Jokodo
Veteran Member
You think you can numerically measure racial privilege? By all means, explain how you do that.
I don't - I'm a linguist, cognitive scientist, and programmer, not a sociologist. But obviously there are ways. For example, you can send out otherwise identical resumes with a stock photo of a black vs. white person to potential employees and record the rate of replies - a higher rate of replies shows a white person has an easier time finding a job, and better leverage negotiating conditions, and you can control for individual factors by having identical resumes and having the photos rated for attractiveness in a pre-test to avoid interference of that other type of privilege. You can look at the statistics of police searches. While the numbers of searches alone doesn't show white privilege, the percentage of successful searches by race does: A higher rate of finding drugs or a gun among those searched in one race suggests that people of that race have a better chance of carrying an illicit item without being caught, and thus the chance of avoiding a criminal record for the same illegal behaviours - in the same way a higher test positivity rate suggests more undetected cases in the case of disease monitoring. In NYC between 2014-2017 inclusive, for example, a weapon was found on 9% of the white suspects frisked but only on 6% of black and latino suspects frisked - see page 18 here.
Your lack of imagination doesn't show it can't be done, and believing so only shows your hubris.
A requirement for what goal? It isn't a requirement if your goal is obfuscation. It is a requirement if your goal is to refute my charge against the previous poster and/or to justify your charge against me. The previous poster labeled your accident victim "their" victim; and you accused me of twisting his words.It doesn't. Again, why would that be a requirement?
What part of Politesse's post suggests to you that they were talking about the equivalent of other truck drivers?
If all your analogy does is present a case for "reducing the blind spots", then it's no doubt pertinent to whatever your social engineering plans are but it is not pertinent to the point in dispute between us. So when you said "It doesn't.", that was you conceding the argument. The previous poster was in the wrong and so are you.
So you claim based on a dubious interpretation of their words which you never bothered to justify.
That's nice, but if you you want to take that approach you have to be consistent about it. No fair making two different arguments, one of which is reasonable and the other of which is a trumped-up accusation, and then, when the accused reproaches you for the injustice, backing it up with further trumped-up insulting accusations, and then pretending you're the reasonable one on account of the reasonable argument you also made.Even the very same cargo truck driver who shoved the moped off the road may not be personally culpable in any meaningful sense - he may be if he was truly reckless and signalled the turn too late, or didn't look in the rear mirror properly, or we may want to blame the company for refusing to retrofit the truck with a blind spot monitor as they value a few hundred bucks more than a human life, or the legislator for not demanding such, or the moped rider for sneaking up to close, where he should have known he's in the truck's blind spot, or his instructor for not teaching him properly about trucks' blind spots. None of is the focus of the discussion - a solution oriented approach simply takes into account that the moped rider is now dead, and would likely be alive had the truck had a blind spot monitor installed.
No, I don't. Where the heck did you get that from? I've criticized utilitarianism many times here.You call yourself a utilitarian, don't you? Well, time to live to live up to your words.
OK, my bad.
Dude. No, my objection is nothing whatsoever like that, and you don't have a reason to think it is. You're just playing lawyer and trying to put the accuser on trial for rhetorical purposes even though you have no case against me. "When the law is against you, pound on the facts. When the facts are against you, pound on the law. When the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table." You are pounding on the table. Stop doing that. Just stop. As you perfectly well know, my objection is not that demanding blind spot monitors implicitly blames drivers in general; my objection is to someone explicitly having blamed particular drivers who had been unjustly accused. So stop misrepresenting me. Stop trumping up new accusations to distract from the old ones.Your objection is a bit like lamenting that we can't demand blind spot monitors because by doing so, we implicitly blame all accidents involving trucks on the truck drivers - and that unfairness is obviously a greater evil than dead moped riders, and therefore, the prudent thing to do about this problem is - nothing (or maybe, banning mopeds).
Talking about trumped up accusations, as far as I can you never asked Politesse whether the "they" in their "their original victim refers to people who knowingly discriminate against minorities, to people who unwittingly acted in ways that put minorities at a disadvantage, to people who benefit from white privilege without any active role in creating it, or to random people who just happen to be white - yet you assumed it must be the latter and built your entire case of calling them a mean bully on that interpretation of yours. You should be ashamed of doing that.
Yeah, funny how that works. I didn't say you personally said the accused were personally culpable either, and yet here we are -- you chose to defend an accused person even though he wasn't you. That's what I did too. People come to the defense of strangers who've been attacked. Is that something you think we shouldn't do?In contrast, saying somebody is personally culpable is, in point of fact, accusing him of being personally culpable.
It is. However, noone has said that you or I are personally culpable, and your quote mine doesn't show otherwise.
It should be obvious that "you and I" is a figure of speech and extends to other people you claim are unjustly accused. Do you have any reason to believe that the "they" in Politesse's "their original victim" is supposed to be a random person who just happens to be white, rather than a concrete individual who, unwittingly maybe and without evil intent, acted in a way that harmed a person of colour by virtue of both of them living in a racially stratified society? In other words, the equivalent to the truck driver who didn't see a moped in his blind spot. If you have any reason to believe that, you have yet to present it.
Stop doing that. Stop making trumped-up accusations that you must on some level know are almost certainly false. Don't say things you should be ashamed of saying. Yes, I bothered to read the whole sentence. I do not believe for a second that you actually believe I didn't.For the record, here's the complete sentence from which you pulled it. If you actually bother to read the whole sentence, you will find that...
Assuming that you didn't read it is the most benevolent interpretation of your behaviour. The alternative is that you consciously decided to attach an arbitrary interpretation to it without as much as checking back with the author.
And yet it contains a throw-away line to the effect that the protesters really are personally culpable. It came off kind of like making a speech about how it's important that we should treat other people's religions with respect and the [anti-Muslim slur]s don't do that.it talks about how the criticisms that attack CRT on the basis that it burdens innocent people with personal culpability are misguided precisely because it isn't about personal culpability in the first place. I know, it's a bit of an awkward run-on sentence, but if I, as a non-native speaker, can attribute a meaning to it, you too should be able to:
Decontextualized?!? I explicitly called out the contrast between the context and the inserted accusation.Accepting injury without protest is a completely inadequate way to challenge the common belief that such offenses are acceptable, earned, or "trivial". Again, this obsession with guilt and personal culpability is distracting from the actual problems, preventing true inequlaities from being addressed by derailing the conversation into a discussion about the aggrieved feelings of the accused, in which it is assumed but never stated that the feelings of the accused should be considered more important or more justified than those of their original victim. This was literally the central thesis of White Fragility, the book all the conservatives are so afraid of but haven't read.
Of course, if you prefer to ignore the context and work yourself up on a couple of decontextualized words instead, there's little I can do to stop you.
I.e., you will continue to libel me. Stop it. It's unethical.In that case, I shall continue to call your behaviour disingenuous. Your choice, really.
I suspect the underlying problem here may be that you and the previous poster don't actually understand why racism is wrong. Metaphor and I know why it's wrong; but the reason it's wrong does not appear to be the same reason you guys think it's wrong. But it's possible I've misjudged you. Feel free to explain why you object to racism.
You have no reason to believe that, since your entire case rests on an arbitrary interpretion of Politesse's word that not only competes with other possible interpretations, but is contradicted by things they said in the same sentence.