affirmative action?

[Narz]

No, I'm paraphrasing a professor at Stanford in the Psychiatry department who specializes in PTSD.

Maybe he should look at the data regarding mental illness.

You, on the other hand, think you might have some PTSD and are making a general statement about white people based on...... ?

Forget what I said about myself. And based on statistics on other mental illnesses & actual suicide & 31 years of getting to know hundreds of both white & black people. In general I think black people are more mentally/emotionally well adjusted than white people even without factoring in income discrepancy.

 

[Hygro]

Maybe he should look at the data regarding mental illness.


Forget what I said about myself. And based on statistics on other mental illnesses & actual suicide & 31 years of getting to know hundreds of both white & black people. In general I think black people are more mentally/emotionally well adjusted than white people even without factoring in income discrepancy.

Maybe she teaches statistics and methods and is already completed the race on your first lap?

 

[Narz]

Maybe she teaches statistics and methods and is already completed the race on your first lap?

I'm not in a race dude. Just trying to get some actual data out of you instead of an appeal to authority combined with "my friends got a degree, you don't, you lost the race!". But it's not working.

You're the one with the hard task to prove. PSTD is generally correlated with increased risk of depression, anxiety disorders & suicide but you're saying blacks all have PSTD even though they display fewer signs of it. Have at it.

 

[Hygro]

I'm not in a race dude. Just trying to get some actual data out of you instead of an appeal to authority combined with "my friends got a degree, you don't, you lost the race!". But it's not working.

You're the one with the hard task to prove. PSTD is generally correlated with increased risk of depression, anxiety disorders & suicide but you're saying blacks all have PSTD even though they display fewer signs of it. Have at it.

Not saying all black people have PTSD but I am saying that most blacks in America have it to some degree.

I think the real bit of interest here is the line that a bolded. Care to qualify that?


P.S. an appeal to authority is perfectly reasonable with the authority is quite literally the authority. If someone is an expert on something, when you haven't done your scientific research and they have, would you not defer to their authority?

 

[Narz]

Not saying all black people have PTSD but I am saying that most blacks in America have it to some degree.

I'd go further to say all modern citizens have it to some degree. This was postulated by Chellis Glendinning is her book My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization and I agree based on my life experience. I've spent over half a year of my childhood is various hospitals due to depression & bi-polar & people on the outside seem nearly as (often more) f-ed up than people on the inside.

I think the real bit of interest here is the line that a bolded. Care to qualify that?

PTSD usually includes levels of depression, anxiety, hypersensitivity to certain stimuli, and of course higher likelihood of suicide. So a population that has more PTSD would have more of all of those symptoms.

P.S. an appeal to authority is perfectly reasonable with the authority is quite literally the authority. If someone is an expert on something, when you haven't done your scientific research and they have, would you not defer to their authority?

If I had a college professor who was a hard-line conservative who'd done/cherrypicked tons of research to support his claims would I be justified mocking everyone who didn't agree with him?

Tons of people far more educated than me have wildly differing opinions to both each other & me. Personally I find looking at the smorgasbord of fact & opinion myself to decide what to believe rather than jumping on a professor's bandwagon though I know that's popular these days.

There was a really interesting book who's title I forgot. I found it so interesting I typed out a page of it to post on my old NarzWarz forum (which was lost unfortunately). It was about a small case study of 20 black girls from the ghetto & 20 white girls from the suburbs. The black girls had mostly grown up with fairly difficult & often abusive parents whereas the white girls had grown up well off but with distant, repressed & neurotic parents. All of the girls managed to get into college but the black girls were actually mentally healthier, the theory was that even though they'd suffered more in certain moments they were better able to make sense of their experience because they weren't lied to. Their lives contained real suffering but no one ever told them it "wasn't supposed to be that way", whereas the white parents very often said one thing & did another, espoused certain values & then opposed them & in general were dishonest & inconsistent (perhaps without even realizing it).

Obviously this wasn't an empirical study (and I probably didn't describe it well) but I do find that in general that lower-middle-class black people are more honest (to themselves & their kids) than middle-class-white people.

Just my 2 cents in case you were interested in discussion & not just running a race.

 

[Flying Pig]

I'd go further to say all modern citizens have it to some degree. This was postulated by Chellis Glendinning is her book My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization and I agree based on my life experience. I've spent over half a year of my childhood is various hospitals due to depression & bi-polar & people on the outside seem nearly as (often more) f-ed up than people on the inside.

I don't think you've got your terminology right. PTSD follows from a traumatic event and almost always has a 'trigger' event, even when there's a series of events there's generally a 'straw' to break the camel's back. I did have some sort of depression a while ago but that was different because it stemmed from a change in circumstances and - God this sounds cheesy - sudden removal from a very ordered system into a very disordered one. PTSD is the sort of thing that people get coming back from Afghanistan minus an arm, leg or best mate. That's the one where you get flashbacks - if you ever see someone dive to avoid a ball, that's probably why - and people start losing their ability to feel emotions properly.

 

[wolfigor]

I'm going to need to see some rational for different punishments for the same crime before I can possibly understand how that makes sense. I've heard of progressive taxes, but not progressive fines for equal crimes. At this time, I very much disagree with that point.

There are countries where fines are connected to your income: Norway, Finland, Denmark, and (I'm not sure about this one) Sweden.

The record fine awarded to Jussi Salonoja a 27 years very rich Finn (was about 180.000 euros that's over 200K US$)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3477285.stm

Here in Norway fines can reach 10% of your annual income with mandatory jail time for specific offenses (e.g. drink-drive).

From a certain point of view it makes perfectly sense (a 100$ fine would have been peanuts for Mr Salonoja and not a good punishment for his infraction), but I still feel unease about it.

 

[wolfigor]

I was talking not so long ago to a man who was involved with admissions for Oxford University, almost universally regarded as one of the world's top five institutions for higher education. He said that in their admissions they do use a form of affirmative action; if they had two candidates whom they could not seperate except by the fact that one had gone to a grammar school in Cheltenham (foreigners: a very rich town indeed) and one had been to Hovel Road Comprehensive in Peckham (foreigners: don't go there, you'll get stabbed), they will pick the one from Peckham. Their logic, which I think is a good one, was that if you can achieve as much with a poor education as the next man can with a very good one, you clearly have far more natural ability and so will probably be a better student for the university. Furthermore, he said, they have a target of about 70% of their students coming from state schools, but said that considering how 90% of pupils attend them, they weren't going to lower their admissions standards but simply encourage state school pupils to get the application in. That's positive discrimination as a good thing.

This is AA based on census and, mostly, about economic conditions.
You had two candidates that were perfectly equal, and they preferred the one coming from the poor background.
Nothing against this type of AA (I would rather call it good sense).

Unfortunately AA is often implemented in a very different way (especially in UK):
Institutions gets a quota of minorities to hire (e.g. 25% of workforce should be black) and they'll de-facto reserve a part of the jobs to "protected minorities" and have open competition on the rest of the job posts.

This is extremely unfair: it discriminates against those that are "protected minorities" that have more problems to get a job in public institutions, it discriminates between minorities (why Pakistani are a "protected minority" while Moldavians are not?), create resentments against those "protected minorities", and fail to hire the best people for the jobs.

Positive discrimination is a poor substitute for colour blindness.

Fully agree sir.

 

[PeteAtoms]

There are countries where fines are connected to your income: Norway, Finland, Denmark, and (I'm not sure about this one) Sweden.

The record fine awarded to Jussi Salonoja a 27 years very rich Finn (was about 180.000 euros that's over 200K US$)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3477285.stm

Here in Norway fines can reach 10% of your annual income with mandatory jail time for specific offenses (e.g. drink-drive).

From a certain point of view it makes perfectly sense (a 100$ fine would have been peanuts for Mr Salonoja and not a good punishment for his infraction), but I still feel unease about it.

I was looking at fines and punishment as a sort of compensation to society for wrongdoing. If parking illegally can be quantified into a dollar amount for how much this kind of thing "hurts" society, the guilty party should compensate the rest of us in the form of a fine or some other form (community service, rehabilitation, etc).

It doesn't matter whether it is Mr. Moneybags or Mrs. Destitute that litters on the sidewalk, the affect it has on society is equal. This is where I was getting conflicted feelings about a scaled system of fines based on income or net worth.

As a disincentive, I agree that static value fines are a useless tool against the wealthy. But society still gets its compensation.

But I haven't made up my mind on what a fine should be or how it can be both.