130 karma · joined September 29, 2016
It's as much this as it is keeping discourse alive. A week of reaction and speculation on social media is just free advertising.
The former just seem like good politics: "states' rights" allowed slave owners to court people who were worried about "big government" while conveniently ignoring the grave injustice that's actually occurring. The latter seems like good twitter politics; it'll get good engagement for being so inflammatory, but at the end of the day, most people don't actually agree.
And the reason these things change is because that's what needed changing. One of the topline features of Svelte is that is has less boilerplate than React, and it achieves that quite handily. Unless you're criticizing particular constructs in Svelte that are unjustifiably different, I don't think unfamiliarity is that damning a criticism.
Maybe I'm just used to switching up languages on a regular basis, but the idea of having to learn different language constructs for loops and the like doesn't seem that herculean of a task.
I'm not qualified enough in foreign affairs to justify the allusion to Putin or Erdogan, but let's not play this down either.
Has systemic racism not been researched?
I feel like you're just grasping at semantic straws here. Systemic racism is a theory, like any other scientific theory. Believe it or not, it's a framework that informs research.
> Systemic racism is used just like God was when I, growing up in the south
God is a theory too, just an increasingly tenuous one. Systemic racism seems to bear out in studies.
I don't know why scientifically minded people seem to act like science is just a done deal, and that any theory they instinctively don't like is somehow newfangled. This is just not how science has ever been conducted. Every theory starts out new and strange, and we just have to see how it comports to the data.
> Every discrepancy between two arbitrarily separated groups is termed evidence of some non-specific, internal bigotry that absolutely must exist.
Except the term "systemic racism" literally means that this bigotry is externalized—it exists within the systems of rules we created.
It also seems weird to use "absolutely must exist" sarcastically when you agreed to that 10% statistic earlier. That's just one stat. No, not everything is systemic racism, but as we established earlier, that's not what anyone's saying. Research suggests that the problem is pervasive enough to validate the phenomenon of "systemic racism" is quite real.
> The fact that various cultural groups behave and raise children differently is ignored.
It isn't? Culture, much like individual action, is determined heavily by institutions. People can complain about rap music glorifying a distrust of the law, but when there are actual stats showing a 10% disparity in sentencing, I can't really be too harsh on the rapper here.
Frankly, I never understand this vector of attack. Like, let's assume that all this was actually 100% culture. How do we fix anything? How do you change culture? You can't just tell Black people "be better, and stop that rap music." It seems to me that the answer is still institutional change.
> There must be systemic bigotry towards men by police.
This is actually true. The justice system is disproportionately harsher on men, but that's because we perceive men as being stronger and more in control of their actions. Indeed, we do need to have a cultural shift towards the perception of men, but that shift starts by making our institutions more willing to consider men as vulnerable so we can address it.
> women are underrepresented in police killings because they are dramatically less likely to be in confrontations with police.
But why is that the case. It's not random.
> And since you are defending activists willfully misrepresenting data to feed emotional narratives
You can be dismissive of activists, just make sure it's universal. No side has ownership of "calm rational discourse." I just see a lot of people focus on the temperament of activists rather than the actual policy being considered. It's just a pointless ad hominem. Everyone can point to some group of the unwashed masses and say "look at all those dumb people supporting you, don't you look silly now!"
> The other impression left on the minds of the public is that black men are exclusively the victims of police violence, when the data says otherwise.
Sure, I also think "defund the police" is a misguided slogan. Fortunately, laws aren't written by slogans, they're written by experts.
> Ask yourself why you have to use Google to find the name of a Latino who was unjustly killed by police in the last 5 years, but you (if you are like me) can list the names of multiple black men unjustly killed by police in the same time frame? Do you think that discrepancy in knowledge is natural, fair, or just?
No, but the reforms that BLM protesters are asking for would also help Latino people. I agree that it would be great that the discourse could be on all police violence, because it certainly is pervasive, but I'm not really going to blame Black people, who have an incredibly unique history in this country to focus on their own community's strife.
I also wouldn't expect an organization called Black Lives Matter to be advocating for Latinos (though, I think the work that they do conveniently does). No one is suppressing a Latino Lives Matter movement, it's just that the Latino experience in this country doesn't seem to coalesce in that way. I'm sure there's a very interesting investigation one could perform to figure out why.
> The ethno-centric activists have taken the very real issue of police violence, and turned it into a race specific one, needlessly.
I don't see why that's a problem when the goal is the same. Proposed police reforms aren't race-specific.
I'm not sure where you learned feminist theory, but it's fairly resolute about the fact that Patriarchy is deleterious to both men and women.
Of course, you seem to be implying that people aren't actually trying to address these issues individually, and you couldn't be more wrong. Academics and policymakers alike are forming and implementing solutions all the time. You might just be looking too closely at Twitter.
It's frankly insulting that, despite the ongoing tragedy of racial inequality and the abundance of experts actively working to resolve it, that you and others are so caught up in such meaningless semantic games.
> It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism
I'm not sure how you can substantiate that claim.
> it's actually a 10% delta
You say that like a 10% delta because the color of your skin isn't tragic.
> It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.
Are they supposed to? We have a representative democracy for a reason: average people and activists push for change, and experts and representatives try to enact that push a reasonably as possible. I wouldn't expect the average person to approach policy failures with moderation. Most don't have years of higher education or a heterogeneous voter base to appease to moderate them. That goes for all sides. Don't act like the constituency who decry systemic racism approach it with the same nuance as Sowell.
Also, if you believe that institutions discriminate against Black people, is the direct implication not that Whites are privileged over them in these spaces?
And as for school choice, my understanding was that the research showed that school choice worsened racial education outcomes, like this paper claims [1]. I know I've seen other research to this effect, but this is just one of the first results of google scholar. If nothing else, I would assume that any school choice policy must be coupled with a progressive transportation program, lest that choice become determined by geographic disparities, which because of segregation policies both on the books and within people's historical preferences, just bakes in racial disparities.
Regardless, to act like school choice is some kind of underground counter-culture movement to a progressive-dominated education system, when Betsy DeVoss is Secretary of Education, seems misguided at best. I don't know why you feel the need to dance around terms like "systemic racism" as if it will inadvertently empower a progressive movement when that progressive movement isn't even in power.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.20226?ca...
The comment I was responding to literally said "It is immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable. As a propagandist you must take care to use things that can not be countered. Systemic racism is one of those." A very clear implication that systemic racism doesn't exist.
Now, this may not be Sowell's views, but fortunately for Sowell, I never mentioned him in my initial reply.
> He just questions whether the studies being produced today are done so without pre-existing bias (are they looking for data to back up their belief, or vice versa) and whether the data produced evidentiates the conclusion.
All science is performed with biases. We couldn't possibly form a hypothesis without following our intuitions first. The question is whether our biases conform to the data. Of course, biases may also shape how we interpret data, but this is true for everyone. Sowell may be right, but let's not pretend that he, or anyone for that matter, is the only one approaching this research with a truly neutral, unbiased approach.
I think it's fair to subject research into systemic racism to scrutiny, but that's merely the process of academic review. It should never be touted as cutting through the propaganda, as if Sowell is some kind of crusader against the dogmatic PC police left.
> In fact, in his books, he openly admits that he believes that it did indeed once exist.
Now, call me crazy, but given that he believes it once existed, I find it hard to believe that he also believes that it's just over and done with now. John Lewis just died recently, and I consider it unlikely that we'd ferret out racism from our systems in just that span of time, especially when I hear stories of, for instance, a North Carolina legislature disenfranchising Black people with surgical precision as recent as 2014. If we still have that kind of explicit racism in our public institutions, it's unreasonable to think more subtle forms aren't also causing unequal outcomes.
If Sowell is responding to specific claims made by researchers of systemic racism, then it can't possibly be merely empty rhetoric, it's a subject of active academic inquiry.
> What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US?
I don't understand this. Why do you want to measure against other countries, and why phrase it like you just want one number? Is it not enough to claim that certain inequalities appear in certain aspects of our society?
It would be like asking for a measure of our foreign policy. Sure, we could probably make one, but that seems like an entirely inadequate means of actually assessing what's happening in a complex sociological ecosystem. Our assessments have to be more individualized.
> That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.
You can do that with anything though. I've heard all the same language used in Climate Change discourse: "well, if you don't think humans caused climate change, they'll just label you anti-science and beat you out of the discussion." This is just a blatant rhetorical tactic to shift discussion from about the actual problem—and indeed all the evidence that this problem has—to nebulous Twitter mobs.
[1] https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2852856
Elected officials can rely on dogma too, styling themselves like sports teams, knowing that because actually accomplishing something is off the table for both parties, they have to appeal to voters almost entirely by signaling their virtues.
Yes, it would mean rapid fluctuations in policy, but the idea is that we need to inject some volatility so we can see what works and what doesn't. Obviously, this can lead to problems, like a majority party implementing policies which restrict the electorate or affect populations that can't form a strong voting coalition, but I'm not sure this is worse than what we have already.
Further, I'm not really sure how we're supposed to reevaluate "we." That's a neat soundbite, but what does that mean? What are you suggesting we actually do? Alter the electorate? Split the union?
If anything, a Liberal Arts educations ought to provide students a higher degree of skepticism towards all expressions of ideology, and seek to find the truth through critical research. Obviously, that's the ideal, note necessarily the reality in all cases, but it seems your notion of Liberal Arts is more akin to "hippy-dippy" nonsense, not critical study.
I can't stand MPFR's page. There's very little visual hierarchy, so if I go to the page, I have to look through all the text to find anything specific. For a library like this, a big, colored download button would just make everyone's life easier. And it's a small thing, but why put the introduction third, so I have to scroll to see it? Just put a short tag line up top so I know what I'm looking at.
I get the desire to have content, and I agree that modern trends often go too far the other direction, but there is such a thing as fetishizing blandness. It's just a chore to read.
And what exactly is wrong with the Go rebranding? They haven't even changed the website, so I don't even know what your criticism is other than "I don't like modern, sleek logos and typefaces." Because otherwise, Rust and the Go update have basically the same info design (modern type, single tag line, high contrast, etc.).
Also, since when have colleges been teaching Vaporwave? Isn't Vaporwave largely a meme? I don't really see it manifesting in any design trends beyond that domain.
I can't stand chatbot popups on websites, because I know what I'm doing and don't like being bothered, but I can imagine that an older or less tech-savvy demographic might find the instant tech support quite novel.
Regardless, the fact that we've made any strides at all within these fields is proof of determinism. If not 100% determinism, then enough to dispel notions of a "just world."
If we want better representation of the facts and the People's opinion, we need better representation. The current system lacks nuance and seems to be subject to Elite interests over popular ones.
It's essentially a moral argument: women and minorities deserve equal treatment and opportunity, but due to stereotyping and social inertia (i.e. girls don't grow up seeing many women in technical fields, so they aren't compelled or don't even think to join them), they don't currently get it.
To answer the question:
> Still, if women, men and people of different ethnicities and races all have such fundamentally different backgrounds, why would you expect them all to choose the same fields in the same proportion?
I think we'd like to assume that everyone can essentially do whatever they want, but just choose not to, but we simply can't because we've never had an equal starting position to begin with.
I also don't really understand what you mean by giving people the experience of something you were creating in the past. What does that mean? As advice it seems exceptionally vague; something an writing teacher might tell me to write about, but not solid advice for founding a startup.
I would also hope that we can come up with a solution that doesn't involve hindering others's ability to communicate. Even if it is the simplest and most effective tactic, it seems like that's just fighting the symptoms rather than the disease.
It seems to me that social superiority was part of the conversation to begin with. The OP wants to celebrate being a white male and apparently doesn't believe that the social superiority of white males is something that needs to be changed.