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Can you elaborate what you meant by "per capita" insanity? Given what I wrote above about regression to the mean, do you identify any deficiencies in my understanding of it? I'm more than happy to being corrected here. I've never heard of the regression argument before in response to the immigration topic so I was just surprised in the moment, but I'm also very much not immersed within the race & IQ rabbit hole.
I'll try to give a very brief synopsis on my approach here, but a full dissection will need a much longer effortpost. The reason why (if I had 6 hours to record) I would start with the question "how do you know who is white?" would be for exactly the same reasons I would ask, for example, a diehard believer that hot dogs are sandwiches "how do you know what is a sandwich?" So many common categories we regularly use are unconsciously accepted, and generally there's no reason to crisply demarcate their specific boundary lines because...who cares? Things change when the category itself is elevated as the central organizing focus. An answer from the hot dog guy would probably be "well I look at the food in question and I check to see if it has a central savory ingredient that is surrounded by two layers of bread" or whatever. Once the hot dog guy establishes his own boundaries for what food should be included in the venerated sandwich category, my next question would be "why is inclusion in the category important to you?"
Going one level up in complexity from sandwiches, I've observed an insanely high overlap regarding how white nationalists describe being white, and how transwomen describe being a woman. I would go through the same process, I'd want my interlocutors to explain in their own words how they determine how someone fits into a category that is clearly very important to them. Once they establish these boundaries themselves, the next phase of questioning would be to discern whether they care about the underlying traits or about achieving membership in a specific category. My overall thesis is that membership is sought out because of the background associations attached to the category. This is why for many transwomen it doesn't matter how much you compliment their outward expression or whatever, they'll still deem it a failure if they are not slotted into the 'woman' category.
I haven't figured out the best vocabulary to satisfyingly describe what I think is going, so bear with me. First, imagine a generic list of generally positive traits broadly associated with "woman" (caring, graceful, nurturing, beautiful, etc). Some of the dynamic I suspect is happening with the trans discourse is a sort of delusion that if someone succeeds in checking off enough superficial traits associated with "woman" (long hair, make-up, dress, high-pitched voice, etc) then that person also be successfully associated with the broader constellation. Something like "if I have long hair then people will slot me into the 'woman' category, and if I'm in that category then I'll also be beautiful by definition".
I suspect something similar is playing out with people's attachment to race. There are an infinite number of ways to slice "preference for similarity in appearance". It could include anything from hair style, hair color, cheekbone shape, neck length, gut size, toe nail shape, overall height, overall weight, beard length, etc etc. Picking one dimension and reifying it as the central organizational filter strikes me as arbitrary, but it makes sense if what people are after isn't the trait itself, but rather the formidable constellation of associations linked with the trait.
That's all terse given the subject matter, and not communicated in the most elegant manner. But let me know if any of the above makes any sense.
Per capita https://twitter.com/UsingLyft/status/1773872358421332266
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Simultaneously, I completely agree with your breakdown of “white” being difficult/impossible, but also I can totally understand what the white nationalists aspire to.
Oh man, I just assumed you knew about Twitter “per capita discourse.” I don’t even know where to start. How about fire alarms chirping?
At any rate, what you wrote here seems fine. It was just in the podcast where I was perplexed about your reaction.
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