I'll do a quick response here, since this is my article.

Obviously, no one argues that "racism does not exist." The point is that you do not DETERMINE the existence of racism simply by pointing out "performance gaps" re something like income or police encounters - which is literally the level of a lot of 'woke' research....or by adjusting for sex as well as race (whee!).

As J. O'Neill pointed out 20+ years ago, most such gaps close or vanish after basic adjustments for things like age, region, any aptitude test score, etc. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10… (2) At some very basic level, it makes no sense to argue that, if a 27-year old Black Mississippian with a community college degree makes less money than a 58-year old white Bostonian who went to BU, the reason is "racism."

These are the sort of gaps political scientists often look at between large groups. More whites DO live in the US North (the boats landed further South). That IS the gap in at least modal average/most common ages between Blacks and whites...pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

To put this "President of Harvard had 11 articles all time" story in context: I teach at a regular state university, could be fairly 'criticized' for doing more public intellectual than strictly academic writing......and have four articles (some as co-author) and a book this year. This isn't a boast, btw: "publish or perish" is very real, and this^ is likely a bit behind the curve at top-300 universities...before you adjust FOR the PI stuff.

It's a point about a broad reality: affirmative action causes so much hostility because the double standards involved are so often so glaring.

"Civil war" talk is all fun and games until you actually see 10,000 people from Kentucky or Oakland riding toward you on 4-tracks, blasting "Money, Cash, Hoes" or "Enter Sandman," waving machetes and ARs - coming to kill your family and take all your shit.

Peace is a blessing. (2) Lot of comments here on who would win.

That's not really the point, but - as a decent political and sometimes military analyst - any conflict like this would be a lot uglier than people think. For example, any competent Blue general would respond to red-state denial of food by authorizing "gleaning" attacks on the red states by his guardsmen or waves of "teens X 10."

Conquest is not theft. This isn't some edgy, radical statement. In the pre-WW2 Right of Conquest era, ~all Asian, European, West African, Amerindian, etc societies recognized it as fully and even legally legitimate to challenge other societies in war, defeat their fighting men, and take their stuff.

The Scholar has now moved to explicitly claiming that any argument that non-genetic CULTURAL differences (in, for example, study time) between racial and ethnic groups explain group performance gaps is racist.

It's worth unpacking just how absurd this is.

https://twitter.com/DrIbram/status/1650526361868484608

(2) First, the fact that there ARE large gaps in performance between groups, which have a big cultural component, is disputed by essentially no serious people.

Asian-American kids study ~2x as much as white kids, and 3x as much as Black kids, IIRC after the income adjustment.

An awkward historical fact, which genuinely complicates the reparations debate, is that Black Americans are just obviously better off on average than we would be had our ancestors never come to the United States. Pointing out something this self-evidently true isn't "justifying slavery," which was obviously terrible FOR SLAVES and existed ~globally in 1850.

But, no one arguing for that $5M today in LA is or has ever been a slave. Pro-POC affirmative action has been the law since '67.

An under-recognized aspect of "PC" language is that it serves as a class signalling mechanism.

W/o trying to be rude, there is no logical difference between saying "slow"..."retarded"...or "delayed developmentally." Knowing the more complex term shows you went to college. Same's true for "colored person" vs "person of color," "POC," "BIPOC," etc.

Obviously, ~no one saying something a la "The hosts were a great local group of colored businessmen" is being wildly racist - but they have instantly pegged themself as older and working class.

This is getting a bit silly.

The original claim was that people who critique Black (or Appalachian?) culture are genetic racists, because the forces driving culture - at very least, these were the only ones mentioned - must be genetics or racism.

That is obviously not true.

https://twitter.com/CathrynTownsend/status/1638570762486394880

(2) Massive, culturally-caused differences in income, test scoring (I've attached global PISA), alcohol consumption etc exist all around the world - between genetically similar, same-"race" groups in situations where 'systemic racism' could not even plausibly have played a role.

There is no difference between the argument (1) "Black cops killing a Black guy in a Black-run Black-majority city is white supremacy" and the argument (2) "Black people can never be responsible for anything."

Both, of course, are false. (2) What's remarkable about a lot of these arguments, to me as a political scientist, is how provincial they are - suited specifically to the 1960s race debate, specifically in the USA.

Do you really not think they...do not have cops in Lagos or Tokyo or Ankara?

So, I wrote a fair number of things lately, which I'll soon add to my pinned tweet.

This is my @NRO article about how virtually every information-curation conspiracy theory was...just true: nationalreview.com/2022/12/the-co… (2) This was my second piece for big @nro - whatever "gender" is, it isn't actual biological sex involving reproductive systems and chromosomes, and this matters for sport, sex, and prisons...nationalreview.com/2023/01/cleari…

With a shout to @Elijosss: this was the actual, real-world follow up to the "the shooter WAS Black tho" expose earlier.

Wait for it... This dude just picked the goal-posts up and threw them into the Dead Sea.

This is a "no shit" point that right-leaning, and simply empirically-minded, critics of list experiments have been making for years - see Reilly (2021).

Hiring "Joe" over "Jamarrian" is not necessarily - or probably - a sign of racism.

https://twitter.com/owasow/status/1603041385074262016

Leaving aside common-sense tips like "Just apply as 'Mr. J. Washington'," one question is whether the link between highly ethnic names and perceived class is incohate bias or tracks s/t real at the group level.

The Asian-W-B-Latin rankings below do ~track w. group performance.

There's almost a total Venn Diagram overlap between people who say (A) "37 year old financially stable men dating happy 24 year old female lawyers is evil" and (B) "Children can consent to parent-free gender transition and other therapy at 12."

Why? This isn't me talking trash.

Dozens of pieces show that the same people who argue consent is ~impossible across any slight "power dynamic" are very much about actual young kids, mentally ill people ('homeless street rights'), drug addicts etc making life decisions. Again - why?

There are some "castle doctrine" limits here, but......yes. Your treasured things are worth more to you than an enemy's life.

Will say: almost no normal off-twitter person finds this controversial at all.

https://twitter.com/_Reaganite_/status/1606803740610428930

A very simple way to phrase the ethical question here is: assuming CD law allows you to use force to prevent these things, would you simply allow a criminal to burn down your business or murder your dog, because "NOTHING is worth taking ONE human LIFE?!"

I...would not.

Anyone to truly, objectively, apply a standard like "All sexists and racists are individually evil" would have to condemn virtually every human being who lived before about 1954. (2) My own take on whether/how to apply modern Western ethical standards to past societies - or current rival civilizations like the Arab world - breaks down into 3 parts.

First, whether ULTIMATE morals exist is at some level an unanswerable question about the existence of God.

Going to a prison full of desperate women is a fairly common sexual fantasy for men.

The idea that no male sex offender would lie about "being a woman" to make this happen may be THE single craziest thing I have ever heard. Interestingly, the great weakness of leftism is this sort of stupid blank-slate naivete writ large: the idea that insane ideas doomed to fail - "Let's bus Black and poor white kids who hate each other two hours away from home to shared schools" - can be made to work with Hope.

Some questions a serious media might want to ask about the H. Biden story - about the President's son closing int'l business deals and apparently paying 10% of revenues to a shadowy "Big Guy," while smoking ounces of crack and partying with young-looking foreign prostitutes... (1) Who WAS "the Big Guy" taking 10% - was it Joe?

(2) That aside, is there any evidence Joe profited from any of these deals, or that H. Biden used his dad's name to secure them?

(3) Did other connections exist? Was crack on AF2? Was a WH credit card used for any of this?

Canada outchea running commercials for death.

Calm down, guys. We'll all use the product soon enough.

https://twitter.com/BowTiedRanger/status/1596957492940275712

A: "WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THE GOD OF DEATH, WARRIORS?"

B: "Are group and POC discounts available?"

Pictures are trash, but: I bought my entire Thanksgiving dinner from the preppie Swiss Colony website (plus a pie from the local store) - no one on the team wanted to slave in the kitchen for six hours, and total cost was like $150 after Hunni coupons. #highly_recommend The one exception is this 2lb tenderloin, which I'm going to make into a Beef Wellington while errybody else chills.

I too am a "trained journalist (as well as a academic!)" I am an official columnist for @spikedonline - I can write about fact or opinion, focus the USA - and sat through training in journo standards and methods before taking the post.

Let's briefly discuss credentialism.

https://twitter.com/ItsGoneAwry/status/1589842132386271232

(2) One of the problems/amusing realities in upper-middle class society today is that virtually everyone is an "expert" - defined as having a four-year or beyond degree from a good-to-elite college in a specific field.

Today, you can get MA level terminal degrees in Sales.

I mean, tell him.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1582792496953774080

My own frank answer: it's not hard to cut a $5.35 trillion dollar budget, and absurd to have one. If King, I would end all 'Build Back Better'-style "stimulus" tranches, and cut the budgets for most government programs -certainly including defense and foreign aid- by 25% or more.