Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
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.
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.
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.
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.
The above does that.
It took me several go-rounds before Ty would concede that an oppressed person is not completely absolved of all responsibility for decisions.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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