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May 2
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Yuck. My feeling is that I want all entities granted with special authority (Government, employer, school/teacher during my school-years) as far as possible from my personal life. I just do not want to pollute personal life where relations are (or should be) as symmetric as possible by mixing entities whose relations to you are by definition asymmetric. Structurally asymmetric.

This is (was?) the whole justification behind anti-harassment laws. And now you want to put companies back in your inner circle? Those are not friends, they never were and if anything, there are less and less so in the modern world. They are not even human.

The only exception is parents when I was a child, a relation both asymmetric and personal...which should be a recipe for very bad outcomes. It sometimes is, but fortunately most of the time our instincts and genetic altruism (Hamilton rule) makes it work.

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This is a really good comment -- appreciate your perspective.

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> I’ve worked at 90%+ white places that didn’t care about diversity and those are the ones where there is no company loyalty or friendship and everyone is just trying to get as much money as possible before they’re pushed out.

It's perhaps at this point that we should remember Sturgeon's law: 99% of everything is shit.

If Wokism is the majority, then 99% of Woke companies is shit. If 1950s style mad men corporations is the majority, then 99% of 1950s style mad men is shit. When a society is religious, the 99% of all shit is the traditional pathologies and failure cases of religion, like discrimination against women and obsession with taboos. When a society is secular, 99% of all shit is the traditional pathologies and failure cases of secularism, like atomized individuals with no communal support networks and obsession with secular taboos.

The majority - simply by being a majority - incurs a penalty against itself: It's the default. All of its nakedness is visible like nothing else, all of its flaws amplified.

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Yes, I've worked at such places too. As long as you don't mind walking around with a metaphorical gun to the back of your head ensuring that you don't say anything even slightly unwoke according to constantly changing rules designed by mentally ill people on social media, then sure, the camaraderie is great. There's lots of camaraderie in prison camps, too.

>mediocre white men

Speaking of which, please keep the racism down to a dull roar, thanks?

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May 1
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I disagree. Scott's style is awesome.

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Right - he is an engaging writer, and his meanders are a good thing to read when one is stuck in a queue.

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Scott's writing style is why I've been reading his writing for the last decade, not everyone has to like it.

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> A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days.

I'm unable to parse this sentence. Is there a word missing after "would"? Or it referencing back to something I'm missing?

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He's imitating a pause in speech where he changes his mind mid sentence, for rhetorical effect. Imagine the dash was a period and the first sentence was just left unfinished.

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For Scott: if that was your intent, the way I do this is I make su-- well, I add the dash to a partially-completed word that's part of a natural sequence of words so that it's obvious I've stopped mid-thought and started anew.

So in this case, I might say "A book on Civil Rights Law is Bad would be a terrib-- okay, I admit...."

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Please don't do that, Scott. I could understand you just fine.

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It's correct though (well using an actual em dash instead of two hyphens)

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The kind of dash is a completely separate issue. I don't think that matters either.

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That's overdoing it on a blog post. On Twitter or something it would be fine.

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I thought the point was that he had no idea at all what it would do, so there's no word to start

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Thanks for clarifying!

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> the article links to another famous case, where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application

Does anyone have a link to this? I did some searching and couldn't find any concrete references/credible sources. Just some off-handed remarks but no actual case history.

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Ain't it funny how these "travesties" are never quite as simple as they're portrayed by the anti-woke crowd? Yet hardly anyone is prepared to do the investigative work to arrive at something approximating truth when it's so much easier and more entertaining to just keep repeating anecdotes that make their way around the internet. Oy vey.

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What was the relevant difference between that link and the earlier summary?

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Relevant difference? Tricky question - we can factually say that Scott got the gender of the purported Hispanic female wrong, but the relevance would seem to be that it is a "famous" case that nobody seems to have a great link to, and so resists any sort of validation. Journalistic stealth edits make things a little tricky; easy to see that Scott has now dropped some of the editorializing and added that link to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, but I don't see the link from the previously-mentioned Washington Examiner article. Might've been there before, or maybe I'm just blind?

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It seems to me that Scott's summary was pretty fair. The most substantial gap seems to be that the Obama-era agency didn't single out this particular applicant, it's just that the change they were demanding would require the events planner to not treat attempted murder plus lying about it as a negative, at all, and there was at least one applicant who fits that example. But doesn't this point still stand?

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[Puts on Morpheus dark glasses]

What if I told you that was true of almost all "travesties" pushed for ideological purposes?

(Example: The details of the Michael Brown shooting.)

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The McDonald's hot coffee case is a great example: turns out the coffee was literally scalding and caused third degree burns and the company had been warned about the problem hundreds of times!

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Right. And, that most of the elderly plaintiff's damages award was thrown out by the judge anyway. She ended up actually getting her direct medical bills covered plus not much more.

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Liebeck v. McDonald's has resulted in a fascinating "backlash to the backlash" phenomenon in which misleading and exaggerated claims about how the case was "frivolous" gave way to misleading and exaggerated claims about (e.g.,) how Liebeck's damages award "was thrown out by the judge." The plaintiff's damages award was not thrown out by the judge. The jury awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, which is the total amount of what people think of as "actual damages" (medical bills, but also pain and suffering). That amount was reduced by 20% because the jury found Liebeck 20% at fault for her own damages. The judge did reduce the separate $2.7 million dollar punitive damages award against McDonald's to 3x the compensatory damages award, or $480,000. That amount was (as the law requires) added to the compensatory damages award for a total award of $640,000. This was a substantial award for the time. The parties ultimately entered into a confidential settlement while an appeal and cross-appeal were pending, but the important point is that neither the compensatory damages award nor the reduced punitive damages award was ever "thrown out by the judge."

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"The judge did reduce the separate $2.7 million dollar punitive damages award against McDonald's to 3x the compensatory damages award, or $480,000."

I said that "most of" the jury's award was thrown out by the judge. A reduction from a total of $2.9M to a total of $640,000 fits comfortably into my personal definition of "most of". YMMV of course.

And then of course a third or so of the final amount goes to the plaintiff's attorneys, and then the punitive damages portion is fully taxable as income. Hence "she ended up actually getting her direct medical bills covered plus not much more."

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Strong disagree. The original reaction to the hot coffee case was the correct one.

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Thank you. It drives me insane that this is so rarely said.

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It's a case where there are enough facts favorable to each side that one's opinion can potentially go back and forth like a tennis ball based on which facts you've encountered. Opinions can also differ depending on what ideological lens you're viewing the facts through.

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The range of plausible possibilities a reasonable person would expect when getting a coffee is anywhere between room temperature and 100°C. And the question isn't the extent of the burns, but whether McDonald's should have been considered responsible for them. IMO no, and the tendency to impute this sort of not-explicitly-assumed responsibility for not-directly-caused harms has a lot of cost to society. The lawsuit may not have been frivolous in the existing legal system, but the existing legal system is too litigious.

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McDonalds advertised how hot their coffee was, their customers wanted hot coffee, and the government shouldn't have the right to punish restaurants for producing things their customers want in the way that they want them which don't injure third parties.

Yes we can say "The Thin Skull standard means..." but I'm explicitly opposed to that standard.

We shouldn't have to have dull knives, lukewarm coffee, or any semi-functional product just because a few people can't use it correctly.

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Of course coffee is scalding! It's coffee! It's made with boiling water! And yes, McDonalds had been warned about the "problem" of coffee being hot hundreds of times, just like they've probably gotten frivolous complaints about hundreds of other things hundreds of times.

If you order coffee at the drive-through, put it in your lap (!), and then try to open it by pulling the tab toward you (!!) while not making 100% sure you're holding it firm with the other hand (!!!), all the while knowing you have mobility problems...and then you sit in the spilled hot coffee for 90 seconds because of aforementioned mobility problems (!!!!), you don't get to blame McDonalds for your own carelessness. Yes, it sucks that that it happened, but Liebeck's lawsuit was frivolous. The initial public perception of the lawsuit was exaggerated, but not wrong.

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All normal coffee is scalding and can cause third degree burns. McDonald's was holding their coffee at 180°-190°F, which is the temperature recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. Liebeck's lawyers argued coffee should never be served hotter than 140°F (60°C), which is quite cool for serving coffee and I don't think any coffee chain serves coffee that cool.

If you ever poured boiling water into a teacup and given it to a friend, you've given them something hotter and more dangerous than McDonald's coffee. There are many dangerous activities we accept as normal and worth keeping and you shouldn't later get sued just for doing normal activities.

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So your argument here is *literally* "everyone else was doing it"? Didn't your mom ever have the "if everyone else was jumping off a cliff" talk with you?

In all seriousness, though, what possible merit is there to serving a beverage hot enough to even burn the tongue, let alone melt skin and cause 3rd degree burns?!?

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Because people don't want to drink 60°C coffee. It's not "everyone else is doing it". It's following the recommendation of coffee experts. Coffee chains don't serve 60°C coffee because they'd lose their customers.

What's the merit of having a kitchen knife sharp enough to slice your hand? Or sitting by a campfire that could cover you in burns if you trip? We do slightly dangerous things for our enjoyment and drinking hot beverages is one of them.

All that aside, even if society does one day decide that some now normal activity is actually too dangerous and must be stopped (say we decide kitchen knives must be replaced with safe scissors and food processors), the way to go about it is for the regulatory body to ban it and then penalize anyone who keeps doing it. You don't just randomly penalize one person/corporation for using kitchen knives without first announcing the new norm.

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The merit is that the coffee stays hotter on your way to your destination, so it's at a good temp when you drink it. You can always ask them to put ice in it if you want to drink it sooner.

This is just one way of doing things, but that's the answer to your question.

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Looks like this might be an appealate brief, at least:

https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_files/eeoc/litigation/briefs/freeman.html#_Toc120287278

At a quick skim, seems to be a standard case of the EEOC suing for the use of criminal and credit checks as it does - this particular case is allegedly built around an individual who was rejected on credit grounds that failed to match Freeman's explicit criteria.

Was this a game of telephone where the defendant's attorney makes an inflammatory statement about the sought relief that gets included in poorly-sourced blurbs, which Scott repeated as the focus of the whole case? The chain of attribution is pretty shaky here.

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Ok, I'm spending way more time on this than I should (whole minutes!) but whatever. Here's the appellate decision:

https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/published/132365.p.pdf

Story seems to be that as Step 1 in the suit is that the EEOC needs to establish a prima facie case of discrimination, and that it relied on an expert report to do so. Problem was, the expert report sucked really bad, was excluded by the trial court, and Freeman moved for a summary judgement that was ultimately granted. EEOC tried to submit an amended report but it sucked too. Case dies in the crib and any argument about the sympathetic Black applicant or the mis-aimed relief is irrelevant. EEOC appeals, appellate court narrowly holds that the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded the report, and that's whole ballgame.

(And Judge Agee concurrs specifically to say that the EEOC fucked up this case *extra* hard.)

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Oof, that decision totally rips the EEOC a new one. Excellent find @Dan L, and thanks for doing the research and posting here!

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So either way the entire story is nonsense and no one was compelled to (nor did the govt attempt to compel anyone to) ignore prior attempted murder when hiring.

So 1.5/2 of the examples tested from (former?) nazi Hannannia are made up.

Maybe Scott should reflect on the credibility of the source before doing a review.

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The example was from Scott. I feel like Scott owes an explanation or a hyperlink for this example. the whole claim looks really extreme to not source: "Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application" I can't imagine making the claim without linking the source, there is no such claimed link in the article, or on the internet archive...

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>Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can’t bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic status, as, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America.

While I agree that it's not as widespread in effect, Title IX (especially during Obama and Biden years, with a brief hiatus during Trump) has/had much more widespread effects at colleges than just sports funding.

Obama Administration's Title IX guidance (the "Dear Colleague" letter) eviscerated what little due process there was regarding campus sexual assault and essentially removed presumption of innocence in favor of presumption of guilt. Also- why are colleges "investigating" in the first place and not, you know, police? When you hear complaints of "campus kangaroo courts," you have Title IX interpretation to thank. Related to the other civil rights topics, this Title IX guidance had massive disparate impact (https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2019/01/21/black_men_title_nine_and_the_disparate_impact_of_discipline_policies_110308.html) and that lead to a partial walkback even during the Obama years, but mostly wound up in a weird position of balancing special interests (no rights for the accused but also can't suspend too many black guys).

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>Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument.

You cover it with the repetition of glaring omissions, but for the exclusion of the progressive's counterargument has at least two reasons: A) he's not writing to progressives, and B) only a certain kind of progressive will buy that particular brand of "solving racism with more racism is worth it" argument. I considered including Ezra Klein's support for the "completely terrible" (his words) Yes Means Yes law above (https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-terrible-bill-and-i-completely-support-it) but it fits here too.

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Title IX is also why schools across the country are allowing self-identified transgender students to use whichever bathroom they would prefer and other related items. Even rural conservative schools are being told by the legal system that Title IX requires it, even beyond the guidance from the feds.

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Good point, it is more far-reaching than I pointed out too.

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>Also- why are colleges "investigating" in the first place and not, you know, police?

Because the police investigate on whether or not to send someone to prison, and campuses investigate on whether or not to impose academic penalties.

The idea that groups other than the police investigate things is not weird. HR investigates employee complaints. Parents investigate stories where both children say the other one broke the vase. Investors investigate company's reports and statements to decide whether they have a strong future. Etc.

And we hopefully aren't surprised when campuses investigate plagiarism or cheating charges, or other matters of academic integrity.

Assuming campuses need to respond to one of their residents raping another resident, why shouldn't they investigate before making a decision? What should they do, make a ruling *without* investigating, just flip a coin?

Of course, police can *also* investigate if it is reported to them. Two organizations investigating the same thing for different reasons as pat of different processes using different methods of investigations and different standards of evidence and etc. is not at all weird, if they both have a reason for their own investigation to exist the way it does.

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> What should they do, make a ruling *without* investigating, just flip a coin?

Rape is a crime. What they should do is stay out of the investigation of criminal matters and leave it to the criminal justice system, which is far more competent at it. This is a win-win for colleges: If the person is convicted, they don't need to impose additional "academic penalties," because they will get locked up and no longer be a student, and if the person is found not guilty, the school doesn't get egg on its face (and potentially expose themselves to lawsuits) by their incompetent investigation and punishment of a wrongfully accused student.

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This just misunderstands or ignores reality in too many ways. Examples:

1. Criminal investigations of rape typically take 8 months to 2 years to go from initial report to final sentencing, and can go years longer if there's an appeal process. Should the aledged rapist stay on campus with their alleged victim for that whole time? If the aleged rapist finishes out their education and graduates during the 2-4 years the criminal investigation and trial process is ongoing, that's the same as the campus having *zero* response to sexual assault cases.

2. Not every victim wants to file a police report. Necessary evil or not, being the victim in a criminal prosecution significantly tears your life apart, for the months or years that the process is going through court. Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus. Police actually investigate only a small number of reported sexual assaults, and few of those investigation go to trial.

3. The goals of a campus investigation are different from a criminal investigation, and therefore follow different rules and use different standards. Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups. Many witnesses are more wiling to talk to campus investigators than police. Campus investigations are designed to protect students rather than punish offenders, and therefore use a different standard of evidence when making rulings. Campuses need fast resolutions to protect students, police can take years to make sure justice is done correctly. Campuses are just severing a business relationship with a client, police are a government wielding its power against its citizens, again this justifies different standards of evidence. Etc.

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Why doesn't the same logic apply for rapes that occur OFF campus, where they are far more likely to occur? Isn't it still unjust for rapists to be in vicinity of their victims elsewhere? You've really come up with an argument for our criminal justice system to be much speedier.

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If you lived on a commune where membership was determined by a contract that you signed which agreed to binding arbitration by members of the commune for things like assault, then yes, that would make perfect sense.

But as I said like 7 times in the post you're responding to, *the government* has to balance the benefits of speed and decisiveness against the dangers of abusing its power, threatening liberty in general, etc.

Basically we grant the government a monopoly on violence, in exchange for them being extremely restrained on when and how they are allowed to use that violence against citizens. The extremely meticulous trials with very high standards of evidence and very restrained court procedures are all part of that, and that's a general public good that's insanely dangerous to erode.

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No, the delay is not a genuinely public good. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/ Innocent people plead guilty often because the process (lengthened in an attempt to be pro-defendant) takes so long that they actually lose less from the plea bargain. It's an unintended result that serves nobody other than lawyers billing more hours and even they likely wouldn't have endorsed it if they'd known what would happen.

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> Criminal investigations of rape typically take 8 months to 2 years to go from initial report to final sentencing, and can go years longer if there's an appeal process.

OK, that one sounds like a legitimate problem. How about putting some effort into fixing it, rather than just making it someone else's problem, with all the attendant collateral damage?

> Not every victim wants to file a police report.

You can fix that one with better training. Teach girls that they need to report sexual assault immediately, teach them what not to do in the immediate aftermath that would ruin the evidence, etc. This is the reason we teach people about what to do in case of various other emergencies: our natural instincts are often wrong, so we drill the right course of action into their heads so they'll do the right thing rather than the instinctual thing when and if it ever happens to them.

> Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus.

Again, this is the instinctual-but-wrong thing, and is actually kind of a horrifically selfish attitude if you think about it and analyze it for a few moments. "I don't want to have to deal with this guy myself, even if it means letting him go free and be able to victimize other women down the line. At least it won't be my problem."

Most victims who think this way probably don't consciously think about it in such callous terms, and I'm not going to accuse them of doing so. But the effect is exactly equivalent to this level of callousness, which is why they need to be taught and trained beforehand to be aware of it and not make that mistake.

> The goals of a campus investigation are different from a criminal investigation

Yep. The goals of a criminal investigation are to find the truth and see justice done, while the goals of a campus investigation is *always* first and foremost to avoid embarrassment to the school.

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>How about putting some effort into fixing it

We've been trying to get police reform, on this topic and many others, for decades (centuries? probably centuries.).

I'm still actively engaged in agitating for that. But it's a slow process, and there's not a lot of political will behind it today.

How long should campuses keep letting their students get raped while waiting for that reform to happen?

If the police process isn't sufficient to protect campuses *today*, then why shouldn't campuses do their own investigations *today*, and stop when they become unnecessary?

>You can fix that one with better training. Teach girls that they need to report sexual assault immediately,

See again about investigations and trials often being horrific for the victim and ruining their lives for years. This is perhaps an difference in beliefs about an empirical fact that is decisive here. All I can say is I've heard this to be the case from many many sources I trust over my life, I'm not interested in tracking them down for you today, and if it were to turn out that I'm wrong about this then yes the calculation would be different.

And yes, this is another police reform thing that is very very actively being worked on by police reform groups and feminist groups and etc. But not there yet.

>while the goals of a campus investigation is *always* first and foremost to avoid embarrassment to the school.

Man, you are getting too cynically brain-poisoned by Bryan Caplan or whoever. The world actually includes a lot of people who care about people in their immediate community not getting raped, and are very motivated by trying to stop that.

Bill Maher made a career out of this type of professional cynicism, and there's a reason he looks like an idiot today.

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Another problem is the massive gap between what the campus calls rape and what the police call rape. Are we talking "he roofied me, tied me up, forced me" or are we talking "the sex was meh and he hasn't called back so I'm retroactively removing my enthusiastic consent a week later"?

I'm not saying that a campus should do *nothing*, but they tend to jump to extreme options, lacking any due process or consideration of the accused. I get that you, like Ezra Klein and the state of California, don't give a rat's ass about them, their life is a sacrifice you're willing to make. Replacing one injustice with another *systematized* injustice does not justice make.

Sort of amusing because I would've expected you to be on the side of the accused in pretty much any other case. Fascinating how this subset of activity throws a wrench into that.

>The world actually includes a lot of people who care about people in their immediate community not getting raped, and are very motivated by trying to stop that.

Used to be that's what pissed-off brothers were good at, but that has its own set of problems, yeah?

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> Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups.

Title 9 explicitly doesn't apply to "private groups" but to colleges that are accepting public funding. If your little exclusive club wants to have no due process that's fine, but the vast majority of institutions of higher learning in the USA are public bodies.

>Campus investigations are designed to protect students rather than punish offenders, and therefore use a different standard of evidence when making rulings.

That's simply not true. If it were, the accused would be able to complete their courses online, or after the accuser completed their time there.

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>"Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups."

Public universities, at least, are *not* private groups and therefore the good reasons for restricting police *do* apply to them.

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"Should the aledged rapist stay on campus with their alleged victim for that whole time?"

Campuses are usually pretty big places.

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Just wanted to let you know I'm happy to see you around again. I always used to enjoy your posts on reddit (and possibly ssc?) for being reasonable and arguing a position underrepresented around here.

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I don’t see why you’re happy, given the atrocious quality of the comment you responded to. Unless you enjoy seeing trainwrecks and consider them an “underrepresented position”?

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So you're unhappy with darwins post. Good for you, I don't care?

If you're upset and looking for a fight on the internet then maybe consider if that's worth your time. Its certainly not worth mine.

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Funny how, throughout your post, you treat the *alleged* rapist as guilty.

(How *dare* they continue to have access to their education?! How *dare* their accuser have to file a report?! Guilty until proven innocent!!)

It’s genuinely mind-boggling you don’t realize how unhinged you sound.

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Yeah it's called 'a premise', comes up a lot in hypothetical discussions.

Anyway this was all from 3 months ago, you doing ok?

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In 1920, Major League Baseball investigated whether eight members of the Chicago White Sox had colluded with gamblers to throw the World Series. It found that they had, and banned them permanently from baseball. Separately, a court was investigating whether the players had broken the law, and acquitted them. So the professional investigation resulted in professional penalties, while the criminal investigation did not result in criminal penalties. Should baseball have stayed out of the matter, and let the players continue playing since they were acquitted?

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Charming as ever. Nice to see some things never change.

>Assuming campuses need to respond to one of their residents raping another resident, why shouldn't they investigate before making a decision?

Considering the Title IX guidelines for investigations are quite possibly *worse* than a coin-flip for the accused, seems like a good argument for returning to sex-segregated colleges.

Investigation of non-academic offenses should be handled by the appropriate authorities. If the problem is that an assumed victim doesn't want to live in the same room/floor/building as the assumed perpetrator, then whatever, move one of them, not a big deal. If the assumed victim doesn't want them on campus *at all*, that's a much more serious demand and beyond the scope of the university.

From below:

>Necessary evil or not, being the victim in a criminal prosecution significantly tears your life apart, for the months or years that the process is going through court. Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus.

And... getting long-term suspended or expelled from university *doesn't* tear someone's life apart? Not to the same degree as criminal charges, sure, but it's not exactly a slap on the wrist that might entail years worth of lost education and tuition.

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>And... getting long-term suspended or expelled from university *doesn't* tear someone's life apart? Not to the same degree as criminal charges, sure, but it's not exactly a slap on the wrist that might entail years worth of lost education and tuition.

If I were factually innocent, I think I would rather be criminally charged and deal with all that entails, than have my entire college career exploded without recourse.

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Sort of a tossup IMO and depends on the factors like the specific jurisdiction, but yeah, you would probably have more recourse in the justice system even if the whole process is tedious and miserable.

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The actual reason (I suspect) is tied to the history of Universities (https://historyofphilosophy.net/medieval-universities). Universities have always had an aspect of protecting students from the law (e.g. underage drinking on Campus). This means the university has to investigate these crimes because they don't want police presence on campus.

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> Universities have always had an aspect of protecting students from the law

And have always also had a reputation for producing graduates who act as if they think they're above the law. Hmm...

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Similar letters also eviscerated the discipline and safety structures at a lot of districts when they were basically instructed by the Obama DoE that any regime of behavior correction that didn't have racially proportionate outcomes would put them at grave danger of lawsuit.

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>So everybody gets more and more woke, with no end in site.

That should be 'sight.'

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> That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian.

Really? I'll just say, this is far from a universal experience, and "Asian" is every bit as made-up a category as AAPI.

My wife has a story from when she was at college, attending a course taught by a Chinese-American woman. When a Japanese-American student tried to take the class, the teacher strictly forbade him from being in the class and ordered him out of the room entirely, because he was Japanese and Chinese people have long memories of atrocities committed generations ago. And the teacher got away with it free and clear, for reasons that would be too doxxy if I were to elaborate here. Not a hint of "Asian solidarity" here!

> Like I said with What We Owe The Future, it’s probably unfair to review this book qua book.

I think you're right. I haven't read it myself (yet; you've piqued my interest now,) but from your description, it sounds a lot like a book that assumes a fair deal of context and is expanding on it. For example, a fair percentage of its target audience has likely read Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." (Have you?) Sowell makes the explicit case that Hanania doesn't have to here (because Sowell already made it) that "Civil Rights Law (from 1964 on) Is Bad."

Sowell lays out the progress of African-Americans in assimilating into broader American society and closing various gaps in their standard of living compared to white Americans, aided at times by various civil rights laws. (The 1964 one was definitely not, as this article claims, the original!) And then the 1964 law happened, setting up a bunch of bureaucracy to help things along, and all that progress that black Americans were making suddenly hit a hard wall. By the 1980s, with the "help" of a lethal combination of bad policy and cocaine, they were "advancing" backwards, giving up decades of real progress.

Post-1964 Civil Rights Law Is Bad, because not only does it create all of the devastating knock-on effects described by Hanania in his book, *it does so while also doing harm to its own stated goals rather than advancing them!*

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In terms of Asians, I think most Asians I know think of themselves as Asian to some degree. Obviously the Chinese and Japanese don't get along, but neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white".

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The salience of "white" is not a constant over time. It's not true that "The Irish Became White", as they were always so legally, but intra-racial inter-ethnic differences were more salient in the US long ago.

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How is this different from "Asian"?

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I don't think South Asians previously lumped themselves together with East Asians. On the other hand, Middle Easterners are legally considered white, and previously they & Europeans wouldn't lump themselves together, and now Middle Easterners are politically mobilizing to get a separate category.

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How many Middle Easterners and East and South Asians do you think would agree that that is "the most salient part of their history"?

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> I don't think South Asians previously lumped themselves together with East Asians.

They don't do that now, either.

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That might be the more politically active ones, which also seems to be more common in South than East Asian Americans.

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Do most Indians consider themselves “Asian”? Do Cambodians? Philipinos?

An “East Asian” category might make sense to some degree but AAPI is vastly broader than that.

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In my experience, 'feeling Asian' is a 2nd/3rd gen American construct.

2nd and 3rd generation Americans are sufficiently disconnected from their home culture, that they more so 'pick' their culture/race than grow up in it. They are told they're Asian, so they choose to be Asian. 1st gen immigrants or culturally integrated 2nd gen Americans never use blanket race identifiers.

They are honest in their belief in being East-Asian or South-Asian. But, a Japanese-American's sincere belief in East-Asian solidatrity is a manufactured belief veering on offensive to any person actually from East-Asia.

Imagine Germans speaking for Ashkenazi Jews because they're both white and eat Sauerkraut.

> neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white"

Which gets to what the categories really are : "To what degree can a random white American (majority demographic) tell you guys apart?" and "To what degree can you tolerate seeing yourself reflected in another person?".

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Not sure where you draw this opinion from ?

Chinese, Arab and Indian immigration patterns are nothing alike. In the US, Chinese diaspora first came to the US as manual labor in the 1800s. Indians didn't arrive until the 1970s, and are actually in the midst of a massive tech-driven immigration wave unlike China, which seems past it. Arabs follow neither narrative. Their immigration stories are grounded in refuge or fleeing persecution. Japanese and Korean immigration worked very differently, as they both ended up as vassal states of the US immediately after WW2.

What common immigration patterns are you pointing to ?

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> Imagine Germans speaking for Ashkenazi Jews because they're both white and eat Sauerkraut.

That… was the normal situation pre-Holocaust? Like, many people didn't know they were "Jews" for Nazis until they checked their grandparents' birth certificates.

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How many?

Wasn't one of the biggest complaints against the Jews that they maintained a separate identity and refused to integrate into mainstream German society?

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The _complaint_ was there, but it had seemingly stopped reflecting reality somewhere before WW1. I mean, there were always _some_ minorities on outskirts, but the integration was far bigger than propaganda would ever give credit for. For instance, obviously the integration was the reason they had to switch from religion to race: there didn't remain enough non-Christened Jews to have the wide-scale attack they did in the first place!

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There's a more complete description for each country of Nazi-occupied Europe in the back of "Eichmann in Jerusalem", but I think the general trend was that rich urban Jews had a tendency to become indistinguishable from their neighbors, and in places intermarry frequently, and sometimes even convert to Christianity. While poor rural Jews were more culturally distinct and kept to themselves (probably often due to bigotry by poor rural locals). I hate to say this about Nazi domestic policy, but that book helped me make more sense of it, of the Nazi sense of Jews as a xenomorph-alien threat.

(Giger was Swiss-German , right? I bet someone could write an interesting essay tracing a line from pre-WWII antisemitism to chest bursters.)

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> "If the most important event in the recent history of Jews hadn't happened, then things would be different.".

Yeah, duh. (the dismissiveness is mostly for effect. Sorry about that, I'm feeling edgy today)

_______________

Often, Immigrant's most serious concerns have to do with these exact neighbors. Forcing a large intra-continental identity onto immigrants, creates a false sense of unity. It makes it difficult to talk about inter community tensions.

The South-Asian-Commitee at Harvard is structually unable to comment on South Asian matters because the 2 main cohorts (Pakistanis and Indians) disagree on all policy goals. You'll hear platitutes like "India and Pakistan should strive to live together', which is the sort of naievete you expect from elementary schoolers.

The Arab-American-club will similarly talk about peace and cease-fires even with the Saudis and Yemenis want nothing to do with each other. Jordanian Americans and Egyptian Americans will lecture Israelis on 'fair treatment of Palestinians', because the Palestinaians are now part of the greater 'Arab American community'.

Uber drivers are my favorite people to talk to. They're usually 1st gen immigrants, far too overqualified for their current job and talkative. Their biggest complaints/policy goals always have to do with neighboring cultures that are part of the same 'race'.

If I (an Indian) had to make a list of what identities I feel, then Chinese and Pakistani would rank as my bottom 2, despite being the 2 other big umbrella identities in the Asian race.

Categories make sense when they share traits in common or have common interest. Other than appearances, what traits or interests do these racial grouping share in common ? Hell, in the Asian tent, even the appearances aren't shared.

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I agree, but why club them together into Asians at all. Why not have unity among all americans?

If race is used as a tool for affirmative action, then we already have fine grained statistics to dole it out at the national level. Why the need for blanked categories ?

Which comes back to my original point. A random white american who dislikes Chinese people for appearances, also dislikes Taiwanese and Japanese people for the same reason. The categories are thrust upon them by racists. Not of their own choosing. That it is the main utility of race.

And if that is true, then you might as well create races accordingly. East-Asian, Brown, White, Arab, SEAsian, Black and Mixed.

As more people intermarry across races, Mixed will become a larger category. If your nation is already (many Mexicans, Brazillians) and were cool like that, then assimilate into the mixed category. You don't need your own special section.

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This is directly relevant to the fact that groups are fractal. Of _course_ we have strongest feuds with those who are relatively close to us but differ in some important-to-us way (cf. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/). Serbs will hate Croats, not Chinese. But this doesn't mean that someone who notes the similarity between Croats and Serbs is wrong. Same, I'm afraid, is largely true of India and Pakistan: they are at each other's throats, but they do share similarities important for interacting with them.

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Another example: probably the _most_ alienating identity for a New Yorker who wants to control all guns is your stereotypical Alabama redneck who says "six guns is the _minimum_ to hold in your house". But _both_ of them will care about gun control much more than most non-US citizens, so the statement "for Americans, gun control is a hot button issue in an unusual way" is (with all the usual caveats about stereotyping) true.

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> 2 main cohorts (Pakistanis and Indians)

What's up with Bangladeshis? Are there not enough of them, or do they stay out of that sort of politics, or something else?

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I think it’s interesting how much someone who is otherwise seen as “race realist” is also acknowledging the important points of racial constructionism, noting that “Asian” and “Hispanic” and “white” are very clearly artificially constructed around their edges - though it’s notable that he doesn’t seem to make the same observation about “black” (particularly given the major genetic differences between west and East Africans and many groups within each region, as well as the cultural differences between parts of Africa, and descendants of slaves in different parts of the Americas).

Also, I believe the 2030 census plans to move “Hispanic” to the “race” category and create “middle eastern/North African” as a sixth race, addressing some of the more notable divergences between the legal/official racial categories and the social racial categories that have grown up with them.

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Vast majority of ADOS are of west African origin. And they make up the vast majority of the black population. Slave trade stopped in 1808, whatever distinction existed amongst the West African populations that they came from has blurred to the point where similarly whether one is English, German or French American is meaningless. Yes there are certainly large and growing Somali and Ethiopian diaspora communities but I don’t think omitting that distinction is as large an omission as the one Scott highlights, omitting that he’s a race realist in the first place.

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The idea that the specific boundaries are socially constructed doesn't contradict in any way that race correlates with any particular genetically determined trait. The only reason it may seem remarkable that a "race realist" takes a social constructionist view is that social constructionism is sometimes pushed as a motte, with the bailey being that a particular genetic trait cannot correlate with race [when the social constructionists want to argue it doesn't], and in any case race is an obsolete, pseudoscientific, racist concept [when you talk about race in a way they don't like]—which don't actually follow from the motte.

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Most people are "color realists" and would say that there is clear and significant difference between color green and color blue, despite the fact that it is impossible to draw a clear consensus boundary between green and blue on a rainbow or color wheel - the boundary (or the number of colors separated; e.g. the languages&people's which split what's blue in English into two separate concepts) is arbitrary and artificial, but that doesn't mean that the differences aren't there.

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> but neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white".

Maybe in America they adopt this bizarre kind of self image, but definitely not in Europe. In Europe it sounds rather out of place. Yes they share multiple identities (Slavic, Ruthenian, Orthodox, Eastern European), and maybe even 'white' - but probably more in the sense of 'white' as opposed to 'Caucasian' (meaning Chechens, Dagestanians etc)

Sorry for honesty but such misguided and ignorant offhand race remarks from Americans annoy me immensely. I feel like you Americans are doing it all the time and thus forcing your ridiculous categories down the throats of Europeans, far outside the realm of those categories' applicability.

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He even included "in America" as a caveat, and you still have a problem with his assertions, which as an American I can verify as true? He's not talking about Europe. He made that clear.

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My favorite example of Asian "solidarity" was a kerfuffle about a Japanese cultural exhibit in Boston where visitors could try on kimonos. It was shut down as anti-Asian by a _Chinese_ activist against the will of the actual Japanese people doing the exhibit.

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Japanese basically committed holocaust level atrocities on the Chinese. Chinese are taught from early age their war crimes in WWII. Jew, married to Chinese. Feel neutral/positive to present day Germans. If I had gotten her 'cultural education's likely would not.

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Yes, I'm aware of this. There are good reasons why the Japanese Empire allied with Germany in World War II; the more you look at the "State Shinto" religion guiding them at the time, the more they look like natural allies of the Nazis.

But as you say, today's Jews (quite reasonably) don't look at today's Germans as Nazis. And today's Japanese are likewise not State Shinto-ists... but all too many Chinese people continue to look at them as if they were!

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The big difference is that Germans are well versed in their WWII history. Japanese never learn from their government authorized schoolbooks about their country's escapades in China, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The official Japanese government response is to play down or deny atrocities. The information (eg about medical experiments and bio warfare) exists if people seek it out, though.

If you are interested, The Wages of Guilt by Ian Buruma, who speaks both Japanese and German, contrasts the responses of the two countries. Some Japanese people even believe that Jews and Japanese were the biggest victims in WWII. Yet more Chinese people died during the Nanjing Massacre than ever died of the impact of the atomic bomb, Buruma says. Of course, official Japanese believes that is an exaggeration too.

The elderly Korean women, former "comfort women" forced into prostitution, who sat outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul for so many years? They volunteered to be prostitutes or their claims for an apology or compensation were covered by the 1965 peace treaty with South Korean.

I was in Japan in 2018 when San Francisco erected a statue honoring comfort women from the Philippines, China and Korea. Sister city Osaka promptly broke off a 60-year relationship saying the claims were historically inaccurate. I recall when a Japanese history, maybe 20 years, found an imperial army document ordering round-ups.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/osaka-drops-san-francisco-as-sister-city-over-comfort-women-statue

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I know about the massacres, but I've heard recently that most of the "comfort women" were hired employees, though academics who have written as much got cancelled.

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The last time I looked at this (20-ish years ago, so this may well be out of date), the majority of the women were forced, but most of them were only used for a short time - a few weeks, often. The long-term permanent organisations tended to use hired employees who did have a choice. And they did the majority of the work.

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It is simply not true that the Japanese do not learn about Japanese war crimes during school. And yes Japan did settle all reparations claims with both China and South Korea.

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>Japanese never learn from their government authorized schoolbooks about their country's escapades in China

I never know what to make about these claims because I was also repeatedly told US schools didn't teach the truth about slavery or the civil war or the native expropriation, and yet in my really actual school in the 1980s and 1990s those were the two MAIN topics my history books covered.

So much of the justification for CRT is sold to me as an antidote to a form of schooling that in my school district probably hasn't existed since the 70s or maybe earlier. I am positive my 1980s history textbooks would be CRT approved, with an effort to make black Americans ~40% of the content and natives another ~20%.

FWIW the Japanese people I have personally known seem well aware of their WWII history, and that makes sense since there are themes pointing to it in much of their media as well (those references wouldn't make sense if people didn't get them).

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Matt Yglesias likes to say that the frequent claims that people weren't taught certain things in school is just people not remembering their schooling.

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I remember walking through Sproul Plaza at Berkeley years ago when a group of Japanese teenage girls came off a tour bus and waited around for their tour to begin. An Asian-American student walked up to one of them and said "My family is Korean. Do you know what your people did to my people?" The Japanese girl looked like a deer in the headlights. I walked on so I didn't hear the whole list of (admittedly true) atrocities.

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I would be a deer in the headlights too if a random person in a foreign country started speaking to me in a language I (likely) didn't speak particularly well about something that happened decades before I was born.

Even if I was reasonably familiar with the history that would be a challenging and uncomfortable situation to navigate as an adult let alone as a teenager.

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I mean, the Chinese _also_ committed holocaust-level atrocities on the Chinese, multiple times and notably more recently. Not quite sure how that fits in, though.

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Ouch. That even holds true going back in time, although the 20th century seems to have upped the pace.

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To a certain degree.

There have always been tyrants, since the beginning of human history. But they didn't always have automatic weapons, artillery, and the like, and they also didn't have modern agricultural techniques that enabled the sort of massive population base that you need, by definition, to kill off a massive population.

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Germany was kind of special in how the next generation was handling the crimes of their parent generation in the 1960s. The latter generation won that culture war eventually. Acknowledgement of the crimes committed by Germans in the Nazi era is totally mainstream. High school covers the Nazis and their crimes at least twice in history. On the 27th January, of course the German chancellor visits Auschwitz and asks for forgiveness. The bigger KZs in Germany have long been turned into sites of documentation and remembrance.

There is not a lot of stuff I like about being German, but the Erinnerungskultur is one of the things I like about Germany. Being rightfully ashamed of its past was also what was required to sever ties with Prussian militarism, which went quite well for Europe.

I am not an expert on Japan, but I think that it is not as open acknowledgment of their crimes may not be as common as in Germany. (OTOH, they also seem to have left their military expansionist phase mostly behind.)

Of course, post-war Japan was not exactly an ally to mainland China in the way Germany turned into an ally of Israel. So the framing of "this was the past, and the current generation is not likely to repeat their father's crimes" is probably stronger in Israel wrt Germany than it is in China wrt Japan.

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I've thought, since I first heard that "Oriental" was offensive and to be replaced with "Asian" that it was far less descriptive, lumping together Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian, Iranian, Russian, and many more, all together. Yet it commonly still refers basically to Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Who would call a Russian "Asian"?

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