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Once again, you can't reason people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. To quote Michelle Obama: "Don't think, Barack, feel!"
If you reason from facts, the United States is obviously not a white supremacist nation. The top countries of origin for immigrants in America are Mexico, China, India, the Philipines, and El Salvador. The highest income ethnic groups in America are, in order: Indian, Filipino, Taiwanese, Sri Lankan, Japanese, Malaysian, Chinese, and Pakistani. Whites are barely average.
"People of Color", as white liberals like to call them, seem to want to come to America, and once they get here, they do so well they outperform white liberals. They even serve in the armed forces in higher proportion than whites.
But those are facts, and white progressivism isn't about facts, it's about feelings.
Progressives believe things that make them feel good. More specifically, they believe things that make them feel like they are a member of a high status group, they have high status in that group, they are secure in that status, and that they deserve that status. That's how they simultaneously claim that you are born with your sexual orientation, but you can pick your gender, that affirmative action is a remedy for past discrimination, but Asian Americans should be pushed out in favor of whites, etc.
There's a greentext floating around saying that some people parse information through a "consensus filter" - they don't ask themselves "is this true", they ask themselves "are other people OK with me believing this". If your world is social, that's probably a good survival tactic. You conform to and behave according to the memes that will cause the group to accept and protect you.
That's how white progressives end up saying crazy things about ethnic minorities that ethnic minorities themselves don't believe.
"White supremacy" is one of those things. By saying that America is white supremacist, you differentiate yourself from your lower or middle class origins where people are patriotic and colorblind. You can ingratiate yourself into and reinforce your position in the PMC. You even get to tell yourself you deserve this status because you have a large circle of care than others.
They don't, in any way, believe in the literal truth of America being white supremacist - if they did, they would ban immigration from Haiti to save the Haitians. You won't get anywhere pointing out the three million people of color risking their lives to get here, or the incredible success so many of them achieve in such short order.
To a white liberal, words don't actually have meaning, they're just the carrier wave that gets modulated to transmit feelings, specifically social feelings about who is cared about and who belongs where.
Trying to reason with them will just confuse or infuriate them.
Filipinos are the second highest income group? That seems off.
Does it? I feel like they pretty much run medicine and manufacturing.
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By household. They commonly have households with several working adults.
Great point. Collectivist living'd skew it back, definitely wouldn't expect them to be top 2 for average adult incomes.
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There's some truth in what you say but I think that you go too far with it. White liberals don't just spew meaningless words, they have plenty of explanations (or, to be less charitable, rationalizations) for their beliefs. Take your Haiti example. The bog-standard progressive explanation for this is "Yes, America is a white supremacist country, but it is still a good thing for Haitians to be able to come to America because white people have destroyed Haiti so much through colonialism that America is better to live in materially than Haiti even though America is white supremacist." You might not agree with this explanation, but I don't think that it's pure status/virtue signalling. If you are convinced of the truth of the assumptions that the explanation depends on, the explanation will seem quite logical to you.
I think that some people really overestimate the degree to which progressiveness is some sort of status-climbing social adaptation. To some extent it is, but I'm not sure that it really is one much more than any other political, social, or religious movement.
And if you want to convince white liberals that they are wrong, I think that you would probably be more effective by doing stuff like subtly introducing them to data that puts their assumptions into question than you would be by going into it assuming that most of them are opportunistic social climbers who do not actually care about the truth.
Some people here don't realize that what is obvious to them is not obvious to others. Yes, you (not you satirizedoor specifically, I mean the generic Motte poster) might be well-acquainted with FBI crime statistics, for example, or with sophisticated logical arguments about why central planning underperforms the free market. But there are a bunch of people out there who literally do not even know that there are racial discrepancies in crime or in the results of intelligence tests, or know anything about the history of communist economies. It's not even that they know about it but have progressive-type explanations for those things, it's that they don't even know that there is anything to explain to begin with.
Of course there are also white liberals who know about those things but have progressive-type explanations for them. And there is a group, probably small in my opinion, who really do simply not care about the truth, like some kind of O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four. My point is, though, that in my opinion the most accurate mental model of white liberals is that most of them fall into either the first (they don't know) or the second (they know but they have progressive explanations for it) groups. Not into the third (cynical social climbers) group.
Oh my sweet summer child, I'm related to white liberals.
You'll never get anywhere reasoning with an AWFL. On the other hand, you can move them by subtly implying that the elite social consensus has moved on, and that by advocating for what they believe, they're now behind the times or low status. The other way you can move them is to show that there's a group that their opinion doesn't care about, and then emote about the harms done to that group.
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I would love to live in a world in which I could redpill woke people just by spitting a ceaseless barrage of facts and logic™ at them until their worldview crumbles into dust. Unfortunately, after a decade of arguing with woke people using pretty much exactly this approach, I don't have a great deal of confidence in its efficacy. Wokeness is a fully self-contained and self-consistent paradigm. In a remarkably short period since its inception, it has evolved antibodies for any objection one might raise against it - not necessarily good antibodies, but antibodies nonetheless. If you tell a passively woke person a politically uncomfortable fact, they will generally defuse the cognitive dissonance by appeals to ignorance ("I'm sure that's only one of several studies showing that Asian-American households make more money than white American households, and other studies have found otherwise"), while a hardcore true believer will do so by retreating into conspiratorialism ("you really think the Amerikkkan police only shot 30 unarmed black men this year? There's no way the police are reporting every single black man they kill").
Really, I think the idea that woke people can be persuaded just by showing them facts and data is the same sort of naïveté Scott described as endemic on the 2000s internet, in which atheists apparently believed that Christians and/or creationists would leave the faith en masse once presented with ironclad evidence of Biblical inconsistency or irreconcilable fossil records. It's fair to say that didn't go as they hoped.
You're preaching to the choir. I'm not arguing that it's possible to convince the majority of woke people with facts. I'm just arguing about what is more likely to be effective when trying to convince that fraction of woke people who are persuadable.
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Completely poisoned in the educated upstanding progressive brain. Back in college we were thoroughly taught how bullshit intelligence tests are. I believed it for a bit before I understood college misled me.
Posters on reddit commonly recite the thought-defeating sneers against intelligence tests that I learned in school. This has really sunk its claws into the broader progressive consciousness.
There but for the grace of God go I. Good thing I was born a contrarian.
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A lot of them do and you get responses like this:
Pretty much any online political person knows about this and they wave it away with all kinds of ridiculous rationalizations. Just search "13/50 reddit" and you'll see they don't even try to engage with it just find some way of deboonking it and moving on. Same with economics.
A better retort to counter the 13/50 stat would be something like '90% of fraud in the US is perpetrated by whites'. Different races are more inclined to engage in different types of crime. for blacks, it is violent crime.
Best stat I can find shows whites committing about 70% of fraud; this figure is 20 years old and is roughly the same as the percentage of the population that was white. Whites are only over-represented in bribery.
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This isn't true though. Blacks commit almost every crime at rates higher than whites. There might be a few exceptions but the general trend is certainly not that different races commit equal amounts of crime but just commit different crimes. The general trend is that blacks commit more crime.
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This is true far more than even the normal damages that colonialism did to non-whites living under it. Haiti (then Saint Domingue) used to be a very productive and rich colonial possession of France, its plantations provided a good amount of the total wealth of the French Empire. During the French Revolution the Haitians managed to get a small amount of freedom for themselves, while still being a French colony. After wanting the ideals of equality that the French apparently espoused so heartily to apply to them as well, the were rewarded for their impudence by first being sent Charles Leclerc who tricked the Haitian leader Toussaint L'Overture into meeting him, ostensibly to discuss terms. When L'Overture agreed to this meeting, thinking Leclerc was a man of honour like himself he was arrested and shipped off to Metropolitan France and imprisoned until he died. It turned out that Leclerc was not an honourable man...
Leclerc died of Yellow Fever (perhaps a divine punishment?) a few years later and was replaced with Rochambeau (this was the son of the Rochambeau who fought in the American Wars of Independence, his father was a hero, he was a shitstain), who turned out to be even worse than Leclerc, being actively evil instead of merely dishonourable.
Rochambeau was known for burying captured rebels alive in insects or boiling them to death in molasses. He even invented the first rudimentary gas chambers to kill people en masse and the story is told of him inivting some natives to a ball then at the stroke of midnight announcing that he had just ordered his troops to come and kill every single native man present (this trechery against his guests would get him straight down to the 9th circle of Hell if we are to believe our Dante).
Eventually the Haitians were able to throw off the yoke of the French and declare independence in 1804. However their "white man" problems were far from over. France was not happy at losing such a valuable possession, and immediately instituted a blockade of the island. At this time the other great naval powers of Europe who had a presence in the Carribean: Spain and England were engaged in the Napoleonic Wars against France where they were tearing each other apart. A reasonable observer may well have expected that given they were at each other's throats, these two countries might have helped clear the blockade of Haiti. Instead they did the exact opposite, choosing to help France enforce the blockade out of fear that their own colonies in the area may be next to revolt...
In 1825 the blockade was finally lifted and France recognised Haitian Independence. But not before the Haitians agreed to assume a 90 million Franc debt to France, and to add insult to injury the reasons given for this debt were as "compensation of lost property". To put this into perspective, France had recently sold Louisiana (this was the entire middle third of the modern day US in size, not the small chunk of land Louisiana is today) to the United States for 60 million Francs and here they were demanding substantially more from the populace of a portion of a single island in the Carribean.
So basically Haiti, an island of half a million extremely poor recently freed slaves, was burdened with a debt 1.5x the price France had gotten for the entire middle third of the modern day USA. And of course they had to pay high rates of interest on this debt too. It would not be cleared until 1947, well over a century after it was imposed on the Haitian people.
It is impossible to deny that the conditions imposed by the white man upon Haiti made it particularly difficult for them to become a success story. To me a fair punishment for French crimes in the region would be France being obliged to take 30,000 Haitian citizens a year as immigrants in perpetuity, accepting them as citizens and treating them no different from their own people, up and until we reach a state of the world where each year there are fewer than 30,000 people who want to move to France from Haiti. It would provide a very good incentive for the French to improve living standards in a country where the people are still so poor that they eat cookies made from mud to sate their hunger.
Yet Haiti and the Dominican Republic had comparable GDP per capita in the 1950s. Look at them now.
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Here I was thinking that I might have an uncharitably low opinion of the PMC's cognitive abilities, but fuck me if this isn't so much worse.
I wouldn't say this speaks ill of their cognitive abilities. They took over Harvard, and we didn't.
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Good post. So what can be done about people who pick and choose based on feelings and belonging rather than truths? I don't know how I can respect and get along with them. For me truth, or the attempts to find it at least, is so central to what separates us from the animals.
Politically you prevent them from being able to participate in the broader society.
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