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.
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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