5 ms·

First listed reason for inequality in America according to The Atlantic: Slavery. Good to know what political slant they bring to the table.

loeg 9y ago
Can you explain how Slavery represents a political slant? Are facts political now?
- AckSyn 9y ago
  Facts that are so old that they have no resemblance of any reasonable basis of someone's current situation should be called out for being political.
  - pikzen 9y ago
    Facts that have affected generations and driven a part of your population to the lowest levels are, indeed, political. Especially if they point out facts you don't like. Aree you going to say the same thing about Jim Crow laws? There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort.
    - AckSyn 9y ago
      > There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort. Are you mad, or are you posting from the wrong century?
      - pikzen 9y ago
        I am posting from the century where, for example, the war on drugs is still a thing, which affects black communities more. I'm posting from the century where an African American will get a harsher sentence than a white person, for the same offence or crime. Reality is tough, huh?
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Because you're not arguing facts, by ignoring them if not flat out suggesting they don't exist in the present time, what you've written is worthy of legitimate ad hominem attack. And that's because the problem is with you, the person. You are a deeply ignorant and foolish person - whether it's malice or not I cannot say. But it is damaging to your personal credibility and is damaging to discourse by speaking mistruth. Jim Crow laws are from 1965, they directly connect to this country's history of slavery. That is not "so old" at all. And variations of Jim Crow laws still persist to this day, hence the Voting Rights Acts. That there are clever derivatives of these practices does not at all mean "they are so old they have no resemblance of". Yes foolish person, they do have resemblance of. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-rights-act_us_58714e44e4b02b5f85891a0d http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-ri... For some book ideas so you can work on your ignorance of this present day relevant history: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-by-the-book.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-...
LyndsySimon 9y ago
Oh, it gets better: "Temin advocates doing away with the belief that private agencies can act in the interest of all citizens in the way that public entities can, and should"
- Applejinx 9y ago
  Makes sense to me. Private agencies must act in the interest of themselves in a fiduciary sense, even outside of market forces. Once you involve market forces, and worse, the issuing of stock leading to ownership by a class that demands immediate returns of money for their investment, private agencies are seemingly required to screw over citizens, because that's how you extract money from them in large quantities. Contrasted to that, the bureaucracy of public entities is a much more insignificant problem. Public internet might be sort of 'third world', but right now they are kicking our butts in that, and Comcast might be working hard (meh…) but they are not working for you, they are working to extract capital out of you in the most efficient manner possible. Once you include the caveat of 'all citizens' (even in Podunkville) it's not even an argument anymore. There's an assumption that it's right and proper to hose Podunkville because they're not the big city and shouldn't have nice things if their productivity doesn't warrant it, and this assumption is fair to challenge or even contradict outright. I'm rooting for Podunkville (the big city doesn't need my ideological help) so I'm in favor of public entities. I guess we'll be seeing some experimentation, in that we're likely to see a heavy swing to privatization right now, and most likely a counter-swing in four to eight years. Should be worth keeping track of how it all works. That 'all citizens', though, that's a conditional which is at the heart of the discussion.
  - greggyb 9y ago
    Private != for-profit. Perhaps you realize this, but it does not seem clear in your post.
    - scarface74 9y ago
      The distinction between private for profit and not for profit is a distinction without a difference. It just means that outside shareholders aren't making money, but you'll find that stakeholders in a lot of not for profit companies are just as interested in making money as for profits. The stakeholder are often just the employees.
aphextron 9y ago
How exactly is this a political slant? Slavery is directly responsible for the mass genocide and economic subjugation of African Americans for the past two centuries. Beyond that, it set the stage for the civil war, which crystallized the economic disparity between north and south forever.
alexc05 9y ago
I really think these articles are important to read. I still think about and reference Ta-nehisi Coats' article "the case for reparations" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas... He makes a strong point. Now, I'm a white guy, my father owned a small business after selling his scanning electron microscope company to a bigger player. He paid for my University education outright including rent. I had to work for any spending money I wanted, but I basically had a free ride into my current programming job. A poor black kid living in a high-violent-crime area who is the child of a minimum-wage-working single mother, is not going to have the same chances. If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed. This is (according to this article and others) traceable in a large part back to slavery. But it also comes from gererational poverty. Lack of parental resources leading to malnutrition, which leads to inattention in school, parental long hours at work leads to a lack of attention and corrective feedback. Or the parents are addicted to something and modelling bad behavior to begin with. The child in these cases starts innocent and realistically has an infantessemal chance of success. The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. Free breakfast and lunch for kids, raise minimum wage, etc... The Palmer Luckey's of the world have to catch on to just how fucking privileged they are as middle class white kids. These articles don't deserve to be rejected outright under "bias" they're based on real solid research.
- teslabox 9y ago
  > The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants: At the time [1994], I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe... edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around. [1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/ https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/
yardie 9y ago
Indeed. It began with slavery and stayed with us in various forms of oppression up to and including today. But America is great so we're going to take it back to Jim Crow.
josho 9y ago
Your comment is being downvoted because you dismiss the article based on the first sentence and offer no specific criticism. We can do better than that here.
- r00fus 9y ago
  I'd also say the comment is being downvoted for mentioning rational, on-topic facts as "political slant".
cmurf 9y ago
How is this a political slant? If you want to refine the cause of inequality, that's fair, but on the face of it, calling it political and somehow therefore invalid or a weak argument, is itself weak and invalid. I'd refine it by saying the reason is when exploitation is considered valid and moral, it exists for a purpose. It is OK to select your targets, where you gain and they lose, if they don't stop you. It's finders keepers losers weepers. It's a game of might makes right. You either agree that there are superior people with superior ideas and it's morally OK to exploit others, or you don't. But I consider exploitation the superset cause of inequality. The specific instance of this exploitation in American history has been various kinds of servitude, varying from targeting races (African, Chinese, Irish, Italian). And even today there's exploitation that's class based: trying to make public institutions in a democratic tradition a pay for play, or privatized. Justice, education, privacy - these are products to be paid for, and if you can't pay, you get none or you get lower quality versions.
sctb 9y ago
> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

loeg 9y ago

Can you explain how Slavery represents a political slant? Are facts political now?

AckSyn 9y ago
Facts that are so old that they have no resemblance of any reasonable basis of someone's current situation should be called out for being political.
- pikzen 9y ago
  Facts that have affected generations and driven a part of your population to the lowest levels are, indeed, political. Especially if they point out facts you don't like. Aree you going to say the same thing about Jim Crow laws? There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort.
  - AckSyn 9y ago
    > There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort. Are you mad, or are you posting from the wrong century?
    - pikzen 9y ago
      I am posting from the century where, for example, the war on drugs is still a thing, which affects black communities more. I'm posting from the century where an African American will get a harsher sentence than a white person, for the same offence or crime. Reality is tough, huh?
- cmurf 9y ago
  Because you're not arguing facts, by ignoring them if not flat out suggesting they don't exist in the present time, what you've written is worthy of legitimate ad hominem attack. And that's because the problem is with you, the person. You are a deeply ignorant and foolish person - whether it's malice or not I cannot say. But it is damaging to your personal credibility and is damaging to discourse by speaking mistruth. Jim Crow laws are from 1965, they directly connect to this country's history of slavery. That is not "so old" at all. And variations of Jim Crow laws still persist to this day, hence the Voting Rights Acts. That there are clever derivatives of these practices does not at all mean "they are so old they have no resemblance of". Yes foolish person, they do have resemblance of. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-rights-act_us_58714e44e4b02b5f85891a0d http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-ri... For some book ideas so you can work on your ignorance of this present day relevant history: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-by-the-book.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-...

LyndsySimon 9y ago

Oh, it gets better: "Temin advocates doing away with the belief that private agencies can act in the interest of all citizens in the way that public entities can, and should"

Applejinx 9y ago
Makes sense to me. Private agencies must act in the interest of themselves in a fiduciary sense, even outside of market forces. Once you involve market forces, and worse, the issuing of stock leading to ownership by a class that demands immediate returns of money for their investment, private agencies are seemingly required to screw over citizens, because that's how you extract money from them in large quantities. Contrasted to that, the bureaucracy of public entities is a much more insignificant problem. Public internet might be sort of 'third world', but right now they are kicking our butts in that, and Comcast might be working hard (meh…) but they are not working for you, they are working to extract capital out of you in the most efficient manner possible. Once you include the caveat of 'all citizens' (even in Podunkville) it's not even an argument anymore. There's an assumption that it's right and proper to hose Podunkville because they're not the big city and shouldn't have nice things if their productivity doesn't warrant it, and this assumption is fair to challenge or even contradict outright. I'm rooting for Podunkville (the big city doesn't need my ideological help) so I'm in favor of public entities. I guess we'll be seeing some experimentation, in that we're likely to see a heavy swing to privatization right now, and most likely a counter-swing in four to eight years. Should be worth keeping track of how it all works. That 'all citizens', though, that's a conditional which is at the heart of the discussion.
- greggyb 9y ago
  Private != for-profit. Perhaps you realize this, but it does not seem clear in your post.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    The distinction between private for profit and not for profit is a distinction without a difference. It just means that outside shareholders aren't making money, but you'll find that stakeholders in a lot of not for profit companies are just as interested in making money as for profits. The stakeholder are often just the employees.

aphextron 9y ago

How exactly is this a political slant? Slavery is directly responsible for the mass genocide and economic subjugation of African Americans for the past two centuries. Beyond that, it set the stage for the civil war, which crystallized the economic disparity between north and south forever.

alexc05 9y ago

I really think these articles are important to read. I still think about and reference Ta-nehisi Coats' article "the case for reparations" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas... He makes a strong point. Now, I'm a white guy, my father owned a small business after selling his scanning electron microscope company to a bigger player. He paid for my University education outright including rent. I had to work for any spending money I wanted, but I basically had a free ride into my current programming job. A poor black kid living in a high-violent-crime area who is the child of a minimum-wage-working single mother, is not going to have the same chances. If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed. This is (according to this article and others) traceable in a large part back to slavery. But it also comes from gererational poverty. Lack of parental resources leading to malnutrition, which leads to inattention in school, parental long hours at work leads to a lack of attention and corrective feedback. Or the parents are addicted to something and modelling bad behavior to begin with. The child in these cases starts innocent and realistically has an infantessemal chance of success. The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. Free breakfast and lunch for kids, raise minimum wage, etc... The Palmer Luckey's of the world have to catch on to just how fucking privileged they are as middle class white kids. These articles don't deserve to be rejected outright under "bias" they're based on real solid research.

teslabox 9y ago
> The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants: At the time [1994], I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe... edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around. [1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/ https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/

yardie 9y ago

Indeed. It began with slavery and stayed with us in various forms of oppression up to and including today. But America is great so we're going to take it back to Jim Crow.

josho 9y ago

Your comment is being downvoted because you dismiss the article based on the first sentence and offer no specific criticism. We can do better than that here.

r00fus 9y ago
I'd also say the comment is being downvoted for mentioning rational, on-topic facts as "political slant".

cmurf 9y ago

How is this a political slant? If you want to refine the cause of inequality, that's fair, but on the face of it, calling it political and somehow therefore invalid or a weak argument, is itself weak and invalid. I'd refine it by saying the reason is when exploitation is considered valid and moral, it exists for a purpose. It is OK to select your targets, where you gain and they lose, if they don't stop you. It's finders keepers losers weepers. It's a game of might makes right. You either agree that there are superior people with superior ideas and it's morally OK to exploit others, or you don't. But I consider exploitation the superset cause of inequality. The specific instance of this exploitation in American history has been various kinds of servitude, varying from targeting races (African, Chinese, Irish, Italian). And even today there's exploitation that's class based: trying to make public institutions in a democratic tradition a pay for play, or privatized. Justice, education, privacy - these are products to be paid for, and if you can't pay, you get none or you get lower quality versions.

sctb 9y ago

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html