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

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

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.

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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.

Read 4 tweets

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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