Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania
Richard - I think you would enjoy reading Lee Kuan Yew. Excerpt from "The Man and His Ideas":
---
I did the exact opposite
Having arrived reluctantly at the conclusion that the gap in performance between races would not be eliminated simply by providing the less well off with a head start through better educational and life opportunities, Lee did what would have been unthinkable to most politicians elsewhere - he went public, airing his observations and concerns before the whole country
Not for him the race-blind approach, which sought to gloss over ethnic differences, whether out of political expedience or ethnic guilt. For Lee, that was an exercise in self-deception, or worse, raising false expectations. Nor would he brook programmes such as affirmative action schemes which he saw as misguided attempts to hobble the more adept in society so that others might catch up. This,
he felt, would only hold the whole society back.
"I did the exact opposite. Once I discovered that special tuition, special food and all this did not produce the necessary result, I looked up the prewar records and I found the same weaknesses in mathematics and so on. So I decided: first, inform the leaders and the elders and inform the teachers, then publish it. So please, let there be no misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with discrimination or lack of support or whatever. It's a profound problem.
"The reasons why I did this are simple ones. This way, we are going to get results. The other way, we are going to confuse people and you're going to get wrong results. Now, I suppose maybe it's too touchy a problem to say this openly, but to pretend that we are all egual and therefore I am not in it because you have discriminated against my caste, so I need a quota - it's going to lead to very unhappy consequences ...
"I do not believe that the American system of solving the problem stands any chance. First, they deny that there is a difference between the blacks and the whites. Once you deny that, then you're caught in a bind. All right, if we are egual, then why am I now worse off? You have fixed me. The system has fixed me. So they say, right, let's go for affirmative action. Lower marks to go to university, and you must have a guota for number of salespersons or announcers on radio or TV. And so you get caught in a thousand and one different ways. And you say, since the army is now 30, 40 per cent blacks, you must have so many generals, so many colonels, and so on.
"I don't know how they have got into this bind, but I think that is not realistic. You don't have to offend people because they are not as good as you. I mean I'm not as smart as an Israeli or many Chinese for that matter. But that doesn't mean that I'm not to be treated as equal in my rights as a
human being.
"The only way we can all really be physiologically equal in brain power and everything else is to have a melange. All go into a melting pot and you stir it. In other words, force mixed marriages, which is what the people in Zanzibar tried. The blacks wanted to marry all the Arab girls so that the next generation, their children, will be half-Arab. But I don't think that's a practical way nor will it solve the problem. And you can't do that worldwide, you can - maybe you can do that in Zanzibar. In the process,
you diminish Zanzibar. Because whereas before you had some outstanding people who can do things for Zanzibar, now you have brought them down to a lower level.
"So my attitude now would be a very practical one of saying that we are equal human beings. Whether you can run 100 yards in 20 minutes, 20 seconds or 10 seconds, you've got a right to be here. But that doesn't mean that because you run at 20 seconds, I must run at 20 seconds. Then
At some point you have to consider the possibility that the people who disagree with you are simply physically unable to perceive reality and or uninterested in it, as opposed to say being aspiring Bayesians aiming at the truth. Once you start modeling people as the former, many of their bizarre epistemic shortcomings seem to make a whole lot more sense.
Lol. I saw your tweet earlier about Rufo (where he mentioned David French) and was temporarily thrown off by the the content of this essay.
What's funny is you could STILL blame minorities committing more crimes, being arrested more, etc. on the "legacy of slavery" but it doesn't change the fact that depolicing has a really negative effect on minority communities. But you can't "listen to the people" on this issue because they aren't rational. Some twitter guy said it best: "People in minority communities want more policing, just not for their nephew who is really a good kid."
Williams misunderstands the crowd's reaction. I guarantee you, absolutely promise you, that a good 90% of those who "hissed" would do so if a White guy said the same thing. They're hissing because it's intensely anti-French (as a creed, not an ethnicity) to put one's race, sex, orientation, or whatever above the nation. If you are French, you are French. Hence the lack of race as an option on the census, etc.
You can say this is idealistic and isn't really true, but it's besides the point: the average French patriot wants it to be true, very much so.
"Not even anti-wokes seem comfortable acknowledging that yes, police might treat people of certain ethnic groups differently, but they are justified in doing so."
This. I am 100% comfortable believing and stating this fact. I grew up in an area that is roughly 50/50. You have a group of teens that have fuss fights in the hall that cause some hair pulling and fist fights if they feel whatever way that day. You have another group bringing razor blades to cut those they "feel" have caused them a problem that day. Everyone is getting suspended, but the group that's known to carry the razor blades is being searched in the mornings because the danger is on another level. It's justified until it changes. That's my belief.
The majority of American blacks have an identity centered around a quasi-religious narrative of being victims of omnipresent racial discrimination. Facts that contradict the narrative are rejected a priori. It's like trying to convince a young-earth creationist with evidence of evolution; their priors, all accepted "on faith" in advance or reason or evidence, won't allow them to consider the possibility that what you are saying could be true. Unfortunately, things have to get awful enough and people have to feel endangered enough for there to be any real change. But as quickly as things seem to be falling apart, we may get to that point in the next couple years.
I had to have a talk about the reality of race with my daughter recently. It’s not like kids don’t already notice racial group differences anyways. How could they not help but notice? These differences are even more pronounced at the meritocratic and highly selective high school she attends. At this school, there are a LOT of Asian students, quite a few whites students, and very few black students. Kids are going to construct a narrative to explain the differences that are plainly obvious, and I refuse to allow her understanding of these issues to only be shaped by the mainstream narrative of systemic racism and white supremacy. I simply told her the truth; there are innate differences among racial groups in intelligence, behavior, and ability. The world makes so much more sense when you understand and accept these facts, and I could see that this confirmed suspicions that she secretly had. I think it’s cruel to perpetuate lies about race. Everyone suffers as a result and society is destroyed with the futile attempts to attain equal outcomes.
Local police departments, at least for the time being, do publish crime data that all decent commentators do their absolute best never to mention publicly. For example, on page 16 of the St. Louis Police Department's annual report for 2020, 74 of 82 persons arrested for homicide were black (90%), while 263 of 290 arrests for robbery were black (also 90%). St. Louis is 43% black. I suppose the woke will insist that countless nonblack murderers and robbers avoid arrest, while countless black arrestees are innocent. Perhaps... Source: https://www.slmpd.org/images/2020_Annual_Report.pdf
Feb 11, 2023·edited Feb 11, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania
"and Arabs, supposedly, though I suspect they’re just throw in to pretend this is a “brown” issue too"
Every French reader wet themselves with this line because for the vast majority of French northern Africans (maghrebin) are much more prominently "an issue" than black Africans.
In fairness to all parties, a lot of the issues are driven by the lack of economic opportunity caused by two main forces: one, and the dominant one, economic segregation which is caused by France's insanely "pro-worker" labour laws, which are arguably a crime against humanity, and two, a very degraded education system including an extreme lack of school choice for poor people.
The hostility of Black Africans and Magrehbis towards dominant French culture is ameliorated slightly by their ghettoization. It's counterintuitive but the segregation present in most cities means less scope for conflict.
Then again, geographic assimilation is increasing simply because the minority numbers are exploding, so oblivious BBRs will find themselves confronted sooner or later. We'll see if they can hold their nerve.
“Éric Zemmour was once even convicted of racist speech for defending the police by saying that most drug dealers are blacks or Arabs.”
So white people must lose their liberties to accommodate woke, egalitarian, multicultural, fantasies. But it’s not purely an ideological phenomenon; it’s also connected to the need to have to constantly smooth over the racial divisions that come from mass, non-white immigration. But this is the price that must be paid when you have a “cosmopolitan” elite that thinks the massive externalities that result from the loss of a homeland count for nothing.
It's not clear to me why we can't have Lee Kwan Yee's approach of frankness on race. Compared to current egalitarian ideology it would come across as harsh initially, but eventually we'd get used to it and perhaps even try to change to avoid some of the more negative and true nurture-related stereotypes.
“Point out a disparity, ignore obvious but unpleasant explanations, and jump to the conclusion that discrimination must be the cause. In the area of public policy, this is pretty much all wokeness is! Police arrest more black people, so police are the problem. Blacks score lower on all written tests, the tests are the problem. Blacks have less money, which means that capitalism….you get the point.”
I have never seen anyone put my, and others’, concern about left identitarianism in politics so succinctly and so well. Well done.
Surely there's some (constitutional, moral) limit to "I have to accept worse treatment because of my demographic's greater propensity towards violence," though? As a society we have norms around what the police can do if they have suspicion, vs. what they can do if they have probable cause, and of course we lock people up only after due process.
How often is it reasonable for a law-abiding person to be bothered by police? Whatever the amount, there's some level of proportionate (i.e. targets people at a rate proportional to their demographic's propensity to commit crime) police activity that would end up with law-abiding white Americans being under that level, and law-abiding black Americans being above that level.
I think it's very consistent to complain about, say, stop and frisk, even if the police are being proportionate as described above, if the end result is that many law-abiding black men are frequently harassed by police.
Also, given de facto segregation (not a factor for age or sex), normalizing this sort of proportionality is likely to have second-order effects. You would expect to further alienate law-abiding black residents from the police and the dominant culture. In fact, this is exactly what we see happening - despite being by far the biggest victims of black crime, black Americans (as you have pointed out) are leery about "tough on crime" policies.
(To be clear, I'm not talking about incarceration or arrests, but rather things like stop and frisk where a significant burden is borne by those who are under suspicion largely due to their demographics).
An alternative measure to your kind of proportionality would be "how often are we bothering innocent members (as determined after the fact) of a given demographic"? There are genuine costs imposed by policies with many false positives.
There was actually a very interesting studies run on police stop in Paris public transport system. The researchers observed who was stopped and gathered information about them.
It turns out that while people from arab and african origins where indeed stopped much more often than the average, that was mostly because the police was mostly stopping young men dressed in "youth culture" (hip hop, gothic, etc). A black or arab man dressed in a casual (but not urban / youth) way had a much lower chance to be arrested, not very different from the general population, and people from all origin wearing business attire were almost never arrested.
So indeed, police stop are not random, but africans and arabs are more likely to be arrested mostly because they have observable characteristics which trigger police stop.
>Not even anti-wokes seem comfortable acknowledging that yes, police might treat people of certain ethnic groups differently, but they are justified in doing so.<
There are plenty of people who acknowledge this, but they also tend to hold views that you would likely find abhorrent due to being "actually racist" or some such (for instance, desiring to not live around black people). Whereas your sphere is more likely to be populated by "anti-wokes" who are basically just pre-Trump liberals that didn't follow the rest of the left off the deep end.
The evidence provided by reality is that in any mixed-race society, racial differences will exist and cannot be removed by any means, and there does not seem to be any possible policy or intervention that can do anything about it except to make things worse as wokeness does. Thus the reality-based approach to racial differences can only be one of two things: Separatism, or just get over it and deal with it being a fact.
The through-line with gender insanity is the insistence that no, there *must* be a way to somehow "solve" this "problem" and make people equal. Just as gender ideologues are not content to simply deal with the physical reality that men and women are different, racial ideologues think likewise about ethnicity.
Richard - I think you would enjoy reading Lee Kuan Yew. Excerpt from "The Man and His Ideas":
---
I did the exact opposite
Having arrived reluctantly at the conclusion that the gap in performance between races would not be eliminated simply by providing the less well off with a head start through better educational and life opportunities, Lee did what would have been unthinkable to most politicians elsewhere - he went public, airing his observations and concerns before the whole country
Not for him the race-blind approach, which sought to gloss over ethnic differences, whether out of political expedience or ethnic guilt. For Lee, that was an exercise in self-deception, or worse, raising false expectations. Nor would he brook programmes such as affirmative action schemes which he saw as misguided attempts to hobble the more adept in society so that others might catch up. This,
he felt, would only hold the whole society back.
"I did the exact opposite. Once I discovered that special tuition, special food and all this did not produce the necessary result, I looked up the prewar records and I found the same weaknesses in mathematics and so on. So I decided: first, inform the leaders and the elders and inform the teachers, then publish it. So please, let there be no misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with discrimination or lack of support or whatever. It's a profound problem.
"The reasons why I did this are simple ones. This way, we are going to get results. The other way, we are going to confuse people and you're going to get wrong results. Now, I suppose maybe it's too touchy a problem to say this openly, but to pretend that we are all egual and therefore I am not in it because you have discriminated against my caste, so I need a quota - it's going to lead to very unhappy consequences ...
"I do not believe that the American system of solving the problem stands any chance. First, they deny that there is a difference between the blacks and the whites. Once you deny that, then you're caught in a bind. All right, if we are egual, then why am I now worse off? You have fixed me. The system has fixed me. So they say, right, let's go for affirmative action. Lower marks to go to university, and you must have a guota for number of salespersons or announcers on radio or TV. And so you get caught in a thousand and one different ways. And you say, since the army is now 30, 40 per cent blacks, you must have so many generals, so many colonels, and so on.
"I don't know how they have got into this bind, but I think that is not realistic. You don't have to offend people because they are not as good as you. I mean I'm not as smart as an Israeli or many Chinese for that matter. But that doesn't mean that I'm not to be treated as equal in my rights as a
human being.
"The only way we can all really be physiologically equal in brain power and everything else is to have a melange. All go into a melting pot and you stir it. In other words, force mixed marriages, which is what the people in Zanzibar tried. The blacks wanted to marry all the Arab girls so that the next generation, their children, will be half-Arab. But I don't think that's a practical way nor will it solve the problem. And you can't do that worldwide, you can - maybe you can do that in Zanzibar. In the process,
you diminish Zanzibar. Because whereas before you had some outstanding people who can do things for Zanzibar, now you have brought them down to a lower level.
"So my attitude now would be a very practical one of saying that we are equal human beings. Whether you can run 100 yards in 20 minutes, 20 seconds or 10 seconds, you've got a right to be here. But that doesn't mean that because you run at 20 seconds, I must run at 20 seconds. Then
we'll all get nowhere."
At some point you have to consider the possibility that the people who disagree with you are simply physically unable to perceive reality and or uninterested in it, as opposed to say being aspiring Bayesians aiming at the truth. Once you start modeling people as the former, many of their bizarre epistemic shortcomings seem to make a whole lot more sense.
Lol. I saw your tweet earlier about Rufo (where he mentioned David French) and was temporarily thrown off by the the content of this essay.
What's funny is you could STILL blame minorities committing more crimes, being arrested more, etc. on the "legacy of slavery" but it doesn't change the fact that depolicing has a really negative effect on minority communities. But you can't "listen to the people" on this issue because they aren't rational. Some twitter guy said it best: "People in minority communities want more policing, just not for their nephew who is really a good kid."
Williams misunderstands the crowd's reaction. I guarantee you, absolutely promise you, that a good 90% of those who "hissed" would do so if a White guy said the same thing. They're hissing because it's intensely anti-French (as a creed, not an ethnicity) to put one's race, sex, orientation, or whatever above the nation. If you are French, you are French. Hence the lack of race as an option on the census, etc.
You can say this is idealistic and isn't really true, but it's besides the point: the average French patriot wants it to be true, very much so.
"Not even anti-wokes seem comfortable acknowledging that yes, police might treat people of certain ethnic groups differently, but they are justified in doing so."
This. I am 100% comfortable believing and stating this fact. I grew up in an area that is roughly 50/50. You have a group of teens that have fuss fights in the hall that cause some hair pulling and fist fights if they feel whatever way that day. You have another group bringing razor blades to cut those they "feel" have caused them a problem that day. Everyone is getting suspended, but the group that's known to carry the razor blades is being searched in the mornings because the danger is on another level. It's justified until it changes. That's my belief.
The majority of American blacks have an identity centered around a quasi-religious narrative of being victims of omnipresent racial discrimination. Facts that contradict the narrative are rejected a priori. It's like trying to convince a young-earth creationist with evidence of evolution; their priors, all accepted "on faith" in advance or reason or evidence, won't allow them to consider the possibility that what you are saying could be true. Unfortunately, things have to get awful enough and people have to feel endangered enough for there to be any real change. But as quickly as things seem to be falling apart, we may get to that point in the next couple years.
I had to have a talk about the reality of race with my daughter recently. It’s not like kids don’t already notice racial group differences anyways. How could they not help but notice? These differences are even more pronounced at the meritocratic and highly selective high school she attends. At this school, there are a LOT of Asian students, quite a few whites students, and very few black students. Kids are going to construct a narrative to explain the differences that are plainly obvious, and I refuse to allow her understanding of these issues to only be shaped by the mainstream narrative of systemic racism and white supremacy. I simply told her the truth; there are innate differences among racial groups in intelligence, behavior, and ability. The world makes so much more sense when you understand and accept these facts, and I could see that this confirmed suspicions that she secretly had. I think it’s cruel to perpetuate lies about race. Everyone suffers as a result and society is destroyed with the futile attempts to attain equal outcomes.
Local police departments, at least for the time being, do publish crime data that all decent commentators do their absolute best never to mention publicly. For example, on page 16 of the St. Louis Police Department's annual report for 2020, 74 of 82 persons arrested for homicide were black (90%), while 263 of 290 arrests for robbery were black (also 90%). St. Louis is 43% black. I suppose the woke will insist that countless nonblack murderers and robbers avoid arrest, while countless black arrestees are innocent. Perhaps... Source: https://www.slmpd.org/images/2020_Annual_Report.pdf
"and Arabs, supposedly, though I suspect they’re just throw in to pretend this is a “brown” issue too"
Every French reader wet themselves with this line because for the vast majority of French northern Africans (maghrebin) are much more prominently "an issue" than black Africans.
In fairness to all parties, a lot of the issues are driven by the lack of economic opportunity caused by two main forces: one, and the dominant one, economic segregation which is caused by France's insanely "pro-worker" labour laws, which are arguably a crime against humanity, and two, a very degraded education system including an extreme lack of school choice for poor people.
The hostility of Black Africans and Magrehbis towards dominant French culture is ameliorated slightly by their ghettoization. It's counterintuitive but the segregation present in most cities means less scope for conflict.
Then again, geographic assimilation is increasing simply because the minority numbers are exploding, so oblivious BBRs will find themselves confronted sooner or later. We'll see if they can hold their nerve.
“Éric Zemmour was once even convicted of racist speech for defending the police by saying that most drug dealers are blacks or Arabs.”
So white people must lose their liberties to accommodate woke, egalitarian, multicultural, fantasies. But it’s not purely an ideological phenomenon; it’s also connected to the need to have to constantly smooth over the racial divisions that come from mass, non-white immigration. But this is the price that must be paid when you have a “cosmopolitan” elite that thinks the massive externalities that result from the loss of a homeland count for nothing.
It's not clear to me why we can't have Lee Kwan Yee's approach of frankness on race. Compared to current egalitarian ideology it would come across as harsh initially, but eventually we'd get used to it and perhaps even try to change to avoid some of the more negative and true nurture-related stereotypes.
https://lkyonrace.wordpress.com/
The lines:
“Point out a disparity, ignore obvious but unpleasant explanations, and jump to the conclusion that discrimination must be the cause. In the area of public policy, this is pretty much all wokeness is! Police arrest more black people, so police are the problem. Blacks score lower on all written tests, the tests are the problem. Blacks have less money, which means that capitalism….you get the point.”
I have never seen anyone put my, and others’, concern about left identitarianism in politics so succinctly and so well. Well done.
Surely there's some (constitutional, moral) limit to "I have to accept worse treatment because of my demographic's greater propensity towards violence," though? As a society we have norms around what the police can do if they have suspicion, vs. what they can do if they have probable cause, and of course we lock people up only after due process.
How often is it reasonable for a law-abiding person to be bothered by police? Whatever the amount, there's some level of proportionate (i.e. targets people at a rate proportional to their demographic's propensity to commit crime) police activity that would end up with law-abiding white Americans being under that level, and law-abiding black Americans being above that level.
I think it's very consistent to complain about, say, stop and frisk, even if the police are being proportionate as described above, if the end result is that many law-abiding black men are frequently harassed by police.
Also, given de facto segregation (not a factor for age or sex), normalizing this sort of proportionality is likely to have second-order effects. You would expect to further alienate law-abiding black residents from the police and the dominant culture. In fact, this is exactly what we see happening - despite being by far the biggest victims of black crime, black Americans (as you have pointed out) are leery about "tough on crime" policies.
(To be clear, I'm not talking about incarceration or arrests, but rather things like stop and frisk where a significant burden is borne by those who are under suspicion largely due to their demographics).
An alternative measure to your kind of proportionality would be "how often are we bothering innocent members (as determined after the fact) of a given demographic"? There are genuine costs imposed by policies with many false positives.
There was actually a very interesting studies run on police stop in Paris public transport system. The researchers observed who was stopped and gathered information about them.
It turns out that while people from arab and african origins where indeed stopped much more often than the average, that was mostly because the police was mostly stopping young men dressed in "youth culture" (hip hop, gothic, etc). A black or arab man dressed in a casual (but not urban / youth) way had a much lower chance to be arrested, not very different from the general population, and people from all origin wearing business attire were almost never arrested.
So indeed, police stop are not random, but africans and arabs are more likely to be arrested mostly because they have observable characteristics which trigger police stop.
Study in English is here for those interested : https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-population-2012-3-page-349.htm
>Not even anti-wokes seem comfortable acknowledging that yes, police might treat people of certain ethnic groups differently, but they are justified in doing so.<
There are plenty of people who acknowledge this, but they also tend to hold views that you would likely find abhorrent due to being "actually racist" or some such (for instance, desiring to not live around black people). Whereas your sphere is more likely to be populated by "anti-wokes" who are basically just pre-Trump liberals that didn't follow the rest of the left off the deep end.
The evidence provided by reality is that in any mixed-race society, racial differences will exist and cannot be removed by any means, and there does not seem to be any possible policy or intervention that can do anything about it except to make things worse as wokeness does. Thus the reality-based approach to racial differences can only be one of two things: Separatism, or just get over it and deal with it being a fact.
The through-line with gender insanity is the insistence that no, there *must* be a way to somehow "solve" this "problem" and make people equal. Just as gender ideologues are not content to simply deal with the physical reality that men and women are different, racial ideologues think likewise about ethnicity.