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Third, the argument from dementia: we don’t approach the problem in a systematic way, we don’t learn from our failures, and we don’t even keep track of what’s been tried or what the outcomes were. The realities of politics, policy, media narratives and public attention span and engagement mean that there is no consistent train of thought, no effective accumulation of experience. People can and do spend their whole lives pushing solutions that were proved to be a dead-end a generation ago. For obvious reasons, this makes the previous problems much worse. It’s not just that we’re stuck in a maze, and it’s not just that the maze is extremely vast, it’s that we aren’t capable of remembering what turns we took. For an example, look at the ubiquitous claims that bad educational outcomes are caused by differences in school funding between majority-white and majority-black schools. Note, halfway down that article, the following sentence:

The analysis does not include federal dollars, much of which is targeted to the poorest communities.

You will find a similar sentence in most articles on this subject, because those federal dollars completely close the gap. Less educational funding for black students looked like an obvious example of low-hanging fruit, so we fixed it by using federal money to compensate for differences in local funding from disparate tax bases. Only, the disparate outcomes didn’t go away, and so people willfully ignore that the solution they’re advocating has already failed.

Classic rationalist approach to existing work: engaging only so far as picking out a sentence in a Washington Post article that the literally simplest solution - just throwing money at the problem - doesn’t work. No engagement with studies on the effects of state and city-level racial segregation in housing, redlining in finance services, etc. to life outcomes for black Americans. I’m sure if the term “institutional racism” pops up, the author will dismiss it as a, probably ‘radical,’ political narrative rather than a point of sustained, systematic research in sociology, or dismiss it as unsystematic by an incorrigible standard.

A key skill in the narcissistic complex of the internet ‘rationalist’ is maintaining and leveraging ignorance on whatever matter to service one’s own prejudices.

Dutch experiment in ubibwas declared a failure because just giving money didnt inprove economic prospects (aka didnt get people job (no idea why people didnt talk about other aspects, well neoliberalism prob)) what everybody ignored (because the media didnt report it, and nobody bothered to read the research) was that when it wasnt just money given, but it also included personal help there was a small but positive benefit. To quote one of the sociologists doing the study, 'this stuff is complex'. While this is not comparable to racial differences in the us (the study was done one people who were out of a job for a long time), it does show how attempts at helping people gets interpreted by the media/public vs actual researchers.
If they were serious about measuring the impact of every attempted solution and holding it up to a standard of creating total equality, they wouldn't be able to escape the conclusion that only significant reparations combined with decommodification of necessities is the minimum program that can feasibly create equal outcomes.
communism killed bajillion people, this is very weakman

Every now and then I take a serious look at the motte and I realize the discourse in it is disconnected from reality. To posters in the motte, Flynn was set up by the FBI, the Mueller report cleared Trump of wrong doing, the founding myths of America are true and essential to the country, whites are being repressed, and thousands have died in the recent protests. This is just another example of the way they treat completely ignore reality and makeup their own that supports their racist views. And of course they have to spend thousands of words to do so because if you make 14 words take a thousand it’s not racist and it magically becomes charitable and fair. In this posters case they somehow think that there was totally a good faith effort to help black communities and not an equal or greater effort by racists to hurt them. And of course as a result they think it’s time to stop trying to help black communities because it’s hurting conservatives.

If there is one reason I do like reading the motte, it’s that in their crazy worldview conservatism and the social fabric is coming unraveled. It gives me hope to know that they feel like the racist social fabric that has privileged them is coming undone.

>And of course as a result they think it’s time to stop trying to help black communities because it’s hurting conservatives. More specifically, it hurts Conservatives feelings. Bernie Sanders didn't propose Medicare For All Blacks, he proposed Medicare For All.
It proves that the more educated and informed most people are, the more they spend effort trying to justify their gut feelings, they aren’t actually any better at critical thinking.

As nobody in themotte is in any position to change any of this, I wonder what the real reason is for typing this all up this whole ‘it is a folley to try and help the untermensch, mein freunde. It is sad but this attempt at improving their lot is destroying our social bonds’. 🤔

Democracy? I mean if we lived in a dictatorship, it wouldn't matter what anyone thought.

Yes, America has been earnestly trying so hard to help the black community for the better part of a century.

Redlining? Trying to help the black community.

GI Bill is only for whites? Trying to help the black community.

Poll taxes? Trying to help the black community.

War on Drugs? Clearly trying to better the QoL of disadvantaged minorities by cleaning up their communities /s
War on Terror this War on Poverty that, I just wanna drone strike some drug-addled dirt-poor Afghani women for God's sake.
No he literally makes that argument too
Honestly the worst part of poll taxes I recently learned about was the fact that some states required you to pay poll taxes for that year and *all previous years you missed*. So, if you’re unable to pay it for five years, but your situation gets better, you’ll still have to pay 6x the normal amount to vote and receive all the benefits of being a citizen, such as being able to drive.

Bro I ain’t reading that

You are not not missing much. In imitation of their heroes like Scott Alexander and Mencius Moldbug, they use thousands of words to say 14.
1488 words you say?
The goal is to say a lot of wrong things in the hopes that their critics will get irate and try to pick one minor point to argue with, at which point the author will Reddit-lawyer them to death.
You get the gist from the first few overbearing and lofty sentences. Basically, this person believes nothing in the past has worked to even put the wealth gap so why bother trying anything at all?
Seems like they have to pad out the word count to get to 2 pages double-spaced for their racism essay. These faux intellectuals think more words=more smart when it’s just a lot of fancy ways to say “I don’t care for black folks”.
Deleting words is woke censorship. You should never delete words, even if you just discovered that you accidentally said the same thing twice. What im saying is, only the woke use editors, or edit down how much they type. Which is censorship. E: forgot to say censorship is bad

I like how the ultimate conclusion almost seems to be that the solution is for there to be no more conservatives.

I guess the author meant for that to be a horrible scenario, but I like it.

Why are there so many straight up proper conservatives on the motte? Isn’t ssc supposed to be largely socially left, libertarian folks? With a dash of HBD racism? Increasingly I see posts mostly from “red tribe” folks , not the typical disillusioned “blue tribe” people. I genuinely feel like there’s large scale radicalization going on in there

Because there is a certain tone in rationalism that appeals to the young, educated man. It makes them feel smarter than everyone else on the internet. They feel that (and this is somewhat justified) they were once at the top of the social order and their cultural status is threatened. They have an interest in remaining at the top which starts to lead them down the conservative path. So they spend a lot of their intellectual energy pushing back against anything that promotes bigger roles in society for women and minorities. They will claim that the science supports them and shrug their shoulders when anyone else pushes for social equality. They don’t “hate” minorities, but they will calmly claim use cherry picked science to defend existing power structures. It’s basically a defensive position in the face of changing attitudes and demographics. It’s aggression clothed in cold logic and disregard for human beings as individuals.
Because "socially left, libertarian" is at best an unstable equilibrium or at worst a dishonest cover, but never a true sustainable political position. Libertarians are better understood as "indulgent conservatives" - they don't *like* minority groups, they just don't see using the state against them as practical. The state is the beast, and for all that it is useful in (as one Trump supporter famously put it) "hurting the right people", it has lashed out at conservatives enough times that some of them don't trust it. They'd rather get by on the old boy's club than the law, and thus you have libertarians. But when the influence of the old boy's club is challenged as well, by "woke" and "SJWs", those same people realize that they've made a loser's bet - and so they come crawling back to Mother Government, begging for a drop of social conservatism for her prodigal sons.
it was always fake; same principle as the kotaku in action boys screaming that they're "the true liberals" as they argue for beheading whatever woman the video game clerics on youtube are targeting this week