Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort)

A guy followed a mother around with his camera while she tried to get away from him and told her to say “nigger” over and over, and when she finally does it that’s apparently a crime. Completely absurd and unacceptable. She must appeal and we must fund it. No magic word crimes.

I fell for a lot of progressive nonsense, and hard. I was literally trans. But two things I can honestly say I never fell for were 1. alternative ways of knowing. Science obviously works, and it’s hard to even coherently describe an alternative. What, you aren’t taking in data or trying to parse it without contradiction? What are you even talking about? I was a new atheist technocratic progressive, and thought the extent to which other groups failed at scientific thinking was a result of disadvantage, but never that scientific thinking itself was bad. Same with everything on that smithsonian chart (being on time etc) 2. Strong anti-hereditarianism. I believed racial average differences were due to discrimination (to the extent I thought about the issue at all, which was infrequently) but the belief that *all* human cognitive differences, even within groups, are due to upbringing was always just facially absurd. There exists such a thing as a smart person, and there are aspects of it that clearly aren’t about education. They talk faster. They’re funnier. They learn *new* concepts faster. Their questions are sharper. It’s textural. It’s visceral. I didn’t know anything about psychometrics or the hereditarian debate at this point. It’s just obvious if you’ve met three humans and are honest.

Do these people not believe in genetics at all? Forget any racial angle, this sounds like a complete denial that genes determine anything significant about human behavior/capabilities. I guess Brock Lesnar has a giant muscly daughter because he gave her weights instead of dolls.

The Nowak case clearly highlights that we need to stop treating racism as an ~infinite evil, not because Nowak was racist (no evidence of this) but because any time you create a social superweapon like accusations of racism are now, it’ll be misused horribly. What is racism? Ask 10 people and you’ll get 12 opinions. Historically, it meant someone who treats people badly in interpersonal interactions because of their race. Which is just, like, kinda annoying and slightly boorish. It’s not the apocalypse. There are many personal traits that are equally or more annoying. Now the definition has been ludicrously expanded to include a bunch of things even less objectionable than that, including belief in very plausible scientific claims and policy preferences that were near-universal for almost all of human history. Racism just isn’t a big deal. We have to take it off its pedestal. If Nowak had said something racist, it would morally change exactly nothing about the horror of what happened to him. He didn’t, but I feel over-focusing on that distracts from the fact that it wouldn’t matter if he had. Murder is worse than racism. Hell, shoplifting is worse than racism. Enough. Who cares.