The government is burying the anti-Asian violent hate crime crisis
twitter.com
twitter.com
So what happened when attacks on Asians in progressive cities went up in 2020? Purported “asian” activists put solidarity with white progressives ahead of representing the people they claim to represent: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang
That makes sense when you think about it. People in Chinatowns don’t identify as “AAPI” and have never heard of these organizations. They exist to raise money from white progressives and put Asian faces on their politics: https://asamnews.com/2021/06/17/mackenzie-scott-donates-2-7-...
Local politics are a different story, but local politics tend to involve changing which people in the party get to hold office, not changing which party holds office. See: San Francisco.
College educated Asians aren’t similarly situated to college educated whites. Progressivism gives white democrats a vehicle for using institutions to advance their cultural values. Asians meanwhile are on the receiving end of that. When an Asian writes a diversity or hardship essay, they are appealing to white peoples’ views of what that means.
Progressives adopting an offensive posture on cultural issues—where they not only want to keep Christian evangelism out of schools, but want to teach Asian kids what Judith Butler thinks about the nature of humans—and republicans learning to frame cultural issues in non-religious terms (like Youngkin) change the script on that.
If you confine your analysis to "progressives", I'll shut up about it. I somewhat agree with you. But when you drag the Democratic party in it, or, even less plausibly, Biden, I'm going to object.
As punishment for your deployment of this canard, I'll observe that the fringe progressive wing of the Democratic party gets roflstomped in elections for national office, while the fringe conspiracy-theory wing of the Republican party controls the Republican party.
Sure, to win in 2020 the Democrats had to go with a more pragmatic candidate. But behind the scenes, the legion of government employees, aides, administrators, lobbyists, and bureaucrats are implementing policies and interpreting rules with more or less the exact set of values and beliefs that you're attributing to "weirdos" on twitter and in academia.
You're not going to see Biden give a speech where he says "Give minorities preferential access to covid treatments to compensate for systemic racism against them" but some committee of people appointed by his office will write the rules as such. So does it matter that Biden publicly claims moderate, centrist positions if all his appointments and policymakers put racial progressivism as their top priority?
Upthread, I pointed out that in contrast to the Democratic party, the fringiest, least-defensible elements of the Republican party control the party. That's true! But it's also a dumb argument, and not one I'd want to have to make outside of zinging Rayiner for pretending Biden is a defunder. Just because a bunch of batshit crazy people run the Republican party (or a bunch of out-and-proud racist authoritarians with the Libertarian party) doesn't mean you can't reasonably be a member of either party; in fact, supporting those parties are the only way they'll change.
So the whole thing is pretty dumb, and we'd be better of discussing the ideological movements themselves (progressivism, America-first nationalism, or, in the case of the Libertarian party, fascism) than the parties.
While Republican voters are definitely nuttier than democratic voters, the intellectual institutions of the broader right are saner than those of the left. I don’t have to deal with this at Fed Soc meetings: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/northwestern-univers...
And what threat do they pose to Asians anyway? The people saying “there’s too many Asians in tech” are mostly on the left, not the right. And the ones with the power to do anything about it are almost all on the left. There’s a lot worse that can happen to Asians in this country than being called names, and most of those threats are coming from progressives. And, frankly, whatever MTG says about Muslim immigrants, my mom has said worse about white southerners with GEDs. That stuff isn’t a political issue with a political solution.
And what happens if MTG becomes President? My kids will have to say the pledge of allegiance three times a day? Great! That’s far less scary to me than some progressive trying to teach my kid to build their “AAPI identity” around shit that happened to Chinese people 150 years ago: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/schools-are-start.... Asians believe that the way you view the world, and the attitudes you have, matters for your success. Progressive education is terrifying in this respect.
The reality is that if MTG becomes President, nothing about the pledge is going to change; the issue will be that she's an incompetent nitwit, and the government will fall apart and we'll make especially stupid foreign policy decisions, which is the area where the executive branch has the most authority. Likewise: despite the fact that no President the Democrats elect would support your schools forcing your kids to "build their AAPI identity" (the D party elects normies, as I keep pointing out), even if it did elect such a person, nothing would actually change, modulo their basic level of competence running the world's most complicated organization.
These folks have tremendous power on elected officials. When I say, "Democrats think that standardized tests are racist," I'm not complaining about some Sunrise tweet. It actually happened at my high school: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/02/25/judge-th...
> Likewise: despite the fact that no President the Democrats elect would support your schools forcing your kids to "build their AAPI identity"
Unelected bureaucrats, teachers unions, etc., have tremendous power over what kids learn. The left is exceptionally adept at using control over institutions to effect political change bypassing elected officials. The President can help such efforts or hinder them through control of the Dept. of Ed., e.g. Title VI and Title IX. Biden rescinded Trump's CRT ban, and Kamala Harris would co-sign whatever Randi Weingarten wanted. A President DeSantis, by contrast, may well use Title VI to stamp out the practice. Again, not a theoretical concern: this is actually happening in my kid's school.
SATs are racist (to tptacek's point I'm on the progressive side, but I do think Biden agrees with me here [Biden education]). I don't know how you look at the data [SAT stats] and come to any other conclusion. We can discuss how much is solely the SAT vs. institutional racism, but the facts are pretty clear.
---
Since no one else is defending race-aware admissions policies, I'll do it here.
Fundamentally this is a clash of values. The left and academia (definitely not all Democrats) want racially representative cohorts. This is because they lead to better outcomes, and education is "the great leveler" and we want to level people from all walks of life as much as we can, given scarce resources. It's better for society.
The right characterizes these racially representative cohorts as unfair, because they believe they should be instead constructed from test scores. They'll say merit, but their only measure is test scores which aren't good indicators of merit because of systemic racism. If we went with this system, we would retrench and amplify existing biases and inequalities.
The current regime is doing pretty good at representation (2019) [Wiki US race] [Undergraduate race]:
AAPI in college/US: 6.89%/6.1%
Blacks in college/US: 12.65%/12.4%
Whites in college/US: 55.12%/60.1%
Hispanics in college/US: 21.08%/18.3%
While not perfect, college undergraduate racial makeup mostly tracks US racial makeup. The main difference is Whites are underrepresented. This is a success story. Race-aware admissions policies have lifted countless millions of racial minorities in the US out of poverty and had a profoundly good effect on our society. We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.
And to be clear, what these policies certainly are not is a long con to bar AAPI from undergraduate programs. If that were true, they wouldn't be overrepresented.
> When I say, "Democrats think that standardized tests are racist," I'm not complaining about some Sunrise tweet. It actually happened at my high school
This is a great example. The judge in this case said exactly this: "The discussion of TJ admissions was infected with talk of racial balancing from its inception" and "The Board’s policy was designed to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment, which would, by necessity, decrease the representation of Asian-Americans". Clearly, like you, he's on the side of test scores, rather than racial representation.
But another way of describing what administrators tried to do at your school is they changed the admissions process in pursuit of a more racially representative student body, and relying on standardized testing would have run counter to their purpose, as it disadvantages the races of students they wanted to increase the numbers of.
This isn't a Democratic idea, this is a well-known admissions problem. When MIT announced they were reinstating their SAT/ACT requirements, they wrote a thoroughly cited explanation about why, noting that "research... shows correlations [with socioeconomic status] for just about every... factor admissions officers can consider... we always have to adjust for context". [MIT] It's a really interesting read; I recommend it.
---
I get this is frustrating for folks when they're denied admission, and I definitely understand to some degree the feeling of unfairness that comes with it being because of who you are (race, gender). But this is a complex issue with society-wide implications, and we're debating it down in the muck with cheap rhetorical tricks, name-calling, and hand-wavey conspiracy theories. There's a high-level debate to be had about how we allocate educational resources in the US, and probably even about who ought to decide that. But racially representative cohorts have been outstandingly good for the US; we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss them as racist and unfair. Fairness has lots of layers and if we ourselves are to have any hope of being fair, we have to appreciate its complexity.
[Biden education]: https://joebiden.com/education/
[SAT stats]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_226.10.a...
[Wiki US race]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
[Undergraduate race]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastFacts/display.asp?id=98
[MIT]: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
"Lead to better outcomes" is going to need a lot of defending here.
Since we're talking about outcomes for various races, I presume that "better" has to be defined in terms of society as a whole. So:
1. What is your definition of "better"? (And maybe also for "outcomes".)
2. What is your metric for "better"?
3. What is your evidence that racially representative cohorts lead to better outcomes?
Some specific research on the educational benefits of diversity [1] ---
White students with the most experience with diversity during college demonstrated:
- the greatest growth in active thinking processes as indicated by increased scores on the measures of complex thinking and social/historical thinking (confirmed in the MSS and IRGCC studies);
- growth in motivation in terms of drive to achieve, intellectual self-confidence, goals for creating original works (confirmed in the CIRP study);
- the highest post-graduate degree aspirations (confirmed in both CIRP & MSS studies);
- and the greatest growth in students values placed on their intellectual and academic skills (confirmed in the CIRP study).
...
Students who took part in the IRGCC as first-year students, compared to a matched sample who did not participate in this program, showed greater growth over four years in active thinking, stronger citizenship engagement as seniors, greater acceptance of difference as compatible with societal unity, greater growth in perspective taking, greater mutuality in orientations toward their own groups and toward other groups, and greater understanding of conflict as a normal, indeed healthy, aspect of social life.
A bit about the legal system and the SAT [2] ---
A 1987 report of the Michigan Supreme Court, reached the same conclusion, noting that "the presence of minorities in the profession increases public perception of fairness." And a 1998 report re-affirmed that position, stating that by "reflect[ing] the diversity of the constituency it serves," the justice system avoids "[t]he appearance of bias, as well as the reality of bias."
...
For example, the SAT measures only about 18 percent of the factors that determine freshman grades. Even that small predictive value decreases over time. SAT scores are thus less predictive of sophomore grades, even less predictive of graduation rates, and even less predictive of professional success.
A warning and a reality check [3] ---
The impact of race-neutral admissions would be especially drastic in admission to professional schools. The proportion of black students in the Top Ten law, business and medical schools would probably decline to less than 1 percent. These are the main professional schools from which most leading hospitals, law firms and corporations recruit. The result of race-neutral admissions, therefore, would be to damage severely the prospects for developing a larger minority presence in the corporate and professional leadership of America.
...
By the year 2030, approximately 40 percent of all Americans are projected to be members of minority groups. More than $600 billion in purchasing power is generated by minorities and more than one-third of all new entrants to the workforce are persons of color. In this environment, a diverse corporate leadership can be valuable both to understand the markets in which many companies sell and to recruit, manage, and motivate the workforce on which corporate performance ultimately depends.
---
The idea here is that postsecondary education is really the gateway to power and prosperity in the US (sure there are other roads, but at a high level this is true). If we only use test scores--like the SAT--we'll shut out racial minorities from the process. The consequences of this is that education will suffer, our businesses and markets will fail to serve racial minorities, and faith in institutions will weaken as racial minorities are barred from the educations that will give them access to economic prosperity and impactful roles in our society. Furthermore, diversity is great for education for every student, not just the direct beneficiaries of affirmative action.
[0]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/
[1]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/gurin...
[2]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/intro...
[3]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/bowen...
What’s the operative mechanism for that “racism?” And how on earth did white people design a “racist” test on which they underperform Asians?
> Fundamentally this is a clash of values. The left and academia (definitely not all Democrats) want racially representative cohorts. This is because they lead to better outcomes
I’m not sure what’s more offensive, the pop psychology, or the implication that I’d think or do my job differently if I were a white guy.
> Race-aware admissions policies have lifted countless millions of racial minorities in the US out of poverty and had a profoundly good effect on our society.
I don’t think you have the basis for asserting causation here. The largest upward economic mobility in the last 50 years has been experienced by racial groups that don’t benefit from preferences in university education (poor Asians such as Vietnamese).
> We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.
That’s because millennials are much more racially diverse than baby boomers. Outside of academia and Supreme Court appointments, racial preferences haven’t been practiced (because they’re unpopular, including among Black and Hispanic people). Racial preferences in corporate board selections are a new thing.
And the long con is efforts to keep Asians from doing the math and realizing that, when they’re 7% of the population but 35% of the engineers at FAANG, that “racial representation” math is contrary to their interest.
> I get this is frustrating for folks when they're denied admission, and I definitely understand to some degree the feeling of unfairness that comes with it being because of who you are (race, gender).
That’s not actually my frustration. My beef is that progressivism puts white people in charge of deciding what’s best for minorities. “Racial representation” for example is something white people want more than anyone else. Listen to “Nice White Parents.” Something you hear over and over is minority parents saying they don’t care so much about race-balanced schools. What they want is their mostly Black or Hispanic school to have the same resources as the mostly white school. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Justice Thomas has said similar things. Overwhelming majorities of Black and Hispanic people support school choice. It’s white progressives that oppose it because it tends to decrease diversity at any given school. And of course polling shows that the majority of people in every minority group opposes racial preferences in both college admissions and employment. Prop 16 in California lost every single Hispanic-majority county. But white progressives love racial balancing, and continue to advocate it over minority opinion, because they end up in charge of systems of racial gerrymandering. When a minority kid writes a diversity essay, or a minority academic writes a diversity statement for tenure, it’s overwhelmingly white progressives that will be in charge of evaluating that against their worldview.
And because white progressives have different interests and incentives than their minority coalition members, they have to lean pretty heavily on the propaganda to keep minority voters, who have diverse and often conflicting interests, in line. This became glaring to me as someone from a Muslim country during the last few years. You got these efforts to cultivate “Muslim” identity, but in a way that’s divorced from what the overwhelming majority of actual Muslims think. That was mediated through folks like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, who gained prominence not because they authentically represent what American Muslims want—remember these are folks who preferred Bush over Gore not that long ago—but a version of Muslim identity that flatters and appeals to the white progressives that control the media and platforms.
I'm not a party to this argument, have no dog in the fight about the SATs, and sort of broadly buy what John McWhorter has to say about standardized testing (the last time I was paying attention to any of this, he had written about "the soft bigotry of low expectations").
But the question you're asking incredulously here is easy to answer: you get "whites" designing a test that advantages "Asians" if the goal of that test is not to maximize white advantage, but instead to minimize Black advantage. That's, like, not a historically unprecedented thing for American policy.
I actually just discovered this while researching a different post! Here's a snippet [0]:
"Standardized test scores of minority students must be viewed with special caution as minority students tend to underperform on such tests due to a psychological phenomenon known as "stereotype threat." When taking tests that purport to measure ability, the performance of talented minority students may be undermined by their fear that they will conform to negative racial stereotypes. Stereotype threat persists even among middle-class blacks, indicating that socioeconomic status does not explain their underperformance."
So, like so many other complex systems, this wasn't designed or intended at all. It's an emergent property. There are other emergent properties, like White families are more affluent so they can afford SAT tutors, their children are less stressed so they are less likely to be cognitively impaired by their home life, etc. etc.
> I’m not sure what’s more offensive, the pop psychology, or the implication that I’d think or do my job differently if I were a white guy.
I dug into this in a sibling post, but it's far from pop psychology. Dig into the University of Michigan's work for some meaty research on the benefits of diverse student cohorts [1].
>> Race-aware admissions policies have lifted countless millions of racial minorities in the US out of poverty and had a profoundly good effect on our society.
> I don’t think you have the basis for asserting causation here. The largest upward economic mobility in the last 50 years has been experienced by racial groups that don’t benefit from preferences in university education (poor Asians such as Vietnamese).
There's pretty good evidence for this [3] [4], but you can just start from first principles:
- Racial minorities have higher poverty rates than Whites in the US
- AA policies lead to more racial minorities getting into and graduating from universities
- University degrees boost income
- This happened to millions of people
Re: Vietnamese etc., that might be a consequence of California's Prop 209 (1996), which forbids its public universities from considering race, ethnicity, or gender during admissions evaluations, and 40% of Vietnamese Americans live in California. The numbers don't seem high enough to explain everything, but it's definitely a big factor. For half of your 50 years 40% of Vietnamese Americans haven't had the benefit of affirmative action from CA's biggest (pretty good) universities.
>> We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.
> That’s because millennials are much more racially diverse than baby boomers.
I don't know that millennials are well-represented in board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, or in the million dollar club. I mean, definitely not the Supreme Court haha. If you've got a cite here I'm interested, but this seems like a stretch.
> Outside of academia and Supreme Court appointments, racial preferences haven’t been practiced (because they’re unpopular, including among Black and Hispanic people). Racial preferences in corporate board selections are a new thing.
This seems incorrect [4]. Question 10 "Do you generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities" has 72% favor from Blacks and 66% from Hispanics. It even has 57% favor from Non-Hispanic Whites. Those are big margins.
> And the long con is efforts to keep Asians from doing the math and realizing that, when they’re 7% of the population but 35% of the engineers at FAANG, that “racial representation” math is contrary to their interest.
I'm a White male SWE, whose demographic represents the majority at FAANG and nearly everywhere else. I believe that's not great, and that our society would be healthier if that weren't the case. It's not hard for me to believe there are Asian SWEs (etc.) who think the same thing, for one because many of them have told me so.
It's possible, and many times even advantageous to care about a collective, societal interest more than your individual interest.
> That’s not actually my frustration. My beef is that progressivism puts white people in charge of deciding what’s best for minorities.
Not to be too cheeky here, but that's exactly what race-aware admissions are trying to combat: we want to give members of racial minority groups the tools to determine their own destinies. It would be cool if we had more Asian judges and Supreme Court justices, or congresspeople, or senators, or a president, or generals, or solicitors, etc. This generally goes for all racial minorities, and that's what creating racially balanced university cohorts does: gotta get 'em through school first.
> What they want is their mostly Black or Hispanic school to have the same resources as the mostly white school.
They are chronically underfunded, this is true. Although studies show that improving diversity can be be more effective than extra funding (and is pretty great overall) [5]. I don't expect parents to buy these arguments--we should fund their schools fairly--but I think doing both is the best option.
> Overwhelming majorities of Black and Hispanic people support school choice.
This is generally because their schools are junk because of underfunding and defacto segregation. Democrats would like to fix this but it's a hard problem (tax bases, balanced budget amendments, blah blah).
> It’s white progressives that oppose it because it tends to decrease diversity at any given school.
Not just that, but it balkanizes educational standards and funding, and is usually a stand in for "fund religious education". It's just a bad policy.
> And of course polling shows that the majority of people in every minority group opposes racial preferences in both college admissions and employment.
Employment yes, admissions no. Again, Gallup.
> And because white progressives have different interests and incentives than their minority coalition members, they have to lean pretty heavily on the propaganda to keep minority voters, who have diverse and often conflicting interests, in line.
This is seemingly the Asian version of "Democrats take Black voters for granted", with some extra "propaganda" allegations thrown in. But throughout your posts, you haven't shown any such propaganda. Your argument is, summarized, "white progressives' focus on racial balancing will harm Asians, and they have to do a lot of work to keep Asians from noticing".
If our goal is to secretly undermine the AAPI community, we're doing an laughably bad job of it. Again:
- our policies have lead to racially representative cohorts in universities, which is a huge success
- we're open about this being a goal and proud of achieving it
- we're lobbying for more funding to be able to expand the number of students we can accept
- we're trying to make it free so poor students (e.g. poor Vietnamese students) have fewer barriers to higher education
It's true that this means that many Asian applicants are denied admission to elite institutions, disproportionately so. But that's the unfairness we've chosen in order to create racially representative cohorts. The other unfairness is to retrench racial inequities. We're choosing a fairer society at the expense of a less fair to Whites and Asians admissions process. Is that right? I think so, but I also think we should probably talk about it. I don't think it should be decided solely by admissions boards.
> You got these efforts to cultivate “Muslim” identity, but in a way that’s divorced from what the overwhelming majority of actual Muslims think.
I will say first that the groups are pretty diverse, and as you get further into the generations their members usually become liberals (you'll see a lot of religious conservatism in 1st generation immigrants, but that tends to fade). So there's nuance here that you're not capturing.
That said, I understand where you're coming from here, but this is because White voters really don't like this stuff; e.g. they're generally OK with a Christian prayer before school, they're very not OK with Muslim prayers throughout the day, etc. This isn't a "Democrats are exploiting racial minorities" problem, it's an "America has a long way to go re: pluralism" problem. Democrats recruit diverse candidates to run for office, but then they have to appeal to diverse groups of Americans, many of whom have some pretty weirdo ideas about stuff. There's a constant tension to try and drag the electorate into the future, whether it's on gay rights, marijuana, education, race, guns, abortion, whatever, and our candidates almost all want to do it, but they'll all almost certainly lose if they do (tptacek is correct here). Your argument here isn't with Democrats/progressives exploiting racial minorities (or other historically marginalized groups), it's with the American voter. Which, of course, I deeply sympathize with haha.
[0]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/intro...
[1]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/
[2]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/sizing-up-the-measurable-g...
[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286031992_The_econo...
[4]: https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/247130/190226AffirmativeAc...
[5]: https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica...
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16...
Also, Democratic donors. For non-white professionals, addressing “how you add diversity” is now part of daily professional life. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/div...
Apart from being rather demeaning, it’s farcical. You have to be all “I’m a proud Bangladeshi!” But also there’s an unstated “but don’t worry, I’m extremely white washed in the ways you care about.”
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I still support it for women because, get this, I think men and women are different in significant and meaningful ways.
I'm glad you support it for women, but I'm not sure what the "different in significant ways" thing means in relation to it. Almost everything thinks men and women are different in ways.
No. Most Black people don't want racial preferences (https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe...). And I've come around to believing that the patronage of progressive whites is ultimately harmful to minorities. The fact is that they don't really know what causes structural poverty and don't have more than theories on how to fix it. If I was in their shoes, I wouldn't want to be a guinea pig for progressive social engineering.
> You could coherently support affirmative action for Black people while not accepting a complicated hierarchy of grievances (which: most people outside of Twitter and nonprofits don't).
Oh, it's spread way beyond that already. If it was just internecine fights at progressive non-profits I'd be amused by it, not worried.
> I'm glad you support it for women, but I'm not sure what the "different in significant ways" thing means in relation to it.
Sex is a different kind of difference than race. Designing office buildings to have separate bathrooms for men and women is an accommodation to biology; retooling promotion tracks to accommodate balancing motherhood and career progression is similar. But having separate bathrooms for different races is a different story! Women, moreover, are not a minority and are not socially isolated from the dominant group. If social engineering directed at sex has negative consequences, it will quickly become apparent to decision makers in the dominant group. Not so with social engineering directed at race. Most white progressives will never have to deal with the consequences of the policies they espouse.
If that's the case, they're not doing a great job of telling that story. The "weirdos on Twitter and in elite college administrations" seem to have the louder voice by far.
If the party wants to tell that story, it probably need to be in terms of loud, clear, and frequent denunciations; not awkward handwringing trying have it both ways and a "clarifying" point on page 97 of the platform.
It cuts both ways! We have a two-party system in the US for almost mathematical reasons, and both sides have tons of incentive to play at a politics of disqualification. There are sane, fundamental differences of policy opinion between Democrats and Republicans that have nothing do with eldritch hierarchies of grievance or unhinged conspiracy theories; the R's and D's have different preferred solutions to important problems everyone agrees exist, and neither party can claim always to have the best answers. Democrats who don't want to confront the difficult issues of, say, out-of-control public sector unions and unsustainable pension liability would much rather cast Republicans as the party of attempted coups. We need level-headed, persuasive, rational Republicans and Democrats so we can work out the real policy issues, and get the approaches of both parties on the table.
But in this thread, I'm not attempting to DQ Republicans; I'm saying that there's no win to have from DQ'ing either party.
Rayiner can't say the same thing; he's --- for reasons I don't totally understand --- abandoned that principle, because he believes the Democratic party is dedicated to a mission of creating a new American caste system. In that, he shares the faults of Democrats who, for instance, believe that if we can just raise enough money we can pull Clarence Thomas off the court. Those people are unserious. But it's fun to pretend they're not, so, here we are.
There's a trivially easy way out of this mess for him. He could just confine his critique to the far-left wing of the Democratic party. I'd even give it to him if he chose the term "progressive" as a shorthand for it. But to do so would be to surrender the disqualification card he's time and again trying to play on the entire Democratic party. Someday soon I'll probably slip up and do the same thing with the Republicans, and when that happens, I hope he calls me out too (maybe less indulgently and with fewer words than I'm burning on this).
It's not unreasonable through. There's an element of economy there, an element of trust, and an element of movement. People don't have infinite time available to search for some needle you claim is there. Then let's say you found that needle on page 97 of the platform or a comment in some speech: can you trust it, or is it insincerity fishing for some extra votes? It's also not like the party is standing still: today it might be officially against X, but very soon it might be for it or something like it.
That's why it's important to be loud. As an outsider, if the loudest voices on an issue in your coalition are unrepresentative but not put in their place, it makes it hard to trust the official position is true or will be maintained when it matters. If those voices are loudly and officially rebuked, the consequences and implications of that can build some trust in the official position, as well as making it easy to discover.
The party rejects this stuff, because ordinary voters reject it, and, contrary to Rayiner's belief, the Democratic party responds primarily to its voters, not to The Groups.
Honestly, anything a voter has to work to find out.
> On my side of the argument, there is the almost unbroken record of moderate/liberal Democrats defeating progressives in primaries, and the recall of leftist politicians in (of all places) San Francisco.
Then they should attack those ideas in their ads, in their stump speeches, and write lots of strident op-eds about them.
> ...and the recall of leftist politicians in (of all places) San Francisco.
> The party rejects this stuff, because ordinary voters reject it...
IIRC, that recall was led by people from outside the normal party structure.
Then they've decided to suffer an account of what those "weirdos on Twitter and in elite college administrations" say, and I guess that's their call. People can be forgiven for assuming what the "party" thinks is what their coalition members are loudly saying.
I'm not so sure about that. If they weren't, wouldn't be easier to throw them under the bus than it seems to be?
In the most literal sense: I have no dog in this fight. But I don't think there is anything funny at all about having a major political party with Nazi's in it. We have a couple of those clowns here in NL in politics as well and fortunately for now the mainstream parties are staying well clear of that. But there may come a day that they will embrace it and then - as far as I'm concerned - all bets are off because it means that the mainstream and the fringe no longer care about being seen together. Note that the actual Nazi's came to power on somewhere between 10 and 15% of the electorate. You may be a lot closer to that than you think.
But what happened is subtle. It's not that GOP voters in the Illinois 3rd are sympathetic to Nazis. It's that a stray dog wearing a Democratic party sweater would have a better chance of being elected in that district than a Republican, so no serious Republican will run for the seat (when you run in a district, lose, and then try to run somewhere else, you're tarred as a carpetbagger). So the only people that run for these ultra-safe seats are lunatics.
But most people don't actually know that! You have to be a political nerd to follow stuff like this. To normal people, the specifics of a congressional candidate are as opaque as the Cubs starting shortstop is to me (is shortstop a thing? is that one of those differences between the NL and the AL?). You take my point.
So really, they're just voting for the party, and not for the candidate, and this particular Nazi took advantage of it.
That is why we have what's called a 'cordon sanitaire' around the parties that are enablers of Nazism, the one thing that sets the US apart from NL right now is that we still have the luxury of doing so. But the moment VVD/CDA/SP/D66/GL would accept one of the fringe that difference would be erased. Now the jerks have to first find a way into a mainstream party that will not kick them out or (alternatively) find a way to 51% of the vote (highly unlikely, for now, though things are very dynamic and it could well change to that at some point).
This is a pretty scary development, in ordinary times people would be expected to protest against a party that allowed Nazis to run under their banner by punishing them elsewhere, you'd expect that enough swing voters would see this as distasteful enough to guarantee that a party that had a single Nazi on their roster could not be expected to win the house/senate/presidential elections. But that's not the case any more (if it ever was). This normalized 'Nazi's in the house' for parties that may well end up in government. And that should have never ever happened.
His nomination in 2018 was a fluke: he ran unopposed (it was a Democratic wave year election --- the Trump midterms, where we flipped the House†, and no Republican wanted to stake any of their time or reputation on a suicide mission to try to flip a safe blue seat). The IL GOP is unlikely to make the same mistake again: if Jones (the Nazi) appears on the ballot again, he'll have opposition, and it will depants him.
† we flipped the House entirely with moderate Democrats, for what it's worth; the Bernie Sanders wing of the party didn't fare a whole lot better than Arthur Jones did in the IL-3
It's an underappreciated quirk of our politics that you can't just try to run in a district, just to see how it goes, and then try again somewhere else. You run and fail, and you're often damaged goods for any other race. A bunch of things in our legislative races make more sense when you grok that.
May I ask how you see nothing wrong with targeting people based on race to support a political party?
Perhaps you accidentally said the quiet part aloud?
Race being a social construct and all, expecting people to align their political views on racial dividers is enforcement of the very divisions that enable and sustain systemic racism. I can say the same thing about product marketing as well.
Should black people vote against republicans because republicans are racist? No! That is liberal racism at its best. However you can say democrats have policies and track record that demonstrates they will make changes that benefits people in specific areas who could be black,white,latino,etc... and educated voters should vote for the party that benefits them not against the party that hates them. Even though there are two parties, it is that way because of such politics.
A person being expected to vote a certain way because of birth-time biological factors is unjust and unfair at the most basic level regardless of the choices at hand.
To anyone considering voting for one party because they hate the other, please, I beg of you, if you love your country don't vote.
There's nothing racist about studying and understanding these things. There's definitely something racist about saying Black people "can't" vote Republican, or should for some reason vote for Sanders (Black Democrats are to the right of white Democrats).
It isn't just black but all sorts of other demographics including people from "fly over" midwest states that are more to the center. Same for republicans, plenty are not trumpists. The problem is no viable third party, imo, the deeper root cause is the fact that the president is elected by the people instead of legislature combined with "winner takes all" voting system. There is no requirement that stipulates in order for an executive branch of government to be valid, the majority (or even 55%+) of legislature's seats need to form a supporting coalition (this is why Israel has been without a proper government for a months now unless that changed).
Burry cites the Criminal Victimization report from 2019 [0] and 2020 [1]. Each of these reports contains a table with victimization by type of crime and demographics of victim (table 9 for 2019 and table 6 for 2020), and each includes "Asian" as a demographic category.
The 2018 report contains the same table (table 9), also with "Asian" as a category.
The CV reports are summaries of the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is just a big pile of data. People are free to analyze it themselves [3].
I don't know what Burry is screenshotting here. The images look like the CV reports, but the table numbers don't match. They don't even match his link. Regardless, this seems spurious; there's no evidence of an effort to bury anything.
[0]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv19.pdf
[1]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/docu...
Additionally, Burry is citing that victim vs offender race table itself missing in cv20 which btw is an even more grave omission.
Good to see crime continuing its long decline though.
Looking up the report the table is a summary of lists the Asian group out seperatly.
Seems like the numbers for "Asian" went down and "other" went up so they combined them for the summary.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv19.pdf
Looks like it declined again in the more recent report
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...
edit: worth also mentioning, this is crime, not just "hate-crime" data.
There's more detail in the reports I linked, both offender and victim.
Notably one of the items has this warning note:
"! Interpret with caution. Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases, or coefficient of variation is greater than 50%."
As this is survey data so like polling they have to multiply responses to get the final answer and once you start subdividing by victim demographic and crime type and offender demographic, you're hitting the limits of what useful info you can extract without it just being random noise.
This document doesn't contain any equivalent of the cross-tabulations contained in the tweet, as far as i can tell.
[1] https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/docu...
Some people, because their education level, would accept and believe whatever their info source pour to them. I’m from China. I know how aggressive the “little-pinks” would behave online and in real world.
Unfortunately, for some reason, this population can roughly map to some races. The political industry is using this issue to rake in their own internet. They are preventing this problem to be fixed.
At least with this issue, however, the reasoning as to why data is being manipulated is so abundantly clear that there is actually virtually no loss of information for the time being. The reality is that Asians largely constitute a problem for the prevailing narrative around racial and ethnic power dynamics. Indians, for example, despite being "brown," and despite being from a "developing" country, are overwhelmingly overrepresented in upper economic echelons. This holds true not just when compared to natively born Americans, but also when controlling for immigration and starting economic conditions. They're also extremely underrepresented in violent crime statistics. Many of these figures remain consistent across the board for Asians living in the US, despite living in a system "designed to explicitly benefit white men." The"model minority myth" is a pathetic manipulation of information in an attempt to account for the narrative-breaking statistics regarding Asian immigrants.
When it comes to violence against Asians, there are multiple reasons to muddy the waters, because there are multiple reasons why statistics cause problems. For one, it has been well established that the "racial" group that is overrepresented in violence against Asians is not "white" people. This is clearly a large problem on its own, but it isn't the only problem. The other problem is seeing how disproportionately low violent crime is within the Asian community, even when controlling for economic factors.
TL;DR this is unacceptable, but at least for now, completely predictable. In a decade or so, however, the information we had a year ago could be considered out of date, and narratives can be shielded from data.
If you look at these groups, you should see that many immigrants from Asia were already well off enough to immigrate, so in some sense mid-to-upper class of their societies.
This is not by far the case for native Americans and African Americans, who have been oppressed for generations in America.
To view things from the perspective of race just seems to miss a lot of essential substance.
The homicide rate of India proper is 2.9 cases per 100,000 population. That of Asian Americans is about the same.
The rate for African Americans is around 18
However, if you are motivated by ... other things, I'm sure you can just jump to conclusions and tell us all the statistics you have about African Americans.
It seems you base your beliefs on things you imagine instead of facts.
There are many examples in history where it was the privileged class/race/ethnicity/group that was the most murderous one.
Spartiates, Normans, elites of Renaissance Italy, even Nazis (see: The Night of Long Knives).
Also, gangs can be seen as proto-states, and a lot of today's criminal violence is gang-related. There isn't really that much difference between, say, drug cartels and the kind of violent packs of future nobility that raided and terrorized Early Middle Age villages in the post-Roman world.
And very importantly for this discussion, an immigrant has no criminal record. So the people who have commited crimes are already filtered out in this process.
For recent migrants, sure. For others, we spent over a century putting them in ghettos, rail gangs and concentration camps. Broadly speaking, I see no gain for anyone, minorities the least, in creating a caste system of victimhood in America.
Edited to please the pedantic among us.
There are actually many reasons why immigrants cannot be directly compared to native populations. A huge one, for example, is that you're not just selecting from those who are typically filtered according to some meritocratic criteria, but you're also filtering people who are motivated enough and sufficiently risk averse so as to upend their whole lives and move somewhere. This is what I meant by controlling for these factors.
In regards to viewing things from the perspective of race, I agree completely. I think that making decisions on the basis of race is functionally the core of racism. That being said, the people whose narratives I'm combatting are racial identitarians, they make arguments in terms of racial populations, and have to be addressed in such terms. i.e. if they say that America is a horribly racist country whose systems are dictated by white supremacy and patriarchy, the only way to tease these arguments apart is by pulling out racial statistics.
I’m Bangladeshi, and we are about 20 years behind in that curve. Still higher poverty rates than average (90% immigrated after 2000), but moving rapidly toward parity. Also, being upper class in “old country” doesn’t mean coming here with money. My family was upper class in Bangladesh. But a Bangladeshi college degree is worthless here. My dad came here with a job from a US company, but we were the exception. Most of my aunts and uncles work retail and service jobs.
Its a typical tactic of the media and the globalist. Find a problem, but instead of dealing with the real cause, find some way to turn it towards attacking the desired group.
They did it with "black lives matter" except its summertime and every weekend for a decade you could find black people being murdered in record numbers in places like Chicago and Baltimore by other black people without so much as a peep from them. For some reason the 1% of deaths outweigh the 99% because the race of the shooter is ultimately what matters, not the fact that black people are dying.
Nor does it make sense to call your organization or movement "black lives matter" when you literally ignore the everyday violence in black communities that kills 99% of black people.
This is a copy in an archive of his tweets:
https://mobile.twitter.com/BurryArchive/status/1556004280695...
(I think he deletes his tweets to stop scammers from posting crypto scams in the replies.)
Cassandra was the priestess who warned the Trojans about the warriors in the Horse but she was ignored. She was blessed with the gift of true prophecy but also cursed that no one would believe her.