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[sebastian_dangerfield]

You're not wrong, but you're also not hearing what I'm saying. Murray presents his work as scientific, though it is riddled with bias. When you pretend it's possible to engage in "a scientific assessment of instances where the victims of a systemic oppressed acquired responsibility for remaining oppressed," you are doing the same thing as Murray -- using "science" as a pretense for engaging in something that inevitably will reflect the bias and oppression of the culture.

I get what you're saying. It's a mischaracterization of what I'm saying. I'm saying a scientific study assessing in what ways an oppressed group's actions contribute to that group's disadvantaged circumstances can be performed. Murray is saying he can and has performed it. (From what I read, he has not. Not even close. He's made all kinds of reckless leaps.) Those are two different statements.

I think the notion that you can somehow measure and "assess" the "responsibility" of a discriminated group for its condition, let alone with "science," is total nonsense.

Why? We do it in courts all day every day. A person claims discrimination caused career earning losses. The defense counters that not all of the claimed losses were caused by the discrimination -- that some were caused by the plainitff's own decisions. How is this controversial? The concept of a superseding cause is Torts 101.

I tried to make that clear when you first referred to the idea, and I asked you for a published example where someone had done that. If someone tells me they are going to write a book assessing the Gypsies' responsibility for their genocide by German Nazis, and that they are going to do it with science, I would expect that person to be wearing a tin-foil hat and driving a cab, at best.

This is where you're engaging in sleight of hand. No one has asserted that any oppressed group is responsible for its own oppression (Gypsies being responsible for the Nazis killing them). That would be absurd. But one can test whether over time, a group's own actions have contributed to its current disadvantages. To use your example, if Gypsies in Europe today suffer certain disadvantages, some of those would accrue from Nazi persecution, others would not. There would be myriad causes.

Is there some accepted and respected model in the world for what you think you are talking about?

I don't know and I don't care. What's at issue is whether it's conceptually possible. And you've made no compelling rebuttal that it isn't.

Honestly, the thing that comes closest to me is Murray's projected of blaming blacks' genes for their treatment by the culture, and using that as a justification to cut social spending and taxes for the rich.

Again, that he fails to credibly apply science does not mean that conceptually, if one wanted to apply scientific rigor in an unbiased fashion, it could not be done. I'm sure it has been done somewhere, but I'm not interested in that, as that's not necessary to answer the abstract question of whether it could be done.*

Murray at least blames genetics rather than choices by blacks. And you have dumped on Murray, so he is not your pole star. So what's your model here?

See immediately preceding point.

eta: Maybe you are thinking about comparative negligence and contributory negligence, and following the lead of the great Justice Traynor in Li v. Yellow Cab in thinking that it's rational for even a victim to be deemed to bear some responsibility?

You still haven't answered my question. Is it your position that a group once and persistently discriminated against can not be responsible to any extent for anything it does afterward?

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* I also don't really want to see the study done, or read the results of any that were done. It'd involve too much identity politics-style generalization. I do not believe one can assess people based on their background "groups" at all, and that one can only credibly assess people individually. I'm only accepting the notion that assessing people based on their groups is valid for purposes of this discussion.