🚀 go-pugleaf

"Bob LeChevalier" <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote in .

>  I do not think that the white male contribution
> substantially exceeds the white female contribution (And I'm not even
> counting the fact that there would be no white males to contribute if
> not for white females).

Riiight...
Some women give birth to murderers. So now we shall consider the
contribution of white women to the murder rate.

>And I don't think that the minority
> contribution of any particular minority is significantly less than
> that minority's percentage of the population.

Well, it is. Look into it and you'll find that out.

> You recall "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."
> have you heard the story of the Boer's trek which was hardly
> comparable to that of the settlers of this country that crossed the
> continent.

But what is the point? Hardships were encountered, and overcome. There was
no reason that when the white man arrived in Africa, he didn't find a
civilization equal to Europe or perhaps even surpassing it. In fact, there
is no reason that Africans could not have sailed north and discovered Europe
instead. No reason, except for the limitations of the Africans themselves.

> Then you agree that we cannot make absolute and unqualified
> statements as to what caused the problems and who is responsible for
> solving them.

I believe we can never convince each other, but it would be pointless even
if we could. Affixing blame will not solve the problems.

I believe strongly that people must solve problems for themselves.
Government cannot fix anything unless the desire and the will is present,
and when they are, government is unnecessary. There are people in this
country of all races who need to work hard to improve their lots in life.
But the fact that black people are overrepresented in just about all areas
of deficiency, government interference always favors them. So government
forces us all to pay, then doles out the cash in programs that cannot and
will not work. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the problem.

> 4th grade white kids in Mississippi have reading test scores 8 points
> below the national average.  8th graders, 10 points below average in
> science.  (I'm not being selective - those are the two subject/grade
> combinations for which NCES reports test scores broken down by both
> race and state).

Well, the obvious response is: where do black students score?

> >This "equal education" argument works for me, too. We agree that whites
have
> >an obligation to educate their young.
>
> We do?  Society as a whole has an obligation to educate its young.
> There needs to be no racial lines drawn, and it would be better that
> there be no racial lines drawn.

I don't think you believe that. If the best education system available
resulted in 98% of white kids but only 65% of black kids graduating I doubt
you would be pleased even if both figures were higher than what we have now.

> Not the same argument.  Except by the voucher supporters that think
> that the inner city kids ARE being deprived the opportunity in inner
> city public schools.

Yes, we seem to think that, don't we? Perhaps we should go in and tear up
the sidewalks, roads, and buildings since thay are what constitute the inner
city. Then all the poor people who live in such accursed places will have to
move somewhere else and the problem will go away.

Come on, Bob. "Inner city" is a euphemism for "black". Quality teachers
won't work there because they don't want to get raped or killed, and they
don't want to spend their careers accomplishing nothing.

> >Yet the industrialized North managed without slavery. >>How strange.

> It was industrialized.  It had resources the South did not have.
>
> >> That is why they first
> >> imported slaves.  If the had had to pay workers, the wages would have
> >> been high because of the shortage.  If they had had to pay their
> >> slaves, and if they could not sell them, they would have gone
> >> bankrupt.  Indeed that was WHY the South was unwilling to abandon
> >> slavery, and part of the reason it did not recovery quickly from the
> >> Civil War.

That is not why slaves were imported. They were imported because slavery was
a common occurrence at the time. And if the absence of slavery contributed
to the slow recovery of the South, (a point I cannot agree with, by the way)
it couldn't have been as big a contribution as a scorched-earth wartime
policy on its soil, the loss of tens of thousands of its men, carpetbaggers,
and corrupt Negro legislatures.

>  Northerners profited from the import of slaves to the
> South.  Slavery never was significantly established in the North
> because the industry and crops did not require the manpower that that
> of the South required.

That's a lame argument. Northern factories needed every bit as much manpower
as Southern plantations. And some of those Northern factories were so much
more inhospitable to human life than was working on a farm. The North could
have utilized slaves quite advantageously.

Besides, when slavery was no longer available machinery was built to do the
work. maybe the machines would have been built sooner if slaves had never
been here.

> >So financial centers of New York and Boston, the mills and factories of
New
> >Enlgand and the Midwest - these existed only because of slavery. Is that
it?
>
> Not "only".  But it was a factor. One needs only to look at the
> relative populations and wealth of Virginia and Massachusetts before
> the Revolution, as well as the power of Virginia in the early
> republic, to realize that slaveholding Virginia was the economic
> engine that made this country possible (Massachusetts especially
> needed the South during the time that when the port of Boston was
> blockaded.)  The Civil War continued until Virginia was totally
> subdued and not significantly longer shows that this power did not
> dwindle rapidly, while on the other hand, without the slave-picked
> cotton that was so highly valued in Europe, the Confederacy would not
> have survived more than a year or so.

During the slave era we were a largely irrelevant outpost an ocean away.
Since slavery we have become the world's only superpower. Now how could we
do that without a cornerstone of our wealth?

Sorry, I don't buy it. Slavery was a blight on our country. We would be a
far better country today if we never had it .

> My "praise for minorities" comes
> only in contrast to your apparent denial that anyone but "white males"
> built America.

But I don't deny that anyone but white males built America.

Heh heh. I know what you mean.

> >Here's a revolutionary idea. None of us have the "right" to the wealth of
> >the country. We only have the right to earn it.
>
> OK.
>
> >It's the redistribution of that wealth that creates anger.
>
> The redistribution takes place because a large sector of the
> population did NOT "earn" the wealth of the country, but instead
> inherited it from others who "gained" that wealth in part by "using"
> the ancestors of another sector of the population, in so doing setting
> up unequal conditions that make it harder for the latter sector to
> "earn" wealth than those who were born with wealth.

If you could show me a financial empire that is a direct descendant of
antebellum plantation owners, I might concede that point. But the War
Between the States destroyed the South. Between the War and Reconstruction,
any financial benefits from slavery were pretty much wiped out.

Those who earned it deserve it. And if we ever return to a fair country,
they'll get to keep it.

> >The fact is that
> >blacks as a group take so much more out than they put in. As a group,
> >whatever they contribute is far offset by what they cost.
>
> If they were not so readily identified by skin color, this might not
> be the case.  I am sure that I could select some 14% of the population
> which is entirely white, which would be even less productive than
> blacks if treated as a "group".  But since you can't see that 14%, you
> don't case epithets at them.

Now that's funny. Where I work, every qualified black is hired. Then they
are treated with kid gloves because management is afraid to reprimand them.
(In fairness, they are decent enough fellows who wouldn't cause trouble
anyway, in my opinion. But management is too afraid to take the chance). I
work for a company with only 20 employees, and if they are that concerned, I
have no doubt bigger companies throughout the country are even more
concerned.

> >But it hasn't worked. Every black inequity is at least as bad is it was
in
> >the 50's, and some are far worse.
>
> Not hardly.

Really? Other than the fact that overt racism is virtually nonexistent, what
would you say are areas that are better?

> >Here is your quandary, which I have yet to see anyone from your side
> >address:
> >
> >1) Whites throughout the world must create or at least          finance a
> >modern society for blacks. It is unacceptable     to expect them to
create
> >it themselves, even if the             know-how is provided for them.
> >2) Blacks, as a group, are equal to whites in every way.
>
> I don't think either of those two statements is true, though the
> second would depend on what you man by the word "equal" and  the
> phrase "every way".

All right then. I'll make no more assumptions as to what you believe.

So what is the white responsibility in Africa, if any?
What responsibility do we Americans have to the millions of blacks living
perpetually in the ghetto? And what is their responsibility?

 "Equal in every way" means that blacks as a group have the brains, drive,
and discipline to create a modern 21st century society. Do you believe they
do?

Mark