If your theory is jettisoning the sciences under the theory that they are inheritally corrupted by power relations, and it's raison d'etre is addressing political concerns, then turning off voters or developing anti-racism interventions that increase racism seem like fairly large problems. A politically unpopular system of thought that focuses on epistemology or aesthetics doesn't have the same issue of being self defeating.

Critical theory, by definition, puts its moral claims ahead of the sciences' epistemological claims. This doesn't necissarily mean starting with the assumption that you're correct, but it's certainly not welcoming of the same kind of skepticism that scientific inquiry has at its heart. This is, to my mind, a pretty major flaw for a theory that wants to shape public policy, given how counter intuitively the externalities of many policies tend to do the exact opposite of what policymakers were intending to accomplish.

Typical? I don't know, maybe for alarmist outlets claiming that such a change is around the corner, not more than half a century away. The UK's Office of National Statistics is not doing that and uses a multiple model approach that is refined over time, and the projected shift to a minority European population pre-dates 2015.

Models projecting a century out are subject to all sorts of problems, but for the last two decades they have stayed fairly on track.

Go look at the articles I posted or check Google scholar for third party reports. This isn't alarmist high end modeling, it's been the consensus since at least the early 2000s.

Also, think about historical migration flows. They generally follow changes in climate and move in the direction of more resource rich areas. The fact that the area to the south of Europe is going to experience massive population growth (Africa will have a larger population than Asia by 2100 in UN models), and that the region remains both less developed, less secure, and at the highest risk for the effects of climate change would suggest that migration, or at least the demand for migration, would increase dramatically over the century, rather than their being a shift down in demand.

Europe would do better to prepare for higher levels of migration than to assume best efforts at modeling migration will prove faulty. Right now, I would say they are generally doing worse with the issue than the US, which is not exactly a high bar.

it's clear that Isreal is a state with full agency

How is this determined? What would define a country lacking in agency? The United States is the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world, but it seems less able to direct even domestic policy than many other states (e.g. China would seem to have more agency in that regard).

I don't think you can divorce any nations actions from their history, and agency is often illusory.

slow burn genocide

That's a good description. It's genocide of the soul. Israel can deny claims to genocide in its conventional sense, since Palestinians have one of the highest birth rates in the world and are suffering from an obesity epidemic on par with the United States, rather than being starved out. This is the new world we live in. Providing food is now cheap enough, and mass exterminations now considered untasteful enough that the new method is a slow execution by the restriction of any access to freedoms or meaning. A restriction to a life of constricted opportunities and constant harassment, with the lack of any meaningful rights. This "genocide of the soul," is somehow considered acceptable enough for Israeli voters and Israeli allies. It is, if possible, even more morally repugnant than the Chinese attempt to forcibly absorb minorities, because it doesn't even envisage eventual parity, even after murdering the culture of other group.

I have found no source that supports a claim that "Europeans" will be a minority in Europe by 2080. That seems like an extreme and highly questionable prediction.

Because that isn't projected, Europe is much larger than the three largest Western European nations' populations combined. The French government doesn't collect data on race, so extrapolations are all by third parties. The topic itself is considered politically sensitive.

However, the UK is more open to discussion, and the ONS has been predicting Europeans would be a minority in the UK in the 21st century for 20 years, with confidence intervals generally dipping more than they increase:

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/when-britain-becomes-majority-minority

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/03/race.world

Already 33% of births in the UK have at least one foreign born parent, although that includes European migrants.

Strong states disappeared partially because of excessive european - in this case British and French, meddling though. The conflict over the middle east extends well beyond merely the Sikes-Picot agreement. Britain and France fought a veritable cold war in the middle east until the 1950s.

This is not an accurate accounting of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It had long been in a state of decay pre-1914, similar to the Austrian Empire. When it was dissolved, there was no existing state structure that European meddling could make disappear. A more appropriate argument might be that there was a power vacuum that the European states failed to sufficiently fill, although it's really unclear that they could have filled it if they wanted to.

I mean, what are you claiming existed outside the Ottoman administration for the Europeans to undermine?

In any event, the former Ottoman states did better than the former Austrian ones did initially. The hallmark instability came after WWII.

Yes, a population of 4.6 million under extreme travel restrictions can just up and go to another poor country of just 10 million that already struggles with providing services. That should go swimmingly...

Palestinians don't/haven't have free access to move to neighboring Arab states. When they did flee there they were denied citizenships and set up in refugee camps. Gaza is blockaded by Egypt as well as Israel.

It's a nonsense solution, which doesn't even get to the whole point of why they should have to leave. What ought to happen is that they should be allowed to live where they are without ceaseless Israeli oppression. This is made impossible by fanatical Israelis who ostensibly want to cleanse the territories for their own use, and fanatical Palestinian militants who continue to think God will grant them a seemingly impossible victory over their opponents, or, as is more common, are more interested in being rulers over the ashes than seeing a peace where they are sidelined.

I'm not sure having Egypt as an ally was ever particularly helpful to the Palestinian cause. They did, at one point, consider granting Palestinians on their soil citizenship and letting them out of squalid camps, but only when Israel was offering them money and land for taking them on. Aside from that, Egypt mostly helped to keep unhelpful raids and reprisals going, following its own political goals, and then their disastrous military efforts helped set the stage for the occupation.

Not to mention that the Arab allies expulsion of their Jewish populations and expropriation of their property wasn't particularly helpful PR for the Palestinian cause during the Cold War, and dramatically increased Israel's need for land. The PR effects of the expulsions have faded over time as people have moved on, but the expulsions continue to haunt the Palestinian cause as the descendants of the Jews expelled from the Middle East tend to vote for more hardline political leaders.

As to your question, I wouldn't choose war. There is no point in waging wars you can't hope to win, and shrewd leaders can offer more through negotiation than conflict. Violence might be necissary, but that doesn't make all violence useful. The whole "any day now we're going to have a miracle victory and genocide our oppressors," statements were not exactly helpful for winning wider support, hence the eventual abandonment of those terms. Certainly plenty of groups could make similar appeals to their right to wage war against their oppressors throughout history, Jews in the Russian Empire for example, but that doesn't mean that waging that war is something every oppressed group is going to agree with, because all it is likely to do is make the situation worse.

It's also hardly the blanket sentiment of the Israeli Arabs or Palestinians I know. If your situation is dire enough, pragmatism can overwhelm moral outrage. In a similar vein, I've had an Afghan national express to me that his country would have been better off if the UK had colonized it, and most of the Egyptians I worked with openly supported Sisi after the coup, despite the admission that they were basically opting to go back under the same boot they were under with Mubarak, the sentiment being, "things can always get worse." To my mind, this is the logic that has driven the drop off in the intensity of the conflict over the past decades.

Rocket attacks in this context are less about costly signaling to Israel, since the effects are meager, as they are about building internal support for those carrying them out.

I think the problem here is that most of these countries have to deal with arbitrary border drawn without regard for ethnic groups, as well as with a lack of institutions to deal with the resulting conflicts. This doesn't seem to be good evidence that the quota system here is significant as a cause of the problem.

Certainly there is support for splitting up nations by ethnic group:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09636410490945893&ved=2ahUKEwirp6Kru8TwAhXuJzQIHba7D8YQFjABegQIGhAC&usg=AOvVaw0gCJwUcrZdq4c3SxZ3YM_g

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09636410490945893&ved=2ahUKEwirp6Kru8TwAhXuJzQIHba7D8YQFjABegQIGhAC&usg=AOvVaw0gCJwUcrZdq4c3SxZ3YM_g

However, the same body of research shows that explicit ethnic power sharing agreements preform very poorly at reducing the risk of further disintegration.

Anyhow, I think it's overly pessimistic to think that multi-ethnic states are doomed to faliure by their borders. Ethnic identity is something that gains utility as other institutions and forms of identity fail. That is, ethic identity tends to be important because the state is failing moreso than the states fail due to ethnic identities.

People generally blame instability in the Middle East on its post WWI borders, but you'd be hard pressed to find any place on Earth other than China where the populations have spent more time living under consolidated empires than the Middle East, which was unified far more often than not throughout its history. Tribal antipathy wasn't an intractable problem when the Ottoman, Persian, Roman, etc. states were ascendant in the region, it became one when strong states disappeared.

It arguably did change under Clinton and a deal that featured a Palestinian state on over 95% of the occupied territories was eventually proffered by the Israelis. There were plenty of problems with the deal, but the psychology of Arafat may have been the primary stumbling block there, since he publically turned away the deal without advancing counter terms in a show of bravado.

The Bush II admins position on the conflict, particularly after the start of the GWOT tilted far more towards Israel, and took pressure off Israel.

However, the biggest factors would be those internal to Israel:

1. Demographic shifts with higher birth rates in ultra Orthodox and Middle Eastern Jews, who tended to favor conservative parties led to a long series conservative governments less in favor of peace.

2. The new Israeli border security measures were very effective. The dramatic reduction in successful terror attacks took pressure off the government to make peace.

It's basically impossible to imagine the Israeli army being used to force settlers out of Gaza today; the country has shifted far to the right. The internal political situation is totally different from the early 2000s. It's also hard to imagine who could bargain for the Palestinians and actually control a binding agreement at this point.

Yes, that's true. Aid for Egypt and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia is generally something that is done shame faced. An unfortunate reality people accept like hurricanes and earthquakes. At the end of the day, Egypt still gets the billions, and Saudi Arabia still gets all the hardware they want, which recently has been a shit ton, as they pass Russia in spending on a military of very dubious quality.

The whole idea of arms sales as pure aid is misleading though. Funds are often earmarked for specific purchases from American manufacturers, making aid function partly as a pass through of tax payer dollars to contractors, with the added benefit of the US military not having to pay to maintain the "donated" equipment.

You'd think the US would have long pivoted from giving so much aid to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Egypt to investing at least as much in Central America given how much more relevance the later has on US politics and security (CA cartels produce far more deaths in the US than Islamist terror attacks, even including 9/11), but we remain embedded.

This is so effective because, unlike so many other ugly aspects of the US-centralized power alliance, Israeli apartheid is not some covert government operation being run by highly trained agents and manipulators. Those responsible for carrying out its day-to-day abuses are just ordinary civilians, police and soldiers who have not been trained on the sinister craft of perception management

I somehow doubt this will matter particularly. Other regimes in the region are even worse at covering up authoritarian action. Egypt killed more civilians in a night than all the fatalities produced by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 2010s, opening up on protest camps with belt fed machine guns. Public response in the US was muted. When Iran periodically puts down protests with live ammunition and kidnapping, it generally puts a damper on liberals favoring engagement for a month tops.

The people who generally don't favor the US alliance with Israel will, of course, circulate the images, as well as ones from Syria and around the region, since apparently current wars aren't horrible enough, so partisans feel the need to recycle and rebrand other conflicts. Those that support Israel will defend their right to self defense.

If the US didn't sanction Egypt for the coup, and continued to send them billions, I highly doubt this will move the needle on a much more popular ally.

I do fear this action could spin out of control. The Palestinians can't hold elections because the PLO and Hamas have both lost support and exert dangerously little control. Israel can't stop having elections, but in none of them does peace play a major role, because lack of Arab support for the Palestinians has made apartheid seem more realistic as a solution.

The Arab states, having originally denied the Palestinians citizenship to keep the conflict with Israel alive for a later day, have now seen that the politics of a captive people metastisized, and appear to be washing their hands of the Palestinians wholesale, so they can't exactly act as brokers for peace either.

Couldn't it be both?

That something is bad, morally wrong, has nothing to do whether or not it increases your chance of reproducing.

Why so people tolerate gross inequity? Probably something to do with humans evolving to live in hierarchical societies, along with the fact that humans, like most animals, tend to focus on satisfying basic needs, not optimizing. There are generally more interesting and immediate things to focus on that politics. Hence many people in developed nations growing totally detached from politics and not voting. Politics has had to be religiousized, turned into a Manichean struggle, to get the populace fired up for it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america-politics-religion/618072/

Given the obscurity of many esoteric texts, it's an open question whether insiders are able to convey their ideas to other insiders as well.

That said, I don't subscribe to the idea that that which exists must be necissarily be something that can be described with language. So I find it entirely possible that some mystics are attempting to describe an insight and failing to do so in clear terms because such transcription is impossible (for them, or entirely).

For sure. Slavery in the Americas is unique in the intensity and codification of racial divisions. Law absolutely prohibited the enslavement of White citizens in the US. However it's a uniqueness in graduation as far as I'm aware, because I am aware of many cases of slavers predating foreigners primarily, because it was more acceptable.

I guess it makes sense in its own sick way. In general, if you're going to raid people and carry them off into horrors, you don't do it to your peers, both due to the way human morality tends to work, enclosing people close to one within a "moral circle" and because you risk reprisals from people living close to you. Then of course you have the state's interest in not allowing raids in its territories. So, Ottoman slavers raided non-Ottoman territories predominantly, etc. I believe Persians had a taboo of capturing Persian boys to make eunuch slaves at one points, taking foreigns instead.

However, the line wasn't as dramatic as in the US.

On a side note, I do think people overstate how cosmopolitan and open people were throughout history. You run into blatant racism in old texts fairly often. I had to set the Arabian Nights down for a second during the Prince of the Black Isles story because it sounded like something a Neo-Nazi could write. Descriptions of slavery from pre-Columbian times certainly carry plenty of racism with them.

This may be true, but I'm not sure what we can conclude about the merits of immigration strategies based on such sentiments, because they're not natural occurrences but results of political and ideological conflict.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. What would make a cross-cultural political trend natural versus unnatural?

In any event, it seems apparent that public sentiment and political conflict vis-a-vis political feasibility, are essential to public policy decisions. In general, how people do act is far more important to formulating policy than how they ought to act. If people acted how they ought, we shouldn't need armies, taxes to cover externalities such a pollution, or prisons. However, they act how people do act, necessitating things like standing armies and prisons.

As evidence of the destabilizing effects of rapidly shifting demographics in West I'd submit the rise and major electoral success of Far-Right parties, and the large shift towards minority rule and ethno-nationalism in the American Republican party. You can see this in any week's headlines. This week France's military is warning of a civil war over migration for example

This destabilization has far reaching consequences not just for the citizens of Western nations, who are protected by stable institutions and high functioning states, but more so for people living in developing nations who stand to benefit from a stable international system, particularly vis-a-vis developed nations getting thier shit together on global warming. It's not that much of a winding causal path between the destablizing effects of rapid demographic shifts on politics, the rise of the Far-Right, and the lack of progress on containing carbon emissions.

Direct migration to developing countries can only benefit a vanishingly small minority of people in developing countries. Even if the US and Europe trippled immigration rates, you still wouldn't get close to 5% of the developing world moving to developed nations. This is why, to my mind, the left should take the destablizing effects of immigration more seriously, or at the very least get rid of the fantasy that pops up fairly often (from John Oliver for example) that declining birth rates in developed nations will allow meaningful percentage of people in developed nations to act as "replacements," for the declining population. The numbers don't add up, you're talking slow decline in developed nations versus multiple billions in population growth in the developing world, primarily Sub-Saharan Africa, over the next 80 years.

People in general underestimate the scale of the shift. The major European nations, France, the UK, and Germany, will all be minority European by around 2080. This represents a more rapid demographic shift than the Americas saw after 1492. Governments need a plan for handling that shift, and CRT, with its extreme moralizing trend, is supremely unhelpful at framing the discussion.

My problem with CRT is that it generally refuses to conceive of immigration in any terms except racism. That is, any policy in favor of restricting immigration must have at its core, racist intent. This simply isn't the case. Given that immigration appears likely to be, with enviornmental issues related to pollution, the defining political issue of the next century, it's a pretty big liability to be caught up in reductive moralizing on the issue.

But clearly keeping the wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority isn't really a solution either, so I'm not sure what the thrust of this argument is. Are you arguing that the approach of CRT to wealth redistribution is wrong, of that wealth redistribution is generally inefficient?

Yes, my argument is that the CRT approach to redistribution is wrong. Wrong because:

1. Historically, essentializing race as respects political representation doesn't tend to end well historically, as it results in the increased politicization of demographics. This doesn't mean race based interventions are necissarily wrong. There is a powerful case to be made for affirmative action alongside other forms of redistribution. However, I'd default towards overall redistribution in most cases. Money, access to healthcare and housing: these are relatively fungible. Access to elite schools, government posts, or mentorships are comparatively quite scarce, so in those cases race based programs make sense, since extending the benefit to everyone isn't feasible.

2. CRT fails to motivate voters. It makes voters less likely to support redistribution, even those it is intended to help most. This seems like a pretty glaring flaw for a framework that aspires to become the main paradigm for left leaning political parties world wide.

On a related note, one of the few academic studies I've seen on anti-racism training at a university had the effect of making students less likely to be friends with members of another race. That does seem like an issue, when your treatment makes you patients worse. And as much of an issue is the fact that CRT can dismiss such positivist critiques of the results of its interventions by claiming that the social sciences themselves are tools of oppression and not to be trusted, which leads to...

3. CRT's focus on moralizing and zeal, and rejection of the validity of various branches of science would appear to make it difficult for adherents to reform their efforts. If you start with the assumption that you are right, and dismiss established methods for testing your assumptions, you end up with a political doctrine that lacks internal course correction mechanisms. Essentially, you swap doctrine for dogma.

Sure, race as a concept didn't have the same sort of relevance for ancient cultures, but certainly there were cases where it was acceptable to capture people considered "other" and to hold them and their descendants in bondage, whereas members of one's own culture could only be held for a period of time. Rome didn't allow you to go around kidnapping Tuscans to work to death in your mines, or use as sex slaves, but the same actions would be allowable for Gauls in the late Republican era. The Ottomans and Persians also tended to take slaves from other peoples, who were considered open game for enslavement due to not being subject to moral protection. Thus, Ottoman slavers raided Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe for slaves, not villages within the empire. Thralls taken by vikings tended to be Celts, hence Iceland being almost as much Celtic in descent as Nordic.

Educated slaves, like educated people in general, were the exception in the ancient world. There were educated slaves in Haiti as well, but it was hardly the norm.

The ubiquity of slavery in ancient history should be apparent in reading any histories of the era. It existed in all state level societies. As for levels of violence in pre-state societies, the bibliography of Pinker's "Better Angles of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," has a copious list of sources. Both modern observation of hunter gatherer societies and forensic archeology converge on extremely high rates of homicide, significantly higher than Europe even if you take 1914-1945 as your measuring period, or the nations with the highest homicide rates today (concentrated in Central America).

I mention Africa in terms of neopatrimonial political systems because SSA has the best examples of pure neopatrimonial models, and Francis Fukayama draws most of his examples from the region in his "Origins of Political Order," and "Political Order and Political Decay."

(IMO, by these two volumes are by far and away the best works on state development. Not so much because of Fukayama's own insights, although those are good, but because he cogently summarizes the insights of Weber, Machiavelli, Jared Diamond, John Mearsheimer, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, etc. while also showing the flaws in their models and creating a new synthesis. He also avoids endlessly selecting on the dependant variable, unlike "Why Nations Fail," or the Tragedy of Great Power politics.")

Anyhow, if the implication is that Africa's problems stem from problems other than its politics, you are, of course, correct, but the negative relationship between explicit neopatrimonial relationships and governance quality extends outside the region. Countries with governments set up to ensure given levels of representation by given ethnic groups, rather than open elections (e.g. Lebanon's history) are far more likely to enter a civil war and more likely to return to war if an ethnic based political system is used following a cease fire. This is a replicable finding, although obviously all IR studies deal with low N studies and lack of experimentation.

I don't know what you mean by "intentionally exploitative policies." This is obviously true, although you could argue that modern capitalism was less exploitive that the systems that preceded it. In any event, my point was specific to colonies.

It's certainly not a settled matter, but the balance of findings in historical macro economic analysis is definitely on the side of colonies being net money losers for European nations. They were pursued for prestige and strategic reasons, and had the side benefit of letting the well-connected loot the treasuries of European nations, but they were a net drain on the host nations, particularly later colonial projects during the 19th century.

This is true even if the incredibly extractive, downright genocidal Belgian Congo project.

Secondly, the nations that gained the most from colonies (analyses generally conclude Spain saw short term benefits from gold and silver inflows) were impoverished by the early 20th century and relied on "catch up growth," to grow near to the main European powers in terms of development. Even today, Spain and Portugal, with their vast, early empires are significantly poorer than France and the UK.

Meanwhile, Denmark's rise to being one of the most developed nations in Europe occured after it lost its colonies. Austria's development trajectory increased after losing its empire. Switzerland and the Nordic nations are the most developed in Europe, despite the lack of colonies. Finland and Korea were impoverished backwaters into the 1950s, and modernized via institutional reform, not colonization, meaning colonies are neither necessary, nor sufficient for development.

On the other hand, the Gulf States boast per capita GDP levels on par with Southern Europe due to natural resource wealth, yet remain authoritarian states with lower quality of life by most commonly used measures, due to lack of core institutions. In modern state development literature these institutions are normally represented as a three or four legged stool of: accountable government/some for of voting, rule of law, and a strong centralized state with a monopoly on violence. Sometimes a strong, independent, professional, merit based beaurocracy is a fourth leg, others it is rolled into the strong state definition. The risk of CRT reducing development to extraction is that it then follows that simply transferring wealth to marginalized groups will be enough to reduce violence and increase standards of living. Yet this experiment has been run, with many poor nations inheriting vast natural resource wealth, and the result has often been a small minority benefiting from said wealth.

As to immigration causing congestion effects for other immigrants, or immigration reaching a tipping point at which the host nation's populace experiences an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-welfare state sentiment, this is a finding that appears in the immigration literature over and over, and can be found on Google Scholar readily. For example:

https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781781001264/9781781001264.00013.xml

Aside from academic sources, you can also look to industry. 19th and early 20th century industrialists made no secret of their attempts to intentionally hire a diverse workforce because it reduced the risks of worker cooperation and unionization efforts. Moving to today, Amazon had a leak showing that it also pursues diversity as a means of reducing the risk of unionization efforts, using it as a key metric of risk in statistical models.

Fukayama among others, lays out the case for reduced immigration being a factor in the homogonization of America after the 1910s. Whether or not it was the main factor is, of course, nigh impossible to prove, since there is a complex relationship between immigration, support for the welfare state, and unionization. What is certain is that curtailing immigration necessarily reduced economic inequality by reducing the number of low asset, unskilled workers entering the country, while also having modest to large effects on wages, depending on how you try to measure said effects.

As to Whiteness existing outside the US in the early 20th century as a unifying concept, I submit as evidence that it wasn't the fact that Europe experienced huge waves of ethnic cleansing (Germans totally removed from large swathes of Eastern Europe they had inhabited for centuries, Armenians subject to genocide in Turkey, the Holocaust of European Jews, the genocided in the Balkans, etc.). Racial theorists of the time also posited different European groups as different races. White, as an overarching identity shows up first as a meaningful social force in the US, and has gained relevance in Europe following the Post-War integration of Europe and the introduction of large non-European populations into Europe. Certainly a form of white identity existed in Europe prior to the 20th century, but it was not the inclusive identity it became in America.


Finally, as to: "The only way equality can be measured is by comparing outcomes," sure. The next step though, advocating for the elimination of anything that shows disparities in outcomes, is necissarily making the error of confusing correlation with causation.

CRT advocates have a real problem with doing absolute junk science, or badly misrepresenting the results of academic research, and then, when confronted with this, deflecting in an almost Freudian way with: "academia itself is a racist institution, and your disagreement is a sign of internalized racism/white fragility."

For example, the slide below is the definition of statistical error:




There are ways of measuring type I and II error in tests. There are ways of assessing their predictive power. The SAT, ACT, and GRE are not perfect predictors for academic and career success, but they are better than students grades.

Standardized tests for civil service positions were implemented with the exact goal of reducing bias in hiring. If the goal is to increase minority hires/admissions, then the solution might be to give those groups even larger preference on exams. The push to remove testing entirely isn't required to shake up admissions rates. A quota system would be the most effective means of doing that. I'd argue that tests are being jettisoned more because disparities in the test scores of those admitted/hired allow critics of affirmative action to use an easy quantitative means to critique said practices, rather than for any practical selection reason. Standardized tests allow bright students with poor grades due to poor quality, non-challenging academic settings to demonstrate their talent, which could be a boon for minority students.

If race (or class, or gender, etc.) is the only unit of analysis you concern yourself with, then of course variances there will explain all of world history.

The problem for these types of theories is that slavery, extremely high rates of violence, human sacrifice, and cannibalism show up in every human habitat if you look back far enough.

Arguments tend to hinge on Europeans becoming the heirs to wealthy countries with high levels of technological development and low levels of violence due to their oppressing other peoples and extracting wealth from abroad. However, the development of thought that would lead to the scientific revolution pre-dates European colonization. The Spanish and Ottoman Empires continued to colonize more lands and take more slaves as they declined, while northern Europe, without a legacy of colonies, became the most developed region. It's essentially an ahistorical history whose purpose is moralizing, not looking to explain the causes of phenomenon, and so its policy prescriptions seemed doomed to faliure from lack of understanding.

The whole concept of Whiteness itself has to start around the 1930s, as the prior peak in US immigration levels two decades earlier, overwhelmingly from Europe, produced a massive backlash against immigration, and by far and away the harshest restrictions on immigration the US ever had. The immigrant share of the population of the US plunged after the 1910s. A strong White national identity didn't develop until a full generation later. The consolidation of identity certainly was helped by the shared challenges of the Depression and WWII, along with the equality promoted by the New Deal, but also followed intentional actions to develop a shared national identity and to get citizens to shed their old ethnic identities.

However, probably the largest factor was the dramatic cut off of immigration under US law. There is ample evidence that immigrants impose externalities, congestion effects essentially, on the rates at which other immigrants assimilate to their new host countries and gain parity in economic status. The implication being that one of the best things the US could do right now to solve racial divisions is to dramatically curtail immigration, since it has reached and will soon exceed prior peaks (1:8 residents being foreign born and 1:4 either being foreign born or having foreign born parents). Since immigration necissarily increases inequality due to the fact that most immigrants are coming from developing countries, and since demand for unskilled labor is plummeting, this would also help to assuage class divisions, and yet CRT generally posits that restrictions on immigration are definitionally racist.

The quote you cite is emblematic of another problem, which is the trend towards labeling everything that correlates with racial disparities as racist. The problem is that some of the beaurocratic systems, designed to treat people equally in all cases, which are essential to high functioning states, can also help produce feedback loops of racial inequality. This does not mean those essential systems need to be dismantled however. At its worst, CRT advocates for the neopatromonial politics common to African nations, where elected leaders main role is to represent their own ethnic group above all else, and bring resources back to them, which is a relationship that is the hallmark of failing states, not high functioning ones.

For example, now standardized tests are racist, where once they were a method for excluding bias in university or job selection. How do we know they are racist? Because there is a test score gap.

And yet, if questions on a test are loaded with racial bias, as with the famous "regatta" SAT question, we can identify those with statistical analysis. Indeed, test do employ these methods, and remove from scoring those questions whose answer rate has too strong a correlation with race, and subjects those to further examination for identifying potential sources of bias. You'd do a lot better looking at how schools are funded than trying to get rid of standardized tests, but I suppose they are low hanging fruit. Indeed, it's ironic since standardized tests are a great way to identify talented individuals who might be preforming well because they are in poor school enviornments, it's exactly the sort of thing you don't want to get rid of.

I think it's dangerous to reduce disparities to class. In a whole host of terms, Blacks tend to fare worse than their poorer White peers, and many institutions were set up with explicit racist intent.

That said, you probably have a point. Wealthy Whites embrace of CRT probably has something to do with:

A. It only discussing redistribution to a select group, thus reducing the burden they would have to face in paying for said redistribution.

B. CRT's unpopularity. You can take a radical stand on the side of goodness knowing full well you aren't at risk of having to follow through on the radical promises. And indeed, we we wealthy Whites jumping ship and moving in cases where they actually win victories on these fronts.

Interestingly, in every attempt to research CRT's electoral appeal, it appears to be an election loser. It variously makes Whites and some minority groups less likely to support progressive policies, while making Black voters no more likely to support those same policies. In general, a demographic group will be no more, or slightly less motivated by racial appeals for progressive policies versus class based ones, and will be significantly less supportive of policies framed by race when the race described as benefiting is not their own (this works between minority groups).

High income, educated Whites are the only group for which CRT seems to have any positive benefit in framing policy prescriptions.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/anti-racist-messaging-is-failing-with-voters-so-why-cant-liberals-quit-it-opinion/ar-BB1gxbxn?li=BBnbfcL

As the 2018 Hidden Tribes paper found, the "Woke" are the whitest single political group next to explicit White nationalists, beating out conservative Evangelicals in their monolithic demographics.

So, what's going on politically? Why is an unpopular framework dominating one party?

It's probably a mix of things. For one, CRT activists' use of cancel and harassment campaigns give them extra leverage. You don't need facts to win an argument. When the 1618 Project was called out by academics for cherry picking and misrepresenting colonial era newspaper archives, defenders could simply point out that too many of the critics were old White men, and that history departments are inheritally enablers of racism.

The framework of CRT itself also allows adherents to write off criticisms about electability. They are, after all, fighting a deontological battle, the forces of good versus the forces of evil. White opponents are exhibiting fragility and racism if they oppose CRT. Black opponents suffer from internalized racism. People who don't respond positively to racial framing are variously racist or sick with internalization. You can add in high income White progressives' measurable bias against White people (a weird, seldom seen form on in group negative bias), since it never hurts to have negative views of a demographic group when shooting yourself in the foot with them electorally.

I wouldn't put too much faith in the "Trump will bring down the party," logic. He won in 2016 despite his liabilities, giving the GOP full control of government and its best showing at the state level in a century.

He came very close to winning a second term, missing the electoral votes he needed by very narrow margins. I think it's safe to say that without the pandemic he would have made an easy second term.

To be sure, his brand will eventually kill the party, since it does terrible with young voters. Bush split young voters (18-24 year olds) almost 50/50. Trump lost them by 15 points. He lost voters under 55 by landslide margins in both elections (9 and 11 points). That said, seniors are by far and away the most reliable votes and aren't going anywhere by 2024.

Trump did better with Latinos in 2020 than any Republican in two decades (which is still fairly poorly). The idea that he'd doom himself through demographics never played out. Given the large structural advantage the GOP has in the Electoral College and Senate, I think Trump will be highly competitive in 2024 and the odds on favorite to win if a recession hits by then, which seems highly likely given record high corporate debt levels today.

In general, I'd expect Far-Right political parties to continue their string of victories until developed nations figure out a solution for the issue of immigration. One can only hope that, if we're stuck with them, they might actually develop to become more competent and less corrupt.

If you're looking for a psychological take on alchemy that is a bit more accessible (still definitely not super accessible) there is Jung's Psychology and Alchemy.

Despite being a kind of a con, Aliestier Crowley's Magick Without Tears has a pretty good intro to the occult of the early 20th century, the fodder that fed Years and many artists. The problem is that said occultism is very much a mix of superstition, and frankly, bullshit, denuded of the religious elements of the Gnostics and Kabbalahists. However, that said, it isn't totally impenetrable the way the Zohar is, and is interesting at least as a historical curiosity.

Well, to approach the issue Hegel is getting at from an entirely different angle, there is Bacon:

...neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science

That is, there is a real sense in which an encompassing view of reality, the kind we'd really like to have, at the same time needs to pull out to such a scope that it can become almost numinous, mystical.

Of course, there is always the risk of deluding yourself into thinking you're viewing things at a grand scope, when you're really just recycling superstitions.

I saw this elsewhere and thought of this thread. Certainly Hegel took mystical ideas seriously. Granted, this is an appeal to authority, but an appeal to the guy I consider the second or third greatest mind in history following Plato and maybe Aristotle (Hegel might edge out the later).

Hegel is not a philosopher. He is no lover or seeker of wisdom — he believes he has found it. Hegel writes in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, “To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title of ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowledge — that is what I have set before me” (Miller, 3; PC, 3). By the end of the Phenomenology, Hegel claims to have arrived at Absolute Knowledge, which he identifies with wisdom.

Hegel’s claim to have attained wisdom is completely contrary to the original Greek conception of philosophy as the love of wisdom, that is, the ongoing pursuit rather than the final possession of wisdom. His claim is, however, fully consistent with the ambitions of the Hermetic tradition, a current of thought that derives its name from the so-called Hermetica (or Corpus Hermeticum), a collection of Greek and Latin treatises and dialogues written in the first or second centuries A.D. and probably containing ideas that are far older. The legendary author of these works is Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Greatest Hermes”). “Hermeticism” denotes a broad tradition of thought that grew out of the “writings of Hermes” and was expanded and developed through the infusion of various other traditions. Thus, alchemy, Kabbalism, Lullism, and the mysticism of Eckhart and Cusa — to name just a few examples — became intertwined with the Hermetic doctrines. (Indeed, Hermeticism is used by some authors simply to mean alchemy.) Hermeticism is also sometimes called theosophy, or esotericism; less precisely, it is often characterized as mysticism, or occultism.

It is the thesis of this book that Hegel is a Hermetic thinker. I shall show that there are striking correspondences between Hegelian philosophy and Hermetic theosophy, and that these correspondences are not accidental. Hegel was actively interested in Hermeticism, he was influenced by its exponents from boyhood on, and he allied himself with Hermetic movements and thinkers throughout his life. I do not argue merely that we can understand Hegel as a Hermetic thinker, just as we can understand him as a German or a Swabian or an idealist thinker. Instead, I argue that we must understand Hegel as a Hermetic thinker, if we are to truly understand him at all.

BTW, Marxists.org and Gnosis.org have a great collection of English texts that are free and in editable/copyable forms. Really nice.

Thanks for the tip. I will check out Creation , sounds like a similar time frame for what I'd like to use.

Guess Herodotus and Xenephon will be on the menu since you need to include the classic sights. I'm thinking if there is a metaphysical big evil it will be up north, above the Scythians, since there are way less sources on them so more can be changed. Of course Hyperborea is up that way too, and said big bad can be blamed for the Bronze Age collapse and burning of Knosis, so there is plenty to work with.

Anthony Kenny's New History of Western Philosophy. It got a lot of good reviews as the best single volume overview. Trying to fill in gaps and revisit old ideas, but so far it's been things I already knew by heart. I might skip ahead to after Plato, although my ability to recommend the book to others is contingent on see how well it handles topics I already know I suppose.

Also listening to Will Durant's the Story of Philosophy. Maybe there is too much overlap here, but I appreciate Durant enough as a writer to want to get his own unique take on different philosophers.

Then I'm also listening to the Great Courses series on the Persian Empire because I have a 2,000 mile drive coming up and need to reground myself in Greco-Persian history of a novel I want to right. Fantasy set in a roughly "real" world, with Christianity and references to real people like Aristotle, but taking place in the context of made up geographies, with magic and monsters, is a growing setting in the genre. I think it has real perks in that you can do plenty of world building, but also can allow people's knowledge of history and culture to do some heavy lifting. It also allows you to tackle philosophical concepts by direct reference.

Very little fantasy takes place in Classical Greece. Most is set in the Middle Ages. I thought a Greco-Persian setting would work well. You know, it's just that Pythagorean school men can actually war reality and do magic with their musical scales, and Zoroastrian priests can actually summon fire; it adds a little flash, so will sparring doses of hydras or gorgons.

The "faith is just people trying to get over their fear of death," trope never made sense to me in light of Calvinism. How could an idea of God that creates and assigns the vast majority conciousnesses to eternal suffering be comforting? Death is just the beginning of your woes, and even if you might escape the torments of Hell, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it yourself.

That's more nightmare fuel than anything else.

Reading through this thread and the esotericism one made me think of the opening of Phenomenology of Spirit:

[Self conciousness] has not merely lost its essential and concrete life, it is also conscious of this loss and of the transitory finitude characteristic of its content. Turning away from the husks it has to feed on, and confessing that it lies in wickedness and sin, it reviles itself for so doing, and now desires from philosophy not so much to bring it to a knowledge of what it is, as to obtain once again through philosophy the restoration of that sense of solidity and substantiality of existence it has lost. Philosophy is thus expected not so much to meet this want by opening up the compact solidity of substantial existence, and bringing this to the light and level of self-consciousness is not so much to bring chaotic conscious life back to the orderly ways of thought, and the simplicity of the notion, as to run together what thought has divided asunder suppress the notion with its distinctions, and restore the feeling of existence.

There is a striving to know, as Hegel terms it, the Absolute that many of us have, that we try to satisfy with philosophy. It's exactly the sort of thing that the sciences can't give us.

Now can, should, philosophy meet this need? As Hegel follows up, "philosophy should beware of being edifying."

To paraphrase Will Durant, the sciences strive to break down the clockwork or reality and organize the pieces. Philosophy strives to give us a glimpse of the whole. I think the interest in esoterica and mysteries is part of that (innate?) striving. Science doesn't give us the view of the whole we want, the immediacy, because it isn't concerned with that aspect of knowledge.

Yeah, I can get on board with that definition. I think "systemic racism," is another tricky term I believe. Should it apply to all systems which disadvantage outgroups, or should the term have an element of intent in its definition? I generally supported a definition that didn't include intent before, but I'm starting to realize that this makes all sorts of positive feedback loops and covariances fall under "structural racism," such that an expansive enough definition includes all cases where group means differ, and essentially includes third variable problems into the definition (by definition, right?).

This is preferable for demonstrating the scope of problems of feedback loops, but also seems to blur causal relationships. Linking a cause back to structural racism is less useful when structural racism means "instances of systems that produce outcomes that vary by group," since at that point the definition is almost tautological. However, including an aspect of intent also damages the term because people can quibble endlessly about intent, and it ignores how individuals' intent in structural racism becomes meaningless, it is "systemic" precisely because it perpetuates and sustains itself without intent. It would be nice if the rhetoric didn't matter as much, but there is very much a necissary "marketing" component to the struggle against racism, where getting your ideas to land with the people who need to hear them most is fraught with dangers.



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Anyhow, to being it back to the original topic, I think their might be a parallel with attitudes towards homosexuality in terms of a predaliction for bias. Homosexuality is common in humans, occuring in all societies across historical periods. Anti-homosexual bias is endemic, being common across many societies, but not historically universal. The scale of such bias is also highly variable, from it being considered just shameful in the Near East of mid-late antiquity, to the genocidal bias Europeans inherited from the Hebrews.

The endemic nature, across cultures and times speaks to something innate in people, a sort of bias. The lack of universality shows that innate trend is not particularly strong, and hardly impossible to overcome.

Racism would be the combination of phenotype bias that we inherited, when codified at the civilizational level. Civilization itself, with its interlocking web of feedback loops in turn amplifies bias, while giving it structure, changing it from bias into the chains of racism.

It's an interesting phenomena. All people under 35 are having less sex, but particularly men 18-24, with those having no sex rising from 19 to 31% over the last 15 years.

More entertainment options, hormone disrupting plastics inundating the food supply, higher rates of obesity, there are plenty of plausible factors. Most don't explain the gender gap, which is more puzzling. Women 25-34 saw a drop, although not as large as men, but women.18-24 are ahead of 1990s figures.

There's an asymmetry there that obesity and chemical contaminants can't explain. Online dating might have some role. There is a huge gender imbalance in number of messages sent, as well as rankings of attractiveness. Male rankings of female attractiveness sort of approximate a normal distribution. Women's rankings of men is heavily left skewed towards lower numbers. Online dating filters the first step of mate selection through mostly visual queues, and that could skew things. That's just a single hypothesis I've read though, I don't know if it has much evidence. The other factor is that people tend to date those at the same educational level and men are attending college and grad school at lower rates and dropping out significantly more often.

To be honest, this situation doesn't seem all that far fetched. While explicit racism is taboo were I live, explicitly anti-homosexual and transgender views, couched in religion, aren't that uncommon.

What do you do?



Well here, with the roach analogy, you can be pretty sure that you have a roach infestation in your community. There are racist individuals, they are just hiding it. So you're stuck tolerating, living with the infestation either way.

The problem with "hunting" such people is that they rarely will do you the nicety of being so explicit, and the act of the hunt itself,.trying to parse true intentions from either deception or misunderstanding, has its own pitfalls.

I've seen people converted to virulent racism and extremism over time. There comes a point where I could no longer tolerate the offenses enough to try a conversion or even maintain any sort of relationship. Of course, people getting cut off from their friends and family by extreme ideologies is exactly the mechanism which allows them to recruit people for violent terrorism, but there comes a point where ostracism is the only step to take, barring physical force.

It's morally dicey. I had to cut or a friend I've known from high school over his conversion to white nationalist ideology following the rise of Trump. My uncle had a similar slide as the popularity of the Orange Augustus grew, although has never become as acute a case. I still have to see him sometimes, and he at least has the ability to step out of his hateful ideology and view relations through the lens of Catholicism. My former friend is really a lost cause, at this point it's really just hoping he doesn't shoot up a place. It astounds me how a reality TV star was able to accelerate so many peoples lurch towards extremism (algorithm driven media consumption is as big a cause too). I was working as a terrorism researcher at the height of IS's rise and it is remarkable how efficiently Western ethno-nationalists adopted their tactics.

You can continually challenge their world view and present facts and logical arguments, but when someone doesn't want to listen and takes any disagreement as signs of oppression and reacts with anger, discussion isn't fruitful.

Thank you, I really like that explanation. I think that is a good way to look at it.


Sorry, I didn't mean to be uncharitable. My initial post in this thread wasn't responding to your specific definitions, and neither was my clarification after your response. I am trying to lay out what I see as the pitfalls of a more nuanced definition of racism than just "prejudice stemming from race."

I think Frank's explanation makes a lot of sense. I wasn't trying at a personal attack, and to be honest I hadn't read enough of your view points to formulate one even if I wanted to. I was expressing where the more nuanced definitions have gone off the rails in my own experience. I can think back particularly to an ethics class I had in graduate school where the argument was made, as I put it above, that racism could be defined on pretty much a global level as defining relationships between given races. That is, power dynamics to enforce prejudice would be assumed to hold at the relevant level of analysis across the world, and across much of history.

I don't think that sort of definition is helpful, and is emblematic of a popular mode of reductive thinking on the left, and that is, unfortunately, how the question "how do you define power," has been answered for me many times.

That's how I've generally understood it too. The issue I have is the scope of power relations. Systemic imbalances can occur in varying ways, at varrying levels of social organization. At the local level, political leaders (who I generally take it can be said to wield power) can have prejudice that runs counter to regional/national trends. I've seen a hire criticized by a city council for lack of diversity, and when it was pointed out that the candidate was Latina, as requested, a hot mic picked up an objection that the candidate was "too light skinned."

That's clearly prejudice following a power dynamic. My objection is that definitions generally wave instances like these away, because systems at the national/global level tip the other way. This scope is then expanded historically as well, at which point it seems the definition is essentially bound to race, and looses any real distinction related to power relations between people, but is rather fixed to racial categories. You could essentially create a flow chart between races to denote when prejudice becomes racism at a global level. At that point, I think you've lost almost all your explanatory power in distinguishing the two terms.

Movements generally get defined as leftist if they challenge existing structures and norms. This is more likely to seem looney.

It's worth noting that all sorts of things have been tradition at some point or another. Female genital mutilation, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, inter cousin marriage, prescribed royal incest, etc. Sometimes going against the flow and being loony for they times isn't a bad idea.

Maybe I was a bit verbose.

To sum up: "racism is prejudice + power" is meaningless without defining power.

When I've inquired on this before, "power" has been defined in stark racial terms. For example, Zimbabwe doesn't have racist policies against White citizens, because historically they had power. I've certainly seen many explanations that say Asians can be racist against Blacks, but not vice versa.

Point is, at that point you seem dangerously close to saying "racism is just prejudice, but the term should only be used based on the race of the person being prejudiced," which is a garbage definition that offers nothing outside the original definition, except some moral loading the word racism has.

Race isn't something it's possible to define using biology, that's for sure. But it is something based in biology, and has real uses in the biological sciences.

For example, I worked as a research assistant/tech at a glaucoma speciality clinical for awhile. Some diagnostic tools for glaucoma do not work without controlling for race. The cup of the optic nerve varies enough by race that someone must be compared to a data set of people of the same race for the diagnostic to be effective.

As for hybrids, different species can produce fertile offspring. No biologist says Neanderthals were Homo Sapiens, but they could produce fertile offspring with Homosapiens. Indeed, humans have recent, biologically speaking, Neanderthal ancestors, with Eurasians having more Neanderthal DNA than the peoples of SSA.

Some recognized "sub-species" of animal are more genetically similar that distant groups of humans. Not dividing humans up into such groups makes sense because there has been a large amount of genetic exchange between groups throughout history. So even though two groups of humans can be fairly far apart genetically, the transition between groups happens on a gradient, due to the endemic presence of humans across the globe. This makes producing defining lines difficult. And at any rate, in the new globalized world such differences become irrelevant. Classifying humans as we do animals also comes with all sorts of baggage and is best avoided in any case.

It's also hard to mesh definitions of race with prejudice seen in the world. India has virulent racism/prejudice based on skin tone, but from a phenotypical standpoint people on the sub-continent are more similar to each other than those outside.

The usefulness of terms in analysis and debates is tied to their communicative power. There has been an attempt to redefine racism racism as "race-based prejudice plus power," or White Supremacy far more broadly as "all systemic racism in White majority countries (or sometimes even racism occuring in places with vanishingly small White populations is deemed a consequence of White supremecy, racism by non-white people must be, definitionally, internalized racism).

The goal of the redefinition is provocative. Everyone agrees Neo-Nazis and the KKK advance "White supremacy." That would be the commonly accepted definition of the term circa as recently as 2005. When things such as credit scores are called "White supremacist" the goal is obviously the to provoke a reaction and reappraisal of larger systems. Since I generally agree with the policy goals and explanations of social trends that people using this language have, I can get on board to this with some degree. However, the definitional switch certainly causes unhelpful backlash in some cases.

There is nothing wrong with this goal, or the definitions per say, but you end up with a morphing concept of White Supremecy that shoots out like an anime-Akira style monster, devouring all analysis and passing everything through its lens.

Thus I have seen the following explanations, all parsed in the new language of Wokeness.

>Racism was invented by White people in the 1700s.
>Enmity between racial groups in Asia based on phenotype are the product of White Supremecy and internalized racism and didn't exist before White influence in the region. They couldn't have, because racism necissarily involves Whiteness. The extreme anti-black racism found in East Asia must have been imported.
>The study of intelligence and all means to measure it are actually an instrument of White Supremecy. It is pseudo science created to support racism, as evidenced by the fact that it shows intergroup variances (although you would think that the White supremacist scientists would have found a definition of intelligence where East Asians and Ashkenazim didn't reliably outscore them).
>Iran has an authoritarian government because the US supported a coup there. That the US involvement was a single case officer making phone calls and dispensing about $100,000 is irrelevant. Agency exists for White males, but is constrained, sometimes to the point of non-existence in other peoples. Thus, history can largely be understood by looking at the foreign policy of European nations.

I could go on. My objection to the redefinitions is that they are often paired with highly reductive, and ahistorical reasoning (see above). They're also paired with an almost substance dualist denial of how factors that track with identity can effect group behaviors. Between group differences based on sex in Big Five personality traits are more well established than global warming, but are denied purely on the basis of wanting to preserve a "blank slate" ideology for the left.

"Racism equals bias plus power," is meaningless without a definition of power. Power in a single interpersonal relationship? Power as respects a given community? Power only at the national level? Or power stretched to the global level? The problem with that definition is that "power" often takes the last definition, taking concepts of "power" globally. You end up with an odd sort of reverse Great Chain of Being, with agency and moral responsibility resting at the top, with White males, and increasing moral rectitude and lack of agency (moral rectitude because of decreasing agency) flowing down. It's almost teleological in it's explanation of all social forces.

You end up with a definition that is essentially "racism is the lay definition of racism (i.e. prejudice), but only when a White person is doing it, or an Asian person to a Black or Latino person, etc." down the Great Chain. Does that definition have anymore analytical power than the lay understanding at that point? I'd argue no, but is has attached to it a lot of reductive baggage.

There's a plenty of papers on people's preferences for people who are genetically and/or phenotypically similar to them, if that's what you're getting at. You're not talking huge effect sizes though. It seems more like a predilection that requires the right enviornment to metastisize.

If you're trying to define "racism" though, good luck. The definition of racism, white supremecy, etc. changes depending on what political camp you belong to. You'll have to sift through the spurious analogies of White grievance politics and hear how Tucker Carlson is the biggest victim of racism in America, along with the battle cries of the culture warriors of the Great Awokening, who have their own language at this point. These new terms are often aimed at offending people, since finding an opponent to righteously revolt against is half the goal of Woke rhetoric. I can't say the enviornment lends itself to good analysis.

Yes. Other developed countries don't allow the sort of massive sentences for low level crimes that prosecutors rely on to get pleas in most cases.

Hence the US having 25% of the world's prison population but only 4% of the population. The US abandoned a trial system of justice and the results speak for themselves.



If 96.4% of criminal cases ending in pleas sounds like a justice system that is too good to be true and is rigging its system and punishing citizens harshly for exercising their right to a trial, you would be correct.

Back in 1945 less than 70% of cases ended with pleas. We essentially abolished trials.

Of course it's outdated. No modern algorithms work like that. They feed you what you'll keep watching. This means that you'll be recommended videos from within your own ideological silo, and generally be led to more and more extreme and emotionally charged videos to boot.

That's how YouTube and Facebook operate. Cable News is dying, and if they're getting viewers outside the Baby Boomer demographic, it's often via internet feeds.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity"

Describes the commentary scene these days, too, which is another factor.

Nothing. I just found a thread to shoehorn that in because I found the idea of being haunted by Hume on a nightly basis both surreal and funny.