Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Tim May wrote...
First, please stop including the full text of the message you are replying to. Learn to use an editor, whether you ultimately top-post or bottom-post to edited fragments.
I actually do this for a reason. If I'm not doing a line-by-line response (or sometimes even if I am), I want the original post from which I am excerpting to be visible, so that it can be referred to and determined I am not taking this particular quote out of context.
So if a kid in high school can't see the "benefit" of studying math, he shouldn't be. It's as simple as that.
Well, part of me doesn't entirely disagree. At least, high school teachers should be teaching and not babysitting. I actually consider it hard enough to develop true competence in math or science (enough to teach on the HS level), and then even harder developing the skills necessary to communicate the ideas effectively. A math or physics teacher can't be an effective babysitter, pal, AND guidance counselor. Or at least, not in the kinds of quantities liberals imagine the schools should be filled with. On the other hand, given the current state of world education in math and science, by 9th grade it's not necessarily too late for a kid to turn into a good mathematician (actually, I myself am an example: in 9th grade I was in a lame but famous private school pulling down low Bs and high Cs in math because I was bored. By 12th grade I was in what was and is regarded as THE top-notch school for math and science in the country, pulling down 100 in calculus...but don't get me wrong, I still know the difference between me and true genius in mathematics). However, the fact is that the school system sucks. It's a joke. Repeat offenders get bounced from school to school, wrecking classes and the environment everywhere they go. Teachers in most states have 25 classroom hours a week, a number matched nowhere in the world (as far as I've ever heard), and THAT'S in addition to homeroom and other duties. The cirriculum is a silly joke, watered down and watered down so that only someone who never shows up couldn't graduate. (And in black schools you'd be suprised how many times I've heard 'these kids can't learn...don't try'.) So your whole "burnoff of the eaters" theme misses one critical element: direct contact with kids. If you yourself had seen and met kids you KNEW might actually have quite a talent for math, YES EVEN YOU might be tempted to give a crap, and see if just one or two might somehow be inspiried merely to do some homework. This is particularly true when you realize that you actually LIKE some of these kids, which are as fully human as you are, by the way. Or, it might just make you even angrier...give your rage some real, practical real-world "fuel" rather than being the theoretical cloistered construct it at least appears to be. At least, 'talent' doesn't seem to be the problem. Inner-city black kids have proven that they can do extremely well in whatever they view as important (I'd argue that some of this is due to genetic superiority)...a well-run school system could easily produce the kind of math and engineering talent needed without brain-draining from other countries (and which is probably not a relaible long-term option).
The parallel I like is one we developed (in Ted Kaehler's nanotechnology study group in the early 90s) for looking at what a society and economy might look like where the costs of material production are as close to zero as one might imagine. That is, a society with full-blown general assemblers, i.e., von Neumann replicators at the molecular, mechano-synthesis, Drexler-type scale. How would goods be produced and sold? How would markets exist/
I don't remember reading any von Neumann where he discusses the idea of "general assemblers"....I'm still not convinced the general physics of that idea works out, and I believe Freeman Dyson has had some similar doubts. But despite that there's a point here...
* Namely, Hollywood. Film stock is essentially free...bits even more so. Cameras remain expensive, but are vastly less so than they were a decade ago. Basically, everything material in Hollywood is nearly free. What is expensive is the creative talent, the know-how, the ensembles of actors and directors and writers and all.
Hell, you don't have to go that far. Food is already cheap enough that we might regard it as being nearly free. I mean, for a couple of bucks you can buy enough beef to stuff a welfare family of five, and to feed a rural Chinese family for a friggin' week. (Well, at least in the US...) People from mainland China would still regard most welfare families as "rich" by Chinese standards.
* The society we are heading towards is one of an increasingly sharp division between the "skilled and in demand" end of the spectrum and the bulk of droids who have few skills in demand.
I've also witnessed this trend, but I currently believe it only holds in certain segments. There are various "craft" industries (as I call them) where this equation seems to be held in suspension. Like it or not, hip hop is one of those, though I suppose you could argue that the number of hip-hop 'artists' that make it is tiny compared to the audience. But the point is that in a craft industry, we're really referring to specific and local tastes, as opposed to Darwinian selection (ie, the 'most fit'). In a craft there may be room for many to contribute. (Other examples of craft industries are US high-end audio, the wine industry, high-end marijuana, organic foods and cheeses, and the current German-centered board game renassaiance.) What's desired in such an envornment is not necessarily the best/fastest/brightest, but something with a particularly 'quality' that corresponds to local vagaries of culture and taste. (At least, there's no other way to explain the success of "Snoop Doggy Dog"...)
(I argued this, circa 1991-2, to a bunch of people who basically bought the line that technology would bring wealth to the masses, blah blah. I argued that yes, the masses would have great material goods, just as the masses today have color tvs in their cribs. But the big money would elude them. Libertarian rhetoric about everybody being wealthy is only meaningful in the sense that even the poorest today are wealthy by Roman or Middle Ages or even Renaissance standards. But the split between those with talents in demand--the Peter Jacksons, the Stephen Kings, the Tim Berners-Lees, etc. and the "reading be for whitey" and "I don't see any benefit to studying math" vast bulk will widen.)
Much more could be said on this. I recall I wrote some long articles along these lines in the early years of the list.
This is certainly possible. On the other hand, depending on how technology unfolds we might all of a sudden find ourselves caught short and looking for talent. And certainly, the have-nots will actually have more and more as time goes on, though perhaps not much land or space.
In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to convince him to study his math.
It's like convincing a kid to start writing so he'll stand a chance of being the next Stephen King: if he needs convincing, he won't be.
The burnoff of useless eaters will be glorious.
Well, if they have access to general assemblers they'll be with us forever. And such a burnoff won't be glorious, it'll be a fuckin' shame. -TD _________________________________________________________________ Make your home warm and cozy this winter with tips from MSN House & Home. http://special.msn.com/home/warmhome.armx
On Jan 1, 2004, at 12:50 PM, Tyler Durden wrote:
Tim May wrote...
First, please stop including the full text of the message you are replying to. Learn to use an editor, whether you ultimately top-post or bottom-post to edited fragments.
I actually do this for a reason. If I'm not doing a line-by-line response (or sometimes even if I am), I want the original post from which I am excerpting to be visible, so that it can be referred to and determined I am not taking this particular quote out of context.
The world has had well over ten years to adjust to using editors to supply sufficient context.
However, the fact is that the school system sucks. It's a joke. Repeat offenders get bounced from school to school, wrecking classes and the environment everywhere they go.
As "demanded" by the negroes and their Jew "speaker-to-negroes" handlers. (A high school teacher of mine pointed out that when someone "demands" something, reach for your gun. She left teaching not long after.)
Teachers in most states have 25 classroom hours a week, a number matched nowhere in the world (as far as I've ever heard), and THAT'S in addition to homeroom and other duties. The cirriculum is a silly joke, watered down and watered down so that only someone who never shows up couldn't graduate. (And in black schools you'd be suprised how many times I've heard 'these kids can't learn...don't try'.)
Because the Jews and negroes have demanded that all students be taught stuff they obviously will never use. Most innerr city mutants should be taught practical skills, not abstract stuff their previous education has been bereft of.
So your whole "burnoff of the eaters" theme misses one critical element: direct contact with kids. If you yourself had seen and met kids you KNEW might actually have quite a talent for math, YES EVEN YOU might be tempted to give a crap, and see if just one or two might somehow be inspiried merely to do some homework. This is particularly true when you realize that you actually LIKE some of these kids, which are as fully human as you are, by the way.
I don't give a shit whether they're "fully human" or not. I only care that they stop stealing from me, that liberal Jews stop saying that my taxes have to be increased to support these "fully human" bags of shit.
The parallel I like is one we developed (in Ted Kaehler's nanotechnology study group in the early 90s) for looking at what a society and economy might look like where the costs of material production are as close to zero as one might imagine. That is, a society with full-blown general assemblers, i.e., von Neumann replicators at the molecular, mechano-synthesis, Drexler-type scale. How would goods be produced and sold? How would markets exist/
I don't remember reading any von Neumann where he discusses the idea of "general assemblers"....I'm still not convinced the general physics of that idea works out, and I believe Freeman Dyson has had some similar doubts. But despite that there's a point here...
Then your education in physics about von Neumann is sorely lacking. Von Neumann spend part of several years investigating self-replicating machines, using some ideas of Ulam and others. Well-covered in the cellular automata literature. In science fiction, one will find the general assembler literally referred to as the von Neumann probe. Cf. 35-year old fiction by Saberhagen on "Berserkers," or slightly more recent fiction by Roger Macbride Allen and others, for example. Von Neumann machines are more than just non-functional bottleneck machines. As for nanotech, I wasn't endorsing it, just noting the context. My skepticism is noted in Crandall's book on nanotech.
* The society we are heading towards is one of an increasingly sharp division between the "skilled and in demand" end of the spectrum and the bulk of droids who have few skills in demand.
I've also witnessed this trend, but I currently believe it only holds in certain segments. There are various "craft" industries (as I call them) where this equation seems to be held in suspension. Like it or not, hip hop is one of those, though I suppose you could argue that the number of hip-hop 'artists' that make it is tiny compared to the audience. But the point is that in a craft industry, we're really referring to specific and local tastes, as opposed to Darwinian selection (ie, the 'most fit'). In a craft there may be room for many to contribute. (Other examples of craft industries are US high-end audio, the wine industry, high-end marijuana, organic foods and cheeses, and the current German-centered board game renassaiance.) What's desired in such an envornment is not necessarily the best/fastest/brightest, but something with a particularly 'quality' that corresponds to local vagaries of culture and taste. (At least, there's no other way to explain the success of "Snoop Doggy Dog"...)
Snoop is razzlekamazzled by the negroes, who have the money they stole from gullible whites, which is reason enough for niggers, whiggers, and chiggers to all be jivin' like daze shit.
The burnoff of useless eaters will be glorious.
Well, if they have access to general assemblers they'll be with us forever. And such a burnoff won't be glorious, it'll be a fuckin' shame.
No, on both counts. The niggers and whiggers _WON"T_ be with us forever, due to GAs, and that _WON"T_ be shame. Those who steal need killing. Killing the guilty is about to get a lot more efficient. Billions in the world need killing, and tens of millions in the U.S. are part of this. I use to say, "regrettably, most negroes fall into this category." Now, I just laugh at their animalistic stupidity. They are like children....stupid children. --Tim May "Aren't cats Libertarian? They just want to be left alone. I think our dog is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout" --Unknown Usenet Poster
Tim May wrote...
In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to convince him to study his math.
Why the BedSty student Tim? This is where your arguments - which on shallow inspection may attempt to lay claim to honest thought - fall down. Why only the inner city black schools? I grew up in New York. I am intimately familiar with BedSty, Red Hook, etc. But I am also familiar with at least two schools in white ghettos (PS87/HS44), and I'm here to tell you from very personal experience, that there is no significant difference. You have some incredible moments of lucidity and insight, and occasionally, we are the lucky recipients of these fleeting events - but then, just as sure as the sun coming over the horizon every morning of every day, you slip back into the pseudo-intellectual racist crap. What's wit dat? Even the Great Tim May cannot be taken seriously with the kind of non-thought that has been coming out of your hermithole the last few years. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org "Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." The Promise of World Peace http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm
"J.A. Terranson" <measl@mfn.org> wrote:
Why the BedSty student Tim?
Uhh, read more carefully. He was responding to a specific point from Tyler Durden.
You have some incredible moments of lucidity and insight, and occasionally, we are the lucky recipients of these fleeting events - but then, just as sure as the sun coming over the horizon every morning of every day, you slip back into the pseudo-intellectual racist crap. What's wit dat?
I don't think Tim is racist as such. He hates everyone equally. :-) But seriously, calling it racism seems wrong-headed. Racism is "I hate black people because they're black." Tim hates (some, most, all?) black people because he percieves them as benefitting unfairly from his hard work. I'm pretty sure, all other things being equal, he wouldn't hate a black person who, through his own hard work and without taking a penny from the government, turned himself into a successful, tax-paying "source." Or, at least, I'm not convinced he would hate such a person, which is to say I'm not convinced he's a racist. It seems that more and more people see "racism" where it doesn't (necessarily) exist. Perhaps this is simply because it's a convenient catch-all counter-argument---"you're arguing that way because you're a racist, hence you're immoral, hence I win," an ad hominem "trump card" that more often than not passes for a real argument, probably because people are afraid to voice opinions to the contrary for fear of being labeled racists themselves. Another more insidious possibility is that as a result of such tactics, people actually _do_ see racism where it isn't. The latter worries me. A lot. In any case, before you tear into me for being Tim's shill, consider whether the following examples count as X-ism: 1) I hate X people because they are X. 2) I hate X people because most people who are X are also Y. 3) I hate people who are Y. Most people who are Y are also X. I'd say that the first one is the very definition of X-ism. The second one seems to me to be a special case of Y-ism (assuming that, as seems to be the case given the phrasing, Y's are hated for being Y), but is not X-ism. The third one, the one I believe describes this situation, is not X-ism. You might care to call into question the generalization "most people who are Y are also X," but even that isn't X-ism unless the generalization is motivated by a thought process similar to #1. -- Riad Wahby rsw@jfet.org MIT VI-2 M.Eng
On Jan 1, 2004, at 10:06 PM, Riad S. Wahby wrote:
"J.A. Terranson" <measl@mfn.org> wrote:
Why the BedSty student Tim?
Uhh, read more carefully. He was responding to a specific point from Tyler Durden.
You have some incredible moments of lucidity and insight, and occasionally, we are the lucky recipients of these fleeting events - but then, just as sure as the sun coming over the horizon every morning of every day, you slip back into the pseudo-intellectual racist crap. What's wit dat?
I don't think Tim is racist as such. He hates everyone equally. :-) But seriously, calling it racism seems wrong-headed. Racism is "I hate black people because they're black." Tim hates (some, most, all?) black people because he percieves them as benefitting unfairly from his hard work. I'm pretty sure, all other things being equal, he wouldn't hate a black person who, through his own hard work and without taking a penny from the government, turned himself into a successful, tax-paying "source." Or, at least, I'm not convinced he would hate such a person, which is to say I'm not convinced he's a racist.
I admire many negroes. Shelby Steele, who wrote "The Content of our Character," for example. And Thomas Sowell, an even more prolific author (and Stanford professor). And Niger Innes (son of the lefty Roy Innes...a lot of children of 60s liberal negroes are now libertarian or conservative, e.g., Adam Clayton Powell's son). And Clarence Thomas (who has argued forcefully that the Supremes ought to do a very thorough review of gun laws, with the hint that the right decision would be to restore the Second Amendment to first class status). And a bunch of others, including Ward Connerly, of California, who has been leading the effort to have "race" removed as the basis for _any_ government actions, including hiring quotas, special admissions requirements for negroes and Asians (at opposite ends of the test score spectrum), and so on. I don't admire the politics of Condie Rice and Colin Powell, but there is little doubt that they are accomplished, bright people. My problem is that negroes are 80% in solidarity on a bunch of disgusting, anti-liberty things: affirmative action, racial quotas, minority setasides (but not for successful minorities--they want limits on the number of Asians admitted to UC schools), welfare, increased benefits, etc. Further, they, as a whole, have a "plantation mentality": always demanding that Massa in the Big White House give them more stuff. Instead of excelling and grabbing the stuff for themselves, as Chinese and Korean and Indian people have done in America, they think setasides and quotas and special favoritism is "owed" to them. I used to not care much about what they did or thought. When I entered college in 1970 I expected to mix with a bunch of different sorts of people. What I found was that the negroes all sat at the same tables in the dining halls, that whites who sat near them were chased off, and that we non-blacks, including Asians, Indians, South Americans, whites, etc., could mix with each other, but not with the "Panthers." And they ghettoized themselves into "Black Studies," which they had "demanded" a couple of years earlier and had just gotten in 1969. In 1972 they formed various militant groups on campus. One obnoxious woman named Judy became the student association president. When she didn't like a decision, she ordered the Panthers, her enforcers, to bar the doors and not let anyone out until the decision was reversed. It was. I am not exaggerating. I included this, and the theft of ASU funds, and the henchmen, and similar leftist actions by others (including the MeCHA "Aztlanos"), in a letter to the Regents of the University of California. It was published in the school newspaper, in a full-paged spread, and I got replies from the governor of the state, Ronald Reagan. I met with the Chancellor and he agreed that the situation at the campus was deplorable, but that in the interests of keeping the peace with the negroes and Mexicans, given the time (1973), there was little they could do. He promised that his office was looking into the allegations and already knew about most of them. When I joined Intel in 1974, I saw plenty of Chinese, Indians, a handful of Koreans and Vietnamese (more later), but only one negro engineer. And he had a major chip on his shoulder. When he was let go in one of the RIFs, he claimed discrimination on the basis of his melanin levels. Meanwhile, the excuses mounted all around about how "science is sexist and gynophobic," about how the ancient Egyptians were actually black Africans and had their advanced civilization (electricity, flying cars, etc.) stolen by the "ice people" and similar such malarkey. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a racist hustler, tried to shake down Silicon Valley corporations for payoffs to his Rainbow scam. (Meanwhile, negroes avoided science, math, engineering, technology and preferred to focus their efforts on lawsuits to get standards lowered, via "race norming." The bullshit went on and on.) I look at the 75% bastard rate (compared to about 25% for whites and about 5% for Asians in America), the black on white crime, the black on black crime, the crack hoes, the disrespect for learning....all this and I can draw only one conclusion" that though there are many fine, competent, bright negroes, on the whole it is a gutter race. Harsh phrase, but true. A race that, in America in the last 40 years, has become a race of beggars, whiners, wheedlers, chiselers, whores, crack addicts, dropouts, and unwed mothers. Charles Murray laid out a lot of the reasons in his book "Losing Ground." ("Dat be a racist book!," said his detractors.) The seminal event was the arrival on the scene of the collectivist JFK. Kennedy ordered his bunch of eastern elitists to look into the "relief" system which had provided very limited and very temporary economic assistance to folks in bad situations. For those few here old enough (I am, just barely), this used to be called "general relief," and it was mostly administered at the county level, in the states that offered it. What Kennedy's brain trust found was that "relief" was seen as an embarrassment, as a negative thing, something to avoid getting on if at all possible and to get off of just as fast as one could. Which is as it should be, of course. So Kennedy's liberals scratched their heads and came up with a new plan. "Relief" would be converted to a series of state and national programs, no longer handled locally. And the bad connotations of "relief" would be changed by the new and positive name "entitlement." Money handed out to various folks would be their "entitlement," something they were _owed_. Other related names would be "social services" and, of course, liberal mention of "children" and "nutrition." Ergo programs like WIC ("Women, Infants, and Children"). Ergo, "Head Start." Oh, and meddling in foreign countries with things like the Peace Corps (which, the feministas are slowly coming to realize, did much to break "primitives" of things like breast-feeding, while giving the baby formula industry a new world market). Kennedy got zapped for his many crimes, but the Good Ole Boy who took over turned out to be just as big a collectivist as Kennedy had been, and LBJ continued the Kennedy welfare/entitlements/handouts and called it "The Great Society." (I don't recall if Kennedy had formally named his progressive plan.) And that year was the year that negroes got to vote in all 50 states, which of course was a good thing. The part of the Civil Rights Act that dealt with voting rights was good. The Constitution applies to all people. However, most of the Civil Rights Act was terrible, for obvious reasons. Between it and new interpretations of the 14th Amendment (lawyers can quote the language), and some terrible Warren Court decisions (*), the effect was to interfere in the ability of people to choose who to do business with, who to rent to, who to associate with, all of the things which liberty means. (* The Supreme Court took a case where a negro had been denied service at a diner in the south and used a weird series of logical steps to argue that if negroes couldn't buy food at this diner then napkin and ketchup and hot dog sales might be affected, and since some of that stuff came from other states, that would be interfering in interstate trade and only Congress can regulate that, blah blah, and so racial discrimination was outlawed under the fucking Commerce Clause of the Constitution! Of course, by the same logic, if Apple decides to change suppliers of disk drives, and this means Illinois gets the business instead of Idaho, this has also changed interstate trade. But logic was not the point of what the Court was doing...they were looking for any excuse to stop "discrimination.") OK, what of discrimination itself? Good or bad? Most of us probably agree that telling a black person he cannot shop in some bookstore, told by the bookstore owner that is, is not cool, to use a technical phrase. We might call it tacky, or unethical, or just plain dumb. (And if the government tried to say blacks could not enter a bookstore, this would be both interfering with the property rights of the bookstore owner AND violating the colorblind standards of the Constitution.) But libertarians argue--and this was the natural system for 170 years--that what a property owner does with his property is, assuming he is not violating real rights (*) of others, up to him to decide, whether his decisions are uncool, stupid, unwise, etc. (* I mean real rights, as in property, personal safety, economic ownership, etc., not some "right to enter the stores I wish to enter." No more so than anyone has a "right" to be invited into someone's house, or into a club, etc.) So, during just a couple of years of the Great Society, this confluence of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new interpretations of the 14th Amendment, and Supreme Court decisions, the ability of people and corporations to choose whom they wished to deal with, or hire, or fire, ended. "Racial discrimination" became the new word to demonize anyone or any group. When civil libertarians like Barry Goldwater said this restriction on liberty was a bad direction to move in, he was dubbed a "racist." I could write much more on this whole sorry episode. It's a sorry episode not because I have any desire to exclude negroes or women or cripples or queers or any other of the "protected groups" (added over the years), but because it erases the concept of liberty. If I can't rent to whom I choose, I have no control over my own belongings. If I can be told I must hire a certain percentage of negroes (later dubbed "tokens'), this not only interferes with freedom of association (which applies to groups and corporations, obviously) but it also has a corrosive effect on those hired and how those around them think about them. ("Token blacks" in departments of companies are often thought of as having been hired to get the EEOC stooges off the company's back.) I have the fundamental right, via ownership of my property and my freedom of association, to hire or fire based on merit, based on whim, based on astrology, whatever. It may not be wise, but it's my choice. I have the fundamental right to have only Muslims in my company, or only Jews working in my bookstore, or to have only buxom women working at my strip club. (Recall the "discrimination" suits filed over such policies, including males claiming they were discriminated against, women in wheelchairs or with mastectomies claiming they have a "right" to be hired by a strip club that doesn't want them, and so on.) The can of worms that was opened when liberty was cancelled is still with us, getting worse and worse. Feminista attorney sued a California gym for excluding women, and the courts ordered gyms to admit women....ah, but the same order did not ban women only gyms, and these are now common in California. A church which refused to hire a Satanist was ordered to do so. (This was later rescinded...apparently even the courts can't deal with the Alice in Wonderland-like situation where discrimination is banned.) This is what Shelby Steele, the black I referred to earlier, is saying in "The Content of our Character," that blacks should be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. (He is quoting Martin Luther King, of course.) This does NOT mean that this maxim gets enforced by the government, and that discriminating on the basis of color should be illegal. He, and King (some think), is arguing that this is the "right" thing to do, but is not something government should be enforcing. Note of course that most businessmen will not turn away customers. Things in the deep south were skewed by the War of Northern Aggression, and it took time for sentiments to change. But in many cases the apartheid in the south was managed and enforced by local _governments_, with the public restrooms being "White" and "Colored." (As in South Africa, where companies like IBM wanted to hire blacks but were ordered not to by the RSA government.) Anyway, I resent deeply being told I may not associate as I wish, may not rent or sell my property as I wish, must meet certain hiring quotas or face EEOC fines, must promote based on race not character or skills, and so on. I resent deeply the whole can of worms that involves "discrimination against gays" and "handicapped-friendly" policies, and the whole enforced "niceness" bullshit (which is not actually making people nicer...just the opposite, as when I had to deal with a token we had in our department and was ordered to not do anything that might cause him to file a discrimination lawsuit against us).
I see the success the Chinese and Indians and other Asians have had in America...none of it do to quotas, to forced hiring, to the nonsense the negroes keep pulling. (I haven't talked much about Mexicans, by the way. Many Mexicans are perfectly fine...hard-working, friendly, etc. Often they are not very academically-oriented, so few are in engineering positions. And many are as bad as many of the negroes. Worse, the issue of "illegal aliens." As Tom McClintock pointed out so cogently in his debate with Schwarzenegger, et. al., the real issue is that these illegal aliens (perhaps as many as 10 million now) are CUTTING IN LINE, cutting in line ahead of those waiting patiently and legally to enter the U.S. from Russia, Romania, India, Thailand, etc. And we gave the Mexican and Latin American illegals an "amnesty" in the mid-90s: Simpson-Mozzoli, a promised one time only deal. Ah, but the cynics, including me, were right: more aliens swarmed in, looking for another amnesty. As a pure libertarian I would have no problem with truly open borders, provided there were absolutely no taxpayer-funded programs or services, and provided the piles of rotting corpses were not used as an excuse to give "services." But open immigration is not going to happen. Meanwhile, giving these illegal aliens permanent residency status would be a fucking disaster. As with the Simpson-Mazzoli illegals, once amnestied they have a strong tendency to sign up for all of the "entitlements" JFK and LBH and RMN established. Which is why my local town has a hospital that is facing insolvency, as the swarms of Mexicans use the services mandated by law and collection is nearly impossible. And the State of California is facing insolvency, as you all know. Enough about Mexicans.) So, to wrap this up, I see plenty of brown-skinned people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. doing very well without chanting about "racist discrimination" and demanding that some version of "Ebonics" be used to teach their children (just the opposite, they really WANT their children to be fluent and precise in standard English). And I see Chinese, Korean, and other Asian immigrants doing well, not bellyaching that the reason they're failing is because The Man is holding them down, that Massah has passing out enough freebies. And the black libertarians and conservatives I cited earlier share this view. They don't put it quite as bluntly as I do, that the negro in America is becoming a gutter race, but they obviously think the trends of the past 40 years are disturbing and not good for the bulk of their fellow negroes. --Tim May "According to the FBI, there's a new wrinkle in prostitution: suburban teenage girls are now selling their white asses at the mall to make money to spend at the mall. ... Now, you see, the joke here, of course, is on White America, which always felt superior to blacks, and showed that with their feet, moving out of urban areas. "White flight," they called it. Whites feared blacks. They feared if they raised their kids around blacks, the blacks would turn their daughters and prostitutes. And now, through the miracle of MTV, damned if it didn't work out that way! " --Bill Maher, "Real Time with Bill Maher," HBO, 15 August 2003
On Jan 2, 2004, at 12:03 AM, Tim May wrote:
So Kennedy's liberals scratched their heads and came up with a new plan. "Relief" would be converted to a series of state and national programs, no longer handled locally. And the bad connotations of "relief" would be changed by the new and positive name "entitlement."
Money handed out to various folks would be their "entitlement," something they were _owed_. Other related names would be "social services" and, of course, liberal mention of "children" and "nutrition." Ergo programs like WIC ("Women, Infants, and Children"). Ergo, "Head Start."
And I should have elaborated on the family system effects of the new welfare system: since the "entitlements" were not given to families with husbands in the household, this made marriage a bad idea for those wanting to get welfare. A young girl could go from the bottom of the pecking order in her household to the top in her own apartment, with an income from welfare that increased with each baby she had. So we had the spectacle of 14-year-old girls being given their own apartments by Big Brother, paid for with taxes taken from working suckers. The effects of this are so corrosive as to practically be unexplainable to normal people: households solely dependent on handouts from government, fathers completely absent (except in sneak visits), a disrespect for those who work, the boys in the household anxious to hang out on the streets below rather than be with Momma, the crime that comes from this kind of hanging out, self-loathing (it seems likely) that leads to lashing out at "whitey," and a perpetuating cycle as the young girls seek to get their own "cribs" so the process can repeat and expand. This is why so many black families today are into their third or even fourth generation of welfare life. By the way, part of the reason Kennedy wanted to "remove the stigma of relief" was because the decade of the 1950s had been especially bad for the urban poor. Many blacks had moved from farms in the south to cities like Washington, New York, Cincinnati, Oakland, Chicago, etc. Partly they had moved to work in factories during the war, partly because automation on the farms had displaced manual laborers, partly because they heard of the success of other blacks who had moved north. But they were moving into the cities just as the whites were leaving. (And the whites were not leaving because the blacks were coming in...rather, the new jobs were increasingly in the suburbs, and as highways and freeways and ring roads were built around cities, and as cars became plentiful, and as families grew, many of the city-born whites were moving into the massive new subdivisions being built out in the suburbs.) So the blacks got to the inner cities with mostly only manual labor skills, just as such jobs were vanishing under automation and through a shift to the suburbs. Now what government _should have done_ circa the early 1960s is this: Nothing. Except to cut taxes to encourage even more business, and to maybe point out to blacks that they should slow down their move to the cities. (By the way, the same move to the cities was happening in other countries, which is why Mexico City now has something like 20 million residents, most of them very poor.) But instead of letting the dice fall where they may, letting the bad effects discourage other blacks from moving to the cities, Kennedy set his advisors to the problem of solving "urban poverty." They expanded welfare and entitlements, ostensibly because America "could afford it" (the 1950s having been a prosperous period). Precisely the wrong thing to do. It encouraged even more blacks to flock to the cities, and once started, once established, the welfare spigot could not be turned off, could not be denied to the newcomers. Whoops. And none of the planners, I expect, saw the effects of the law of unintended consequences, that they would disincentive blacks from seeking hard jobs, that multigenerational welfare would become the norm, and that blacks would be seen by those doing so well in the rapidly-expanding, prosperous suburbs as some kind of throwback to plantation life. The various "demands" by black leaders, the reverse racism ("honkie mofo"), the whole hatred for learning ("reading be for whitey") all combined with the welfare state in these cities to create this gutterization of the negro. Even when the full magnitude of this developing train wreck was obvious even to the liberals, they didn't pull back from the brink and say "Let's stop this train wreck." Nope, they said the problem was "not enough money." So benefits were expanded in the 1970s, with more Medicare, Medical, larger payments...the idea was to pay enough to get people "back on their feet." But of course, human nature being what it is, most took the higher payments and bought nicer stuff, hence the color televisions found in every "crib." And the huge influxes of Mexicans during the 70s and 80s magnified the problem (to turn down Mexicans for the same "entitlements" that blacks were getting would not have been kosher, would it?). The effect was that large chunks of cities now had urbanized Mexican ghettoes, paid for with dollars coming from the taxed suckers out in the suburbs. Whoops. Another train wreck. And it continues. Finally, even Bill Clinton, a Democrat, tried to put the brakes on welfare. It's worked in some ways, but not in other ways. Just too many "entitlements" to stop the hemorrhaging of money. (To those who claim the biggest recipients of "welfare" are corporations, review again what I wrote about "sources and sinks." And look at the $40 billion hole California is in. It isn't because of any "welfare to corporations." The "services" sector is a black hole sucking in nearly all of the tax monies collected in California.) The problem is that some well-meaning social planners thought they could fix a fundamental problem (poor people moving into cities) by giving money to the poor people in cities. It not only didn't work, it worsened the problem in multiple ways and largely caused the "racial" divisions of today. --Tim May "Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"
On Jan 1, 2004, at 8:20 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Tim May wrote...
In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to convince him to study his math.
Why the BedSty student Tim?
Perhaps because I was replying to "Tyler Durden," where he wrote: "I'll tell you a story. Back in the late 1980s I taught at a notorious HS in Bedford Stuyvesant. 90% of my students were black." You liberals see "racism" even when people reply to the points raised by others. --Tim May
participants (4)
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J.A. Terranson -
Riad S. Wahby -
Tim May -
Tyler Durden