Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

Air Canada is in the process of adopting that policy but it's not federally mandated. Although, I suppose that's coming.

Huh? We don't decide whether to label someone a RINO based on their skin color though. I think you totally missed the point there. If I'm a member of a book club, and someone keeps showing up to our book readings with a video and some popcorn, it's perfectly acceptable for me to criticize him for not being on board with our book club ideals and asking him to leave. If instead, I just decide that black people don't read books and refuse to allow a black person in the club, that would be an entirely different thing, right?

When someone says that all black people should support welfare, and affirmative action, and vote Democratic, and then criticizes and ostracizes any black people who don't do those things, they are committing a pretty nasty form of racial bias. Guess what? That's not the GOP, and it's not conservatives. It's the Left that does this.



Interesting how you selectively choose to ignore proportional racial stats when it suites you. Are you actually trying to discuss the issue, or just trying to "win", no matter how much you have to lie to do it? I'm honestly curious what you think you are winning? A continuation of a policy that you have to lie to defend? Why? Maybe the fact that you have to be dishonest about the stats should be your first clue to maybe reconsider your position.



I'm telling you what I think the problems are. You're free to disagree if you want, but just dismissing what I said as "making them up" is kinda pointless. How about you instead address the points I've made about the effect of welfare programs on the populations who receive them? Maybe open your mind to the possibility that the racism out in the world isn't where you've been told it is.



WTF? I'm not going to go looking for a tape that I know nothing about. How about you provide some evidence to support your claim and then we'll discuss that. Until then, I'll just take your response as an admission that you are wrong.



Funny. This all applies to you. You're the one doing this, but you can't even see it.



Yeah. White liberal people. Math isn't that hard. Whites make up the majority of the US population. Therefore any police is going to be "primarily supported by white people". What an incredibly meaningless thing to say.

Welfare is overwhelmingly supported by the Left and opposed by the Right. So if the system is bad for black people, then it's the Left that is supporting a system that hurts black people. That's the point I'm making. Welfare most harms those who were most poor when it was created. That is black people. It also tends to institutionalize and generationalize that poverty, ensuring that the groups that were poor when it was created remain poor. That's black people. When I oppose welfare programs, it's not because I want to hurt black people, but because I believe the programs harm those they claim to help. This position by me happens to help black people disproportionately more than white, but not because I'm trying to help or hurt any group more than another, but because the programs already disproportionately harm black people.

My "side" isn't picking positions based on who they help or harm the most. The Left does that. We don't.



The first part is projection. The last part is not me doing anything at all. Black people by far vote as a single block. If you want to call that "not thinking for themselves" then that is your label, not mine. I'm just pointing out that blacks vote overwhelmingly for a single party (Democrats). Like 90% or higher. No other group does that. We can debate why this is, but it is, nonetheless.

If you want my opinion as to why that is, it might tie back to the whole labeling of blacks who don't support the cause that I mentioned earlier. I don't think it's that black people are incapable of thinking for themselves. I think it's that they are so heavily targeted with social pressures to vote one way and support specific causes, that they are more likely to comply. Additionally, as I also mentioned earlier, blacks are far more likely to be recipients to the very welfare programs that the Dems support, thus creating a financial incentive to support that party. I think that any group subjected to those pressures would likely do the same. The question should be "is this really good for blacks though?". I don't think it is. I think they are being used. And the methods by which they are being used largely go back to the introduction of the social welfare system and all of the organizations and pressures used to promote and support it.

When I say that they are "enslaved" by that system, this is what I'm talking about. Black people are less free precisely because they are subjected to much greater social and economic pressures to vote a certain way and support certain causes. It's much harder for them to make their own choices than it is for a white person. That is entirely the Left's doing. They are the ones making things harder for black people. Not us on the Right.

Edited, Mar 27th 2015 6:37pm by gbaji

Thanks for spoilering those quotes so I don't accidentally read a bit of gbaji's posts.

Again though, there's a difference between associating people politically based on their actions, professions, or income level versus associating them based on their skin color. I'm not sure how much more clearly I can state this. It's reasonable to expect that someone who is in a profession supported more by one party than another will tend to lean towards the more supportive party. It's unreasonable to expect such a tendency based on someone's skin color.



It's different because we don't say that this is about black people. We say that about all people. Being on welfare is bad for anyone. Voting for the party that actively seeks to increase the welfare state is bad for everyone. Not just black people. Everyone. That this affects black people most is because black people are currently the group most likely to be impacted by welfare. As I mentioned in my previous post, we don't oppose welfare because it'll help black people (or any group for that matter). It will, but our objectives aren't about picking groups of people we like and helping them. That's how the left does things. Our objective is to try to eliminate (or at least reduce) things our government does that we think are counterproductive and harmful. Like Welfare.

That this would happen to help blacks more than any other group is a coincidence of the current condition. But you need to stop assuming that we're doing this based on the groups involved (in either direction). That's how the Left does things. Not the Right. I keep trying to explain this, and you just keep ignoring what I say. You're so caught up in your own identity based political viewpoint that you just assume that's how I and other conservatives are viewing things. We aren't.



Again, your problem is obsessing over skin color. Welfare is a trap. It will trap anyone regardless of skin color. I'm not at all saying that black people are any less capable of rational thought than any other group. I'm saying that they were the ones in the most vulnerable position socially and economically when the welfare state was created, and thus they have been the most harmed by it. All people who become dependent on welfare tend to vote overwhelmingly Democrat. That's part of the "trap" of the program(s). They make those who receive the benefits dependent on them, and thus strongly pressured to vote for the party that supports more funding for the programs.

It's not that black people are any different in this regard. They just happen to have a far higher relative percentage of their population dependent on some form of welfare. Thus, they are stuck in the welfare trap more than other groups. My position has nothing to do with the skin colors of those involved. I would argue, however, that the decision to put our welfare system in place right when it was done was made at least partly with the intention of maximizing black dependence on welfare and thus simultaneously institutionalizing poverty and crime among the black population and forcing that same population to vote for the very people who did it to them.

The same negatives would apply to any group thus afflicted. But it was done to black people. You want to know why the crime stats are so skewed by race, that's your answer. And it wasn't us conservatives or Republicans who did it.



Um... Let's pretend for the sake of argument that I don't obsess over every post anyone's every made or every argument I've ever been in and if it didn't happen in this very thread, I'm not going to have a freaking clue what you're talking about.

As to the link, it doesn't say what you claimed it said. Reading what someone else writes, interpreting it, changing the words, and then declaring it to be an "admission" of the changed version is pretty darn silly. No one admitted to voter suppression, much less voter suppression based on race. Once again, the problem is that you can't help by see things based on the skin color of those involved. When we push for things like voter ID, it's not based on which groups it'll benefit or harm, but out of a desire to be "fair" to everyone. Everyone is under the same requirements. That this may impact one group more than another is, just as in the case above, an artifact of the current status. If I raise the price of a ham sandwich, it's going to affect people who eat ham sandwiches more than those who don't. That doesn't mean that I wanted to hurt that group of people though. And calculating the percentage of which races eat ham sandwiches more than others in order to create some kind of racial element to it is freaking insane.

We want voter ID because we believe it'll make the outcome of votes more accurate and fair. If this negatively effects the Democrats, it's because the status quo involves Democrats winning elections because of inaccurate or unfair voting practices. One person's voter suppression is another person's "preventing voter fraud". And I tend to lean in the latter direction on this one.




Huh? No. Welfare imposes an opportunity cost to upward mobility. It makes it harder for the person receiving it to become able to support themselves fully via employment. It we take two sets of people, both with the exact same average desire not to be poor, and put one of them on welfare and the other not, the group receiving welfare will tend to be less successful than the group that does not. Again, you are assuming some kind of racial trait is involved here, but I have never said that. The reason blacks are stuck in this condition more than any other group is because they were already the most poor (and thus going to be recipients of welfare at the highest rate) when welfare programs were created. That's it. The only possible relationship between their skin color and this current condition is if we assume (as I do) that the time at which welfare was implemented was intentional and designed by the racists in the Democratic party as an alternative means to keep black people poor because earlier methods like segregation were being made illegal.

You're free to assume it was just random bad luck (which I suppose is possible, but given the Dems long history with racially oppressing black people, it's hard to imagine), but even without some kind of evil motivation behind it, the outcome is still negative.

Oh hell. I even gave you this answer in my previous post. Why did you respond as though I didn't?



No. It's not the same thing. You're applying an absurd absolute condition. There's a huge difference between "influenced by outside factors" and "incapable of thinking for themselves". If I put green shirts on sale in my store, it'll increase the likelihood that someone will buy a green shirt instead of another color. Would you argue that everyone who purchased a green shirt is incapable of thinking for themselves? That's ridiculous.

As to the stats? Are you kidding? African Americans are a lot more likely to be on welfare or to have been on welfare than whites. Period. Here. I'll even link what has to be the most unlikely site and article to support my position. She's obviously not a friend of conservatives, but she's arguing more or less the same thing I am: That the problem is with black poverty. She and I may disagree on how that comes to be, and probably what to do about it, but the underlying cause is at least the same. Black people are much more likely to be poor than white people. And they are much more likely to be on welfare as a result. Oh. And they're also much more likely to be living in a high crime neighborhood as well.

My point (and where I'm going to guess the author would disagree) is that I believe that welfare acts to generationalize poverty. Meaning that those who receive it have a harder time getting out of poverty than if those programs didn't exist and thus their children will be more likely to be recipients of welfare as well. It'll make poverty more comfortable, which is the exact point. But it's that discomfort that acts as an incentive to pursue upward mobility. Combine that negative reinforcement with an environment where good paying jobs are harder to find and it results in the ghettoization of black communities, rampant poverty, and rampant crime. It's how we get neighborhoods like those in Ferguson.

Look. I can accept and even respect a difference of opinion about the effect of welfare on those receiving it. I can certainly accept a difference of opinion with regards to root causes, racial bias, and possible solutions. But you're unwilling to even acknowledge some very basic truths about the reality of the situation itself. Which makes it kinda hard to even discuss those other things. We kinda have to start with things we can agree on. But it seems like you're willing to pretend that any stat which might support my position just doesn't exist, even if said stat is commonly known to be true. I guess I just don't get that. I'd think that as a black man yourself, you'd want to actually try to find solutions to the problem of unequal racial outcomes in America, but you can't ever do that if you're unwilling to look at reality of the situation.

Edited, Mar 31st 2015 4:15pm by gbaji

Ok. First off, I'm not going to respond point for point because pretty much your entire set of responses makes the same mistake. You're not getting what I'm saying. Conservatives don't adopt their positions based on the race of the people involved. Liberals do. What you keep pointing out is conservative responses to liberals talking about race. It's not wrong for me to point out the irony of a program that the Left adopts out of the belief that it helps black people (and other minorities) when it's actually harming those people.

What you're missing is that the reason those Republican's oppose welfare isn't because it's good or bad for black people. We oppose it because it's bad for all people. The racial context is in response to Democrats claims that said program is good for <insert identity group here>. That's it. If every single person in the country was the same race, we conservatives would still oppose the welfare system. For us, it's not about race. We're forced to address race because it's all about race for the other side. But that's not our choice. It's theirs.





Um... Did you intend to prove my point? Or to show that you're really bad at math? If White people make up 77% of the population and blacks only 13%, but white people make up 37.6% of welfare recipients to blacks 23.6%, then we can say that the rate of welfare use among blacks is approximately 4x higher than the rate among white people. Even when he tosses in numbers about relative employment (whites having about half the relative unemployment rate compared to blacks), it does not counter that. If anything it reinforces my point about poverty afflicting black people more than whites. A higher unemployment rate means that it's harder for that group to get a job than the other. We could speculate some kind of rampant yet largely invisible racism in all hiring across the nation, or we can look at the very clear pattern of living locations. A white person is less likely to be born into a poor neighborhood than a black person. The neighborhoods that even poor white people live in are less likely to have a saturation level of poverty and joblessness as the neighborhoods that black people live in. When you grow up in a neighborhood where 90% of the people living there are unemployed and living on welfare, your odds of getting a job yourself drop dramatically. There simply aren't any jobs in the area. Period.

And that is a condition that can only occur when there is a welfare system in place. That neighborhoods like that are overwhelmingly black should be a huge clue in that there's something horribly wrong going on here. It's not that white people are refusing to hire black people, but that black people have for generations been pushed into increasingly poor neighborhoods with fewer and fewer jobs available. This massively skews the odds of success against them. And that is 100% the result of the policies of the Democratic party. How the heck do you not see this?

Here's some data that illustrates this. About 40% of white people live in a "poverty area". Contrasted to 80% of black people living in a poverty area. Note that in this source, a poverty area just means that 20% of those living in the area live below the poverty line. I suspect that if you increase that number (ie: Look at very very poor areas), you'll find an even smaller relative percentage of white people living in those areas relative to black people. More alarmingly, you'll find that as we restrict our data to areas with higher rates of poverty, we'll find that they become almost entirely black (with some latino neighborhoods). And that's a problem. I'd argue that is the problem. Because once your poverty rate gets that high, the odds of anyone getting out of the area drop. That's when poverty becomes institutionalized and passed from one generation to the next.

Again, this amount of poverty in an area can only exist in the presence of welfare programs. Period. Poor people would be more evenly distributed across the entire nation geographically if there were not welfare programs to concentrate them into ghettos. And if they were more evenly distributed (say in the 20% poverty areas rather than 80%+), then the ability of the poor to become non-poor is not significantly lower than the 80% of non-poor also living in the same area. In other words, the poor would have a much better chance of being able to improve their condition in life. So even if the total rate of poverty nationwide was unchanged, poverty would cease to be so heavily "stuck" to the descendents of those already poor.


And that's how you fix racially disproportionate poverty and all the problems that come with it. If you really want to fix it, of course. If you actually just want to keep the problem alive so that you can use it for political advantage, you'll continue to support the welfare system. Because a whole bunch of suffering black people is apparently a fair price to pay for Democrats to get elected.

There's no mistake. You are once again creating an argument to debate.

Spoiler

Gbaji wrote:

Ok. First off, I'm not going to respond point for point because pretty much your entire set of responses makes the same mistake. You're not getting what I'm saying. Conservatives don't adopt their positions based on the race of the people involved. Liberals do. What you keep pointing out is conservative responses to liberals talking about race. It's not wrong for me to point out the irony of a program that the Left adopts out of the belief that it helps black people (and other minorities) when it's actually harming those people.

What you're missing is that the reason those Republican's oppose welfare isn't because it's good or bad for black people. We oppose it because it's bad for all people. The racial context is in response to Democrats claims that said program is good for <insert identity group here>. That's it. If every single person in the country was the same race, we conservatives would still oppose the welfare system. For us, it's not about race. We're forced to address race because it's all about race for the other side. But that's not our choice. It's theirs.

Your argument was that Democrats commit the "Appeal to Popularity fallacy" enforced by fear of reprisal by being called an Uncle Tom or "race traitor". Furthermore, the GOP doesn't do those types of tactics. So do you agree that the GOP (and conservatives) apply the same "Appeal to Popularity fallacy" enforced by fear of reprisal tactics?

Spoiler

Gbaji wrote:

Um... Did you intend to prove my point? Or to show that you're really bad at math? If White people make up 77% of the population and blacks only 13%, but white people make up 37.6% of welfare recipients to blacks 23.6%, then we can say that the rate of welfare use among blacks is approximately 4x higher than the rate among white people.

The point is that more white people take advantage of welfare than black people. The rate is higher because there is a smaller population, but that completely contradicts your racial conspiracy theory.

I'll ask again, just in case you thought it was rhetorical. How is it that you are able to create these racial conspiracies, but everyone else is obsessed on race? Welfare only creates an opportunity cost to upward mobility if you don't desire to move upward. How do you not understand this? Democrats support welfare not because it's good or bad for black people. They support it because it's good for all people. You're creating this false narrative about race when Democrats and Republicans are essentially doing the same thing. In any case, you're also conflating Democrats support for welfare with blacks support of Democrats. Black people don't vote Democratic because of welfare.

Spoiler

Gbaji wrote:

Here's some data that illustrates this. About 40% of white people live in a "poverty area". Contrasted to 80% of black people living in a poverty area. Note that in this source, a poverty area just means that 20% of those living in the area live below the poverty line. I suspect that if you increase that number (ie: Look at very very poor areas), you'll find an even smaller relative percentage of white people living in those areas relative to black people. More alarmingly, you'll find that as we restrict our data to areas with higher rates of poverty, we'll find that they become almost entirely black (with some latino neighborhoods). And that's a problem. I'd argue that is the problem. Because once your poverty rate gets that high, the odds of anyone getting out of the area drop. That's when poverty becomes institutionalized and passed from one generation to the next.

Again, this amount of poverty in an area can only exist in the presence of welfare programs. Period. Poor people would be more evenly distributed across the entire nation geographically if there were not welfare programs to concentrate them into ghettos. And if they were more evenly distributed (say in the 20% poverty areas rather than 80%+), then the ability of the poor to become non-poor is not significantly lower than the 80% of non-poor also living in the same area. In other words, the poor would have a much better chance of being able to improve their condition in life. So even if the total rate of poverty nationwide was unchanged, poverty would cease to be so heavily "stuck" to the descendents of those already poor.

So you believe that removing welfare, then things like gentrification and white flight will disappear as well? I'm not denying the negative effects of someone choosing to be poor, but if you want to have an honest discussion about poverty, then you must talk about EVERYTHING that leads to poverty and not only the things that support GOP talking points.

New topic: Texas state Republicans have voted to divert funds from HIV prevention programs into abstinence-only education.

Because having the highest levels of funding for abstinence-only sex ed has worked so well thus far. And of course every good Republican knows that the way to solve a problem is to throw more money at it.

Wait, what?

Would've been more effective if they'd burned down the slums then rounded up all of the poors.

Abstinence only might not work for pregnancy, but clearly it'll solve HIV.

Eight people? Imagine if they'd just burned down the church instead. Would've been far better results.

Turns out Scott County, Indiana has also had an uptick in HIV/AIDS since 2011, when Planned Parenthood was successfully defunded. Planned Parenthood did not offer abortion services, at least in Scott County, but did offer HIV prevention counseling and testing. So good job there, fundies.

I'm starting to think they don't really care about outcomes!