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I realize for political reasons we have to only support one side via extreme sophistry, essentially the whole topic is a giant dog whistle test to make sure our
by VLM 6y ago
I realize for political reasons we have to only support one side via extreme sophistry, essentially the whole topic is a giant dog whistle test to make sure our community is politically pure.
However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills.
Part of the sophistry is pretending that no non-white people are capable of responding to documents mailed to them and as such will be entirely disenfranchised. However, the actual percentage simply cannot be that high as 73 percent of households have satellite or cable TV and thus are at least occasionally responding to mailed documents. 73 percent of the population isn't even white anymore.
I mean, yeah, as a political purity test we can rally around Orange Man Bad and try to one up each other in our two minutes hate to eliminate diversity of opinion while encouraging groupthink, but reality is so far from the politics in this particular situation that its hard to play along. And if an individual can't stomach the extreme virtue signallers, may as well join the reality-based community and just vote Trump. So ironically I don't think this topic is a PRODUCTIVE purity test even from a purely leftist perspective.
- Schiendelman 6y agoYou’re so wrapped up in buzzwords you’ve lost the real conversations.
- rc_mob 6y agoWhat a goofy comment
- stdbrouw 6y agoYou seem to be extremely certain of your position and seem to find it impossible to believe that Robert Santos, the statistician in question, could have any motive other than a political one in sounding the alarm. However, "if people can pay their electric bill then surely they can respond to the census" is not a fact and it's not a logical argument, it's just your gut feeling, which you seem to find a superior source of truth to what experts are saying. Why?
- woo49 6y agoRobert Santos works for the Urban Institute which the LA times has called 'leading liberal think tank'. [1] It's impossible to read a comment about the census without looking at the political affiliation of who makes the comment. It's also unfortunately that articles like this don't make these affiliations clear. Gives fuel to 'fake news' and 'liberal media' arguments. [1] http://articles.latimes.com/1988-06-12/news/mn-7095_1_urban-institute http://articles.latimes.com/1988-06-12/news/mn-7095_1_urban-...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI can imagine neutral, nonpolitical commentary on the census process, but that's not what Santos is offering. He says that the census wouldn't have been fair even if the count had been extended, due to factors such as "the public policy climate" and "toxic immigrant policies".
- stdbrouw 6y agoSantos does not offer neutral commentary, but he claims to offer objective commentary: it is objectively possible that public policy and immigrant policies will negatively affect the census. You can't discount that possibility and ignore the arguments made in favor of that possibility (read the article!) just because you don't like someone's politics.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI'm not discounting the possibility. But even if he's right on every objective question and we agree with his value judgments, a claim that we need immigration policy reform is inherently political, and we need to acknowledge that in order to effectively understand the situation.
- pjc50 6y agoNot paying your electricity or cable bill may result in denial of service. Not responding to the census has no obvious consequences.
- colejohnson66 6y agoTechnically, it’s a federal crime to refuse to respond. It’s just that no one has been prosecuted for not doing it in decades.
- croissants 6y ago> However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills. "essentially 100%" is an overstatement. Federal Reserve data (see e.g. Figure 12 here [1]) consistently shows that quite a few Americans have difficulty paying bills. For example, ~25% of surveyed Americans with a high school degree or less said they couldn't pay that month's bills. That number gets smaller with more education but is always 50-100% larger for black and Hispanic people. It seems reasonable to me that people juggling various overdue bills might not prioritize responding to a census that has 0 short-term positive impact. It also seems reasonable to me that we make an extra effort to count these people since the point of the census is to count everybody, not just people who are easy to count. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2018-dealing-with-unexpected-expenses.html https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-we...
- NelsonMinar 6y agoIt's alarming to see white supremacists arguments being made on Hacker News.