Black Rednecks And White Liberals

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1. olalondeNov 2023
   "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell is pretty interesting.

   tl;dr: Sowell contends that the "black ghetto culture", characterized by violence, a lack of ambition, a dismissive attitude toward education, and a casual approach to work, is not inherent to African-Americans. Instead, he argues that it is a cultural relic of white southern 'Redneck' or 'Cracker' culture, which was brought to the South by immigrants from the more lawless regions of Britain.

   These immigrants, according to Sowell, came from areas that were marked by a resistance to work, a lack of education, a predilection for violence, and a general disregard for the law. These cultural traits, Sowell argues, were absorbed by the African-American population in the South during the era of slavery and have been perpetuated in certain communities to this day.

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2. PathOfEclipseJun 2023
   > And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.

   Who did the bad thing, and who is going to make it right, and how?

   > Have things been made right by now? I have no idea.

   How would anyone know? People assume we can establish a causal relationship between past discrimination and present disparity, which thing is impossible. Anti-racists claim that all disparity is evidence of discrimination, but this is as religious a belief as ancient Greeks claiming that all lightning comes from Zeus, God of thunder. And likely to be about as wrong in hindsight.

   In books like "Discrimination and Disparities", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", the author Thomas Sowell gives many examples of minority groups that prospered far above and beyond their relative majorities despite real and systemic oppression against them. And, in "Affirmative Action Around the World", he details just how disastrous, ineffective, and harmful affirmative action programs consistently end up being.

   If you as a doctor consistently diagnose symptoms incorrectly, conclude the wrong illness, and, worst of all, prescribe treatment that ends up harming your patient more than helping, you are a terrible doctor that should be barred from practicing. The political left have been such terrible doctors decades nigh on century. They misdiagnose all disparity as due to racism or oppression, and their prescriptions, whether it's the great society programs of the 60s, affirmative action of the 70s, or today's DEI bureaucracies, are highly counterproductive and devastating to society.

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3. thworpJun 2023
   It goes back way further. For education specifically I'd recommend this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpzsJT1snd8 as well as Sowell's book on Affirmative ACtion.

   The book Black Rednecks and White Liberals explores the cultural dimension pretty extensively.

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4. PathOfEclipseOct 2022
   No, it's not, What the GP said is true. as I responded to someone else, you really should study Thomas Sowell because he articulates this stuff better than anyone else. I would specifically recommend Black Rednecks and White Liberals for a discussion about negative cultural elements that trace back to rural areas of Scotland, Ireland, and England, were transplanted to the American south, and eventually transplanted to African americans, who themselves eventually migrated from the south for more opportunity. He also talk about how leftists exacerbate the problem.

   Wealth, Poverty, and Poltics reads like a textbook, but provides a wealth of information about causes of disparity that have nothing to do with racism. Similarly, conquest and cultures talks a lot about disparate impact throughout history.

   One of the foundational tenets of CRT is that all racial disparity is caused by systemic racism, and, therefore, that all racial disparity must be addressed by systemic change until there are equal outcomes. This idea is fundamentally wrong on a billion levels, and also insanely harmful to society. It is one of the main reasons, if not the primary reason, why CRT is so wrong and so dangerous. When you diagnose the illness so completely wrong, and then diagnose the cause of the alleged illness so completely wrong, then, your prognosis is not only going to fail to improve anything, it's going to make things worse for everyone!

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5. PathOfEclipseOct 2022
   > Take a big bag of fair dice, and split them randomly into two groups.

   If you think human outcomes follow a simple normal distribution in a just world, then you are making the exact prime mistake I already pointed out; which is dramatically, and I mean dramatically, over-simplifying the world. Seriously: read some Thomas Sowell. Nothing about this world or this universe is normally distributed.

   > Are you asserting that history has been just? Think hard before you answer this one.

   What is "just"? Think hard before you answer that one. Actually, read "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" and the "Intellectuals and Society" by Sowell. You'll find that the social justice version of justice is vastly different from what people have historically thought of as justice. It is also, in my estimation, far more unjust, unfair, harmful, and evil than the traditional view. It is an arrogant ideology based on a belief that one has the power to shape the world, and all of society within it, according to one's whims, rather than a proper respect for the fact that we are brief sojourners in a vast, complex, and powerful universe, and a planet filled with billions of complex individuals.

   > Sure, like my dice example. Except the problem is, for my dice example to be wrong, you need to specify a reason why some dice roll differently than others,

   You should read "Discrimination and Disparities" By Thomas Sowell, where he quickly crushes the normal distribution hypothesis for economic outcome. He shows through very simple examples, which are still dramatically over-simplifying the world, where there are multiple preconditions for success, and where missing even one precondition results in the same failure as missing all of them. This model alone completely disproves a normal distribution hypothesis, even in a world where the preconditions are distributed randomly. And, not to sound like a broken record, the preconditions are not distributed randomly or evenly in any way, not by nature or time themselves.

   > I assert that these two groups would have roughly the same outcome in almost any measure.

   Nice assertion, but do you even have any scientific data to back it up? And, even if it you did, and I actually can't find any by searching, it would simply provide evidence that your birthday modulo 2 likely doesn't impact economic outcomes. But we can, of course, find economic disparity everywhere for a thousand different reasons. Firstborns on average have higher IQs and better economic outcomes than all other-borns. There is not random economic outcome distribution even within the same household and within the same genetic pool: http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/53/1/123.short.

   In a world of universal economic disparity, the burden of proof is on you to show why things she be different and how. But, like your leftist forebears, you have no proof, only words and religious beliefs packaged into an ideology.

   > Can we explain it by intrinsic differences?

   You can explain it a billion different ways. The question is: who is right, and how do you prove it? Read "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Sowell, and "Intellectuals and Race" while you're at it. You'll find plenty of explanations that have nothing to do with either racism or of innate genetic differences. It is proponents of CRT who need to prove themselves, but because they are in vogue culturally, they get away with their evidence-less assertions without any pushback.

   > Slavery, the Greenwood bombing, segregation, Jim Crow, police slayings -- those are not hypothetical events dreamed up by "leftists" to account for racial disparity we observe.

   It's good leftists didn't make them up, since leftists, namely, the democrat party, were primarily responsible for all of those things over the past 200 years. They didn't make it up because they mostly caused it! And again, correlation does not imply causation, such a basic statistical truism that CRT theorists love to ignore. Just because there was racism, even just because there still is racism, doesn't mean that racism is the primary cause of economic disparity, or, even a major cause at all! Sowell has written about multiple minority groups in different countries, who, despite being oppressed by real racism, and not the made up CRT kind, managed to prosper economically far above and beyond the majority population.

   > Your train of pseudo-reasoning, like that of so many other racism-apologists, only works if you conveniently ignore the actual multi-hundred year history of actual racism that actually happened.

   Go read "The real history of slavery" and "Conquest and Cultures" by Sowell. In fact, we are probably more educated on slavery than you are, judging from your performance in this debate. The only racists are people like you who think that the appropriate reaction to disparity is real, explicit racism against those with "privileged" skin color. But, really, you're just following a long tradition of the political left being racist.

   I realize this conversation is a waste of time, but maybe one day you'll listen, educate yourself on reality, and develop a better-functioning moral compass.

   Edit: I just want to take a moment to point out how unscientific you are with your statements, like: "Sure, like my dice example. Except the problem is, for my dice example to be wrong, you need to provide a reason why...."

   I don't know what leftist education you paid for or in what university, but in a just world you deserve that loan forgiveness Biden is offering. Science is about making a hypothesis, and then, you yourself objectively gathering evidence that could either support or refute that hypothesis, and only then making a conclusion that is backed by your data. You, of course, did the opposite. You made a hypothesis, that economic outcomes between humans "should" be normally distributed, concluded it must be true, and, finally you put it on other people to disprove it. That's, anti-science! And, no, comparing human beings to six-sided dice is not scientific evidence. You might have missed that in your education as well.

   Similarly, you assert that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome, yet fail to provide any scientific evidence. Yours is a world of cult-like ideology and secular religion, where evidence is irrelevant, or an afterthought.

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6. kleer001Dec 2021
   Mine would be "Black Rednecks and White Liberals". Illuminating to say the least.
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