Evolutionist X is a meta-political blog. We are neither liberal nor conservative, but a radical mash-up of whatever strikes our fancy. We are dedicated to the frank discussion of evolution, genetics, and related concepts–human evolution, human bio-diversity, gene-culture co-evolution, neuro-politics, and social systems.
Or in other words:
There is no god but Gnon, and Darwin is his prophet.
sorry to bother, I wondered what you think of the “fat acceptance movement” and especialy its claims that being fat isnt unhealthy, that society can be changed to see fat people just a beautiful as more….normal people and that fat shaming dosnt reduce the amount of obesety in society?
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No bother.
It’s been a long time since I read any FA blogs, so I can’t comment directly on the movement politically, but I can comment from what I remember from reading health and nutrition research.
Is being fat unhealthy? Fat people die at higher rates than skinny people (you will find very few morbidly obese centenarians,) and their mental function degenerates faster (that is, they get stupider faster than everyone else as they age,) but it is not clear whether the fat itself is to blame, or whether some *other* factor is making them unhealthy which is in turn making them fat. If the fat itself makes people unhealthy, then losing weight ought to make people healthier. But if the cause is further upstream–say, lack of exercise makes people unhealthy and fat–then merely losing weight may not actually address the real problem. (Additionally, some ethnic groups gain more weight than others–Mexican Americans are pretty chunky, but have longer life expectancies than whites; blacks are also chunky, but have shorter life expectancies. It seems unlikely that fat is making blacks die faster but Mexicans die slower.)
Does dieting work? There’s a decent amount of evidence that suggests that most dieters fail, long-term, to lose weight–despite spending a ton of money and effort on it. A few succeed.
On the other hand, dieting may stop people from gaining more weight.
Also, I suspect that a lot of extreme dieting behavior is unhealthy and/or results in long-term weight gain. I would not be surprised if some people would weigh less in the long run if they’d never dieted.
Can society be changed to see fat people as beautiful? No. Societies change, but not on the time scale they want. The best they can hope for is to change their own self-image (mental energy being spent worrying about one’s weight may be better spent on other activities,) and to get people/employers to be generally nicer to them/discriminate less actively against them in employment. (And they probably are discriminated against in employment, because everyone else thinks they’re disgusting. For that matter, short people and people with ugly faces also have a tough time getting jobs; I don’t know why all the unattractive people don’t just band together.)
I think that most men do not realize just how much most women obsess over their appearances, or just how shitty fat women feel about being fat. Women are terrified of being fat. More educated, high-class women would probably be willing to have children if there were less of a social stigma against being fat, because it’s basically impossible to have a kid without getting fat in the process, and once it’s there, it’s very difficult to go back.
The flipside to all of this is that telling people that “fat is beautiful” is a lie, and believing lies can have bad effects. I think a lot of young women are hurt by imbibing too many feel-good messages that appearances don’t matter. I might wish that appearances don’t matter, but they do; people judge each other by their appearances all of the time, and people who don’t realize this are at a disadvantage. I have known nice, smart, reasonably-attractive young women who dressed like slobs and then didn’t understand why they had so much trouble finding a boyfriend, or more tragically, nice, smart, reasonably-attractive young women who didn’t date in college and then gained a tremendous amount of weight within a couple of years and found their dating prospects suddenly very, very bad. No one needs to have “You’re ugly and disgusting!” shouted at them every day, but the rules of the game should be honestly outlined for people: Yes, some people are more attractive than others. No, it is probably not going to get any better than it is right now, because age comes for us all. Yes, people will judge you based on your appearances, so do the very best you can with what you’ve got.
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Thank you very much for the answer!
I wanted also to ask you if you know feminist scholar cordelia fines book “Delusions of Gender” and what your opinion of it is?
Sadly there is no in depth critizism of it (so far as I know). Just a lot of people saying that its bad. Meanwhile many feminists are waving it around as “proof” that all sciense that says there are biological genderdifferences that affect personality is “neurosexism”.
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Her theories have been tested and found not only wrong, but horribly so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
David Reimer was a normal XY baby boy who, after a botched circumcision, had his penis chopped off, his testicles removed, and his name changed to Brenda. His parents stuck a dress on him, injected him with estrogen, and told him he was a girl.
It didn’t work. David did not identify as a girl, even as a kid. By 13 he was suicidal. He began refusing to see the psychologist who’d suggested the gender-swap procedure (he was seen regularly for “follow-up” to document the case,) and threatened to commit suicide if his parents made him see the shrink again. At 14 he was finally told what had happened to him as a baby and completely rejected female identity, renaming himself David. He had his penis surgically reconstructed, testosterone injections, and a double-mastectomy (estrogen causes breast development,) married a woman and became a stepfather.
If Cordelia’s theories were correct, not only would this work, it’d work even without the estrogen injections and testicle removal. You could stick a dress on any boy–or pants on any girl–tell him he’s a girl, and he’d grow up to be a girl. He’d love dolls instead of trucks and grow up to be shy and diffident around boys and obsessed with makeup and handbags, (or whatever.)
I’ve known a fair number of trans people over the years (since middle school.) Most of them have some kind of obvious medical abnormality, like a chromosomal or hormonal disorder. Their experiences are in direct conflict with the radical feminist claim that gender is socially constructed. If gender were socially constructed, there would be no such thing as trans people. A person raised as a boy would just identify as a boy, no matter what chromosomes or hormones he was exposed to. A person raised as a girl would just identify as a girl. It would be far easier for a trans person to say, “Hey, girls can like baseball and being noisy and aggressive and boys can like dolls and handbags, gender is just a social construct!” than to go through all of the pain, expense, and social stigma associated with SRS. This is why there is a deep divide among leftists between trans people and trans-exclusive-radical feminists (aka TERF-wars). (I go into more detail on this in https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/trans-people-prove-that-gender-is-real/ )
Feminists like to talk about how men “silence” them and ignore their experiences, but then they turn around and do the same thing to mothers, their fellow women. Feminists claim that mothers are purposefully raising their little boys to be loud and aggressive, and their little girls to be calm and docile. WHAT SHIT. Parents devote A TON of effort to making their little boys behave. The majority of discipline, both at home and at school, is aimed at making little boys less active and less aggressive. No one is trying to get little boys to misbehave! (Sorry, I am a little passionate on this point.) Meanwhile, society devotes itself to trying to get women to be less shy and nurturing–take books like “Lean In” or all of the researchers Frost cites (http://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-adaptive-value-of-aw-shucks/) who are trying to figure out how to make girls less shy.
Telling a parent who has just spent their day trying to contain the whirlwind of destruction that is little boys that they are encouraging this behavior, and that their sweet little girls would act like this, too, if they weren’t oppressing them is a slap in the face. Radical feminists are delusional, liars, or completely ignorant.
I know this is not a direct response to Fine’s book, which I have not read, just a response to hundreds of pages of other debates I’ve read. But responding to the Amazon summary:
It is true that a ton of “scientific” research is shitty, badly done, or does not replicate. This is also true of a lot of the research that purports to prove that gender differences don’t exist. The most reliable research we have on the subject is, sadly, people like David Reimer, and this research is solidly against Fine’s thesis.
There is a hormonal surge that happens in late pregnancy–androgens for boys and estrogen for girls–that is critical for fetal brain development. Brains dosed with androgens actually develop differently, structurally, than brains dosed with estrogen. This is, again, something we have experimented with, by dosing developing fetuses with high levels of estrogens (found in anti-miscarriage drugs.) XY-fetuses dosed with high levels of estrogens during this development period end up with normal-looking male bodies, but feminine brains, resulting in high levels of trans- identity later in life.
From a biological perspective, the idea that different hormones create different bodies but not different brains is nonsense. No matter how much we might wish it weren’t so, brains are part of our bodies, like livers and toes, and hormones influence the development of both.
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Thanks a lot for the interesting answer!
I think many feminists claim that gender identity may be biological but most charakteristics asociated with it (shynes, nurturing charakteristics, dominance ect.) are learnt.
But there are other explanations as well…..Scott Alexanders (girl?)friend has proposed that cases like david Reimer are exeptions and the rule is gender socialisation….http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
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Occam’s Razor says Ozy is wrong.
What are the chances that–of all cases–David Reimer is a weird exception in which biology suddenly dictated gender, but biology doesn’t do that for the vast, vast majority of people who have their hormonal systems intact?
Speaking from a parent’s perspective, the facts on the ground are that American girls are socialized to be brave and daring and outspoken and courageous (go watch Frozen or Dora the Explorer or Sesame Street if you haven’t delved into kids’ programming recently,) while little boys are socialized to be quiet, docile, and non-violent.
Most of school discipline is aimed at boys. Teachers (most of whom are women,) try very hard to get little boys to behave. This is socialization. I would like someone to show me a school where little girls get the majority of discipline slips, for infractions like “insufficient shyness” or “not enough nurturing,” while little boys are rewarded for biting graham crackers into toy guns and beating kids up on the playground!
Quoting Fine, “My book is concerned with the idea that males and females are, on average, ‘hardwired’ to ‘systemise’ versus ‘empathise’, which is why I focused on evidence most relevant to the question of the effects of prenatal hormones on sex-typed interests…”
The vast majority of people actually believe that women and men have the same math abilities, so different sets of abilities showing up in scientific studies probably has nothing to do with folk-beliefs about math, gender, and brain development. For that matter, the whole idea of there being a systematizing vs. empathizing gradient comes out of autism research, which is miles away from where the average person gets their ideas about the differences between boys and girls.
Is Fine arguing that autistic children have simply been deceived by their parents into thinking they are autistic?
For that matter, if the dearth of female math professors is due to women being socialized to think they’re bad at math, how does she explain all of the boys at the other end of the IQ scale? The population of special ed kids and those diagnosed with genuine mental retardation are both disproportionately male. If society is neurosexist against women, it’s extra-super neuruosexist against boys.
But somehow, I never see people arguing that special ed is sexist just because it’s full of boys.
(Note: I do not believe that people must trade-off between systematizing and empathizing, because lots of people are good at both and lots of people are bad at both.)
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hers what fine herself said about david reimer: “Your book is incredibly well researched so I was surprised that you didn’t discuss the case of David Reimer. He lost his penis in a botched circumcision operation aged eight months and was subsequently raised as a girl (which included having his testicles removed, and female hormone treatment) on the advice of a psychologist who believed gender identity is entirely socially constructed. This proved to be a disaster and Reimer later reclaimed his male identity aged 14. Similar outcomes have been observed for boys with cloacal exstrophy (in which the penis is missing from birth) who have been treated with female hormones and raised as girls. What do you feel these cases say about the innateness of gender identity, if anything? ”
My book is concerned with the idea that males and females are, on average, ‘hardwired’ to ‘systemise’ versus ‘empathise’, which is why I focused on evidence most relevant to the question of the effects of prenatal hormones on sex-typed interests, rather than core gender identity (that is, sense of being male or female). But to answer the second part of your question, despite the huge popular impact the case of David Reimer has had, this was one individual, reared as a male until 17 months of age. And in her new book Brain Storm (which takes on the whole ‘package’ offered by brain organisation theory) Rebecca Jordan-Young points out that femininity was forced rather heavy-handedly on Reimer, and with a kind of anxious ‘let’s hope and pray we can turn this boy into a girl’ mentality, and that we should consider what effect this might have had, especially in light of recent reviews of similar kinds of cases that conclude that rejection of a female identity is far from inevitable.
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Thank you very much for your answer!
Now dine stated: “especially in light of recent reviews of similar kinds of cases that conclude that rejection of a female identity is far from inevitable.”
Now I didnt hear about such cases….Now most people talk about reimer but I heared there were many more examples and in all of them the “changed” people decided to get into the gender of birth. I never heared of people who didnt. Then again I heared about transgender identified people who decided to live in the gender of their birth after all so it may be possible.
Do oyu know anything about that outside of the case of Reimer?
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It’s awfully difficult to evaluate Fine’s claims if she does not cite her sources.
I know trans people personally who have not opted to pursue SRS or be openly trans because of the expense, pain, inconvenience, and public stigma. However, if they could snap their fingers and make SRS cheap, painless, and stigma-free, they’d do it.
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Sorry to bother again. I wanted to ask what you think of the concept of cultural appropriation (SSC seems to have endorsed it).
I must say living in Germany and studying on a quiet left wing university I have never seen the SJW approach of “you cannot be racist against whites” and blacks are perfectly in their right to humiliate, insult and otherwise attack whites as a whole and individual whites based on their whiteness because it helps to destroy oppression. Also white suffering and problems can be mocked as “white tears” (same about feminists with men). Interestingly enough it is also frequently used by white leftists to insult their enemies. Most leftists I met here still believe that it’s bad to insult anyone based solely on race. So I wanted to ask how widespread such an attitude is in the USA, is it limited to Tumbler and other internet movements or is it mainstream at least in the Democratic Party.
Also do you know if Pseudoerasmus has left the HBD movement and if HBD chick will be writing again?
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Hey, Unknown, welcome back.
I have no special knowledge of HBD Chick or Pseudoerasmus’s whereabouts, though I do note that both of them are still active on Twitter. Maybe they just don’t have a lot of material to make long posts about right now?
Things are genuinely pretty bad here. Have you seen any of the videos of Trump supporters being attacked at rallies? There is nothing comparable at all on the other side–the Trump supporters have not attacked Hillary supporters at her rallies.
Here is a video of a guy who actually held up a Hillary sign at the RNC and a Trump sign at the DNC and filmed people’s reactions:
My own mother has been cursed at by random men in the street for wearing a Trump hat or T-shirt.
The media is portraying Trump as literally Hitler, saying that he is making politics dangerous, etc., despite the fact that it’s Hillary’s supporters who are committing the violence.
A couple of days ago, a black police officer shot a black man in Milwaukee. Whites, as usual, were blamed. “Protesters” began burning down buildings, looting, trying to drag random white people out of their cars and beating journalists. A white guy got shot in the neck.
An Hispanic guy just shot a couple of Muslims in New York; media blames Trump.
The violence is new but the attitude is not; when I was a kid, I was routinely bullied and picked on for being white, to the point that I used to pray every evening for God to turn me into a Mexican so I could have friends. Having talked to a lot of other kids who were bullied, I now realize that I actually had it better than many–I was never actually beaten by my classmates, for example, just frequently told that I should kill myself.
I personally know white men who graduated from top universities in the country and have struggled for years and sent out hundreds of resumes in search of jobs.
Twitter is just, like, the unbridled id of it all.
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Oh, sorry for forgetting to answer your first question.
“Cultural appropriation” is one of those concepts that could be useful if used reasonably, but most of the arguments I have seen on the topic are really stupid, and are usually used to attack people who genuinely like the culture in question or are trying to embrace diversity.
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Thank you very much for the answer.
I think the term of “cultural apropriation” seems to suffer from the same problem that most of Americas political discussion seems to suffer from, one sidedness and selective aplication. I mean realy so much european culture has been “apropriated” and changed by just about everyone in the world. Just take classical music which Asians not only embraced and tinckled with but now Asian opera singers and such are replacing Europeans in Europe itself which seems to fit the term.
I am sorry to hear you had it that bad at school. I was myself often attacked for being a Russian at a german school in east germany.
So basicly when scott Alexander in his “anti reationary FAQ” writes that: “5.4.3: Even if the establishment has not managed to completely ban all discussion of race that contradicts their own ideas, isn’t it only a matter of time before political correctness takes over completely?
It’s hard to measure the power of the more intellectually bankrupt wing of the social justice movement, but as best I can tell it does not seem to be getting more powerful.
According to Rasmussen, support for “political correctness” is declining in America. As we saw above, fewer and fewer people are willing to attribute black-white disparities to “racism” over time. Gallup finds that in the past decade, the percent of blacks satisfied with the way blacks are treated has gone up nearly 10% (I can’t find similar numbers for white people, but I bet they’re similar). Both white and black people are about 25% less likely to consider the justice system racially biased than 20 years ago. The percent of whites who think government should play “a major role” in helping minorities has dropped by 10 percent since 2004; for blacks, there is a similar drop of 14 percent.
The percent of people who think women have equal job opportunities to men has gone up 15% in the past nine years. Women are less likely to identify as feminists than twenty years ago, and support for affirmative action is at historic lows.
Here we see really the most encouraging combination of trends possible: actual racism, perceptions of racism, and concern about racism are all decreasing at the same time.
5.4.3.2: So how come social justice people have been making so much more noise lately?
My guess is changes in the media. The Internet allows small groups to form isolated bubbles and then fester away from the rest of society, becoming more and more extremist and paranoid and certain of themselves as their members feed upon each other in a vicious cycle.
Of course, as Reactionaries, you wouldn’t possibly know anything about that.
At the same time, the relative anonymity of the Internet promotes bad manners and flame wars and general trollishness. It’s not just that the writer is anonymous and therefore doesn’t fear punishment for what he or she says. It’s that their enemy is some nameless evil, rather than a person with a face whom they will treat as a human being.
And again at the same time, the national media has become more and more efficient at detecting outrageous events associated with some small town or some B-list celebrity and publicizing them to the entire world. This allows the hatred of the entire world to be focused on a single random person for a short period of time, which usually results in that person’s life being ruined in a way that would be impossible without this media efficiency.” he is basicly wrong?
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If I may be allowed to summarize: We now live in technologically-induced media bubbles which filter and intensify situations, making things seem worse than they really are.
This is–at least in many situations–basically true. For example, there was a big scare about “sexual predators” back around 2000, (that went on for many years,) stoked mostly by 24-hour TV coverage of a few murder cases. These cases were tragic, of course, but people ended up with a greatly exaggerated sense of how often these crimes actually occur.
We humans aren’t designed for social media and TV. We’re designed for village gossip, and if village gossip describes three children gruesomely murdered, you’d better bet that there’s a gruesome murderer in your community.
Modern media raises the philosophical specter of all of your perceptions being just the work of a deceiving demon to a whole new level. But I don’t think it is useful to just throw out the notion of knowing.
But by the same token, that doesn’t mean that crime rates don’t go up or down, or that everyone who is concerned about crime is just delusional (or wrong.) We can still talk about reality.
Ideas influence action, and riots are pretty real.
Sorry you had a rough time, too.
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It occurs to me that I may not have adequately answered your actual question, which I think is more along the lines of, “To what extent do SJWs have actual control and influence in America, or do we just think they have control because they are very vocal on the internet?”
Obviously explicit SJWs are a small % of the country and generally deep in debt. And America is a big country, with large conservative areas where people like Sarah Palin can get into power.
Our upper class is, overall, much closer in politics and philosophy to SJWs. They may regard SJWs as overwrought, they may not care about “fat acceptance” or whatever, but they think conservatives are basically retarded. Liberals set the agenda (eg, LBJ signed into law the immigration act that lead to our current immigration situation back in 1965,) and conservatives oppose them.
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Thank you very much for answering again!
Yes from what I saw of US politics it seemed to me that SSC was clearly minimizing the support for SJW positions that he called “intellectually bankrupt” among the intellectual elites in Media, academia and the leftist political spectrum.
To me the social justice movement is characterized by 2 factors that seem to distinguish it from the mainstream left I know, 1: The bringing of the oppression idea to its logical conclusion and including things like fat acceptance, otherkin and furries into this category and 2: The idea that to create equality you not only uplift the once below the universal level you want all to have but you also have to push the once further up down, thus the belief that attacks (psychological and sometimes even violent) carried out against the “oppressor groups” are justified and that the “oppressed” basically should have the right to carry out such attacks whenever they want. This reminds me strongly of the mentality of Communists in Russia who were far from satisfied in just dispossessing the groups above average in wealth but also created a whole system of laws to humiliate them to “make up for past oppression” and “destroy the psychology of hierarchy still existing in society”. Basically even if dispossessed a worker may still have an inferiority complex before let’s say a lawyer, but if you publicly shame some lawyers and force them to clean the streets without payment while allowing lower class people to spit on them and throw stones (and shoot a few other lawyers) the inferiority complex will be gone (also the lawyer might have not personally oppressed any workers but because he profited from a system based on oppression he is still guilty and must be broken).
It is the second aspect of Social justice I am particularly interested in my question here. Basically how widespread is this attitude among non-University Blue state Americans?
To make an example of what I mean, imagine a gathering of Lawyers who talk about all kinds of things most are white but there is one young Indian among them, this Indian starts to speak “Whites are the cancer of the world, by your very nature you cannot create anything, all you can do is to steal and appropriate. You are responsible for all misery in the world, we Indians were the greatest civilization on earth and invented so much and lived in harmony and peace then you whites came and stole it all from us, all you can do is exploit, steal and kill! Thankfully India and China are rising and I hope we will soon take back all you stole from us. But really you will soon have died off anyway and the world can finally breathe easier!
If some of the white lawyers after listening to him would have answered “I am not insulting your people, please don’t insult mine” the Indian would say “hahaha cry me a river withy I bathe in your white tears!”
Now how common is such a scene in modern blue tribe America, what would be the reaction? Do most Blue tribe Americans subscribe to the idea that this Indian is justified and in no way racist while http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=16824 is racist?
Basically I wonder to what degree the SJW position that whites deserve to suffer is mainstream?
I heard it is at least not mainstream when it comes to feminism, considering that many feminists outside of Gawker Jazzebel and Salon try to lie that the “male tears” and other anti-male phrases are just irony about the stereotype of the man hating feminist while the Feminists on this magazines clearly don’t see it ironicly but believe that men have to be humiliated, Freddie DeBoer agrees for instance that women and blacks have the right to humiliate and attack whites and men as groups but denies the right to whites and men. http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/05/27/political-appropriation/ But the New York times and other mainstream left newspapers deny that Feminists even do such things at all. Thus I suspected that if the mainstream left still prefers to hide such motivations among the SJW it indicates that most blue state Americans aren’t ready for that yet.
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“This reminds me strongly of the mentality of Communists in Russia…”
That’s why we call it “Cultural Marxism.”
Group of lawyers incident:
That level of vitriol would be considered rude, and I’ve never encountered (in real life) a rude Indian, (from India or America.) Also, Americans tend to be careful about what they say in front of co-workers, because no one wants to get fired.
However, at an average blue tribe gathering, I’d expect everyone present to agree with the idea that “whites are privileged and need to atone for their privilege,” that “racism is bigotry + power,” and that blacks can’t be racist (or can’t be racist in ways that actually matter.) You could say, “Oh, invention XYZ, that was actually invented by an Indian guy, and some white guy took credit for it,” and that would be fine. Bonus points if you bring up that Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas were part black. In general, adhering to SJW orthodoxy is the way to go in conversation, just so long as you aren’t obnoxious.
Your link would just confuse them.
“Suffer” is a strong word. They would say that they don’t want people to suffer, because they don’t want themselves to suffer. But if you say, “whites are suffering,” they tell you whites aren’t (and give you a dirty look that implies they think you are racist.) They genuinely believe that the police are racist and shooting black people left and right and that mass incarceration needs to end.
Did you see the video of the woman from Milwaukee telling people “Don’t burn down stuff here, go burn down stuff in the suburbs,” which CNN referred to as a “request for peace” (I am paraphrasing slightly from memory,) and cut to “down burn down stuff here”?
The folks at CNN may not want riots, but they sure aren’t trying to stop them.
I forgot to mention earlier that the statistics on “number of feminists” are misleading because feminism is so deep in the culture, that most people agree with it but see no reason to explicitly say so. Consider Sarah Palin, a woman who probably loudly and explicitly denies being a feminist, but has still chosen to get a job outside the home, in a traditionally male field. Sarah Palin believes that women should have the right to vote, to be governors or presidents, and probably even to earn the same pay as men. The only thing she doesn’t believe in is abortion. It is not unusual at all to meet conservatives who are “feminist” in all but name.
The media–movies, tv–makes buffoons of men all the time. It is extremely common to make fun of men, and they are expected to take it. The legal system, from what I understand, is not kind to them, either. I know several men who’ve been devastated by divorce, (including one man forced to pay child support for a child who had died in his ex-wife’s custody,) but no women.
I should add: among the upper class, it is shameful to be a devout Christian. You can be a Unitarian, or a mainline Protestant, if you must. But Evangelicals and “fundie” Christians are routinely mocked and regarded as little better than slime. Most of my relatives are very religious and their beliefs are some of the more interesting things about them, but I tend to leave all of that out in conversation with upper class people because I don’t want them to look down on me. But these same people are concerned about “Islamaphobia” and have no problem with Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc.
How are things in Germany?
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Thank you for the answer!
Well SJW are very often obnoxious and proud of it they say its their tactic to make white people uncomfortable.
I think that’s what most modern westerners see as being feminist now? Being rude and offensive to men “because oppression” and the women who don’t want that don’t identify as a feminist.
It is strange though SSC says that only fringe internet SJW adhere to the “Racism = bigotry + power” approach but you say it’s mainstream…..I must admit I always had the feeling that he understates, but do you overstate the popularity of such views? The criminal justice system seems at least so far recognize black on white hate crimes as hate crimes (for how long I wonder?). Also Razib Khan argues that most leftists do support free speech http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-silent-majority-liberals-who-support-free-speech/
In Germany the “nonwhites can’t be racist” idea hasn’t caught on yet. Feminism is strong but because there is little resistance to it is generally less rude and aggressive preferring to be condescending towards men. The whole race question is not so acute here but the Gender and Homosexuality question is. My University (Bielefeld) has no gender studies course and there seems to be less such courses in Germany with classical Marxism and the social question being still more prominent then this new weird causes. One quiet leftist professor once told me that he remembered how feminists tried to set up gender studies in the 1970s but nothing came out of it because as he said with a hint of outrage in his voice “they were so horribly radical it just was outside of all boundaries”. Even most leftists I know would consider #killallwhitemen something bad though.
But otherwise society I know is pretty socially left wing. Problems of the third world are universally blamed on “colonialism”, nonwestern inventions get blown out of proportions a western inventions downplayed in importance. the standard western ethno masochism is supplemented by a specifically German national self-hatred an almost pride that Germans seem to take when proclaiming themselves the worst nation on earth, thus making their repentance all the more greater. Economic issues do play a larger role then identity politics in the discourse of the left here. Americans are universally hated and ridiculed and Red state America is basically taken to represent all of the USA. Still “male tears” would be seen as distasteful here.
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What was once fringe internet or academic SJW-stuff had penetrated normal society at a tremendous rate. For example, people used to sit “Indian style,” that is, with your legs crossed. Today, even the Boy Scouts (a conservative organization) call it “Criss-cross-apple-sauce.”
Why? Well, it might be racist to imply that Indians (Native Americans) sit with their legs crossed. Clearly that’s not biology, that’s a cultural thing–nomadic people living in teepees didn’t have chairs–but it’s still seen as racist. Almost any generalized statement about a group of people (including groups that aren’t actually races,) is seen as racist (or the equivalent.)
In general, the American upper class has a lot of rules about what is and isn’t considered polite. The lower classes are seen as rude, and the upper classes keep changing the rules to keep it that way, for example, by constantly changing group/ethnicity names, making it hard for lower class people to keep up and then sneering at them for not knowing the latest terms. Often it is less about what is said as what is not appropriate to say–so while people might acknowledge privately that it is technically possible for a black person to harm a white person out of dislike for whites, they don’t talk about it and talking about it is seen as uncouth and a sign that you’re a racist.
If you ask blue-tribers “Why are black communities poor and violent?” or “Why are African countries poor and violent?” the vast majority will answer, “because of white people.” Even the cultural explanation–blacks drop out of school at high rates and have a lot of kids out of wedlock who end up raised by single mothers–is seen as racist because it “blames the victim.”
I recently read Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy,” gushingly recommended to me by an older, liberal relative. Stevenson is a Harvard Law grad who tries to get black people off death row. Stevenson was interviewed by Harvard Law Bulletin last spring</a and spoke to students at Harvard Law in April.
Stevenson may in fact be fighting for innocent people, but nowhere in his entire book does he mention the reason so many black men are in prison: because black crime rates are very high. Neither does Harvard Law Bulletin. (That same issue of HLSB has an article about racism against an African-American-Muslim-Woman-lawyer who is an Obama administration employee and actually works in the White House–in other words, she's one of the most powerful people in the country, and the article is about how she's a victim because sometimes random people in the street say mean things about her hijab.)
Meanwhile, of course, there is nothing about how whites feel when they are victims of black crime. Nothing. Ever. The upper class doesn't fucking care. And if you do care, it's a sign that you're racist.
Upper class people know these things and don't say them out loud in regular conversation. Not knowing the rules is one of the signs of not being upper-class.
That is sad about Germany.
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Also the term “racism” is understood here almost purly in its original meaning, the cathegorisation of ethnic groups into different biological clusters with different essentian characteristics that members of this groups cant change because they are genetic.
I have so far never encountered a german who believed that the belief that different cultures instill different values into their members which lead to different social outcomes was “racist”. Actualy the inventors of this word were part of the long 19th century debate between racists and culturalists about exactly this question.
With for instance in the USA the racists arguing that the Native americans were inherently biologicly unable to become civilized and thus had to die, while culturalists argued that they were essentialy equal to whites and just had to have their culture changed to reach equal status.
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Thank you very much for your time!
you wrote “If you ask blue-tribers “Why are black communities poor and violent?” or “Why are African countries poor and violent?” the vast majority will answer, “because of white people.” Even the cultural explanation–blacks drop out of school at high rates and have a lot of kids out of wedlock who end up raised by single mothers–is seen as racist because it “blames the victim.”
I wonder why in surveys http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/05/white-supremacy-and-white-privilege-same-coin/#.V7bt_Ezbwz0 only about half of the Liberals believe that Black problems are mostly due to discrimination?
It seems there is a dominant narrative that people cant dare to breach publicly even if they dont believe it.
Maybe some of this people think as consequentionalists in terms like “even if black problems arnt mostly white peoples fault we should still shame white people into giving Blacks privileges and money because this way the existing inequality will lessen” a “end justifies the means” aproach?
The idea here is that it might be unimportant why the downtrodden are downtrodden, the superior groups might perfectly deserve their superiority but whats important is to increase net equality and hapiness (pleasure). Thus rescourses have to be redistributed and to do this thous who have more must be broken.
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I have seen historians openly adopting such an approach btw “we can’t discover the truth anyway and striving for it is pointless so why not strive for equality and social justice instead” some of the post-colonial folks have openly admitted this attitude but many more follow it silently.
If you look at some of their works you’d be shocked to see how much wishful thinking they put there. for instance “Gay marriage was widely practiced in ancient Rome” is based on a text accusing Nero of all kinds of crimes and presenting him as a moral monster which among other accusations also stated (in horror) that he married a man.
The idea behind most of this historians is on the one hand accuse the pre 1960s west of being uniquely and absolutely evil and to create the impression that all elements of nonwestern cultures they don’t like were imported from the evil colonialist west. Its basically westerners declaring to the non-westerners that all of their stories and customs they don’t like are false and recent inventions while their true culture is what is currently fashionable in the western left. Razib Khan summarized my thoughts from reading this kind of literature perfectly: “South Asian religiosity was without form or edge before the arrival of Europeans and their gaze collapsed the wave function. Before the instigation of Europeans people of color were tolerant of religious diversity, varied sexual orientations, and practiced gender egalitarianism. In other words, India was like the campus of Oberlin college, except without the microaggressions, and more authentic spirituality!”
If you call such people out on their farfetched interpretations they will often openly say that “we are trying to make the world better! What could you possibly have against equality and diversity?”
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*nods along* That about sums it up, yup.
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Say, do you have a link to the chart you have at the top of every page?
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Figure 3: Population structure inferred by ADMIXTURE analysis
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sorry to bother again,
what do oyu make of the argument made here http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/
Do you know of any scientific counterargument to this?
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It’s an older post, so various things in it are likely out of date (and therefore it is not necessarily a fair representation of Scott’s current views) “Implicit association” tests of racial bias, for example, are now in the “fail to replicate” or “fail to show real-world outcomes” basket. (I took an implicit association test, once. It told me I was biased in favor of black and fat people. Take that as you will.)
Scott cites a number of cases where blacks and whites send out identical resumes and the like, and whites receive more responses. These are interesting, but neglect the fact that in the real world, blacks and whites don’t, on average, have identical resumes. If the last five black guys I hired did a terrible job, and the last five white guys I hired did a mediocre job, then I am probably going to start preferring the resumes from white guys. If on top of that, the average black resume I receive is just not as good as the average white resume (a likely case given that blacks have, on average, lower SAT scores, lower college attendance/graduation rates, etc., and I have hundreds (or thousands) of resumes to read, then I’m probably going to start skimming the ones that just don’t look like they’re worth the time to read.
Obviously this sucks terribly for black people who genuinely are equally qualified. But if you’re trying to figure out why blacks don’t make as much money as whites or have trouble getting hired, being lower-qualified, on average, is a much bigger deal.
Take, for comparison, the experience of Asian (and Indian) Americans. Japanese Americans were so hated, they were literally put in internment camps about 75 years ago. Today, Asian and Indian Americans are our richest ethnic groups. People are still biased and racist against them, but they’re extremely hard workers and have excellent resumes, which has resulted in financial success.
There are tons of programs today aimed at helping blacks that Asians don’t even qualify for, like affirmative action. Asians actually end up getting discriminated *against* in university admissions and government hiring; the average black medical student has an MCAT (medical admissions test) score 5.5 points lower than the average Asian student.
Talking about implicit bias is just ignoring the elephant in the room.
Scott’s numerical speculation about the cost of racism is interesting, but problematic due to resting on flawed assumptions. Just as baseball teams like wining, so do companies like making money, and presumably the ones with better hiring practices will out-compete the ones with worse. Scott doesn’t seem to take into account the fact that companies (and universities) are already spending a great deal of money on trying to be more diverse, from minority recruitment and scholarships to “African American Studies” departments and the like. I’ve heard too many stories about companies that hire a black (or female!) person who turns out to be not very good at their job, threatens to sue for discrimination if fired, and so is kept on the payroll while transferred to another department where they hopefully can’t do too much damage to think it’s as simple as he presents it.
I’ve heard some terrible stories about female firefighters, eg this lady: Firefighter who flunked physical injured 10 days into the job (She broke her foot stepping off the firetruck while doing routine training.)
“Doirin-Holder, who turns 40 this month, is one of 282 “priority hires” passed over in 1999 and 2000. Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis ordered they must get preference as victims of past discrimination against minorities.
It was Doirin-Holder’s third attempt to pass the academy. She failed midway through an academy class in 2013 and returned to her former job as an EMT. Two other female priority hires in that class did well.
Doirin-Holder started another class in early 2014 but dropped out because of an injury. The FDNY then gave her a desk job and kept her on the payroll at top firefighter salary, $76,488. She made $81,376 with overtime in 2014 and entered her third class this summer.
Since she was injured on duty, she is eligible for a disability pension that would pay three-quarters of her annual salary, tax-free, if deemed unfit to return.”
All things considered, while I’m sure that “real discrimination and racism” do exist, I’m not sure this untapped population that can add a trillion dollars to the economy does.
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Thank you very much for the answer!
I wonder what your opinion of the study that shows blacks pay more for cars is?
Also there is the well known effect that ethnic diversity decreases productivity in most workplaces http://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-diversity-garett-jones/
And what makes you think SSC is of a diferent opinion now?
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I’d just be cautious about assuming any opinion was unchanged after 3 years, plus he’s posted about the “replication crisis” plaguing a lot of the studies he cited, so he knows they’re bad.
I honestly don’t know enough about cars/car buying to have an opinion on the car study.
I have read studies on workplace diversity that go both ways. Some find increased profits and some decreased profits. I suspect that mere “diversity” is less important than the specific employees. Eg, companies in Japan don’t have much diversity, but do very well, while companies in Haiti also don’t have much diversity, but tend to do pretty badly. If companies end up with diverse workforces because they’re genuinely hiring the best employees, (and diversity doesn’t do bad things to group cooperation,) then profits could go up, but if companies are just hiring people in order to fill specific quotas, they’re more likely to get lower quality employees than they would otherwise.
Thanks for the link.
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There is also the greater dificulty to fire protected minorities once hired making employers often think twice about hiering them.
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Well Garret Jones argues that only in the highest income professions is the research on diversity ambiguous, when it comes to lower income professions it one sidedly says that diversity decreases effectivness. Thus from this perspective its not surprising that employers want to keep their workplaces homogenious. Then again SSC would just reply that the reason it decreases effectivness is racism (from white people only I suspect), even though I suspect it has far more to do with diferent cultures. Then again maybe what Garret Jhones studies found wasnt realy a diversity effect but rather the effect of on averege worst preforming groups getting mixed togather with better preforming groups lowering hte averege. While in top positions most of the “diversity” is white-asian thus no decrease.
As for SSC you might be right actualy since in the study we are discussing he is quiet sure that a 10% wage gap between men and women is cause to discrimination while in a more recent article he wrote “I’m tempted to say something like “the worst you’ve ever been able to find is a single-digit pay gap which may or may not exist, and you’re going to turn that into people not thinking you’re human?”” Thus he is now doubting that any of the wage gap is due to discrimination.(and there are quiet a lot of reasons to doubt that, then again I am willing to believe in a 5% gap due to steryotypes or discrimination.)
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That seems sensible. Often in lower-income profession, “diversity” means “lower-skilled workers,” who may be cheaper in the short run but not as effective in the long run (or even a sign that the business wasn’t doing well and so had to hire cheaper workers.) At the upper end, high-income professions, as you say, may be a different matter.
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