Almalieque wrote:
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?
Funny that your answer failed to address in any way the question I asked. Want to try again?
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It doesn't reduce the "need" to choose better unless you choose not to do better.
That makes no sense. I said that it affects the choice. So it increases the odds that they will choose not to do better. Saying "but it has no effect unless they choose not to do better" is circular. If I mark the price of chocolate cake down 50%, it will affect the rate at which people will choose to buy chocolate cake. Arguing that this doesn't do anything because the people still have to choose to buy chocolate cake is ridiculous. Of course they have to choose it. The point is that by changing the relative costs of things you can influence people's choices.
Why do you keep trying to tap dance around this?
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$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?
it doesn't seem stupid to the person who's getting $20k/year in benefits for $10k/year worth of work. It seems to him like he's getting twice as much money as he would otherwise.
You're correct about "hitting rock bottom". But that assumes someone who's already been above that condition. The view looks totally different from the perspective of someone who was born at rock bottom, has lived their entire life at rock bottom, and who lives in a community full of people with the same experience. It's interesting to me because it seems like every time this subject comes up the common argument assumes that we're talking about someone who's already making a good living choosing to go on welfare instead. That's not the case I'm talking about though. I'm specifically talking about generational poverty. The children who grow up in homes funded primarily by welfare and in neighborhoods full of other children in a similar condition. Those children are less likely to learn the value of labor, less likely to be aware of the much better lives they could have, and much more likely to have been taught that welfare is an acceptable long term condition.
For those people, the choices don't look as obvious as they might to the rest of us.
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If they have no problem with it (the VRA), then why did they gut it and say it wasn't necessary anymore?
They didn't.
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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.
That wasn't the issue. I was addressing your statement that black people opposed "privatization of public schools". You have an amazingly consistent habit of responding to something other than what I actually said.
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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.
I think the mistake you keep making is equating ignorance with stupidity. If I teach someone that salad is bad for him, that person will believe that salad is bad for him. He's not wrong because he's stupid. He's wrong because I lied to him. Same deal here. Black people are lied to by the political Left. That doesn't make them stupid. It makes them victims of a lie.
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The feeling of not being welcomed is not based on rhetoric and social pressure and which is literally what I just said.
And yet. Uncle Tom. Heck. Your own mischaracterization of the voter ID and the VRA is rhetoric and social pressure. You can insist that this isn't what is being used to pressure blacks to vote Dem, but you yourself repeat the very same rhetoric. Are you even aware of this? What's funny is that I keep asking you to provide objective arguments for/against these thing, but you invariably fall back on emotional appeals and vague claims of "bad things" that the GOP's policies would result in.
I'll also repeat the point about how such things are often expressed not in terms of how the Dems policies are "good", but because they oppose GOP policies which are "bad", usually including only very vague explanations of why such things are "bad" in the first place. It's a strange way of doing things, don't you agree?
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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
Except you've failed to connect the dots by providing an objective argument that voter ID laws violate the VRA, or are even "bad". You just assume they are and move directly to declaring that the GOP is "gutting" the VRA. Actually, you go backwards. You start by saying the GOP opposes the VRA, then use voter ID as the proof of this. Again though, you haven't argued that voter ID violates the VRA. The Supreme court ruled that it doesn't, yet a whole leg of your "GOP hates blacks" is based on not just this assumption, but an assumed motivation behind it. It's not just that voter ID violates the VRA, but that the intention of voter ID is to violate the VRA, and the motivation for that is based on hatred of black people.
That's a lot of assumptive steps you're making there, with little or no evidence to support them. Which is why I keep going back to "you think the GOP isn't good for black people because you've been told that repeatedly". You start with that assumption and interpret every action of the GOP within that context. But along the way, you never stop to evaluate the assumption itself, much less whether those actions really represent support for it. Your cart is ahead of your horse.
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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.
I did not argue that this was the reason for poverty in black neighborhoods. Ever. I never even expressed it in terms remotely similar to that. Once again, you are zeroing in on skin color. I'm not. I've been talking about
poor neighborhoods. My argument has been all along that the crime stats we see are based on the poverty levels in the neighborhoods in question, not the skin color of those living there. The relation between the crime stats and race is the result of a statistically higher percentage of black people living in high poverty areas. But the crime stats aren't because they are black. It's because they are living in poor neighborhoods.
I've literally explained this at least 5 times now. You are the one who keeps trying to make this about people's skin color. I'm the one continually pointing out that once you account for the disproportional poverty/race stats, the apparently disproportional crime/race stats largely disappear.
White flight from middle class neighborhoods is irrelevant because we can assume that the resulting black neighborhood will also be middle class, right? If we're just talking about skin color with no economic component, that is. Why would the result become poor if the people moving in have similar incomes to those moving out? They wouldn't Now, if we're talking about poor people (of any color) moving into a previously middle class neighborhood (which happens sometimes as property values shift, and populations move around), those who have higher incomes will tend to move out of the now increasingly poor neighborhood. But, again, that isn't about the skin color of those moving in, it's about the economic conditions. If I live in a neighborhood that used to be full of single family homes on nice wide streets, and over time, apartment buildings start cropping up, and duplexes formed, and property values start to go down, I'm going to move from there to a higher cost neighborhood if I can afford it. More significantly, as property values decrease in the neighborhood, the people moving in will tend to be lower income people and those with higher incomes will tend to move into other neighborhoods that they can afford that have fewer apartment buildings and more single family homes.
Over time, just the natural movements of people will result in these economic shifts. No need for white flight to explain it. It's only if you choose to look just at the skin colors of those involved that you'll see a racial pattern. But that's because that's what you're looking at. What appears to be "white flight" is another artifact of the preexisting difference in economic disparity between black and white. And just as I've been saying all along, the solution isn't to blame the cops, or the city, or the white folks who moved out, but to try to figure out how to eliminate that economic disparity. And IMO, welfare doesn't just not do this, but arguably makes it worse over time.
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Gbaji wrote:
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.
Yes. There are several topics going on. And in this one, we're discussing whether or not welfare creates and/or perpetuates the relatively high rate of poverty among black people. You're the one who keeps responding to one topic by spinning off onto another. You've done it three times just in this set of responses. Stop and frisk is a different topic. We can talk about that as well, but when I ask a direct question about welfare and poverty, maybe you should respond to me by talking about welfare and poverty?
I'll ask again: Why do you suppose there are so many predominantly black high poverty and high crime neighborhoods? My argument is that the welfare system perpetuates that condition. What is yours?
Edited, Apr 10th 2015 7:16pm by gbaji