Data Talks - and the lamps start going out

[THREAD]

1/ SAT data from 2020 confirm very little has changed over the decades in the racial gaps, except for Asian-Americans pulling away from everyone else on the math section. In fact, the Asian-white math gap is now almost the same as that between whites and Hispanics. pic.twitter.com/WcSYXgEPXC

— A New Radical Centrism (@a_centrism) December 17, 2020

 UPDATE:  In the continuing Twitter pogrom against independent thinking and interesting empirical content, a reader alerts me to the fact that this link is no longer functional as A New Radical Centrism appears to have been removed by Twitter.  

It makes me think of WWI when Western Enlightenment nations such as Britain, France and Italy were ineluctably drawn into war with the repressive authoritarian regimes of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.  British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously remarked to a friend on Britain's entry to the conflict,  "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."

I don't think things are near so apocalyptic.  Repressive and establishment forces have had a free reign for sixty years and more and now are being pushed back by the 70-90% still committed to participative democracy, rule of law, equality before the law, natural human rights and all the other core beliefs of Age of Enlightenment.  Of course, they feel in peril and see violent insurrection in every assertion of founding values.  

But the imagery of the lamps going out is so applicable to the deplatforming of speakers, the collusion to constrain all social media not owned by the core big tech oligopolists, the purification by firing of independent voices in academia, the disappearing of independent thinkers Argentina style (desaparecidos), the blacklisting, the listing of political enemies - we know how this story ends.  As it always ends, in destruction and tragedy.  

Fortunately we are not a nation divided except in the sense of the 90% working, middle-class, and even upper-middle class versus the 10% secure and sinecured Mandarin Class.  Those who live, one way or another, off the 90%.  There is time to retreat from the coercive, repressive, and authoritarian dictates of postmodernism and critical race theory.  We will emerge from this sooner than late.  But what an avoidable detour from the steady progress of freedom and prosperity. 

The same reader who alerted me to the missing twitter post also reminds me that most this material is available through the wonderful internet archive.  In this instance, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201221144338/https://twitter.com/a_centrism/status/1339468855295553536.

New Radical Centrism also has a Facebook account but it also appears blocked or removed.