Fox News likes to use the slogan 'Fair and Balanced'. In truth, there is presently no such thing as a 'fair and balanced' news network, and there probably never was. Interestingly enough, what Fox News IS is approximately 50th percentile among the American population. This is almost certainly why it's the only major news apparatus that actually turns a profit on a regular basis. It is almost exactly what you'd expect to exist if a rational profit-maximizer were to establish a news network in the US. The other major networks are around 5th-15th percentile on the rough leftist-reactionary spectrum of the US population. Even Rush Limbaugh, that hated exemplar of knuckle-draggers everywhere, is probably only around 60th or so percentile. Can you imagine a news network that took the position that the wrong side won the Civil war? Or perhaps a network that took the position that mixed-race marriages were not in general a good idea (even leaving aside any legal sanctions against such)? Or one that questioned whether diversity was a good thing? Frankly you'd only need to get to approximately the 70th percentile of the distribution in the US for such a network. Yet it seems unthinkable, doesn't it?
A network that was actually 'fair and balanced' would be even more unthinkable. Can you imagine a network that didn't engage in histogram distortion? By this I mean it makes every attempt to ensure that the frequencies with which it reports issues, groups, etc match the frequencies in the actual real world. So, for instance, if it's doing a stories about outstanding young scientists, and X% of them are white males, then it shows approximately X% as, well, white males. Similarly, on crime reporting, over or undersampling any group of perpetrators would be avoided religiously. If blacks commit X% of the homicide, they'll get X% of the homicide coverage, no more, and no less. Existing networks do a truly awful job of this, which is why a recent study where people were asked to estimate the percentage of the population that was homosexual had an average answer of about 25%. Hell, even the homosexual activists have never claimed more than a tenth, and the actual answer is closer to 2.5%. There's a decided irony here---to be truly fair and balanced on issues of identity, be that identity racial, sexual, or ethnic, you have to take an almost mathematical notice of such. Otherwise you're going to easily fall prey to the temptation to distort the histogram by ginning up highly unrepresentative numbers of 'minority scientists' and 'great White defendants' and the like. But that's what fair and balanced would actually look like. Anyone smoking anything efficacious enough to be able to believe that such a thing would ever happen on this side of a political singularity?
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8 comments:
Jehu,
Good post overall. Question, though:
Is there a coherent anti-miscegenation position? I can see the position (a) that if folks are racist, then mixed race kids are in bad shape. (b) that intercultural marriages are lots of work...and as such maybe a bad idea. But no more so than would be Americans marrying Russians. Is there something else?
Yes, those are two big ones, the third is the confusion of cultural/racial/ethnic identity that the child usually feels. Cultural distance is also a huge thing in marriage, because you're not just marrying a person, you're marrying their family as well. That'd be about a 70th percentile position---miscegenation culturally discouraged but not forbidden by law.
Jehu,
Thanks for the response.
Item 3, though, looks to be 1+2 applied to the kids...mixing culture is hard...and racial/cultural identity is important. Is that right? If Racial identity isn't important, and you're some rich white guy marrying a daughter of, say, Clarence Thomas...then no big deal on the culture issue...and it's back to whether race matters.
That final sentence included some thought that was in your head, but that I didn't follow.
Racial identity is important to the overwhelming majority of mankind Aretae. People who straddle the boundaries of two acknowledged races tend to be somewhat deformed by the pressures to either pass or be 'black enough', in the case of black and white. I know a fair number of people who are 1/2 black and 1/4 black and this is a challenge for them, but it's a big deal for those I know that are 1/2 asian as well (Japanese or Thai). Races are more than just a visual and cultural thing, they're also statistical distributions of all kinds of traits. To some extent, these traits drive cultures and the other way around in a very long feedback loop (if your group is good at, say math and merchanting, your culture will bend in that direction, and the guys that get tapped thusly as high status will get to breed more, affecting the distributions for future generations.
Which sentence are you referring to? The political singularity or the 70th percentile position (culture views miscegenation is a bad thing and tries to discourage it but doesn't throw the force of law at the perceived problem).
Fair enough. I'm personally a serial miscegenator, with 2 mulatto kids who can pass as Hispanic by color, (or white if you're as race-clueless as me). Certainly no more black than Mariah Carey. And since we homeschool, we do an awful good job of keeping the "are you black or white" thing away from them.
2. I was referring to 70th percentile. I think you were referring to cultural disapproval of miscegenation being 70% from progressive to Reactionary.
Thanks so much for the interesting discussion. I learned a bit.
Yes, folks around the 70th percentile disapprove of the practice, but not so much as to want legal sanctions against it. Interestingly enough, the strongest opposition is among Asian men and Black women. A 70th percentile news network would call the practice regretable and would probably run stories on the fallout of such relationships as well. Glad I could feed your mind.
Aretae:
Some disapproval of miscegenation probably has little to do with the feelings of the mixed-race offspring, and more to do with the feeling that it creates undesirable offspring that the rest of us have to live with, and that it's also just nasty - sort of bestiality-lite.
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