<div dir="ltr">Marshall Plan black neighborhoods.<div><br></div><div>"I am going to tap out of the group then I will engage in the discussion" - Art</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, May 3, 2023 at 9:57 AM Arthur Bruce <<a href="mailto:lordbruce42@proton.me">lordbruce42@proton.me</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><span style="line-height:1.5">I love Bryce like a brother and even though we sometimes mis-align in what we perceive as the most salient aspect in a matter I find him very rarely boring, frequently brilliant, at all times exceeding my expectations, as high as they are. What is more, he has forgiven me the far too many ways in which I have sinned against him. We have worked through uncountable disgruntlements yet his unique personality draws me inexorably to him. It pains me, therefore, to forgo any opportunity to spend time in his company and yet I really must, for the sake of my own soul, decline to participate in any further bar discussions for my mental health. I already have other people in my life that provide me all the drama I need. <br><br>Stuart, it really has been a pleasure to know you and come to know your unique lifestyle. I appreciate your deeply developed worldview -- I agree with quite a bit, and reject, for myself, great swaths of it. But, again, I am pleased that you think deeply about so many things, and I appreciate so much about how you communicate, however frustrated I unfairly have become all too often.<br><br>Mi Estimado Arturo -- Lo siento tu y yo somos antipatico -- I wish you the best, but I do not appreciate the person you think I am -- I do not appreciate the academic arrogance -- maybe in the end, whatever it is, I am fairly certain we bring out the worst in each other. I think you mentioned PTSD, dittos man. Complete dittos.<br><br>I am confident I have no points of view that are not covered by Bryce and/or Stuart, and it does no good to have a three against one situation. Rejecting a worldview, obviously, does not mean rejecting the person. I reject many worldviews, including the worldview that some people have such deep gnosis that they are immune from committing logical fallacies, whereas everything their "opponents" utter are ostentatiously festooned with such obvious blundering stupidities that they can arrogantly claim to be "tapped out." The technical term for such worldviews are "pseudo-intellectual." Again, Stuart and Bryce can provide the needed counterweight.<br><br>This is a brilliant article by way of introduction to the "ideas so stupid..." rubric, going back to Orwell<br><br><span><a rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" href="https://www.redbluffdailynews.com/2021/10/18/ideas-so-stupid-only-intellectuals/" target="_blank">https://www.redbluffdailynews.com/2021/10/18/ideas-so-stupid-only-intellectuals/</a></span><br><br>This is attack on the foundational source of the ideas, such as "systemic racism" or gender-fluidness<br><br>=================================================================================<br><br><br>"Now I see it is hard for you, as a group, to acknowledge facts for events in hindsight. Tilting the scales back to balance in favor of the disenfranchised is not favoritism, but justice."<br></span><br>I am not interested in being lumped into a bucket that you have some odd fetish to put me/us into. There is simply no verisimilitude in your claim that we dispute facts or events. That is bizarre that you claim that when we specifically acknowledge whatever actual facts you adduce. What is at issue, and I would prefer you do your own research by reading Thomas Sowell, simply because I cannot improve on his reasoning. He is very clear, and all my ideas are from him. I cannot do justice to the totally of his lifelong research into the topic of discrimination. But basically, and you don't have to buy this, because you can have your own frame of reference, but ...<br><br>The crux of his issue is whatever you adduce as evidence of systemic racism, and therefore whatever steps you take to eliminate that systemic racism results in it turning out that there was no racism actually involved despite there perhaps seeming to have been. To wit, when redlining is removed they find that black default rates are disproportionate to white default rates. Which is to say that the red lines did not in fact discriminate incorrectly. Restrictive covenants are always evil when based on such an idiotic concept of "race." How much more clear do we have to be. What is disagreed is that because something ackowledgedly bad happened in the past I must be punished now. Or some group now must be advantaged now, under some theory that they were disadvantaged in the past. Affirmative action, is fine, when used to redress provable harms individuals have suffered, specific people passed over for promotion unfairly. Group outcomes is not proof of anything -- never have the outcomes for groups been "equal." The whole concept of disenfranchisement or marginalization is not a conversation I want to have -- mostly because it offends you that we do not comport to your preferred paradigm. And mainly because it is too complex to craft any actual remedy that does not have unintended side-effects and even more greatly that you are too keen to put us in thought-boxes and beat us up with your tendentious view of facts and logic. Mainly because you have such ideas that necessitate an "impossible conversations" approach and this takes a coordinated effort that is difficult without planning and frankly I have no interest in convincing anyone of anything<br><br><span><a rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Have-Impossible-Conversations-Practical/dp/0738285323" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/How-Have-Impossible-Conversations-Practical/dp/0738285323</a></span><br><br><br><br><br>Here are some starter Sowell references. Do not read them for me, read them for your own edification of the existence of a man deeply revered, of a man who started in impoverished circumstances, as a Marxist, and then via his own intellect transcended that blinkered framework. <br><br><span><a rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ivf9jrXGAY&list=PLEbhOtC9klbCr0iN2ANJbaV477B0eSpc6&index=24&t=0s" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ivf9jrXGAY&list=PLEbhOtC9klbCr0iN2ANJbaV477B0eSpc6&index=24&t=0s</a></span></div><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><br><br>This is not a deep analysis, but it is a consumer grade synopsis based on his profound 40+ year study of discrimination around the world. </div><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><span><a rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/07/bankrupt-exploiters-thomas-sowell/" target="_blank">https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/07/bankrupt-exploiters-thomas-sowell/</a></span><br><br></div><span style="font:400 1.4375em/1.34783 "Open Sans",sans-serif;margin:0.625em auto 0.125em;display:block;max-width:620px"></span><span>Isn't it funny how banks have fallen prey to their own "predatory" lending?</span><span style="font-size:0.875rem">In one of those front-page editorials disguised as “news” stories, the New York Times blames “the lucrative lending practices” of banks and other financial institutions for helping create the current financial crisis of millions of borrowers and of the financial system in general.</span><div><br></div><div><span>It must take either a willful determination to believe whatever they want to believe or a cynical desire to propagandize their readers for the New York Times to call “lucrative” the lending practices that have caused many lenders to lose millions of dollars, some to lose billions and some to go bankrupt.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Blaming the lenders is the party line of Congressional Democrats as well. What we need is more government regulation of lenders, they say, to protect the innocent borrowers from “predatory” lending practices.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Before going further down that road, it may be useful to look back at what got us into this mess in the first place.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>It was not that many years ago when there was moral outrage ringing throughout the media because lenders were reluctant to lend in certain neighborhoods and because banks did not approve mortgage loan applications from blacks as often as they approved mortgage loan applications from whites.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>All this was an opening salvo in a campaign to get Congress to pass laws forcing lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to and in places where they would not otherwise put their money.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>The practice of not lending in some neighborhoods was demonized as “redlining” and the fact that minority applicants were approved for mortgages only 72 percent of the time, while whites were approved 89 percent, was called “overwhelming” evidence of discrimination by the Washington Post.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Some people are more easily overwhelmed than others, especially when they find statistics that seem to fit their preconceptions. But if we do what politicians and the media seldom bother to do — stop and think — an entirely different picture emerges.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>In our own personal lives, common sense leads us to avoid some neighborhoods. If you want to call that “redlining,” so be it. But places where it is dangerous to go are often also places where it is dangerous to send your money.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>As for racial differences in mortgage loan application approval rates, that does not tell you much if you are comparing apples and oranges. Income, credit history, and net worth are just some of the things that are very different from one group to another.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>More important, in the same ways that blacks differ from whites, whites differ from Asian Americans. The fact that whites are turned down for conventional mortgage loans, and resort to subprime loans, more often than Asian Americans do is seldom reported in “news” stories about lending practices, even though such data are readily available.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Shocking as it may be to some, lenders are in the business of making money, and they don’t much care whose money it is, so long as they get paid.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Politicians, on the other hand, are in the business of getting votes, and they don’t much care whose votes it is — or what they have to say or do in order to get those votes.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>It was government intervention in the financial markets, which is now supposed to save the situation, that created the problem in the first place.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Laws and regulations pressured lending institutions to lend to people that they were not lending to, given the economic realities. The Community Reinvestment Act forced them to lend in places where they did not want to send their money, and where neither they nor the politicians wanted to walk.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Now that this whole situation has blown up in everybody’s face, the government intervention that brought on this disaster in the first place is supposed to save the day.</span></div><div><br></div><span>Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others — regardless of what the facts may be. Politicians get away with this to the extent that we gullibly accept their words and look to them as political messiahs.</span><div style="font-family:"Open Sans",sans-serif;font-size:16px;margin:0px auto;padding:15px 0px;max-width:620px;display:flex"><div style="margin:0px 0px 2rem"><p style="line-height:1.5;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:1.1875rem;margin:0px 0px 1.25rem;color:rgb(45,45,45)"></p></div></div><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px"><div>
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On Saturday, April 22nd, 2023 at 12:16 PM, Arturo Davila Andino <<a href="mailto:davand.art@gmail.com" target="_blank">davand.art@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br>
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<div dir="ltr"><div>I think you are taking a reductionist interpretation of what I wrote.</div><div><br></div><div>Since I don't know wether your stance in willfully in mistaking my argument, I am writing short response.</div><div><br></div><div>Redlining was explicitly racist. No amount of correlation between race and income should be a basis to justify discrimination. My brother, we are even talking about loans at the time of the depression; everyone was poor. The "law" was very clear and the society was sick (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#:~:text=This%20%22restrictive%20covenant%22%20stated%20in%20capital%20letters%20and%20bold%20type%20that%20the%20house%20could%20not%20%22be%20used%20or%20occupied%20by%20any%20person%20other%20than%20members%20of%20the%20Caucasian%20race.%22%5B12%5D" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#:~:text=This%20%22restrictive%20covenant%22%20stated%20in%20capital%20letters%20and%20bold%20type%20that%20the%20house%20could%20not%20%22be%20used%20or%20occupied%20by%20any%20person%20other%20than%20members%20of%20the%20Caucasian%20race.%22%5B12%5D</a>)<br><br>The Executive Order 9066 was very clear as well for taking the rights of american citizens when they needed those rights the most.</div><div><br></div><div>Now I see it is hard for you, as a group, to acknowledge facts for events in hindsight. Tilting the scales back to balance in favor of the disenfranchised is not favoritism, but justice.</div><div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_attr" dir="ltr">On Mon, Apr 17, 2023 at 5:20 PM Stuart D Gathman <<a href="mailto:stuart@gathman.org" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">stuart@gathman.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote">On Thu, 23 Feb 2023, Arturo Davila Andino wrote:<br>
<br>
> I think we all agree that rules within a society are entirely fabricated and<br>
<br>
Strongly disagree. Rules within a society approximate reality - the<br>
less accurate, the sicker the society.<br>
<br>
> One example of this is the practice of redlining, which was used by the<br>
> Federal Housing Administration in the mid-20th century to deny loans to<br>
> people in certain areas, primarily Black neighborhoods. This practice helped<br>
<br>
On the other hand, making loans to people who couldn't afford them <br>
led to the crash of the mortgage system.<br>
<br>
> discrimination and marginalization. (I am not even getting started<br>
> on Internment of Japanese Americans in 1942)<br>
<br>
You should, as that was blatantly unconstitutional.<br>
<br>
> A controlling tactic we humans use to subjugate people is using facts and<br>
> ignoring their feelings. By focusing on objective facts and ignoring the<br>
<br>
Reality has a way of smacking people who ignore facts in the face -<br>
without any help from unfeeling people. If someone is truly unaware<br>
of facts (as opposed to willfully ignorant as in Hosea 4:6), it is<br>
kindness to try to inform them, especially if they are in danger.<br>
<br>
> I am not advocating for the elimination of hierarchies or social rules, but<br>
> I will always be a passionate supporter of the disenfranchised. The reason<br>
<br>
Favoritism to the poor is just as wicked as favoritism to the rich<br>
or to the crowd. Exodus 23:3, Leviticus 19:15<br>
<br>
Supporting the disenfranchised with your own time and resources <br>
is a virtue. Stealing other people's time and resources<br>
to do so is wicked. (Note Robin Hood did not steal from the rich,<br>
but was simply returning money literally stolen from the poor at<br>
swordpoint - it wasn't even legally taxed.)_______________________________________________<br>
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