Moldbug’s approach to talking about race seems to me like it gets him roughly as bad a reputation as Herrnstein and Murray (in the circles that know who each is, respectively), while letting him be far less clear than H&M are.
In other words, if Moldbug wanted to avoid being thought of as a racist, he’s clearly not being subtle enough, because people still see him as a racist.
What does “being a racist” mean, exactly? Are Herrnstein and Murray racists?
For that matter, you, prophecyformula and I all looked at that ACS data and found that one can’t make the blackness-crime connection go away no matter what one tries. In my social milieu, the people who go around poking their noses under such rocks are conventionally considered racists. Are we all racists, then?
I originally had a much longer post that basically spiraled into a summa contra Baltimore, which I’ll spare everyone.
I guess what I’d like to say is that if racism is to be opposed, then it seems like a weird rhetorical own-goal to define racists to be people who are acknowledging reality. That sounds flippant, but it’s not. If H&M are racist, then the NLSY is racist as well. If Moldbug is a racist for pointing out that very little in latter 20th American social life makes sense except in the light of white flight, then even thinking about that topic just spreads the contamination further. It leaves me very unsure of what we’re even talking about here.
I find that I’m still confused about your ideas here. Is your contention that white flight did not occur because people were concerned about physical safety, and that people who suggest such things are intellectually or morally deficient?
Elsewhere in the piece you quote, we learn that a guy was recently stabbed to death over his cell-phone on the very same block as Moldbug’s kid’s preschool. No one was ever charged with the murder, though, so we can safely assume that it was an errant apple employee provoked by the decedent’s android.
On a closing note, having read that piece and having lived my entire adult life in a city on the global top 50 list for violence, I have Moldbug’s “zombie” reference class pretty firmly in mind. And it’s not “black people”. It’s a class that finds its least functional expression on the pages of thatguysonheroin.com, whose subtitle, completely coincidentally, is: “Living in Baltimore, fighting zombies.” [0] It’s a subsection of a class, referred to in a less delicate age as the Lumpenproletariat, that is overwhelmingly young, black and male. If all this sounds strange to you, I’m personally glad for you but I fear we’re close to an impasse about entitlement to opinions vs. entitlement to facts. I’d be happy to tell you some stories, though.
[0] I don’t approve, by the way, of the tone of that site. I do, however, think that it serves an important documentary purpose. And it has actually inspired people to try to get clean, so.
(via lambdaphagy)