#kafkatrap

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

The best part of the whole "Kafka Tapes" fiasco has got to be the comments section

It's just so weird

Like

It really reads as a "waaaa waaaaa I am so unfortunate and unfortunate in ways that will never, ever, ever be able to be fixed" thing, but people keep finding it funny. Why is that?

"It is so hard being me. Everyone makes fun of how unfunny I am, but really, I'm pretty great."

That's the weirdest thing I've heard in the last week.

I think people who find this funny for the second, third, or fourth or hundredth time are missing the point. These are not insights about Kafka, they're just sad, pathetic jokes that can't actually convince anyone that they're more sympathetic than he seems to be. I'm not saying these people aren't bad or cruel people -- I just don't see the point in trying to make them feel sympathetic. Maybe that's what they want to do with "It's really awful I can't get a girlfriend," but I don't.

The actual thing that's interesting about Kafka is that he is a genuinely terrible person, and that he was actually fairly well known as such when the tapes were discovered. So people are reading things that might be jokes if taken in context, and feeling compelled to reply in exactly the same joking, self-aware tone even as the joke is clearly terrible and offensive in retrospect. It's like a game of "get the last word," but it seems to be a different, equally awful thing.

(That might be the wrong analogy. Just read the comments on the tiktok, it's just much worse than that. Some people seem to think that making fun of people's suffering is admirable, it seems)

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Class, what is a “kafkatrap”?

[proshippers-against-censorship]

Gosh, antis are annoying. They’re kinda like scabs to me, in that there’s no benefit to picking at them, even though I really want to. It doesn’t do any good to explain my tastes or my motivations or my traumas, even for a bit; it just gives them more ammo. Nevertheless, I really kinda wanna do that bit and heehee and haha and make a joke out of anon hate. Except they literally don’t care about it and are just being facetious— their main goal is to just accuse people of predation and root for their deaths. Neither of these things are worth engaging with, as the predator accusation is just a kafkatrap and the latter is just assholery.

- a bitch holding herself by the scruff of her own neck, doing everything possible to resist the urge to clown on the haters

Godspeed, soldier.

[evelynmlewis]

The Kingdom of Heaven: Bonus material and discussion questions

A reader requested these for a book club and I finally got them ready. Under the cut. Numbers refer to chapter number.

2. What kind of organization is DYNTEC? Have any real-world governments had a branch like this? What are some ways that the Settlement frames DYNTEC in a positive light?

3. What is suggested about gender roles in the Settlement?

4. “Detractor” is a word borrowed from the Soviet Union’s own description of its critics. What, in the Settlement, is Detraction? Who is a Detractor? How do you think the Settlement benefits from this concept?

5. Children in the Settlement aren’t allowed to go outdoors until the age of 16. What is missing from their lives? In what ways have real-life children’s opportunities and independence been reduced over time?

6. Why would the Settlement want Alex to be able to punch her trainer in the face?

7. A Kafkatrap is a scenario in which a person’s denial of wrongdoing is used as evidence of their guilt. How was Alex Kafkatrapped in this chapter? Can you think of any examples of this happening in real life?

12. Fact: Everything that Cam says in this chapter about the Biometric Analysis is true of a conventional polygraph test, including its bias against honest subjects and the methods of fooling it. The US government has been known to go after people who publicize this information about the polygraph, in order to maintain its perceived mystique as an interrogation method. However, The Kingdom of Heaven is a work of fiction and all resemblances to real entities are purely coincidental 😉

13. In your opinion, is the Settlement’s hands-off policy a good form of environmentalism? Why or why not? Do we see this form of environmentalism in any real life policies?

16. In chapter 11, Alex said, “I’ve never seen anything that tempted me to believe it was created by a god.” Why hasn’t she? What might be happening to her views now? Alex seems ill-prepared to experience nature. In what ways might the Settlement’s policies have contributed to Alex’s current predicament?

19. How has the Settlement’s low value placed on human life affected Alex’s opinion of herself? Why is the Kingdom different?

20. How is the education in the Kingdom different from the educational system in the Settlement?

21. Why do you think this hymn and this Bible verse were chosen for the book?

26. Why does Alex attempt to minimize the abuse she experienced when recounting in this chapter?

29. Does this chapter lend more credibility to the Settlement’s arguments that children are better off inside the Settlement? Why or why not?

32. The “plea bargain” that Alex is offered in this chapter is meant to resemble the types of offers that the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states would make people, often giving them the chance to get out of their “crimes” if they make ideological statements.

34. In the book 1984, the regime assumes its final and total psychological control over the individual not (as is commonly assumed) by making them state that 2+2=5, but by causing them to betray their loved ones. This destruction of people’s interpersonal bonds is what renders them incapable of organizing against the regime. Is this realistic? What position does this chapter take on this concept? What does the book suggest might grant people the power to resist the state in a meaningful way?

35. What does Alex feel guilty about on page 311? How is that different from what Dana means to accuse her of?

36. What has been added to Alex over the course of the book that might have given her the ability to resist? Why did the Settlement’s attempts to convey this power to her via training fail? What was missing from the Settlement’s attempts to forge Alex into a strong person?

38.

1) In this chapter, Cam shows distaste for the first time at making empty oaths. Compare this to Alex and her situation with the plea deal. Why couldn’t Alex just have the attitude toward her plea deal that Cam did toward his oath? What does Alex value that Cam is just beginning to value? Do we value this in our culture?

2) Read John 18:33-36. What do both Pilate and Dana Morris-Fletcher fail to understand?

45. Read Mark 9:43-47. What does the Biometric represent in this scenario? Consider also Revelation 13:16. What are some ways the Settlement corresponds to the archetypical figure of the Antichrist? Reread the opening quote by John Bunyan for help with this.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their existence."

-- Leslie Stephen

You may be able to - or even, can - lie to people about what is objectively true. You can even convince people to repeat those lies by making it a moral virtue to do so.

But reality cannot be fooled. Not by threats of hellfire, not by emotional manipulation, not by wails of “bE kInD!!," not by language games, not by redefining words, not by crybullying, not by kafkatraps, not by various “-phobia” ad hominems, not by fallacies, not by academic jargon, not by religious apologetics.

Reality always collects its due. With interest.

[samueldays]

Several bluecheka started impersonating Elon Musk on Twitter to make some kind of point about misinformation and verification, so Twitter started suspending them. Impersonation is against the Twitter rules, and has been since before Musk bought it.

The privileged class felt that equality before the law was oppression. Indeed, some even thought it was fascism!

You wouldn't know a fascist if he danced naked in front of you, Lindsey.

Unlike one of my mutuals, I do not stan Elon Musk per se, but I respect him for having the right enemies. Musk's acquisition of Twitter really is pissing off a lot of shitty people, and they are making a lot of shitty complaints.

Some of the most blatant, IMO, are the complaints that Musk's changes might allow people to spout misinformation/disinformation on Twitter, particularly disinformation from the cover of a bluecheck -- but that was already a deeply entrenched problem coming from inside the house.

To recap: Olbermann is lying, Olbermann is lying about an important topic, Olbermann is lying in an unambiguously verifiable way, Olbermann continues to lie after being corrected several times, and to cap it off, Olbermann exists in a misinformation ecosystem of journalists and the like who have the gall to boast about their commitment to honesty and fact-checking, and award each other prizes about it.

That's the sort of aggravated misinformation which was on Twitter long before Musk, from verified sources, and it wasn't taken down.

May God strike them all with cancer of the tongue for the abuse they have put the gift of speech to.

In addition to the ones being projectively dishonest about misinformation, there's quite a few other general types:

The innumerate: "Musk could have used his money to solve world hunger!" No, he couldn't, that is the sort of nonsense believed by idiots for whom numbers over a billion are interchangeable with infinity.

The kafkatrapping: "Isn't it a bit fishy that you feel the need to write so much in defense of Elon Musk?" No. That is a wicked form of argument.

The wordcel: "Musk says he supports free speech but he [blocked me/suspended an impersonator/deleted spam email/other thing that sounds vaguely speech-related]." Do you want the Curse of Babel? Because this is how you get the Curse of Babel.

The worrying about things which already happened: "Musk might start to [revoke checkmarks/arbitrarily suspend people he doesn't like/allow hatred and lies on the platform]."

Special dishonorable mention for Robert Reich: "Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an uncontrolled internet. That's also the dream of every dictator, strongman and demagogue". I swear he not only said that, he got it past editors and into newspaper publication.

And finally,

The aggressively illiterate. Musk said "To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic." and bluechecks started a circlejerk of selectively quoting each other that trimmed out everything before the first comma, everything after the second comma, as well as the word "therefore", and then paraphrased the out-of-context sub-sentence-fragment with headlines like "Elon Musk Says the Quiet Part Out Loud, Tells His Minions to Vote GOP". If you ever wonder why there's such a lack of nuance on the internet, I think This Fucking Shit Right Here is part of it.

Boy, there sure are a lot of loud idiots on the internet!

These seem a little different from the common-or-garden variety of loud idiot, though.

First, of course, is the Checkmark of Nominal Verification. C-o-g idiots generally don't get that. So many of these bluecheka are not merely wrong-on-the-internet, they are wrong with credentials, wrong about that same credential, wrong in a coördinated way about it, and recursively doubling down about the professional, verified, credentialed, expertise that bluechecks supposedly have, particularly bluechecks of a prestigious-sounding profession like journalists.

Second is a certain Orwellian-named coalition, and related coalitions like it organizing against Musk, where I have the sensation that these "coalitions" are more like... hm, "astroturf" is overused and it's not exactly "grassroots" they're pretending to be anyway. Let's go with "loudspeakers".

Loud, prominent, pushy, often sounding important and official but did you know you can just buy them?, pointless to argue with because there's nobody in the loudspeaker, the speaker element doesn't have its own opinion, there's a million outlets talking with a single voice, sometimes presenting as though it were a much larger crowd than it is, and it's indicative of a degree of coordination and infrastructure in the background that sometimes gets labeled "conspiracy".

And this framing also appeals to me because it lets me [compress/explain/predict] a lot of the complaints as metaphorically "I want sole control of the microphone." Musk has bought a chunk of loudspeakers, and the current broadcaster hates competition.

[kata4a]

over-the-top cute boy (improbably young for his position of power) in an over-the-top frilly lolita dress with an over-the-top manic narcissistic Queen-Of-Hearts some-kind-of-dere-probably-yandere-but-maybe-several-of-them personality. he is the state's chief prosecutor and he is named Olivia Bolivia Francesca Von Kafkatrap. is this something

what if I kinned him

[woodsteingirl]

ap seminar worst class ever i can’t read anything without being like. oh fuck you…. ad hoc ergo propter hoc! Kafkatrapping! argumentum ad ignorantiam!!!!!!

[amaraudermind]

Alrighty, time for a more serious post: this is especially for my teen followers but it's important for everyone!

Please, and I mean this so genuinely, study logical fallacies.

I can hear you thinking, but that sounds too complicated! And studying? Gross maybe even isn't that some silly debate stuff?

To that I say, HA! This is in actuality the key to petty fandom squabbles and online arguments over social issues alike! This is the ultimate knowledge of the universe!

Dramatics aside, knowing fallacies is incredibly important and useful for your communication skills! Being able to spot a fallacy when it's being used allows you to come at a discussion from a clearer angle, and helps prevent you getting worked up over an argument you can't seem to win(because they're rigging the discussion!)

For those of you who don't recognize the phrase, a logical fallacy is an argument that is logically flawed or intentionally deceptive. When you're debating with someone and they twist your words or change the rules, when their argument makes no sense but you can't seem to refute it, it's likely there's a logical fallacy at play! Learning about fallacies will genuinely make your online experience so much more enjoyable. And your everyday life outside, too!

It doesn't have to be a lot! Just look at one or two at a time and familiarize yourself with them. Understand what one means and then try to identify it in arguments you see in passing, or ones you get involved in.

The thing is, once you start understanding fallacies, you'll see them everywhere. You'll even start noticing the way you use fallacies, and maybe you'll reframe your arguments to be more sound logically, and therefore more difficult to refute. Or maybe you'll use this knowledge for evil and employ an infuriating set of fallacies just to make my life miserable, I can't stop you!

If you need a starting place, I find some of the most common fallacies I see around include Fallacy of Composition, Fallacy of Division, the Quotation Mining Fallacy, the False Dilemma Fallacy, and Kafkatrapping, to name just a few.

(just be sure you don't fall into the fallacy fallacy once you start learning: it would be a major disservice to yourself to fall into the idea that if a fallacy is at play then one's entire argument has no basis)

Go forth and learn my loves!

[mopeing]

I really hate the phrase "touch grass"

Like many other buzz phrases, it doesn't mean anything. It's just essentially "shut up because I don't like what you said"

It's sort of an ad hominem because the implication is that you should be ignored because you don't go outside much. First of all, it's an accusation and not the truth. Secondly, I first saw this phrase gain popularity was around 2020. You know, when people literally weren't allowed to go outside?

Also, it's kind of a kafkatrap (meaning: an argument of the form "the fact that you are denying that my argument is true is further evidence that it is true") because if you try to argue with someone telling you to touch grass, they can just put on a "you mad?" face and act like the fact that you're continuing the argument is more evidence that you need to touch grass.

[pessimistpress]

Saturday Sock Puppet Post!

It is Saturday once again, you dozy sock puppets! It's looking dull as usual outside - typical. Talk about typical British weather, eh? I hope it gets pretty sunny soon. Doctor Pessimist smiles now and again at dull weather. My Timmy likes sunny days. We're continuing planning for D-Vision! We've created more recording trackers and such. We're working on the scripts at the moment. We're getting super excited for this project, kids! We notice that humans are using everything they can to Kafkatrap each other. Certain humans are hating those who read The Lord of the Rings. I have no idea why, I think humans are bored again. Well, that's it for this episode, kids. TTFN! - Manic Minion.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

SYABM comic 64 “Off The Mark”

[ Older comics | Chronological order | Subreddit ]

"If you need 30 rounds/extra accuracy to hit an attacker, you shouldn't have them" is a kafkatrap, plain and simple.

Even though >trained soldiers and cops regularly miss<, even in close quarters, when the adrenaline’s pumping. Not to mention multiple attackers. 

It’s not just a question of skill. It is a question of biology.

Also, pistol calibre carbines and people who have trouble shooting a regular pistol but not a braced rifle both exist. This stance isn't just stupid, it's ableist.

I think the most blatant bit of stupid from >the Redditor that inspired this comic< (Archive) were the parts where he said people should just defend themselves with a handgun. And then in his next post he said "well, you shouldn't have an AR-15 because you shouldn't kill anyone!"

How exactly does he think defense with a handgun works? 

Do the bullets tickle intruders into submission?

He also claimed that if an AR-15 is cheaper than a handgun, it must be a cheap, low quality AR-15. 

Based on what? He "works in engineering".

And that's it.

I happened to look up double-stack .45s, and >found this article<, Precisely one was under a grand. The next cheapest one was $1,700. The next one after that was $2,100.

There was an ad for a cheaper AR-15 in the sidebar. And >the same site had this budget AR article<. Literally *all of them* were cheaper than the cheapest DS .45.

PS: Also, I've seen politicians try to paint standard 15 round pistol mags as "high-capacity magazines". Like the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which put the "high-capacity" limit at a whole 10 rounds.

Probably won't surprise you to learn California currently has the same standard.

Also, here’s a video about a guy who says “if you can’t afford mandatory gun training, tough luck”.

[kamiyu910]

I think the thing that bothers me the most is when people completely misrepresent what people say. It doesn’t make sense. Words are right there, on the screen, you can read them many times and analyze them....

If someone says “I think we should start opening things up slowly, taking lots of safety precautions, so we can help the economy not tank” then that obviously does not mean “we should just get rid of the lockdown entirely and let 16 million people DIE.” 

Yet, no matter how many times it’s been explained, with data and everything, that’s still what they’re claiming was said. That’s still what’s being spread around. It really proves people don’t care about accuracy, they don’t care about truth, they don’t care about honest debates. When people do that, it’s because they’ve latched onto a bit of drama and they’re bored and are looking for confrontation. They’ve chosen a target and they will continue to misconstrue, twist, and skew anything said by that person, to further demonize them.

I’ve seen this countless times before, and I’m sure there are studies on it if I go looking. It’s even similar to a kafkatrap. They have decided you are this thing, the more you deny it, the more it confirms it to them. The worst I ever saw was when a woman in a “support” group I was in asked a question concerning discrimination and trauma, asking if a woman who was raped by a Middle Eastern man in a turban would have problems any time she saw someone who looked similar. 

This question offended a good number of the other women in the group, despite having legit grounds in psychology, and they began twisting the woman’s words and started claiming that she said it was fine to discriminate against people who aren’t white, and even started saying some really horrible crap about her. They chased her out of the group, followed her onto her own facebook page and bullied/harassed her there, spread lies to her friends and family.

What I’m seeing here is minor in comparison, but there is still that similarity. No matter what the person says, their words will be twisted. There is no hope for them to defend themselves, logic has no place in this. This is a purely emotional setting, facts and reason are checked at the door. It’s sad seeing people I thought were a little more level headed doing this, but it’s tumblr so it’s not really surprising...

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: May 2022

Words have to mean things. That isn’t a glib, throwaway line. Many of the most vicious battles in modern American public life are, in their essence, purely semantic fights—often focused on postmodern attempts to redefine previously consistent terms. The Title IX debate on college campuses centers to a remarkably large extent on whether “rape” is a fair description of essentially consensual sex facilitated by alcohol or drugs, and later regretted. Even the contemporary philosophical squabble over human agency seems to boil down to the question: “We now know that people often make decisions at the conscious level of the brain/mind, on the basis of their own genetics and experiences—but is it correct to call that free will or not?”

Across these battles, the postmodern left often holds something of a natural advantage, because—speaking less than half-jokingly—they have all the English teachers on their side. And, while some of the intellectual fights in question are purely theoretical, others matter quite a lot in real-world political and social terms. Perhaps the most relevant of these is the ongoing attempt, by widely read academics and public intellectuals such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to redefine the concept of racism. In foisting upon us a new understanding of such a consequential term, this campaign leaps from the semantic into the substantive and seeks to reevaluate our thoughts and actions as individuals and as a nation.

For Kendi in particular, racism is properly thought of not as simple out-group bias, but rather as any system that produces disparate outcomes between or across racial and ethnic groups. He says this openly. In his book How to Be an Antiracist and again in an interview with Vox just after he had been minted a MacArthur “genius,” Kendi argues that there are only two possible explanations for a measurable difference in performance between two large groups in a given undertaking—say, standardized testing. These are (1) some form of racism within a social “system,” no matter how hidden and subtle, or (2) actual (I read him as meaning genetic) “inferiority” on the part of the lower-performing of the two groups. “There’s only two causes of, you know, racial disparities,” Kendi said on a Vox podcast. “Either certain groups are better or worse than others, and that’s why they have more, or racist policy. Those are the only two options.”

Disparities, in the Kendi model, are de facto evidence of racist discrimination. Moreover, Kendi’s proposition sets a clever rhetorical trap: His logical implication is that anyone who argues against Explanation No. 1 is, by definition, agreeing with Explanation No. 2. If you don’t accept racism as the culprit in performance outcomes, you must be endorsing group inferiority. Thus, should we accept his framing, simply to argue against “anti-racism” is to identify oneself as a racist. For the nonconfrontational—who dodge this trap by agreeing that all group gaps are either evidence of racism or the dread thing itself—Kendi proposes some social-engineering solutions to fix our racist system. These include the formation of a federal Department of Anti-racism, tasked with ensuring proper representation of all groups across all fields of American enterprise, regardless of performance.

In order to determine the value of Kendi’s proposed definition of “racism,” we must first examine the logic of his claims. The old business-world canard that “the problem with this whole argument is that it is wrong” comes to mind. It is remarkable that such an easily disprovable idea has become so globally popular. The contention that the only factor that might explain group differences in performance, at any given time, is either genetic inferiority or hidden racism is simply wrong as a matter of fact. And if Kendi were saying that temporary cultural underperformance demonstrated genuine “inferiority” across an entire race, that too would be wrong as a matter of fact.

Serious social scientists—from Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on the political right to William Julius Wilson and John Ogbu on the left—have pointed out for decades that large human groups differ in terms of performance because of dozens of variables. Yes, these include culture (i.e., hours of study time per day). But they also include factors such as environment, region of residence, and even stochastic chance (or luck, to state it a bit more plainly).

One particularly obvious and noncontroversial example of such an “intervening independent variable” is age. According to the Pew Research Center, the most common (modal) age of black Americans is 27, and the most common age for white Americans is 58 (the median age gap, approximately a decade, is smaller). The most common age for Hispanics in the U.S.—across all regions and among both males and females—is 11. Vast differences such as these, which have nothing to do with inferiority, are certain to be reflected in measured group outcomes.

Geography is another powerful factor. Near-majorities of both American blacks and Hispanics still live in the South or Southwest, but a far smaller percentage of whites live in the same regions. This matters because test scores for all groups living in those regions have traditionally been lower than for those elsewhere in the country. Any analysis of group outcomes—from wealth and income statistics on the left to crime rates on the right—that fails to take obvious factors like these into account is dishonest or willfully ignorant.

Almost invariably, analyses that do take such factors into account find what might seem intuitively obvious to most thinking people: These variables explain group-performance gaps far better than “invisible racism” does. While she is sympathetic to arguments about the lingering effects of past oppression, the economist June O’Neill pointed out decades ago in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that the sizable gap in raw income between American blacks and whites shrinks to just 1 to 2 percent when adjustments are made for variables such as test scores, median age, and work experience. And the business-data company PayScale came to similar conclusions just last year regarding a range of commonly discussed race and gender pay gaps. Leaving aside its reductive circularity, a definition of racism as “group gaps” fails utterly if 98 percent of the gaps in question vanish when we adjust for basic non-raced variables such as “how old people are” or “what scores on the big test look like this year.”

--

One would think that analyses such as these make an airtight case against theories of overriding systemic racism. And they do—which is why those who believe in such theories make a fighting retreat toward a god-of-the-gaps argument when faced with data that shrink racism as a factor. According to this argument, perhaps even those secondary metrics (age, regional difference, and so on) reflect some still deeper and more dispersed form of racism. This is one of the reasons we are told that standardized exams that test mathematics and similar academic skills are culturally biased against blacks. This is what activists began to argue in the 1970s and what some scholars are beginning to reassert once more. They’re both wrong. Putting to one side the fact that mathematics developed historically in multicolored Mediterranean and North African regions (we still use Arabic numerals today) rather than in, say, Norway, we know what predicts test scores: They track closely with patterns of study time for members of all racial groups. This has been the core “culturalist” argument against IQ hereditarians, who believe in group differences in intelligence, for decades.

In 2017, the liberal-centrist Brookings Institution released a widely circulated article demonstrating that white high-school students study nearly twice as much as black high-school students, with Hispanic students falling in between the two. There are a variety of complex reasons for this, including social class, family stability, the prioritization of other activities such as athletics, and—no doubt—the effects of racism in the past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, grades and test scores follow exactly the same pattern. What’s more, Asian students out-study and thus outperform all white groups—an important phenomenon, in that theories such as Kendi’s provide no coherent way to explain it. Can anyone seriously argue that contemporary U.S. society is institutionally biased toward Korean or Indian-American kids (or Jews) and against blond-haired Anglo-Saxon gentry sprigs?

At least a few left-leaning thinkers are currently dealing with the confusing reality of high performance and successful minorities by hiding it. One recent method has been to formally reclassify Asian Americans as “white” in official documents. For those of us who are more confident in our theories, however, there is no mystery here to decipher: The same set of variables, influenced by past and current bias but also by many other things, explains why some minority groups are currently “beating” whites and why others are not. And one more than suspects that these factors largely explain the distribution of white income in the U.S., where wealthy white groups such as Australian Americans take in 200 to 300 percent more in annual household income than poorer ones such as Appalachian Americans. There is no coherent woke response to these points, beyond moving the causal focus of the original argument back one step and then calling anyone who still disagrees with them a racist.

In addition to its insufficient explanatory power, another weakness of the newly proposed definition and theory of racism is its lack of any coherent causal mechanism. To provide an example, Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow that black and Hispanic overrepresentation in the criminal-justice system is due to bigotry. To this claim, a quantitative scholar of political science or criminal justice would respond by saying that group crime rates explain the gap in incarceration rates. The next argument, chess-match style, would be that some form of subtle racism must explain the crime-rate gap. But we then have to ask: How? What is the mechanism that inflicts a given set of social problems on black Americans today (and often afflicts working-class whites to the same degree)? And why did this mysterious mechanism have far less influence on genuinely abused black folks in the past—with all “non-whites” making up 24 to 27 percent of sentenced prisoners even during the 1930s (blacks make up 52 percent of non-Hispanic prisoners today)? What’s more, how is it that this mechanism is ineffective when it comes to virtually all African and South Asian immigrants in the U.S. today? During the fairly typical year of 2018, all Asian Americans combined—including dark-skinned South Asians—committed just 127,651 violent crimes  in the U.S. versus 2,531,480 for non-Hispanic whites and 1,087,895 for the smaller black population? On a per capita basis, the Asian violent-crime rate breaks down to one such crime annually for every 153 citizens or residents of Asian descent, versus one crime per 79 among white Americans. And according to a somewhat classic but methodologically sound 1998 article produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, native-born black Americans are “much more likely to be incarcerated” than black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Why? Such questions are never answered, and the argument dies on the spot.

--

The Kendi definition of racism so popular today simply fails when subjected to logical analysis. This leaves thinking people facing an obvious question: “So what does racism mean?” Fortunately for us, this is a query with a simple answer: Racism continues to mean what it has always meant. Tribalism is an ancient human vice, dating back to before the Bible, and virtually every dictionary, at least until the Great Awokening of the past few years, has defined “racism” in much the same way for decades: genetically or ethnically based animus against members of a human out-group. The Free Dictionary definition is typical of the genre and quite good. It says that racism is the belief that genetic race “accounts for differences in character or ability” and that “one race is superior” to one or more other races, and it is almost always combined with dislike, prejudice, or “discrimination.”

Racism, in this real sense, is not a vague synonym for reverse karma, as it often seems to be in contemporary writings on the left. It is not “that thing that makes those who have previously suffered continue to struggle today.” It is a practical phenomenon that can be quantified and opposed. Further, and significantly, it is a vice that members of all races are capable of, and that is often expressed at the level of the individual. A major, if rarely discussed, problem with defining racism as a matter of statistical output at the systemic level is that it moves society’s focus away from most actual and demonstrable manifestations of racism—the slurs, fistfights, and muggings, and the simple refusals to promote someone “not quite like us”—that citizens do occasionally face in their pursuit of a good life. Using the older and better definition, we can categorize a range of individual statements and attitudes (“blacks/whites/Jews are inferior”) as definably racist and focus on opposing them as they arise.

Real racism is evidenced not by performance gaps alone but rather by proven discrimination. And such discrimination can be measured in a multitude of ways in this era of sophisticated statistical methods. Any facially racist laws or policies that remain in place—and there may be a few—constitute unethical discrimination and demand that we rid ourselves of them. It can be argued that the same is true for statutes that seem to treat otherwise identical people of different races differently after all major nonracial characteristics have been adjusted for (urban marijuana laws might be an example of this). We, as a society, might even choose to be skeptical of policies that produce large pre-adjustment racial gaps and that do not seem to serve any necessary purpose. There’s a fascinating debate around exactly this issue as it pertains to a string of legal cases dealing with workplace qualifications such as aptitude testing. The point is, bias is bad, and we should fight it.

We’ve seen enough of the fashionable arguments about racism to know that they’re only detrimental to that fight. The claim that “we know significant racism exists because the thing we have defined as significant racism exists” is not serious. If we were to accept it wholesale, it would mean, among other things, that the United States is a Korean-supremacist country. According to the proposed definition of racism, there’s no other way to interpret the outsize success of Korean Americans. This is why words must mean something. Rather than embracing the absurd, or choosing to deny the reality of continuing residual racism, thinking liberals, centrists, and conservatives need to reclaim the classic meaning of a critical term. If not, the proposed definition will become the definition. In a haunting indication of what’s to come, Merriam-Webster revised its definition of “racism” in 2020 to include “systemic racism.”

Ibram X. Kendi was born Ibram Henry Rogers. It is time we left Mr. Rogers’s intellectual neighborhood and got back to consensus reality before the real meaning of the word becomes a cultural artifact.

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The thing to understand about Mr. Rogers is that he’s not a deep thinker. He doesn’t come from the social sciences, he doesn’t come from a domain that requires evidence, analysis or testing. He’s little more than a storyteller.

But that’s enough for people taken in by his schtick and their own terror of not looking sufficiently virtuous.

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"And grift my way through companies and institutions for large sums of money.”