DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: sirs on April 19, 2012, 05:56:36 PM
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Mix, matching class and race
By THOMAS SOWELL
Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government's time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government's preconceptions.
Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness -- whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations -- shows a "problem" that has to be "corrected."
No speck of evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence, of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population -- in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history.
Nothing is more common than for people to sort themselves out when it comes to residential housing, whether by class, race or other factors.
When there was a large Jewish population living on New York's lower east side, a century ago, Jews did not live at random among themselves. Polish Jews had their neighborhoods, Rumanian Jews theirs, and so on. Meanwhile German Jews lived uptown. In Chicago, when Eastern European Jews began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods, German Jews began moving out.
It was much the same story in Harlem or in other urban ghettoes, where blacks did not live at random among themselves. Landmark scholarly studies by E. Franklin Frazier in the 1930s showed in detail how different neighborhoods within the ghettoes had people of different educational and income levels, with different male\female ratios and different ways of life living in different places.
There was nothing random about it. Within Chicago's black community, the delinquency rate ranged from more than 40 percent in some black neighborhoods to less than 2 percent in other black neighborhoods. People sort themselves out.
None of this was peculiar to blacks or Jews, or to the United States. When emigrants from Scotland went to Australia, the Scottish highlanders settled separately from the Scottish lowlanders. So did emigrants from northern Italy and southern Italy.
Separate residential patterns that are visible to the naked eye, when the people are black and white, are also pervasive among people who physically all look alike. Charles Murray's eye-opening new book, "Coming Apart," shows in detail how different segments of the white American population not only live separately from each other but have very different ways of life -- and are growing increasingly remote from one another in beliefs and behavior.
None of this matters to politicians and ideologues who are hell-bent to mix and match people according to their own preconceptions. Moreover, like many things that the government does, it does residential integration more crudely than when people sort themselves out.
Back in the days when E. Franklin Frazier was doing his scholarly studies of the composition and expansion of black ghettoes, he found the most educated and cultured elements of the black communities living on the periphery of these communities.
It was these kinds of people who typically led the expansion of the black community into the surrounding white communities. By contrast, government programs often take dysfunctional families from high crime ghetto neighborhoods and put them down in the midst of middle-class neighborhoods by subsidizing their housing.
Whether these middle-class neighborhoods are already either predominantly black or predominantly white, the residents are often outraged at the increased crime and other behavior problems inflicted on them by politicians and bureaucrats.
But their complaints usually fall on deaf ears. People convinced of their own superior wisdom and virtue have no time to spare for what other people want, whether in housing or health care or a whole range of other things
Commentary (http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/people-349592-neighborhoods-black.html)
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yeah SIRS and many of the leftwingers that spout
all this crap live in lily white neighborhoods.....
is Chinatown in San Fran racist?
just another example of liberalism attempting to deny reality
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just another example of liberalism attempting to deny reality
That sums up things pretty nicely 8)
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Mr. Sowell's 25 top snippets
25) "Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?"
24) "Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America."
23) "Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets."
22) "What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are given ‘class’ labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept."
21) "There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other people who are more advanced."
20) "The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people."
19) "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
18) "Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."
17) "The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society'."
16) "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind."
15) "Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored."
14) "There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs."
13) "Civilization has been aptly called a 'thin crust over a volcano.' The anointed are constantly picking at that crust."
12) "We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did, but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past."
11)” For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”
10) "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
9) "Intellect is not wisdom."
8)” The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?"
7) "Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good."
6) "Experience trumps brilliance."
5) "The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
4) "One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."
3) "Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large."
2) "In short, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon."
1) "There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs."
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is Chinatown in San Fran racist?
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Are there any streets there named for anyone Chinese?
Chinatowns are vastly different from Black ghettos. The Chinese who live there often speak no English and live there because they have difficulty coping with American customs. Poverty is the main reason who Blacks are confined in ghettos. Here in but Miami, there is no real Chinatown, just a few places where there are several Chinese businesses, but they are not residential areas.
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Chinatowns are vastly different from Black ghettos. The Chinese who live there often speak no English and live there because they have difficulty coping with American customs. Poverty is the main reason who Blacks are confined in ghettos.
Are you denying that races many times like to be around their own race
and it is not simply as you say ecomomics/language but can have many
aspects of shared history and culture and there's not a damn thing wrong
or "evil" about that?
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In most places, Black people are turned away from renting in places other than the ghettos. Chinese, in this country, rarely encounter this problem.
And Thomas Sowell is the official Black hack, and not even close to being a "political philosopher".
"Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America."
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Promises are cheap.
Social mobility is higher in most of Northern Europe than it is in this country.
Social mobility is DROPPING in this country and has been doing so for years.
93% of the increase in per capita income has gone to the top 1%.
Sowell is full of crap.
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In most places, Black people are turned away from renting in places other than the ghettos.
Based on what?? Because they don't have the financial means? That would apply to anyone, not just blacks
Chinese, in this country, rarely encounter this problem.
Because they do? Which also doesn't refute the notion that various races can CHOOSE to glum together
And Thomas Sowell is the official Black hack, and not even close to being a "political philosopher"....Sowell is full of crap.
Your 99% history of erroneous claims (such as Obamacare is a mere 1000 pages) is duley noted
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Promises are cheap.
true Social mobility is higher in most of Northern Europe than it is in this country.
Sounds unliklySocial mobility is DROPPING in this country and has been doing so for years.
How is this measured? Is it not a result of tax policy as it is?
93% of the increase in per capita income has gone to the top 1%.
I didn't know that we had had any increase in per capita income at all in the last three years, if there has been an increase what does it amount to?
Sowell is full of crap.
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Based on what?? Because they don't have the financial means? That would apply to anyone, not just blacks
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Based on the landlord's conclusion that the prospective tenet calling on the phone has a Balck accent or a Black name (Ebony, Leroy, Lamar, Levon, Shanequa, Keisha) and so forth.
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That would be against the law. So, since you're not presenting any series of lawsuits that are making this claim, I think we can safely deduce just how wrong you are again, at the claim of how Blacks can't move out of black areas, but Chinese can out of Chinese areas
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Based on what?? Because they don't have the financial means? That would apply to anyone, not just blacks
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Based on the landlord's conclusion that the prospective tenet calling on the phone has a Balck accent or a Black name (Ebony, Leroy, Lamar, Levon, Shanequa, Keisha) and so forth.
Landlords are not black?
Some of these assumptions are quaint.
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Are you saying that if a Black landlord rejects a tenet because he is Black, that is not racist?
If a Black cab driver refuses to pick up a Black passenger, is that not also racist?
Why would you say that?
The percentage of Black landlords is quite small, but anyone denying anyone a service based entirely on their race is racist.
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And against the law
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If you have no evidence that you have been denied a rental by a landlord, the EEOC will pay no attention to your complaint at all.
The landlord will not say "I don't rent to n!ggers": he will say "I am sorry, but that unit is rented."
If EEOC calls, the landlord will deny even hearing the complaint. If they send a Black person to pretend to be interested, and the landlord says the unit is rented, the landlord can always say that the party changed their mind, did not pass a credit check, anything.
No one records calls to landlords. No one wears a wire when looking at apartments.
The number of prosecutions for discrimination in housing is a tiny fraction of the actual number of discrimination events that occur.
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Then if there's no evidence of racism, then there's no racism, despite you're all too often wrong claims of such, and the reason for not moving elsewhere, is generally something other......FAR MORE LIKELY, financial ::)