Race as a real thing or as a social construct

The conspiracy aspect points out that someone can become a racist by reading from internet echo chamber pots and not having necessarily acquired it through any institutional means.

  • Albeit premature, I think you’re close enough to being right until some better culprit shows up.
    Along that line of thought, I saw this video yesterday: Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t
    • Malcolm Gladwell addressed a Microsoft Research group and spoke, unexpectedly (?) about something that he said “was not in his book Outliers, but which “encapsulates” a lot of what his book is about”: “capitalization”, an idea which Gladwell attributes to a psychologist named James Flynn.
    • According to Gladwell, Flynn is known among folks engaged in IQ research and probably have heard of “The Flynn effect.”
      • [2:02-2:22] "that’s James Flynn’s idea and he’s written a lot about this content of capitalization which is "What is the rate at which a society capitalizes on its potential? and
        "What percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing right? “How efficiently do we make use of the talents within a given group of people?”
      • Then Gladwell gives an example, taken from Michael Lewis’ book: The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (turned into a movie starring Sandra Bullock), about Michael Oher, [2:29-5:29] "a young man in East Memphis, a teenager who’s six foot six and 350 pounds and he’s discovered by and adopted by a wealthy white family and they realized that he’s an extraordinary athlete and they work with him until he becomes one of the finest offensive lineman in the country and in fact he’s about to be drafted into the NFL’s as many years later and make a “kajillion” dollars … but the part of it that always stayed with me when I read it was it right at the very end, [Michael Oher says:] “if everyone who I grew up with–who was into football, who had real ability in football–actually ended up playing football, they’d need to have two National Football Leagues.” And what he was saying was that East Memphis did not do a very good job of capitalizing on its athletic ability, right? And so Lewis actually follows up on this, and he talked to some people in the school system, and he asked them: "What percentage of kids in East Memphis, who get a college athletic scholarship, actually end up going to college? And the answer was one in six, which absolutely floored me, because I would have thought that …if there was one thing in America that we were really good at doing, it would be exploiting the athletic ability of our youth, in particular, our African-American youth. I would have thought that in an inner-city area the capitalization rate for sports would have been 90%; but, in fact. what we learn in East Memphis is that the capitalization rate is one in six, it’s 16 percent right. So, now, think about it: if, in something that we care about as much as sports, right? Something where there’s possibly nothing in American society that we devote more time and attention intellectual resources to, then the maximization of the professional sporting experience in something that we cared that much about our cap rate is 16 percent, so how high must it be in things that we don’t care that much about right? That’s a very sobering notion. And it says that, as a society, we have an awful long way to go towards properly maximizing the human potential of our members. And so I realized, when I thought about that book, that Outliers is really about that question. It’s about identifying sources of constraints on capitalization rates, and figuring out how how to remove them. So what I thought what I’d do is just talk about a variety of these constraints: What are the kinds of things that lower cap rates in any number of different areas of human endeavor? So one obvious one is “Poverty”.
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So very true. An extreme example is the word “queer.” It used to simply mean strange. Then it became a derogatory term for gay folks. But lately, the gay community seems to have rehabilitated the word, and “queer” is now a respectable term, shorthand for LGBTQ etc.

Something every teenager knows implicitly (wicked, cool, sick, etc. = good) but seem to forget when they become adults.

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Redistribute wealth.

Easy peasy. A benevolent dictatorship would be good.

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This feels like a hair splitting contest, but it cannot go without being said, the left has used racist accusations to further their political goals. And this has in turn radicalized groups on the right.

It’s like a troubled marriage where each party needs to carefully watch the words they use. I’m often guilty of failing at this, but this doesn’t make me a racist for seeing how conservatives have been carelessly accused of being racist in recent U.S. history.

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That is an exceptionally all-inclusive statement. I often find those to be exaggerations.

I think it’s more about equal opportunity, justice, and respect. Something along the lines of teaching to fish instead of giving fish.

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I would assume you don’t accidently attend White Nationalist meetings.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/idaho/articles/2022-02-26/mcgeachin-delivers-taped-speech-to-white-nationalist-meeting

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First I’ve heard of that group. Just about anything associated with Unite the Right can be labeled white nationalist.

The white nationalist label can also be thrown at whatever is white and a nationalist. Breitbart and the Tea Party movement are two examples I’m familiar with.

Do you know anyone who has corrected Biden’s perpetual lying about Trump’s “fine people on both sides” comment?

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Denial just ain’t a river in Egypt.

You are part of the problem.

What … Did Trump not say that?

Read the transcript

Got a link handy?

There’s a short video you can watch at the top of the page that highlights the relevant part .

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Thanks for that. And you’re right - he did finally get around to denouncing Nazis and white nationalists there. He probably should have led with those lines - but your point is well taken. Detractors will show the portions that drive home the point they want to make.

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Wow… I wasn’t expecting that. Thank you

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That just creates meritocracy. Without equality of outcome there is no justice, no respect.