Effectronica posted:

No, dumbass, the point is that if the reparations are to be of the same size, then, given that there are fewer black Americans than white Americans, black Americans would have to contribute more proportionately. Requiring the same amount of money from all people would in turn produce smaller reparations from black Americans than from white Americans. You can't even set up a situation that fits your strawman! You're a loving idiot!

I think the best part is that I'm talking on the level of national governments, which makes this example invalid in any case, and that I'm talking about reparations as a substitute for people admitting that racism is wrong- if people actually acknowledge prejudice is wrong, there's no need for the reparations in this scheme! All you need to do is repent of the works of your hands and be free of having your government make a symbolic apology for your very existence, Europeans!

Liberal_L33t posted:

Amidst this theatrical display of bloodlust, did you ever get around to acknowledging the point that U.N. (and individual western nations) humanitarian aid funds might qualify as a form of reparations? If you were to closely read the texts of the resolutions mandating the funding of organizations that distribute humanitarian aid, I think you would, in fact, find many references to historical European responsibility for colonialism. Why doesn't this qualify?

Liberal_L33t posted:

Since you have already established at length that you consider criticizing religious doctrines to be a form of racism, I'd imagine most Europeans wouldn't be very eager to admit that (what you define as) racism is "wrong", and I can't blame them.

Effectronica posted:

Sure, if you take the position that intent doesn't matter, and if you ignore everything I said because racism destroys your brain, you could argue that. But I am equally justified in ignoring you, because if intent doesn't matter, all posts can be treated as if they were accidentally generated by sitting on your phone. Anyways, instead of sitting on your phone you should sit on a landmine.

Effectronica posted:

Effectronica posted:

No, dumbass, the point is that if the reparations are to be of the same size, then, given that there are fewer black Americans than white Americans, black Americans would have to contribute more proportionately. Requiring the same amount of money from all people would in turn produce smaller reparations from black Americans than from white Americans. You can't even set up a situation that fits your strawman! You're a loving idiot!

I think the best part is that I'm talking on the level of national governments, which makes this example invalid in any case, and that I'm talking about reparations as a substitute for people admitting that racism is wrong- if people actually acknowledge prejudice is wrong, there's no need for the reparations in this scheme! All you need to do is repent of the works of your hands and be free of having your government make a symbolic apology for your very existence, Europeans!

steinrokkan posted:

Look, it doesn't matter if you spend effort and human capital on rectifying past mistakes through humanitarian efforts. The only thing that counts is if you stand up on the highest pedestal you can find and just yell "I'm not racist anymore", that's the only way to actually help.

Office Pig posted:

I'm honestly starting to wonder if this tendency to express increasingly worse ideas with incrementally more baffling posts isn't the result of some horrible stroke, maybe because it's somewhat more optimistic than the probability that you're deliberately trying to antagonize anyone and everyone that you possibly can between probations.

Small Frozen Thing posted:

He mostly just does it in incurably lovely threads in an attempt to get them closed

Tragically, this one seems unusually robust for how incredibly bad it is

steinrokkan posted:

Look, it doesn't matter if you spend effort and human capital on rectifying past mistakes through humanitarian efforts. The only thing that counts is if you stand up on the highest pedestal you can find and just yell "I'm not racist anymore", that's the only way to actually help.

SaltyJesus posted:

hahaha racism on the level of national governments ahahahaha

i didn't meticulously set up an unassailable fortress of an example because your idea is ridiculous and useless on its face. people will more or less universally (outside of literal neo nazis) pay lip service to the idea of racism being wrong and act offended if you accuse them of racism, the story changes completely if you expect them to do something useful about it tho, but your approach solves that by leaving things at useless masquerade of lip service

e: for the record, useful is not throwing arbitrary amounts of money at even more arbitrary recipients

Office Pig posted:

I'm honestly starting to wonder if this tendency to express increasingly worse ideas with incrementally more baffling posts isn't the result of some horrible stroke, maybe because it's somewhat more optimistic than the probability that you're deliberately trying to antagonize anyone and everyone that you possibly can between probations.

SaltyJesus posted:

Yes, I too believe saying "sorry bro, my bad" to a man's son twenty years after stabbing his daddy is cool and good. Your own son can then throw a symbolic twenty bucks at a rando on the street who resembles your victim in the name of reparations.

Precisely because you want reparations for any and all prejudice the idea of reparations at the level of national governments only glosses over so much that it makes the whole idea idiotic. It only makes sense for highly homogeneous nation states or those with a short history and a permanent underclass.

Small Frozen Thing posted:

He mostly just does it in incurably lovely threads in an attempt to get them closed

Tragically, this one seems unusually robust for how incredibly bad it is

Effectronica posted:

Stay on topic, kiddo.

SaltyJesus posted:

Lemme spell it out for you. Throwing a pithy "my bad" at the descendants of the people your people did something terrible to will seem dishonest at best and like taking the piss at worst if you don't take measures to address and make up for the specific wrongs that have been committed. Just like there's a difference between admitting that some behavior is wrong in the abstract and that your own behavior is wrong there's a difference between making a symbolic gesture and attempting to fix what you broke.

SickZip posted:

Did you read his thread on evolution? He's completely genuine and unbelievably stupid and histrionic.

Office Pig posted:

Seeing how this thread's been made all about you, I think I've done pretty well for myself.

SickZip posted:

Did you read his thread on evolution? He's completely genuine and unbelievably stupid and histrionic.

Small Frozen Thing posted:

I talk to him frequently in chat, and he's actually funny and very clever. One of my favorite things about him is how utterly convinced the sad weirdos he riles up are that he's some kind of ur-SJW abomination.

steinrokkan posted:

In that case, ban him for shitposting.

Anyway, Effectronica's posting reminds me of high school debate contests where students yell random sentences as fast as possible with no regard for coherence or actually convincing anybody, in hopes the other party will be overwhelmed by the wall of nonsense hitting them, and will be eliminated because of a technical failing.

SaltyJesus posted:

Reparations for historical wrongs are the only kinds of reparations worth talking about, and the only ones sane people consider. You're hardly gonna pay reparations if you're still busy loving somebody. Maybe stopping the loving is a more important goal then throwing some pity cash their way, that's called adding insult to injury. As soon as you stop they become historical reparations.

Please find me a single journal article in a serious, peer-reviewed academic journal by an IR or discrimination scholar calling for reparations the same way you do.

steinrokkan posted:

In that case, ban him for shitposting.

Small Frozen Thing posted:

Shouldn't you be getting furiously angry about sitcoms in the LP forum right about now?

Effectronica posted:

I don't get how it's OK to wish harm on people some times, but others, it's "shitposting" that must be punished greatly.

steinrokkan posted:

???


Only one thing is against the rules.

SaltyJesus posted:

As for quantification, you have yet to propose how we should determine the amount to be paid by all the people committing thoughtcrime. You have some quantification to do yourself buddy. How should the burden of apology be divided among the nations of Europe? How should the funds be distributed among the victims of their racism? Is it a lump sum or periodic payments and how long do they go for, until racism is completely eliminated? If the latter that doesn't really sound like the goal is just to get the perpetrator to admit wrongdoing.

I wasn't proposing anything, I was making fun of your untenable idea, but if I were it would be an open ended and ongoing aid program to try and restore the standards of life of the place you hosed up (or equality if the racism was directed at people living within your state) to something that would be deemed just by consensus of the provider and recipient of aid. The quantification like you bray about only comes into play if you believe everybody owes everybody else they have bad thoughts about even if they are / were not in power and did not benefit materially from their prejudice and so clear inequalities arise if you try to treat all prejudice the same.

SaltyJesus posted:

e: also, please propose a non-comical system of collecting reparations for chauvinistic jokes from one side and genocide from the other without considering the relative gravity of the acts

SaltyJesus posted:

What have I inferred about you? I simply asked you how you propose to implement in reality the reparations you have in mind for the European Union.

Racial prejudice absolutely does help create structural racism, but only the kind practiced by the group in power. If you look at the historical cases of racial prejudice, it has been largely fluid and molded around whatever formed the most convenient narrative for those who would like to preserve the status quo, see the whiting of Italians, Irish, and Polish. The racial prejudice of the abused groups rarely plays into any kind of large scale, systematic inflicting of pain and suffering.

SaltyJesus posted:

I'm not inferring anything about you. I'm just saying your proposed system of reparations has no meaningful way of being implemented. Neither method of payment really achieves the stated goals: lump sum can be either an empty gesture if too low or completely unworkable if high enough on both the giving and receiving ends, periodic reparations bound in time or amount by some conditions require some kind of quantification, periodic unbound reparations until we reach a utopia where nobody has racist thoughts seems like a joke.

If we're going with unbound periodic reparations then you're laying the responsibility of even a single citizen having racist thoughts on the government. What is the government supposed to do about it, some people will just be unreasonable despite your best efforts to eliminate racism. If we divide the responsibility across Europe based on their population or per capita GDP or whatever what happens when one country is much more successful at reducing the number of racist citizens in their land? Would it not be more logical to somehow allocate the amount of reparations according to the amount of racism coming from each country, maybe racism-per-capita? How low does the number or racist or the racism per capita ratio need to go before getting rid of the reparations or are we gonna keep trucking on principle with insultingly low payment amounts?

I'm not interested in quantifying anything. I am interested in addressing a committed wrong to the satisfaction of the wronged side. I doubt you'd seriously get a lot of people interested in organizing reparations for misogynisticchauvinistic jokes or even thinking it's worth the time even if they were on the receiving end but you just might for genocide. You are the one asserting they need to be addressed at some level of equality.

steinrokkan posted:

In that case, ban him for shitposting.

Anyway, Effectronica's posting reminds me of high school debate contests where students yell random sentences as fast as possible with no regard for coherence or actually convincing anybody, in hopes the other party will be overwhelmed by the wall of nonsense hitting them, and will be eliminated because of a technical failing.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

Effectronica is what you get when you have someone with no job or any other outlet for their time. There are only so many reasonable posts you can make in a day, if you spend all day posting like he does it's bound to turn to poo poo like it has in this thread.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

Effectronica is what you get when you have someone with no job or any other outlet for their time. There are only so many reasonable posts you can make in a day, if you spend all day posting like he does it's bound to turn to poo poo like it has in this thread.

SaltyJesus posted:

Yes, it is a historical invention which I clearly understand from one of my previous posts. Now that it's out in the wild how possible do you recon it is to completely root it out within any reasonable time frame? You still have monarchists in countries that haven't had a monarch for a century now. Should countries continue paying the adjusted for inflation original sum of reparations for the full duration of racism's continued existence? Even if they manage to eradicate it in all but a microscopic fraction of their society? Should the amount be adjusted according to the progress made on getting rid of it? How do you propose to quantify this? Do you think if you do reduce the amount to reward progress the reparations will become an insultingly low amount at some point and should we stick to them on principle?

As for the other thing: That's why I would not try to mathematically beep boop it but arrive at some kind of closure/healing that both sides can be satisfied with through negotiation.

Effectronica posted:

Lol. So how many followers of Mo Tzu exist in the world today.

SaltyJesus posted:

You are the one who is essentially trying to boil everything down to money. Why would a chauvinist joke even need a monetary reparation? Maybe the offended party would be satisfied with getting to poo poo on the offender's lawn, or telling a chauvinist joke back, or the offender having to wear humiliating jorts around town for a day. Why would you insist on monetary reparation which would either be insultingly low if you wanted to equate it to your intuitive feeling of scale or insanely high if you wanted to put it on some kind of par with genocide.

Effectronica posted:

I want to make it absolutely clear that I believe reparations are merely a reasonable compromise compared to the violent depopulation of Europe from shooting the racists.

SaltyJesus posted:

Ah, I see. You've got nothing to say so you're gonna resort to cheap dodging of the question. You still have Russian royalists for one.

e: and I bet if you trawl the Chinese comments sections enough you'll find some netizens pining for the good old Qing, if the CPC weren't so repressive I'm sure they'd be out in the open too

SaltyJesus posted:

You are the one who is essentially trying to boil everything down to money. Why would a chauvinist joke even need a monetary reparation? Maybe the offended party would be satisfied with getting to poo poo on the offender's lawn, or telling a chauvinist joke back, or the offender having to wear humiliating jorts around town for a day. Why would you insist on monetary reparation which would either be insultingly low if you wanted to equate it to your intuitive feeling of scale or insanely high if you wanted to put it on some kind of par with genocide.