Sorry, can't take Sam Harris serious anymore. Not after him backing Murray's debunked conservative propaganda bs.

Define culture plz.

Or better yet, no more posts.

Brooks,cmon man.

Brooks wrote:

Define culture plz. Or better yet, no more posts.

Google Dictionary tells me it's "the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society".

And that's exactly how I'm using it.

JRPC wrote:

tin_robot wrote:

I did start writing a point by point rebuttal to the second of JRPC's linked articles then realised that I didn't have the time, and it seemed like there was probably little point.  

Still, JRPC, if you're interested, here are some questions to consider. Why has he used the word "just" in the opening sentence? What does his statement about "the Left" being ignorant and "the Right" being impotent tell you about his biases and his blind spots?  The whole essay is essentially framed as a rebuttal, but what arguments is he actually refuting, and were they made by others, or simply by the author himself? Is the Pedestrian Parable really applicable here - again what assumptions are being made when applying it, and are they fair? etc etc. 

(edit - Just read that back and realised how patronising it sounds.  Sorry.)

 

What jumps out is that your very first move is to try and discredit the author by assigning him to a rival political tribe.

 
Um, what? Where does he do that?

Seems like a lot of words to say that you subscribe to the right wing personal responsibility ideology and that you don’t like identity politics.

JRPC:

Meritocracy is awesum, blablabla etc.
Everyone should be judged so. Begone evil IP politics!

In a perfect world where discrimination doesn't exist I would agree with you.
Sadly, human nature doesn't work like that so we have to manually 'adjust' the system.
In the real world people do not only get judged on merit, we also get judged on appearance, race, age, ses, gender and sexuality. All the time and in continues fashion.
Don't get me wrong, I hate IP politics. I just see it as a necessary evil to help adjust the social balance.

And there needs to be balance. Acting as if race and discrimination don't exist and aren't human traits is just retarded and only benefits one group (society's 'default' group). You'll only get pent up frustration by denying people (and that includes white people!) their identity. That pent up frustration is what drove the Brexit vote, the Trump election and he rise of Geert Wilders in the netherlands.

Yossarian wrote:

Seems like a lot of words to say that you subscribe to the right wing personal responsibility ideology and that you don’t like identity politics.

No Yoss you're simply wrong about this.

In fact I actually have unusually extreme views in the opposite direction. 

My views on Free Will mean that I don't think any of us can take deep responsibility for anything we do. Not our failures nor our greatest successes. The difference between me and my life and the ICE addict who's sleeping under an archway tonight I see as nothing but sheer luck. 

Perhaps my views just don't fit neatly into your simplistic ideas of a political dichotomy?

JRPC wrote:

Seems like a lot of words to say that you subscribe to the right wing personal responsibility ideology and that you don’t like identity politics.

No Yoss you're simply wrong about this. In fact I actually have unusually extreme views in the opposite direction.  My views on Free Will mean that I don't think any of us can take deep responsibility for anything we do. Not our failures nor our greatest successes. The difference between me and my life and the ICE addict who's sleeping under an archway tonight I see as nothing but sheer luck.  Perhaps my views just don't fit neatly into your simplistic ideas of a political dichotomy?

So you're all for meritocracy but you also believe you're not in control of life?
What gives?

God knows.

Literally.

JRPC wrote:

OK so I’ve been super busy this week with work, but also had to think about how to respond to all that stuff other day. Looking back, obviously by posting links to those articles I knew I was poking the monster a bit so I’ve definitely got my share of the blame here. But things turned nastier than I imagined. But after a couple of days mulling the options, I figure fuck it. This place is mine as much as anybodys. I’m just going to carry on for a bit. I am going to ignore the more hateful stuff though, as I did last time.  Having said that, this is a last attempt to step outside my echo-chamber and engage a with a clique of clearly other-minded people about this admittedly controversial topic. If this goes south again like last time then I’ll leave you to your open and inclusive conversation and return to my alt right rabbit-hole or whatever.

It's okay, you can stay.
I enjoy grilling you on my bbq.

Actually, another question:

You decry identity politics but talk about cultural differences in US black communities. Is this not a contradiction?

I'm off to bed. Knackered. 

Yoss I'll get to them tomorrow.

Diluted Dante wrote:

Before that can I get an answer to my question?

Ah I'll wait to see what Tin says if he gets a chance. 

I'm sure he wouldn't frame it the way did, but like I said I don't think he'd deny that's what he's really doing there.

JRPC wrote:

Yoss I'll get to them tomorrow.

Suuuuuuuuure you will.

JRPC wrote:

(Lots of stuff I've edited oout because this is already going to be a massive wall of text... 

I did start writing a point by point rebuttal to the second of JRPC's linked articles then realised that I didn't have the time, and it seemed like there was probably little point.   Still, JRPC, if you're interested, here are some questions to consider. Why has he used the word "just" in the opening sentence? What does his statement about "the Left" being ignorant and "the Right" being impotent tell you about his biases and his blind spots?  The whole essay is essentially framed as a rebuttal, but what arguments is he actually refuting, and were they made by others, or simply by the author himself? Is the Pedestrian Parable really applicable here - again what assumptions are being made when applying it, and are they fair? etc etc. (edit - Just read that back and realised how patronising it sounds.  Sorry.)

Don’t worry about sounding patronising Tin. It can be hard to avoid in these kinds of things (please see below). So I'll just say a couple things about your post in general to this then get to the specific points.  

Oh no, this means I'm going to have to remember whatever half baked nonsense was in my head when I wrote this.  Still, let's go...  (Also this is the third time I've tried writing this, as work gets in the way and then it's magically gone when I come back.)

JRPC wrote:

 What jumps out is that your very first move is to try and discredit the author by assigning him to a rival political tribe. The implication is that this is somehow hostile to the veracity of his argument. I don’t think you’d deny that you’re making this move.

Never underestimate my capacity for denial.  I don't think I at any point assign him to a tribe, "rival" or otherwise.  

My "opening move" was to flag what I felt was the slightly odd use of the word "just" to describe a 65% difference in income between white households and their "black counterparts".  I thought it was a revealing piece of framing, not politically, but simply because I thought it extraordinary to find a  65% pay difference so insignificant as to prefix it with "just".  (Though that may, I suppose, be more of a statement on me, than the author.  Equally, as Jon pointed out, it could simply be sloppy writing.)

I then went on to ask you to consider the way in which he chose to describe "the left" and "the right".  For instance, I thought his description of "the right" as impotent to be bizarre.  (The exact context to which he was referring was the assertion that "the right" was "too far from the media channels through which blacks communicate" - a statement that is both as bizarre as it is bold, but also utterly rife with the very identity politics which you dislike.  It is highly problematic at the very least.)

I said that the essay was, in my opinion, largely framed as a rebuttal and asked you to consider what exactly he was refuting, and whether those were really arguments others had made.  (A none too subtle suggestion that much of his argument felt to me like a strawman.)  He chiefly posits that "progressives" believe that the wealth gap is attributable entirely to slavery and New Deal policies.  I'm not widely read when it comes to those he is critiquing, but what exposure I have had to their arguments has led me to believe that their position is considerably more complicated and nuanced.  This makes it all the more ironic therefore when he suggests that about a third of the wealth gap might indeed be due to historical racism.  "It's part of the problem, just not the whole problem", is not a particularly strong refutation, particularly when no-one had really been arguing it was the whole problem anyway.

Which brings us to the pedestrian parable.  A quick recap.  The Pedestrian Parable goes like this:  A pedestrian (P) gets hit by a driver (D) and sustains serious injuries.  The incident itself in entirely the fault of D.  D pays all the medical fees for P, who is patched up in hospital.  However P refuses to engage in physiotherapy, holding D entirely responsible for his physical condition.  P doesn't recover, despite D doing everything he can to facilitate it, because P won't take the necessary steps required to ensure his recovery.

The parable is invoked here (and elsewhere) to suggest that black americans are now essentially P.  They could get out of their predicament if only they would stop blaming D and help themselves...

There are a bunch of assumptions in this that renders the analogy unhelpful, if not actively offensive.  The primary one is the idea that the D (in this case, "white america") has done all it can to help P ("black america").  This seems to me to be pretty much a nonsense.  To get even close to being able to make that argument you would need to begin with the sort of financial reparations that Coates et al have called for.  Though even then, I think you're a way short.  P is probably not engaging with his physio, partly because physio sucks, but also because of the psychological impact of the accident.  The psychological effect of a road traffic accident is nothing next to generations of oppression, so again, I think this particular driver has quite a way to go before they can be said to have "done everything".  

I think there's a wider point to be made about our metaphorical pedestrian too.  I've seen plenty of people who act in exactly the manner described in the parable.  People to whom terrible things happened because someone else fucked them over.  It's true that some are held back in their recovery because they're so busy blaming the person who caused their suffering, that they never take ownership of the bit they can control.  I understand that argument.  But...  For the most part I find people are really good at letting go of that resentment once, and only once, they feel that the person that caused their injury has atoned.  The phrase "if they had only apologised" is used a lot.  the argument the Coates et al have employed in what little I have read of their work tends to be about precisely that.  Achieving a sense of reparation, not really financially, but socially, and psychologically, so that everyone (white americans included) can move on.  Moving on involves acknowledging and accepting the past, not making convoluted arguments about why we should just forget about it and pull ourselves together.

So to make the pedestrian parable work here, you need the driver to have run him down, but then refuse to make any initial attempts to help, and refuse to pay for any physiotherapy or pain relief, just grudgingly stumping up enough for essential life saving treatments.  D should insist he's done nothing wrong, and should then regularly tell P it's time he stopped whining because he could probably get better if he really tried.  Then the "parable" just about fits.  Fuck D.

And that's enough milking of what was already a bloody terrible analogy. 

JRPC wrote:

Rather than that, what in that article do you find the most objectionable?

You probably get the gist.  But if I absolutely had to pick one thing, it's that I felt the whole piece was built on air.  There was no real meat, just a whole bunch of assertions with little evidence, refuted with even less.  We all debate like that to some degree, (certainly I have done here), and that's fine when you're just shooting the shit, but less so in a pseudo-intellectual article about racial politics.

Finally, apologies, I almost certainly won't respond to any reply (certainly not in this level of detail).  That's not meant as blanking you, simply a reflection of my singular lack of time.  (This has been assembled piece meal as is.)  It's bloody rude, but it's also inevitable I'm afraid.