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https://twitter.com/PatrickFIanagan/status/1745850252098261073

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

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?

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

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.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

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.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

May 28

On Noah Smith’s podcast he’s talking with Matthew Yglesias about how conservatives “lost their shit” over the, “if I had a son he would look like Trayvon” line.

Noah says he doesn’t get it. Why did they care about that line? Matt responds coyly (paraphrasing), “I mean, it’s unproductive to call people names, but…”

And then they both agree that it’s just because they’re racist.

Noah doubles down (paraphrasing, again): “ok sure, they’re racist, but why this one line? I don’t get it.”

I don’t think this is a particularly difficult case!

It’s not that obscure: the belief is that Trayvon was not a great kid and was probably up to no good when he was killed and white people do not as a general rule immediately identify with shitty white people purely on racial grounds. For most white folks it’s very strange to jump straight to, “that could have been my kid” when some shithead teenager gets himself killed in a pointless fight.

All you have to grant is that conservatives mostly believe Trayvon to be the architect of his own demise and then the rest follows quite easily from there.

Crucially, you do not have to personally subscribe to this understanding of the facts in order to comprehend the controversy about the line.

It’s just kind of a weird thing to say, something that indicated to a lot of people that the president of the United States was not going to be capable of objectively evaluating the facts of the case, because of his own racial priors.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

May 5

Yes, but just to be clear, almost nobody in middle class America actually dislikes poor people for being poor. We don't live in Downton Abbey, or whatever, where you're supposed to know your station in life and people demand that you remain in your class without reference to what you're like as a person. The simple fact is that poverty is associated with increased rates of crime and disorder. It's that simple.

Poverty is associated with crime likely not because poverty causes crime, but because crime causes poverty or, more directly, because the set of behaviors, habits, and personalty traits that lead to a life of criminality lead also to a life of poverty.

Think of it like this: you can bust out in poker because you bet a good hand and got unlucky, or you can go broke because you're a reckless idiot who made lots of stupid decisions. It sucks for the first kind of person that they have to stand next to the latter fella in the group photo, but there's no way around the fact that this cohort is going to be full of the second kind of person.

That's just sort of logically how things pretty much have to shake out.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

May 3

Is it really, though? I mean, yes, people want the immediate, proximate problem solved — i.e. the homeless people near me are a nuisance and a net negative on my quality of life — but how does that actually prevent governments from solving the broader issue of homelessness? What about that fact prevents them from building adequate shelters? What about that fact stops us from developing longer-term interventions?

I feel like people want to set these two positions up in opposition to each other, when one does not actually have anything to do with the other. The truth is that solving homelessness is just really hard. We’re almost by definition talking about the most disordered and dysfunctional people in society. So it’s tempting to want to say that the guy who first wants you to get them off his block is somehow preventing you from solving what you’d otherwise have to admit is an intractable problem.

In fact, I think it would quite clearly be much easier to target and experiment with longer-term interventions on homeless people who have been already forcibly removed to shelters, as opposed to scattered around various unsanitary street camps.

Yes, the places with the worst homelessness problems are all liberal/Democrat strongholds. The people there probably want the city to get the homeless off their block, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that that’s where they stop thinking about it or the full extent of what they want to happen with the homeless.

Hell, it’s not even the full extent of what I want to happen, and I’m about as hard-core on the law and order/disorder aspect of this as you can get. I want the city to do draconian sweeps in which they grab up every homeless person on the street and force them into shelters or psychiatric hospitals.

But then, beyond that, I want those shelters and psychiatric hospitals to be well funded and fully staffed by competent, compassionate professionals.

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