Good morning everyone (it's Monday morning in Blighty, anyway). Short note to let you know this piece got "Instapundit-ed" yesterday morning (I think) Pacific time, which meant most of you visited while I was asleep and Lorenzo was awake. We are doing our best!
Racism has been a minor factor in US life for quite some time, though progressive racialisation of identity is doing its best to revive it. “White supremacy” is a bullshit term. It either means folk of European origin are a majority or it treats the US as if Jim Crow was never abolished, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts never happened and racial discrimination was never outlawed.
Wonderful swing of the bat, with that musical smack of wood on ball! Looks like a home run. I really appreciate the astonishing breadth of this take, and mastering of numerous details--each detail itself a worthy topic. How you gathered it together! Bravo to the authors, and thank you for sharing it.
The reason we don't understand the religious is their ENTIRE world is grounded in the thunderingly loony. Full-stop.
Palestinians had been unwanted refugees denied permanent residence since 1948. The last sentence of note three is simply nonsense. The one outlier that said otherwise? Saddam's Iraq.
Barring that; this is a tour-de-force, both in its' content and the distillation of that content.
NB: TaNaKh and al Qur'an are very peaceable sacred scripture chocka from beginning to end full of malevolence and genocidal hatred toward the Other. Funny that. Not.
After 1948, the Arab states, with the partial exception of the Kingdom of Jordan, absolutely left Palestinians as stateless sticks to beat Israel with. Nevertheless, they let Palestinians settle as refugees in their countries. Since 1991, that has ceased. Jordan, for example, took lots of refugees from Iraq and Syria, but has made it very clear it will not accept any from Gaza. Egypt has made that even more clear. So, their revealed preferences have changed. It is not hard to work out why.
So all these other Muslim-majority countries should have completely opened their borders to every Palestinian refugee, just because of a shared religion? lmao, don't even try suggesting the US should do that to (Christian) refugees headed up from South and Central America!
Their resistance to taking Palestinian refugees is rational. It was the original decision to define Palestinians as hereditary, stateless refugees and set up a structure (UNRWA) to pay them to be such that has proved disastrous. They are the world’s only hereditary refugees and the only ones not taken in by their ethno-religious confreres as citizens. There have been lots of C20th population swaps and displacements: Germans, Greeks and Turks, Jews from Muslim countries, Indochinese, etc. Only one group have remained hereditary refugees.
"The oppressed/oppressor, the marginalised/dominant template provides the moralising structure for such cruelty."
So this is an exceptionally interesting point in Nietzschean terms, as it doesn't quite fit the priestly or revolutionary modes, but overlaps both of them, and of course is predicated on the shared slave morality.
I'm just wrapping up Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community which is absolutely fascinating and introduced me to some nuances of Rousseau that had I not seen before. What is relevant from that is how all of this is built off the consolidation of authority in the nation-state (and the concurrent diminishment of non-state authorities within a society), and of the interplay between individualism and equality that are the key inheritances from the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment.
"The way to engage in aggression and cruelty without it seeming to be such—even to oneself—is to dress it up as moral concern, as social concern."
Moralized cruelty also speaks to how blind we are about our own selves, motivations, goals, and how we appear to others. Since we're dealing here mostly with the messianic punitive Puritans we call "Leftists", let's take a look at their Founding Fathers: imagine considering that misanthropic psychopath Karl Marx as any kind of philanthropic benefactor of humanity! Even his commas and semi-colons are dipped in rage and hatred. Or imagine believing that the neurotic narcissist J-J Rousseau could discern the "general will" of mankind and that his writings could be the basis for some future utopia. He spent his whole life begging crumbs from aristocrats and having self-pitying tantrums whenever he felt snubbed—nothing straight could ever come from the crooked timber of these twisted souls. And this goes triple for all their acolytes and descendants, mostly the West's spoiled infants who consider having an unmet need a second Middle Passage and who think flashing their tits makes them a second French Resistance. Moralized cruelty begets moral narcissism and then moral autism: everything that affirms me is moral, everything that doesn't is an immoral evil.
Thanks for the great piece, it shouldn't be a post, it should be a book!
Great essay. Re: Structural Racism- I am not claiming that racism or implicit bias don't exist-because both do- although the IAT is prone to wild errors and only really useful for population level data. However, neither racism or implicit bias are particular strong causes of disparate outcomes by group, for the simple reason that we have empirical evidence of factors which are far more powerful and proven.
First, there's Raj Chetty's research on social mobility. It shows that levels of fathers in the community are the most important thing for upward social mobility. This is also important in the sense that fathers working collectively have a moderating influence on pubescent male peer groups. This in turn directly involves the quality of schools in community. It demonstrates why generally poorer and more deprived Catholic communities in Northern Ireland were able to first draw equal with and then significantly outperform Northern Irish Protestants- because their families were disintegrating at a slower rate. Now, the positions are reversed, and liberals are blaming Catholics better educational outcomes on their more affluent backgrounds, when it was the fathers all along which powered their rise.
Second. HR really isn't the Black person's friend. There first duty is to protect their company from being sued. There are several good studies out their which show that Black applicants are more likely to have their CVs rejected on the basis of name only. Ingroup preference is cited as the cause. I'm not entirely discounting the possibility. However, there is a far more obvious cause. Most professional managers have to be more disagreeable than most. The ability to routinely say no to subordinates is in the basic job description. And some professional managers are a lot more disagreeable than others. If a vacancy entails working for a boss who has a track record of leaving behind disgruntled employees, which is actually a lot more common than most would think, what's the betting that HR is going to prevent minority employees from working for a manager who, through his management style, is likely to incur a charge of racially motivated constructive dismissal? In addition, many roles in companies are business critical, even though they may not be particularly well-paid. If an HR departments knows that over half of new entrants will need to be fired, just how likely are they to refer someone from a minority background for the job?
The other problem is that discrimination in hiring tends to be higher in customer facing roles. Believe it or not there is actually an HBR article out there arguing that the authors white progressive friends aren't really racist, but they are forced to discriminate against minorities because their customers are racist. Sure, this is a little bit true. There is old evidence of studies conducted back in the nineties and noughties which shows that customer facing businesses suffer when they hire minority employees, but this is almost exclusively a phenomenon when restaurants or businesses serving predominantly white neighbourhoods have staff compositions where the percentage of minority employees is over half. Yes, it's racism- but of a kind far milder than most have been led to believe. If anything this should engender empathy for people who are more often than not in the minority in whichever workplace they chose. In any event, White progressive (and mostly female) customer service managers need to be corrected in their assumptions, lest their active and illegally racist discrimination continue.
This brings me onto the third cause of structural racism, and it really is tragic, because it's free choice. There is an economic study from the Netherlands which studied the economic progress and prosperity of three successive waves of inward migration. it's finding are as profound as they are disturbing. The study looks at native networks vs. co-ethnic networks. Unsurprisingly, it shows that migrants prefer co-ethnic networks over forming native networks. It's looking at migrant populations, but really what is being studied is ingroup, stemming from social integration theory. The study shows that once someone with high ingroup had their basic needs fulfilled, they will opt for working with a co-ethnic network at lower pay, rather than work in an environment which is primarily non-co-ethnic in composition, but is better paid, with better opportunities. The study even shows that often migrants will chose to become temporarily unemployed in the hopes of finding a job with their fellow migrants rather than look for employment outside their community. Obviously ingroup is a spectrum, and tertiary education as a rule exposes up to 50% of a given community to a world of opportunities, and opportunities to form networks which are not co-ethnic, but what about the kids who were left behind?
The study recommends several positive actions, and is worth a read purely on this basis, but the question remains should be really be forcing people to become homo economicus, when it's their free choice as to the types of employment they will consider, and with whom?
I didn’t say that racism or implicit bias didn’t exist. Simply that they only accounted for a statistically small percentage of economic disparities by group. Obviously this wasn’t always the case, and there are significant differences in wealth accrued due to past injustices.
But where the Left goes wrong is in imagining that wealth makes a difference to future outcomes. It doesn’t. Children’s future life outcomes are predicted by their parental incomes levels, not their parental wealth levels. And it’s not that some individuals born to wealth don’t gain advantages. They do. But those who gain access to opportunities through wealth are cancelled out by those who are ruined by it. Besides most family wealth cancels out within three generations, as for the most part the profligate waste their family estates. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Look, I’m not against the goal. I’m for it. But empirical knowledge-based approaches work- unfalsifiable theories don’t. One example is cognitive load theory. Filling a mind with knowledge, committed to long-term memory over time, is akin to kindling lighting a mighty fire. In London there are now schools serving Black communities in the second poorest borough in London, rife with knife crime, yet those kids outperform the best that the overly privileged mostly White sons and daughters at Eton have to offer, under exam conditions.
Yes, investments were made, but mostly modest ones- particularly focusing on teacher training, especially in classroom practice. An inspirational African headteacher might also have had something to do with it.
It should be noted that this is part of a broader trend. Here in the UK we’ve almost completely eliminated differences in educational outcomes by race, under exam conditions. This was primarily due to educational improvements in London.
There are still areas where we fail, however. An example would be in labour participation. Labour participation is 7% lower for Black British men. Research shows that this tends to be because of a lack of participation in higher value blue collar trades, including amongst those who drop out of university. This also highlights why Dr Raj Chetty’s research on social mobility in the US showed that fathers at the community level was the best predictor of upward social mobility. It seems that fathers in the community can act as an unofficial social safety net, especially for the roughly 50% of kids in any groups who don’t do well in school.
The West has been focusing on university as a means of equalising racial outcomes for 30 years. It helps some people, but not enough. In order to truly raise the living standards and life outcomes of poorer communities, much more attentions needs to be paid to vocational training and the male mentoring it brings. Male unemployment disrupts a rough balance of gender parity favouring hypergamy, which causes lasting community damage through a lack of stable family formation.
Sure, the GI Bill was atrocious, but what caused far more lasting social damage was the mother of labour shocks caused by deindustrialisation/neoliberalism.
It’s why most Western countries should be focusing on starter homes like this. Good for people. Good for the planet.
There is a long used joke that the demand for racism far exceeds its supply. It may seem a bit crass but there is an underlying truth to it. I have concluded that concepts such as misogyny, racism and homophobia are "political mythologies" that have been created artificially (after their natural occurrence became harder to find) and sustained to keep justifying the political demands of the prog/left.
The primary objective is to keep the demanding demographics in a continuing state of apparent oppression because they would simply have no further reason to keep voting for socially left parties if they were to gain the long-promised equality. Hence the teaching of a persecution complex through the school system.
The more functional the developed democracies became, the more left-progressivism has been driven to the valorisation of dysfunction and so bs narratives of oppression.
I know I'm on a fool's errand. I've made it one of my missions to craft an alternative hypothesis to structural racism, because the majority of people in the Anglosphere actual believe in the concept of structural racism. I think I've gathered enough empirical evidence to prove it- only to find that most people aren't interested in any alternatives to their preferred narratives. I occasionally win over the odd heterodox thinker or open-minded independent, but despite the commonality of political independence, open-mindedness when it comes to biases is another matter entirely.
I had heard the racism demand/supply joke. Shelby Steele calls it poetic truth- a narrative truth which is more persuasive than the actual truth. Just because most people have always been somewhat influenced by instrumental rationality, it doesn't mean that we should abandon epistemic rationality entirely, Shelby Steele's documentary on What Killed Michael Brown? is excellent, by the way- particularly good at tracking the history of how institutional Leftism sabotaged African America communities, with purported 'help'.
Most people don't realise that Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School stole their ideas from Herder. However, instead of allowing that two realms of knowledge exist- the objective scientific realm and the subjective cultural realm, they set out to pretend that there was no such thing as objective truth. I only know about Herder because he was one of three of Isaiah Berlin's favourite Counter Enlightenment philosophers.
I agree with your diagnosis on motives. I think what the Left failed to understand was the more aggressively they pushed the dogma the less persuasive it would become. It might have played well with with gullible white kids in tertiary education guilty about their genuine socioeconomic privilege, but not everyone else.
Plus, the intersectional alliance is a net negative in terms of social self-interest, a far more powerful motivator than economic self-interest, for anyone already fulfilling their basic needs. A Black man may not necessarily be more disadvantaged by being a man, than he would be by being Black in the intersectional world, but when it comes to social threats and being told what to think the story is completely different. He can be told he is racist by a Latina or an Asian woman. He can be an Islamophobe, if he's a committed Christian and has questions or criticisms. He can forced like Kevin Hart to make a grovelling apology to an overly privileged gay White kid if he makes a joke. If he's Dave Chappelle or Charlemagne he can be called a transphobe.
There are other ways it doesn't work. It robs itself of the empirical power to genuinely enact trade-offs. Most powerful of al, it doesn't work politically. The power of the 'They/Them' vs. 'For You' ad was not on the 'They/Them' side, which committed partisans care about. The power of the ad was decidedly in terms of Trump declaring himself 'For You'. That's the problem of reducing people to their arbitrary characteristics, their labels, it robs the voters of the ability to imagine that you might be acting in their individual or citizen interest. Of course, this is a rationally implausible fiction, but at an emotive level such undercurrents of thought have a very real power to persuade.
The other problem is that a given person might encounter racism five times a day, but most people drastically underestimate how many people they interact with. The average person will encounter and interact with (including gestural interaction) 50 to 100 people in 30 minutes of travel.
Now let’s look at instances which are commonly perceived as racism, but at best are structural racism.
Let’s take a common scenario. The act of signing in at a security desk. Everybody not scheduled to work in a building has to sign-in. It’s important for many reasons, but let’s take the most straightforward. Fire lists. It’s important to have an accurate accounting of who is a building at any given time, otherwise people die or lose their jobs.
This is a particular problem at universities, where lecturers for example, keep irregular schedules. It may seem racist when a security guard has to ask a Black professor to sign it but it is nothing of the sort. It saves lives. If a security guard doesn’t ask everyone not scheduled to be in the building to sign he will quickly be fired for gross misconduct.
If Elon Musk was visiting a Tesla factory in which he doesn’t regularly work, then he should sign in. If the security guard didn’t ask him to sign in he would probably fine him. I know this because I’ve asked CEOs to sign-in. I apologised. The CEO was emphatic that I should not apologise. I was not a security guard, simply responsible for maintaining fire lists and other safety provisions at a major manufacturing facility.
The world is full of these sorts of scenarios, where what is not often racism is perceived as racism. The other issue is a human problem. People are great at spotting risks but not great at evaluating the extent of the risk. It’s a human problem which exists in all circumstances dealing with outgroups. It’s not particular to any one group, but clearly when majoritarian demographics prevail it can be a much bigger problem for some than others.
The problem is that it’s not a problem which can be easily solved. All the research on ingroups shows that the only thing which can defeat it is the formation of new ingroups. The military is particularly good at this, but milder positive results can be achieved in working environments through teambuilding. Diversity training and raising race consciousness do not work- all the evidence points to the conclusion that these approaches make the problem worse, because they emphasise difference. And no I don’t argue for colour blindness, a better approach would be fair-minded rapport building. Humans are hardwired for fairness, not equity-orientated equality.
The problem will become less over the long-term as children’s playgroups and educational environments become more diverse. It will lead to the formation of broader ingroups.
The oppression narratives are in equal parts appeals to fear and self interest. Since humans are very prone to blaming others for their own misfortunes, it is an easy sell.
And btw: Cutting off relations because of an election is the most fembrained, hysterical move I can imagine. Even incels would think it’s too much of a parody of womanly behavior.
You two have outdone yourselves! I presume this was written before the gunning down of the health insurance company CEO. I don't want be greedy, but I'd be interested to know your thoughts about how the counter-revolution against the PMC is likely to play out, especially come January 20. Keep up the good work.
Yes, it was written before then. I am intending to do a follow up on my own Substack. The murder of Brian Thompson (and some of the reactions to the same) raises worrying possibilities.
The Manhattan assassination has become quite a hit on YouTube commentary... But consider the other elements coalescing: look at the mass rejection of celebrity political intrusion, the Diddy fallout which may drag a whole generation of public figures down with him (unless he gets Epsteined). The powder keg of Trump's razor gang coming into office... This will be a wild ride.
If I were an American I'd be prepping up and looking for a quiet spot.
“What women and Jews have in common is a vision of themselves as peaceful people. It is self-delusion: there is nothing peaceful about attempting to systematically hound people, to deny them a voice, to seek to destroy their careers, reputations, livelihoods—particularly not for things they merely said.“ Still skimming this article. Curious how Jews fit into this narrative. I’ll keep reading.
They don’t see what their lobbyists did in monstering people over things they said (or were alleged to have said) as either aggression or cruelty. It was just “moral concern”. But those campaigns pioneered modern cancel culture.
You have to excuse people being made queasy by that connection, Lorenzo - but I saw it in the 80's, and Helen (and you?) experienced it. So it can't be denied, but I think it was still more at the margins (but I wasn't getting cancelled). Those that didn't live it can't credit it at all, given the current situation, because they don't have the history. But the "slavery selection" contention would probably make others balk, if it wasn't becoming so obvious - ditto the whole "feminisation" argument. There's hardly a word here that won't push someone's buttons.
The best we can do is be as scrupulous as possible, but also not to pretend things that happened, didn’t happen. I mean, Robert Manne has just written another book in which I feature heavily. He has already written an entire book about me. He is a nasty bully, and the genocide narrative around Aborigines he built in the 90s is now being used against Jews (narrowly) and Australia’s immigrant population (more widely). It is legitimate and fair to point this out.
I’m not made queasy by the references to Jews — I’m revolted by them. Truly disgusting, othering stuff.
“What women and Jews have in common is a vision of themselves as peaceful people. It is self-delusion.” I see: we’re actually bellicose. The brutish, militaristic Jew has entered the chat. Blood libel adjacent or close.
I’ve been a fan of Helen’s for a long time, but candidly you can both get stuffed with that garbage.
The rest of the essay was excellent but I say that with zero enthusiasm.
Jeff, I'll leave Helen to respond if she chooses. I'll just say I was a very interested bystander in 1995 when she was being "cancelled" - subscriber to Quadrant (and News Weekly!) and reader of the major capital dailies. She was heavily attacked by a not-insignificant portion of the higher-profile Jewish community in Australia - no-holds barred and very personal. It is fair to say, even to an outside observer, they were trying to end her career and destroy her. It's not for me to judge the rights and wrongs, but it looked very heavy handed, and identical (perhaps a template) for what happens so often now.
I'm not sure that it's an outright slander to say Jews are not peaceful - they have no reason to be and plenty of reason not. I'm not peaceful, either. I think you're making the jump from not peaceful to bellicose, brutish etc. I'm pretty sure that's not Lorenzo's meaning or implication.
But, as I've already said - it's a vexed topic, and a difficult formulation. I have a bit more trust in good intentions, but that's not right for everyone.
People are entitled to their views on this issue, but I’ll just note here that Tony gives an accurate thumbnail sketch of what went on wrt me. Lorenzo’s essay under the link goes into more detail, as does my piece on “the Omnicause” and Katy Barnett’s piece on “living in interesting times” (all available on the front page of the blog).
The wider problem is that it wasn’t just done to me. What made my situation notable was its publicness—everyone got to see it and people around at the time remember it. It was also done to a significant number of people who criticised hate speech laws (which were promoted by the Jewish lobby) and supported Palestine (in any form, not just the obvious pro-Hamas fruitcakes you see on university campuses). Often their stories did not become known, although ex-Jerusalem bureau chief for the Australian John Lyons has put together a collection of the worst Aussie ones in a book.
Now (as should be obvious to anyone with eyes), the pro-Palestinians in Western countries are taking what they consider vengeance. When I was in Australia in October I encountered quite a few of them who wanted to use me as a stick to beat Jews with. Meanwhile, just before I arrived in the country a group of Jewish creatives were mass doxxed and personal information about them leaked. This is exactly what was done to me, and I want nothing to do with people who prosecute their cause in this way.
It is important to note the differences: pro-Palestinian lobbying in Western countries has crossed over into street violence and terrorism. This is far worse than anything the Jewish lobby has ever done, pro-Palestinians need to own it, and stop giving us crap about “settler-colonialism”. However, the use of “peaceful” cancel culture methods over many decades does no credit to Jewish activists, and they need to own it too.
The Jewish self image as peaceful — THE one Jewish self image
Their [i.e. Jewish] activists pioneered cancel culture
NONE OF THESE THINGS EXIST, except in a phantasmagorial projection of Jews as forming a conspiracy. And that is classic antisemitism. Which you are now performing.
There are Jewish organizations that lobby. There is no Jewish lobby as an amorphous faceless force. The phrase itself is antisemitic, à la “the Israel lobby.”
There is no unified Jewish self image as peaceful. In fact, there is no unified Jewish self image in general: as the phrase goes, two Jews, three opinions. We are not a faceless non-individuated blob.
Cancel culture certainly exists, and I deplore it. However, ostracism has been a feature of human life for (one must assume) millennia. The idea that the Jews created cancel culture is insane.
I’ve long been a fan of Helen’s, and I think what happened to her was dreadful. That it happened at the hands of progressives, some of whom were Jewish, I do not doubt. But there’s something going on here that is deeply distasteful, and which you guys are clearly not aware of. I’ve done all I can. I will say one more time: we are not a monolithic blob, and we do not think of ourselves as being NOT like ordinary humans. In fact, we would like to be like ordinary humans. As the line (from Fiddler on the Roof?) goes, “I know we’re the chosen people, but couldn’t you [God] choose someone else once in a while?”
Maybe hang out with some Jews. I’m outta here. Thank you for engaging.
A lot of what activists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews got up to was vile. But part of the reason they could get away with such monstering of people for what they said or wrote was precisely the Jewish self-image as being a peaceful people, rather than just ordinarily human.
The pro-Palestinian activists post October 7 have behaved much worse than activists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews ever did. Nevertheless, Jewish denial that their activists pioneered modern cancel culture are up there with progressives, particularly female progressives, denying there is any such thing as cancel culture. The self image as peaceful and moral, and what was done was just moral concern, is part of such self-blinding.
Jews were a big part of the cultural Marxist movement in the 1960s and a lot of the left in the USA from about the 1930s to...the 2010s I'll say? You had quite a few prominent Jewish conservatives too, ranging from Saul Bellow through Milton Friedman to Bill Kristol and Ben Shapiro (in recent years Edward Blum was the dude behind the SFA lawsuit that killed affirmative action), but the net effect was left. It started with anticlericalism (duh, they weren't Christian) and moved through socialism from there to being a big part of the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and a lot of the early woke movement.
Since my own blood is tainted, I use it as an excuse for me not to have kids. ;) Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
“The slavery of the Antebellum South has left a continuing legacy. One is that the churn of Transatlantic transportation and commerce in people separated the slaves from their cultural heritages. Another is that it was a process of negative selection—selecting for folk of more physical robustness but lower executive function—through who was enslaved (and survived the Atlantic passage). The experience of slavery itself was also a process of negative cultural selection—selecting against trust, a sense of personal agency, and in favour of an in-the-moment hedonism.“ I think you’re either on very shaky ground here or your use of the term negative selection is just simply your own opinion. Is your definition of negative selection described above?
If I understand correctly, negative selection is the process by which you believe slaves — regardless of race — were selected, bred, and presumably killed? And so this is a universal statement about slavery in all times and places or is mostly limited to American slavery?
And it is supposed to contract with “positive selection?” Which is what?
And how does negative selection relate to “natural selection?
Now of course evolution is largely or completely an emergent order. Negative selection is a planned order. I’m not sure why the planned order in your case called negative selection? From the perspective of the slave master the selection was positive, but you’re called it negative?
Selection is not necessarily an intentional process. Indeed, except among animal and plant breeders, it is normally not. Who gets enslaved is a selection process. Who survives the trip is a selection process. Who survives slavery is a selection process. Who manages to have children is a selection process.
It is a negative selection process if it disadvantages the lineages within the group by selecting against features that would encourage flourishing in more normal circumstances.
But there’s no universal normal with respect to slavery. Slave labor was normal for a very long time, maybe millions of years. Can’t prove this. It isn’t normal anymore. If you agree, would you want to re-word this?
Does your narrative take into account house slaves? There’s a selection process in who gets to be a house slave.
Does your view of negative selection take into account the NBA, NFL, and Olympics?
Assuming that you’re correct, that there was a negative selection process in American slavery, how big of an effect is this? How many generations were negatively selected and how many generations would it take to nullify the effects? Assuming 200 years of negative selection (1665-1865), then 200 years of natural selection (1865-2065) the effect should almost certainly be neutralized.
But I think this still misses the most important point. There’s not enough space to write it out here but it has to do with the role of people that do grunt work. Such workers are valued then and still valued now. So I don’t see how there can be a
negative selective process going on here. I’ll have to take up this point in a full post on my Substack. People that do manual labor are very valuable. People that do mundane work are very valuable. People that do routine, mindless work are very valuable. Do you take this into account?
Slaves were largely stripped of their cultural heritage, which is a negative selection process. Slavery also has enduring effects in undermining trust, a serious form of negative selection. (With Homo sapiens, one has to consider both genetic and cultural selection effects.)
Transatlantic slavery was a very particular form of slavery. In temperate zone Americas, the high survival (so low turnover) rates resulted in the slaves adopting a form of the religion of their masters. In tropical zone Americas—where the death rates, and so population turnover, were much higher—you get more African syncretic religions.
There was a selection process in who was enslaved (and who did the enslaving). Those doing the enslaving tended to be better at coordinating and connecting, those being enslaved tended to be worse.
The Saharan passage was every bit as horrible as the Atlantic passage, and lasted far longer. But Islamic slavery involved a very high rate of castration of males, while Islam was a polygynous culture where having a Muslim father made you a Muslim. So the consequences were different. There is no identifiable ex-slave diaspora within Islam, despite Islamic slavery lasting so much longer.
Labour is a very different matter. Yes, slaves were enslaved for their labour but slavery has very particular features.
Even there, there are other selection effects. Afro-Caribbeans in the US have persistently done better, on average, than the descendants of Americans slaves. Some of this is the voluntary-migrant initiative effect. Some of it is a longer history of self-government. Some of it is different cultural evolution. (The comparison between the failed state of Haiti and the successful one of the Dominican Republic on the same island is striking.)
It is clear that the descendants of American slaves were doing better and better up until the social shock of the 1960s, whereupon a range of negative things happened. The triumph of the civil rights movement did not have the consequences equalising outcomes effect that folk hoped, hence a lot of the ideological and policy dysfunctions since.
“All things considered—and despite the oppressions of Jim Crow—there was a lot of triumph in the post-slavery history of the former slaves and their descendants. The level of literacy shot up, there was considerable valuing of education and they developed a high level of employment and intact families.“ So what effect did the negative selection have if the post slavery history consisted of “a lot of triumph?” Is this triumph what you would expect following so called “negative selection?”
The combination of selection for physical robustness (not a negative in itself) and for lower executive function (which is a negative) leads to a larger “tail” of propensity to physical aggression (i.e. violent crime), which was then aggravated by under-policing (and still is). Humans, and human groups, are bundles of traits. That there were achievements does not stop there also being problems.
African-American leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, often railed against the negative patterns within their own communities. This included crime and short-term hedonism. The vibrancy of African-American entertainment culture is obvious. Nevertheless, there are some downsides to it as well.
Any human nature most assuredly can be greatly adjusted by nurture.
Unfortunately nurturing the worst in people became policy in the 1960s across the board, both public and private sector.
Beware ; Race in America LW and HD - race is a miasma that conceals many other things, in fact it’s an often used smoke screen for many ill deeds.
Boeing’s safety failures have nothing to do with DEI, but its a popular meme, and of course many companies pay protection money to the Left and then commit the most egregious offenses.
I think there is a great mis-attribution in American political culture of things to race which actually are attributable to *caste* - which race is actually just a convenient but inaccurate analogue for.
I had the very same thought on my bike ride yesterday...
There is a "Jolly Swagman" living in a tent in a North Carlton park. He seems like a pleasant bearded fellow who hangs his washing on a tree branch...
I was shocked into pulling up by realising that this country has returned to the same point it was in BP's time. We are back to living off the land owned by a squattocracy of housing oligopolists. I hope the troopers don't get him.
The advice to cut off your family is the most frightening element to come out of this - the only milieu I've ever encountered this demand is inside cults. And just like cults the social justice movement engages in "love bombing" of their acolytes by telling them they are perfect and all their shortcomings stem from THEM oppressing you.
Following on to the prestige angle is highly apt. Once equality is more or less attainable - what is the next social good to demand? Prestige. Problem is that equality is not a zero-sum social good, it actually raises all boats when meritocracy is allowed; but for me to gain prestige you must lose it. Therefore it is not hard to see why there is such a sustained campaign of "ritualised humiliation" toward white (working class) men. And not hard to see why elite white men participate - they are howling with the wolves to preserve their precarious status.
Prestige can proceed across multiple dimensions. Much of politicisation is about trumping prestige with propriety. Shirtgate was the key moment of cultural shift.
I am well aware of it - and other incidents like the Lebow elevator joke*. Such were my first thoughts when I saw feminists fighting against gender ideology being punished w/o due process... a practice of course originally instituted by them in the exemplar cases. Nevertheless I am not a petty man and support the Truth Espousing Rational Females regardless.
*Which reminds me: has anyone read The Joke by Kundera? Ideal book for our times, needs a film adapted to present events.
Throwing other members of oppressed groups under the bus to get in good with your oppressors is a time-honored way of moving upward in society's hierarchy. Oh, you'll never be seen as equal to the oppressors - the people in charge - but you'll be treated better than most of your people by them. Just look at the Indians who supported the British rulers in India. It's just like women supporting trans-identifying males over other women.
For women supporting trans identified males, I suspect it's a form of potlatch. They are attempting to signal that their situation is so secure, they will not be threatened by males coming in to take resources previously allocated to females. That is why, I suspect, the political standpoint is so prevalent among highly educated women. They may even be attempting to demonstrate that their success isn't due to affirmative action; their merit will always be recognized regardless. Since an appearance of power is in fact often accepted as deserving power, this isn't an approach that would encounter internal red flags. It's a gamble, but the more that their colleagues also play the game, the more risky it becomes anyway, to not play the game.
I'm definitely following your substack and am going to be reading through it. I've been wrestling with nature vs nurture and identity politics since the 90s, as it wrecked my preferred academic interests.
Yes, indeed. But also a status signal, which tells others (mostly women) what standing one has. To be unconcerned with TIM incursions into women's shelters is to assert that one will never need to make use of such services. One's attorney would win the house and a large settlement, if one's husband became a problem--which he wouldn't do because he's not of the battering classes.
To be unconcerned with what fewer cops in poor brown and black neighborhoods actually means for those people is to demonstrate that one has never thought experimented to walk in their shoes. Certainly never had a heart to heart discussion in which one felt their problems as close to one's own life. Even releasing criminals is no problem, because one never goes to those places anyway. In fact one has never needed the police one's entire life, except to obtain directions in a tourist town.
It's similar to volunteering: conspicuous expenditure only possible because one has so much excess. It's also a giving away of others' safety of course, and so one demonstrates one's distance from those people.
Yes as you said it's throwing one's own oppressed group under the bus, but it's also a proclamation of how distant that group is. Doesn't matter if one's blocked from SVP by a TIM, my husband is CFO and we'd be fine if I didn't even work. And I have no idea what you mesn by AGP, I've never thought of such a thing I don't know what that is.
One time I was being hassled by a homeless guy at the ATM and I spoke to him normally with expectations of him shoving off. My companion was appalled, because we don't talk to them. It's like that. The problems caused by idpol are invisible when one's at a certain level, so it's déclassé to admit they exist.
I agree with the idea asserted in the title, but primarily as a description of how Democrats police each other, rather than how they police people outside their coalition. I also think this tendency has moderated as of late. Democrats seem to slowly be getting their act together just as Republicans have sank further into the deep end.
A lot of other ideas in the essay are very confused attempts at Bulverism. The authors seem incapable of simply listening to what left-leaning people believe and instead sit around making up theories about what they believe and why they believe it out of thin are. For example:
The idea that liberal parents are making their kids trans in some scheme to gain status through Munchhausen by proxy is certainly... convoluted. But isn't a more logical explanation simply that their children really are trans? When conservative parents have trans kids they seem incapable of making them become cis, so isn't it equally implausible that liberal parents can make cis children become trans?
There is similar confused thinking when discussing how, in the hierarchy of social justice sacred values, trans rights supercedes women's rights. This is confused because it only makes sense if you subconsciously assume that people don't think trans women really are women and are just pretending to believe it. Imagine, instead, that someone really thinks that trans women are women. In that case there is no conflict between trans rights and women's rights, because they are one and the same, trans women are a subset of women. Saying there is a tension between protecting the rights of trans people and protecting the rights of women is as wrong-headed as saying that there is a tension between protecting the rights of redheads and protecting the rights of women. Trans women are simply another type of women. Disagree with that sentence if you want, but understand that other people actually sincerely believe that it is true.
I would also say that the neoliberal notion that you can plug any type of person into the American system and have it work seems to have largely been vindicated by recent events. In general the election has vindicated the notion that immigrants assimilate so effectively that they've even start practicing the time-honored American tradition of shutting the door behind them by voting for nativity parties. The attacks against the Haitian community by JD Vance showed that the main cause of ethnic tension are the nativists themselves. In general neoliberalism seems like it's still pretty much correct about everything, it's only flaw is that it provokes a backlash from people who don't want it to be.
Yes, trans is a human thing, but the notion that children are capable of such assessments is destructive nonsense. There are gay teenagers, as sexual attraction is visceral and a consequence of puberty. Gay kids are often gender non-conforming from an early age, though not all gender non-conforming kids are gay, and confusing that with a “trans” identity is vicious nonsense. The surge in “trans” identification shows that what we are dealing with is social contagion.
Trans adults are a tiny minority, so having more than one “trans” kids in a family is a very bad sign.
I am always amused when left-progressives demand to be taken at their self-assessment when they are so often so unwilling to grant that generosity to others.
It isn't implausible to me that some percentage of the surge in trans kids are hypochondriacs. The internet is full of hypochondriacs, it doesn't seem impossible that gender dysphoria could be one of the things they latch onto. However, the overwhelming majority of these possible social contagiocontagion trans people are ftm. The trans people that people freak out about the most online, by contrast, are mtf. This makes me strongly suspect that concern about kids is often a fig leaf for general transphobia.
I agree that most kids probably can't figure out they are trans on their own, but probably they can do so with the help of psychological professionals.
Surgical interventions are pretty much always performed after a trans person is an adult. I have come across anecdotal examples of trans men having breast reductions when they are in their late teens rather than legal adults. However, breast reductions are routinely performed on minors for non-gender related reasons (gigantomastia, for example), so it seems like someone opposed to cosmetic surgery for minors would want to focus on that first.
Reading over them, the main difference that I could find is that the study that claimed it was uncommon made a point of making sure not to count breast reductions performed on cisgender male minors with gynecomastia, even though those are technically "gender affirming care." I couldn't tell if the "Do No Harm" study did that or not. The other study was also over a shorter time frame, I suppose it's possible that gender affirming surgeries have skyrocketed since then, but that would mean that the recent push back against them has had no effect, which is counterintuitive.
Transphobia is mostly a bs claim used as a form of moral abuse to punish dissent and close down debate. It is part of a much wider pattern of the explosion is use of such terms which correlates strongly with the collapse in the popular standing of universities and of the audience of the mainstream media.
I'm open to a better term. I think much of what we call transphobia is actually motivated by misandry and sexism towards men. Since most of the people accused of transphobia do not believe a trans person is the gender they identify as, when they show hostility towards trans women they are, from their point of view, showing hostility towards men who fail to conform to gender roles.
There is also hostility towards trans men, but it is less common, even though the recent surge in people identifying as trans has predominantly been FtM. That's another bit of evidence that misandry is at the root of it.
A lot of “transphobia” is just disagreement with behaving as if biological sex is not a thing. The demands to change language, to control how other people speak of them, to have access to women’s spaces, are very expansive and intrusive.
The Romans said galli could only have access to women’s spaces after castration. That strikes me as the minimal workable arrangement. If you have a penis, you do not have a right to enter and use spaces for folk without penises. The gap in physical strength between the sexes makes a difference.
A lot of the social contagion seems to be connected to discomfort about sexualisation, which is understandable.
Good morning everyone (it's Monday morning in Blighty, anyway). Short note to let you know this piece got "Instapundit-ed" yesterday morning (I think) Pacific time, which meant most of you visited while I was asleep and Lorenzo was awake. We are doing our best!
Racism has been a minor factor in US life for quite some time, though progressive racialisation of identity is doing its best to revive it. “White supremacy” is a bullshit term. It either means folk of European origin are a majority or it treats the US as if Jim Crow was never abolished, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts never happened and racial discrimination was never outlawed.
Wonderful swing of the bat, with that musical smack of wood on ball! Looks like a home run. I really appreciate the astonishing breadth of this take, and mastering of numerous details--each detail itself a worthy topic. How you gathered it together! Bravo to the authors, and thank you for sharing it.
Thank-you! Lorenzo is asleep at the moment (he's in Australia) so will see this when he wakes up & checks in.
My only caveats to this being totes excellent
The reason we don't understand the religious is their ENTIRE world is grounded in the thunderingly loony. Full-stop.
Palestinians had been unwanted refugees denied permanent residence since 1948. The last sentence of note three is simply nonsense. The one outlier that said otherwise? Saddam's Iraq.
Barring that; this is a tour-de-force, both in its' content and the distillation of that content.
NB: TaNaKh and al Qur'an are very peaceable sacred scripture chocka from beginning to end full of malevolence and genocidal hatred toward the Other. Funny that. Not.
After 1948, the Arab states, with the partial exception of the Kingdom of Jordan, absolutely left Palestinians as stateless sticks to beat Israel with. Nevertheless, they let Palestinians settle as refugees in their countries. Since 1991, that has ceased. Jordan, for example, took lots of refugees from Iraq and Syria, but has made it very clear it will not accept any from Gaza. Egypt has made that even more clear. So, their revealed preferences have changed. It is not hard to work out why.
So all these other Muslim-majority countries should have completely opened their borders to every Palestinian refugee, just because of a shared religion? lmao, don't even try suggesting the US should do that to (Christian) refugees headed up from South and Central America!
Their resistance to taking Palestinian refugees is rational. It was the original decision to define Palestinians as hereditary, stateless refugees and set up a structure (UNRWA) to pay them to be such that has proved disastrous. They are the world’s only hereditary refugees and the only ones not taken in by their ethno-religious confreres as citizens. There have been lots of C20th population swaps and displacements: Germans, Greeks and Turks, Jews from Muslim countries, Indochinese, etc. Only one group have remained hereditary refugees.
"The oppressed/oppressor, the marginalised/dominant template provides the moralising structure for such cruelty."
So this is an exceptionally interesting point in Nietzschean terms, as it doesn't quite fit the priestly or revolutionary modes, but overlaps both of them, and of course is predicated on the shared slave morality.
I'm just wrapping up Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community which is absolutely fascinating and introduced me to some nuances of Rousseau that had I not seen before. What is relevant from that is how all of this is built off the consolidation of authority in the nation-state (and the concurrent diminishment of non-state authorities within a society), and of the interplay between individualism and equality that are the key inheritances from the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment.
"The way to engage in aggression and cruelty without it seeming to be such—even to oneself—is to dress it up as moral concern, as social concern."
Moralized cruelty also speaks to how blind we are about our own selves, motivations, goals, and how we appear to others. Since we're dealing here mostly with the messianic punitive Puritans we call "Leftists", let's take a look at their Founding Fathers: imagine considering that misanthropic psychopath Karl Marx as any kind of philanthropic benefactor of humanity! Even his commas and semi-colons are dipped in rage and hatred. Or imagine believing that the neurotic narcissist J-J Rousseau could discern the "general will" of mankind and that his writings could be the basis for some future utopia. He spent his whole life begging crumbs from aristocrats and having self-pitying tantrums whenever he felt snubbed—nothing straight could ever come from the crooked timber of these twisted souls. And this goes triple for all their acolytes and descendants, mostly the West's spoiled infants who consider having an unmet need a second Middle Passage and who think flashing their tits makes them a second French Resistance. Moralized cruelty begets moral narcissism and then moral autism: everything that affirms me is moral, everything that doesn't is an immoral evil.
Thanks for the great piece, it shouldn't be a post, it should be a book!
Great essay. Re: Structural Racism- I am not claiming that racism or implicit bias don't exist-because both do- although the IAT is prone to wild errors and only really useful for population level data. However, neither racism or implicit bias are particular strong causes of disparate outcomes by group, for the simple reason that we have empirical evidence of factors which are far more powerful and proven.
First, there's Raj Chetty's research on social mobility. It shows that levels of fathers in the community are the most important thing for upward social mobility. This is also important in the sense that fathers working collectively have a moderating influence on pubescent male peer groups. This in turn directly involves the quality of schools in community. It demonstrates why generally poorer and more deprived Catholic communities in Northern Ireland were able to first draw equal with and then significantly outperform Northern Irish Protestants- because their families were disintegrating at a slower rate. Now, the positions are reversed, and liberals are blaming Catholics better educational outcomes on their more affluent backgrounds, when it was the fathers all along which powered their rise.
Second. HR really isn't the Black person's friend. There first duty is to protect their company from being sued. There are several good studies out their which show that Black applicants are more likely to have their CVs rejected on the basis of name only. Ingroup preference is cited as the cause. I'm not entirely discounting the possibility. However, there is a far more obvious cause. Most professional managers have to be more disagreeable than most. The ability to routinely say no to subordinates is in the basic job description. And some professional managers are a lot more disagreeable than others. If a vacancy entails working for a boss who has a track record of leaving behind disgruntled employees, which is actually a lot more common than most would think, what's the betting that HR is going to prevent minority employees from working for a manager who, through his management style, is likely to incur a charge of racially motivated constructive dismissal? In addition, many roles in companies are business critical, even though they may not be particularly well-paid. If an HR departments knows that over half of new entrants will need to be fired, just how likely are they to refer someone from a minority background for the job?
The other problem is that discrimination in hiring tends to be higher in customer facing roles. Believe it or not there is actually an HBR article out there arguing that the authors white progressive friends aren't really racist, but they are forced to discriminate against minorities because their customers are racist. Sure, this is a little bit true. There is old evidence of studies conducted back in the nineties and noughties which shows that customer facing businesses suffer when they hire minority employees, but this is almost exclusively a phenomenon when restaurants or businesses serving predominantly white neighbourhoods have staff compositions where the percentage of minority employees is over half. Yes, it's racism- but of a kind far milder than most have been led to believe. If anything this should engender empathy for people who are more often than not in the minority in whichever workplace they chose. In any event, White progressive (and mostly female) customer service managers need to be corrected in their assumptions, lest their active and illegally racist discrimination continue.
This brings me onto the third cause of structural racism, and it really is tragic, because it's free choice. There is an economic study from the Netherlands which studied the economic progress and prosperity of three successive waves of inward migration. it's finding are as profound as they are disturbing. The study looks at native networks vs. co-ethnic networks. Unsurprisingly, it shows that migrants prefer co-ethnic networks over forming native networks. It's looking at migrant populations, but really what is being studied is ingroup, stemming from social integration theory. The study shows that once someone with high ingroup had their basic needs fulfilled, they will opt for working with a co-ethnic network at lower pay, rather than work in an environment which is primarily non-co-ethnic in composition, but is better paid, with better opportunities. The study even shows that often migrants will chose to become temporarily unemployed in the hopes of finding a job with their fellow migrants rather than look for employment outside their community. Obviously ingroup is a spectrum, and tertiary education as a rule exposes up to 50% of a given community to a world of opportunities, and opportunities to form networks which are not co-ethnic, but what about the kids who were left behind?
The study recommends several positive actions, and is worth a read purely on this basis, but the question remains should be really be forcing people to become homo economicus, when it's their free choice as to the types of employment they will consider, and with whom?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00168-019-00953-8#Tab4
I didn’t say that racism or implicit bias didn’t exist. Simply that they only accounted for a statistically small percentage of economic disparities by group. Obviously this wasn’t always the case, and there are significant differences in wealth accrued due to past injustices.
But where the Left goes wrong is in imagining that wealth makes a difference to future outcomes. It doesn’t. Children’s future life outcomes are predicted by their parental incomes levels, not their parental wealth levels. And it’s not that some individuals born to wealth don’t gain advantages. They do. But those who gain access to opportunities through wealth are cancelled out by those who are ruined by it. Besides most family wealth cancels out within three generations, as for the most part the profligate waste their family estates. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Look, I’m not against the goal. I’m for it. But empirical knowledge-based approaches work- unfalsifiable theories don’t. One example is cognitive load theory. Filling a mind with knowledge, committed to long-term memory over time, is akin to kindling lighting a mighty fire. In London there are now schools serving Black communities in the second poorest borough in London, rife with knife crime, yet those kids outperform the best that the overly privileged mostly White sons and daughters at Eton have to offer, under exam conditions.
Yes, investments were made, but mostly modest ones- particularly focusing on teacher training, especially in classroom practice. An inspirational African headteacher might also have had something to do with it.
It should be noted that this is part of a broader trend. Here in the UK we’ve almost completely eliminated differences in educational outcomes by race, under exam conditions. This was primarily due to educational improvements in London.
There are still areas where we fail, however. An example would be in labour participation. Labour participation is 7% lower for Black British men. Research shows that this tends to be because of a lack of participation in higher value blue collar trades, including amongst those who drop out of university. This also highlights why Dr Raj Chetty’s research on social mobility in the US showed that fathers at the community level was the best predictor of upward social mobility. It seems that fathers in the community can act as an unofficial social safety net, especially for the roughly 50% of kids in any groups who don’t do well in school.
The West has been focusing on university as a means of equalising racial outcomes for 30 years. It helps some people, but not enough. In order to truly raise the living standards and life outcomes of poorer communities, much more attentions needs to be paid to vocational training and the male mentoring it brings. Male unemployment disrupts a rough balance of gender parity favouring hypergamy, which causes lasting community damage through a lack of stable family formation.
Sure, the GI Bill was atrocious, but what caused far more lasting social damage was the mother of labour shocks caused by deindustrialisation/neoliberalism.
It’s why most Western countries should be focusing on starter homes like this. Good for people. Good for the planet.
https://builtoffsite.com.au/emag/issue-05/sweden-became-home-prefab/
Can you be more specific? I don't understand the criticism. What is the truth as you see it?
There is a long used joke that the demand for racism far exceeds its supply. It may seem a bit crass but there is an underlying truth to it. I have concluded that concepts such as misogyny, racism and homophobia are "political mythologies" that have been created artificially (after their natural occurrence became harder to find) and sustained to keep justifying the political demands of the prog/left.
The primary objective is to keep the demanding demographics in a continuing state of apparent oppression because they would simply have no further reason to keep voting for socially left parties if they were to gain the long-promised equality. Hence the teaching of a persecution complex through the school system.
The more functional the developed democracies became, the more left-progressivism has been driven to the valorisation of dysfunction and so bs narratives of oppression.
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/tialpasj
I know I'm on a fool's errand. I've made it one of my missions to craft an alternative hypothesis to structural racism, because the majority of people in the Anglosphere actual believe in the concept of structural racism. I think I've gathered enough empirical evidence to prove it- only to find that most people aren't interested in any alternatives to their preferred narratives. I occasionally win over the odd heterodox thinker or open-minded independent, but despite the commonality of political independence, open-mindedness when it comes to biases is another matter entirely.
I had heard the racism demand/supply joke. Shelby Steele calls it poetic truth- a narrative truth which is more persuasive than the actual truth. Just because most people have always been somewhat influenced by instrumental rationality, it doesn't mean that we should abandon epistemic rationality entirely, Shelby Steele's documentary on What Killed Michael Brown? is excellent, by the way- particularly good at tracking the history of how institutional Leftism sabotaged African America communities, with purported 'help'.
Most people don't realise that Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School stole their ideas from Herder. However, instead of allowing that two realms of knowledge exist- the objective scientific realm and the subjective cultural realm, they set out to pretend that there was no such thing as objective truth. I only know about Herder because he was one of three of Isaiah Berlin's favourite Counter Enlightenment philosophers.
I agree with your diagnosis on motives. I think what the Left failed to understand was the more aggressively they pushed the dogma the less persuasive it would become. It might have played well with with gullible white kids in tertiary education guilty about their genuine socioeconomic privilege, but not everyone else.
Plus, the intersectional alliance is a net negative in terms of social self-interest, a far more powerful motivator than economic self-interest, for anyone already fulfilling their basic needs. A Black man may not necessarily be more disadvantaged by being a man, than he would be by being Black in the intersectional world, but when it comes to social threats and being told what to think the story is completely different. He can be told he is racist by a Latina or an Asian woman. He can be an Islamophobe, if he's a committed Christian and has questions or criticisms. He can forced like Kevin Hart to make a grovelling apology to an overly privileged gay White kid if he makes a joke. If he's Dave Chappelle or Charlemagne he can be called a transphobe.
There are other ways it doesn't work. It robs itself of the empirical power to genuinely enact trade-offs. Most powerful of al, it doesn't work politically. The power of the 'They/Them' vs. 'For You' ad was not on the 'They/Them' side, which committed partisans care about. The power of the ad was decidedly in terms of Trump declaring himself 'For You'. That's the problem of reducing people to their arbitrary characteristics, their labels, it robs the voters of the ability to imagine that you might be acting in their individual or citizen interest. Of course, this is a rationally implausible fiction, but at an emotive level such undercurrents of thought have a very real power to persuade.
The other problem is that a given person might encounter racism five times a day, but most people drastically underestimate how many people they interact with. The average person will encounter and interact with (including gestural interaction) 50 to 100 people in 30 minutes of travel.
Now let’s look at instances which are commonly perceived as racism, but at best are structural racism.
Let’s take a common scenario. The act of signing in at a security desk. Everybody not scheduled to work in a building has to sign-in. It’s important for many reasons, but let’s take the most straightforward. Fire lists. It’s important to have an accurate accounting of who is a building at any given time, otherwise people die or lose their jobs.
This is a particular problem at universities, where lecturers for example, keep irregular schedules. It may seem racist when a security guard has to ask a Black professor to sign it but it is nothing of the sort. It saves lives. If a security guard doesn’t ask everyone not scheduled to be in the building to sign he will quickly be fired for gross misconduct.
If Elon Musk was visiting a Tesla factory in which he doesn’t regularly work, then he should sign in. If the security guard didn’t ask him to sign in he would probably fine him. I know this because I’ve asked CEOs to sign-in. I apologised. The CEO was emphatic that I should not apologise. I was not a security guard, simply responsible for maintaining fire lists and other safety provisions at a major manufacturing facility.
The world is full of these sorts of scenarios, where what is not often racism is perceived as racism. The other issue is a human problem. People are great at spotting risks but not great at evaluating the extent of the risk. It’s a human problem which exists in all circumstances dealing with outgroups. It’s not particular to any one group, but clearly when majoritarian demographics prevail it can be a much bigger problem for some than others.
The problem is that it’s not a problem which can be easily solved. All the research on ingroups shows that the only thing which can defeat it is the formation of new ingroups. The military is particularly good at this, but milder positive results can be achieved in working environments through teambuilding. Diversity training and raising race consciousness do not work- all the evidence points to the conclusion that these approaches make the problem worse, because they emphasise difference. And no I don’t argue for colour blindness, a better approach would be fair-minded rapport building. Humans are hardwired for fairness, not equity-orientated equality.
The problem will become less over the long-term as children’s playgroups and educational environments become more diverse. It will lead to the formation of broader ingroups.
The oppression narratives are in equal parts appeals to fear and self interest. Since humans are very prone to blaming others for their own misfortunes, it is an easy sell.
Excellent piece.
And btw: Cutting off relations because of an election is the most fembrained, hysterical move I can imagine. Even incels would think it’s too much of a parody of womanly behavior.
"Fembrained"? I must not be up on all the latest incel slang!
Ok boomer
lol, I was born in 1970!
Welcome, fellow GenXer.
You two have outdone yourselves! I presume this was written before the gunning down of the health insurance company CEO. I don't want be greedy, but I'd be interested to know your thoughts about how the counter-revolution against the PMC is likely to play out, especially come January 20. Keep up the good work.
Yes, it was written before then. I am intending to do a follow up on my own Substack. The murder of Brian Thompson (and some of the reactions to the same) raises worrying possibilities.
Worrying possibilities of UHC hit.
It’s democracy LW.
Pallas Athena
Savage, isn’t she?
That’s because she’s us.
I have BTW no respect for those wild talkers waving this around, they would run or faint this happened around them… it may well .
Ironic how they aren't waving the bloody shirt this time to scream about gun control.
I shall eagerly await your characteristically insightful analysis!
The Manhattan assassination has become quite a hit on YouTube commentary... But consider the other elements coalescing: look at the mass rejection of celebrity political intrusion, the Diddy fallout which may drag a whole generation of public figures down with him (unless he gets Epsteined). The powder keg of Trump's razor gang coming into office... This will be a wild ride.
If I were an American I'd be prepping up and looking for a quiet spot.
“What women and Jews have in common is a vision of themselves as peaceful people. It is self-delusion: there is nothing peaceful about attempting to systematically hound people, to deny them a voice, to seek to destroy their careers, reputations, livelihoods—particularly not for things they merely said.“ Still skimming this article. Curious how Jews fit into this narrative. I’ll keep reading.
They don’t see what their lobbyists did in monstering people over things they said (or were alleged to have said) as either aggression or cruelty. It was just “moral concern”. But those campaigns pioneered modern cancel culture.
You have to excuse people being made queasy by that connection, Lorenzo - but I saw it in the 80's, and Helen (and you?) experienced it. So it can't be denied, but I think it was still more at the margins (but I wasn't getting cancelled). Those that didn't live it can't credit it at all, given the current situation, because they don't have the history. But the "slavery selection" contention would probably make others balk, if it wasn't becoming so obvious - ditto the whole "feminisation" argument. There's hardly a word here that won't push someone's buttons.
The best we can do is be as scrupulous as possible, but also not to pretend things that happened, didn’t happen. I mean, Robert Manne has just written another book in which I feature heavily. He has already written an entire book about me. He is a nasty bully, and the genocide narrative around Aborigines he built in the 90s is now being used against Jews (narrowly) and Australia’s immigrant population (more widely). It is legitimate and fair to point this out.
I’m not made queasy by the references to Jews — I’m revolted by them. Truly disgusting, othering stuff.
“What women and Jews have in common is a vision of themselves as peaceful people. It is self-delusion.” I see: we’re actually bellicose. The brutish, militaristic Jew has entered the chat. Blood libel adjacent or close.
I’ve been a fan of Helen’s for a long time, but candidly you can both get stuffed with that garbage.
The rest of the essay was excellent but I say that with zero enthusiasm.
Jeff, I'll leave Helen to respond if she chooses. I'll just say I was a very interested bystander in 1995 when she was being "cancelled" - subscriber to Quadrant (and News Weekly!) and reader of the major capital dailies. She was heavily attacked by a not-insignificant portion of the higher-profile Jewish community in Australia - no-holds barred and very personal. It is fair to say, even to an outside observer, they were trying to end her career and destroy her. It's not for me to judge the rights and wrongs, but it looked very heavy handed, and identical (perhaps a template) for what happens so often now.
I'm not sure that it's an outright slander to say Jews are not peaceful - they have no reason to be and plenty of reason not. I'm not peaceful, either. I think you're making the jump from not peaceful to bellicose, brutish etc. I'm pretty sure that's not Lorenzo's meaning or implication.
But, as I've already said - it's a vexed topic, and a difficult formulation. I have a bit more trust in good intentions, but that's not right for everyone.
People are entitled to their views on this issue, but I’ll just note here that Tony gives an accurate thumbnail sketch of what went on wrt me. Lorenzo’s essay under the link goes into more detail, as does my piece on “the Omnicause” and Katy Barnett’s piece on “living in interesting times” (all available on the front page of the blog).
The wider problem is that it wasn’t just done to me. What made my situation notable was its publicness—everyone got to see it and people around at the time remember it. It was also done to a significant number of people who criticised hate speech laws (which were promoted by the Jewish lobby) and supported Palestine (in any form, not just the obvious pro-Hamas fruitcakes you see on university campuses). Often their stories did not become known, although ex-Jerusalem bureau chief for the Australian John Lyons has put together a collection of the worst Aussie ones in a book.
Now (as should be obvious to anyone with eyes), the pro-Palestinians in Western countries are taking what they consider vengeance. When I was in Australia in October I encountered quite a few of them who wanted to use me as a stick to beat Jews with. Meanwhile, just before I arrived in the country a group of Jewish creatives were mass doxxed and personal information about them leaked. This is exactly what was done to me, and I want nothing to do with people who prosecute their cause in this way.
It is important to note the differences: pro-Palestinian lobbying in Western countries has crossed over into street violence and terrorism. This is far worse than anything the Jewish lobby has ever done, pro-Palestinians need to own it, and stop giving us crap about “settler-colonialism”. However, the use of “peaceful” cancel culture methods over many decades does no credit to Jewish activists, and they need to own it too.
I’ll say this as gently as I can. I read:
The Jewish lobby
The Jewish self image as peaceful — THE one Jewish self image
Their [i.e. Jewish] activists pioneered cancel culture
NONE OF THESE THINGS EXIST, except in a phantasmagorial projection of Jews as forming a conspiracy. And that is classic antisemitism. Which you are now performing.
There are Jewish organizations that lobby. There is no Jewish lobby as an amorphous faceless force. The phrase itself is antisemitic, à la “the Israel lobby.”
There is no unified Jewish self image as peaceful. In fact, there is no unified Jewish self image in general: as the phrase goes, two Jews, three opinions. We are not a faceless non-individuated blob.
Cancel culture certainly exists, and I deplore it. However, ostracism has been a feature of human life for (one must assume) millennia. The idea that the Jews created cancel culture is insane.
I’ve long been a fan of Helen’s, and I think what happened to her was dreadful. That it happened at the hands of progressives, some of whom were Jewish, I do not doubt. But there’s something going on here that is deeply distasteful, and which you guys are clearly not aware of. I’ve done all I can. I will say one more time: we are not a monolithic blob, and we do not think of ourselves as being NOT like ordinary humans. In fact, we would like to be like ordinary humans. As the line (from Fiddler on the Roof?) goes, “I know we’re the chosen people, but couldn’t you [God] choose someone else once in a while?”
Maybe hang out with some Jews. I’m outta here. Thank you for engaging.
A lot of what activists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews got up to was vile. But part of the reason they could get away with such monstering of people for what they said or wrote was precisely the Jewish self-image as being a peaceful people, rather than just ordinarily human.
The pro-Palestinian activists post October 7 have behaved much worse than activists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews ever did. Nevertheless, Jewish denial that their activists pioneered modern cancel culture are up there with progressives, particularly female progressives, denying there is any such thing as cancel culture. The self image as peaceful and moral, and what was done was just moral concern, is part of such self-blinding.
You might also be interested in my post here.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/marxism-is-a-dreadful-framing
I discussed the problems of activists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews in this post.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/jews-cant-afford-the-jewish-lobby
Jews were a big part of the cultural Marxist movement in the 1960s and a lot of the left in the USA from about the 1930s to...the 2010s I'll say? You had quite a few prominent Jewish conservatives too, ranging from Saul Bellow through Milton Friedman to Bill Kristol and Ben Shapiro (in recent years Edward Blum was the dude behind the SFA lawsuit that killed affirmative action), but the net effect was left. It started with anticlericalism (duh, they weren't Christian) and moved through socialism from there to being a big part of the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and a lot of the early woke movement.
Since my own blood is tainted, I use it as an excuse for me not to have kids. ;) Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
I have written about why Jews were attracted to Communism. https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/arab-nationalist-christians-and-jewish
Hm. So that's the backstory. Makes sense.
Unfortunately I still can't be a groyper, so I'll have to sit around and post silly things on people's Substacks. C'est la vie.
“The slavery of the Antebellum South has left a continuing legacy. One is that the churn of Transatlantic transportation and commerce in people separated the slaves from their cultural heritages. Another is that it was a process of negative selection—selecting for folk of more physical robustness but lower executive function—through who was enslaved (and survived the Atlantic passage). The experience of slavery itself was also a process of negative cultural selection—selecting against trust, a sense of personal agency, and in favour of an in-the-moment hedonism.“ I think you’re either on very shaky ground here or your use of the term negative selection is just simply your own opinion. Is your definition of negative selection described above?
If I understand correctly, negative selection is the process by which you believe slaves — regardless of race — were selected, bred, and presumably killed? And so this is a universal statement about slavery in all times and places or is mostly limited to American slavery?
And it is supposed to contract with “positive selection?” Which is what?
And how does negative selection relate to “natural selection?
Now of course evolution is largely or completely an emergent order. Negative selection is a planned order. I’m not sure why the planned order in your case called negative selection? From the perspective of the slave master the selection was positive, but you’re called it negative?
Selection is not necessarily an intentional process. Indeed, except among animal and plant breeders, it is normally not. Who gets enslaved is a selection process. Who survives the trip is a selection process. Who survives slavery is a selection process. Who manages to have children is a selection process.
It is a negative selection process if it disadvantages the lineages within the group by selecting against features that would encourage flourishing in more normal circumstances.
Good on the first paragraph.
But there’s no universal normal with respect to slavery. Slave labor was normal for a very long time, maybe millions of years. Can’t prove this. It isn’t normal anymore. If you agree, would you want to re-word this?
Does your narrative take into account house slaves? There’s a selection process in who gets to be a house slave.
Does your view of negative selection take into account the NBA, NFL, and Olympics?
Assuming that you’re correct, that there was a negative selection process in American slavery, how big of an effect is this? How many generations were negatively selected and how many generations would it take to nullify the effects? Assuming 200 years of negative selection (1665-1865), then 200 years of natural selection (1865-2065) the effect should almost certainly be neutralized.
But I think this still misses the most important point. There’s not enough space to write it out here but it has to do with the role of people that do grunt work. Such workers are valued then and still valued now. So I don’t see how there can be a
negative selective process going on here. I’ll have to take up this point in a full post on my Substack. People that do manual labor are very valuable. People that do mundane work are very valuable. People that do routine, mindless work are very valuable. Do you take this into account?
Slaves were largely stripped of their cultural heritage, which is a negative selection process. Slavery also has enduring effects in undermining trust, a serious form of negative selection. (With Homo sapiens, one has to consider both genetic and cultural selection effects.)
Transatlantic slavery was a very particular form of slavery. In temperate zone Americas, the high survival (so low turnover) rates resulted in the slaves adopting a form of the religion of their masters. In tropical zone Americas—where the death rates, and so population turnover, were much higher—you get more African syncretic religions.
There was a selection process in who was enslaved (and who did the enslaving). Those doing the enslaving tended to be better at coordinating and connecting, those being enslaved tended to be worse.
The Saharan passage was every bit as horrible as the Atlantic passage, and lasted far longer. But Islamic slavery involved a very high rate of castration of males, while Islam was a polygynous culture where having a Muslim father made you a Muslim. So the consequences were different. There is no identifiable ex-slave diaspora within Islam, despite Islamic slavery lasting so much longer.
Labour is a very different matter. Yes, slaves were enslaved for their labour but slavery has very particular features.
Even there, there are other selection effects. Afro-Caribbeans in the US have persistently done better, on average, than the descendants of Americans slaves. Some of this is the voluntary-migrant initiative effect. Some of it is a longer history of self-government. Some of it is different cultural evolution. (The comparison between the failed state of Haiti and the successful one of the Dominican Republic on the same island is striking.)
It is clear that the descendants of American slaves were doing better and better up until the social shock of the 1960s, whereupon a range of negative things happened. The triumph of the civil rights movement did not have the consequences equalising outcomes effect that folk hoped, hence a lot of the ideological and policy dysfunctions since.
All sounds plausible. I’ll keep an open mind. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
Are you familiar with Robert Higgs book, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914?
Not familiar with the volume, no.
I’m not sure if it’s relevant to your narrative, but I started reading more of it last night.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152819627
“All things considered—and despite the oppressions of Jim Crow—there was a lot of triumph in the post-slavery history of the former slaves and their descendants. The level of literacy shot up, there was considerable valuing of education and they developed a high level of employment and intact families.“ So what effect did the negative selection have if the post slavery history consisted of “a lot of triumph?” Is this triumph what you would expect following so called “negative selection?”
The combination of selection for physical robustness (not a negative in itself) and for lower executive function (which is a negative) leads to a larger “tail” of propensity to physical aggression (i.e. violent crime), which was then aggravated by under-policing (and still is). Humans, and human groups, are bundles of traits. That there were achievements does not stop there also being problems.
African-American leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, often railed against the negative patterns within their own communities. This included crime and short-term hedonism. The vibrancy of African-American entertainment culture is obvious. Nevertheless, there are some downsides to it as well.
Any human nature most assuredly can be greatly adjusted by nurture.
Unfortunately nurturing the worst in people became policy in the 1960s across the board, both public and private sector.
Beware ; Race in America LW and HD - race is a miasma that conceals many other things, in fact it’s an often used smoke screen for many ill deeds.
Boeing’s safety failures have nothing to do with DEI, but its a popular meme, and of course many companies pay protection money to the Left and then commit the most egregious offenses.
I think there is a great mis-attribution in American political culture of things to race which actually are attributable to *caste* - which race is actually just a convenient but inaccurate analogue for.
There is much in what you say. Especially post the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Brilliant.
It’s the 1850s again alright.
I had the very same thought on my bike ride yesterday...
There is a "Jolly Swagman" living in a tent in a North Carlton park. He seems like a pleasant bearded fellow who hangs his washing on a tree branch...
I was shocked into pulling up by realising that this country has returned to the same point it was in BP's time. We are back to living off the land owned by a squattocracy of housing oligopolists. I hope the troopers don't get him.
The advice to cut off your family is the most frightening element to come out of this - the only milieu I've ever encountered this demand is inside cults. And just like cults the social justice movement engages in "love bombing" of their acolytes by telling them they are perfect and all their shortcomings stem from THEM oppressing you.
Following on to the prestige angle is highly apt. Once equality is more or less attainable - what is the next social good to demand? Prestige. Problem is that equality is not a zero-sum social good, it actually raises all boats when meritocracy is allowed; but for me to gain prestige you must lose it. Therefore it is not hard to see why there is such a sustained campaign of "ritualised humiliation" toward white (working class) men. And not hard to see why elite white men participate - they are howling with the wolves to preserve their precarious status.
Prestige can proceed across multiple dimensions. Much of politicisation is about trumping prestige with propriety. Shirtgate was the key moment of cultural shift.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Shirtgate
I am well aware of it - and other incidents like the Lebow elevator joke*. Such were my first thoughts when I saw feminists fighting against gender ideology being punished w/o due process... a practice of course originally instituted by them in the exemplar cases. Nevertheless I am not a petty man and support the Truth Espousing Rational Females regardless.
*Which reminds me: has anyone read The Joke by Kundera? Ideal book for our times, needs a film adapted to present events.
Throwing other members of oppressed groups under the bus to get in good with your oppressors is a time-honored way of moving upward in society's hierarchy. Oh, you'll never be seen as equal to the oppressors - the people in charge - but you'll be treated better than most of your people by them. Just look at the Indians who supported the British rulers in India. It's just like women supporting trans-identifying males over other women.
For women supporting trans identified males, I suspect it's a form of potlatch. They are attempting to signal that their situation is so secure, they will not be threatened by males coming in to take resources previously allocated to females. That is why, I suspect, the political standpoint is so prevalent among highly educated women. They may even be attempting to demonstrate that their success isn't due to affirmative action; their merit will always be recognized regardless. Since an appearance of power is in fact often accepted as deserving power, this isn't an approach that would encounter internal red flags. It's a gamble, but the more that their colleagues also play the game, the more risky it becomes anyway, to not play the game.
What a fascinating perspective. I will have to think on this, ta.
I'm definitely following your substack and am going to be reading through it. I've been wrestling with nature vs nurture and identity politics since the 90s, as it wrecked my preferred academic interests.
"That is why, I suspect, the political standpoint is so prevalent among highly educated women."
Luxury beliefs of the upper class.
Yes, indeed. But also a status signal, which tells others (mostly women) what standing one has. To be unconcerned with TIM incursions into women's shelters is to assert that one will never need to make use of such services. One's attorney would win the house and a large settlement, if one's husband became a problem--which he wouldn't do because he's not of the battering classes.
To be unconcerned with what fewer cops in poor brown and black neighborhoods actually means for those people is to demonstrate that one has never thought experimented to walk in their shoes. Certainly never had a heart to heart discussion in which one felt their problems as close to one's own life. Even releasing criminals is no problem, because one never goes to those places anyway. In fact one has never needed the police one's entire life, except to obtain directions in a tourist town.
It's similar to volunteering: conspicuous expenditure only possible because one has so much excess. It's also a giving away of others' safety of course, and so one demonstrates one's distance from those people.
Yes as you said it's throwing one's own oppressed group under the bus, but it's also a proclamation of how distant that group is. Doesn't matter if one's blocked from SVP by a TIM, my husband is CFO and we'd be fine if I didn't even work. And I have no idea what you mesn by AGP, I've never thought of such a thing I don't know what that is.
One time I was being hassled by a homeless guy at the ATM and I spoke to him normally with expectations of him shoving off. My companion was appalled, because we don't talk to them. It's like that. The problems caused by idpol are invisible when one's at a certain level, so it's déclassé to admit they exist.
I haven’t read The Joke, but now, I’m going to have to so thank you in advance!
I agree with the idea asserted in the title, but primarily as a description of how Democrats police each other, rather than how they police people outside their coalition. I also think this tendency has moderated as of late. Democrats seem to slowly be getting their act together just as Republicans have sank further into the deep end.
A lot of other ideas in the essay are very confused attempts at Bulverism. The authors seem incapable of simply listening to what left-leaning people believe and instead sit around making up theories about what they believe and why they believe it out of thin are. For example:
The idea that liberal parents are making their kids trans in some scheme to gain status through Munchhausen by proxy is certainly... convoluted. But isn't a more logical explanation simply that their children really are trans? When conservative parents have trans kids they seem incapable of making them become cis, so isn't it equally implausible that liberal parents can make cis children become trans?
There is similar confused thinking when discussing how, in the hierarchy of social justice sacred values, trans rights supercedes women's rights. This is confused because it only makes sense if you subconsciously assume that people don't think trans women really are women and are just pretending to believe it. Imagine, instead, that someone really thinks that trans women are women. In that case there is no conflict between trans rights and women's rights, because they are one and the same, trans women are a subset of women. Saying there is a tension between protecting the rights of trans people and protecting the rights of women is as wrong-headed as saying that there is a tension between protecting the rights of redheads and protecting the rights of women. Trans women are simply another type of women. Disagree with that sentence if you want, but understand that other people actually sincerely believe that it is true.
I would also say that the neoliberal notion that you can plug any type of person into the American system and have it work seems to have largely been vindicated by recent events. In general the election has vindicated the notion that immigrants assimilate so effectively that they've even start practicing the time-honored American tradition of shutting the door behind them by voting for nativity parties. The attacks against the Haitian community by JD Vance showed that the main cause of ethnic tension are the nativists themselves. In general neoliberalism seems like it's still pretty much correct about everything, it's only flaw is that it provokes a backlash from people who don't want it to be.
Yes, trans is a human thing, but the notion that children are capable of such assessments is destructive nonsense. There are gay teenagers, as sexual attraction is visceral and a consequence of puberty. Gay kids are often gender non-conforming from an early age, though not all gender non-conforming kids are gay, and confusing that with a “trans” identity is vicious nonsense. The surge in “trans” identification shows that what we are dealing with is social contagion.
Trans adults are a tiny minority, so having more than one “trans” kids in a family is a very bad sign.
I am always amused when left-progressives demand to be taken at their self-assessment when they are so often so unwilling to grant that generosity to others.
It isn't implausible to me that some percentage of the surge in trans kids are hypochondriacs. The internet is full of hypochondriacs, it doesn't seem impossible that gender dysphoria could be one of the things they latch onto. However, the overwhelming majority of these possible social contagiocontagion trans people are ftm. The trans people that people freak out about the most online, by contrast, are mtf. This makes me strongly suspect that concern about kids is often a fig leaf for general transphobia.
I agree that most kids probably can't figure out they are trans on their own, but probably they can do so with the help of psychological professionals.
And Tiktok. And their friends at school. And teachers. And drag queens desperate to read to them.
Castration of minors: of course that bothers folk.
Surgical interventions are pretty much always performed after a trans person is an adult. I have come across anecdotal examples of trans men having breast reductions when they are in their late teens rather than legal adults. However, breast reductions are routinely performed on minors for non-gender related reasons (gigantomastia, for example), so it seems like someone opposed to cosmetic surgery for minors would want to focus on that first.
It appears that Trans surgical interventions on minors are more common than is claimed.
https://nypost.com/2024/10/08/us-news/over-5700-americans-under-18-had-trans-surgery-from-2019-23/
Even puberty blockers are a dubious intervention.
The normal pattern in these things is
(1) X is not happening.
(2) X is happening, but not very much.
(3) X is happening, and that is a good thing.
Since Trans is somewhat in retreat, it appears that this progression is in retreat.
I found another study done over the same time frame that got the opposite result:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/gender-affirming-surgeries-rarely-performed-on-transgender-youth/
Reading over them, the main difference that I could find is that the study that claimed it was uncommon made a point of making sure not to count breast reductions performed on cisgender male minors with gynecomastia, even though those are technically "gender affirming care." I couldn't tell if the "Do No Harm" study did that or not. The other study was also over a shorter time frame, I suppose it's possible that gender affirming surgeries have skyrocketed since then, but that would mean that the recent push back against them has had no effect, which is counterintuitive.
Transphobia is mostly a bs claim used as a form of moral abuse to punish dissent and close down debate. It is part of a much wider pattern of the explosion is use of such terms which correlates strongly with the collapse in the popular standing of universities and of the audience of the mainstream media.
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/tialpasj
I'm open to a better term. I think much of what we call transphobia is actually motivated by misandry and sexism towards men. Since most of the people accused of transphobia do not believe a trans person is the gender they identify as, when they show hostility towards trans women they are, from their point of view, showing hostility towards men who fail to conform to gender roles.
There is also hostility towards trans men, but it is less common, even though the recent surge in people identifying as trans has predominantly been FtM. That's another bit of evidence that misandry is at the root of it.
A lot of “transphobia” is just disagreement with behaving as if biological sex is not a thing. The demands to change language, to control how other people speak of them, to have access to women’s spaces, are very expansive and intrusive.
The Romans said galli could only have access to women’s spaces after castration. That strikes me as the minimal workable arrangement. If you have a penis, you do not have a right to enter and use spaces for folk without penises. The gap in physical strength between the sexes makes a difference.
A lot of the social contagion seems to be connected to discomfort about sexualisation, which is understandable.
Social contagion and Munchausen By Proxy.