Who, exactly, is this "society" you speak of? I would be happy to write him a check.
And people who use a thing should pay for it. We don't take up a collection so I can golf every week, why should we take up a collection so you can feel good about being a parent?
You don't understand. The term "rich" no longer has anything to do with wealth. It's simply a term people throw around that means "someone who I think for some misguided reason should be treated badly or differently".
And to the GP, you will find if you pay attention, that most rich people who's names you know have worked very hard.
We are talking prmarily about free speech. It's telling that you dismiss that as a "libertarian philosophy". No one suggested shooting anyone. The fact that you would equate speeking freely with murder is, again, telling.
"Free Speech" does not promise a captive audience, that is your responsibility. It simply promises free...well, speech.
The bottom line here, is that we are losing freedoms. You are ok with that. That's fine I guess...but it makes me sad, angry, and some other emotions I'm not sure I can describe.
I'm sorry--since when could I rewrite the Constitution without being a member of Congress or winning a Supreme Court case?
First of all, the Supreme Court was never supposed to be able to "rewrite the Constitution". The fact that you even consider that an option is a travesty.
And at no time in the principle of this goverment, was it ever meant that "we", the people, gave up authority. The intent was that we maintained final aurhority. Again, the fact that you believe the other is again a travesty.
and the Supreme Court opinion is the one that counts. They are the authority.
No. You are the opinion that counts. You are the final authority.
Or at least, you used to be, until you gave that up and assigned that right to someone else.
The amendment, as written, is intended to give everyone an equal voice in the eyes of government, not to allow the rich and/or powerful to steamroll the country because they're louder and have flashier commercials.
The amendment, as written, is to ensure that government will not abridge free speech. It's that simple, really.
Everyone is accountable for slander. It's just really, really difficult to prove. There is more to it than I suspect you think.
And incidentally, since it is the written word we are discussing, "libel" (not "slander") would be the appropriate defamation you are referring to.
I'm curious, how come you can be so obsessed by a private group deciding to pull something like that becuase of private reaction, but be (apparently) perfectly O.K. with the fact that the FEC can tell you what you can say?
It's time to quit the petty left/right bullshit. We have more important matters to deal with, like simple freedoms we used to have. Let's deal with those important issues, then get back to our petty bickering.
Exactly. I think so many people have some sort of weird, "left/right", "liberal/conservative" view now, nothing matters except what hurts the other side.
This is about freedom. Fuck politics. We can say what we want. If that one fact is no longer true, then this is no longer the same America I thought I was growing up in.
Except that no government agency should be allowed at all to tell us what to say, wether said in print, person or otherwise. The fact that any agency is allowed to rule on such a thing is disturbing.
I admit, I'm not always up on the latest geek news, but:...is meant to assure 'the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.'
Um...were we not already Free to comment? And if not, what do we need to do to change that?
I'm not really an audiphile, but I plan to get my wife an iPod for Christmas. I don't really like the proprietary format, but with audacity I should be able to convert anything to mp3, as this software has the ability to create an mp3 from anything playing on the soundcard. (I haven't done this yet, I was told about this functionality, so it's possibility not even available). I don't know if this would lose quality, but unless it's obvious, I don't really care. It may be a solution others are interested in looking into.
Others have mentioned burning to a CD and re-ripping, I didn't realize that would be an option, but it sounds like a good backup plan.
Also, no harm in letting everyone know what you can do.
"We know everything about you."
In general, I'm sure the casinos would consider it preferable to advoid cheating, than to catch cheating. In the same way, police will often patrol an area that might be more likely to have crime (like a concert) BEFORE any crime is done.
I wonder why beer companies compare themsevles so much to a competitor (especially miller/bud). I don't think it's illegal. It may not be smart as far as adding to name recognition for th other guy...
Thats a myth. He was elected by popular vote to the position of chancellor. He came to control the President's position legally (the legislature voted on it).
That topic was a business abusing it's power over it's employees.
Specifically, the point you were addressing, was the statement made along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing) "companies aren't ALWAYS bad/wrong/etc". That's what the line you quoted was essentially saying.
Is it unreasonable to have read your response as somewhat challenging? I don't think so, and that's the feeling I was left with after reading your post. So, at the least, you are significantly suspicious of companies (at this point). Then I get to the end of your post. You reiterate your distrust of companies, say that companies are at least partially responsible for government corruption (and I don't think it's completely unreasonable to interpret that is saying you believe they are primarily responsible), and demonstrate at least a partial trust/faith in government.
So far, you have indicated:
Companies are corrupt. (power->corruption)
Companies are not to be trusted, at least as a general rule, I can still believe there may be exceptions.
Companies need to be carefully watched/regulated.
Governments deserve at least some degree of trust
That I think is a very fair summary of your feelings as demonstrated by your post. I commented on my thought about that. It was short, and I didn't get into a discourse on what I thought was wrong. Of course, that single post can't possbily represent your entire social/political view, I realize that.
But let's go on.
I think your next post is of particular interest. You object first to me saying you think government is "good". Perhaps I overstated that, but allow me to try and describe why your post gave that impression. Based on your initial post, it's not a matter of whether you addressed a distrust of government. I realize the post was mostly about the behavior of business. If you hadn't mentioned government at all, I wouldn't have responded. The thing is, when you did mention government, it was in the context of an explicit trust (lot of trust/little bit of trust?) and was specifically delivered in contrast to business (and you were clearly distrustfull of that). I summarized that sentiment by making a comment essentially saying "company bad/gov. good", perhaps an oversimplification, but at worst that's all it was. You then indicate that government could be corrupt already "for other reasons". Fair enough. Especially given my oversimplification. However, the last part of this post is what I thought was most provoking:
...difference...between large organizations who's stated goal is to make money and large organizations whose stated goal is to serve the will of the people...
Now, you started off this post demonstrating that you DON'T inherently trust government, yet finished up by, in fact, demonstrating an inherent trust of government (at least, relative to your feelings about business), making the statements in the beggining of that post somewhat suspect. (which helped lead to my comment about backpeddling later on)
I'll stop about this. Hopefully you can see it's why it appears you consider gov. > business, for whatever that may mean to you. Attempts to later demonstrate distrust of government seemed suspect, hence the backpeddling comment. Perhaps I completly read you wrong.
Not that it really matters I suppose. Millions of people out there are so polarized one way or the other nothing will ever change.
Have you ever noticed that no matter what issue people have (anti welfare, pro welfare, lower taxes, increase taxes...) they almost always look to the government for the answer? The funniest thing about that, is even among people that claim in many cases to want less government, that sentiment only applies to issues they don't really care about. I would speculate that probably most people have said at one time or another that govenment "has gone too far" or "overstepped it's bounds" or something similar. And yet almost anyone you find wi
this implies that, in your opinion, power does in fact corrupt. But I'm sure you will claim it DOES NOT imply that, since you didn't explicitly make the statement that "power does corrupt."
Your psychic ability to see the future is as poor as your mind reading...
My statement was sarcasm. Much like "...and governments are infallible organizations that always work perfectly...", sorry if that was unclear.
Again, this one is all yours. I never said nor implied this. In fact I implied otherwise by saying that governments 'theoretically' act in the best interests of the people, thus implying that in reality they do not.
I know, I specifically addressed that.
I also made a great deal of explicit statements about how governments and corporations both have similar problems with corruption and can exacerbate one another's problems.
So far, most of our debate has been about the meaning of your initial post (or rather, the post of yours that I initially responded to, I'm not sure if you had a post before that). Nowhere in that post did you make any such statement.
Your intial post only ever contained sentiment that governments protect people (barring interference from companies) and that greedy companies will only try to take advantage of peopel (barring interference from "the people", which I assume are supposed to be represented by government).
Even if I may be exaggerating the sentiment presented in the initial post (and I'm not sure that I am), I'm not sure how you think anyone could infer anything other than the idea that you clearly have a whole lot more faith in government than you do in private companies.
You asked, Have you ever heard the phrase, "power corrupts?"
Of course, this implies that, in your opinion, power does in fact corrupt. But I'm sure you will claim it DOES NOT imply that, since you didn't explicitly make the statement that "power does corrupt." You also point out that corporations have significant amounts of power, a point that I won't disgree with, and imply from that then that since power corrupts, and corporations have power, corporations tend to be corrupt.
You say: Theoretically the government acts in the best interests of the people.... When people use the word "theoretically" in that context, that usually means we are to expect an exception to the rule soon. That's perfectly reasonable, and like any person raised speaking the English language, you follow suit with the exception to this rule:
...large companies have significant influence over the government... and reiterating later...have also been able to corrupt the government to the detriment of the individual...
So, barring meddling by "large companies", the government would apparently act in the best interest of "the people".
Summary: Employers/corporations/large-companies generally tend to be corrupt as a result of their power (barring outside influence, i.e. "regulation") while governments, despite your assertion that "power corrupts", and the undisputable fact that government has more power than a single corporation, "act in the best interest of the people", barring outside influence (i.e. meddling corrupting corporations).
That's all flexible. I'm not sure why people so frequently think ALL answers have to be answered before anything happens. And it only seems to apply to economic models. If we applied that attitude to everything else, we'd still be living in the stone age.
But to try and answer your question, it depends. Maybe individuals could buy insurance. Maybe salaries would increase a bit to compensate...maybe a thousand other possibilities that I haven't thought of and never will think of.
Please point our where I made this assertion in my post. It's called a straw man argument.
It was implied. Or at least it was implied that corporations in general are inherently more evil than governments in general. Which is weird because the source of "evil" by your reasoning is "amount of power". Clearly governments have more power, so I would think that if evil is proportional to power (which you do clearly state), then governments are more evil. But the only time you mention government, is in the context of government being a victim of "corruption." Saying that corporation are able to corrupt the government, implies that:
a) The government would not have otherwise been corrupt.
b) The corruption was done without the consent of government.
And a staw man argument is only a straw man argument if I made up some assertion or position and represent it as yours. I certainly represented the position of corporations being inherently evil/dangerous to regular people and governments being inherently good/protecting of regular people as your postion. However, I didn't not make it up. It's pretty clear by your post that you consider most corruption in government to be the fault of corporations, and despite what you say now, that governments are otherwise corruptionless (or close to it).
There is a difference, however, between large organizations who's stated goal is to make money and large organizations whose stated goal is to serve the will of the people, don't you think?
I think stated goals mean crap. It's perfectly possible to make money without hurting lots of people. In fact, I would say in most cases where people make money, they are doing it by HELPING people in some manner. On the other hand, Hitler was supporting the will of the people. But that was a pretty evil organization, don't you think?
Perhaps there is no physical reason for black people excelling in Bball, but maybe there is a genetically physical reason.
That statement seems condradictory to me.
In many cases, someone making such a claim would be considered racist. Part of (the intent of) my entire post was directed at considering the possibility that an honorable person could come to a conclusion that there may be a genetic/physical reason for the glut of top, black athletes. Reading it again, that statement does sound bad. Basically, I was just setting up that it's not unreasonable (or racist or evil) to speculate that a certain group of people may be disproportionatly better (or worse) at something than the rest of the world because of genetic reasons. It either "is" or "isn't" (the case).
I certainly hope that you're not trying to make inferences about the genetics of a general population based on such a small subset of the population.
I'm taking a position that, until there is some conclusive study of the matter (there may be, I'm not aware of any and I'm not really sure it's important enough to warrant serious scientific study) it is certainly resonable to speculate about the propensity of certain traits within a certin population of people based on what we see everyday.
About 25% of black people live below the poverty line.
Ok, lets do some rough math for a bit. I think the total population of the US is about 270-280M. I'll go with 280. Black people are 12.7 percent of that. That article says (I'm rounding up) 36M people are below the poverty line. So: .127 * 280 = 35,560,000 Total Black People
25% of that is 8.89M poor black people.
That means 8.89/36 = 24.6% of poor people are black.
For the NBA, according to this article, 77% of NBA players are black (I had a bit of a hard time finding something more official). Further, I have a bit of a problem with your NCAA numbers. Not that I think they are technically wrong, but remember, we are talking about top athletes. Saying 40% of bball players are black, doesn't really take into consideration that number includes lots of third rate players. Just watch a Division 1A game sometime. The percentage of top bball athletes that are black is clearly higher than the 40% number would indicate. Hopefully the number above relating to the NBA would support that.
Having said all that, I think this is where we start to diverge. First, I wouldn't go as far as saying "There are lots of other possibilities". There are certainly other possiblities, I addressed one or two, but "lots"? Poverty certainly seems like a good candidate, and let me be clear, I believe that IS an influential factor, I just don't think it explains the entire phenomenon. Look above, of all poor people (who would all presumably be driven to get out of poverty), only 25% are black, yet they make up 77% of NBA players (one of the best paying jobs in the world you can get, and therefore a job anyone would desire). Are black people disproportionally interested in bball? Probably that too. I'm sure that has at least something to do with why there aren't very many black hockey players. But basketball is a pretty common sport. There are lots and lots of fans both black and white, so that would seem to me (again, this is all subjective) to have at best a minimal affect.
Bottom line, at this point it just gets subjective. I take the position that genetics is probably a factor, or it's at least worth consideration, along with social factors, economic factors, and maybe others. You apparently take the position that it has little or no impact. Also reasonable.
//Start real issue here//
To me, the issue of whether genetics actually plays a role in this particular thing is not very important, although it is interesting. What I initially took exception with, was the
Basically, large companies have proven themselves untrustworthy (in general) and dangerous to the well being and rights of the individual. They have also been able to corrupt the government to the detriment of the individual.
Wow. It's amazing people think this way, not surprising, but amazing. "Power corrupts, corporations have power over employees, therefore they are evil". However, government, with even more "power" than any corporation could hope for, is good. They protect us. And in cases where they are corrupt, it's because "...[corporations] have been able to corrupt the government".
I'm not sure why I ever wonder how our current political environment has remained for so long. Thanks for the reminder.
Slashdot Mirror
Who, exactly, is this "society" you speak of? I would be happy to write him a check. And people who use a thing should pay for it. We don't take up a collection so I can golf every week, why should we take up a collection so you can feel good about being a parent?
You don't understand. The term "rich" no longer has anything to do with wealth. It's simply a term people throw around that means "someone who I think for some misguided reason should be treated badly or differently".
And to the GP, you will find if you pay attention, that most rich people who's names you know have worked very hard.
This particular virus thrives in Twinkie cream.
No they won't. It will become accepted, and pretty soon geeks will defend it as a necessary service the government provides.
We are talking prmarily about free speech. It's telling that you dismiss that as a "libertarian philosophy". No one suggested shooting anyone. The fact that you would equate speeking freely with murder is, again, telling.
"Free Speech" does not promise a captive audience, that is your responsibility. It simply promises free...well, speech.
The bottom line here, is that we are losing freedoms. You are ok with that. That's fine I guess...but it makes me sad, angry, and some other emotions I'm not sure I can describe.
I'm sorry--since when could I rewrite the Constitution without being a member of Congress or winning a Supreme Court case?
First of all, the Supreme Court was never supposed to be able to "rewrite the Constitution". The fact that you even consider that an option is a travesty.
And at no time in the principle of this goverment, was it ever meant that "we", the people, gave up authority. The intent was that we maintained final aurhority. Again, the fact that you believe the other is again a travesty.
and the Supreme Court opinion is the one that counts. They are the authority.
No. You are the opinion that counts. You are the final authority.
Or at least, you used to be, until you gave that up and assigned that right to someone else.
The amendment, as written, is intended to give everyone an equal voice in the eyes of government, not to allow the rich and/or powerful to steamroll the country because they're louder and have flashier commercials.
The amendment, as written, is to ensure that government will not abridge free speech. It's that simple, really.
Everyone is accountable for slander. It's just really, really difficult to prove. There is more to it than I suspect you think. And incidentally, since it is the written word we are discussing, "libel" (not "slander") would be the appropriate defamation you are referring to.
And after all that crap you typed, free people become criminals.
Congratulations. You win.
I'm curious, how come you can be so obsessed by a private group deciding to pull something like that becuase of private reaction, but be (apparently) perfectly O.K. with the fact that the FEC can tell you what you can say?
It's time to quit the petty left/right bullshit. We have more important matters to deal with, like simple freedoms we used to have. Let's deal with those important issues, then get back to our petty bickering.
Thanks.
Exactly. I think so many people have some sort of weird, "left/right", "liberal/conservative" view now, nothing matters except what hurts the other side.
This is about freedom. Fuck politics. We can say what we want. If that one fact is no longer true, then this is no longer the same America I thought I was growing up in.
Except that no government agency should be allowed at all to tell us what to say, wether said in print, person or otherwise. The fact that any agency is allowed to rule on such a thing is disturbing.
I admit, I'm not always up on the latest geek news, but: ...is meant to assure 'the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.'
Um...were we not already Free to comment? And if not, what do we need to do to change that?
I'm not really an audiphile, but I plan to get my wife an iPod for Christmas. I don't really like the proprietary format, but with audacity I should be able to convert anything to mp3, as this software has the ability to create an mp3 from anything playing on the soundcard. (I haven't done this yet, I was told about this functionality, so it's possibility not even available). I don't know if this would lose quality, but unless it's obvious, I don't really care. It may be a solution others are interested in looking into.
Others have mentioned burning to a CD and re-ripping, I didn't realize that would be an option, but it sounds like a good backup plan.
Oh snap!! You got him there. Way to go!
(And he said MP3 was the successor to cd audio.)
Also, no harm in letting everyone know what you can do.
"We know everything about you."
In general, I'm sure the casinos would consider it preferable to advoid cheating, than to catch cheating. In the same way, police will often patrol an area that might be more likely to have crime (like a concert) BEFORE any crime is done.
An ounce of prevention...
I wonder why beer companies compare themsevles so much to a competitor (especially miller/bud). I don't think it's illegal. It may not be smart as far as adding to name recognition for th other guy...
Thats a myth. He was elected by popular vote to the position of chancellor. He came to control the President's position legally (the legislature voted on it).
That topic was a business abusing it's power over it's employees.
...difference...between large organizations who's stated goal is to make money and large organizations whose stated goal is to serve the will of the people...
Specifically, the point you were addressing, was the statement made along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing) "companies aren't ALWAYS bad/wrong/etc". That's what the line you quoted was essentially saying.
Is it unreasonable to have read your response as somewhat challenging? I don't think so, and that's the feeling I was left with after reading your post. So, at the least, you are significantly suspicious of companies (at this point). Then I get to the end of your post. You reiterate your distrust of companies, say that companies are at least partially responsible for government corruption (and I don't think it's completely unreasonable to interpret that is saying you believe they are primarily responsible), and demonstrate at least a partial trust/faith in government.
So far, you have indicated: Companies are corrupt. (power->corruption)
Companies are not to be trusted, at least as a general rule, I can still believe there may be exceptions.
Companies need to be carefully watched/regulated.
Governments deserve at least some degree of trust
That I think is a very fair summary of your feelings as demonstrated by your post. I commented on my thought about that. It was short, and I didn't get into a discourse on what I thought was wrong. Of course, that single post can't possbily represent your entire social/political view, I realize that.
But let's go on.
I think your next post is of particular interest. You object first to me saying you think government is "good". Perhaps I overstated that, but allow me to try and describe why your post gave that impression. Based on your initial post, it's not a matter of whether you addressed a distrust of government. I realize the post was mostly about the behavior of business. If you hadn't mentioned government at all, I wouldn't have responded. The thing is, when you did mention government, it was in the context of an explicit trust (lot of trust/little bit of trust?) and was specifically delivered in contrast to business (and you were clearly distrustfull of that). I summarized that sentiment by making a comment essentially saying "company bad/gov. good", perhaps an oversimplification, but at worst that's all it was. You then indicate that government could be corrupt already "for other reasons". Fair enough. Especially given my oversimplification. However, the last part of this post is what I thought was most provoking:
Now, you started off this post demonstrating that you DON'T inherently trust government, yet finished up by, in fact, demonstrating an inherent trust of government (at least, relative to your feelings about business), making the statements in the beggining of that post somewhat suspect. (which helped lead to my comment about backpeddling later on)
I'll stop about this. Hopefully you can see it's why it appears you consider gov. > business, for whatever that may mean to you. Attempts to later demonstrate distrust of government seemed suspect, hence the backpeddling comment. Perhaps I completly read you wrong.
Not that it really matters I suppose. Millions of people out there are so polarized one way or the other nothing will ever change.
Have you ever noticed that no matter what issue people have (anti welfare, pro welfare, lower taxes, increase taxes...) they almost always look to the government for the answer? The funniest thing about that, is even among people that claim in many cases to want less government, that sentiment only applies to issues they don't really care about. I would speculate that probably most people have said at one time or another that govenment "has gone too far" or "overstepped it's bounds" or something similar. And yet almost anyone you find wi
this implies that, in your opinion, power does in fact corrupt. But I'm sure you will claim it DOES NOT imply that, since you didn't explicitly make the statement that "power does corrupt."
Your psychic ability to see the future is as poor as your mind reading...
My statement was sarcasm. Much like "...and governments are infallible organizations that always work perfectly...", sorry if that was unclear.
Again, this one is all yours. I never said nor implied this. In fact I implied otherwise by saying that governments 'theoretically' act in the best interests of the people, thus implying that in reality they do not.
I know, I specifically addressed that.
I also made a great deal of explicit statements about how governments and corporations both have similar problems with corruption and can exacerbate one another's problems.
So far, most of our debate has been about the meaning of your initial post (or rather, the post of yours that I initially responded to, I'm not sure if you had a post before that). Nowhere in that post did you make any such statement.
Your intial post only ever contained sentiment that governments protect people (barring interference from companies) and that greedy companies will only try to take advantage of peopel (barring interference from "the people", which I assume are supposed to be represented by government).
Even if I may be exaggerating the sentiment presented in the initial post (and I'm not sure that I am), I'm not sure how you think anyone could infer anything other than the idea that you clearly have a whole lot more faith in government than you do in private companies.
evil, greedy, bad, corrupt, not-trustworthy...whatever. You're backpeddling.
...large companies have significant influence over the government... and reiterating later ...have also been able to corrupt the government to the detriment of the individual...
You asked, Have you ever heard the phrase, "power corrupts?"
Of course, this implies that, in your opinion, power does in fact corrupt. But I'm sure you will claim it DOES NOT imply that, since you didn't explicitly make the statement that "power does corrupt." You also point out that corporations have significant amounts of power, a point that I won't disgree with, and imply from that then that since power corrupts, and corporations have power, corporations tend to be corrupt.
You say: Theoretically the government acts in the best interests of the people.... When people use the word "theoretically" in that context, that usually means we are to expect an exception to the rule soon. That's perfectly reasonable, and like any person raised speaking the English language, you follow suit with the exception to this rule:
So, barring meddling by "large companies", the government would apparently act in the best interest of "the people".
Summary: Employers/corporations/large-companies generally tend to be corrupt as a result of their power (barring outside influence, i.e. "regulation") while governments, despite your assertion that "power corrupts", and the undisputable fact that government has more power than a single corporation, "act in the best interest of the people", barring outside influence (i.e. meddling corrupting corporations).
That's all flexible. I'm not sure why people so frequently think ALL answers have to be answered before anything happens. And it only seems to apply to economic models. If we applied that attitude to everything else, we'd still be living in the stone age.
But to try and answer your question, it depends. Maybe individuals could buy insurance. Maybe salaries would increase a bit to compensate...maybe a thousand other possibilities that I haven't thought of and never will think of.
Please point our where I made this assertion in my post. It's called a straw man argument.
It was implied. Or at least it was implied that corporations in general are inherently more evil than governments in general. Which is weird because the source of "evil" by your reasoning is "amount of power". Clearly governments have more power, so I would think that if evil is proportional to power (which you do clearly state), then governments are more evil. But the only time you mention government, is in the context of government being a victim of "corruption." Saying that corporation are able to corrupt the government, implies that:
a) The government would not have otherwise been corrupt.
b) The corruption was done without the consent of government.
And a staw man argument is only a straw man argument if I made up some assertion or position and represent it as yours. I certainly represented the position of corporations being inherently evil/dangerous to regular people and governments being inherently good/protecting of regular people as your postion. However, I didn't not make it up. It's pretty clear by your post that you consider most corruption in government to be the fault of corporations, and despite what you say now, that governments are otherwise corruptionless (or close to it).
There is a difference, however, between large organizations who's stated goal is to make money and large organizations whose stated goal is to serve the will of the people, don't you think?
I think stated goals mean crap. It's perfectly possible to make money without hurting lots of people. In fact, I would say in most cases where people make money, they are doing it by HELPING people in some manner. On the other hand, Hitler was supporting the will of the people. But that was a pretty evil organization, don't you think?
Perhaps there is no physical reason for black people excelling in Bball, but maybe there is a genetically physical reason.
.127 * 280 = 35,560,000 Total Black People
//Start real issue here//
That statement seems condradictory to me.
In many cases, someone making such a claim would be considered racist. Part of (the intent of) my entire post was directed at considering the possibility that an honorable person could come to a conclusion that there may be a genetic/physical reason for the glut of top, black athletes. Reading it again, that statement does sound bad. Basically, I was just setting up that it's not unreasonable (or racist or evil) to speculate that a certain group of people may be disproportionatly better (or worse) at something than the rest of the world because of genetic reasons. It either "is" or "isn't" (the case).
I certainly hope that you're not trying to make inferences about the genetics of a general population based on such a small subset of the population.
I'm taking a position that, until there is some conclusive study of the matter (there may be, I'm not aware of any and I'm not really sure it's important enough to warrant serious scientific study) it is certainly resonable to speculate about the propensity of certain traits within a certin population of people based on what we see everyday.
About 25% of black people live below the poverty line.
Ok, lets do some rough math for a bit. I think the total population of the US is about 270-280M. I'll go with 280. Black people are 12.7 percent of that. That article says (I'm rounding up) 36M people are below the poverty line. So:
25% of that is 8.89M poor black people.
That means 8.89/36 = 24.6% of poor people are black.
For the NBA, according to this article, 77% of NBA players are black (I had a bit of a hard time finding something more official). Further, I have a bit of a problem with your NCAA numbers. Not that I think they are technically wrong, but remember, we are talking about top athletes. Saying 40% of bball players are black, doesn't really take into consideration that number includes lots of third rate players. Just watch a Division 1A game sometime. The percentage of top bball athletes that are black is clearly higher than the 40% number would indicate. Hopefully the number above relating to the NBA would support that.
Having said all that, I think this is where we start to diverge. First, I wouldn't go as far as saying "There are lots of other possibilities". There are certainly other possiblities, I addressed one or two, but "lots"? Poverty certainly seems like a good candidate, and let me be clear, I believe that IS an influential factor, I just don't think it explains the entire phenomenon. Look above, of all poor people (who would all presumably be driven to get out of poverty), only 25% are black, yet they make up 77% of NBA players (one of the best paying jobs in the world you can get, and therefore a job anyone would desire). Are black people disproportionally interested in bball? Probably that too. I'm sure that has at least something to do with why there aren't very many black hockey players. But basketball is a pretty common sport. There are lots and lots of fans both black and white, so that would seem to me (again, this is all subjective) to have at best a minimal affect.
Bottom line, at this point it just gets subjective. I take the position that genetics is probably a factor, or it's at least worth consideration, along with social factors, economic factors, and maybe others. You apparently take the position that it has little or no impact. Also reasonable.
To me, the issue of whether genetics actually plays a role in this particular thing is not very important, although it is interesting. What I initially took exception with, was the
Basically, large companies have proven themselves untrustworthy (in general) and dangerous to the well being and rights of the individual. They have also been able to corrupt the government to the detriment of the individual.
Wow. It's amazing people think this way, not surprising, but amazing. "Power corrupts, corporations have power over employees, therefore they are evil". However, government, with even more "power" than any corporation could hope for, is good. They protect us. And in cases where they are corrupt, it's because "...[corporations] have been able to corrupt the government".
I'm not sure why I ever wonder how our current political environment has remained for so long. Thanks for the reminder.