51–60 of 128 posts
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So the only thing out of it they actually are is… white? Hahahaha
I guess it depends on the original poster's intention. If your point is that people have colloquialized "WASP", and that I fell into your trap, then OK you got me. :)
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By "owe" I mean that the credit for their success belongs to the group and not the individual, because the individual was merely a product of good circumstances provided by the group. I believe this is the sentiment intended by the "no such thing as a self made man" crowd--no individual is special, and anyone else would achieve similar things under similar circumstances. This ignores the fact that many others DO enjo…
Owing your success to something is not the same as saying that having the something guarantees success. I owe my love of Korean food to my time spent living in South Korea; others may live there and come away hating it.
It's obviously true that nobody achieves things in a vacuum, since we all have some level of "privilege" given to us by our economic circumstances, the level of education available to us, our luckier heritable traits, etc. But for every successful person, there are countless others born to a similar level of privilege who squandered it. The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
Owing your success to the group does not imply that the success itself is a guarantee. Just that without the group, the odds are many many times worse.
If it merely improves my odds, then I owe it something, but there must have been at least one other factor at play, and that factor is also owed credit. I presume you would call that factor something like "luck". No doubt that that plays a role, but credit for luck belongs neither to the society nor the individual. All that is left, then, is individual choice, and so the rest of the credit belongs to the individual.
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The very first example on your list is the Walton family. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, grew up in nowhere Oklahoma as the child of farmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton . Show me where it says his wealth was built on your “WASP slavery money?”
Do you know anything about how Oklahoma was colonized by white farmers?
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Native Americans were here for tens of thousands of years. If it was so easy to use Indians’ resources to build a civilization, why didn’t the Indians do it? Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?
They had own civilization. They lost war and were genocided out. And for the record, they had wars against themselves too, just like Europeans had wars against other Europeans. Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. Both took quite a lot of time too. Both were quite barbaric from our point of view, but cruelty and violence can be wealth builder. After all, Putin is super wealthy too. St…
It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math.
What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.
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Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny. Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues. Ascribing only vices (chopping hea…
> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues. Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders whil…
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Wait, I thought it was the Jews that owned everything? Or was it the Freemasons? I can’t even keep track anymore. I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though - maybe that’s the mind control at work?
> I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though Gates, Buffett, Musk ... all spring to mind. White certainly. Anglo-Saxon doesn't mean much more than "of western/northern european ancestry" any more. Protestant as much as any other non-Catholic Christian sect. But WASP doesn't mean literally what it means any more, so maybe I'm missing the reason you overlooked the most famous modern American-citizen billionaires…
It's obviously true that nobody achieves things in a vacuum, since we all have some level of "privilege" given to us by our economic circumstances, the level of education available to us, our luckier heritable traits, etc. But for every successful person, there are countless others born to a similar level of privilege who squandered it. The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
If you were to truly do a science of people would you not take into account all of the circumstances that person was in, in order to understand them? You say: "One achieved it, but the other person in similar circumstances didn't achieve it" Well how do their circumstances differ? Don't you think it's important how they differ? Actually, couldn't how they differ be the key? Why, then, do you draw the line at an incom…
Let's take a person who made it rich betting big on bitcoin early on. Were they a savvy investor who made their own fortune, did they merely think it sounded cool and thought why not while bitcoin prices were so low that snatching them up was super cheap, did they rely on a tip or tips from friends/family, or was it some other reason?
If you come back and ask them years later after they've become worth 10^7 or better, how likely is the person who merely got lucky to admit it was dumb luck in an environment that lionizes the wealthy as self-made superhumans?
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Yes, facts make it necessarily both. But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality? The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured. If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exis…
Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny. Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues. Ascribing only vices (chopping hea…
But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.
I've replaced the title with the subtitle in the hope that this may help.