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Yeah, there was a story about that I read somewhere just last week. My wife and I go through avocados at the rate of two a day, and for the first time in many months the local Safeway isn't discounting them under any kind of program. As a result, they've gone up from 77 cents or a dollar up to two dollars apiece. #### that, we're now just splitting one until the prices drop back down.
1. "O.J. Simpson is a double murderer who should be in prison for life." - not racist
2. "O.J. Simpson murdered those people because black people are violent by nature." - racist
3. "Bill Kristol's arguments in his latest op-ed directly put the interests of Bibi Netenyahu's government ahead of US national interests." - not anti-semitic
4. "Bill Kristol can never be truly loyal to the United States because he's Jewish, and Jews are untrustworthy." - anti-semitic
I have never made an anti-semitic argument here or anyone else. TGF is either stupid or a liar. Or both.
He and you are in almost exactly analogous positions.
I don't believe TGF is a white supremicist, but he advances arguments sometimes made by white supremacists.
I don't believe you are an anti-semite, but you advance arguments sometimes made by anti-semites.
I'm actually looking for an apartment at the moment in Regina, Saskatchewan. My memory is pretty terrible for what I spent at the pub last night, so I have no faith in my memory regarding increases in rent over the previous years, but let's have a go anyway:
I lived in the UK for three years so it's been a while since I had a place in North America (been running the old, unemployed out of grad school - living in the parents house scam for the past few months). Around 2007-2009 I think I was paying $500-600 a month. A quick look for places right now and it seems like I'll be in the $650-800 range. I think I was paying 520 pounds (damn this North American keyboard!) every 2 months...which I believe works out to roughly just over $400 Canadian.
I'll be working a sessional teaching job, just two courses. So it's possible it will be a net negative.
To Rants:
I've asked a few times and always forget, what part of New Brunswick do you live in? I'm heading out there to our bi-annual family reunion in St. Martins this July. Always have good fun in that province. The other day I was watching a documentary on the Bay of Fundy, and the talking head was saying it Fun-DAY. Everyone I know (and my family has lived there since the American Revolution) calls it Fun-DEE. This specialist has actually worked with some kind of natural preserve on the bay for 10+ years, so I kind of figured she'd know what she was talking about. Have I had it wrong all these years?
Well, no.
TGF advances an argument that says "black people" are intellectually inferior and prone to violence, as a group." That is directly arguing the white supremacist position. I have never made any argument equivalent to that. Outside of using "Goopers" or "Teapers" as a throw away category for "right wing nutters who annoy me" I don't make arguments to group behavior. I have never made a single argument about "Jews" as a group. I have never made a single argument that attributes bad characteristics to any ethnic or cultural group like that. Arguing Person X made a bad argument is not anti-semitic, even if Person X is Jewish.
As a boxing historian (and I know how much everyone here loves my starting replies with "As a boxing historian") I wonder if you're endorsing the bias sometimes derisively referred to in boxing circles as "the brotherman bonus". The idea is that since negro boxers dominated the sport, especially at the heavier classes, from 1930-1990 (give or take) that this provides adequate evidence that negro fighters possessed an inherent genetic superiority that made them more successful as prizefighters (these natural gifts were variously hypothesized as thicker skin, denser bone structure, higher baseline testosterone levels, etc.), then any negro prizefighters from the early days of "color lines" are de facto presumed to have been superior to the mainstream white champions and should be rated accordingly in historical analysis. Thus, for example, Denver Ed Martin, "Colored Heavyweight Champion", should be considered superior to James Jeffries, "recognized" heavyweight champions. Because blackness. Steadier minds would point out that boxing has always drawn from the dregs and oppressed factions of society, perhaps noting the success of the ghettoized Jewish fighters in the early 20th-century, but how could you argue with such irrefutable evidence of genetic superiority?
This foolishness was seriously propounded by generally credible historians for reasons not unlike those expressed here. And then a massive wave of post-cold war Eastern European fighters came rolling into the sports in the 90s and largely washed away that line of argumentation (perhaps you haven't seen the most recent top-10 rankings). You'll still hear the occasional argument in favor of overrating negro champions of the early days but they no longer lean so heavily on the "obvious" natural superiority of the fighter in question and instead have to be defended based on record and film analysis just like any other fighter.
The estimates of how "white" American-born blacks are vary from 19 to 29% of their ancestry. Almost no African-Americans born here of parents born here have 100% African (much less West African) ancestry. Getting more precise than that varies upon the test but one number that gets repeated is that 60% of African-Americans are at least 1/8 white by DNA.
FloJo, for one, would absolutely be considered white in other cultures. Would that then lead you to posit that there was a white gene for sprinting?
Just. One. Drop.
I lived there for a year. Four years ago they had a "Secession Ball" where local notables dressed up in antebellum costumes, including Confederate uniforms.
I am not a genetics expert, but it strikes me as foolish to judge a groups genetics (and propensity therein) by the outliers. Olympic sprint finalists are extreme outliers.
If you are saying at the high end it appears that there is a genetic advantage in sprinting that might be more defensible, but to generalize the high end results to the general populace seems very dicey.
Even if you assume genetics play a huge role and are significant in whatever you are analyzing, using the outlier results to generalize back to the general population makes some assumptions about the distribution of the significant "genes" throughout the groups population, and those assumptions may not be valid.
For example if "West African" genes move the whole "sprint curve" to the right relative to the rest of the world then maybe your assumption is valid. If instead it stretches out the bell curve, making both tails longer but not changing the average then your base assumption that "they are better at sprinting" is wrong. Similarly it could change the distribution in many other ways.
In summary using outliers to generalize is basically foolish.
YC, you couldn't post enough boxing lore and analysis to suit me. It's one of the enjoyable facets of this unusual diamond that is Baseball Think Factory.
TGF advances an argument that says "black people" are intellectually inferior and prone to violence, as a group." That is directly arguing the white supremacist position. I have never made any argument equivalent to that. Outside of using "Goopers" or "Teapers" as a throw away category for "right wing nutters who annoy me" I don't make arguments to group behavior. I have never made a single argument about "Jews" as a group. I have never made a single argument that attributes bad characteristics to any ethnic or cultural group like that. Arguing Person X made a bad argument is not anti-semitic, even if Person X is Jewish.
You hold Israel to impossibly high standards of behavior, vs. holding their Arab enemies to no standards whatsoever. This is the classic party line of Leftist anti-semites.
Well, you know those Slavs, they don't really feel pain like other people...
And Hungarians dominate water polo, so Magyars must be naturally buoyant.
link
I was on a road trip up from Florida to Toronto last month and we stopped in a few places with war monuments. Lynchburg's was pretty neat as there were a series of them laid of chronologically on the way up a hill to the courthouse [my God is that town hilly]. There was one is St. Augustine, Florida commemorating the Confederate dead, which was interesting to see. I suppose it's not equivalent for a host of reasons, but it reminded me a bit of how Louis Riel (executed by the Canadian government for treason) is celebrated as a hero in many parts of Canada.
Even if this is true, since when is opposition to Israel the political entity the equivalent of anti-semitism?
It's not equivalent, but there's like an 80% overlap in those views.
Your refusal to swing over to Montgomery to take in the First White House of the Confederacy, a couple of miles from my house, is duly noted & hereby goes on your permanent record.
From a recent CBC article:
No he doesn't, as far as I can tell from his postings. I, unlike many posters here and the Shrub, lack the ability to see into people's souls and know their character.
Personally I am regularly disappointed by both Israel and the various Arab nations and peoples. I do hold Israel to a higher standard, but that is because I hold democracies to a higher standard and also because they proclaim they are better and if you do that you darn well better act the role you are claiming. Also they are a US ally and beneficiary of much more US aid of all sorts, and should be held accountable for that as well.
This is a very unfair statement.
Yep. CA produces roughly 50% of the nation's fruits and vegetables and nuts (over 90% of many of them), and we're in a very severe drought. This has nothing to do with monetary policy.
So it's not, but close enough to call Sam a Leftist anti-semite. And 80%? Another classic snapper made up on the spot BS assertion.
Does this mean Israelis that oppose the political goals of their government are 80% anti-semitic, as well?
More accurately known as "Second Place Monuments", "Monuments to Treason", and "Monuments trying to Excuse the Inexcusable".
No. I hold governments who receive billions of dollars of US support annually to higher standards than I do governments who do not. See also Egypt. I also refuse to ignore apartheid policies just because Israel does it. (I have never supported attacks on Israel by Hamas or Hezbollah; I have argued against treating every single Palestinian on the planet as if they are members of those organizations, simply because they're Palestinian. This is part and parcel to not judging people based on group generalizations.)
Everyone should live in a state of doubt about their own knowledge and beliefs; I freely confess that I don't know for a certainty what role individual, much less group, genetic tendencies play in relation to environment and culture and other factors in part because I'm not an expert and in part because the experts themselves can't know for a certainty.
But expressing certainty about the genetic meaning of "black" and about a small number of sprinters from widely dispersed places is the opposite of rational skepticism. It's faith-based belief, as is illustrated by the incredible difference between the "data" on "West African ancestry" and sprinting compared to Kalenjins and marathons.
No, that's been my position GF's position is that some of these things are not theoretical, but rather have been proven/established.
Does this mean Israelis that oppose the political goals of their government are 80% anti-semitic, as well?
If you read my comment, you'd see I specifically said that I don't believe Sam is anti-semitic.
This is a very unfair statement.
Really? The Arab and other Islamic opponents of Israel are blatant in their anti-semitism. The European left, barely tries to hide it.
But TGF is not an impartial seeker of truth. He trumpets anything that favors his world view, however shoddy, while at the same time dismissing or ignoring hard data that cuts the other way.
He is certainly not doing so. He is linking that idea to race, which is a completely discredited idea in biology. I'll let John Wilkins explain succinctly:
According to data at the Chronicle of Higher Education, the median college president's salary in 1996 was about $125,000; in 2008, it was around $400,000.
Hey, we had about three days to get to Toronto!
I think we stopped at St. Augustine, Savannah, some place in South Carolina I forget, Lynchburg (and the nearby Sweet Briar College, an all-girls private college in Virginia I had applied to teach at...didn't end up getting the job, that would have been a very interesting year I think), a tiny sliver of Maryland and West Virginia (we were in four states (VA, WV, MD, and PA) within about 20 minutes), and Ridgway, Pennsylvania (because my dad is from Ridgeway, Ontario and he wanted to see it).
In other words, all the main tourists stops along the way.
Not those are the self-hating Jews
YC? Man, I guess all us Yankee fans must look alike.
To be fair we all do that to some degree or another, I think the issue most have with GF is that he is more strident than most in insisting that he (and he alone) is immune to that.
There is that, and there is the abject refusal to acknowledge the history of his arguments. He's not exactly putting forth a radical new and distinct idea, regardless of how radical he thinks he is being with his "race realism." He's simply repackaging centuries old arguments, but instead of citing phrenology he cites cherry picked FBI crime statistics. But the arguments themselves are identical to the same white supremacist arguments put forth for centuries on end.
Refusing to acknowledge that, and refusing to establish what policy he thinks his "facts" should lead to, is simply unacceptable.
Indeed, and you've made great points here, Greg. As I'll restate from the last page, the odd thing about the "West African" point is that actual West Africans are well down the sprint rankings among mere Japanese and Germans :) — while the East African long-distance runners dependably come out of given localities and families in East Africa. "West African" in this context is a hopeful grab-bag thrown together to preserve a racial assumption: since champion sprinters don't form a coherent genetic group, let's make one up for them and hope nobody looks too hard at it.
It's the horns and smell of brimstone that causes the confusion.
This makes no sense to me. Israel a small Western democracy, beset on all sides by enemies who would literally exterminate them if given the chance. They have been attacked since the very moment of their inception. The enemies of Israel specifically target innocent women and children, using their own women and children as suicide attackers.
To me, Israel gets a lot of credit for being as restrained as they have been.
Well, I've given my impression, and I'll just let TGF make his own arguments, and they may very well include saying I'm entirely wrong about what he is claiming.
Nonetheless, people conflate and confuse the social and political with the biological. It helps, if you are going to engage in this sort speculation, to just think of it as groups and sub-groups, not as races, since that comes with so much noise and baggage. With any species, groups, and sub-groups, are we really surprised that there are ranges and hosts of variations? That doesn't mean superiority in any absolute sense, whatever that is, nor does it speak to every individual or unit within a grouping or groupings. It's about probable tendencies. I may belong to the "better" class, but that doesn't mean there aren't many within the "inferior" class who are better than men. Not only that, given a different context, that inferior class might have tendencies working in its favor. Nevertheless, there could be a tendency. Is there a trajectory of civilized, complex, technological societies and cultures? And if so, would those people most closely linked to that cultural evolution have a leg up on those that weren’t?
Yes, all that sort of thinking can be abused in social and political context. And that makes them different from other ideas exactly how?
You can pretty much draw a straight line from the phrenologists through the Madison Grants through the Carleton Putnams to their 21st century counterparts like GF. Each generation a new formerly discredited group---the Jews, the Italians, the Asians, sometimes even the West Indian immigrants---gets admitted into the category of honorary whites, but the underlying message is always the same. At least the Shockleys and the Jensens had the courage to attach their names to their theories.
*Also because they were wrong.
This all reminds me of Seinfeld and George when they say, oh, no, we're not gay--not that there's anything wrong with that.
I don't want to get naked all by myself.
Can we ever have a discussion about this without the continual insistence on disclaimers, genuflections, and kowtowing at the conventional beliefs? Apparently not. Can we ever extend it to an overarching view of race and other ethnic differences, cultural and biological? No, it can only be discussed in terms of a very short span of history involving one very restricted special class--except they aren't in the broad scheme of history.
Several people have been talking about exactly how such a discussion might happen. Another person has insisted on implausible constructs as scientific markers.
And your claim is the first group is the one that won't have a discussion?
THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK
As a good Jew I'll cop to the horns, but any sulfurous odors are most likely the result of your diet, which is heavy on baloney and sour grapes.
Here's a link to Aesop's fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. You should read it carefully and try to figure out why it's meaningful here.
And here we hit the point: "beset on all sides by enemies who would literally exterminate them if given the chance".
Once this was much more true than today. Basically this is really old news that shouldn't be driving the narrative any longer. Israel has Nukes. None of its neighbors are going to be invading them. Ever again.
That doesn't mean it is all sunshine and bunnies. Far from it. They have to deal with "asymmetric" warfare. And while perhaps (I doubt it, but maybe) being a hardass is a good idea when you are on the verge of being swallowed up, it is really counter productive when you are trying to reduce tension and reduce the long term consequences around asymmetric warfare. In other words their tactics are nicely set up to ensure future generations of palestinian terrorists who want them all dead.
As the party with more power, certainly than the Palestinians, they should be held to a higher standard. But your analysis suggests they have much less power, and are the scrappy underdog (with a large well funded army and nukes). They are no longer the scrappy underdog.
Racist.
Or in honor of my typing skills, cacist.
The problem being that the people with actual knowledge of genetics don't support TGF's (strong) and Morty's (weaker) argument for "race realism." As such, they must be ignored, because it's more important for TGF to promote his theory of intellectual inferiority and violent natures, and for Morty to maintain his self-image as fearless thinker of difficult thoughts regardless of social costs, than it is to look at actual facts.
Once this was much more true than today. Basically this is really old news that shouldn't be driving the narrative any longer. Israel has Nukes. None of its neighbors are going to be invading them. Ever again.
That doesn't mean it is all sunshine and bunnies. Far from it. They have to deal with "asymmetric" warfare. And while perhaps (I doubt it, but maybe) being a hardass is a good idea when you are on the verge of being swallowed up, it is really counter productive when you are trying to reduce tension and reduce the long term consequences around asymmetric warfare. In other words their tactics are nicely set up to ensure future generations of palestinian terrorists who want them all dead.
As the party with more power, certainly than the Palestinians, they should be held to a higher standard. But your analysis suggests they have much less power, and are the scrappy underdog (with a large well funded army and nukes). They are no longer the scrappy underdog.
Yes they have the power now, but if they ever lose it, do you doubt their enemies would at best, expel every Jew from Israel? At worst, conduct a 2nd Holocaust? In that environment, it would be foolish to make any compromise at all in terms of security.
As I've said before, David. You abhor government exactly as much as it benefits someone other than David, and you support government precisely to the point that it benefits David. It's not some sort of mysterious alchemy at work here.
While I think the actions of the current, right wing governments of Israel actually compromise the security of Israeli citizens more than not, it is their decisions to make as the lawfully elected leaders of that state. That does not mean I support my government's propping up of bad behavior by the Israeli state.
So you are suggesting they should base their behavior, not on the world as it is and likely to be for the likely and foreseeable future, but rather on worst case analysis. Do other countries get this leeway?
EDIT: More to the point, I should judge them giving them this benefit of the doubt.
Oh no, you just conflated opposition to the country with religious discrimination and claimed he shares the majority of the views of anti-semites, based on a number you made up on the spot and asserted as fact like you do every day.
Wrong. I said he shares a particular view widely espoused by anti-semites. Not that he shares the majority of his views with anti-semites.
If the number is 50% of 80% doesn't matter. There are a lot of anti-semites out there (practically the whole Arab and Muslim world, plus lots of others) and they peddle the anti-Israel line consistently. One needs to be careful about lying down with dogs.
Not really. Again, if I claim X and his argument Y indicate a preference for Israeli policy over US interests, that is not anti-semitic.
If I claim "Jews are incapable of loyalty to the US, because they are compromised by their Jewishness" that is anti-semitic.
One does not lie down with dogs. That's your error. Claiming X is wrong does not mean I claim Y is right, even if Y is a sworn enemy of X.
EDIT: More to the point, I should judge them giving them this benefit of the doubt.
Yes. Within living memory, something like 40% of the Jews in the world were exterminated. The current enemies of Israel include many people who openly celebrate this fact, and would like to repeat it. In this particular context, yes, the Israelis get a pass from me for acting on worst case analysis.
I extend a similar "privelege" to Poles with respect to Russia and Germany, Ukrainians with respect to Russia, and Tutsis with respect to Hutus.
Also, reading TFA, it's ridiculously sensationalized. First, the tape is of the wife, not D'Souza, so it can't "prove" anything about D'Souza. Second, the claim that he was "planning ahead" about what to do if he was caught makes it sound like he was plotting to destroy documents and flee the country, or something. But in fact, the "planning ahead" that he was purportedly doing was, according to the prosecutors' claims about the tapes, "he might plead guilty, but would initially plead not guilty because that 'gives him a window of opportunity to get his story out there.'" Wow; master criminal there.
¹ Although fraud on behalf of a candidate who lost an election by 44 percentage points has to be the dumbest thing ever. Not to mention that Gillibrand outraised Long by about $15M to $700K; what could D'Souza possibly have thought an extra $15K would do for Long?
It does, because you claimed it as fact and used it as the basis for comparison. Like AC130s, "No one in the US is even remotely close to subsistence level", poor people have "better material conditions than the average middle class American in say, 1950", literally every day, you just fabricate things from whole cloth and offer them as fact.
This is a standard that cannot work, snapper.
The problem is that Israel's actions are directly harmful to their long-term security. Pointing that out isn't anti-Semitism by any stretch of the imagination.
Every person who breaks the law is subject to prosecution for a perfectly valid reason, which logically undermines (though doesn't refute) the claim of political motivation.
Selective prosecution is not an argument that a defendant is innocent; it's an argument that a defendant is being singled out unfairly.
This is a standard that cannot work, snapper.
Right, that's why I said one needs to be careful, not that those views are out of bounds.
The problem is that Israel's actions are directly harmful to their long-term security. Pointing that out isn't anti-Semitism by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, the actual Israelis don't seem to feel that way.
When you have to cavort into such knots to make a theoretical case, your hypothetical is broken. Regardless, I have never made an argument vaguely similar to this.
GregD: The school receives 8% of its operating budget from the state (that number gets lower every year).
Duh. The fact that the person is actually guilty, though, demonstrates a prima facie reason to prosecute. Thus, the "however" clause you mentioned creates that prima facie case. If D'Souza wants to come forward with facts showing selective prosecution, he can do that, but that's irrelevant to your argument.
That was actually a topic here while you were away
Free speech for me. Tiny American flags for you.
More than 20% do feel that way, and besides, even if 95% felt the way you say they do, that doesn't mean they are right.
Israelis should dismiss the advice given to them by those who wish them harm, but I think many have gotten in the habit of assuming that any criticism comes from those who wish them harm and thus dismiss it out of hand.
I'll second that. The restaurants in Charleston are indeed great and the waterfront is charming. The latent ante bellum racism is, however, not.
Logical thinking has not exactly been a D'Souza strong point throughout his career.
In the spring.
So David, is the government of Israel the only one on earth that can't be meaningfully distinguished from the religion/ethnicity of most of its citizens? Or are you just assuming that the many millions of people on earth who despise the US government also hate Americans?
If he's feeling charitable he'll include the Vatican
Interesting malapropism.
It's glorious there in October too.
He was probably thinking it would solidify his conservative bonafides. But he could have saved his money because the episodes in infidelity already did that for him.
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