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As for Prop 209, experience is a substitute for foresight. Many University of California campuses are close to half-Asian today. Many non-Asian taxpayers aren’t entirely comfortable with this state of affairs, and have more nuanced opinions on affirmative action today than they did in 1996. The two major political causes Ron Unz has advocated for over the last few years have been a higher minimum wage and a reduction of Ivy League anti-Asian discrimination; the former has caught fire, but the latter has met a more ambivalent response. I really don’t think that an elite is suppressing the masses there today, though I’ll grant that that may have been the case earlier.

I’ll also grant that gay marriage may qualify as a modern-day example of successful suppression of the masses, but I suspect that it’s starting to succeed mostly because it isn’t very consequential. “If it matters that much to you, FINE.”

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Or as Ozy puts it, we’re apparently so unhappy with the status quo that we’ve summoned Cthulu and are hoping for the best.

Someone called for me? Because actually, as the representative of Cthulhu Leftswimmer on this comments page, I actually think that Yarvin shouldn’t have been disinvited from Strange Loop. Sorry, but blah blah complexity of values blah blah means that you don’t try to destroy someone’s professional and technical life just because you don’t like their politics. The trade-offs between these radically different domains of life need to involve direct violence before it’s acceptable to stomp Yarvin’s work life in favor of everyone else’s political decency (decent though it is, and wrong though Yarvin is).

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Most social issues are decided by elites, in opposition to the masses. I believe that gay marriage has passed only a single referendum (Maine).

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But your assertion that Mencken can be totally ignored is not just wrong, but dangerous; that’s often used as a pretext for completely screwing over an unliked majority. There is a range of policies that the public is willing to support, and I don’t think a return to a pre-1965-Northern-state scenario is in that range. (I will grant that your Proposition 209 example has made me reconsider the possibility that the popular support actually does exist and elites are preventing the public from getting what it wants, though.)

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To come at it from another angle, suppose we eventually get a really clear picture of how gender and attraction each happen, and pin down what causes them to be linked in the uncommon way. Would that change our view of homosexuality? What if we discovered at the same time that the cause was directly connected with something else, like an increased chance of depression, or a decreased chance of schizophrenia?

I honestly don’t know but it seems intriguing. Certainly if we found such associations to exist with regard to presence or absence of a Y chromosome, we would just shrug and say “That’s how it is,” rather than deciding that presence or absence of a Y chromosome was itself a genetic defect.

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In California, the residents did vote on a ballot initiative to end affirmative action in college admissions. Do you support direct democracy, or do you support the college administrators who defy the law? Do you support other states having referenda?

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