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A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

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Re: A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

#81

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Atlas667 wrote: post #17
api wrote: post #10

In the debate between self made and team effort my opinion is “both.” Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others. At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable. I think b…

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…

> If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Consider the alternatives to this.

The first is that great works are being accomplished without anyone being in charge of them. People invent alternating current and land on the moon in a completely decentralized manner with no one leading the effort and no one making a larger contribution than anyone else. Not the thing where everyone gets to try but only one out of a million succeeds but rather some other thing where everyone is a fungible cog and you can't identify anyone as being the lynchpin or anyone else as not pulling their weight, and yet the great works still happen.

The second is that great works are not being accomplished.

The first one seems implausible. The second one seems bad.

Re: A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

#83

Post by lazide »

astrange wrote: post #64
quesera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Surely Musk isn't a WASP. I think he's from Northern England (don't know why I know this.) You might as well call Paul McCartney a WASP billionaire.

Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad) and Canadian model+dietician (Mom), and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements. His whole family seems not particularly religious.

The extended musk family is from all over, however, including Canada, England, American, etc. but he seems pretty clearly a mongrel.

Re: A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

#85

Post by amanaplanacanal »

card_zero wrote: post #74
cyberax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which it couldn't be. And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense? If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and inf…

Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times. I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very…

Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.

A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.

As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.

Re: A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

#86

Post by amanaplanacanal »

roarcher wrote: post #53
xboxnolifes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that the degree to which you owe something credit for your success is the degree to which it guarantees that success. If my society/group/family guarantees my success, no matter my actions, I owe it everything. If it makes no difference at all, I owe it nothing. 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 ow…

Assuming free will actually exists, and that everything is not actually just cause and effect back to the big bang.

Re: A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

#87

Post by amanaplanacanal »

rayiner wrote: post #6
ramesh31 wrote: post #4

Go back a few generations for just about every wealthy family in the US, and it's nothing but slave (or highly exploitative) labor building on land and resources stolen from the indians. It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?". The whole "self-made" myth is nothing but a byproduct of white guilt all the way down.

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 did build a civilization. Which was then ravaged by diseases brought from Europe by the early explorers. By the time Europeans started settling what became the United States the native population was living in what was essentially a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Re: A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

#88

Post by quesera »

lazide wrote: post #51
quesera wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

My point is that the only actual applicability I can see in its usage is just racism.

Your point is kind of boring though.

If OP had asked "why do white people hold most of the wealth in the US", the answer would be the same:

Because they arrived (first) with superior technology and made slaves or serfs (or corpses) out of the indigenous population, and seized the indigenous de facto "ownership" (or at least possession, as de jure is contextually meaningless) of vast natural resources which had previously not been exploited fully due to lack of will or ability.

That plus generational wealth and the miracle of compound interest. (And, critically, the socio-econonomic-political skills for organizing large populations!)

"WASP" was always a pejorative, meaning basically "person from one of the usual countries/cultures". It's a distinctly (originally) American label, and it has always represented the massively-entrenched established power structure.

It has evolved to mean less and less over the years. It now basically means "white, with English-speaking or adjacent ancestry".

It's also less true that true WASPs, or even white people, are the American aristocracy today than it was then. But the echoes are long and deep and hard to miss. I stand by Gates, Buffett, and Musk as modern WASPs, to the extent that the label means anything at all.

Re: A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

#90

Post by quesera »

lazide wrote: post #83
astrange wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely Musk isn't a WASP. I think he's from Northern England (don't know why I know this.) You might as well call Paul McCartney a WASP billionaire.

Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad) and Canadian model+dietician (Mom), and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements. His whole family seems not particularly religious. The extended musk family is from all over, however, including Canada, England, American, etc. but he seems pretty clearly a mongrel.

That's as WASPy as WASPy gets.

It's not important that the specimen is an active Protestant. The point is that their ancestry (with some decent adjacency to: white, anglo-saxon, protestant) landed them in a place of general privilege.

Musk is a WASP by any definition.

But it's always been a pejorative, and always used as a cudgel. Musk is not responsible for his ancestry. But he certainly benefited from it.

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