AZ Kid:

“brave new world”  Now YOU"RE talking; this is right along with ‘power-knowledge,’ big-brother, what is called “disciplinary” society, and all the changes that you for sure would recognize as the “soma” putting the masses to sleep.  I suspect you would agree that democracy is something that has to be perpetually defended.  I am afraid that the coming generations will be too mesmerized by technology and trinkets to notice that it has been stolen. 

p.s.  I like that your skeletal vaquero appears to be holding a Remington rather than the more cliche colt.  Happy trails!

@AZ HA! ‘Are you lonesome tonight, do you miss me tonight…” one of my favs! No, “baby” is here and she gets on my case when I get caught up in these exchanges, but I don’t often.  Between work, looking after ailing parents, the animals, keeping kids with four-wheelers off the property, weeding the garden, and repairing everything that keeps breaking I keep really busy, so you don’t have to worry about me becoming a regular nuisance.  I just got some extra time this week because of rain. 

All we’re doing here is really no different than the old timers that sit up at the country store and talk about nothing all day: we’re just passing time and aren’t going to change anything.  Honestly this has more to do with me not wanting to get on fixing a fence than saving the world.  I apologize if I got you rattled.

p.s. Pouvoir-Savoir means “power-knowledge” and basically has to do with institutional and bureaucratic control…the way Michel Foucault saw modern society controlling people, rather than overt brute force from the top down…

@AZ

I don’t write that “pretty” or that flowery and I can be plain but I tend to ramble on when I get into something because I want the details of my point to be understood.  In my opinion all people that aren’t actually suffering from some real defect are about equal in intelligence.  It isn’t smarts but motivation and how one thinks.  Many of the more complex concepts that I muse about have not been easy for me to comprehend, and I may die before I understand economics to my satisfaction. Many topics are very complex and I simply don’t want to be lazy and choose an oversimplified mischaracterization. 

Some things are simple however.  I find it very compelling that many simple “truths” that I “figured out” on my own by setting ego aside are central to the teachings of many of the great teachers one might name: Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, King etc..  Things like compassion, forgiveness, humility, restraint, and so on.  These are my values and they both inspire my search for a better way for us to live together, and inform “my” ideas about what that might look like. 

But I do have some strong biases about how life ought to be lived.  It seems to me that in those things that most define humans in comparison to other creatures can be found the purpose of life: knowledge, science, arts, technology and so forth.  One of Marx’s main criticisms of “wage slavery” was not that it just made people poor, but that it robbed them of their humanity, the ability to live to their fullest human potential.  To live only to work only to live is to be no more than any other animal.  To be a little more affluent and have some creature comforts is not much better IMHO.  You have merely moved from being a gazelle to being a pampered cow.  I think that life ought to afford everyone the opportunity to fully develop his/her mind regardless of what vocation he/she chooses. 

I remember reading about how poor, dirty, rag-clad, rural, Irish students in sod schools some centuries ago still managed a first rate education replete with all the literary, scientific, and mathematical knowledge of the day.  It may have had little practical use for these largely agricultural and/or pastoral people, but how much richer were their lives for it.

that works, never thought life was anymore than
a quark anyway.

@John Ellis

The supernatural/magical claims of your statement cannot be addressed scientifically/factually at all.  Beyond that you have a problem with your terms or variables: you begin with the assumption that race is real or natural biological category and it isn’t.  Therefore you must define each group: black = all dark skinned people of African ancestry; white = all light skinned people of European ancestry (limited to the fairly recent past), for instance. 

A behavioral comparison of each group would yield the obvious: the full compliment of possibilities from the most heinous to the most selfless examples of altruism. 

The issue of reparations (again whether practical or not) is not about tallying up which race has behaved the worst or about settling a score between races (they don’t exist).  This is about a particular historical event or trend: the enslavement and exploitation of a segment of American society by another segment.  It is not skin color that defines the crime, just tells you something about what the exploited and exploiter look like. 

If a white man today just hates black people and then assaults a black man because he is black, the latter deserves justice for the crime not because he is black, but because he got beat up.  Skin color was motive, not the crime.  Similarly, if the US owes reparations to living blacks because they experience continued hardship as a direct result of slavery, it is NOT because they are black, but because their ancestors were enslaved in this country.  Again, ideas of race were important elements of and informed the conduct of the crime, but were not the crime.

abstract philosophy verses statistics
on race.

PouvoirSavoir:  As to your statement “...immgration and money flying out in other ways”-

Financially speaking, “illegal” Mexicn labor is not financially very significant compared to, for instance, the unholy amount of cash (not to mentioin lives) thrown away, blown away, every hour of every day for years on end, and with no end in sight.
  Truth is, at present, the U.S. economy is dependent upon killing people—or abusing and underpaying them, or shipping their jobs to countries where wages are lower and unlimited pollution is allowed, or stealing their resources.
  Considering this, it is so sad to find many people frantic over immigration in the Southwest and making statements like “why don’t they stay in Mexico and fix their own economy there?”
  Why don’t we “fix our own economy here?” That one step would make a huge difference in many places around the abused world.
  Of course I know it isn’t all the U.S. fault, but because the U.S. is the biggest, the strongest, the richest, its responsibility is the heaviest.

@AZ

Just because something is complex, isn’t intuitively obvious, and conflicts with someone’s “common sense” notions, doesn’t make it nonsense.  Social science developed the same way as other science, systematically and by starting with observation and an attempt to mitigate the impact of bias and received “wisdom.” 

I have not been brainwashed or indoctrinated, but rather grew up wondering how things worked, was unsatisfied with many of the “common sense” explanations I was given, began to developed my own theoretical framework (so to speak) based on observation, and found it very compelling when I much later read the work of real theorists that came to similar conclusions.  I include in this everyone from Buddha to Vygotsky, and Marx to Von Meses.

I am not arrogant or contemptuous of anyone, and as I already indicated, my origins are too damn common to be uppity or feeling superior.  I loathe ignorance not the ignorant and it is only by practicing humility that one can attempt to mitigate the former.  I don’t get many opportunities for this kind of dialogue in my “real” life, it would sound like Yiddish to those I interact with on a daily basis. 

A long time ago people just knew that witchcraft, or demons, or some other nonsense caused illness.  They would have looked at someone trying to explain germ theory the same way average people react when theories conflict with their “common sense” ideas about how things work and how to interact with one another. 

I suppose it is the definition of a conservative to hold that people should just believe the values they are given unquestioningly, and that maybe people even need to think this way, but I think that people people should learn to question everything, should be taught the ability to think critically rather than what to think.  In the absence of emotional attachments to particular ways of thinking it seems to me that finally reason would guide us. 

In this exchange I don’t presume to be teacher or student, and my ego is largely out of it; not about me (although this comment mostly is), but the pursuit of knowledge, communication.  You have already categorized me as a type AZ, but I’m just a person, questioning, trying to figure it all out, and I am not playing word games or trying to deceive anyone.  I’m trying to allow the interplay of ideas, that don’t really belong to us, to yield some understanding in spite of the individuals involved here.

@Larry

“Liberal America will continue creating confusion and doing incredible damage to race relations in general if they don’t learn the difference between diversity and Balkanization.”

You are spot on here, and I was already thinking this when I read your point about Ebonics.  I tend to think of myself more of a scientist than a liberal: what matters is fact and what will (or might) work.  What I always grapple with is the possible disagreement between what may be demonstrably fact, but socially indigestible.  AZ alluded to the cycle of social change or “progress,” and alternating conservative backlash.  I think academics, liberals, progressives and so on of the more philosophical and/or activist sort have been miserable failures at communicating their “truth” to the masses and predicting how the average person might react to their efforts. 

When a new medicine is developed supposedly much testing is done to predict its efficacy and safety before full production.  It seems that nothing comparable has ever been done with respect to social engineering or policies dreamed up by technocrats.  I think science can inform policy, but this really hasn’t happened yet. 

I still disagree about nature/nurture however.  I could never have the physique of a professional basketball player, which is analogous to your horse example, but the preponderance of evidence concerning the development of identity/personality and so on is heavily inclined towards nurture.  This is to be expected since, unlike other animals that rely almost exclusively on instinct and/or some learned behavior, humans conversely rely almost totally on learned behavior and generally will not even survive without socialization.

“Bad” genes are not what keeps the inner city black kid in the bullet-riddled neighborhood, or the red-neck kid up the road, from becoming a rocket scientist.  In each home there is not only a lack of education among the parents, but also an attitude of hostility towards education and the educated.  Perhaps there is drinking or drug abuse in each household, disruption due to financial hardship, or any other varieties of dysfunction.  Perhaps both households have young men fantasizing about the pipe-dream of professional sports rather than “hitting the books.”  Education is not the only means to success, but misery is concentrated among the poor and uneducated.  Many have hurdles to overcome, but it is a fact that the poorer and less educated your family is the more likely you are to encounter more hurdles and greater ones.

She woman, ITW, Leefeller, where are your loud
liberal mouths now ??????????????

30 years
drug sentencing powder to crack
100 to 1

the reform

30 to 1

prison pop.
poor , poor , poor, whitey…
so discrimated against.

Pouvoir-Savoir - not entirely true. My father bred horses and I guarantee you they were not born being able to run equally fast. People are no different. While everyone may have a gift, not everyone is born with the same gift and it is largely nature and not just nurture. Of course being deprived of opportunity is also a factor but my point is that over the last half a century we have given a great many opportunities to Blacks and others to the point where Asians and other ethnicities have had to pay the price for slavery and in the course of doing so, come up with all sorts of inane notions. Ebonics comes to mind. What could possibly be more racist than the concept that Blacks are genetically pre-disposed to being unable to speak English? How could anyone not break out laughing at such a downright idiotic suggestion and yet the Oakland School Board left to their own devices would have run that puppy up our you know whats. My point is that 30 years of affirmative action IS REPARATIONS in every respect and conversely at this point many of the “obstacles to success” spring from the Black community, not the white one.  To make Whites and worse yet, Asian Americans and others sacrifice out of collective guilt for slavery rather than allowing our obvious mistakes to disappear in the rear view mirror and move forward expeditiously doing the next right thing one “next right thing” one at a time seems the obvious path. Black Americans are never going to become self sufficient as a group if we continue to treat them as if they are handicapped. Liberal America will continue creating confusion and doing incredible damage to race relations in general if they don’t learn the difference between diversity and Balkanization.

@AZ and Larry

Why did the first settlers come here if not to find opportunity unavailable in the Old World stratified societies?  What is America if it becomes likewise so hierarchical that mobility is virtually nonexistent?  I am not any of the things that you believe me to be, and what knowledge I have accumulated is despite my very blue-collar and common upbringing.  I am not an ideologue and do not cling to any party or socio-political philosophy.  I am open minded, critically minded, and skeptical, but I care about people and I think much about how we might do things better. 

Are you certain that your more “dog-eat-dog” or “that’s just the way it is” attitude isn’t just a way to justify not caring?  I have not endorsed any particular way to right what I see as injustice, and there may not be a practical way to do so, but this does not justify pretending that the injustice didn’t happen. 

I’ll give you that the liberal strategy has historically been to just take tax money and absent mindedly throw it at a problem as if by magic all would be mended.  I’ll even go so far as to say that everyone might be better off if many such efforts had never been undertaken, but I will never willfully ignore facts just because they are ugly. 

I care about “social injustice” because I see it as a tremendous waste of human potential and talent.  I don’t want to create a system with a permanent welfare class siphoning off the productivity of the other portion of society; that would/is be just as wasteful.  You seem to believe that there is a certain class that are just innately takers, but I disagree. 

Nearly everyone wants to feel some sense of achievement, want to “stand on their own” so to speak, but how an individual defines achievement, and whether or not he/she believes it is worth the effort, makes all the difference and thee things are socially defined.  We can improve here, but we have yet to do a very good job.

I am a very compassionate person, but even I recognize that at some point no more can fit in the “life-boat” or everyone drowns.  This country has a legal obligation to its people, but not the rest of the globe, and we aren’t going to be an example of freedom or prosperity to anyone if we sink.  Translation: we do have to make some “mean” choices about immigration and money flying out in other ways.

@Larry

“God was handing out talent disproportionately…”

This is really the crux of the matter.  People of your slant tend to believe that individuals either invent themselves or are born (made by God or their genes) superior/inferior, but this is demonstrably false.  I am sure you are a hard working “good” American, but you were not dropped into the woods as an infant and merely walked out that way; you were made by the people in your young life. 

Similarly, the latest research gives even more weight to the view that our inheritance IS NOT our destiny.  Therefore, it is unjust to use one’s unearned privilege resulting from the particulars of one’s birth and upbringing to justify one’s relative success in life over that of the less fortunate.  It is unjust to blame the unsuccessful for barriers and hardships they didn’t chose and that you likely didn’t have to cope with. 

And, please don’t offer any exceptional examples of those who overcame hardship.  These are exceptions and do not refute the “rule” therefore.  You will find that these exceptional individuals, born in adversity, that nonetheless overcame,were privileged to have equally exceptional individuals in their life that made all the difference.

Where is it written that everyone is entitled to an equal amount of success? I do believe that everyone is entitled to equal opportunity but while Marx was thinking there IS NO God, God was handing out talent disproportionately and apparently Marx could not understand that. I wish I could do all sorts of things that I am not particularly adept at. I wish I had more money too ... so what? Why does anyone even do silly studies like this anymore if not to fan the fires of racial tension?

…      I have realized that the progressive movement was NOT an attempt to provide everyone relatively equal access to the “American Dream,” but merely prevent the worst poverty and thereby prevent disorder or descent into full-blown Communism.  In fact Marx saw this strategy already developing late in his life which made him withdraw his prediction about the inevitability of revolution.  Capitalists have so successfully disseminated the myth of meritocracy throughout this society that working class people commonly take working hard for nothing as a source of pride, and continue to believe in the fantasy of economic mobility.  They do not see themselves as systematical exploited and blame others among them for their economic woes: “I could make a living if it weren’t for all the dead-beats draining the system” and so on.  It is a lie and a perfectly executed ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that I doubt will be overcome.

Finally, there are a multitude of strategies for social-economic organization that are floating around and have yet to be tried.  There is nothing inherently human that demands one strategy rather than another and the current state of affairs has to do with history and culture, not human nature.  Capitalism, or something like it, could be reformed and/or developed that provided for a more equitable distribution of wealth, success, opportunity etc. automatically without the need for institutionalized redistribution, but this is not possible so long as certain elements of the current system remain.  As long as existing structures of finance, debt, and investment (and other elements that allow unproductive wealth creation and the concomitant exploitation of labor) continue in their current form no change is possible.  Economic growth must incessantly chase fake “wealth” created as debt in an unsustainable spiral upwards.

@Arizona Kid

“There can be no doubt that the practice of slavery contributed most to the advancement of capitalism and western civilization that anything since homo sapiens began to speak…Slavery is just another word for cheap labor…”

You interpret the cultural sophistication and technological developments you call “advancement” as good.  That IS open to debate, but I won’t one way or the other.  You are quite astute however to point out the relationship between slavery (coerced or usurped labor in whatever form) and the magnitude and rate of this advancement.  Wage slavery IS just the more modern version of an old pattern.  Pharaoh’s directed thousands of slaves to construct the pyramids (the point is still valid if no longer historically accurate), and capitalists accumulate the “stolen” labor of wage earners in money, in profits, and then do with it what they will. 

These ideas are central to Marxist analyses.  However, you argue that this is the way it must be, or it ought to be.  Why?  Who does it serve to perpetuate this system rather than adopting another and why wouldn’t the masses desire a system in which the decisions about where to invest everyone’s labor were made more democratically?  One fact that occasionally offered by the Tea Party crowd and some Libertarians that I must agree with is that the “Robber Barons” and more contemporary industrial and capitalist giants that dominate politics and retain a disproportionate share of power for themselves, would NOT have been able to exist in the first place without government subsidy. 

However, it is quite meaningless and impractical to discuss ways to address unequal access to opportunity at a time when opportunity is nearly “dried up.”  Obviously this wouldn’t be such a hard sell if a large majority were experiencing relative affluence.  Of course it would only be to the benefit of the nation as a whole if a large majority was engaged in some kind of productive enterprise, but to repeat a popular refrain, we aren’t producing much at all anymore, and too many are creating “wealth” out of thin air, and this will reduce the majority of us to serfdom.  The so called “progressive” effort has always been to ameliorate this effect of capitalism, but just so much.                (cont.)

Lets “cut away the fat” and just be honest about the intent of this article which is to promote reparations and affirmative action until the cows come home, no matter who else is damaged by it. In America we have a Constitution that has enabled us the unique quality of being able to “correct our own mistakes”. Many white Americans died fighting a civil war to correct the egregious shame of slavery. I didn’t personally own slaves and I do not intend to pay for it forever and there are myriad reasons why various races succeed when others do not and whether you are honest enough to admit it or not, the clear intent of such studies are to promote “set asides” and racial preferences which ultimately often hurt the very ones they are intended to help.

@Larry

Again, the “whiteness” of the people that enslaved and exploited blacks in this country is not what made these acts wrong; they could have been blue, or black themselves for that matter.  The wrongness was simply the enslavement or exploitation of an individual.  The cause was not race, it was economic, but racism facilitated the advent and proliferation of plantation slavery. 

There really is no such thing as “the black people” (or the “white people” for that matter)except as a social construct in the minds of people.  Black individuals were enslaved because it was profitable for the planting class to do so, and racism created the justification for enslaving people of color. 

Remember also that the political, legal, and otherwise systematic discrimination of persons of color went virtually unchallenged until only a generation ago.  When you consider that familial and social environment strongly determine how an individual develops, achieves or fails, its a but much to expect all of that socio-cultural baggage to just vanish instantly.

@Larry

Also, comparing various cultures which you have placed into some kind of contrived hierarchy and then drawing conclusions about ethnic/racial superiority is weak, and long refuted.  The African continent is immense with a similarly immense history and prehistory involving thousands of languages, cultures, and a variety social organizing schemes.  You lump all these into one stereotype. 

Highly complex and sophisticated cultures existed at one time or another from Egypt to South Africa.  What was the state of “civilization” in Britain or central Europe during the Golden Age of Greece, or when Semitic peoples established the great city-states of Mesopotamia, or when the advanced settlement of Catal Hoyuk was buzzing with activity in Turkey almost 10,000 years ago? 

The point is that you subjectively take elements of a particular culture to rank it on some hierarchy, as “better” or “worse,” and by extension interpret this as saying something about innate qualities of the members of said culture.  This is incorrect.  Dutch-Americans are not born speaking Dutch or exhibiting Dutch cultural traits, and those of us with some indigenous ancestry are not born knowing how to construct a Tee-pee.  We are one species and individuals reflect the environment of their socialization regardless of ancestry. 

If race were a real biological thing, which it is NOT, and blacks were genetically predisposed to failure as you indicate, there could be very few, or zero, exceptions.

Pouvoir-Savoir - are you suggesting that I mis-state the clear trend among liberal Americans to place the entire emphasis on racism and economic deprivation? This logic does not just apply to Blacks but rather everyone BUT white males. I am laughing at your ploy because you begin your rant with a straw man that I am “jerking at the knee” and “coming from a place of insult” and then after a whole bunch of meaningless high falootin dialogue you say “in any demographic the average black has more barriers to success” but YOU HAVE STILL AFTER DOING SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS ON MY PSYCHE NOT ADDRESSED MY POINT ..... which is, WHAT WERE THOSE ALLEGED “BARRIERS TO SUCCESS” WHEN there wasn’t a white guy within a thousand miles and tribal Africans were living in a world of their own creation? What makes some people remain tribal and primitive when others evolve? Hmmmmmmm?

Then you move on to “reparations for slavery” etc but at what point do Black Americans take any responsibility for kids in the inner city who want to be like Kanye West? By depriving American Blacks through slavery, have we set in motion a dynamic that is irreversible or is “Whitey” gonna get the blame no matter how long affirmative action applies to everyone BUT him? What about the poor Asian who’s ancestors never owned a slave but must now test higher than a Black man OR a White man to qualify for college. Your thinking is a manifestation of intellectual and academic pollution. Some of your are so very educated that you have no common sense at all.

@Larry

Respectfully, your knee-jerk feeling of individual insult, as a result (apparently)of identifying with ‘whiteness’ that you perceive to be under attack, betrays your conflation of large scale social processes with individuals.  You make the same mistake when you conflate the statistically verifiable under-performance of black Americans with their “blackness.” 

Understanding systems of oppression need not alienate or threaten you or any other white person individually.  It is not your “whiteness” that is being criticized, it is an established system of privilege that statistically privileges whites over blacks.  This system is real and is a result of real slavery and real discrimination. 

It is not an indictment of you as a person merely because you are a member of the statistical group, “white.” It would likely be very easy to compare the individual circumstances of your life and a specific black individual such that the latter was clearly privileged, BUT we are talking about averages.  In any demographic the average black has more barriers to success than the average white and there are reasons for that, and the preponderance of evidence DOES NOT indicate genetic inferiority; its history.

It is not the case that white individuals owe reparations to blacks due to the legacy of slavery etc., but that the US as a legal entity owes those blacks that have suffered hardship as a demonstrable result of slavery.  These families deserve compensation both for the crimes committed against their ancestors, and for the generations of uncompensated labor that contributed to the immense wealth of this country that they have been unable to share in.  All those who have benefited most from living in this country, regardless of race, owe an unpaid dept to the exploited millions that made huge contributions to the foundation of the same.

Now, while there is an unpaid debt that OUGHT to be paid, this is in no way a blanket endorsement of any particular program or policy.  Just because something is “right” to do, doesn’t mean that it will work.

comments prove my theory about Americans

Before there WERE any blacks in Europe or America and before the days of the slave trade, if you had gone to Africa and seen Africans living in huts and hunting with primitive weapons for their food while Europeans were building ornate churches and castles etc, who would you have blamed the disparity on then?

Without white people and Jews to blame everything on, American progressives are practically autistic! LMAO I’m surprised you have not found a way to retroactively blame the disappearance of Dinosaurs on “carbon emissions”.  “Whitey did it, whitey did it”!

I read the whole story in the Guardian.  Property was not included in the study.  The gap would be higher if property/homes were included.  The so-called “American dream” is a myth.

Maybe, and of course they feel 5 times more guilty about it…

and it’s that guilt that drives them to become liberals…and support meaningless symbolic social programs that sooth their guilt, but actually do very little to change the way wealth is distrubuted in this country….

the plutocracy remains firmly in power…

hello. spaces are just for racial exhibitionism. blacks are losing from affirmative action, just like whitey planned. sucessful blacks will not invest in other blacks, because they know better. all whiteys are rich. there is no room in this country for hispanics. asians make more than all other races combined. does that fill your gaps? and i do no even get funded by a college!

Could someone please fill in the gaps in this article? As it is written it makes almost no sense whatever.

It seems that in this article that all white families make $100,000 a year and are considered high income, then goes on to say that African-American families make $25,000 a year and are considered high income.