Scott Alexander wrote about “hyperstitious slurs” and reading it, it wasn’t a terrible point. I wondered, is hyperstition a thing that’s been around this whole time that I didn’t know about. I searched and found a blogpost linking to a Wikipedia article—so, oh, maybe it was. I follow the link and it redirects to Nick Land because of course it’s his neologism. Which is funny because I just learned about Land on this subreddit a few days ago.
That’s a very long winded way of stating the obvious idea of “words have meaning through peoples shared understanding of them” (therefore a true Scotty A blog post)
“…having established that, I will now proceed to find a marginally less dumb hill to die on!”
According to Scott Alexander, police departments get called racist unfairly because the unspoken truth you’re not allowed to mention is that black people commit more crime, and this holds true even if you adjust for poverty.
Conveniently, he leaves out any mention of systemic racism and redlining that make poor african americans worse off than their poor white counterparts, and, crucially, that nonviolent and even law abiding black people are statistically more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be harrassed when stopped, more likely to be arrested after harrassment, more likely to be convicted on the same charges in comparison to white criminals, and, again, given a harsher sentence FOR THE SAME CRIME. Scott Alexander looooves to write long ass posts, but none of this and another thousand things like it seem relevant or even worthy of mention to him when discussing crime and policing.
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Mr. Alexander just can’t help but insert a censorious SJW into his story about actual, literal racism. This once-neutral term became a slur, but it’s the fault of people who oppose racism and not the racist people, of course.
Search how many instances of the n-word are written out in those comments for a fun little game.
It actually is a terrible point, thanks for playing
I looked up the archive of the article from 2006 and it’s kind of hilarious.
AfD discussion from 2006.
https://mobile.twitter.com/doc_ochs/status/1630299217356009472
What these people think folks are angry about: not being able to call people Jap or retard because language changes over time.
What folks actually get angry about: academic dumbasses making up words because they can’t just use the ones that already fucking exist