, but somewhere north of seven digits of people have died for absolutely no goddamn reason because of the ideology behind that song, eight or nine digits have had their lives flooded with ceaseless misery, while our military and our nation have been degraded, worn-down and humiliated in search of a catharsis that could never possibly be achieved. And that would be the truth.
Or perhaps you could point out that I personally have incubated hatred and malice in my heart, and that this is a fundamentally foolish thing to do, as you have a number of times. And that too has been the truth, on at least some of those occasions. (I'm working on it. Some days are better than others, but the keel is now reasonably even.)
The point wasn't only that people have sacred cows. It was that some events are sufficiently significant that sacred cows are no longer supportable, no longer tolerable. When people lie to the nation to get a green light on burning down half the Middle East, or it turns out the Catholic Church has been concealing worldwide sexual abuse by priests for decades, it's time for the polite silence to come to an end. I contend that the BLM rioting is one of those moments.
From my perspective, this is the most clear-cut social intervention of my lifetime, with by far the largest and clearest effect, so everything else pales to insignificance. You mention that the murder rate was, in absolute terms, worse in the 80s and 90s. Another way to state this is that this crime spike has wiped out at least two decades of progress on closing the gaps on racial outcomes. If we can't get the rates back down, there is every reason to believe that the problem will perpetuate itself beyond any hope of control, with consequences spinning out for another two or three generations. Certainly that's the accepted narrative of how it happened last time, isn't it?
Argue. Or don't, that's fine too. Half the reason I'm writing these is so I have something legible to gesture to next time someone brings the topic up. In general, though, I guess I'd ask that you understand that we really have some very significant differences in perspective, and it it isn't just invective. If you see me apparently spouting unsupported opinions, feel free to pick the most implausible and demand hard evidence. I try quite hard to not say anything I can't support here, and if I'm caught short I'll readily admit it. In exchange, I'll try to add more links to the ranting.
From my perspective, serious conflict exists. Sometimes prosecuting conflicts is desirable, whether with words or nukes, because the point of contention really is worth it. Sometimes it's not, but while an assumption of the possibility of compromise is a reasonable first-resort, it's not useful as an axiom.
For the subject of race relations, it is not inevitable that racial reconciliation is a near-term possibility in the US, and it cannot be assumed that a breakdown in race relations, or indeed their past history is solely or even mostly Red Tribe's fault. It is possible for people to foment irreconcilable racial conflicts for tribal profit, and Blue Tribe is made of people.
I'd agree that this is at least potentially a problem for my narrative, if the increase were fairly uniform. On the one hand, I think there was a significant disparity of how Red and Blue areas handled the riots, and assumably a difference in the general attitudes of their populations before the riots, so I'd expect blue areas to see a disproportionate amount of the increased crime. On the other hand, BLM was an attack on policing itself as a concept. The memes and propaganda that drove it were not constrained to local targets. Quite a bit of the white underclass thinks All Cops Are Bastards too, and cops in white areas don't want to get abruptly famous and likely modify their behavior to offset the increased perceived risk. BLM memes had significant social impact in Australia. It seems likely to me that inducing negative effects in mostly-white suburbs and rural areas is significantly easier than that, especially given that very few areas in America are actually all-white.
I'd divide this into "before", "during", and "after".
"Before", I was attempting to at least start digging into with that poll. The poll is significant evidence in and of itself. It demonstrates the effects of serious misinformation, with a distinct population overestimating the rate of a particular social ill by two or three orders of magnitude. The misinformation hits blue tribe specifically, leaving Red Tribe relatively untouched. The misinformation is specific to a subject that Blue-tribe dominated media and academia have focused much of their attention on for the last decade. Much of that output from blue tribe media and academia on this subject have been very clearly biased, and often deliberately, grossly dishonest, pushing exactly the angle these poll results reflect. Further, the issue this poll targets is exactly the central issue that drove the riots, as the rioters and their many supporters made exquisitely clear. I think it's pretty clear that the misinformation campaign was deliberate on the part of the journalists and academics, even if most of them were aiming for generic "social change" rather than riots specifically. Absent the prolonged misinformation campaign and the widespread false beliefs that it generated, I think it's entirely possible that the riots would not have happened. (If you'd like evidence of the disinformation campaign, I can try and dig back through the old posts to find the one where I grabbed up a bunch of examples.)
..."during" and "after", I think I'll have to leave to some other time. Institutional support, PR support, policy cover, keeping the cops on a leash, the "fortifying elections" article in Time, evidence from the reactions of posters here, etc, etc. An argument for another time.
1/2
And since I ran out of characters:
What makes you think that I don't understand that we have different perspectives? I've been reading what you and others write for something like 4 years now. I regularly do the Fox news/breitbart/OANN circuit to see what you're exposed to. I read your substacks and whatever pieces the conservative users here link. I don't do the youtube/facebook/telegram/talk radio rabbit holes so maybe I'm missing the true, authentic conservative experience, but based on what little I've heard, that's probably for the best.
Your whole goal is to show that our worldviews are irreconcilable, that the die is cast and that our conflict is written in the stars. This is trivially true, in that you can unilaterally refuse to compromise or budge an inch no matter what I tell you and either force me to agree with you or just use that to support your position. Regardless what happens in the wider world, it's wide enough for you to find Bad Things happening, even more so given the incentives of for-profit media. You devote a lot of exposition to how the BLM protests prove that we're incompatible and out to get you, but you blackpilled before BLM, just like you were blackpilled before Trump just like (I presume) you were blackpilled before Iraq.
Differences in perspective are either due to misinformation, or it's a value judgment and one of us values x more than y. Frankly, our world is so staggeringly complex that we're all helplessly ignorant; some few people can specialize in a tiny sliver of one field among many, yet invariably, any given event draws an avalanche of takes from individuals whose conviction massively outstrips their knowledge.
Like, do either of us honestly believe we're experts on poverty rates in the US? Cherry picking some figures from a paper which probably cherry picked some figures in turn doesn't make either of us qualified to draw any kind of conclusion. The true 'perspective' we should be uniting behind is epistemic humility and calling out people who pretend otherwise.
More options
Context Copy link
2/2 (Like Sisyphus, I am bound in Hell.)
In the first place, it mostly wasn't black people rioting this last time. The racial resentments of the Black community were employed as a pretext by mostly-white rioters, often over the explicit objection of local blacks, who were then left to deal with the long-term consequences.
In the second place, by the time the video hit, it was too late by years.
Blacks should believe that police help them on net because that is the straight, utterly inescapable truth. Black criminals harm innocent blacks directly and at staggering scale. Black crime rates and other bad outcomes are not the fault of racism or white culture or Red Tribe, at least not in anything like the way the dominant Blue narrative claims, and Blues absolutely do not have any workable, pain-free cure for any of these problems. A brief elaboration and some evidence on this point further below.
White liberals have fucked blacks by humoring, encouraging, and cementing into the general culture the lies Blacks tell themselves collectively about where their problems come from, and by opportunistically adding to and reinforcing those lies in a multitude of ways. White liberals don't have to do this, and in fact have refrained from doing this in the past, notably in the 90s under Clinton, whose tenure coincided with a precipitous drop in violent crime at the cost of lots of incarceration of criminals, including a disproportionate number of Black criminals. They started doing it again in the 2010s, largely in my view for political reasons, and the results have been both immediately obvious and a total disaster.
Blacks need to face the fact that their communities are a mess, and that fixing that mess is going to require them facing a number of extremely painful realities. If they want the results the rest of us get, they have to do the things the rest of us do to get them. They have to write off their criminals, the way the rest of us do. They have to embrace actual law enforcement, the way the rest of us do. They have to enforce standards, the way the rest of us do. They have to accept accountability for their own choices, individually and collectively, the way the rest of us do. Absent a serious commitment to these and other points, all the affirmative action and diversity initiatives and juking of stats is for naught. The violence and the poverty and misery will continue, because they're the ones choosing it. If they are determined to remain in the mire, we simply lack the capacity to drag them out against their will. It's a bitter pill, and while it can perhaps be sugar-coated, the sugar pills Blue Tribe swears by simply won't do the job.
Alternatively, they can continue lying and being lied to, while we burn through what remains of our dwindling supply of social cohesion.
...and here's where I should probably start providing some evidence.
My apologies, I needed a bit more elaboration to grasp what you were saying.
I don't think this is true.
Blue States and areas are, in general, significantly wealthier than Red states. If this were down to policy, though, if Blue policies lead to wealth and Red policies lead to impoverishment, then you need to explain why Blue cities and states contain areas that have been very poor for a very long time. If Blue policies actually eliminate poverty, why is there so much poverty in Blue areas?
I don't think the evidence supports a claim that either party is actually better at managing the general economy, either at the national, state or local levels. I don't see evidence that either side or even both cooperating have can arbitrarily force good outcomes. I have seen some evidence that leaders can, through bad decisions, devastate local economies, but I've seen few to no examples of the reverse. I see no reason to believe that Mississippi can become as rich as California if only it elected Blue leaders, or that California's economy would crater if it elected Red leaders.
In any case, despite their overall wealth, Blue areas have fair-sized black populations, and very large portions of those populations are doing very, very badly, by any reasonable measure, and have been for generations. Red tribe areas have even larger black populations, and near as I can tell, those populations are doing just about exactly as bad by all the same measures. This is one of the insights that really should be discussed more: there is no significant racism gradient between Blue and Red America. Crime, incarceration, educational outcomes, single parenthood, drug use and so on show no clear Red/Blue divide. This fact is occasionally concealed by dishonest blues, by exploiting the fact that blacks are not uniformly distributed. So for example Penn State can get a congressman to sign off on a report claiming that the former confederate states, where a majority of America's blacks still live, have the majority of some bad outcome for blacks. Just neglect to run the calculations per-capita, and bob's your uncle, more evidence of the pernicious effects of racism! Meanwhile, pay no mind to the disastrous effects their solutions cause...
I have seen a few places that seemed to be doing a whole lot better, which then turned out to be cheating by faking the stats in one way or another, but leave that aside: if you could demonstrate a clear pattern where black populations as a whole did significantly better in Blue areas than in Red areas, I would abandon my pessimistic arguments and enthusiastically advocate for copying their methods. I am quite confident that such evidence doesn't exist.
If there is no detectable racism gradient between Blue and Red Tribe domains, the Blue Tribe racism narrative is simply unsupportable. It is not reasonable to argue that one's tribe can solve a problem if and only if they have absolute, unquestioned, unaccountable power; just for starters, such a claim is completely unfalsifiable. It does not seem plausible to me that any lesser claim can salvage the standard racism narrative; California is very large, very rich and very blue, it has no shortage of resources, of ideology, of true-believer theorists to formulate plans, uniformly-captured institutions to carry them out, and ideologically-pure tribals to handle street-level implementation, and it delivers roughly similar results to Deep Red strongholds like Mississippi and Alabama. If there's a way to reconcile that discrepancy between predictions and outcomes, I haven't seen it.
There's plenty-more to the rabbit hole: black culture pretty clearly drives some amount of the violence and other bad outcomes, and that culture is national in its impact. Nor is the black underclass regionally-bound; when I was going through the county murder stats, one of the deep-south rural areas had a note that a lot of its gang violence had apparently been imported from Chicago. Gangs and gang behavior do in fact appear to spread geographically as gang members, many of them still children, are moved around the country by their parents, and there's not much to stop poor kids in rural areas from simply copying inner-city gang behavior from what they read about on the internet, or from distant friends they make online... Etc, etc, you get the idea. Iceberg, soda straw.
So am I, on the theory that said underclass sublimates into the general citizenry. But they haven't. I'd still be willing to go for it on the theory that we're doing our best, and we give them some level of preferential treatment in exchange for them generally playing along with society. But they haven't done that either. The better deal they're demanding isn't "some economic inefficiencies", it's unlimited, unquestioned power for Blue Tribe, with zero responsibility for any actual improvement of outcomes. That is unacceptable.
2/2
And I'm claiming that there are double standards regarding how we discuss and treat drug offenders. By your own admission, opiate users are just less violent criminals, though I can attest that I've never once heard a red triber refer to them as anything other than victims. The party of law and order likes to talk about Chicago because they can blame the democrats; I guess they still like to talk about the opioid crisis because they can blame the globalist-China-sellout-democrats for those problems as well, but they sure don't like to talk about any of the crime you're referring to. Are you truly going to refuse to see any parallels between democrats telling impoverished communities of color that their problems are the fault of racist white nationalists without admitting that the Red tribe has their own victim mythos that they prefer to tell rather than taking responsibility and improving their lots?
There's a kernel of truth in the globalist narrative buried in heaps of salt, just as there is a kernel of truth to the fact that most social programs and redistributionist policies that would alleviate poverty are stymied by republicans in congress (and by extension, republican voters). Moreover, 'free trade' and laissez-faire economics have been the domain of Republicans from the 80s through what, the mid 2000s? Many of the people most upset about globalization happily voted for it for decades. At least on the free trade side, who can even guess at a counterfactual world where America turned inwards after WWII, and condemned condemned as damaging to the middle class and pursued protectionism? For all we know we lost the Cold War, sparked WWIII, or got wrecked economically by an ascendant mercantile Japan. What I am pretty confident in, though, is that TheMotte exists in this world, and it's populated by people absolutely convinced that our government is headed by some of the laziest, most corrupt and least competent politicians in history. Except for the few locals they voted for.
Quite the jump from a nihilistic 'human societies gonna society, the good life comes from God' worldview. But regardless, I'm sure you've gotten the same pushback that 1960s (or whenever the idyllic golden era you long for was) America is an arbitrary date to freeze in amber, and no doubt people have longed to do so in a recognizable way since the French Revolution if not the Greeks if not whatever proto-civilization we lack records of.
I hear replacing Christmas was poorly received, and not even the orgies were enough to keep heads on shoulders. More seriously, there's a reckoning coming for the NIMBY policies that wrecked the housing markets. A true reckoning would probably be someone sitting down and saying 'huh, those libertarians and conservatives might have been onto something 15 years ago...' rather than rebranding free market capitalism (red coded) as YIMBYism.
But then, do you think the modern right have major examples of policies they espoused that they believe have been net-negative, besides allowing the existence of the democratic party? That people and movements are both bad at admitting fault is not a particularly striking criticism.
Moreover, the idea that desiring to transform our society and culture is unique to progressives seems patently false. Was Reagan transforming our polity by espousing free trade rather than the rampant protectionism that carried the day in the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas pro-union democrats were conserving it? Is Moldbug the true conservative because he wants a neo-monarchic-corpo-state? Enough of that, I'm sure you're familiar with the argument.
You know how my answer to that goes.
You neglect to consider widespread unemployment, breakdown of routine and social ties due to the pandemic, so on and so forth. I would push it harder, but it's not clear to me why this pattern didn't hold true in other countries. Too many variables and too many superficial news articles, not really a satisfying answer.
I'm not sure I believe this, or how you would prove it. Say 20% of the black population of LA rioted in the 90s, and the same fraction of black people turned out after George Floyd joined by, say, 5% of the white population that made the protest 50-50. Would you characterize that as a pretext for mostly-white rioters to burn black neighborhoods to the ground, when the same fraction of the black community was turning out? Moreover, any counterfactuals would support your argument in other ways; all black rioters, black people perpetuate violent crime, if they burned white neighborhoods instead of black neighborhoods, blue tribe wants to burn down innocent red tribe homes, etc.
83% of black Americans express some support for BLM. I expect the views you'd get from people living in those neighborhoods would be a bit more nuanced than white rioters just looking to cause trouble burned down my house, we're all living on Joe Biden's plantations as neo-slaves.
There's probably a tradeoff between 'X will grow up fatherless because his dad is serving life in prison for petty theft' and police turning a blind eye towards rampant gang violence. I don't know where the sweet spot is, but blindly optimizing for line goes down for violent crime probably does hit a point of doing more harm than good, which has been the argument of the criminal justice reformers.
Fox news has entered the chat.
Looks like I was poorly informed on this front. I'd always seen stats on the welfare systems being more robust and generous in blue states, which is true, but it's more than [eaten up by the cost of living(https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/measuring-poverty-in-the-united-states-comparing-measurement-methods/) (states colored in red actually have higher poverty levels after accounting for federal programs and some CoL adjustments). It's interesting that welfare is so much more effective at reducing poverty in red states than in blue states (see, for example, the impact of SNAP on poverty is mostly felt in red states, although I can imagine the outcry if they tried to peg aid to the CoL in some way. Debatably, these social programs are largely supported by democrats at the federal level, and 80% of the welfare budget is spent by the feds. Welfare spending at the state level per capita is a bit more varied, although probably less consequential relative to the feds. I'd need to read more, but maybe I should limit the amount of time I waste on things without clear answers...
Mississippi also just kind of sucks.
I think they'd actually be pretty happy with similar representation in congress and some lucrative occupations, along with middle-class opportunities. Maybe some respect too. Sounds a bit like what people around here demand for the rust belt whites, a
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link