There’s a problem with saying that everyone is the same. We aren’t.
People are not interchangeable parts, but some want to treat us as if we were. Others want to _make_ us _be_ all the same.
We want equality under the law.
Jim Crow would not have lasted so long if it weren’t for the laws enforcing it. Remember what happened after the color barrier in baseball broke. Teams which would not hire top talent regardless of race lost out to those which would.
There are not only group differences, but more importantly, vast personal differences. Discrimination is key to our friend and mate selection, so why not make it completely legal for business as well? The market will find a way to ensure that all are served.
Personal differences vastly outweigh group differences, enough that group differences give no information about the individual in front of you, even with affirmative action muddying the waters.
This elides the useful distinction between the in group and the out group, which has nothing whatsoever to do with attributes and everything to do about which group a person is in. Only an economist who believes in a truly infinite world of limitless growth can imagine that treating people who are not my family the same way that I treat my family could possibly be good for my family. Let me just set a couple hundred more places at the Thanksgiving table this year. I'm sure there will be plenty to go around.
And yes of course I realize that Brian never reads the comments. Adds a Quixotic charm to leaving them.
> preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.
> "prejudice against people from different backgrounds"
I believe it is logically impossible to cause prejudice by making people focus on real group differences, and therefore logically impossible to cure prejudice by shrinking group differences. For if the opinion was caused by group differences, then it is not prejudice.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to virtue signal
I really genuinely honestly thought you were doing a parody :-)
> Workers of all races are equally productive
The 2SD IQ gap (30 points!) between blacks and Ashkenazi Jews begs to differ. A black can be more productive than an Ashkenazi Jew but the probabilities are very low, and that is what stereotypes allows us to handle extremely efficiently.
> Men and women have the same personalities and interests.
Are you kidding???? Men overwhelmingly prefer working with things and women prefer working with people. The effect on the jobs they chose is enormous and the segregation increases the freer the society. Few women sustain a hard core programmer job or jet pilot long time, their motivation is just too different from a technology obsessed men. Not to forget the serious handicaps that many women bring to the job of a monthly period, much lower strength, much higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism, emotional incontinence, pregnancy, less competitive, and a brain transformation after giving child birth that seriously degrades the attention level to business details. We are forced to pretend that these handicaps do not exist in the workplace but stereotypes tend to be true in most cases.
Additionally, the ever present sex drive will seriously affect the performance of any mixed group. I am not sure where you're hanging out but a male group gets a completely different dynamic if you add more than one woman. They can completely destroy the very effective fluid hierarchies based on competence that tend to be used by many male groups with a goal and that rarely occurs in all female groups.
> People from all countries make equally good citizens.
Unfortunately it doesn't. I am from the Netherlands and lived in Sweden and I can assure you the immigration from muslim countries seriously degraded the quality of our society. In 94, Sweden had the lowest criminality in Europe, it is now one of the highest after massive immigration.
> Marriage is just as worthwhile for gays as it is for straights.
This was never disagreed but we're not talking about the gain for the individuals, we talk about the effects on society. The opposition wanted to reserve marriage for heterosexual couples to promote and protect natural family forming. I don't recall there was a lot of opposition to forming civil unions between gays? When I see the bizarre things happening in the LGBTQIA2+ etc world then I think we could've stressed the intention of gay marriage a bit more. And I've always been in favor of gay marriage.
---
I do agree fully that we should treat people as individuals and stress our shared humanity. I also agree that the identity obsession of neo-racists and feminists, who take disparate impact as gospel, has corrupted the discussions. Color blindness was pretty cool but the neo-racists and feminists ensured that disparate impact became proof and thereby made objective testing illegal.
However, I think you completely forget the genes.
We are machines evolved to produce the next generation of us. Morality and ethics are highly influenced by the genetic connection. A lot of ethics are utterly confused by being too much in their head and not on the street talking to real people. Nature is horrendously cruel and there exists not fair objective scientific moral good, it is the genetic connection that is the measuring stick of good and bad. It might not be the morals you theoretically want but it are the morals you got to live with.
Think about a trolley problem and then displace one of the possible victims with your child. The moral clarity that suddenly flashes on the problem is stunning. My wife's brother and my brother got seriously sick last year. We both really love our brother's in law but the emotions around your own brother are quite a different level. Genes are awfully sticky.
Feminism has worked very hard to destroy a lot of the sticky genes in younger women and many women seem therefore to opt out of the reproducing game, choosing hedonism over motherhood. Where almost any groups prefer the in-group, white long educated women are the largest cause why the white group dislikes their in-group more than out-groups. An auto-immune disease if there is one.
In a good society, old men plant trees that they will never receive any shade from. Remove grand children and they will get the pop corn and watch Rome burning.
"Thus, the cleanest argument against race-based employment discrimination is, “Workers of all races are equally productive.” The cleanest argument against single-sex clubs is, “Men and women have the same personalities and interests.”"
This strikes me as exactly backwards: every single pro-discrimination person and organisation I know of uses the above statements as pro-discrimination arguments, i.e. "Men and women have the same personalities and interests yet industry X has more men, so there must be some invisible force conspiring against women. Hence diversity programs and other discriminatory hiring practices are justified as a way to restore justice"
There’s a problem with saying that everyone is the same. We aren’t.
People are not interchangeable parts, but some want to treat us as if we were. Others want to _make_ us _be_ all the same.
We want equality under the law.
Jim Crow would not have lasted so long if it weren’t for the laws enforcing it. Remember what happened after the color barrier in baseball broke. Teams which would not hire top talent regardless of race lost out to those which would.
There are not only group differences, but more importantly, vast personal differences. Discrimination is key to our friend and mate selection, so why not make it completely legal for business as well? The market will find a way to ensure that all are served.
Personal differences vastly outweigh group differences, enough that group differences give no information about the individual in front of you, even with affirmative action muddying the waters.
This elides the useful distinction between the in group and the out group, which has nothing whatsoever to do with attributes and everything to do about which group a person is in. Only an economist who believes in a truly infinite world of limitless growth can imagine that treating people who are not my family the same way that I treat my family could possibly be good for my family. Let me just set a couple hundred more places at the Thanksgiving table this year. I'm sure there will be plenty to go around.
And yes of course I realize that Brian never reads the comments. Adds a Quixotic charm to leaving them.
> prej·u·dice
> /ˈprejədəs/
> noun
> 1.
> preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.
> "prejudice against people from different backgrounds"
I believe it is logically impossible to cause prejudice by making people focus on real group differences, and therefore logically impossible to cure prejudice by shrinking group differences. For if the opinion was caused by group differences, then it is not prejudice.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to virtue signal
I really genuinely honestly thought you were doing a parody :-)
> Workers of all races are equally productive
The 2SD IQ gap (30 points!) between blacks and Ashkenazi Jews begs to differ. A black can be more productive than an Ashkenazi Jew but the probabilities are very low, and that is what stereotypes allows us to handle extremely efficiently.
> Men and women have the same personalities and interests.
Are you kidding???? Men overwhelmingly prefer working with things and women prefer working with people. The effect on the jobs they chose is enormous and the segregation increases the freer the society. Few women sustain a hard core programmer job or jet pilot long time, their motivation is just too different from a technology obsessed men. Not to forget the serious handicaps that many women bring to the job of a monthly period, much lower strength, much higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism, emotional incontinence, pregnancy, less competitive, and a brain transformation after giving child birth that seriously degrades the attention level to business details. We are forced to pretend that these handicaps do not exist in the workplace but stereotypes tend to be true in most cases.
Additionally, the ever present sex drive will seriously affect the performance of any mixed group. I am not sure where you're hanging out but a male group gets a completely different dynamic if you add more than one woman. They can completely destroy the very effective fluid hierarchies based on competence that tend to be used by many male groups with a goal and that rarely occurs in all female groups.
> People from all countries make equally good citizens.
Unfortunately it doesn't. I am from the Netherlands and lived in Sweden and I can assure you the immigration from muslim countries seriously degraded the quality of our society. In 94, Sweden had the lowest criminality in Europe, it is now one of the highest after massive immigration.
> Marriage is just as worthwhile for gays as it is for straights.
This was never disagreed but we're not talking about the gain for the individuals, we talk about the effects on society. The opposition wanted to reserve marriage for heterosexual couples to promote and protect natural family forming. I don't recall there was a lot of opposition to forming civil unions between gays? When I see the bizarre things happening in the LGBTQIA2+ etc world then I think we could've stressed the intention of gay marriage a bit more. And I've always been in favor of gay marriage.
---
I do agree fully that we should treat people as individuals and stress our shared humanity. I also agree that the identity obsession of neo-racists and feminists, who take disparate impact as gospel, has corrupted the discussions. Color blindness was pretty cool but the neo-racists and feminists ensured that disparate impact became proof and thereby made objective testing illegal.
However, I think you completely forget the genes.
We are machines evolved to produce the next generation of us. Morality and ethics are highly influenced by the genetic connection. A lot of ethics are utterly confused by being too much in their head and not on the street talking to real people. Nature is horrendously cruel and there exists not fair objective scientific moral good, it is the genetic connection that is the measuring stick of good and bad. It might not be the morals you theoretically want but it are the morals you got to live with.
Think about a trolley problem and then displace one of the possible victims with your child. The moral clarity that suddenly flashes on the problem is stunning. My wife's brother and my brother got seriously sick last year. We both really love our brother's in law but the emotions around your own brother are quite a different level. Genes are awfully sticky.
Feminism has worked very hard to destroy a lot of the sticky genes in younger women and many women seem therefore to opt out of the reproducing game, choosing hedonism over motherhood. Where almost any groups prefer the in-group, white long educated women are the largest cause why the white group dislikes their in-group more than out-groups. An auto-immune disease if there is one.
In a good society, old men plant trees that they will never receive any shade from. Remove grand children and they will get the pop corn and watch Rome burning.
"Thus, the cleanest argument against race-based employment discrimination is, “Workers of all races are equally productive.” The cleanest argument against single-sex clubs is, “Men and women have the same personalities and interests.”"
This strikes me as exactly backwards: every single pro-discrimination person and organisation I know of uses the above statements as pro-discrimination arguments, i.e. "Men and women have the same personalities and interests yet industry X has more men, so there must be some invisible force conspiring against women. Hence diversity programs and other discriminatory hiring practices are justified as a way to restore justice"