If “including this one” means me, that’s a totally mistaken read of what I have been writing all morning.
No, I don't mean you, I mean that an argument virtually identical to the one you've been making is routinely used is used to perpetuate the policies and practices that drive or maintain racial and class inequalities. That's why "victim blaming" causes such negative reactions: it lends itself so easily to justifying continued victimization, even if that isn't the intent of the person making the original argument.
Yes, if it weren’t for slavery, and segregation, and Jim Crow, the black community would probably be similar to the Polish community, albeit with more melanin. But because of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow they are not. I’m not the first one to notice this. Moynihan did too, in 1965.
But actively racist policies didn't stop in 1965. They may have been better concealed, but the War on Drugs and all the associated damage, redlining and blockbusting, and the like continued, as did a general slashing and burning of social safety net programs. Both "tough on crime" and "anti-welfare" arguments would often be rooted in racist appeals.
Otherwise, the road will be clear of obstacles, but many blacks won’t be able to walk through it.
I think asking people to prove they can walk through a closed door is unlikely to have useful results. If it's open and they still aren't coming out, then it may be time to talk.
Because correlation isn't clearly causation in either case. It is (quite obviously) possible to have increases in Islamist terrorism without an influx of refugees.
Brandon Berg:
To be fair, when a conservative pointed out that the devastation in white communities is also due to cultural pathology, he got shouted down, mostly by lefties.
This is true, but I can't quite help but notice that said conservative--if I'm thinking the same one--tends to phrase everything in the most obnoxious way possible, and his comments about those white, rural communities were not in any way an exception.
It appears that the true objection here is not to inconsistency, but to the idea that anyone who has bad life outcomes bears any personal responsibility for it.
I don't really believe "personal responsibility" is a concept that can meaningfully apply to communities.
J_A: It might be that if enough things change the black family , or the Appalachian family, disfunction will disappear (*) without them having to change anything about their world views. But the odds are that that won’t happen.
I don't think your statement of odds follows at all from anything else that's been said, and the problem of "victim blaming" is, that in many cases, including this one, is that the "cultural pathologies" are used to justify perpetuating the external pressures that lead to the damaged communities in the first place. See responses about "black on black crime" to the "Black Lives Matter" movement, where one catastrophic failure on the part of law enforcement is used to justify and defend another.
Given the way your example about gay acceptance played out, I think activists are acting entirely appropriately by treating demands that they address a culture that allegedly drives those pathologies in the absence of clear evidence that they will persist beyond the removal of the external forces driving them.
Do you want to know if the writer who wrote that paragraph told us about her parents’ first seven jobs?
Do you?
"You didn't click on the goatse link, but don't worry: I can describe the picture you would have seen!"
I think it must say something profound about society that we have replaced a single piece of crude pornographic photography with endless, carefully refined pieces of prose in order to satisfy our urge to look at horrible things, and then make our friends and acquaintances look at them too.
I do, however, suspect that I'm not unique in the way I read a (figurative) room to determine to what degree dickish behavior is tolerated or even expected. In a sense, having, "Don't be an asshole," as a guideline can be somewhat helpful in that kind of situation, but I tend not to take such injunctions terribly seriously if I don't believe anybody else is, and I suspect I'm not unique in that regard, either.
So I brought up white Appalachia and similar communities to argue against "cultural pathology", on the ground that it appears that there are some real common factors, like lack of economic and, for that matter, physical mobility that have had common effects. The reasons that white people are stuck in Appalachia are different from the reasons that black people are stuck in Milwaukee [1], but being stuck seems to be really corrosive in both cases.
The only reason I see to attribute this to cultural pathology is that other communities have not suffered in the same way, but it's far from obvious those other communities would be doing so well if they were subjected to the same pressures.
As for open racism, it's hard for me to believe that it's irrelevant in the US when we have an openly racist Presidential candidate whose strategy for getting elected evidently depends crucially on racist campaigns of voter intimidation, both by states like NC and by "poll watchers" he wants to recruit to go into minority neighborhoods. Maybe Jim Crow died 50 years ago, but a major political party is trying to resuscitate its corpse as we speak.
[1] Racism and its aftermath plays a major role in Milwaukee, but not in Appalachia.
J_A:
But blacks must also somehow address the pathologies of black culture.I do believe they (or some of they) try to do so, but there’s a lot of self inflicted harm.Conservatives (and racists) do have a valid point. The institutions (family, churches, black colleges, the black middle class) that blacks had built for themselves for generations during segregation crumbled when segregation ended.I think there’sa mix of correlation and causation in there, but the result is that the “separate and unequal” black community turned into a small black middle class immersed within the majority of the country, yet not fully integrated with it, and a larger black underclass that were unable to make this transition, but whose communities lost the support -and the positive example- of the educated black middle class.
I'd find this argument more persuasive if, following (or apace with) the economic collapse of white communities in rural and suburban areas, we weren't seeing the rise of the exact same "cultural pathologies", and in fact we've been seeing them get worse while things have (for the most part) slowly been getting better among African Americans. Worse, there's a strong thread of conventional wisdom that says the devastation in black communities is due to "cultural pathology" while the devastation in white communities is due to "globalization" and "coastal elites".
I'm rarely impressed by attempts to explain a constant with a variable.
The people that don’t like blacks will still be there, and able to do a little mischief, but, like in most places with black minorities, they will not be able to stop black people participating fully in society. They are not the problem. Eventually, they will be gone.
And I'd be more convinced by this argument if Donald Trump weren't a major party nominee for President.
Is this true? I can think of cases in online fora--hell, cases on OT, and I haven't been here that long--where I've pretty deliberately acted like a dick. Maybe I'm tremendously unusual in this, but (as I sort of alluded to elsewhere) I generally take the presence and toleration of certain kinds of dickish behavior in these kinds of environments as license to engage in dickish behavior myself.
This may be the norm you desire for OT, but it is, evidently not the norm you actually have, because there is a non-zero number of people who persistently act like assholes here. I'm not going to say who I think they are, and I suspect that a hypothetical poll would reveal that most commenters also think there a number of persistent assholes here, but that there is little consensus on who those assholes are.
If at all possible technically, one thing that would help is to at least allow us to ignore (as in hide) comments made by selected people. Then we could at least maintain the illusion that there is a respected norm against being an asshole, whatever idiosyncratic definition of asshole we might be using.
I... considered assembling a bio, but chose not to on the grounds that I thought any such bio would be insufficiently interesting to be worth sharing. I'm seeing a lot of responses along those lines. I don't know if you should see it as a deeper problem, unless, "We thought our readers' stories would be more interesting than they themselves did," is really a symptom of that problem.
So, you play EVE Online for a long, long time, compared to a game of... almost any straightforward competitive game I can think of, and it is a roleplaying game. Most roleplaying games involve an element of immersing yourself in a simulated world and interacting with that world by making the choices that some fictional avatar would make. Given that, for many RPG players, the goal is to enjoy a world that is both interesting and has some sort verisimilitude, people might just want a game to be unfair because that reflects the unfairness of the world, or because it makes for more interesting stories.
There are, but difficulty of mastery seems orthogonal to the kind of fairness we're talking about, which really seems to involve the resources you and your opponent have. In an RPG like Final Fantasy VII, you don't really have an opponent at all.
Look where China was 50 years ago compared to now. I'm not saying it's all sunshine and lollipops by any means, but it's not going through the Cultural Revolution, either.
What games other than EVE Online are popular despite having the sort of unfairness you describe?
In almost every popular, competitive game I can think of, there's a lot of emphasis on formal fairness. Now, I'm not immediately sure whether it would make sense to describe a game of chess between me and Gary Kasparov as "fair", but we both get the same number of pieces.
The complaint is the same across the ideological spectrum. It’s unpersusive no matter where it comes from.
I remember some liberal advocacy group used to (and for all I know still does) circulate a list of the top 10 "censored" news stories of the year. Not only were they never actually censored, they were rarely news either--usually just conditions that liberals would tend to find unpleasant continuing from one year to the next.
"America" as an abstract doesn't necessarily prefer spectacle, but the news media does. It's not like the WI voter ID decision wasn't reported at all: I knew about it before Ms Whitman posted this article, and I can only assume she did as well.
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.08.18.Th}”
If “including this one” means me, that’s a totally mistaken read of what I have been writing all morning.
No, I don't mean you, I mean that an argument virtually identical to the one you've been making is routinely used is used to perpetuate the policies and practices that drive or maintain racial and class inequalities. That's why "victim blaming" causes such negative reactions: it lends itself so easily to justifying continued victimization, even if that isn't the intent of the person making the original argument.
Yes, if it weren’t for slavery, and segregation, and Jim Crow, the black community would probably be similar to the Polish community, albeit with more melanin. But because of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow they are not. I’m not the first one to notice this. Moynihan did too, in 1965.
But actively racist policies didn't stop in 1965. They may have been better concealed, but the War on Drugs and all the associated damage, redlining and blockbusting, and the like continued, as did a general slashing and burning of social safety net programs. Both "tough on crime" and "anti-welfare" arguments would often be rooted in racist appeals.
Otherwise, the road will be clear of obstacles, but many blacks won’t be able to walk through it.
I think asking people to prove they can walk through a closed door is unlikely to have useful results. If it's open and they still aren't coming out, then it may be time to talk.
"
Because correlation isn't clearly causation in either case. It is (quite obviously) possible to have increases in Islamist terrorism without an influx of refugees.
"
I wonder if Merkel would be willing to admit that the US has been experiencing record high temperatures since she opened Germany to refugees?
"
This is true, but I can't quite help but notice that said conservative--if I'm thinking the same one--tends to phrase everything in the most obnoxious way possible, and his comments about those white, rural communities were not in any way an exception.
I don't really believe "personal responsibility" is a concept that can meaningfully apply to communities.
"
I don't think your statement of odds follows at all from anything else that's been said, and the problem of "victim blaming" is, that in many cases, including this one, is that the "cultural pathologies" are used to justify perpetuating the external pressures that lead to the damaged communities in the first place. See responses about "black on black crime" to the "Black Lives Matter" movement, where one catastrophic failure on the part of law enforcement is used to justify and defend another.
Given the way your example about gay acceptance played out, I think activists are acting entirely appropriately by treating demands that they address a culture that allegedly drives those pathologies in the absence of clear evidence that they will persist beyond the removal of the external forces driving them.
"
Do you want to know if the writer who wrote that paragraph told us about her parents’ first seven jobs?
Do you?
"You didn't click on the goatse link, but don't worry: I can describe the picture you would have seen!"
I think it must say something profound about society that we have replaced a single piece of crude pornographic photography with endless, carefully refined pieces of prose in order to satisfy our urge to look at horrible things, and then make our friends and acquaintances look at them too.
"
I'm not going to click that link. You can't make me.
On “Not An Ordinary Time”
I don't believe I stated or implied otherwise.
I do, however, suspect that I'm not unique in the way I read a (figurative) room to determine to what degree dickish behavior is tolerated or even expected. In a sense, having, "Don't be an asshole," as a guideline can be somewhat helpful in that kind of situation, but I tend not to take such injunctions terribly seriously if I don't believe anybody else is, and I suspect I'm not unique in that regard, either.
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.08.18.Th}”
You must be a mathematician in your day job
No, just by training. I think I'm an economist in my day job these days, but I'd have to double check my business cards.
You say a lot of things that are true and accurate, but not very useful to get us from here to there.
Well, in this case I don't think you can get there from here, at least not by going in the direction you're talking about.
"
So I brought up white Appalachia and similar communities to argue against "cultural pathology", on the ground that it appears that there are some real common factors, like lack of economic and, for that matter, physical mobility that have had common effects. The reasons that white people are stuck in Appalachia are different from the reasons that black people are stuck in Milwaukee [1], but being stuck seems to be really corrosive in both cases.
The only reason I see to attribute this to cultural pathology is that other communities have not suffered in the same way, but it's far from obvious those other communities would be doing so well if they were subjected to the same pressures.
As for open racism, it's hard for me to believe that it's irrelevant in the US when we have an openly racist Presidential candidate whose strategy for getting elected evidently depends crucially on racist campaigns of voter intimidation, both by states like NC and by "poll watchers" he wants to recruit to go into minority neighborhoods. Maybe Jim Crow died 50 years ago, but a major political party is trying to resuscitate its corpse as we speak.
[1] Racism and its aftermath plays a major role in Milwaukee, but not in Appalachia.
"
Gee, maybe that's why the proposed fix is to allow physicians to make the determination?
This is something you just might have noticed if you'd read the article before posting the link.
"
Just b/c you choose not to have sex with a man doesn’t mean you are infertile, does it?
So married lesbians should be required to have sex with men who they aren't married to for two years before they're acknowledged to be infertile?
Yeah, I can't see why anyone would have a problem with that.
"
I'd find this argument more persuasive if, following (or apace with) the economic collapse of white communities in rural and suburban areas, we weren't seeing the rise of the exact same "cultural pathologies", and in fact we've been seeing them get worse while things have (for the most part) slowly been getting better among African Americans. Worse, there's a strong thread of conventional wisdom that says the devastation in black communities is due to "cultural pathology" while the devastation in white communities is due to "globalization" and "coastal elites".
I'm rarely impressed by attempts to explain a constant with a variable.
And I'd be more convinced by this argument if Donald Trump weren't a major party nominee for President.
"
How long would a lesbian couple need to have unprotected sex for before you believe one of them isn't going to get pregnant?
On “Not An Ordinary Time”
Is this true? I can think of cases in online fora--hell, cases on OT, and I haven't been here that long--where I've pretty deliberately acted like a dick. Maybe I'm tremendously unusual in this, but (as I sort of alluded to elsewhere) I generally take the presence and toleration of certain kinds of dickish behavior in these kinds of environments as license to engage in dickish behavior myself.
On “Games Without Fairness”
I dunno. This would seem to mean that chess or fencing are as unfair as EVE Online.
On “Not An Ordinary Time”
This may be the norm you desire for OT, but it is, evidently not the norm you actually have, because there is a non-zero number of people who persistently act like assholes here. I'm not going to say who I think they are, and I suspect that a hypothetical poll would reveal that most commenters also think there a number of persistent assholes here, but that there is little consensus on who those assholes are.
If at all possible technically, one thing that would help is to at least allow us to ignore (as in hide) comments made by selected people. Then we could at least maintain the illusion that there is a respected norm against being an asshole, whatever idiosyncratic definition of asshole we might be using.
"
I... considered assembling a bio, but chose not to on the grounds that I thought any such bio would be insufficiently interesting to be worth sharing. I'm seeing a lot of responses along those lines. I don't know if you should see it as a deeper problem, unless, "We thought our readers' stories would be more interesting than they themselves did," is really a symptom of that problem.
On “Games Without Fairness”
So, you play EVE Online for a long, long time, compared to a game of... almost any straightforward competitive game I can think of, and it is a roleplaying game. Most roleplaying games involve an element of immersing yourself in a simulated world and interacting with that world by making the choices that some fictional avatar would make. Given that, for many RPG players, the goal is to enjoy a world that is both interesting and has some sort verisimilitude, people might just want a game to be unfair because that reflects the unfairness of the world, or because it makes for more interesting stories.
"
There are, but difficulty of mastery seems orthogonal to the kind of fairness we're talking about, which really seems to involve the resources you and your opponent have. In an RPG like Final Fantasy VII, you don't really have an opponent at all.
On “What the Trump/Khan Debate Really Says About America”
Look where China was 50 years ago compared to now. I'm not saying it's all sunshine and lollipops by any means, but it's not going through the Cultural Revolution, either.
On “Games Without Fairness”
What games other than EVE Online are popular despite having the sort of unfairness you describe?
In almost every popular, competitive game I can think of, there's a lot of emphasis on formal fairness. Now, I'm not immediately sure whether it would make sense to describe a game of chess between me and Gary Kasparov as "fair", but we both get the same number of pieces.
On “What the Trump/Khan Debate Really Says About America”
The complaint is the same across the ideological spectrum. It’s unpersusive no matter where it comes from.
I remember some liberal advocacy group used to (and for all I know still does) circulate a list of the top 10 "censored" news stories of the year. Not only were they never actually censored, they were rarely news either--usually just conditions that liberals would tend to find unpleasant continuing from one year to the next.
It was, as you say, unpersuasive.
"
"America" as an abstract doesn't necessarily prefer spectacle, but the news media does. It's not like the WI voter ID decision wasn't reported at all: I knew about it before Ms Whitman posted this article, and I can only assume she did as well.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2016.08.15.M}”
...Wait, what?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.