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https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1656363811371118626

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wanye

@xwanyex

Nov 11

https://twitter.com/esjesjesj/status/1987956909987532993

People will make fun of this, but it actually distills the argument down to its essence. I would not, for example, rework society to make life easier for trans people. I would just accept that trans people are probably going to have more difficult lives than average.

https://twitter.com/esjesjesj/status/1987956909987532993

Note that we’re not talking about any kind of abuse here. I’m not suggesting that you should mistreat people or humiliate them. But if a trans person says, “I would really like to play on the girl’s softball team and it really hurts me that I can’t and this is going to be something that causes me pain for my entire life“ then I would look that person in the face and say, I’m sorry, but the answer is still no.

I don’t actually care about making you comfortable to the exclusion of all other considerations. It’s good to frame it this way. It’s good to have this argument directly.

Read 4 tweets

wanye

@xwanyex

Nov 1

One thing that the neoliberal technological solution enjoyers will never understand about ordinary people’s feelings about crime, is that if Guy A gets his package stolen off his porch, but Guy B doesn’t because he checks the door every 15 minutes to see if the Amazon driver has arrived and diligently removes the package from the porch before anyone has a chance to see that it’s there and take it, and Guy C has to drive across town to an Amazon locker because he’s tired of dealing with it — these are all the same outcome.

Only one of these things shows up as a property crime.

But all three of them are the same outcome.

You have to kill the package thief or put him in prison for a million years or somehow get him to stop being a threat.

You literally cannot address the problem just by preventing the theft. That’s not a win. Nobody cares.

You have to take away the threat.

What you have to understand about our evolved psychology is that we don’t like being around the threat of interpersonal violence. It’s not just that we don’t like the violence itself. It’s not just that we are unhappy when an actual instance of violence spawns into the world.

We don’t like being around the *threat* of interpersonal violence.

This is why you can’t just give everybody food stamps and then celebrate the negligible statistical effect that it has on crime rates.

Everybody living around those people who would have committed the crimes you prevented can see that the people they were worried about before are still a threat. So they still don’t want to be around them. Which means that the neighborhoods they live in are still going to be undesirable.

People aren’t responding in their daily lives to actual instances of violence, for the most part. Most of us don’t get murdered. We’re responding to the threat of interpersonal violence. We make decisions about where to travel, where to live, where to visit based on the perceived threat.

You can’t just make number go down. You can’t just move things around, coerce this guy over here, pay off that guy over here, introduce this or that technological solution and proclaim victory.

Because none of that addresses the *threat*, which remains.

Read 4 tweets

wanye

@xwanyex

Aug 13

Just pause for a minute to appreciate the official story on this, to swim in the absurdity of it. White people left American cities for basically no reason except that they were racist and just could not abide living around African-Americans. Literally nothing happened that would encourage this flight. They did it because their hearts are just that black. They looked around at their neighborhoods, which were functioning perfectly and which had experienced no negative changes or deleterious effects and they said, nope, I just absolutely cannot live around Black people, so I’m out of here. They sold their houses at a loss, they abandoned their communities, and all of it for nothing except pure, unadulterated racism.

Meanwhile, right after they left the cities got horrible, again mostly because racist white people just had to get a few jabs in on their way out. White people leaving had nothing to do with any of the bad stuff going on in cities after white people left. That stuff all happened only as a result of the white people leaving, you see. White people at the time said they were leaving because of crime, because of disorder, because they no longer felt safe, but that was all fake. They were just racist liars who were lying about their motivations and about how they felt.

If this is what you think, then this is what you think. It tells us something about how you think. It tells us something about what you think sounds plausible, about the kinds of explanations you’ll accept, about your standards for evidence, about the way you reason through History, about your understanding of human psychology.

This is not a very good story! It does not make much sense. At every turn you are presented with inexplicable behavior and the answer is always something like, “I don’t know what to tell you, white people are just that awful and racist.” In the official narrative, white people are insane. They do things for no reason, they shoot themselves in the foot, they cause themselves great hassle via longer commutes and more expensive houses to start over in the suburbs.

And anytime you think, “does this make sense? Why would anybody do this?” You’re reminded that this is just what white people are like. They’re just bad people. Who knows why they do anything they do? They’re just bad.

I was an adult the first time somebody said to me, “don’t you think the crime probably came first? Like don’t you think it’s way more likely that White flight was caused by crime than that white flight caused crime?”

And then I felt pretty stupid for never having thought of that myself.

Read 4 tweets

wanye

@xwanyex

Jul 11

At some point you just have to say that this isn’t even remotely convincing. We find these gender differences in the youngest of babies. You’ve got to believe that parents are treating one-year-olds significantly differently in a way they’d pick up on and that would impact their preferences. You’ve got to believe that one year-olds are soaking up a ton of media that’s enforcing these gender norms.

That’s just…very unconvincing in a way that says a lot about the way people who make these claims think.

This is just classic, “God of the gaps” type reasoning. You start by claiming that this is the result of social conditioning, but you can’t ever point to this social conditioning, and we go back to younger and younger and younger babies and finding the same results and you just keep repeating that the social conditioning must be happening somewhere! We don’t know where it is, but it must be there! Do they have access to media? Huh? Are they locked in a room? Not so smart now are you?

This is just very silly stuff.

We see the same results in, like, chimpanzees. Are the chimpanzees getting it from the Disney Channel?

Read 6 tweets

wanye

@xwanyex

Jul 10

A very straightforward fact about the United States that progressives have tricked them themselves into believing is the opposite of reality is that there are far more neighborhoods in the United States in which a white person would be treated by minorities as unwelcome than there are white neighborhoods in which minorities would be treated as unwelcome.

Literally every white person knows this to be true and avoids any of a dozen neighborhoods in their region for this reason. This is just a boring, straightforward, widely known fact about our country that you’re never supposed to admit to in public. In fact, the rule is that you’re supposed to say that the opposite is true.

Even if you think my math is wrong here and that the balance tips in the opposite direction, you’d still have to say that there are thousands of neighborhoods in the country in which white people would be treated as unwelcome and that this experience is not in fact unique to minorities, but is entirely legible and familiar to white people, as well.

Read 5 tweets

wanye

@xwanyex

Jun 9

“The average American crime rate, isn't the crime rate of the average American” succinctly explains the disconnect on the debate about whether immigrants commit more crime than natives. You don’t even have to focus on the racial aspect of this, if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s enough just to notice that crime rates differ quite a lot on an important dimension and that our society is largely segregated by the same dimension. That means that you’ve got two distinct, largely non-overlapping rates for which it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to take the average.

This may be hard for people to see, but you can have immigration that consists largely of people who have a lower crime rate than the current average, but who will raise the average crime rate in the medium to long-term, so long as you assume that demographic disparities persist. This is precisely because there are already large disparities in offending and unequal group population sizes.

I said that this may be hard for people to see, but I think actually people intuit it.

Read 4 tweets

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