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Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

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Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#261

Post by SilasX »

mikeash wrote: post #79
javert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get from "more black people live in areas where there were more productive plantations" to "we need affirmative action"? (The answer is, you don't.)

> (The answer is, you don't.) You do realize that putting words in other people's mouths like this pretty much destroys any chance of having a productive and useful conversation? What is the point of even asking a question that you're sure you already know the answer to?

I'm tired of people misusing the concept of a strawman (or other equivalent concepts). Just because someone pointed out something weird or bad about an argument doesn't make it a strawman.

The OP comment was not misrepresented. He started from "black people historically lived in greater proportion where soil was good for cotton." He ended with "affirmative action is still needed". Yes, the OP said more than that, but those statements as given are correct.

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#262

Post by juiceandjuice »

clarky07 wrote: post #241
arrrg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm, that's not how it works. If you are white the odds are massively stacked in your favor. That doesn't mean you can't lose, but it's less likely. All AA does is fudge the odds a bit in the other direction. No more. Just stopping to discriminate would do nothing – because that's for the most part not the reason why the odds are stacked against minorities. Structural racism is the reason. Society is constructed in a…

Note the comment below. People in poverty in America by race ~24 mil white ~11 mil black ~14 mil hispanic I cannot and will not believe that in 2012 we have structural racism in America, the day after a black man named Barack Hussein Obama got elected to his second term as President of the United States. Is their racism? Yes. Is it structural and 100% pervasive? No. The reason they have less opportunities is a struct…

Do you accept that black people are two and a half times more likely to live poverty? From that, wouldn't if follow that a black person is two and a half more times likely to reap some sort of benefit from affirmative action, even if it wasn't based on race? What if affirmative action was based purely on the statistic of being part of a single parent family in poverty?

Do you accept that the median salary if you are black is less that 2/3 of that if you are white?

You comment on the stats of single mothers in poverty, say we need to turn it around, then and pretend it's an easy problem to solve when these communities don't have the money to fund programs at a local level (since they, you know, live in poverty), coupled with a history of racism and neglect at the state level, and you just say "well it's not really a problem because more white people are poor and we should end affirmative action"

Affirmative action seems pretty targeted to me. Sure white people don't really get affirmative action (that's not really true because there's all sorts of advantages you for just being poor), but life's not always exactly fair.

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#263

Post by jarek »

mullingitover wrote: post #214
clarky07 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead we have a system that systematically disadvantages non black people. Just stop discriminating. Either way. No reason to have one or the other have an advantage. We just had a black man elected to his second term as president, so I think that's a pretty good sign we aren't that racist. This wouldn't have happened a few decades ago.

> Instead we have a system that systematically disadvantages non black people. Can't tell if I'm getting trolled here...

Nah, you're just on HN.

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#264

Post by mikeash »

SilasX wrote: post #261
mikeash wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (The answer is, you don't.) You do realize that putting words in other people's mouths like this pretty much destroys any chance of having a productive and useful conversation? What is the point of even asking a question that you're sure you already know the answer to?

I'm tired of people misusing the concept of a strawman (or other equivalent concepts). Just because someone pointed out something weird or bad about an argument doesn't make it a strawman. The OP comment was not misrepresented. He started from "black people historically lived in greater proportion where soil was good for cotton." He ended with "affirmative action is still needed". Yes, the OP said more than that, but…

I don't know where you're getting any of this. My objection was to asking the question and then assuming that it could not be answered before even giving the other guy a chance to respond.

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#265

Post by mkconor »

bdunbar wrote: post #137
rmc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean there was no extreme poverty amoung marginalized groups before affirmative action?

The poster I was replying to said "gang violence, intense poverty, substance abuse, neglect, and trauma" These, by and large, were not systemic problems before the introduction of affirmative action.

gang violence The gangs were white, but the contours of the violence would probably be familiar to contemporary observers.

intense poverty Sociocultural hurdles that limited property ownership, the inability to meaningfully advocate for fair wages, and the lack of the suffrage required to change this reality meant that intense poverty was the status quo.

substance abuse http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/jamdoi.html

"William Henry James and Stephen Lloyd Johnson document the role of alcohol and other drugs in traditional African cultures, among African slaves before the American Civil War, and in contemporary African American society, which has experienced the epidemics of marijuana, heroin, crack cocaine, and gangs since the beginning of this century. The authors zero in on the interplay of addiction and race to uncover the social and psychological factors that underlie addiction."

neglect see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#History; see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JimCrowCar2.jpg

trauma Subjective, based on who you ask, but I'd say yes.

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#266

Post by qq66 »

saraid216 wrote: post #221
binarycheese wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery lasted for 400yrs(+).

Slavery when, where, and how? The term is surprisingly broad, when you actually look into details, and can easily span all of remembered human existence.

And still exists today, to a very large extent.

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#267

Post by saraid216 »

ta12121 wrote: post #255
saraid216 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the US government wants to atone for its immoral actions in the past it should pay reparations not institute a system of race based discrimination. How much money do you think a few generations' of slavery is worth? > If, on the other hand, the US government wants to help disadvantaged people gain a level economic footing with the rest of the population they should use a much better predictor of disadvantage tha…

How much money do you think a few generations' of slavery is worth? I don't know. How many years of race based discrimination is it worth? Would you like to suggest one? As many others in this thread have suggested: actual economic disadvantages, such as poverty, single parent household, etc...

> I don't know.

Oh, come on. Think a little. Let's say your entire family was enslaved and made to work on a plantation for a few generations. How much money would you want for that? Why offer the alternative if you can't come up with a number?

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#268

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #259
iy56 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harms and benefits you are talking about are not quantifiable in a commonly-agreed-upon way. I think that's a prerequisite for the kind of analysis you want to do.

This is a common flaw in reasoning--just because harms or benefits are not easily quantifiable does not mean that they should be assumed to be zero.

[deleted]

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#269

Post by iy56 »

rayiner wrote: post #259
iy56 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harms and benefits you are talking about are not quantifiable in a commonly-agreed-upon way. I think that's a prerequisite for the kind of analysis you want to do.

This is a common flaw in reasoning--just because harms or benefits are not easily quantifiable does not mean that they should be assumed to be zero.

I didn't say it was zero. I said it precludes principal component analysis (or whatever variant you prefer).

Re: Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

#270

Post by Tsagadai »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #89
rayiner wrote: post #41

I think this is a great answer to people who ask why we still need things like affirmative action. Here you have a continuing demographic phenomenon that can be traced directly back to slave ownership patterns hundreds of years ago. It should be noted also that the black belt is also a terribly poor stretch of the country. Unfortunately, it appears that socioeconomic patterns are imprinted more deeply than anyone wou…

The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race. It is racist. In fact it isn't just based on race, it is based on skin colour - since some mixed black-white people with white skin can be discriminated against. America needs to put race on the sidelines and start thinking in terms of class. You should help the disadvantaged or poor regardless of their great great grandparent's struggles. Affirmative a…

You said the C word (class) and you weren't downvoted into oblivion. Thank you, Hacker News readers, for not voting purely on political biases.

Class mobility is essential for a healthy society. When everyone who starts life at one income level and almost always finishes life at that same income level you have an unbalance, neo-feudal society.

We live in a world where if a child's parents don't have the income or education to take them to a doctor when they get a simple inner ear infection they can be permanently disadvantaged (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otitis_media). This kind of class lock-in is what was so terrible about earlier human models of cooperation and what the Enlightenment apparently fixed. Any argument against class-based discrimination is void while poor children are going deaf and ending up with speech development problems from a curable condition that very rarely causes serious long term consequences for a child of wealthier parents.

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