If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

The evidence is ample. All you need is the history we have.

Yeah. Redlining. Jim Crow. Like I said, decades ago. Like 5+ decades ago. The parents of Millennials weren't even born yet. Systemic racism accusations today and for the last several decades have done nothing but looked at outcomes and claimed racism when they didn't meet perfect parity. This is as ignorant as the persistent male-female wage-gap claims. It's ignorant of basic logic, employs contextless statistics, and completely ignores any individual choice, which flies in the face of current social psychology.

When women or blacks fall short of the population income mean (cause we don't know how to use statistics!), it's sexism or racism. When black men commit a statistically significant portion of murders (against other blacks mind you), it's racism. When women initiate the majority of divorces it's because men made them do it. No agency. No explanation allowed that uses either good statistics or intracultural issues.

I well understand your concerns. There are plenty of descriptive statistics to support the assertions of differential outcomes in all sorts of areas and from every angle. That doesn't in anyway automatically support accusations of systemic anything.

 

[Einherjar86]

I won't say that systemic explanations are never used inaccurately, but that doesn't change the fact that resistance to systemic explanations are overwhelmingly ideologically influenced. They are rejected on the ground level because many people don't even want to entertain the possibility that certain phenomena might be more complex than what they can see outside their windows. Such people piss the hell out of me, I'm sorry to say.

Systemic explanations shouldn't, and don't have to, preclude personal responsibility. We just need to be vigil and attentive about how we apply these explanations.

 

[Dak]

They are rejected on the ground level because many people don't even want to entertain the possibility that certain phenomena might be more complex than what they can see outside their windows. Such people piss the hell out of me, I'm sorry to say.

Systemic explanations shouldn't, and don't have to, preclude personal responsibility. We just need to be vigil and attentive about how we apply these explanations.

I agree with this, I just don't think it applies in the case of racism or sexism, currently. Particularly when you consider the counter influence of the antiracism systemic policies like Affirmative Action and the broad social movement of antiracism. I wouldn't argue that there aren't some measure of lingering effects of past systemic racism. But they don't, at this point imo, explain the "majority of the variance" to borrow a statistical term. If there is in fact any current "systemic racism" or effects of such it is in the victim ideology that pervades modern "movements" which seek to stymie positive behavior in minority communities.

I do accept arguments which incorporate systemic factors when appropriate. Currently, I think there are systemic factors to explain, for example, the obesity problem and the heroin problem.

 

[H.P. Lovecraft]

Is it odd of me to archive you guys' discourses via screenshotting on account of just how philosopihcally fascinating I find them?

 

[Dak]

Better than the "fuckin wtf stfu" responses we normally get

 

[H.P. Lovecraft]

I understand entirely what both of you argue, the sole reason for the infrequence of my own engagement being I don't feel my powers of intellect or articulation suffice to provide the conversation with anything. I tend to thoroughly enjoy anything that makes me think, particularly when two intelligible, informed, but diametrically opposite minds duke it out.

 

[CiG]

Better than the "fuckin wtf stfu" responses we normally get

cough Mort cough

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

 

[CiG]

More like Bill Meh.

 

[rms]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slat...ocaust_statement_because_others_suffered.html

how many years have gone by with non-Jews trying to get some spotlight about their genocide? This is getting #alllivesmatter'd by twitter/left

ridiculous. You go to Berlin and there's only a Jewish memorial from the Holocaust

 

[Dak]

Apparently 6 million Jews > all the other lives lost in the 20th century to socialist/communist regimes.

 

[rms]

i'm looking at the comments of these articles about the Quebec mosque shooting and the highest liked comments are saying because of Trump there is now islamophobia in Canada

??

 

[CiG]

When did the left lose the ability to use introspection and self-awareness?

 

[SentinelSlain]

I think the left have suffered from their own "privilege". They can nullify the importance of any counter argument to too great a degree.

 

[Dak]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/ladies-check-your-privilege/article33797846/

 

[rms]

really hoping the term reverse discrimination dies one of these days

 

[Dak]

Yeah, it's dumb. It's all just discrimination.

 

[CiG]

Same with reverse racism. No, it's just regular old racism.

 

[Einherjar86]

Speaking of racism...

btw, this is what, in academia, we call "fudging":

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...ng-terrific-trump_us_58920a79e4b0c90eff015bb3

Technically, Frum didn’t get the quote exactly right, based on footage of the speech. But he was pretty darn close. Trump referenced Douglass as “an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

 

[rms]

care to expand here?