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#577 Apr 04 2015 at 8:39 AM Rating: Default
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Gbaji wrote:
when assessing a politician.

It's bad tactics when it is used against the voting public on the basis of their identity (race, ***, etc). It is not a bad tactic when used against a politician elected by the public on the basis of their actions. I've explained this several times. When will it sink in?
See post 575

Gbaji wrote:
It's completely relevant to the tactic of labeling black people who don't support their party Uncle Toms. WTF?

How the fear of reprisal is being used is irrelevant to the fact that the fear of reprisal is being used. Those are two separate issues. I addressed the "how" as well and you refused to respond. So you can't accuse of me of not addressing the issue.

Gbaji wrote:
I didn't "fail to respond". I said I wasn't going to respond point for point and clearly explained why. Deal with it. If you really want me to respond to you point for point, you need to stop using spoiler tags and instead trim my own points that you are responding to down to a reasonable size. While using spoiler tags hides the text on the page, the entire text appears when I quote you to respond, forcing me to have to trim both my previous post and yours. If you want me to respond point for point, trim the quotes you're responding to. If you don't do that, then you can't complain when I periodically just post a general response without quoting you.

Pick one. I honestly don't care which.
You're confusing the act of me addressing your posting tactic with me caring. I don't care whether or not you respond. I'm merely pointing out the fact that you are NEVER at a loss of words and you create tangents in posts when you know that you are wrong. As long as I play along with "welfare" and other nonsense, you will write forever. When I stick to a singular point, you runaway. I just think its funny. It doesn't bother me in the least.
#578 Apr 04 2015 at 8:52 AM Rating: Decent
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Aripyanfar wrote:
My life got so much better after I allowed myself to be wrong on the internet. That being said, centrifugal force isn't a thing any more. It's part of the history of science, like the Bohr model of the atom.

Damn you, science! I never even knew about centripedal force. Not surprising, really, as I never even finished school.
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#579 Apr 04 2015 at 9:29 AM Rating: Excellent
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Jophiel wrote:
Kavekkk wrote:
Aripyanfar wrote:
My life got so much better after I allowed myself to be wrong on the internet. That being said, centrifugal force isn't a thing any more. It's part of the history of science, like the Bohr model of the atom.

https://xkcd.com/123/

Rate up for beating my expectation that it was a link to the "wrong on the internet" comic.


That was well played.

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#580 Apr 04 2015 at 11:54 AM Rating: Good
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Just like all my posts, right guys?

Smiley: laugh
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#581 Apr 06 2015 at 7:51 AM Rating: Good
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Aripyanfar wrote:
It's part of the history of science, like the Bohr model of the atom.
History of science is always fun, especially medicine.
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#582 Apr 06 2015 at 10:05 AM Rating: Excellent
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Rand Paul's campaign slogan wrote:
Defeat the Washington machine
Unleash the American dream

Rhyming doesn't work like that, Rand Smiley: mad

Edited, Apr 6th 2015 11:06am by Jophiel
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#583 Apr 06 2015 at 1:07 PM Rating: Good
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Should have asked Ted Cruz for help, since we know Teddy has at least read some of Green Eggs and Ham.
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#584 Apr 06 2015 at 1:19 PM Rating: Excellent
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I'm sure he meant "Unleash the Ameri-Kraken dream".
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#585 Apr 08 2015 at 7:17 PM Rating: Decent
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Almalieque wrote:
So, you're admitting that Republicans use "appeal to popularity" and "fear of reprisal" dealing with political actions of GOP elects and candidates?


Of course. Now. Will you admit that this is completely different than using those methods based on someone's skin color?

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Being on welfare does not in any way, shape or form make it harder for an individual to progress in life unless you choose not to do better.


Being on welfare reduces the need to choose to do better. That's what opportunity cost is about. It affects your choices by skewing them. It decreases the value of working relative to the value of not working. This is not rocket science.

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So even if I were to accept your flawed definition of it being a "cost", that "cost" has zero impact on being successful which contradicts your claim of it being designed to hold blacks back.


It has a significant impact. If I give you a choice between getting a job and earning $20k/year, or sitting on welfare collecting the equivalent of $20k/year in benefits, are you seriously going to argue that this isn't going to affect your choice? Let me make an even easier example. I offer you a lunch for free, or one that you have to pay for. Which do you choose? The free one, right? Every. Single. Time.

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The fundamental belief is that the government should provide services to who those who need them. The pandering goes to those who need the services. So, their pandering is aligned with their fundamental belief.


I was specifically asking why they make a point of adding "and minorities" if the actual criteria is being poor. My point is that the Dems make a specific point of ensuring that blacks and latinos know which party is buttering their bread. That's the pandering I'm talking about.

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Gbaji wrote:
Then do so. And not in "because they don't like them" or "because they have policies that hurt them". Be specific. See, the problem I'm having here is that I'm arguing that Republican policies are not actually bad for blacks, but Dem policies are, and that the Dems use labels and repeated claims to the contrary to convince people that it's the other way around.

The Voting Rights Act is a great example.


What about it is a great example? The GOP has no problem with the Voting Rights Act. What's amusing is that you seem to be doing exactly what I just talked about with the labeling and pandering. The Left has labeled voting ID as suppression of voters (specifically minority voters just to make sure to get the correct outrage). Once again, an issue that should be objective and applied equally to all gets redefined in a racial context in order to convince people to support a "side". So yeah, I suppose that is a great example of how the Dems use identity politics to pursue a political agenda.

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Conceptually, blacks also tend to be against privatization of public services, such as schools.


If you're talking about charter schools (since true private schools have been around long before the public school system existed), then this is another case where Dem policies are actually bad for blacks, but perversely blacks continue to support them. I just don't get it. The Dems are so entrenched in their status quo education system, and in protecting the teachers unions, that they fight tooth and nail to preserve public schools in poor neighborhoods that are absolutely horrible. Given that this disproportionately impacts black people, it's another example of what I'm talking about.

If you think the Dem policies on public schools are actually good for black people, I think you need your head examined.

Quote:
Do you think blacks are blind to what is good for them?


I think that black people in the US are subject to massively more social pressures to support a "side" of politics and that it absolutely can blind them to whether the political actions in question are actually good for them or not. Again, it's not that they are incapable of making their own choices but that they are subject to rhetoric and pressures that other groups are not. Everything else being the same, the group that's being marketed to "buy this product" will buy it more often than the group that isn't. That doesn't say anything at all about the group. It says a lot about the marketers though.

If someone markets a crappy product just to black people, this will result in black people buying it more often than white people. Does that make black people stupid? No. Does it make white people (who are not subject to the marketing and thus making a more rational assessment) racist for saying "that's a crappy product and you shouldn't by it"? No. If anything it represents an attempt to help the other group. What it does indicate is a possible racist motive on the part of the person who marketed that crappy product just to black people. And if they included "anyone who tells you this isn't good for you is a racist and trying to keep you down", in your marketing you might actually get a bunch of the black people to call other people racist for trying to warn them about the crappy product.

That's more or less what has been happening.

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Regardless, a person voting against Republicans because of not feeling welcomed isn't based on policies, so your argument of being persuaded by Democrats fails.


Except if the reason for "not feeling welcomed" is because of that rhetoric and social pressure, it may not be a good way to make a choice. See what I'm talking about? Group A is advocating policies that are good for you. Group B is advocating policies that are bad for you, but has a very aggressive PR campaign to convince you not to trust Group A. So when Group A attempts to tell you that Group B's policies are bad for you, you refuse to believe them.

That's basically what's going on here. It's pretty ridiculous when I can point to all of the positions of the GOP and show how they are good solid fair policies that rest on objective assessment, and then to the positions of the Dems and show how they are bad and unfair policies that rely on emotion and rhetoric to get people to support them, even when those very people are the most harmed by them, and the response I keep getting is "But the GOP aren't good for black people". Um... Why do you think that? I just don't think the examples you gave support that claim at all.

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Read above. I didn't fail to respond. The Democrats didn't abandon their positions, they pander based off their positions.


Do they? Do they argue against voter ID because there's some reason why requiring an ID to vote is bad, or would result in less fair elections? Or do they just rile people up by claiming that it would suppress black votes? I'm thinking the latter.

And when they fight against charter schools, do they talk about things like actual education stats? Or do they just claim that they're bad for black people somehow and insist that you oppose them?

This is why I say that they've stopped even trying to justify their positions based on any sort of logical or objective reasoning. They just find a way to represent any issue in an identity context and then call upon an emotional response to the assumed unfairness of the situation. That's just pandering. Period.

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White flight HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH POVERTY. I'm talking about current middle class neighborhoods.


Then you're talking about something that is irrelevant to the subject at hand. You're the one who mentioned white flight as a cause of poor predominantly black neighborhoods. To now say you're talking about middle class neighborhoods is a ridiculous attempt to shift off on a tangent. Yes. Some people will talk about shifts within middle class neighborhoods that align along racial lines as "white flight", but that's not the cause of poverty rates among black populations, so it's irrelevant to this conversation.

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If anyone leaves, it's not because they can "afford" to leave, but a decision. People like to live near people who look like them. The more black people who move IN to a middle class neighborhood, the more white people move out, not out of racism, but because they feel more comfortable around people like them.


Again, I'm struggling to figure out why this is relevant to the discussion of how black people came to be disproportionately poor or what forces may be keeping them that way. I'm talking about why crime stats disproportionately impact black people. My argument is that they are disproportionately negatively impacted by crime (both as victims and as perpetrators) because they are disproportionately more likely to be living in a poor neighborhood and because crime rates and poverty rates tend to go hand in hand. I further argued that the introduction of the welfare system right at a time period when black people were still suffering the effects of segregation and thus were already artificially poorer than they might otherwise be acted to inhibit their ability to improve their condition and has lead to the perpetuation of that disproportionate poverty stat. I pointed to the existence of numerous inner city neighborhoods with ridiculously high poverty rates as support for this argument, based on the assumption that such high rates of poverty could not be obtained (in the US anyway) in the absence of a welfare system. I further argued that in a neighborhood with such high poverty, job opportunities would be so scarce that most people growing up there would be forced into the very same welfare system their parents were on.

You countered with "white flight" being the reason for those super poor inner city neighborhoods with their disproportionately black inhabitants. When I argued against that as a valid explanation for that condition, you then decided that white flight had to do with middle class neighborhoods instead. Again. That's nice and all that, but you've lost sight of the issue we were discussing. We were talking about the factors that contribute to high poverty neighborhoods with disproportionate numbers of black people living in them. Middle class neighborhoods have nothing to do with that at all.

Want to at least attempt to address that issue? Why do you suppose there are so many predominantly black high poverty and high crime neighborhoods? Because at some point the oft repeated "white racism" argument has to give way to more rational explanations. I've argued that the welfare system perpetuates that condition of poverty. What is your explanation? Do you have one?

Edited, Apr 8th 2015 6:25pm by gbaji
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#586 Apr 08 2015 at 7:24 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
If I give you a choice between getting a job and earning $20k/year, or sitting on welfare collecting the equivalent of $20k/year in benefits, are you seriously going to argue that this isn't going to affect your choice?

Please post a link to a state site that tells me a single person will get ~$20k/yr in welfare benefits.

I'll just wait over here.
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#587 Apr 08 2015 at 8:02 PM Rating: Decent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
If I give you a choice between getting a job and earning $20k/year, or sitting on welfare collecting the equivalent of $20k/year in benefits, are you seriously going to argue that this isn't going to affect your choice?

Please post a link to a state site that tells me a single person will get ~$20k/yr in welfare benefits.


It's an example number to illustrate the concept of opportunity cost. Obviously, the actual benefit structure is much more complex than that, but I'm trying to get him to acknowledge the basic concept first and then maybe move on via baby steps to a more realistic model of how welfare systems actually work.

But since you asked nicely:

In reality welfare tends to be a set of benefits based on need and income level. Most people on welfare do work, but the benefits themselves act as a disincentive to working more hours than the minimum or shifting jobs or careers to something which might in the future provide sufficient income to allow one to be rid of the need for the benefits in the first place. The benefits primarily take the form of housing and food assistance. But that assistance scales based on the income level. What this means is that if you are working part time and earning say $10k/year, welfare will make up the difference in need by providing housing subsidies sufficient to allow you to have a place to live and food subsidies to allow you to provide your family with sufficient food. Let's imagine for the sake of a simple example, that this results in that $20k/year figure I mentioned earlier (so $10k of earnings and $10k of assistance). The problem is that as your income increases, the benefits will decrease, meaning that you must increase your total earnings by $10k/year before you start seeing a single dollar of benefit. This has the effect of severely limiting upward mobility. Why should I work more hours if I ultimately earn the same living as a result? Why expend the effort improving my job skills if I see no benefit? It might take years of effort before I see any improvement in my standard of living as a result of that effort.

Now, if I'm in a neighborhood where only a small percentage of people are on welfare, I might spend that effort because that's what those around me are doing. They're getting better jobs and moving upwards, so I'll probably follow their example. And frankly, the desire to get off of welfare will drive me to do so as well. But if I'm living in a neighborhood where everyone else is also on welfare (and this becomes more likely when you realize that the housing assistance is often geographically oriented), I have no such social pressure to do so. In fact, I have the opposite. No one's looking down on me for using food stamps. We're all living in the government assisted housing complex, so there's no stigma there. And it wont take long for me to realize that working harder doesn't get me anything, doubly so given the poor job choices in the area anyway. Better to just work any random minor job to keep my benefits and work the system, right?

Again, I'm still just tossing out example numbers, but the factors in play remain the same no matter what those numbers are. As long as the welfare benefits are significant enough to actually act as a benefit and offset the direct effects of poverty, then they must be significant enough to affect choices regarding upward mobility out of poverty. We can quibble about the exact numbers all day long, but as long as anyone is arguing that those benefits are important and needed, then those same benefits must also act as an inhibitor to upward mobility. There's no way around that. I agree that this sucks, but this is actually a topic I've thought long and hard about, and the only conclusion I've been able to reach in terms of how to provide assistance for those in need while avoiding the dependence and anti-mobility effects is to have some method that forces people off the assistance over time.

How you do that is hard to say, but that's the only sure way. The immediate opportunity cost to working your way out of welfare is so high that very few people will do so absent some kind of serious nudging. It's why one of the arguments I make is to get the government out of the business of welfare entirely. Let private charities, which are free to cut people off if/then they feel they're being taken advantage off for a free ride, do it instead. I'm not married to that as the only solution, but government ones tend to get bogged down in politics and perception issues (like the very identity stuff I've been talking about in this thread), that make it hard for government run welfare to take the "tough love" action that is really needed. You have to push the bird out of the nest before it'll fly.

Edited, Apr 8th 2015 7:04pm by gbaji
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#588 Apr 08 2015 at 9:35 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
It's an example number to illustrate the concept of opportunity cost
It's a bad example because the numbers are a joke. Here, if you are very,very lucky you will get (assuming you have no income) subsidized housing (~$7200/yr value) and food stamps (~$2000/yr value). That falls quite short of the ~$17.5K/yr you would take home working full time at minimum wage ($8.5/hr here).

So your numbers don't add up. What you are saying is "people would rather get a small apartment and subsistence food than work at a burger joint and double their income". Maybe you would rather do that. You don't get to speak for anyone else.



EDIT: spelling

Edited, Apr 8th 2015 10:12pm by Bijou
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#589 Apr 08 2015 at 9:48 PM Rating: Excellent
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Think you mean subsistence instead of subsidence. Unless your food is actually making you sink into the water table, maybe.
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#590 Apr 08 2015 at 11:28 PM Rating: Excellent
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Also living wage experiments have generally shown that it doesn't actually disincentivize getting a job. So there's that.
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#591 Apr 08 2015 at 11:32 PM Rating: Excellent
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Samira wrote:
Think you mean subsistence instead of subsidence. Unless your food is actually making you sink into the water table, maybe.
Have you eaten at McDonalds?
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#592 Apr 09 2015 at 5:50 AM Rating: Excellent
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I think I've already pointed out that I am far too snobby for that.
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#593 Apr 09 2015 at 6:06 AM Rating: Decent
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How you do that is hard to say, but that's the only sure way.

Raising benefit levels so people can take the risk of working without worrying their family will suffer. Not a mystery, there are probably 1000 studies. In places with near full employment, high benefit levels are wildly more likely to lead to people being less risk adverse and going to work. Interestingly, there is almost literally no "why work when the dole pays so well" effect, which is surprising even to me. Data, though, it doesn't care what your make believe world was before it was generated.
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#594 Apr 09 2015 at 6:54 AM Rating: Default
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Gbaji wrote:

Of course. Now. Will you admit that this is completely different than using those methods based on someone's skin color?
If we're talking about GOP leaders and not the base, then you must acknowledge that the "uncle Tom" talk doesn't come from President Obama, Eric Holder or other elected black leaders, it comes from the voter base. So your claim that the Democrats use those tactics with race is false, so both parties use the aforesaid tactics.

Secondly, what options does an individual who supports (or wants to run as) a candidate with contrary views that are labeled as a RINO have if they are shunned?

Gbaji wrote:
Being on welfare reduces the need to choose to do better. That's what opportunity cost is about. It affects your choices by skewing them. It decreases the value of working relative to the value of not working. This is not rocket science.


Gbaji wrote:
t has a significant impact. If I give you a choice between getting a job and earning $20k/year, or sitting on welfare collecting the equivalent of $20k/year in benefits, are you seriously going to argue that this isn't going to affect your choice? Let me make an even easier example. I offer you a lunch for free, or one that you have to pay for. Which do you choose? The free one, right? Every. Single. Time.

It doesn't reduce the "need" to choose better unless you choose not to do better. People on welfare don't all of the sudden become oblivious to the "American Dream". They get on welfare and make a choice to either do better or stay the same. You say it's not rocket science, but you're acting like it is.

$20k a year without benefits can turn into 60k a year. 20k/year with benefits will not ever come close to that. So, no, I would not choose the "free one" because that is stupid. If you hit rock bottom and had to use welfare, would you stay on welfare or would you try to work your way out of it?

Gbaji wrote:
I was specifically asking why they make a point of adding "and minorities" if the actual criteria is being poor. My point is that the Dems make a specific point of ensuring that blacks and latinos know which party is buttering their bread. That's the pandering I'm talking about.
That's the point that I was addressing. They say "minorities", "(single) women", "LGBT" etc., because those people make up their base and that's who they are pandering to. However, their pandering goes in line with their fundamental beliefs. It wouldn't be pandering if they didn't try to relate to the base or specifically call them out.

Gbaji wrote:
What about it is a great example? The GOP has no problem with the Voting Rights Act. What's amusing is that you seem to be doing exactly what I just talked about with the labeling and pandering. The Left has labeled voting ID as suppression of voters (specifically minority voters just to make sure to get the correct outrage). Once again, an issue that should be objective and applied equally to all gets redefined in a racial context in order to convince people to support a "side". So yeah, I suppose that is a great example of how the Dems use identity politics to pursue a political agenda.
If they have no problem with it, then why did they gut it and say it wasn't necessary anymore?

Gbaji wrote:
If you're talking about charter schools (since true private schools have been around long before the public school system existed), then this is another case where Dem policies are actually bad for blacks, but perversely blacks continue to support them. I just don't get it. The Dems are so entrenched in their status quo education system, and in protecting the teachers unions, that they fight tooth and nail to preserve public schools in poor neighborhoods that are absolutely horrible. Given that this disproportionately impacts black people, it's another example of what I'm talking about.

If you think the Dem policies on public schools are actually good for black people, I think you need your head examined.
I, along with many other blacks, do agree with the public education system. You asked a question and I gave you an answer. Of course we are not going to agree, but the point of the discussion was why blacks support Democrats. And, yes, it does include private schools because they were historically used as a way to keep schools segregated.

Gbaji wrote:
I think that black people in the US are subject to massively more social pressures to support a "side" of politics and that it absolutely can blind them to whether the political actions in question are actually good for them or not. Again, it's not that they are incapable of making their own choices but that they are subject to rhetoric and pressures that other groups are not. Everything else being the same, the group that's being marketed to "buy this product" will buy it more often than the group that isn't. That doesn't say anything at all about the group. It says a lot about the marketers though.

If someone markets a crappy product just to black people, this will result in black people buying it more often than white people. Does that make black people stupid? No. Does it make white people (who are not subject to the marketing and thus making a more rational assessment) racist for saying "that's a crappy product and you shouldn't by it"? No. If anything it represents an attempt to help the other group. What it does indicate is a possible racist motive on the part of the person who marketed that crappy product just to black people. And if they included "anyone who tells you this isn't good for you is a racist and trying to keep you down", in your marketing you might actually get a bunch of the black people to call other people racist for trying to warn them about the crappy product.

That's more or less what has been happening.

The difference between politics and your "crappy product" scenario is unlike a product that might have hundreds of alternatives, in politics, there is only one alternative. So, to say that the black people just don't understand the Republican party is an attack on black people for being stupid. I'm not denying any social pressure, but this isn't a "chicken or the egg" scenario. The pressure came second.


Gbaji wrote:
Except if the reason for "not feeling welcomed" is because of that rhetoric and social pressure, it may not be a good way to make a choice. See what I'm talking about? Group A is advocating policies that are good for you. Group B is advocating policies that are bad for you, but has a very aggressive PR campaign to convince you not to trust Group A. So when Group A attempts to tell you that Group B's policies are bad for you, you refuse to believe them.

That's basically what's going on here. It's pretty ridiculous when I can point to all of the positions of the GOP and show how they are good solid fair policies that rest on objective assessment, and then to the positions of the Dems and show how they are bad and unfair policies that rely on emotion and rhetoric to get people to support them, even when those very people are the most harmed by them, and the response I keep getting is "But the GOP aren't good for black people". Um... Why do you think that? I just don't think the examples you gave support that claim at all.
The feeling of not being welcomed is not based on rhetoric and social pressure and which is literally what I just said. The average person doesn't follow politics, so they are not paying attention to what either party is saying. However, they do see the Confederate flags and hear the racial slurs. So your claim that blacks are persuaded by DEM policies is false if the uninformed blacks are voting off of personal feelings.


Gbaji wrote:
Do they? Do they argue against voter ID because there's some reason why requiring an ID to vote is bad, or would result in less fair elections? Or do they just rile people up by claiming that it would suppress black votes? I'm thinking the latter.

And when they fight against charter schools, do they talk about things like actual education stats? Or do they just claim that they're bad for black people somehow and insist that you oppose them?

This is why I say that they've stopped even trying to justify their positions based on any sort of logical or objective reasoning. They just find a way to represent any issue in an identity context and then call upon an emotional response to the assumed unfairness of the situation. That's just pandering. Period.
You are literally proving my point. The VRA was put in place as a protection mechanism. Black people care about the VRA regardless who is talking about it. The DEMS wouldn't need to pander to blacks, college students, etc. about voter ID laws if the GOP didn't gut it

Actually, every argument that I've heard on charter school was 100% about the school stats as that education for children tend to cross party lines.

Gbaji wrote:
Then you're talking about something that is irrelevant to the subject at hand. You're the one who mentioned white flight as a cause of poor predominantly black neighborhoods. To now say you're talking about middle class neighborhoods is a ridiculous attempt to shift off on a tangent. Yes. Some people will talk about shifts within middle class neighborhoods that align along racial lines as "white flight", but that's not the cause of poverty rates among black populations, so it's irrelevant to this conversation.
What? The point is that even when black people move into better neighborhoods, the white people leave and when they leave, so does the value of the community because no one else wants to live there. You were arguing that welfare was the reason for poverty in black neighborhoods. I asked you a question if you believe getting rid of welfare would stop other instances like gentrification and white flight? You were the one who started arguing white flight from poor neighborhoods.

Gbaji wrote:
Again, I'm struggling to figure out why this is relevant to the discussion of how black people came to be disproportionately poor or what forces may be keeping them that way. I'm talking about why crime stats disproportionately impact black people. My argument is that they are disproportionately negatively impacted by crime (both as victims and as perpetrators) because they are disproportionately more likely to be living in a poor neighborhood and because crime rates and poverty rates tend to go hand in hand. I further argued that the introduction of the welfare system right at a time period when black people were still suffering the effects of segregation and thus were already artificially poorer than they might otherwise be acted to inhibit their ability to improve their condition and has lead to the perpetuation of that disproportionate poverty stat. I pointed to the existence of numerous inner city neighborhoods with ridiculously high poverty rates as support for this argument, based on the assumption that such high rates of poverty could not be obtained (in the US anyway) in the absence of a welfare system. I further argued that in a neighborhood with such high poverty, job opportunities would be so scarce that most people growing up there would be forced into the very same welfare system their parents were on.

You countered with "white flight" being the reason for those super poor inner city neighborhoods with their disproportionately black inhabitants. When I argued against that as a valid explanation for that condition, you then decided that white flight had to do with middle class neighborhoods instead. Again. That's nice and all that, but you've lost sight of the issue we were discussing. We were talking about the factors that contribute to high poverty neighborhoods with disproportionate numbers of black people living in them. Middle class neighborhoods have nothing to do with that at all.

Want to at least attempt to address that issue? Why do you suppose there are so many predominantly black high poverty and high crime neighborhoods? Because at some point the oft repeated "white racism" argument has to give way to more rational explanations. I've argued that the welfare system perpetuates that condition of poverty. What is your explanation? Do you have one?

I explained above. You're confusing yourself because we're talking about various topics at once. The initial complaint was about the stop and frisk statistics. You were the one trying to insist a poor person walking to work in a poor neighborhood should be stopped and frisked more because he is poor in a poor neighborhood. I've argued that the people stopped and frisked should be based on statistics of actual crimes. Furthermore that their stop and frisk criteria is flawed if the majority of the people searched (of EITHER RACE) doesn't result in any thing.
#595 Apr 09 2015 at 7:48 AM Rating: Good
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Friar Bijou wrote:
It's a bad example because the numbers are a joke.
You didn't even get an op-ed pretending to be evidence. Smiley: frown
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#596 Apr 09 2015 at 9:40 AM Rating: Default
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Just to add on to the privatization of public services and the VRA, blacks also tend to be for gun control, jail reform, drug reform, against war and for affirmative action. However, since we are a two party system, each person will likely vote against their own interest. Although time is changing, my generation and back tend to agree with the GOP on morals and values, i.e, marriage, abortion, religion, etc. The decision that is often made is, which is overall more important? While the latter is important on a personal level, homosexual couples getting married in a secular society that supports abortions don't affect individuals as much as the liberal concerns.

So to reduce all of that to "social support" and "not understanding the GOP" is offensive, ignorant and wrong.
#597 Apr 09 2015 at 10:38 AM Rating: Good
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Almalieque wrote:
So to reduce all of that to "social support" and "not understanding the GOP" is offensive, ignorant and wrong.
I see you've met gbaji. As a conservative, let me tell you that his take on conservatives is offensive, ignorant and wrong as well.
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#598 Apr 09 2015 at 11:19 AM Rating: Excellent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
It's an example number to illustrate the concept of opportunity cost
It's a bad example because the numbers are a joke. Here, if you are very,very lucky you will get (assuming you have no income) subsidized housing (~$7200/yr value) and food stamps (~$2000/yr value). That falls quite short of the ~$17.5K/yr you would take home working full time at minimum wage ($8.5/hr here).

So your numbers don't add up. What you are saying is "people would rather get a small apartment and subsistence food than work at a burger joint and double their income". Maybe you would rather do that. You don't get to speak for anyone else.



EDIT: spelling

Edited, Apr 8th 2015 10:12pm by Bijou


Here is a chart.

The typical case is that you earn some degree of wages, as well as some subsidies. Someone making nothing will in fact receive more than minimum wage in benefits. This isn't a problem, assuming two things, that benefits are linear and decay at a rate lower than the rate at which income escalates. Unfortunately, this isn't how it works. There are multiple discontinuities, and because of that there are segments where generating more income doesn't result in a higher net. This is a problem that is solvable, by uniting all of the entitlements under one aegis which linearizes the net formula, and sets the decay.

This is part of what gbaji is talking about with the opportunity cost of working harder ( or the net gain from +1hr of wage) vs the opportunity cost of losing that time. In many cases, people are being paid far less than minimum wage equivalent for working that additional hour, for example someone working 30 hr/wk making 30k going to 40 hours is being paid roughly $2/hr for those additional hours. If that was the deal you were receiving, would you work those hours, or would you slack?
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#599 Apr 09 2015 at 11:21 AM Rating: Good
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Oh, in addition to more coherent linearization, there is also the option of having flat entitlements or non income linked entitlements, which would counter that effect as well.
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#600 Apr 09 2015 at 1:00 PM Rating: Good
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Smasharoo wrote:
How you do that is hard to say, but that's the only sure way.

Raising benefit levels so people can take the risk of working without worrying their family will suffer. Not a mystery, there are probably 1000 studies. In places with near full employment, high benefit levels are wildly more likely to lead to people being less risk adverse and going to work. Interestingly, there is almost literally no "why work when the dole pays so well" effect, which is surprising even to me. Data, though, it doesn't care what your make believe world was before it was generated.


Yeah, I found it unintuitive, too; I mean, if there was an easy way to quit working and drop out of society I would be gone. I would have expected more people to check out.

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If that was the deal you were receiving, would you work those hours, or would you slack?


Third way: do both (the American way).

Edited, Apr 9th 2015 3:03pm by Kavekkk
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#601 Apr 09 2015 at 1:13 PM Rating: Default
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TLW wrote:
If that was the deal you were receiving, would you work those hours, or would you slack?
I would use the aid to allow me to gain the training and education to get a better job that would pay more than "stacking".
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