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@disgusted
That's because I was right from the beginning, their dishonesty to themselves not withstanding.
How did you come to acquire these magical mind-reading powers???
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@Casual_Leftist
Forgot to tag you in the previous post.
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"This modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to millions of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records analyzed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting."
Holy fuck, dude. I explicitly addressed that. "Income, loan amount, and neighborhood" aren't the most important variables to control for. The researchers explicitly admitted that credit score and debt-to-income ratio are far more relevant, and that they were unable to access that data. Furthermore, I cited an extensive study showing that high-income blacks actually tend to have *worse* credit scores than low-income whites, which would explain why we see such prominent racial disparities in mortgage lending. It's got nothing to do with racism.
Please stop making me repeat myself.
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@Casual_Leftist
you didn't debunk any of the sources or claims
You clearly didn't read a single word of what I wrote.
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@disgusted
Repeating yourself doesn't make you any more correct.
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@Greyparrot
He's clearly not interested in having a substantive discussion. Leave him alone!
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@disgusted
I don't support banning abortion. But it's fucking insane to believe that pro-lifers are motivated by misogyny. It's clear to any rational person that the vast majority of them genuinely believe in the moral worth of the unborn.Kavanaugh's plan is consistent with the christian right wing misogyny that demands women be kept as second class citizens. Roe v Wade repeal anyone? Only the brain dead could consider that men have a say in what a woman does with her body.
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What a cogent rebuttal.I don't really care about your opinion. You're clearly hyper-partisan and thus your evaluation is suspect and frankly just boring.
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@Casual_Leftist
And who are you to judge that?
Someone whose reading comprehension skills are vastly superior to yours.
Uh huh .. so for job applications when the only difference is the name on the application - what is the most obvious reason for less call backs?
The structure of that study was ridiculous to begin with. What were those employers supposed to do? Flip a coin? Obviously when everything else is equal, they'll prefer a name they're more familiar with. That isn't evidence of racism. If the study showed that employers prefer white names to ethnic names despite the ethnic names having higher qualifications, then maybe your claim would be validated. But I haven't seen any evidence of that.
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@Greyparrot
Because you don't have to manufacture demand, but you have to engineer capital.
That's not true. Demand is contingent on factors such as disposable income and consumer confidence. Those are both factors the government can influence.
I strongly urge you to deeply research the broken window fallacy before you advocate for government to create demand through things like wars and open borders.
... I don't think I even vaguely implied that I support "wars and open borders" as a way to boost demand.
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@Buddamoose
Yeah, I don't understand how people are construing this as a negative. Free trade isn't categorically beneficial.
Trade is complicated. Every imposition or removal of a trade barrier has numerous costs and benefits. It makes no sense to say that globalization is always good and protectionism is always bad. There's a reason why international trade deals are negotiated so thoroughly, at such a detailed level -- the complexity of trade policy demands a nuanced consideration of every action on an individual, case-by-case basis.
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It's pretty obvious when a quarter of the US pop believes Obama was born in Kenya there are enough people who contrive racism to make it an effective reality
That's not a product of racism. It's a product of hyper-partisanship. Due to the rise in political polarization over the past several years, literally every politician in existence has had to deal with vile lies being made up about them -- the "birther" conspiracy is just another example of such a lie. There's no rational reason to assume the involvement of racism. This is a textbook example of the leftist obsession with blindly attributing racist motives to everything. It's factually inaccurate, socially corrosive, and morally repulsive.
^ I already said that in another thread (in response to the same person making the same dumb argument), but it's worth repeating.
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@bsh1
The use of the term deluded may or may not constitute a personal attack depending on the context. If you have concerns about a specific situation, please notify me in private so that I can evaluate the situation and take action if action is appropriate.
Jesus Christ.
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The leftist reaction to Kavanaugh is one of the most depraved and frighteningly irrational things I've ever seen. I'm generally of the opinion that both parties are equally tribalistic, but this is all making me more inclined believe that the Democrats are uniquely bad. I don't wanna become a right-wing partisan :(
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Racism still clearly exists in society when you have alt-right goons with tiki torches shouting "the jews will not replace" - or running people over with cars - oh wait we can't attribute this behavior to antisemitism or white supremacy can we?
I never said racism doesn't exist. All I said was that it's no longer a widespread or significant problem in modern American society.
The denial of generational wealth in a capitalist society.Even if those social restrictions a generation ago - that's just 1 generation.Whites have been passing down thier wealth since the Founding, who do you think runs this country? old rich families.
There's a reason why I drew a distinction between "present-day discrimination" and "historical discrimination." I don't deny that slavery and segregation have had an enormous negative effect on the current state of the African American community.
Here ya go, just a taste of the reality outside of your bubble:
I'm already familiar with most of the studies you cited. That's precisely why I'm so confident in my beliefs on this matter. It's got nothing to do with living in a bubble. The fact is that none of those studies come anywhere close to proving what they're intended to prove. They all conveniently fail to account for crucial external variables, defaulting to "racism" while ignoring far more obvious explanations. There isn't any attempt at honestly exploring why the racial disparities in question exist. Your mortgage loan study is a perfect example -- it didn't control for credit score or debt-to-income ratio, i.e. the two main factors that banks use when deciding whether or not to grant a loan. Let's try taking that information into consideration:
"A recent $1.3 million dollar study undertaken by Freddie Mac has revealed some surprising differences in credit scores between African-Americans and Caucasians. The study compared the credit scores of members of each ethnic group, leading to data that shows Caucasians earning less than $25,000 per year were likely to have better credit scores than African-Americans earning between $65,000 and $75,000 per year. Overall, the study found 27 percent of all credit reports belonging to Caucasians were poor, compared to 48 percent of those belonging to African-Americans. Only 28 percent of Hispanics were found to have bad credit. The study involved 80,000 individuals. Researchers assigned a rating of “bad” to anyone who had two bills past due by more than 30 days in the past two years, a single bill past due by 90 days or more, a judgment against them, a lien against them or a bankruptcy."
Black people, for a variety of cultural and historical (and arguably biological) reasons, tend to be much less financially responsible than white people. This would appear to be a much more plausible explanation for the mortgage loan disparity than racism.
I don't have the time to walk you through the flaws in each of your studies, but I urge you to re-examine them yourself. They all fall into this same trap of prematurely jumping to the conclusion of racism. If you honestly and thoroughly analyze the empirical evidence, you'll realize that virtually all socioeconomic disparities are primarily caused by behavioral differences between the groups in question.
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@Imabench
Alex Jones is insane, but I don't feel good about this. These technology giants have far too much control over our consumption of information. This time it was just Twitter and a couple other social media platforms. But what if Google decides to filter Alex Jones out of its search results? What if all the ISPs get together and decide to take Alex Jones off the internet? What if all that starts happening to people who aren't Alex Jones? I support regulating the technology giants as public utilities, forcing them to respect free speech in the same way that the government has to.
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@Casual_Leftist
Literally not having a say in laws being passed that effect them. Lack of access to greater financial institutions like banks for home/car loans. Being secluded from power also means that claims of abuse of authority go ignored. It is a structural denial to blacks that has been in place for centuries,
There's no reason to believe that this structural denial remains in place today. I challenge you to offer any convincing evidence that present-day discrimination is primarily responsible for the socioeconomic disparities between blacks and whites.
and only now in the new millennia have we had a non-white president, and even then a large segment of the population still believes he was born in Kenya.
That's not a product of racism. It's a product of hyper-partisanship. Due to the rise in political polarization over the past several years, literally every politician in existence has had to deal with vile lies being made up about them -- the "birther" conspiracy is just another example of such a lie. There's no rational reason to assume the involvement of racism. This is a textbook example of the leftist obsession with blindly attributing racist motives to everything. It's factually inaccurate, socially corrosive, and morally repulsive.
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@Kasmic
Pinker is essentially correct. There's no evidence for the idea that America remains a deeply "racist, sexist, and homophobic society." By all empirical metrics, attitudes towards minorities have improved vastly over the past 50 years, with genuinely bigoted attitudes being confined to a tiny, marginalized segment of the population. Discrimination can no longer be reasonably portrayed as a significant force in modern society.
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@Greyparrot
Also, don't let anyone tell you that demand creates jobs. Capital creates jobs, not demand. If there's not enough capital, then swelling of the streets of your sanctuary city will surely turn your hometown into Brazil. Plenty of demand and yet no jobs there.
They're both important. It's true that demand without capital is useless. But capital without demand is useless too. Demand is what ensures the profitability of capital investments. Nobody is gonna start or expand a business (i.e. create job/wage growth) unless they know there's demand for that business's product.
There are two sides to the equation, and I don't understand why people insist on ignoring one side or the other on the basis of their partisan affiliation.
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@bsh1
This isn't the "laissez faire" moderation style you promised. Get your minions under control.
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Dueling should be legalized. It's the most natural way for men to settle their disputes.
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@bsh1
On that question, I will have to disagree, particularly when the cyberbullying is causing suicidal ideation or self-harm. There have been instances of such occurrences on DDO. Let me make this clear: the onus to change in a case of cyberbullying is on the bully, not on their victim. If the victim chooses retaliation or if the cyberbully was deliberately provoked then that changes the equation. But cyberbullying is not the same as debating and it's not the same as the free flow of ideas. It's a deliberate, long-term, often merciless effort to harm someone to their core. Cyberbullying is not appropriate on this site.
I'm not defending the practice of cyberbullying. I just think moderator intervention should be kept to a bare minimum, only activating when absolutely necessary. Cyberbullying, like virtually all forms of dickish behavior, can (and therefore should) be handled without moderator intervention.
I don't think I've advocated much intervention at all. Certainly, only a small, small minority of users are going to use phrases like the one I demonstrated to REF or are going to engage in cyberbullying. Where have I advocated high levels of interventionism in this thread? I certainly see no evidence of that. And, as I said earlier, I agree that people should deal with their disagreements themselves, but, unfortunately, there are situations which demand moderator action. Those situations are a fraction of all interactions on this site, and it is my hope that moderation can largely take a backseat in the user experience.
We'll see about that, man... based on your DDO history, I have a hard time believing that you won't overreach. But perhaps you'll prove me wrong.
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@bsh1
I agree that people should deal with their disagreements themselves, but I disagree that safety is not an issue on this site. Certainly, there are minors on websites like these who deserve protection from severe invective and severe cyberbullying (of the kind that I demonstrated to REF, were it aimed at a particular person) and there are those who might be harmed if they were, for example, doxxed.
Doxxing is a blatant a violation of the right to privacy, and I have no issue with banning people for doing it.
The appropriate solution to perceived "cyberbullying" is for the victim to learn how to deal with it on their own, perhaps with the help of older members, and perhaps even using the "Block user" feature if necessary. No need for moderation to be involved in any official capacity.
But my point was not to focus on privacy and safety specifically, but rather to illustrate the broader point that a moderator must juggle competing interests and concerns to find, in their judgment, the best way forward.
The best way forward is to let people sort out their own issues with one another. The level of interventionism you advocate is completely unnecessary.
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@bsh1
I believe that free speech is important, as is robust and sometimes raucous debate. That said, I also believe that free speech does not occupy a place of preeminence among all the major rights we hold. It is not, for instance, more important than privacy and safety
I certainly agree that the right to privacy must be upheld. But this is a debate website. "Safety" is not a concern here. The users of this site don't need a babysitter to protect them from emotional harm. Let people hash shit out on their own.
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@TheHammer
Why did you feel the need to say that
Because there isn't a "Like" button on this site.
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I've actually revised my beliefs on this a bit since the last time I posted here:
1. Labor shortages are bullshit. Having done some more research, I think businesses could easily fill all their alleged labor shortages by raising wages and offering more training. There wouldn't be any "jobs Americans can't/won't do" if businesses were willing to invest more resources into hiring American workers. Immigrant-dominated industries (e.g. agriculture) have only become immigrant-dominated by virtue of immigrant workers pushing American workers out of those industries. In other words, any level of immigration is going to introduce competition into the job market and harm American workers.
2. That being said, immigration can still be justified on economic grounds. It's a net benefit to the economy in the same way that free trade is: by improving efficiency of production and drastically reducing the prices of goods and services for all consumers. Immigration and free trade displace a subset of American workers, but in doing so, they benefit everyone by boosting purchasing power (i.e. raising real wages).
3. I'm still anti-immigration because of its impact on social cohesion. And the economic displacement of so many American workers only exacerbates that impact.
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This is not "laissez-faire moderation" by any meaningful definition of those words. This is technocratic insanity.
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@DebateArt.com
Don't take this personally, but appointing Bsh1 was a very ill-advised move. The guy has gotten wrapped up in more drama over site governance bullshit than pretty much any other DDO member. He regularly overreaches and overreacts, and I think you're gonna regret this decision.
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@Stronn
It's hard to know whether DeSantis intended the comment to imply race
No, it isn't hard to know. It's very obvious that he wasn't thinking about his opponent's race, and any attempt at claiming otherwise is bullshit armchair psychology.
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@Imabench
I guess now the only argument that could be made is that there wouldn't be much harm in keeping a slight surplus of the number of immigrants needed to curtail labor shortages rather then keep it at a bare minimum
Every immigrant that isn't filling a labor shortage is -- by definition -- taking a job that could have been taken by an American.
Those first two links have like 40 pages worth of info that I don't really have the time to go through. If you can pinpoint where in those links the studies address social stability for immigration, that would be helpful.
Each study is adequately summarized by its abstract. Honestly, though, this concept shouldn't need a mountain of empirical evidence to prove. It's obvious that a lack of assimilation is going to hurt social cohesion. People have a natural tendency to dislike those who they feel they have nothing in common with.
if you want to measure an immigrants ability to assimilate into a country, knowledge of how the government works and ability to speak English is fine with me, but also as far as I would go. Anything beyond that for the most part is arbitrary and should not be enforced just because we want to cull down the numbers.
The only additional factor I'd really want to include is some sort of subjective assessment via interview. Professional interviewers are capable of discerning quite a lot about a person, and I think that skill-set could be applied towards determining whether or not a potential immigrant is likely to assimilate culturally.
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@RationalMadman
That's actually a kickass profile picture. I will consider adopting it!
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@secularmerlin
Then I'm not sure how we could have any discussion about them.
There's no discussion to be had. I've already conceded that my theism isn't based in rationality.
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@drafterman
1. I don't have the book and can't read it. So what I say is glossed from online reviews and summaries, so feel free to correct. But the book doesn't appear to be saying that IQ -> socioeconomic disaprity, but rather IQ -> other factors (income, job performance, etc.) instead of socioeconomic disparities.
Differences in income and job performance would, by definition, play a role in the creation of socioeconomic disparities...
2. The book has been criticized for its use of "race science" and rather controversial sources for some of its information.
Even if it's true that the book contains some inaccurate information, that doesn't provide a rational basis for one to assume that Murray is a racist.
3. Let's be honest. Is this what you really think the OP is doing here? Balance of probabilities.
I honestly don't see how you can infer from what she wrote that she's a racist. Nothing she said indicated any sort of hostility towards black people.
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@drafterman
Charles Murray, in his book The Bell Curve.
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@drafterman
I don't understand what you're asking for examples of.
It's a well-established fact that there are massive socioeconomic disparities between African Americans and literally every other ethnic group in the United States. It's perfectly plausible that the relatively low average IQ of African Americans could be part of the reason for that, and it isn't racist to honestly consider that possibility.
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So far, the majority of this thread's respondents have been even more anti-immigration than I am... lol
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@triangle.128k
Labor shortages aren't a bad thing, they drive up wages and working conditions. The elites emphasize it as such for this reason.
In many cases, there simply aren't any workers available to take the job, regardless of how high the pay-rate is. Those are the kinds of labor shortages that should be filled by immigrants. Leaving them unfilled would just inflict gratuitous harm upon businesses.
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@Imabench
Thank you for providing such a thorough, substantive response.
#1) You claim that immigration should be restricted to the bare minimum levels needed to fill labor shortages, but there is simply no way to accurately compute what that bare level is in a given month or year. Labor shortages are impacted by how many jobs are available, how many more jobs are created, how many Americans decide to go into retirement or stop looking for work, how many positions a company decides to open or close, and those are just things off the top of my head. Restricting the number of immigrants allowed into a country based on numbers that fluctuate or maybe cannot even be calculated simply isn't practical......
Actually, economists have developed many reliable methods of measuring labor shortages. You can read about some of them here.
2) Your first argument is also built on the assumption that unemployed Americans looking for work should be able to fill open jobs before immigrants, but the geography of the country throws a giant wrench into that belief. 30,000 people in New York who are looking for work aren't going to move to Arizona to fill 30,000 farming jobs just because they're available.
Well, yes... that would constitute a labor shortage. Geography is among the most common reasons why labor shortages exist. As I said, I have no issue with immigrants taking jobs that Americans legitimately can't/won't take.
3) The second main argument you make against immigration is far weaker than your first one. You start off by focusing entirely on 'immigration without assimilation', and make a bunch of fairly opinionated claims about how it harms things like 'kinship' and 'national identity' which aren't things that can really be measured or evaluated in the first place.
It's difficult, yes, but again -- researchers have actually developed some very reliable methods of doing so. There are tons of empirical studies out there that use sophisticated metrics to quantify factors related to social stability (e.g. interpersonal trust levels, connectivity within social networks), and most of them conclude that immigration without assimilation is terrible for social stability. Check some of them out here, here, and here.
More importantly though is that even if the first generation of immigrants do not assimilate well with society and maintain most of their own languages and culture, later generations from that first generation do assimilate at a better rate, since they grow up learning the languages and customs from early ages rather then be thrusted into it in the second half of life.
True, but that doesn't make it any less crucial to maximize the assimilation of first-generation immigrants. They make up more than 10% of the U.S. population!
4) You claim that immigrants must be selected carefully on the basis of cultural compatibility, but offer no explanation of what that basis is or how to calculate it. How do we calculate the cultural compatibility of someone? By having them speak English? By being Christian? By having them pass a high school level civics exam?
All of those factors would definitely be taken into consideration when determining cultural compatibility, especially the "speaking English" one. I would also be okay with relying on the subjective assessment of trained interviewers.
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@RationalMadman
Every time. I answered all the questions they had available.
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@Stronn
Maybe not, but then neither CNN nor NYT crow endlessly about how they are "fair and balanced."
Wtf? Yeah, they are... they construe any suggestion that they might be biased as an "attack on the free press."
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@Analgesic.Spectre
What would be your alternative? Everything you said about democracy's flaws is true, but unless you can come up with a better political system, it all amounts to nothing.
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I'm a devout theist, but I don't believe that God's existence can be rationally justified. The physicalist model of the universe is 100% coherent, and there's no rational reason to suppose that any supernatural being exists beyond that.My faith in God is ultimately based upon my own personal experience of him.
I'd also like to note that my faith in God doesn't change much about how I think the universe works. I don't view the physicalist model of the universe as incompatible with God's existence.
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@secularmerlin
What sort of experience?
Words cannot describe it.
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@drafterman
Acknowledging it as a flawed measure of anything other than the ability to take an IQ test, why would anyone bring this up as a point! The OP isn't a poorly programmed robot mindlessly spouting bad science trivial. There is a purpose, a reason, why certain groups of people roll out the "Blacks don't IQ" misinformation: they think blacks are mentally inferior to whites and want to believe that science backs them on this.
That's bullshit. Just because someone brings up racial IQ differences doesn't automatically mean they're racist towards blacks. What if they're just impartially considering all the possible reasons why there are massive socioeconomic disparities between blacks and every other race? Unless you have actual evidence of their racism, it's irrational to assume their motives like that.
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@Zarroette
I agree, for the most part.
Leftists have diminished the term "racism" to describe the subconscious biases we all have against those who don't look like us. I find that definition of the term to be meaningless because, like I just said, we all have those biases. And frankly, they don't play that big of a role in our decision-making. The leftist obsession with subconscious racial biases is ridiculous.
I think the term "racism" should only be used to describe actual hostility towards members of other races. Under that definition, the number of genuine racists in this country becomes negligible, and all the leftist narratives about racial injustice are rendered baseless.
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FOX is no more biased in Trump's favor than CNN, NYT, etc. are in the Democrats' favor.
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I have two takeaways from this:
(1) Mueller's investigation needs to end. Its original intention was to find out whether or not the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. After more than a year, it has found nothing to that effect. Manafort and Cohen's crimes are completely irrelevant. At this point, the investigation is simply serving as a political weapon against Trump by placing undue legal scrutiny on him and his associates.
(2) It's pretty incredible how many of Trump's associates have been involved in illegal activity. Given how paranoid Trump is about this investigation, he himself has probably been involved in illegal activity too (although I seriously doubt it has anything to do with Russian election interference).
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