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"I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism)" People like Charles Murra

"I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism)" People like Charles Murray have not asserted this, to my knowledge. He supports race-neutral policies, such as a universal basic income. The assumption that all talents or personality traits are equally distributed among all demographic groups is not necessary to support equality under the law.

api 6y ago
Murray may not have asserted this, but by the time his ideas make it to the street level you get racist tiki torch marches and cops murdering black people in public. A thinker cannot simply wash their hands of the manifestation of their ideas, especially once that manifestation becomes stupidly obvious. Sometimes an unrelated example helps: Marxists do this all the time when they hand wave away the awful history of Communism. “Marx advocated evolution toward communism, not dictatorship.” Okay, maybe so, but virtually every large scale society to attempt to adopt Marxism ends up as some kind of totalitarian state that oppresses people at huge scale. At some point it’s reasonable to conclude that there is something very wrong with Marxism. Maybe Murray didn’t intend to help resurrect Naziism, but he played a central role in doing so. Back to the Rationalists, this is one of my huge problems with them and it’s evident in that paragraph about BLM. They reason in an absolute vacuum. They never seem to look down at the street to see what their ideas are doing down there.
damnyou 6y ago
Murray is not merely a racist. He's a white supremacist eugenicist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126606 edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: UBI isn't inherently bad but Murray's version is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207
- Gunax 6y ago
  If UBI is racist, then it seems to me that literally everything is racist. You cannot change a government policy without somehow, somewhere affecting some minority. If we are going to going to call that racism, then we really cannot even have policy discussions. Obviously Murray is a particularly controversial person, but UBI is obtaining small amounts of broad support in general. I guess it just feels a bit exhausting to me. While I understand the reasoning behind what you wrote (and it's logical and internally consistent), I also feel one could just as reasonably make the case that not supporting UBI is racist.

api 6y ago

Murray may not have asserted this, but by the time his ideas make it to the street level you get racist tiki torch marches and cops murdering black people in public. A thinker cannot simply wash their hands of the manifestation of their ideas, especially once that manifestation becomes stupidly obvious. Sometimes an unrelated example helps: Marxists do this all the time when they hand wave away the awful history of Communism. “Marx advocated evolution toward communism, not dictatorship.” Okay, maybe so, but virtually every large scale society to attempt to adopt Marxism ends up as some kind of totalitarian state that oppresses people at huge scale. At some point it’s reasonable to conclude that there is something very wrong with Marxism. Maybe Murray didn’t intend to help resurrect Naziism, but he played a central role in doing so. Back to the Rationalists, this is one of my huge problems with them and it’s evident in that paragraph about BLM. They reason in an absolute vacuum. They never seem to look down at the street to see what their ideas are doing down there.

damnyou 6y ago

Murray is not merely a racist. He's a white supremacist eugenicist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126606 edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: UBI isn't inherently bad but Murray's version is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207

Gunax 6y ago
If UBI is racist, then it seems to me that literally everything is racist. You cannot change a government policy without somehow, somewhere affecting some minority. If we are going to going to call that racism, then we really cannot even have policy discussions. Obviously Murray is a particularly controversial person, but UBI is obtaining small amounts of broad support in general. I guess it just feels a bit exhausting to me. While I understand the reasoning behind what you wrote (and it's logical and internally consistent), I also feel one could just as reasonably make the case that not supporting UBI is racist.