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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

I think ultimately what’s so boring about the Europe versus United States quality of life discourse, is that every quality of life issue in the US is downstream of high levels of crime and disorder in American cities, but that’s the one topic no expat acknowledges. They ridicule and denigrate their fellow citizens for traveling 8 miles to a suburb to avoid it, but then imagine themselves to be sophisticates while doing basically the same thing. Every single one of these “I moved to Europe” articles dances around this topic. Every single one of them was written by someone who voted for and continues to support policies that go easy on the crime and disorder they’ve fled.

I don’t believe there’s any such thing as objective morality, yet I feel very strongly in my stomach that there must be something like right and wrong. And I act in my life as though I really do truly believe in right and wrong, even if intellectually I reject the premise. Once I realized that I could behave the same way with respect to all other aspects of religion, this issue resolved itself.

I may try to write more about this later. I think almost all intellectuals already act as though they believe something that they reject, because I think that almost all serious intellectuals accept on some level that morality is fake. We are creatures produced by the process of evolution by natural selection. There is no such thing as right and wrong.

And yet those same intellectuals (most of them) feel very strongly about various issues of right and wrong — positions they arrive at for expedience, because of practicality, through argumentation, but mostly because they feel something painful in their stomach when they do wrong.

They are experts at keeping two sets of books. It used to be that the average intellectual felt as awful about rejecting religion as today’s intellectuals feel about the idea of rejecting right and wrong. They might arrive at the intellectual conclusion, but they feel as strongly in their stomach about the existence of right and wrong as they have ever felt about anything, and they live their lives as though right and wrong are meaningful concepts.

This is what the *entirety* of the history of “white flight” is like. “Sure, the way we teach this leads people to believe ridiculous caricatures, but it’s true that people used to be more racist than they are today, and this explanation neatly explains all persistent outcome disparities, so you can’t really expect us to teach kids that white people in the 1950s were multidimensional, rational human beings who acted out of anything but malice.” And, of course, because this is how this always goes, the people who believe this extremely mainstream narrative think that they’ve been given access to secret wisdom that makes them more educated than everyone else they encounter. In fact, on their worldview, holding this exact set of beliefs is precisely what it *means* to be educated.

When I point out, as I sometimes do, that large shares of the public don't actually understand how modernity works, it's tempting, I'm sure, to dismiss this as elitist snark. But I think it's actually sad, in its way. People don't know how things work, but worse, they have no intuition for why things work the way they do, even once it's explained to them.

This is obvious when you see the arguments they bring to bear.

Courts and laws must seem totally insane to them, never addressing their needs, always coldly rejecting what must seem to them to be persuasive arguments about personal hardship that might have carried the day in more intimate societies.

The whole thing, the whole project of society must seem capricious and random and unfair. When they are asked to make arguments for themselves, they can produce only non sequiturs and appeals to emotion that might as well be in an alien language for how likely they are to have anything to do with the issue at hand.

It might be obvious to you in what ways the cable company is different from the police is different from a local hardware store is different from Lowe's is different from the Social Security Administration, both in their obligations to you and in the limits of thinking about them in terms of obligations at all.

I assure you, this is not true of all people equally.

And if you think, you know, well these people just need to be *educated* better, then you haven't heard what I'm saying. They don't think in contracts, in abstract moral systems, in legal structures. Their intuition is a tide pulling them out into a sea, no matter how many times you row them back in. Modernity is great. We're not going back to small tribes. And this all just is what it is. But clearly we've moved into territory that some non-trivial share of the population is always going to find themselves out of sync with.

And that's not their fault. And it's genuinely sad.

I don’t know, I’m not that vindictive and I don’t really want ordinary liberals to suffer for their views, but we do need some social norms around these things. The thing that drives me most crazy is how many people on the left have absolutely no self-awareness or self-consciousness about the fact that they might be talking to someone who is just a little bit more conservative than they are. It’s a kind of narcissism, a solipsism.

I’m not saying their lives should be ruined for this, but maybe they should be forced to sit through a yearly DEI-esque training that reminds them that other human beings exist, that they sometimes have different political views, that it’s inappropriate to make strident political claims at work, that you’re not actually better or more empathetic or kinder than your coworkers, and that it is extremely obnoxious to behave as though you are. As has been pointed out to me before, this is probably just an ordinary human foible. If conservatives controlled all the institutions, then this is probably how they would behave in the office, too.

Saying that people should wait to get married because they’ll be wiser is sort of like saying that people should wait until they’re 30 to play in the NFL, so that they don’t get involved in any stupid scandals when they’re young and stupid.

It’s of course true, in some sense, so long as you’re aware of the opportunities on which you are foreclosing. I have no trouble believing that younger marriages are higher variance. But if you wait, you will foreclose on the potential for a specific kind of marriage that many people find quite rewarding.

I really don’t think you can underestimate the impact of the mass incarceration narrative on political polarization. Imagine how different a country that busts people’s doors down and throws them in prison for decades because they’re smoking a joint is from one that doesn’t. Those are two completely different societies. There are lots of normal, otherwise well adjusted, successful people walking around you who think there are people in prison who have been there for years and years and years for smoking a joint. That’s what they think. They think that’s a thing that happens in this country. They think the nature of the criminal justice system is that you get caught with a joint, then it goes all the way to a criminal trial, after which you will be sentenced to prison for many years.

Anybody who believes this is completely fucking insane and out of touch with the actual reality of criminal justice in the United States. This isn’t a small difference. That’s an insane belief.

And it might be the modal belief.

I think there’s a way in which the phrase, “what do people even DO in suburbs and small towns” is kind of telling on yourself, as though the whole point of life is to consume restaurant food and attend street fairs (at which you consume restaurant food from a cart).

https://twitter.com/nealjclark1/status/1876987400297099470

“What do people even do in the suburbs” is it a question with a shelf life. It’s supposed to be uttered by teenagers who are in their peak socializing years during which they are supposed to be finding a mate to have children with.

You aren’t meant to still be asking that question in your 30s.

To the extent that allowing millions and millions of Ellis Islanders to come here guaranteed for at least the next century that the average American would now think of the country as defined by that immigration — that the immigration wasn’t just something that happened, but rather core to what it means to be an American — I think that’s a perfectly good argument against doing new rounds of mass immigration. Certainly you have to acknowledge and admit that this totally changed the average person’s conception of America. People literally think of the country as something else, now.

Obviously, you can prefer what came before or you can prefer what came after, but I don’t see how it’s possible to deny that there’s a difference. Again, I would just insist that you don’t get to talk about this like it’s no big deal. A thing happened that completely changed the ordinary American’s understanding of what it means to be an American. That’s a really big deal! That’s always going to be a big deal. There’s always going to be a fight about it. It’s always going to be contentious. No, it isn’t just the most obvious thing in the world that you should do it again.

This image going around purporting to explain two-lane roundabout usage nicely demonstrates why these intersections are confusing and dangerous.

The image says that the right lane is for turning right and the left lane is for turning left, but that *either* lane can go straight, suggesting that the blue car is allowed to t-bone the red car when it turns across its lane. In fact, it's much more typical that the right lane *must* turn right, as can be seen in the markings on this real-life two-lane rotary in Warwick, RI.

This obviously makes way more sense and the image is just simply confused about that which it is attempting to explain.

The messaging around hiding your vote from your husband is of a kind with arguments against home schooling, because it can conceal abuse, or arguments about having parents leave the room when kids are at the doctor, so that the doctor can find cases of abuse, and so on and so on.

In each of these cases progressives want to rudely insert themselves into an existing relationship -- a primary relationship, the kinds of relationships on which you build a society.

This is extremely rude and presumptuous and insulting and also, yes, it will catch some predators, but at the cost of inserting yourself where you don't belong millions of times for every serious case of abuse you uncover.

Liberals are of course *entirely* aware of this dynamic and *accept my point of view uncritically* when it comes to defending the rights of criminal suspects in literally every other context.

It's just marriages and parent/child relationships that they're willing to subvert in order to get tough on crime and abuse. Amongst my worst critics are a handful of cretins and liars who seem to simultaneously hold the view that it's critical to defend the rights of somebody who almost certainly committed a serious violent crime, but also that they just can't understand why anybody would be against routine intrusions into the lives of parents against whom no credible evidence of abuse even exists and that my doing so implies something nefarious about me.

The deeper point revealed by this obvious truth is that we're all individuals, not avatars for our group identities. "You can't have that job, because people who look like you have dominated in that role for the last 100 years and it's time to give somebody else a chance" is basically incoherent, because I'm just a singular individual and either I get the job or I don't. Whether people like me did or didn't get the job in the past and whether people who look like you did or didn't get the job in the past collapses into a single point where one of us gets the job and one of us doesn't. American individuality is fundamentally at odds with social justice. It's zero sum. They make opposing, incompatible claims about the world. Either you and I are individuals who should be treated as such or we're pawns in a bigger game. You can't have both.

The country literally devolved into riots and practically every institution, from your local PTA to the largest corporations and government agencies, remade itself in response to the lie that police hunt minorities for sport

https://twitter.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1844835702753619974

I’m sorry, but that happened. That all happened. It just happened. Not a long time ago. It just happened. Yes it’s also true that some people recently said some things that are untrue about FEMA. To what end? What were the consequences? What burned down? What was looted? What institution that you are part of completely remade itself in the image of this lie? How many television ads were premised on this line? How many moments of silence at sporting events asked you to reflect on this lie?

One of my most strongly-held is that beliefs are developed primarily from emotion and that if you felt the same immediate, knee-jerk, emotional responses that your opponents feel on any given issue, then you would believe as they do. You happen to feel different emotional responses, so you’ve developed commensurate beliefs.

Conservatives aren’t particularly good at this, either, but it’s particularly funny that the “veil of ignorance” understanders, who spend 75% of their time on this website talking about how empathetic they are, seem completely unable or unwilling to grant this. A good exercise to go through is to create a table with three columns labeled, “issue,” ,”my position,” “my emotional response to that issue” and see if you can come up with even one thing for which your emotions do not match up with your preferred policy.