tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post5650895033805372277..comments2024-03-28T18:32:05.933-04:00Comments on bensozia: African Immigrants and African AmericansJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-79516448573789467142016-09-25T17:38:54.245-04:002016-09-25T17:38:54.245-04:00"Pithom: no, most black-white racial mixing i..."Pithom: no, most black-white racial mixing in the US was before 1860. Almost all of it, in fact."<br /><br />-On what basis do you claim this?pithomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13997094225496018110noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-50856897107005175702016-09-25T17:37:51.636-04:002016-09-25T17:37:51.636-04:00You've pointed to no statement of mine that sh...You've pointed to no statement of mine that showed lack of backing in fact. No wonder: there is none.<br /><br />"Reality seems to bear no gravitas for him"<br /><br />-How do you think I came to my present views, Verloren? Not through ignoring reality, I can tell you that readily.<br /><br />You didn't appeal to facts here, so I guess I automatically win this argument.<br /><br />"How much time, effort, and thought is it healthy or sane to devote to the cause of repeatedly refuting such erroneous assertions ad nauseum?"<br /><br />-One tenth of that necessary for you to have written your above screed would have sufficed. And not one of my assertions is, so far as I am aware, in the least bit erroneous.<br /><br />Verloren, you seem like a person enamored with ideology and paragraphs. You do not seem, like I am, to be enamored by empirical evidence and cold, hard logic.<br /><br />"But today, such behavior can earn you a nomination to the highest office of government in the nation, propelled forward by the adoration of the unabashedly ignorant and self serving."<br /><br />-True! For both candidates!pithomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13997094225496018110noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-18390260553746738702016-09-25T17:33:07.910-04:002016-09-25T17:33:07.910-04:00Pithom: no, most black-white racial mixing in the ...Pithom: no, most black-white racial mixing in the US was before 1860. Almost all of it, in fact.Johnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-82833646755948897662016-09-25T16:31:50.254-04:002016-09-25T16:31:50.254-04:00I really don't even know how to respond to Pit...I really don't even know how to respond to Pithom at this point. Reality seems to bear no gravitas for him, so it's hard to bring myself to attempt to convey it in the face of such overwhelming bias and willful delusion.<br /><br />And yet, I recently came across a quote by T. H. Huxley which impresses upon me to persist to some degree: <i>"The obstinate reiteration of erroneous assertions can only be nullified by as persistent an appeal to facts."</i><br /><br />But at the same time, I almost feel that such a statement doesn't quite apply universally - that it is true on a societal or historical scale, but that it doesn't always hold on an individual one. What use is appealing to facts when faced with a specific party that, either through malice or pathology, exhibits no significant response to such appeals?<br /><br />At what point does the law of diminishing returns take effect, and to what degree? How much time, effort, and thought is it healthy or sane to devote to the cause of repeatedly refuting such erroneous assertions ad nauseum? At what point do the potential benefits cease to outweight the costs? How exactly should one go about performing what amounts to a sort of psychological triage? How does one develop the ability to properly judge which parties are worth spending resources on, and which ones you should simply cut your losses on?<br /><br />And even after all that, if one writes off a given party as unlikely to benefit from any efforts you might spend on them, what then? Leave them to continue on spreading their erroneous assertions, to the detriment of others? Proactively go about refuting such assertions with facts, to innoculate others against them? Employ some form of quarantine?<br /><br />The worst part is, I feel like this exact uncertainty is purposefully exploited by many individuals - that they know if they just shout down and ultimately exhaust and outlast proponents of the truth, then they can eventually spread their falsehoods in the place of facts and get away with it. In Huxley's time, such behavior had consequences - individuals would be ostracized and not taken seriously when others exposed them for their falsehoods. But today, such behavior can earn you a nomination to the highest office of government in the nation, propelled forward by the adoration of the unabashedly ignorant and self serving.<br /><br />What is one to think, say, or do in response?G. Verlorennoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-78450093083971723212016-09-25T15:41:40.036-04:002016-09-25T15:41:40.036-04:00"So what does explain the difference between ..."So what does explain the difference between African Americans and African immigrants?"<br /><br />-Occam's Razor: skilled African immigrants are heavily selected by virtue of their intelligence and work ethic and western immigration systems' preferences in favor of these; African refugees and African-Americans, being selected more or less at random from the native African population, are better representative of the native African population. Intelligence is mostly heritable, at least, within the First World.<br /><br />There is no racism of any substantial effect in America. It's pure mythology. The idea of institutional racism had very little explanatory power in the twentieth century, and, after 1970, has no explanatory power whatsoever.<br /><br />"Most (but not all) of the differences in school performance and the like between African Americans and whites can be accounted for by income, that is, students from poor families always do worse in school than children from middle class families, and more African Americans are poor."<br /><br />-No, they can't. More bollocks. When adjusted for parents' SES (not just income!), most of the Black-White school performance gap visibly remains:<br />http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html<br /><br />It's genes, man. Genes. That's the simplest, best, and most obvious explanation for all this.<br /><br />"African Americans endured 150 years of slavery and then a century of Jim Crow, and that left a legacy that can't easily be erased."<br /><br />-It was erased in all but life expectancy and self-reported happiness by the last quartile of the twentieth century in the United States. Now, it's mostly genes.<br /><br />"It seems inevitable to me that over time the distinctiveness of west African immigrants will fade."<br /><br />-Yeah; probably. It depends on whom they have children with. Let's see how the Obama daughters are doing in a few years.<br /><br />"But of course this is one of those explanations that just demands more explanations; why do west African immigrants have higher incomes?"<br /><br />-At least you understand this.<br /><br />"It is also hard on any sort of racial genetic model, since most African Americans are genetically a mix of west Africans and whites, with their white ancestors drawn disproportionately from the upper class."<br /><br />-It's not 1860. It's not even 1960. Most Black-White interbreeding since then has not been disproportionately from the upper class; quite the contrary. The average White American is less than 1% Black. The average Black American is less than 30% White. I'm reasonably certain, due to greater tolerance of race-mixing in the past half-century than there ever was during the half-millennium before that, that most Black-White interbreeding in America has been after, not before, 1960.<br /><br />"These facts refute basic nineteenth-century tri-racialism,"<br /><br />-Nope. Dude, can you even <i>Bell Curve</i>? There are always some smart people within every race. But they cannot be expected to be representative of the population they originate from.pithomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13997094225496018110noreply@blogger.com