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Wilfred Reilly

@wil_da_beast630

Feb 2

I'll do a quick response here, since this is my article.

Obviously, no one argues that "racism does not exist." The point is that you do not DETERMINE the existence of racism simply by pointing out "performance gaps" re something like income or police encounters - which is literally the level of a lot of 'woke' research....or by adjusting for sex as well as race (whee!).

As J. O'Neill pointed out 20+ years ago, most such gaps close or vanish after basic adjustments for things like age, region, any aptitude test score, etc. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

(2) At some very basic level, it makes no sense to argue that, if a 27-year old Black Mississippian with a community college degree makes less money than a 58-year old white Bostonian who went to BU, the reason is "racism."

These are the sort of gaps political scientists often look at between large groups. More whites DO live in the US North (the boats landed further South). That IS the gap in at least modal average/most common ages between Blacks and whites...pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

(3) A common response from smart left-slanting stats folX, including Kareem, is that these other variables (age?!) could themselves just be measures of racism.

But, especially given that we can easily test for multi-collinearity and covariance, there is almost never any evidence presented of this. Aptitude test scores, for example, are higher for white kids from families making $40,000 per year than for Black kids from families making $200K per year.......and don't vary at all with reported racism. The obvious actual predictor here (attached) is study time.

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Wilfred Reilly

@wil_da_beast630

Dec 21, 2023

To put this "President of Harvard had 11 articles all time" story in context: I teach at a regular state university, could be fairly 'criticized' for doing more public intellectual than strictly academic writing......and have four articles (some as co-author) and a book this year.

This isn't a boast, btw: "publish or perish" is very real, and this^ is likely a bit behind the curve at top-300 universities...before you adjust FOR the PI stuff.

It's a point about a broad reality: affirmative action causes so much hostility because the double standards involved are so often so glaring.

(2) For anyone interested in reading any of these, here's Bob Maranto (lead author), myself, and Pat Wolf of U-Arkansas looking at the empirical impact of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Final version of this came out in Administration and Society...scholarworks.uark.edu/edrepub/136/

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Wilfred Reilly

@wil_da_beast630

Sep 16, 2023

"Civil war" talk is all fun and games until you actually see 10,000 people from Kentucky or Oakland riding toward you on 4-tracks, blasting "Money, Cash, Hoes" or "Enter Sandman," waving machetes and ARs - coming to kill your family and take all your shit.

Peace is a blessing.

(2) Lot of comments here on who would win.

That's not really the point, but - as a decent political and sometimes military analyst - any conflict like this would be a lot uglier than people think. For example, any competent Blue general would respond to red-state denial of food by authorizing "gleaning" attacks on the red states by his guardsmen or waves of "teens X 10."

(3) Most of the BLUE states - CA, PA, IL - are also totally self-sufficient in food, and just have a lot of immigrants and union members (who would fight pretty well, btw).

And, the standard of living in the reds would collapse by half within the 1st year...because ag. and industrial products could not be sold TO the blues, or through them (the other side would control 80% of the coast-line and patrol all of it) to the world.

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Wilfred Reilly

@wil_da_beast630

Jul 5, 2023

Conquest is not theft.

This isn't some edgy, radical statement. In the pre-WW2 Right of Conquest era, ~all Asian, European, West African, Amerindian, etc societies recognized it as fully and even legally legitimate to challenge other societies in war, defeat their fighting men, and take their stuff.

Almost any non-religious, non-Gandhi world leader you might admire before about 1954 - Shaka, Iskander, Churchill, Cortes, Washington, Musa, Sun Tzu, Caesar, Hannibal, Crazy Horse - was among other things a conqueror: an acquirer of land and food for his people.

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Wilfred Reilly

@wil_da_beast630

Apr 24, 2023

https://twitter.com/DrIbram/status/1650526361868484608

The Scholar has now moved to explicitly claiming that any argument that non-genetic CULTURAL differences (in, for example, study time) between racial and ethnic groups explain group performance gaps is racist.

It's worth unpacking just how absurd this is.

https://twitter.com/DrIbram/status/1650526361868484608

(2) First, the fact that there ARE large gaps in performance between groups, which have a big cultural component, is disputed by essentially no serious people.

Asian-American kids study ~2x as much as white kids, and 3x as much as Black kids, IIRC after the income adjustment.

(3) The claim that these sort of differences are somehow all due to "racism" (or genes) fails.
Importantly, they also exist between different ethnic/cultural sub-groups of the SAME race. The highest-earning white groups make 200% as much $$ as the lowest..en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e…

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Wilfred Reilly

@wil_da_beast630

Mar 30, 2023

An awkward historical fact, which genuinely complicates the reparations debate, is that Black Americans are just obviously better off on average than we would be had our ancestors never come to the United States.

Pointing out something this self-evidently true isn't "justifying slavery," which was obviously terrible FOR SLAVES and existed ~globally in 1850.

But, no one arguing for that $5M today in LA is or has ever been a slave. Pro-POC affirmative action has been the law since '67.

Last: it's worth noting that a version of this is true for ALL Americans. I don't see many alt-right sparring partners actually going back to Hungary, Sicily, Moldova, etc.

Even our Native brothers alive today probably appreciate "supermarkets" and "wheeled vehicles."

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