Greg Lukianoff on speech suppression; Alexander Kruel on hate speech; Emil Kirkegaard on Palestinians; Noah Smith on China, Taiwan, and the U.S.; Glenn Reynolds on civil service
The problem with Alexander Kruel’s idea is that the Nazis (as an example) aren’t just self-identifying, they are recruiting. If they are allowed to speak openly without public shaming and shunning, their numbers will grow. I think it’s necessary for very bad ideas to be socially disallowed, especially among young people who look around them to calibrate their growing minds on what is normal and acceptable.
First, socially disallowed seems rather ambiguous to me but Kruel didn't say that. He said banned.
Yes, the danger you state is interesting and almost certainly true but free speech bans never stop with the worst and most dangerous speech. I suspect it wasn't by accident free speech was the first amendment.
I' pretty sure back in the ?60s?, ACLU fought to allow Nazis to demonstrate.
True. It gets messy. But let’s stick with the Nazi example. It’s not illegal to talk like a Nazi but if you wear a Nazi arm band to school you will likely get sent home. That’s as it should be. Effectively banned. The state is not the only or best cultural force for banning bad ideas.
It seems to me calling them Nazis obfuscates rather than clarifies. It makes it about European guilt rather than a Muslim responsibility. You’ve already lost the plot if you placate in this way. Now I’m not saying that is not by design, or a good thing to do if your culture is kaput - you don’t allow millions of Muslims into Europe without knowing what you’re about, and a good deal of self-loathing - but it doesn’t reflect a willingness to acknowledge what the future is going to look like.
I don’t know. A Google search brings up lots of hits on school district dress codes, and multiple cases of teachers and principal getting in trouble or being fired for allowing a student to wear Nazi paraphernalia.
Recruiting people to your POV is the entire point speaking to other people.
I dont see how your arguement applies any differently to any speech.
“We can’t let anti-maskers speak because they might recruit others and that is literal murder.”
I recall quite a bit about of shaming and shunning on that and many other things.
To become popular enough to take power (receive 4x% of the vote and maneuver around a dying old man and an already authoritarian constitution) the nazies needed their country to lose a world war, suffer hyper inflation, peak at the height of the Great Depression, and have most of societies gatekeepers afraid an even crazier group would take over (communists) without them.
That’s a lot. I really don’t think we need to be worried about that right now.
True. The culture needs to have some mechanism for promoting good and kicking evil to the sidelines. That is as it should be. The real problem comes when we can no longer distinguish between the two. For example, mistaking red / blue tribal political axes (or mask/ no mask) with the good / evil axis. A culture with skewed moral bearings is in trouble.
I would say conservatives aren't just self-identifying, they are recruiting, too- or progressives, or libertarians, etc. However, I think you are conflating shaming and shunning with banning, which seems inappropriate here.
Your reaction to Reynolds illustrates exactly why Lukianoff has it backwards. Trust in "experts" (that is, the credentialed class) is a bad idea that *should* be undermined. From Covid to environmental and war policy, our present system, both public and private, is chock full of "experts" whose advice is leading us to ruin.
I'm pretty sure I saw Kirkegaard's data on Palestinians in Denmark in a comment on one of your posts near a week ago. I was skeptical then and remain so. It reminds me of the meme about how many in Congress went bankrupt, were convicted felons, etc. That one wasn't true, This one might be but I need to know where he got that data because I'm not taking his word for it and you shouldn't either.
Who followed them?
What is "a very large portion" on welfare and why isn't it expressed as a number?
What is "a large chunk" on welfare and, again, why isn't it expressed as a number?
From what I've seen, Kirkegaard has an unusual amount of actual racist bias for an online "heterodox" writer. That doesn't make everything he says automatically wrong but it should give people pause.
As I mentioned elsewhere, it's not at all clear Kirkegaard has real data. There's no indication of a source, some has numbers, some has vague descriptions. Could be real but has many indicators of being fake.
In Sweden a majority of rapes (presumably other serious crimes if I looked it up) are committed by foreign born (mostly Middle East). Despite being a minority of the population. Basically, it seems like ME immigrants are at least as bad as African Americans in terms of order of magnitude worse on just about everything.
1/3 of adult black males in America have a felony conviction. That isn't 60%, but it's a lot closer to 60% when the white rate is to 33%. It's one of those things where the statistics are so bad that you could half them and it wouldn't really change the answer to the question "do you want these people in your country?"
"The per-capita offending rate for African-Americans was roughly eight times higher than that of whites, and their victim rate was similar."
It has only gotten worse since then due to Black Lives Matter.
If I whip out bell curve statistics with 100 vs 85 means and 15 STD, it doesn't take long to get 10:1 or even higher ratios. Given that the bottom of the bell curve is where most problems originate and the top is where most progress originates, that isn't good for blacks.
2.28% of the white population is IQ 130+
0.13% of the black population is. That is 17:1.
It is virtually impossible to state how big the gap is. If it really were just a 2-3x thing we wouldn't have the problems we have.
Ok. I was making a ballpark estimate based mainly on murder and I off a bit on murder. But it turns out I wasn't off overall. At least not by what I found in the FBI report you mention.
Robbery is the only other offense that blacks are arrested more than whites and again by a small margin so not much more than 5X. Overall, whites are arrested (not traffic offense) more than 2.5x as many times as blacks. At 5x the population that means a black person is a shade less than twice as likely to be arrested.
I don't know if this is accounted for but e.g. in Chicago (the article knows where to place the blame so hopefully this won't be seen as intrinsically biased): "In 2021, there were 800 homicides counted. The clearance rate by prosecution was 21.7% in predominately Black neighborhoods, yet 45.6% in predominantly White neighborhoods. The study also found that since 2001, the rate of unsolved homicides for Black women is at 35% compared to 23% for White women.
Artinese Myrick, the lead Chicago organizer with Live Free Chicago, points to both a lack of trust between communities and law enforcement and a lack of care given to Black communities from law enforcement when dealing with homicides."
"White" in a lot of official statistics includes "Hispanics". Sometimes they break out the white statistic by "ethnicity", sometimes they don't.
Race of Offender in murder is listed as 2,948 white.
However, looking at white victims (probably the best for determining how much of white is Hispanic) breaking it down that's 738 Hispanic, 1,542 Not Hispanic, and 1,019 Unknown. Unknown probably just means they don't have a data point, so we should use the split on the known ones. That means that white crimes are really 1/3 Hispanic (probably more because Hispanic on white likely outnumbers white on Hispanic).
Note that black victim has hardly any Hispanics, which shows that its a good metric.
Blacks as Offender is 3,218. White as offender is likely 2,984 * 2/3 ~ 2,000
You're committing the same kinds of statistical fallacies as Kirkegaard with these comparisons. "Ever convicted of a felony" is very different from "currently incarcerated" (the percentage of black men currently incarcerated is ~1.8%). If one is talking about a population which is 60% currently incarcerated, there's no way that population isn't vastly unrepresentative of whatever group we're talking about.
Edit: Oops my bad, he's talking about ever incarcerated, not currently incarcerated.
I don’t have much familiarity with him - I don’t have twitter and yes I know about nitter but it turns out you only need a small barrier to quit bothering with something like that - but I will say a culture that mandates “love” and admiration for certain groups qua groups, as ours very definitely does - (my husband gets a firm wide email blast enforcing this weekly) - even veering into deification, is begging to call up an equal and opposite response. I don’t really think it could be otherwise and I’d be sorry if there was no pushback. Could the pushback be prettier? I am not sure.
ETA: of course the original animating impulse is just as ugly. We pretend it’s not, but it is. It is really hatred, expressed in relief.
I don't understand why we don't have more leverage with Jordan; we aren't late with the payments as far as I know.
I guess there is almost a feeling of - the one vaguely *good* and stable and not overtly-hostile Arab country - we don't want to upset the apple cart by adding more Arabs to the place. But surely that's ridiculous.
The first lady of Jordan is Palestinian. None of these borders means a damn thing historically so why can't Jordan "be" Palestine once and for all?
It seems like the place where resentment could in theory be replaced by aspiration.
There is already a branch of the U.S. federal government where all of the staff involved in making policy are at-will employees: Congress. I have worked both in Congress and in the executive branch, and can report that it is not obvious that Congress works better.
On another point, Arnold, if you wan to reduce the burden of moderating, I suggest that you require people, or at least nonsubscribers, to use their real names. In my view, the costs of wading through the stupid things that people would otherwise not post outweigh the benefits of the candor of anonymity.
As I wrote on Glenns substack, and Ramaswamy advocates, best fast improvement of civil service is an 8 year term limit for bureaucrats.
It doesn't take long to learn to do most gov't jobs fairly well - and even 20 years isn't enough to know ALL the regulations in most regulatory agencies.
We need a LOT more turnover - probably best to explicitly support hiring older, more mature folk with non-gov't experience, like 20 years or more before joining the civil service. For their last 8 years? So folk at 55 or 60?
Regarding the countless college kids ironically parading around in their fashionably adorned, pop-culture outfits and T-shirts, celebrating the Hamas insanity with their fists in the air: I agree, these kids should not be cancelled - thanks for including this link to consider.
The problem with Alexander Kruel’s idea is that the Nazis (as an example) aren’t just self-identifying, they are recruiting. If they are allowed to speak openly without public shaming and shunning, their numbers will grow. I think it’s necessary for very bad ideas to be socially disallowed, especially among young people who look around them to calibrate their growing minds on what is normal and acceptable.
(Yes, I know my conservative axis is showing.)
"aren’t just self-identifying, they are recruiting. If they are allowed to speak openly without public shaming and shunning, their numbers will grow."
That is an interesting argument to ponder. Not saying that I agree with it.
First, socially disallowed seems rather ambiguous to me but Kruel didn't say that. He said banned.
Yes, the danger you state is interesting and almost certainly true but free speech bans never stop with the worst and most dangerous speech. I suspect it wasn't by accident free speech was the first amendment.
I' pretty sure back in the ?60s?, ACLU fought to allow Nazis to demonstrate.
True. It gets messy. But let’s stick with the Nazi example. It’s not illegal to talk like a Nazi but if you wear a Nazi arm band to school you will likely get sent home. That’s as it should be. Effectively banned. The state is not the only or best cultural force for banning bad ideas.
Kruel was talking about banning pro-Hamas rallies. I have difficulty connecting that with not being able to wear a Nazi arm band to school.
It seems to me calling them Nazis obfuscates rather than clarifies. It makes it about European guilt rather than a Muslim responsibility. You’ve already lost the plot if you placate in this way. Now I’m not saying that is not by design, or a good thing to do if your culture is kaput - you don’t allow millions of Muslims into Europe without knowing what you’re about, and a good deal of self-loathing - but it doesn’t reflect a willingness to acknowledge what the future is going to look like.
I don’t know. A Google search brings up lots of hits on school district dress codes, and multiple cases of teachers and principal getting in trouble or being fired for allowing a student to wear Nazi paraphernalia.
Consider Timur Kuran's Preference Cascade / Falsification. Suppression prevents common knowledge as regards widespread support, keeping people's heads down.
I was wondering what Kruel was referring to. I'm guessing it was this. Either way, thanks for the details.
Recruiting people to your POV is the entire point speaking to other people.
I dont see how your arguement applies any differently to any speech.
“We can’t let anti-maskers speak because they might recruit others and that is literal murder.”
I recall quite a bit about of shaming and shunning on that and many other things.
To become popular enough to take power (receive 4x% of the vote and maneuver around a dying old man and an already authoritarian constitution) the nazies needed their country to lose a world war, suffer hyper inflation, peak at the height of the Great Depression, and have most of societies gatekeepers afraid an even crazier group would take over (communists) without them.
That’s a lot. I really don’t think we need to be worried about that right now.
True. The culture needs to have some mechanism for promoting good and kicking evil to the sidelines. That is as it should be. The real problem comes when we can no longer distinguish between the two. For example, mistaking red / blue tribal political axes (or mask/ no mask) with the good / evil axis. A culture with skewed moral bearings is in trouble.
Eh, to be honest I thought the mask people were evil. At least in certain circumstances (what they put small children through for instance).
"A culture with skewed moral bearings is in trouble."
Sure, but that's all the more reason not to trust censorship if the censors have skewed moral bearings.
I would say conservatives aren't just self-identifying, they are recruiting, too- or progressives, or libertarians, etc. However, I think you are conflating shaming and shunning with banning, which seems inappropriate here.
Your reaction to Reynolds illustrates exactly why Lukianoff has it backwards. Trust in "experts" (that is, the credentialed class) is a bad idea that *should* be undermined. From Covid to environmental and war policy, our present system, both public and private, is chock full of "experts" whose advice is leading us to ruin.
Of course if Smith gets his way on the decoupling thing, it will weaken deterrence with China since the price of starting a war will effectively drop.
I'm pretty sure I saw Kirkegaard's data on Palestinians in Denmark in a comment on one of your posts near a week ago. I was skeptical then and remain so. It reminds me of the meme about how many in Congress went bankrupt, were convicted felons, etc. That one wasn't true, This one might be but I need to know where he got that data because I'm not taking his word for it and you shouldn't either.
Who followed them?
What is "a very large portion" on welfare and why isn't it expressed as a number?
What is "a large chunk" on welfare and, again, why isn't it expressed as a number?
What’s wrong about Emil’s post? Is there any unselected Arab population that doesn’t perform very badly?
I get that Isreal would like to dump this problem on someone else. Egypt and Jordan are too smart for it. I hope the west is too.
But badly like 60 percent in jail badly?
From what I've seen, Kirkegaard has an unusual amount of actual racist bias for an online "heterodox" writer. That doesn't make everything he says automatically wrong but it should give people pause.
As I mentioned elsewhere, it's not at all clear Kirkegaard has real data. There's no indication of a source, some has numbers, some has vague descriptions. Could be real but has many indicators of being fake.
In Sweden a majority of rapes (presumably other serious crimes if I looked it up) are committed by foreign born (mostly Middle East). Despite being a minority of the population. Basically, it seems like ME immigrants are at least as bad as African Americans in terms of order of magnitude worse on just about everything.
1/3 of adult black males in America have a felony conviction. That isn't 60%, but it's a lot closer to 60% when the white rate is to 33%. It's one of those things where the statistics are so bad that you could half them and it wouldn't really change the answer to the question "do you want these people in your country?"
Differences in US whites and blacks are mostly in the 2 to 3x range so they'd be closer to the same than an order of magnitude.
No.
According to the 2019 FBI Uniform Crime Report:
"The per-capita offending rate for African-Americans was roughly eight times higher than that of whites, and their victim rate was similar."
It has only gotten worse since then due to Black Lives Matter.
If I whip out bell curve statistics with 100 vs 85 means and 15 STD, it doesn't take long to get 10:1 or even higher ratios. Given that the bottom of the bell curve is where most problems originate and the top is where most progress originates, that isn't good for blacks.
2.28% of the white population is IQ 130+
0.13% of the black population is. That is 17:1.
It is virtually impossible to state how big the gap is. If it really were just a 2-3x thing we wouldn't have the problems we have.
Ok. I was making a ballpark estimate based mainly on murder and I off a bit on murder. But it turns out I wasn't off overall. At least not by what I found in the FBI report you mention.
USAFacts says there a shade less than 5X whites than blacks in 2021. Use 5X. https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/
According to that FBI report you cite, blacks are arrested for slightly more murders and negligent homicides than whites so a black person commits murder at a bit more than 5x the rate of a white. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-43
Robbery is the only other offense that blacks are arrested more than whites and again by a small margin so not much more than 5X. Overall, whites are arrested (not traffic offense) more than 2.5x as many times as blacks. At 5x the population that means a black person is a shade less than twice as likely to be arrested.
I don't know if this is accounted for but e.g. in Chicago (the article knows where to place the blame so hopefully this won't be seen as intrinsically biased): "In 2021, there were 800 homicides counted. The clearance rate by prosecution was 21.7% in predominately Black neighborhoods, yet 45.6% in predominantly White neighborhoods. The study also found that since 2001, the rate of unsolved homicides for Black women is at 35% compared to 23% for White women.
Artinese Myrick, the lead Chicago organizer with Live Free Chicago, points to both a lack of trust between communities and law enforcement and a lack of care given to Black communities from law enforcement when dealing with homicides."
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
"White" in a lot of official statistics includes "Hispanics". Sometimes they break out the white statistic by "ethnicity", sometimes they don't.
Race of Offender in murder is listed as 2,948 white.
However, looking at white victims (probably the best for determining how much of white is Hispanic) breaking it down that's 738 Hispanic, 1,542 Not Hispanic, and 1,019 Unknown. Unknown probably just means they don't have a data point, so we should use the split on the known ones. That means that white crimes are really 1/3 Hispanic (probably more because Hispanic on white likely outnumbers white on Hispanic).
Note that black victim has hardly any Hispanics, which shows that its a good metric.
Blacks as Offender is 3,218. White as offender is likely 2,984 * 2/3 ~ 2,000
2,000 / 5= 400. 3,218 / 400 ~ 8.
You're committing the same kinds of statistical fallacies as Kirkegaard with these comparisons. "Ever convicted of a felony" is very different from "currently incarcerated" (the percentage of black men currently incarcerated is ~1.8%). If one is talking about a population which is 60% currently incarcerated, there's no way that population isn't vastly unrepresentative of whatever group we're talking about.
Edit: Oops my bad, he's talking about ever incarcerated, not currently incarcerated.
I don’t have much familiarity with him - I don’t have twitter and yes I know about nitter but it turns out you only need a small barrier to quit bothering with something like that - but I will say a culture that mandates “love” and admiration for certain groups qua groups, as ours very definitely does - (my husband gets a firm wide email blast enforcing this weekly) - even veering into deification, is begging to call up an equal and opposite response. I don’t really think it could be otherwise and I’d be sorry if there was no pushback. Could the pushback be prettier? I am not sure.
ETA: of course the original animating impulse is just as ugly. We pretend it’s not, but it is. It is really hatred, expressed in relief.
"Is there any unselected Arab population that doesn’t perform very badly?"
I don't have the data handy but unlike Europe, Arabs in US are on average better educated and higher income than whites of European origin.
One of the early Freakonomics podcast (~#130?) Is on how well Lebanese are doing in US.
Arabs in the US are selected. They come from across the Ocean by legal means.
Arabs in Europe are unselected. They come over in rafts illegally.
I don't understand why we don't have more leverage with Jordan; we aren't late with the payments as far as I know.
I guess there is almost a feeling of - the one vaguely *good* and stable and not overtly-hostile Arab country - we don't want to upset the apple cart by adding more Arabs to the place. But surely that's ridiculous.
The first lady of Jordan is Palestinian. None of these borders means a damn thing historically so why can't Jordan "be" Palestine once and for all?
It seems like the place where resentment could in theory be replaced by aspiration.
I don't really pay attention of care about the Middle East, but I think Palestinian refugees tried to overthrow the government at some point.
There is already a branch of the U.S. federal government where all of the staff involved in making policy are at-will employees: Congress. I have worked both in Congress and in the executive branch, and can report that it is not obvious that Congress works better.
On another point, Arnold, if you wan to reduce the burden of moderating, I suggest that you require people, or at least nonsubscribers, to use their real names. In my view, the costs of wading through the stupid things that people would otherwise not post outweigh the benefits of the candor of anonymity.
As I wrote on Glenns substack, and Ramaswamy advocates, best fast improvement of civil service is an 8 year term limit for bureaucrats.
It doesn't take long to learn to do most gov't jobs fairly well - and even 20 years isn't enough to know ALL the regulations in most regulatory agencies.
We need a LOT more turnover - probably best to explicitly support hiring older, more mature folk with non-gov't experience, like 20 years or more before joining the civil service. For their last 8 years? So folk at 55 or 60?
Regarding the countless college kids ironically parading around in their fashionably adorned, pop-culture outfits and T-shirts, celebrating the Hamas insanity with their fists in the air: I agree, these kids should not be cancelled - thanks for including this link to consider.
A system where the president appoint whom he wants without reference to competence is not a system where the president is accountable. Ask Xi...