arctotherium Profile picture
Baby Boom II https://t.co/yHjmcR0aOY
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Feb 26 5 tweets 2 min read
It is completely false that redlining was "explicit racial gatekeeping." 92% of redlined homes were white! Redlining was based on bureaucrats trying to predict if home values in an area would go up or down so as to avoid wasting taxpayer money on bad loans. Image Almost all black neighborhoods were redlined because black neighborhoods tend to be poor, violent, dirty, and getting worse (because of black behavior), and so not places people want to move to. This was true in 1936, it was true in 1966, and it is true today.
Feb 26 21 tweets 9 min read
Thread with excerpts from Helen Andrews "Boomers" (2021). Image Steve Jobs was an atypical Boomer - he didn't care for politics or philanthropy. Also did not like porn and saw himself as an institution builder, not a destroyer, and closer in personal habits and ideals to the founder of IBM than his age peers. Image
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Feb 25 30 tweets 15 min read
Thread with excerpts from Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" (1984), a book on the failure of US welfare and social policy 1950-1980 to achieve its goals. Image In 1950, poverty was such a non-issue it was causing problems - philanthropists had nothing obvious to do [perhaps the foundations went race communist]. In 1968, after a huge economic boom, mainstream papers predicted imminent race war without massive welfare expansion. Image
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Feb 23 5 tweets 3 min read
Most Spanish South American countries had very liberal constitutions on independence, guaranteeing property, liberal freedoms like speech and contract, and abolishing the fueros and legal caste/race distinctions, often inspired by but going further than the United States. Image
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Many people claim the US was founded as a [classical] liberal state without racial or ethnic content. This is mostly not true; the US was founded by Whigs (the word liberal was coined around 1800) and had explicit race laws. But it *is* true of most of Latin America. Image
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Feb 21 6 tweets 3 min read
In experimental settings, blacks of both parties and white Democrats favor black criminals over white ones in sentencing and pardoning decisions, while white Republicans have no racial preference. Image The same effect shows for sentencing. Of note: black Republicans are basically indistinguishable from black Democrats, in aggregate. Image
Feb 21 5 tweets 1 min read
In 2009, Denmark cut the top marginal tax rate 7%, from 63% to 56%. Thanks to Denmark's population register, we can estimate the effect of this tax cut on the fertility of coupled (married+cohabitation) men and women. More money increased male and reduced female fertility. Image Specifically: higher wages (increasing the opportunity cost of time) reduced women's fertility and had negligible effects on men, while higher incomes (increased money overall) had negligible effects on women and increased male fertility (ie, children are a normal good).
Feb 21 19 tweets 7 min read
Thread with excerpts from "Why Post-Liberalism Failed." Thesis: liberalism is dead and has been for a long time. Modern post-liberalism fails because self-described post-liberals are attacking an order that died a century ago; we live under actually-existing post-liberalism. Image (I would recommend reading the entire essay rather than this thread, because I'm leaving out a lot, but it is quite long. Link here. Thread continues below.)
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Feb 11 6 tweets 3 min read
Thread on affirmative action in Brazil. In 2012, Brazil began mandating that 50% of seats in all programs offered by federal universities should be distributed via affirmative action to the following three groups: public school grads, the poor, and blacks/Indians. Image Affirmative action also applies to government jobs in Brazil. 20% were reserved for blacks until 2025 when this was increased to 30%. This applies to all government organizations as well as public companies and mixed-capital state-run companies. Image
Jan 17 15 tweets 7 min read
Thread with excerpts from the 1976 essay "On Meritocracy and Equality." I want to clear up some misconceptions around the idea of "meritocracy." The word was initially coined as a *pejorative* in 1958 to describe presently-existing Anglo-American society. Image What characterized WWII and postwar Anglo-American society that made the word "meritocracy" appropriate? That talent (as measured by heavily genetic IQ) and technical skill, rather than hereditary privilege or some other mechanism, led to status and wealth. Image
Jan 16 7 tweets 3 min read
Thread on California NGOs. Who works for and leads California NGOs? Mostly women, who are very starkly overrepresented in nonprofit employment and leadership. Image Direct government funding is 30% of nonprofit revenue; the rest is tax-advantaged. Image
Jan 16 4 tweets 2 min read
The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 allows defendants (in practice, blacks and Hispanics) to claim racial discrimination and overturn convictions explicitly in the absence of intentional discrimination, off of disparate impact alone. Image Supposed discrimination can be used to reverse a judgment even if said "racial bias" is harmless and did not actually impact the decision. Image
Jan 14 6 tweets 2 min read
In 2022, 45% of high schoolers polled say they were taught that "America is built on stolen land" in class at school, and another 22% heard it from an adult there. Image Students taught all of the "critical social justice" (CSJ) concepts were in fact more likely to agree with them; among those taught "America is built on stolen land" 73% agreed. Image
Jan 4 23 tweets 11 min read
Thread with excerpts from Boris Sax's "Stealing Fire", a book of the author reckoning with his discovery (after his father's death) that his father, Saville Sax, had been a major Soviet atomic spy, stealing important info on the A-bomb and likely the H-bomb and going unpunished. Image The author was initially devastated, but eventually relieved at this discovery as partly explaining his father's awful lifetime behavior (living in black slums, beating his wife and kids, torturing dogs, never getting a stable job, dropping out of Harvard twice). Image
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Jan 2 4 tweets 2 min read
No it wasn't. We know exactly what the key decisionmakers (eg Bill Clinton) and intellectuals at the time were saying: China will become rich (benefitting everyone else in the process), and this will make them liberal, democratic, and peaceful.Image
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"Globalist Americans are just trying to turn China into a cheap labor sweatshop" was a conspiracy theory promulgated by the last remnants of the Western laborist left (think anti-WTO riots) in the early 2000s, to reconcile "this is hurting Western workers and unions" with hating nationalism by arguing the REAL victims of outsourcing were workers around the world. Never based in reality.
Jan 2 4 tweets 2 min read
The obvious historical comparison here is Nazi Germany, which pursued similar policies of suppressing labor (by eg destroying independent unions) in favor of capital to allow for investment and exports while still successfully raising worker's living standards. Image
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Mexico not growing much since 1990 isn't because it "knows its place," it's because Mexico, being a New World country, escaped the Malthusian trap centuries prior and thus already had high living standards [comparable to China today] befitting its human capital.
Jan 1 16 tweets 9 min read
Anti-Mexican immigration thread. Many American right-wingers have started defending Mexican immigration, often by comparison with MENA types in Europe. This is a mistake. First, Mexicans are just not very smart. On white American norms, they tend to score around 90. Image Mexicans are most responsible for the racial transformation and hence dumbing down of America; for roughly 30 years (until 2008) hundreds of thousands crossed the border annually (mostly illegally, about 1/2 of total immigration) and they also had exceptionally high TFR.Image
Dec 21, 2025 5 tweets 2 min read
Interesting hypothesis. Now let's check the evidence. Image Boomercons love the idea that immigrants are uber-patriotic and grateful, and some are (I personally don't expect gratitude, this is America, don't need boot-licking, but non-hostility is essential and among the politicized segment usually missing), but this is not the norm. Image
Dec 20, 2025 6 tweets 2 min read
The British are often blamed for millions of Indian famine deaths. This is exactly backwards; like all Malthusian agrarian civilizations famines were a primordial feature of Indian life, ended in peacetime by Raj-built railroads that allowed shipping food to affected areas. Image Part of the reason the Raj is attacked for this is that, unlike prior government in India, they wrote reports about the famines under them to try and figure out how to prevent future ones, and eventually succeeded (peacetime famines in India ended before they did in Russia). Image
Dec 19, 2025 15 tweets 6 min read
More on the long history of affirmative action/DEI in the US. These excerpts are from Chapter 5 of the 1992 book "Paved With Good Intentions," and cover affirmative action outside of education and employment. The 1978 Community Reinvestment Act forced banks into giving subsidized loans to nonwhites.Image When broadcasting licenses change, citizens can challenge the racial bona fides of their hiring policy, allowing black activists to extort money and jobs through threat of lawsuit. Image
Dec 18, 2025 25 tweets 9 min read
I want to break the impression that Affirmative Action/DEI began in 2014 or is limited to school admissions and a handful of infamously left-wing fields. Here are some excerpts from chapter 4 of the 1992 book "Paved With Good Intentions." First, firefighting. Image Police, firefighting, sanitation work, federal civil service. All public fields throwing out tests because blacks scored lower. These fields don't have market competition, so eliminating these tends to make them very dysfunctional. Image
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Dec 16, 2025 6 tweets 3 min read
"Saikat Chakrabarti-Stripe’s second founding engineer...harness commie-curious young voters" - couldn't ask for a better demonstration of why even indisputably economically-valuable immigration can be politically crippling. This is particularly a problem with Indian immigration. Saikat is indisputably a very smart guy who's produced a ton of value in the US. He also checks every single retarded and destructive New Left gay race communist box. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saikat_Ch…