Lots of bad arguments and false information about AA verdict today.

1. Affirmative Action is not just a "tie-breaker". It's a big dose of discrimination: 2. Most Americans, including most black ppl, do not support the use of race in college admissions. It's only when we use the euphemism "Affirmative Action" that people support it. (I'm sure "enhanced interrogation" polled better than "torture" too).

1/ Since people seem to care whether I am now a "black conservative," as indicated by @briebriejoy's podcast title, I should share some thoughts: 2/ "Black conservative" is a term that means ten different things to ten different people. Whether I meet *your* definition is ultimately a semantic, and therefore boring, question.

1/ I'm not angry about Biden basing his supreme court decision on race & gender. And I've put my finger on why. 2/ The decision process behind nominating a supreme court justice has always been secretly non-meritocratic. And it will always remain non-meritocratic so long at it is a "back room" decision made by the POTUS.

1/ With all due respect to Chappelle as one of the all-time greats, his latest special was uncharacteristically bad.

Most of the jokes were undercooked, and aside from a handful of hilarious moments, it was preachy and boring. 2/ Over half the special was on a single topic: trans.

He was so fixated on defending himself from the accusation of transphobia that he put what should have been the primary goal––comedy––on the back burner.

1/ Lots of whatabouttism on the issue of conceding elections. First: Hillary conceded, so that's not an argument. Second: yes, dems have played the same game––none were more critical of Stacey Abrams' non-concession than me. It was disqualifying for her, and it is for Trump too. 2/ I don't expect Trump to actually enact a coup. But given that he has a cult following who believes most of what he says, I worry about the prospect of ~30% of America––angry & armed––convinced that the election was stolen, egged on by Trump.

1. “If you oppose the riots, you don’t care about George Floyd” is the liberal version of “if you oppose the Iraq War, you don’t care about 9/11”.

The tragedy and the proper response to the tragedy are DIFFERENT issues. 2. In MN, it appears the majority of arrests have been people from other states. This is a feature of almost ALL riots, including Ferguson in 2014. Anarchists and trouble-makers come in, destroy the city, and then leave the residents to deal with the fall out.

I have trouble seeing how someone can believe both A and B at the same time:

A) "The moment someone tries to take your gun, you should assume they're trying to kill you, and from that moment on you have the right to preemptively use deadly force." B) "If a random man approaches you gun-in-hand and shows no badge, you should NOT assume he's trying to kill you, and you don't have the right to use ANY force in response."

(1/3) In a way, this piece gets things exactly backwards.

Yes, regimes have used the idea of cultural difference to justify oppression. The author points to the internment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang as an example. Agreed!

nyti.ms/2QOOFVh (2/3) But her intellectual history is backwards when she cites Nazi Germany as an example

Anthropologists like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict originally located the source of group difference in culture rather than genetics in order to *combat* Nazi theories of racial supremacy

1/ My sense is that the ppl who want to expand this hate speech law in NYC are relying on the stereotype that white men are the ones doing the hating.

A few weeks ago, I ordered a Via at 3AM. My driver was a middle-aged black woman. From the start,

nypost.com/2019/09/26/cit… 2/ she complained to me about how exhausted she was. She lived in NJ, but drove in NYC at night for extra cash. Halfway through the ride, a cab cut her off. She rolled down the window and, in typical NYC fashion, exchanged pointed words with the driver, who looked Arab.

This was an interesting case study in echo chambers.

The event gets protested at around 4:00 (not because of me though.)

I speak around 12:00, 28:40, 43:30, 59:00, and 1:24:00––when the crowd nearly rises up against me.

Points I wanted to make but wasn't able to:

1. Bill H.R. 40 asks whether we should consider a national apology for slavery & Jim Crow. Already happened: House of Reps formally apologized in 2008. The Senate followed suit in 2009––five years after it had apologized for lynching.

A point rarely made in the abortion debate is that many women considering an abortion are not choosing between having a child and not having a child, but between having a child now and having a child later––when they're better able to provide for it. The first situation pits a world with N lives against a world with N+1 lives. The second situation pits a world with N+1 lives against a slightly better world, also with N+1 lives––a world in which a mother is better able to provide for her child.

1/ I should leave it alone, but you guys got me going.

"Voter Suppression" thread: 2/ How strong is the case that Republicans have suppressed minority votes? Georgia's gubernatorial election between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams is the most widely-cited recent example. Let's start there.

1/4 In left-wing media, the story of the past two years has been about lowered black voter turnout due to the rolling back of voter rights.

In reality, the story has been a *historic & unprecedented* rise in black voter turnout. 2/4 Pew data says that, in 2018, a higher percentage of blacks voted in midterm elections than in any year going back several decades––by a *huge* margin.

(link: pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019…)

Thread:

Some Columbia students are up in arms over this story: A man walked into Barnard campus past 11pm and refused to show his ID. Public safety followed him into a building, asked for his ID again, and he refused again.

columbiaspectator.com/news/2019/04/1… Public safety restrained him physically so he gave them his ID. The physical restraining was caught on video.

The man was black and claims that he did not show his ID because the security guards often let white people pass through without showing ID. In other words: racism.

Making choices does not equal having free will. If the centuries long debate in philosophy had been about whether humans make choices, that’d be a pretty boring argument. Free will (libertarian free will) would entail being the prime mover (or uncaused cause) of your thoughts and actions—i.e, having the ability to have chosen otherwise. We don’t have that.

A real life example of the economist's cliché that there is no free lunch:

I was hanging around central park and had to pee. I remembered that Starbucks bathrooms are now open to the public (i.e., you don't have to buy anything to use them.) I go to Starbucks, but there is a line for the bathroom around 5-people long. I wait 10+ minutes to pee. (Plus, the bathroom is pretty gross.)

I used to go to the same Starbucks and there was never a line that long. What you make up in money you lose in time (& cleanliness.)

As a philosophy major, I've always been jealous of economics as a discipline because it has a fairly clear definition: The study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses.

Ask 10 philosophers what philosophy is and you'll get 10 different answers However, a few months ago I thought of a definition of philosophy that I think is accurate: The study of brute intuitions and what follows from them.

It's not too narrow; every branch of philosophy does this. It's (arguably) not too broad; other disciplines don't focus on it.

As a rule-of-thumb, when someone says "society tells X that Y," you can assume that, in reality, society tells X the opposite of Y.

Examples: "Society tells men that they own women's bodies"

Reality: In America the dominant messaging to young boys, with rare but disturbing exceptions, is A) Never hit women; B) Consent is paramount. Nobody told me I owned women's bodies as a young boy.

Many sum up MLK's views on race with the essay, "Letter to Birmingham Jail," where he rightly criticizes white moderates. But read all the sermons he gave, his essays, & books. You'll find dozens (& dozens) of examples of him framing CR movement in nonracial, universalist terms. A few examples below.

As you read, consider how bizarre it would be to hear a #BLM
leader utter even one of these quotes.

1/3 @DavidBrooks_NYT provides a great example of a deepity:

"Medication can rebalance chemicals in the brain, but it can’t heal the inner self."

Deepities have two interpretations. (1) True-but-trivial, (2) False-but-mind-blowing.

nyti.ms/2DAIOwHA 2/3 True-but-trivial reading: For some conditions, social or psychological interventions work better than currently-available chemical ones.

1. Kanye's views on racism have proved highly controversial. It's worth nothing, however, that other rappers have been criticizing elements of the woke consensus on racism for some time. 2. Remember when The Game said "F**k Jesse Jackson cuz it ain't about race now" (I listened to this song everyday as a 13-year old)?