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[sebastian_dangerfield]

I don't know how many times I have to say this, but I guess I'll just keep doing so. It is not a logical inquiry. It is not an exercise one can perform. I don't give a shit about Klein. I have given you reason after reason after reason.

And I'm going to tell you, I don't agree with you, for the 50th time. You very well can assess how much an individual is responsible for his own disadvantages relative to forces beyond his control. You can look at his actions over the course of his life, figure out which of his behaviors caused self-harm, and which were directly attributable to outside forces. Is it easy? No. Is it technically possible? Yes.

Your argument has shifted so often that I don't know what the fuck you're saying. You say things like this:

"This takes right back to Murray and Harris and Klein. To talk effect is to examine inequality between races, which involves an analysis of causes. That analysis includes an examination of how much responsibility a disadvantaged group has for its circumstances versus how much was inflicted by outside forces beyond its control.

I agree with the approach, but this is the third rail conversations of all third rail conversations, apparently."

I don't like that group approach. I don't think it provides accurate data for reasons I've stated. But the hypo, the issue as it was framed by Klein and Harris, involved groups.

If you're going to engage in the analysis they did, the only approach is the one I offered above.

And you've said this often. You talk about logical inquiry into a group's responsibility for their circumstances. Then you turn around the next minute and talk about how this can't be done for groups. You are making no sense. The argument you have seized on and keep making (and denying you're making) is ridiculous. But you can't drop it no matter how stupid it is.

There's absolute consistency. If I'm compelled to debate this involving groups, as Harris and Klein did, then within those limits, you'd have to take a number of sets of people in that group, assess how many suffered disadvantage as a result of their own acts versus outside acts, compare these smaller sets to one another and reach average percentages which are then extrapolated to the whole group. I don't like it because I think it's terrifically inaccurate, but if we must chop people into groups, this is how it'd be done.

This is the dumbest fucking analogy to support an argument I've seen in quite some time.

No it's not. It's simple. X, Y, and Z are members of an oppressed group. X makes certain decisions, Y makes others, Z makes others. All decisions are discrete. Their lives take different trajectories afterward. Each bears a certain degree of responsibility for his trajectory. The fact that they're oppressed does not erase that.

Either we discuss the impact of the disadvantages an individual faces in the context of the treatment that person endured as a part of a group or we don't. Discussing what an individual does outside of that context is fucking pointless because it has nothing to do with whatever impact on that class of people the negative treatment has had.

The above does that.

Again, you are arguing a point that no one is making anywhere.

It took me several go-rounds before Ty would concede that an oppressed person is not completely absolved of all responsibility for decisions.

The whole point of the conversation is that if one group suffers a difference in circumstances than another after disparate treatment, whatever evidence you think you're analyzing about why part of it is their fault is really evidence of how they are treated differently. I don't know why you keep bringing up individuals in the context of this conversation to make your point. It makes absolutely no sense.

That wasn't the point of this conversation. The point of this conversation, going way back, was whether Harris should be engaging in an assessment of self-responsibility regarding oppressed individuals.

It's not a logical argument. That's the whole fucking point. You can't shift the conversation into something that no one was discussing and call it logical. It is illogical to try to figure out a percentage of blame that you can assign to a group that has suffered oppression for their current circumstances. Period. End of story.

It is entirely logical to accord a percentage of personal responsibility to every single person, everywhere, in every circumstance. You yourself admitted earlier that every person bears a certain level of responsibility for his circumstance. This includes all people, advantaged people and disadvantaged people.

We can take a look at any individual's life and understand that any specific choice they make is a bad one or a good one. Of course. We can gauge to what extent that person's choices are limited or influenced by racism and oppression. We can step back and say, "Okay. We see you don't have the same opportunity that others do, but you could have started a business like this other guy in a similar situation." But what the fuck does that do? And how do we measure a percentage of blame for each individual and then aggregate it for a group. And even if that were possible, what is the point other than to point to the group and say, "See? It's __% your fault."

So we should just ban such inquiry? We should police against it by having people like Klein cast opprobrium on Harris? Free speech is absolute. Period. End of story. That's my ultimate point here.

Your inability to understand the point of what you have deemed to be "identity politics" is sickening. Black people don't engage in identity politics because it's fun. They do it because they are in a class of people that is treated worse than other people. They are asking to be treated in the same way as white people. "Fans of identity politics." What a stupid fucking way to look at it.

I don't think black people engage in identity politics at all. I think things like BLM are direct, rational reactions to clear racism. I think white people like Klein, and on the other side, the bigoted Trumpkins, are the peddlers of identity politics. Harris says numerous times, in his podcast and elsewhere, "Isn't the goal to see people as individuals, not groups?" At one point, he says, "If we get to Mars and people are still fixating on skin color, haven't we failed miserably?" (Those are paraphrases, T[imm]y.)

Again, didn't read it, but based on what everyone else has said here, that's not what Klein said at all. In any case, whatever.

Klein's points can be distilled to, "What good is it to analyze self-responsibility of an oppressed person. It can only be used for negative ends. You shouldn't do that."

He does not get to make that call. No one gets to make that call. All questions may and should be asked, always.

TM[/QUOTE]