If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

But how are you not committing a grievous error by insinuating more than the correlation between "poorly run" cities and democratic leadership? How is that tweet not implying that democratic leadership causes or is incapable of fixing the issues, when in fact they could be caused by any number of things and it's unlikely the republican leadership would fix anything either? The tweet uses the word "correlation," but it's saying more than that.

I'm not frustrated by your attacks on democratic leadership, but in the insinuation (in that tweet, at least) that republican leadership is superior.

It's not simply that it's Democratic leadership, but that we are talking about unbroken decades of it all while these places trend worse and worse, while there is no questioning of the leadership or the citizenry but rather any problems are blamed on "racism". It's Coatsian.

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_first_rule_of_white_club_steve_sailer/

The central event in Between the World and Me is the fatal shooting in 2000 of an acquaintance from Howard U. by an undercover deputy from Prince George County, the country’s most affluent black-majority county. Coates refers to this tragedy repeatedly as proof of America’s demonic drive to destroy black bodies. (The dead man’s family, I found, was eventually awarded $3.7 million in their wrongful-death suit, much like the $3 million awarded to the parents of a teen gunned down by an undercover Obama Administration agent in a shooting that I investigated in 2010. You have never heard of my local police blotter item, though, because the victim was white.)

Since I”m a horrible person, my immediate response to Coates” tale was…okay…black-run county, affirmative-action hiring, and poor police decision-making…you know, I bet the shooter cop was black.

And sure enough, the Carlton Jones who shot Prince Jones turned out to be black. Coates eventually gets around to briefly admitting that awkward fact, but only after seven pages of purple prose about people who believe they are whites destroying black bodies.

https://www.takimag.com/article/occams_rubber_room_steve_sailer/

Today’s standard story as peddled by Coates rejects Occam’s Razor. For example, in 2011 the Obama administration reported that blacks commit homicide at a rate almost eight times that of whites. Is that proof of “the enduring myth of black criminality”? Or is it just evidence of black criminality?

But the simpler interpretation would be a stereotype! And stereotypes, as you learn at college, are mass delusions. Or something. The professors didn't explain precisely, but you got the message: Knowing that the average person is wrong about everything is what makes you better than people who didn't learn that at college.

What distinguishes Ta-Nehisi from his white competitors in the Hate Whitey business is his guileless faith in what he was taught. He really believes that if he amasses a mound of evidence that everybody for the past 150 years whose opinion is worth considering has been concerned about the black tendency toward criminality, well, that just proves how hallucinatorily racist America is. Since we all know from first principles that blacks couldn't possibly be more inclined toward disorganized crime than, say, Chinese, the fact that every expert has, at one point or another, broken down and admitted that they are just demonstrates how mind-warping white racism must be.

 

[Einherjar86]

It's not simply that it's Democratic leadership, but that we are talking about unbroken decades of it all while these places trend worse and worse, while there is no questioning of the leadership or the citizenry but rather any problems are blamed on "racism". It's Coatsian.

For me, it's not simply that democratic leadership is at issue (or is the sole issue). There's no reason to assume that republican leadership would do anything to fix these problems. It's true that faith in democratic leadership is misplaced in many cases, but so is faith in republican leadership.

Regarding the takimag excerpts, I think the journalist is suffering from a delusion about what his professors told him about stereotypes.

 

[Dak]

For me, it's not simply that democratic leadership is at issue (or is the sole issue). There's no reason to assume that republican leadership would do anything to fix these problems. It's true that faith in democratic leadership is misplaced in many cases, but so is faith in republican leadership.

Regarding the takimag excerpts, I think the journalist is suffering from a delusion about what his professors told him about stereotypes.

Republican leadership is like democracy, the worst form of leadership except for all the others. Plenty of room for improvement, but it is unlikely to be found across the aisle. Can't fix real problems in communities when there are SJW issues to address.

Having watched a graduate Social Psychology professor hem and haw around the accuracy of stereotypes and discuss how they could be "problematic" even if accurate, I don't find anything delusional about it. At least the graduate psych professor couldn't avoid the research; outside of psychology (and probably even down at the introductory undergraduate psych level), stereotypes are dismissed as illinformed if not also outright bad. Sailer's writing is everything Coates' is not: Sharp, witty, and accurate. He's a noticer extraordinaire.

 

[Einherjar86]

Republican leadership is like democracy, the worst form of leadership except for all the others.

mmmmm not true, but can we just say we disagree and call it a day?

I'm also not prepared to defend Coates against your charges since, as I mentioned earlier, I haven't even read any of his books. I've only read the occasional Atlantic piece.

Having watched a graduate Social Psychology professor hem and haw around the accuracy of stereotypes and discuss how they could be "problematic" even if accurate, I don't find anything delusional about it.

You're not using "delusion" the same way he did:

But the simpler interpretation would be a stereotype! And stereotypes, as you learn at college, are mass delusions.

You just said that your professor acknowledged stereotypes can be accurate; hence they're not "mass delusions." Your boy is suggesting that college teaches us that stereotypes are inaccurate; but that's not at all what most professors versed in the discourse would say. They'd say that stereotypes misidentify the trait, behavior, characteristic, what-have-you as inherent or essential to the type, e.g. Jews are good with money and it's their Jewishness that makes them good with money. That's the fallacy, which is what we "learn at college" (or most of us, anyway).

Stereotypes by their very nature convey some element of truth. As the old adage goes, stereotypes exist because they're true. Asking whether a stereotype is true misses the entire point. The answer is always "yes." The point is where we locate the source of the truth.

EDIT: speaking of McWhorter...

We can accept that “Don’t retreat, reload” isn’t always a command to shoot people, and that “I’ll pay the legal fees” if someone punches someone else in the face isn’t always a command to punch someone in the face. But then we must also accept that “concentration camp” harks back to the Nazis without exactly implying that Trump is literally pulling a Hitler. If the right can’t take what it dishes out, it might reconsider its comfort with metaphors of violence. In the meantime, the Trump administration’s “tender-age facility” will be, quite justifiably, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “concentration camp.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...sio-cortez-concentration-camp-comment/592180/

Damn republican snowflakes.

 

[Dak]

mmmmm not true, but can we just say we disagree and call it a day?

I'm also not prepared to defend Coates against your charges since, as I mentioned earlier, I haven't even read any of his books. I've only read the occasional Atlantic piece.

I'm interested in what you would consider an example of metropolitan or even state Democratic leadership. There are plenty of examples of bad Republican leadership. Most politicians suck by default. If you don't want to pursue that that's fine though

You're not using "delusion" the same way he did:

You just said that your professor acknowledged stereotypes can be accurate; hence they're not "mass delusions." Your boy is suggesting that college teaches us that stereotypes are inaccurate; but that's not at all what most professors versed in the discourse would say. They'd say that stereotypes misidentify the trait, behavior, characteristic, what-have-you as inherent or essential to the type, e.g. Jews are good with money and it's their Jewishness that makes them good with money. That's the fallacy, which is what we "learn at college" (or most of us, anyway).

Stereotypes by their very nature convey some element of truth. As the old adage goes, stereotypes exist because they're true. Asking whether a stereotype is true misses the entire point. The answer is always "yes." The point is where we locate the source of the truth.

So what makes them good with money? I disagree with your general assertion here about stereotype teaching. A Psychology Today article had to address this back in 2012:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201210/stereotype-inaccuracy

These are statements in peer reviewed papers and APA statements. While some of the comments are quibbles, they are an attempt to suggest we should never actually apply stereotypes because we might be interfacing with the rare exception. So it stands to reason this is a widespread sentiment, beyond anecdata.

Why do so many psychologists emphasize stereotype inaccuracy when the evidence so clearly provides evidence of such high accuracy? Why is there this Extraordinary Scientific Delusion?

There may be many explanations, but one that fits well is the leftward lean of most psychologists.

Stereotypes and IQ tests are the most valid things in all of psychology, an incredibly left-leaning field, which adds extra credence to them, since leftists generally dislike the most likely conclusions from the results. If psychologists, who should know their own literature, want to emphasize in the wrong direction, so much more so for the rest of academia.

EDIT: speaking of McWhorter...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...sio-cortez-concentration-camp-comment/592180/

Damn republican snowflakes.

I frankly don't care what people want to call them. Concentration camps are better than what illegals deserve. Instead of war with Iran, the US Army should be stationed along the borders and at ports of entry with permissive ROE and actually protect the country. Throw in drones and helicopters armed to the teeth for good measure.

Edit: Those people upset about the concentration camp comments are mostly Jewish neocons and the religious right who slavishly follow them. They can fuck off.

 

[CiG]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...sio-cortez-concentration-camp-comment/592180/

Damn republican snowflakes.

If they had any tact they'd refer to them as gulags. Conflating what Republicans do with communism would explode their heads.

 

[Einherjar86]

Concentration camps are better than what illegals deserve.

It's not a matter of intellect or argument; I just can't imagine thinking that. There's no logic you can use to convince me. And I'm okay with that.

 

[Dak]

It's not a matter of intellect or argument; I just can't imagine thinking that. There's no logic you can use to convince me. And I'm okay with that.

It's not really an intellect or logic (slightly differentiated from argument) position per se. It's about skin in the game and related knowledge and ethics. It's somewhat ironic that liberals are only libertarian on borders, while persons like myself are mostly libertarian except on borders. I'm not much of a Milton Friedman fan but he was absolutely right when he said you can't have a welfare state and free immigration. Liberal policies are going to Brazilify the US, which won't hurt them as much because they can afford personal property walls instead of border walls.

Edit: I should also mention the math behind the sentiment: A country owes illegals nothing. A bullet is cheap. Housing and food and guards, no matter how cheap and mean, are expensive.

 

[Dak]

When we get right down to it, the main dividing difference between every strain of "progressive" and "conservative" is that progressives refuse to accept TANSTAAFL, both literally and metaphorically.

 

[CiG]

#BuildTheWall, limit focus on illegal entry to points of entry. Solves many issues right there.

 

[Dak]

#BuildTheWall, limit focus on illegal entry to points of entry. Solves many issues right there.

Only problem is that the wall isn't a perfect solution to all illegal crossings. Still need monitoring, which can be done by drone, with QRF support.

 

[CiG]

Even with monitoring it isn't perfect. if people can escape from North Korea, they'll sure as shit make it into your country wall or no wall, monitored or unmonitored, but it solves many ethical issues both sides care about. Taxes aren't spent on people who have no right to be there in the first place and you don't have tent cities or illegals being shot because they're processed at points of entry and that way you have a tighter control over the flow of entry, or the rate of rejection.

Even if a wall is expensive it makes a lot of sense in the long run to have it.

 

[Dak]

Even with monitoring it isn't perfect. if people can escape from North Korea, they'll sure as shit make it into your country wall or no wall, monitored or unmonitored, but it solves many ethical issues both sides care about. Taxes aren't spent on people who have no right to be there in the first place and you don't have tent cities or illegals being shot because they're processed at points of entry and that way you have a tighter control over the flow of entry, or the rate of rejection.

Even if a wall is expensive it makes a lot of sense in the long run to have it.

A couple of quibbles, taxes are spent on illegals, quarantining them or not. Also illegals will make it in wall/monitoring or not, but the numbers are drastically reduced. There's a reason many countries have border walls/fences, and it's not because they are all stupid.

 

[CiG]

A couple of quibbles, taxes are spent on illegals, quarantining them or not.

Yeah I should have said taxes spent on illegals are reduced.

Also illegals will make it in wall/monitoring or not, but the numbers are drastically reduced. There's a reason many countries have border walls/fences, and it's not because they are all stupid.

Agreed. Was only making this point as it relates to "perfect solutions."

 

[Einherjar86]

When we get right down to it, the main dividing difference between every strain of "progressive" and "conservative" is that progressives refuse to accept TANSTAAFL, both literally and metaphorically.

We don’t think TANSTAAFL at all. We just think there’s plenty of resources to provide for everyone’s lunch.

The irony of late-stage capitalism is that we have pockets of enormous wealth, and disparate regions of extreme scarcity. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity because if it didn’t then there wouldn’t be any need for competition. It’s not a disconnection from reality that progressives suffer from; it’s a disagreement with the values that promote the unquestioned hoarding of wealth.

It’s easier to say that progressives are out of touch with reality than it is to argue cultural values.

 

[CiG]

Mostly dumb but pretty funny:

Kamala Harris shamed by Jamaican father over pot-smoking joke.

Kamala Harris made headlines last week when she joked in a radio interview that of course she smoked marijuana in her younger years: “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

But the crack didn’t go over well with at least one Jamaican: Donald J. Harris, her father.

The elder Harris sent an unsolicited statement to Kingston-based Jamaica Global Online, for which the emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University wrote a recent essay on his family’s history.

“My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote.

“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” he added.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The irony of late-stage capitalism is that we have pockets of enormous wealth, and disparate regions of extreme scarcity. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity because if it didn’t then there wouldn’t be any need for competition. It’s not a disconnection from reality that progressives suffer from; it’s a disagreement with the values that promote the unquestioned hoarding of wealth.

Capitalism is the greatest distributing force of wealth in the history of the world. Countless third-world nations have left poverty thanks to free trade. Regions of extreme scarcity are overwhelmingly ex-leftist and otherwise property-less African shitholes. Capitalism doesn't "need" competition, it creates competition, and scarcity is the primary thing that capitalism alleviates through competition. Everything you said is exactly wrong.

 

[Einherjar86]

Capitalism is the greatest distributing force of wealth in the history of the world. Countless third-world nations have left poverty thanks to free trade. Regions of extreme scarcity are overwhelmingly ex-leftist and otherwise property-less African shitholes. Capitalism doesn't "need" competition, it creates competition, and scarcity is the primary thing that capitalism alleviates through competition. Everything you said is exactly wrong.

1. Creating and needing aren’t mutually exclusive.

2. Regions of scarcity may be locally ex-leftist, but the global axiomatic is capitalism. As soon as local regions attempt something other than free trade internally, they’re usually excluded from international trade internationally (or seriously disadvantaged by it).

3. Capitalism can alleviate scarcity, absolutely; but if it actually distributed its products evenly then it would leave little or no incentive for people to compete (hence why capitalism “needs” competition).

A lot of what you said is exactly right, but you’re assuming there’s a supreme universal perspective from which to interpret the situation. I’m telling you there isn’t. Capitalism is the greatest distributing force in the history of the world, and yet still promotes poverty, misery, and exclusion. It has to in order to survive.

 

[CiG]

 

[Dak]

We don’t think TANSTAAFL at all. We just think there’s plenty of resources to provide for everyone’s lunch.

The irony of late-stage capitalism is that we have pockets of enormous wealth, and disparate regions of extreme scarcity.

1
2. Regions of scarcity may be locally ex-leftist, but the global axiomatic is capitalism. As soon as local regions attempt something other than free trade internally, they’re usually excluded from international trade internationally (or seriously disadvantaged by it).

3. Capitalism can alleviate scarcity, absolutely; but if it actually distributed its products evenly then it would leave little or no incentive for people to compete (hence why capitalism “needs” competition).

A lot of what you said is exactly right, but you’re assuming there’s a supreme universal perspective from which to interpret the situation. I’m telling you there isn’t. Capitalism is the greatest distributing force in the history of the world, and yet still promotes poverty, misery, and exclusion. It has to in order to survive.

Terms like "wealth" and "resources" and "scarcity" are all being used in far too slippery ways here (and in most conversations that invoke these terms). When we talk about wealth, do we mean liquid money? Broad money? Are we including assets like buildings? What about services (human knowledge + labor)? When we mean resources are we talking about All of the above? Are we including untapped natural resources (which in this case we are also told by some progressives that using them is "raping the earth", and regardless of that, it definitely contributes to pollution)? By scarcity, are we referring to a lack of things provided only within a capitalist context? IE, smartphones were infinitely scarce pre-2007, so to blame capitalism for everyone on the planet not having a smartphone is ridiculous, but this is the same move made about everything constantly.

Capitalism also doesn't "do" anything. It's a system for relatively (but certainly not entirely) decentralized human economic activity. Referring back to the smartphone example, poverty, misery, and exclusion are the base states of nature:

While its true that the capitalist system won't distribute everything equally, the base state of poverty, misery, and exclusion across the globe is far, far higher than at any point in history, and continues to move in an upward trajectory. Internationally, regions of "scarcity" are only relatively so, and often areas with abundant natural resources. Within the US, regions of income "scarcity" have been created by taking low-mid IQ jobs from here, and putting them elsewhere: a net gain for the world but a loss for those persons in the US. This doesn't occur for "capitalism to survive." It occurs because of the regulatory environment and business competition.

Also an important point to add to the above graph: If you eliminated sub-Saharan Africa, it would drop all lines almost the rest of the way, despite tons of international aid and investment, and being rich in resources:

Which area has become more capitalist since 1981: East Asia/Pacific, or Sub-Saharan Africa? Which area has reduced poverty more?