Your assertion that "money has to come from somewhere" is a falsehood. There is a printing press used by the American Treasury and a loans office in the Chinese government that disagrees with you.
Additionally, to present a "devil's advocate" opinon; based on the American GDP (15.8 trillion) and our commitment to making the world a better place, couldn't we just apply a minute tax to all money made and stop world hunger permanently? Why hasn't anyone thought of this?
/sarcasm
You hate to love me
You're being sarcastic, but one could actually apply a minute (even as low as 0.05%) tax on all financial trades and make quite a bit of money that way. Not to mention that if basic nutrition were guaranteed for every human on the planet, we'd see some pretty massive increases in economic activity both supply-side and demand-side.
I think both sides are racist for different reasons. Mostly to do with both sides think minorities are inferior in some ways, i.e. none of them think minorities can do things on their own.
I don't think people are inherently racist. Racism has been taught to people.
I concur on both counts, to this degree: both strains of thought, if unchecked by reason and evidence, can lead to justifications of racist thought and policy.
Right-wing extreme: Some groups of people are inherently inferior, so no amount of welfare "coddling" will improve their lot.
Left-wing extreme: Some groups of people are so oppressed by power structures that they need all the help they can get... to the extent that they have next to no agency.
At the core it's denial-of-agency, the root of this sort of prejudicial evil. Of course, this is a borderline ludicrous generalization, but I've seen enough instances on both sides to feel comfortable making the conjecture.
Horatio Hornblower has a nice scene in it where the eponymous character notices a flea on a waiter's arm. Do you know how many diseases are spread by fleas? The answer is "a lot". (Typhus comes to mind.) So even in a royal court, what happens to the least of us concerns us all.
I... think I know where that analogy is going, and I agree wholeheartedly. I just want to leave open certain policy possibilities. Moral possibilities are a different story. But I think it's all askew from the topic at hand so suffice to say I wasn't trying to defend food-stamp defunders, just not demonize them.
And yet the current language of VAWA is gender-neutral. That was actually a big issue, because House Republicans didn't want gays, Indians, or illegal aliens (the other two issues) protected by VAWA. Yet in this very thread, we've had VAWA opponents keep going on about how it was a plot against men: As always, RTFL applies.
Fair enough! So that conspiracy theory is doubly stupid.
So for the Republicans-hate-the-poors example, it's possible that some Republicans sneer at the destitute, but some also legitimately think that government welfare is simply not the best way to lift people out of poverty. (Questionable, but a valid policy debate.) So it's just singly stupid to suggest that there's a grand conspiracy.
Unless I misunderstand, this is flawed anti-feminists can still believe in the equality of the sexes.
Oh, the analogy breaks down there, yep. I meant more that "feminism" is a broad constellation of related beliefs, like "theism" is. And there are wildly disparate flavors of each. It's also true that the loudest, most radical, and most strident ones are going to be quickest to self-identify. Just as the typical egalitarian feminist isn't really going to bring up feminist theory (or "theory") in a conversation, so the typical mainline church-goer isn't going to bring up apologetics in a conversation.
What conspiracy? If Republicans cut food stamp funding and you lose food stamps is that a conspiracy or cause and effect?
The conspiracy theory would be "Republicans cut food stamps specifically because they're out to screw over poor people." Similarly "feminists passed VAWA (e.g.) specifically because they're out to screw over males." Conspiracy implies some coordinated malice aforethought.
What a wonderful story with the only evidence supporting it being that less girls then boys going into STEM fields (aslo known as a circle). Sociology sure is awesome when you control the narrative isn't it?
Well, the actual explanation would be "historically women simply weren't allowed into STEM fields; now the explicit barrier has been removed, but education is discouraging a lot of students from going into STEM fields, so the disparity remains largely intact." Also, you could do your own informal survey: take anyone who self-identifies as "bad at math" and ask them whether they had a particularly horrible math teacher in their elementary or middle school years. Most of the time that experience sours their whole self-perception on the subject.
Blinking spirit-There are more studies then just that one but this is the part that irks me...But is it just the world or the concepts associated with the label? Poll respondents were given a dictionary definition of “Feminist” - someone who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
Frankly that's about as accurate as saying...Jehovah's Witness-Anyone who believes in a god/gods.
I'd say it's more like counting how many people agree with theism. "Belief in a god or gods" is overbroad when you want to sort the Seventh Day Adventists from the Sufis and Sikhs and the Unitarians.
Just because it is dangerous does not mean it is wrong. We should not be so afraid of hurting someone's feelings that we ignore the truth. If black guys are more likely to be good at certain athletics... then they are. Key being "more likely".
The difference is that "race" is a fuzzy not (really) biological concept, whereas sex has biological definition (if a complex and nuanced one). There is certainly some genetic component to athletic prowess, but it's shakier to assume that the genetic pattern fits into a social construct.
Instead, we should use the knowledge of predisposition and accept them. If more SWM's make good quarterbacks (or more of them prefer to seek out that position) then why should we try to "fix" it and make everyone the same?
Well, "make everyone the same" might not be the right "fix," but it's not obvious that we should accept nature the way it is. After all, we wear clothes
Do the toy commercials need to display girls playing with hot wheels to make girls feel more comfortable asking to play with them?
Well, as an example, old Lego ads used to show boys and girls playing with the same Legos. Now the advertising is rather gendered. This certainly hasn't stopped girls from playing with "regular" Legos (as opposed to the "girly" Lego sets) but it's worthwhile to wonder why Lego bothered to change it up, and if there really is an effect.
Are you suggesting that parents doing this is that pervasive? Do 50% of girls really like science but their parents didnt let them play football so most of them "grew into" more girly tastes?
I'm not sure I follow you...
But you'd be surprised at the extent to which adults pigeonhole kids, for whatever reason. For education in particular, there's a problem with crappy teachers leading to bad experiences that only reinforce sterotypes. If a girl doesn't learn math well because her teacher sucks at it, she might not even need to hear that "girls don't do math," she'll probably think "I suck at math" and gravitate towards English or history or whatever. This totally happens for boys as well, it's just that there's already a gender bias in a lot of STEM fields and discouraged girls not going into STEM won't change anything.
"Some effort" academia has easily invested a thousand times more energy in this then solving any of the problems males are having in our education system. Feminists getting their way and creating quotas favoring women was inevitable. Many large studies showed little to no bias (and even then IT FAVORED WOMEN!). Feminists just kept pushing and finally a small study came along with only 127 test subjects and they declared "See proof" and all those other studies with far better methodologies and much larger pools of data are being ignored. Source http://readingsubtly.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-stem-fempire-strikes-back-feminists.html
To sum it up you are part of the single most privileged group of human beings that has ever existed and yet get to go through life blaming every perceived shortfall or inequity as part of a conspiracy against you (even when 99.9999% of the data says otherwise), congrats.
Irony: you're blaming feminism for screwing men over, then criticizing feminists for conspiratorial thinking.
Most of the problems in our society don't come from sex/race discrimination per se. They come from the fact that our economic system is structured such that the rich tend to stay rich, and the poor tend to stay poor. Research shows this tendency is also heritable - children of the poor usually end up poor, and children of the rich usually end up rich (or at least well-off). Privileged groups also tend to select new members that seem similar to those already in the group; ergo a group of African Americans is going to prefer to teach, mentor, and promote people of color, a group of asians will seem to prefer other asians, and so on.
How does this relate to feminism/egalitarianism/etc? Well, it turns out the rich, as of 50 years ago, were mostly WASPy straight men. Even without explicit barriers to other groups, minorities are not going to gain privilege equal to that of straight white men...because part of privilege is getting to choose who gets it once you're gone! Straight White Men (SWM from now on) will naturally prefer to raise up other SWM just because there are fewer differences from the get-go, not because they're inherently racist per se. But while these practices aren't inherently hateful, they do create seemingly unfair barriers to success for those that don't superficially relate to whomever happens to be in power. As such I think it would be beneficial to recognize be more aware of these tendencies, and keep such behavior limited if possible.
So much this. It's all about elitism: the haves fighting to keep the have-nots from dividing up the power-pie more evenly. Which is a rather rich irony, given that feminism borrows a lot of Marxist class-warfare rhetoric but seems to totally miss the point at the same time.
I know my credibility is put into question because I am a SWM, but I really feel like it does everyone a disservice when your explanation is used as an excuse for why someone fails.
Yeah, it's all too easy to blame "the System" for getting in your way. But, then again, sometimes there are rules that are rigged against you (and people like you). The key is having enough humility to recognize that the game's not always rigged.
This does not address gender but I want to make sure we're clear that there is very good reason to believe that black people dont have a hard time getting out of poverty because they are black... it's because their parents were poor.
True, though I think some of it really is "because they are black", or more accurately "because they experience 'being black' in America." That is, the (historical) fact of few black people in positions of power means fewer opportunities for networking and such, given that urban populations in particular tend to be racially segregated (because of historical and socioeconomic inequalities). So in that very important sense it's not yet true that "race doesn't matter."
It does bother me just as the the blatantly misandrist speech that permeates academia, the media, the government, and the courts bothers the HELL out of me but guess what most of those mysoginist quotes are taken out of context or are random comments in the comment section from some random DB the misandry is the law of the land.
I dunno. There's a lot of pure slime out there: do you think that almost all "misandrist feminazi" quotes are full-context and almost none of the "misogynist MRA" quotes are? I can think of several rather influential organizations (religious, which explains a lot of it I think) spouting some blatantly misogynistic stuff. My palm does tend to hit my face harder when I read some radfem Tumblr screed about how all men, transmen and "gender traitors" will be summarily executed after the Glorious Revolution, but I suppose it's because religious misogyny is so familiar.
Well...I think there's sometimes an assertion that goes along with that claim, and I think it's one that billy is making, that treating people as individuals requires us to ignore the fact that society doesn't always. So I think he's justified in disagreeing in so far as billy is making that point. Billy is using it as an excuse to blind ourselves to the problem of racism.
The point is that when people generalize the (real or imagined) qualities of a group onto a member of that group, they're often wrong. The aggregated wrongness of such generalizations can be seen in society, but that's no reason to capitulate to that wrongness.
To the extent that anyone tries to take this as forcing ignorance of race-based problems... well, that's wrong too. Racial problems are problems because there's a discrepancy in outcomes across racial groups. It's why many people say that higher rates of conviction and incarceration among non-whites is racist, but nobody says that higher rates of epilepsy among non-whites is racist.
Have we had better models in the past? If so what where they?
We haven't. Go back far enough and the only news channels were "rumor" and "whatever the king tells you." We've sort of clawed our way towards actual freedom of information since then, but there's never really been a NPOV news utopia (newstopia?) to look back on for guidance.
I guess the problem is I want people that are too busy to find good news to have a good news source that is readily available. Maybe I want people to have something they do not want. Even if I think it is extremely important. ignorant is bliss and all.
In my estimation, news should not be for profit. Including ads to absorb the cost of creating the news is acceptable and understandable. But this should end at 'paying for the news', and should not carry over to 'making money off of the news'. Our current news system has become too much of an effort to create as much profit as possible via the news, which has lead to defeating the purpose of reporting the news in the first place.
I agree that news shouldn't be for profit, but I don't think advertisements are a good funding model either. Advertisers are for profit, and won't advertise if they don't think the ad will bring in more business. So there's a hidden incentive for channels to skew towards the profitable (to advertisers) demographics. Forced non-profit status for news channels might help a bit, but the bias would still be there.
It has gotten to the point where, on the rare occasions that I suffer through watching the news, I immediately feel compelled to research that news online to get the whole story. This should NEVER have to happen, mostly because it is not going to occur to 95% of the population to do so. They are just going to take what their local news network says as fact.
The problem is that most issues require sustained attention and some are incredibly resistant to concision. And most people don't much like straight-facts documentaries (though they apparently love "reality" television). People tend to confine themselves to friendly narratives.
Both the BBC and CBC practice all sorts of censorship. The both have all sorts of cases biased/misinformation/disinformation, spend some time on goggle. The only major difference between them and say MSNBC how the station is paid for.
I think that has a lot to do with Canada and the UK not having free speech and free press enumerated as rights in their constitutions. (See the "hate speech" thread from a while ago, it's amazing what a short trip north will do to one's ideas about speech and the regulation thereof.)
Cmon Val, don’t play me like that. Haole is the actual Hawaiian word for foreigner. It just so happens that some of the most prominent foreigners and the ones that native Hawaiians dislike the most are white.
Okay, I was being a bit too snarky. My point was that while the word literally translated means "foreigner," the word has strong negative connotations, especially towards white people. Meanings aren't static.
Some Africans have a higher propensity for sickle-cell, not all. It also appears in Kurds, Arabs, Mizrahi Jews, Greeks, and Indians. Basically anywhere malaria exists.
Ah, yes, thanks. The main point was that because of founder effects and other genetic quirks, ethnic populations can very well be significantly different from the general population on various factors. It would be naive to assume otherwise, but dangerous to assume what factors may be significant. (In this case, aggression or "criminality." You'd think criminal anthropology would've died a long time ago...)
Of course they will do forensics. Racial profiling was only used to refine the suspect list (and probably only one criteria used to refine the list, but still a effective criteria).
But really, how effective? Suppose forensic data turns up two prime suspects, one black, the other not. Do you weight the black suspect higher on the "probably a criminal scale"?
People shouldn't use this type of studies to make the jump 'profile is not good in this case then it's not good in any case'. Each case must be analysed individually based on the strength of known correlations.
Right, so one of those things must not apply in profiling a guy on the street. Which one?
To be fair, we've already given greedy and self-interested human beings monopolistic power over the news... more than the news, really. It's harder to see, but the major media conglomerates have silo'd themselves off so they really don't compete very much. (Easiest example is in telecoms, Comcast/Verizon get the cable broadband markets, and Sprint/CenturyLink get the wi-fi.) Similarly the major cable news channels aren't really competing for the same demographics. FOX is for conservatives, MSNBC is for liberals, and CNN is for... nobody. Radio is worse. Newspapers are dying out or being bought out by the media conglomerates.
But the problem for a socialist program for news is that we've never had a good model for disseminating facts to the public. With a government news service there's a catch-22: it would require high levels of accountability and transparency to ensure NPOV, but that requires a well-informed public, which requires a good model for disseminating facts to said public...
Also, even supposing it were proven that the current capitalistic model is irreparably flawed, that's still no argument in favor of a socialistic model. It's not a strict dichotomy.
Example of this sort of application:
The police is investigating a store mug case. It has a list of suspects. For a matter of resource limitations, it can only investigate half of that list. The police is going to run a probit-logit with available data in order to know the 50% more likely criminals of that list. But the policy don't have full data of all the suspects.
So darker skin ~ low income ~ criminality? Yeah, those things are correlated, but what a shaky chain of inferences. I'd hope that they could do a little forensics at least.
And as one of my links pointed out, racial profiling doesn't work any better than random sampling in the case of airport screenings. What makes you think it would do better in a line-up?
Anyway, I wouldn't put that on the same level as n***** since there is no history of Hawaiin oppression on white people, quite the opposite, and the word itself is another thing that you'd need to actually explain why its offensive to most people.
Not in Hawaii, which was my point. It's not universally offensive, but locally it is. As for Hawaiian history, there's a fair amount of grievances, but that doesn't justify violence against modern-day non-natives.
while a hawaiin could definately physically beat me up because he doesn't like white people, there is no systemic oppression to worry about, no fear of a lack of recourse in the court system (although, granted, being assaulted on vacation is a pain because its a pain to travel back there)
Actually, check the SPL link. Things can be pretty tough for non-native Hawaiians if they become victims of abuse.
It seems that you and _ require that a word's offensiveness have a certain scope in order to qualify as truly offensive. Fair enough, but I think it doesn't need to be a national scope.
You're being sarcastic, but one could actually apply a minute (even as low as 0.05%) tax on all financial trades and make quite a bit of money that way. Not to mention that if basic nutrition were guaranteed for every human on the planet, we'd see some pretty massive increases in economic activity both supply-side and demand-side.
I concur on both counts, to this degree: both strains of thought, if unchecked by reason and evidence, can lead to justifications of racist thought and policy.
Right-wing extreme: Some groups of people are inherently inferior, so no amount of welfare "coddling" will improve their lot.
Left-wing extreme: Some groups of people are so oppressed by power structures that they need all the help they can get... to the extent that they have next to no agency.
At the core it's denial-of-agency, the root of this sort of prejudicial evil. Of course, this is a borderline ludicrous generalization, but I've seen enough instances on both sides to feel comfortable making the conjecture.
I... think I know where that analogy is going, and I agree wholeheartedly. I just want to leave open certain policy possibilities. Moral possibilities are a different story. But I think it's all askew from the topic at hand so suffice to say I wasn't trying to defend food-stamp defunders, just not demonize them.
Yet.
Fair enough! So that conspiracy theory is doubly stupid.
So for the Republicans-hate-the-poors example, it's possible that some Republicans sneer at the destitute, but some also legitimately think that government welfare is simply not the best way to lift people out of poverty. (Questionable, but a valid policy debate.) So it's just singly stupid to suggest that there's a grand conspiracy.
Oh, the analogy breaks down there, yep. I meant more that "feminism" is a broad constellation of related beliefs, like "theism" is. And there are wildly disparate flavors of each. It's also true that the loudest, most radical, and most strident ones are going to be quickest to self-identify. Just as the typical egalitarian feminist isn't really going to bring up feminist theory (or "theory") in a conversation, so the typical mainline church-goer isn't going to bring up apologetics in a conversation.
The conspiracy theory would be "Republicans cut food stamps specifically because they're out to screw over poor people." Similarly "feminists passed VAWA (e.g.) specifically because they're out to screw over males." Conspiracy implies some coordinated malice aforethought.
Well, the actual explanation would be "historically women simply weren't allowed into STEM fields; now the explicit barrier has been removed, but education is discouraging a lot of students from going into STEM fields, so the disparity remains largely intact." Also, you could do your own informal survey: take anyone who self-identifies as "bad at math" and ask them whether they had a particularly horrible math teacher in their elementary or middle school years. Most of the time that experience sours their whole self-perception on the subject.
I'd say it's more like counting how many people agree with theism. "Belief in a god or gods" is overbroad when you want to sort the Seventh Day Adventists from the Sufis and Sikhs and the Unitarians.
The difference is that "race" is a fuzzy not (really) biological concept, whereas sex has biological definition (if a complex and nuanced one). There is certainly some genetic component to athletic prowess, but it's shakier to assume that the genetic pattern fits into a social construct.
Well, "make everyone the same" might not be the right "fix," but it's not obvious that we should accept nature the way it is. After all, we wear clothes
Well, as an example, old Lego ads used to show boys and girls playing with the same Legos. Now the advertising is rather gendered. This certainly hasn't stopped girls from playing with "regular" Legos (as opposed to the "girly" Lego sets) but it's worthwhile to wonder why Lego bothered to change it up, and if there really is an effect.
I'm not sure I follow you...
But you'd be surprised at the extent to which adults pigeonhole kids, for whatever reason. For education in particular, there's a problem with crappy teachers leading to bad experiences that only reinforce sterotypes. If a girl doesn't learn math well because her teacher sucks at it, she might not even need to hear that "girls don't do math," she'll probably think "I suck at math" and gravitate towards English or history or whatever. This totally happens for boys as well, it's just that there's already a gender bias in a lot of STEM fields and discouraged girls not going into STEM won't change anything.
Irony: you're blaming feminism for screwing men over, then criticizing feminists for conspiratorial thinking.
So much this. It's all about elitism: the haves fighting to keep the have-nots from dividing up the power-pie more evenly. Which is a rather rich irony, given that feminism borrows a lot of Marxist class-warfare rhetoric but seems to totally miss the point at the same time.
Yeah, it's all too easy to blame "the System" for getting in your way. But, then again, sometimes there are rules that are rigged against you (and people like you). The key is having enough humility to recognize that the game's not always rigged.
True, though I think some of it really is "because they are black", or more accurately "because they experience 'being black' in America." That is, the (historical) fact of few black people in positions of power means fewer opportunities for networking and such, given that urban populations in particular tend to be racially segregated (because of historical and socioeconomic inequalities). So in that very important sense it's not yet true that "race doesn't matter."
In principle it should control for everything but gender, so basically the hourly pay for the same job.
Er, so who's giving men crap for homemaking or child-rearing? Women?
I dunno. There's a lot of pure slime out there: do you think that almost all "misandrist feminazi" quotes are full-context and almost none of the "misogynist MRA" quotes are? I can think of several rather influential organizations (religious, which explains a lot of it I think) spouting some blatantly misogynistic stuff. My palm does tend to hit my face harder when I read some radfem Tumblr screed about how all men, transmen and "gender traitors" will be summarily executed after the Glorious Revolution, but I suppose it's because religious misogyny is so familiar.
Trans* and genderqueer people do, sometimes. There was a small push for more unisex bathrooms at my college for that reason.
No, insofar as I'm not sure if there's much difference in kind between stereotypes and "racial hatred."
The point is that when people generalize the (real or imagined) qualities of a group onto a member of that group, they're often wrong. The aggregated wrongness of such generalizations can be seen in society, but that's no reason to capitulate to that wrongness.
To the extent that anyone tries to take this as forcing ignorance of race-based problems... well, that's wrong too. Racial problems are problems because there's a discrepancy in outcomes across racial groups. It's why many people say that higher rates of conviction and incarceration among non-whites is racist, but nobody says that higher rates of epilepsy among non-whites is racist.
We haven't. Go back far enough and the only news channels were "rumor" and "whatever the king tells you." We've sort of clawed our way towards actual freedom of information since then, but there's never really been a NPOV news utopia (newstopia?) to look back on for guidance.
Yeah, that's one big barrier.
I agree that news shouldn't be for profit, but I don't think advertisements are a good funding model either. Advertisers are for profit, and won't advertise if they don't think the ad will bring in more business. So there's a hidden incentive for channels to skew towards the profitable (to advertisers) demographics. Forced non-profit status for news channels might help a bit, but the bias would still be there.
The problem is that most issues require sustained attention and some are incredibly resistant to concision. And most people don't much like straight-facts documentaries (though they apparently love "reality" television). People tend to confine themselves to friendly narratives.
I think that has a lot to do with Canada and the UK not having free speech and free press enumerated as rights in their constitutions. (See the "hate speech" thread from a while ago, it's amazing what a short trip north will do to one's ideas about speech and the regulation thereof.)
Okay, I was being a bit too snarky. My point was that while the word literally translated means "foreigner," the word has strong negative connotations, especially towards white people. Meanings aren't static.
And xenophobia is a great source of prejudice and hate.
It's almost as if slurs are particularly powerful when directed at a minority population (that doesn't have an overwhelming power advantage).
Ah, yes, thanks. The main point was that because of founder effects and other genetic quirks, ethnic populations can very well be significantly different from the general population on various factors. It would be naive to assume otherwise, but dangerous to assume what factors may be significant. (In this case, aggression or "criminality." You'd think criminal anthropology would've died a long time ago...)
But really, how effective? Suppose forensic data turns up two prime suspects, one black, the other not. Do you weight the black suspect higher on the "probably a criminal scale"?
Right, so one of those things must not apply in profiling a guy on the street. Which one?
But the problem for a socialist program for news is that we've never had a good model for disseminating facts to the public. With a government news service there's a catch-22: it would require high levels of accountability and transparency to ensure NPOV, but that requires a well-informed public, which requires a good model for disseminating facts to said public...
Also, even supposing it were proven that the current capitalistic model is irreparably flawed, that's still no argument in favor of a socialistic model. It's not a strict dichotomy.
So darker skin ~ low income ~ criminality? Yeah, those things are correlated, but what a shaky chain of inferences. I'd hope that they could do a little forensics at least.
And as one of my links pointed out, racial profiling doesn't work any better than random sampling in the case of airport screenings. What makes you think it would do better in a line-up?
And cracker is a synonym for biscuit.
Not in Hawaii, which was my point. It's not universally offensive, but locally it is. As for Hawaiian history, there's a fair amount of grievances, but that doesn't justify violence against modern-day non-natives.
Actually, check the SPL link. Things can be pretty tough for non-native Hawaiians if they become victims of abuse.
It seems that you and _ require that a word's offensiveness have a certain scope in order to qualify as truly offensive. Fair enough, but I think it doesn't need to be a national scope.
I mean, neither does the n-word...