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Are you smarter than The Obama?

Are you smarter than The Obama?


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I had a computer at home from the time I was 16(admittedly it was a TI-99, but hey). Schools are not the only place computers are, and not the only access to computers. In fact, if schools are your primary source of access to computers, you probably have less access than many people...

Simple logic, it's good stuff.

Your argument boils down to socioeconomic status ----> educational outcome.

Let's pretend (just for this debate) that computers actually enhance educational outcomes, especially computers at home. Look at the Ferguson data I linked above - black upper class and black middle class students are not suffering from the disadvantage of lack of educational resources in the home. The outcome is still the same - they lag their white peers, with socioeconomic status being controlled.

Look at the performance of black upper class students (those from families making $70,000 or more) and how they do poorly in comparison to poor whites on the SAT. Are you seriously contending that the children of the black upper class lack in access to home computers while the children of the white poor do have access to home computers?
 
Your argument boils down to socioeconomic status ----> educational outcome.

Let's pretend (just for this debate) that computers actually enhance educational outcomes, especially computers at home. Look at the Ferguson data I linked above - black upper class and black middle class students are not suffering from the disadvantage of lack of educational resources in the home. The outcome is still the same - they lag their white peers, with socioeconomic status being controlled.

Look at the performance of black upper class students (those from families making $70,000 or more) and how they do poorly in comparison to poor whites on the SAT. Are you seriously contending that the children of the black upper class lack in access to home computers while the children of the white poor do have access to home computers?

Do you enjoy building those straw men?
 
Indeed, gaps would grow, but they would not be due to what you term the "Achievement Gap," as that is a function of race and class. I am advocating for something else entirely, which is to maximize individual potential regardless of race or class.

I realize that it's impossible under current conditions. I am advocating we change the conditions and reorient toward this new goal. Designing a new system that tracks every child's development, seeing to it that no need goes unmet. Removing or reducing to the extent we are able, the environmental factors that account for the current "Achievement Gap." Then, motoring their development closely noting individual affinities, and tailoring their education accordingly to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

Yes, it would be a huge project, and we would need to get the parents all on board even before the births of their kids, but surely a national campaign aimed at that will generate positive results. Who wouldn't want their kid to have the best chance to reach their own individual potential?

I'm guessing, because of your comment on getting parents on board even before their kids are born, that you're being facetious?
 
Indeed, gaps would grow, but they would not be due to what you term the "Achievement Gap," as that is a function of race and class. I am advocating for something else entirely, which is to maximize individual potential regardless of race or class.

I realize that it's impossible under current conditions. I am advocating we change the conditions and reorient toward this new goal. Designing a new system that tracks every child's development, seeing to it that no need goes unmet. Removing or reducing to the extent we are able, the environmental factors that account for the current "Achievement Gap." Then, motoring their development closely noting individual affinities, and tailoring their education accordingly to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

Yes, it would be a huge project, and we would need to get the parents all on board even before the births of their kids, but surely a national campaign aimed at that will generate positive results. Who wouldn't want their kid to have the best chance to reach their own individual potential?

I admire the idealism you project and I chuckle at the naivete that underlies your vision. I too would like nothing more than a system which allows each student to reach for the sky and to fulfill their inherent potential. Then I look about me at the current educational establishment and the liberal polity that supports that establishment and I know that they would never allow a system which allowed the achievement gap to increase in size to ever get off the ground. For your vision to become reality you basically have to change liberals into conservatives. Good luck with that project.

The short and sweet of the different approaches is this - conservatives are in favor of equal opportunity and liberals are in favor of equal outcomes. Look back a couple of pages in this thread and you'll find a paper which looked at racial wage disparity. When IQ is controlled for we find that the racial wage disparity disappeared over 4 decades ago. Take a white person with 90 IQ and take a black person with 90 IQ, match them on education attainments, match them on age, match them on criminal record, match them on marital status, etc and you find that they earn equal incomes and this has been the case for a long, long time, longer than I've even been alive. The problem is that the IQ distributions in the two populations are not equal. The mean IQ of the African-American population is 85. No one who knows the material disputes this any longer. This has been studied to death. The mean IQ of the white population is 100. Environmental factors cannot influence IQ. Oh, all sorts of experiments have been tried, but they all fail.

So, equal opportunity is prevalent in American society and we see that, ceterus paribus, equal outcomes are often the result. That doesn't satisfy liberals and the African-American community, they want equal outcomes even though when conditions are not equal and CANNOT be made equal by any means that is within our grasp.

Your project runs directly counter to the imaginary world that liberals have created and which rules our real-life world. Good luck though. For conservatives all you need to do is overcome the income redistribution aspect but most will buy in on the equal opportunity plank. For liberals you need to come up with a way to mollify them about the guaranteed unequal results that your project will produce. That's just throwing gasoline on the fire.
 
Do you enjoy building those straw men?

If it's a strawman then it's an honest attempt to understand what you're getting at. Spell it out in detail.
 
I'm guessing, because of your comment on getting parents on board even before their kids are born, that you're being facetious?

The further you plan in advance the more time you have to realize and correct flaws in what you are envisioning.
 
You'd be guessing wrong. Suppose you are going to be a parent and then you find out that there is a new program aimed at helping your child reach their full potential. It's well funded, and designed to help you be a better parent with free educational programs and other services (such as monitoring your child's nutritional needs to see that they are met properly from the very start), to see to it your kid has full medical coverage up to the age of majority, and to provide the very best education any money can buy, tailored to your child's personal needs.

No one is going to turn that down.

This is an investment in a whole generation, with no holds barred, aimed at eliminating the current social and class disparities that would normally interfere with your kids ability to reach their potential, starting from birth and continuing to the age of majority. It would allow us to phase out the current social programs which inadequately seek to make up for all those kids growing up without these sorts of benefits.


Every child deserves the best shot we can give them, and this program would see to it they got it. People want their kid to have access to the American Dream.. well here's an engraved golden ticket.

Of course it will cost a lot of money. But as I said, it's an investment. Imagine what that generation might be able to accomplish. There is no better investment for capital anywhere.
 
So what you are saying is that you can ignore cumulative factors, and god and evolution made black people stupid.

I'm saying that you should address the "cumulative factors" methodically. Isolate and study them. Study them in various combinations with other factors. Eventually you'll be able to assign a value to each factor which should sum up to 100% to explain outcomes without resorting to any genetic explanation. Any shortfall needs to be explained.

You can cling to your evolution denying ways but then you're really no different from religious creationists who think that god put us on this earth 6,000 years ago after creating man in his image and creating woman from Adam's rib. Your myths are really no different than theirs.
 
For your vision to become reality you basically have to change liberals into conservatives.

I think you don't at all understand the real liberal agenda. This program meets progressive liberal goals beautifully.

We don't want everyone to be the same and get the same. That's insane and impossible. We want everyone to play on a level playing field, and we have tried to make policy to reflect that. We understand that everyone's potential is not going to be the same, but if you start from birth, then you can remove those factors which liberals claim are the cause of the disparity.

If you can honestly tell liberals that every child will enter the adult world as prepared to succeed as they are personally capable of being, then you will get no arguments.

Liberals will probably ask that the social programs be phased out as the new generation steps in, but when all is said and done, 30 years down the road, there really should be no need for those programs. Because the first generation of kids through the program will have been a part of the adult world for at least 11 years, and will be able to influence the rest of us to make the necessary changes to take us the rest of the way. I call that serious dividends on an investment.
 
nothing at all-it was a comment to someone who pretends he is some sort of hero for going into the military to learn a trade. in fact trade school is a better choice than millions who go to college to major in fornication or public drunkenness and end up with degrees that cannot gain them a useful career. The guys who work on my car do pretty damn well as does the HVAC techs I know

There is nothing wrong with him being proud of his service or trade either
 
I think you don't at all understand the real liberal agenda. This program meets progressive liberal goals beautifully.

If you say so. I work in a liberal-saturated environment and I'm pretty certain that if I laid out your program to those of my acquaintance that they'd all be aghast at a program which resulted in a widening of the achievement gap and a widening of income inequality gap between races even though it made the lives of all parties incrementally better.

Look at what's happening on the income inequality front. Liberals are blowing steam out of their ears about the RELATIVE increase in income inequality and they are not mollified by the ABSOLUTE increase in living standards that accumulate to the poor.

Why should I expect a different reaction to your scheme when I see with my own eyes the reaction that I detail taking place on a similar issue?

Liberals will probably ask that the social programs be phased out as the new generation steps in, but when all is said and done, 30 years down the road, there really should be no need for those programs.

You're crafting a romanticized vision of liberals, one where they are thoughtful and rational. You have no evidence to back up that portrait. I've never heard of a liberal politician ever declaring that it was time to end a social program. Liberals love big, activist government. More programs means they have more opportunity to meddle.

Look at how affirmative action has changed and expanded over the years. It now includes all sorts of minority groups in its mandate.
 
..Your myths are really no different than theirs.

which "myth", that there is no evidence that people of the so-called Negro race are no less intelligent than people of the so-called Caucasoid race?

you show me IQ tests done on 10,000 middle-class Caucasoids compared to the IQ tests done on 10,000 middle-class Negros, and then we can chat.

until then, save it for the Prisonplanet forum.
 
...The guys who work on my car do pretty damn well as does the HVAC techs I know

folks who go to trade-schools can end up becoming part of the lower-upper class.

its not uncommon to see a carpenter or mechanic making more than 100k.
 
Affirmative action asserts that one racism is superior or inferior to another? Wow, I had no idea.


.

of course it does, it tells blacks that they can't compete with whites without special consideration. ergo, blacks aren't as good as whites. racist at its core
 
I think most of the honest people on this forum would agree that Obama is smarter. The more important question is whether Obama is smarter than those who have said they want to run against him, and I have not seen one come forward to date who is smarter than Obama IMO.
 
of course it does, it tells blacks that they can't compete with whites without special consideration....

this is of course a lie.

affirmative action does not tell anyone that blacks are inferior. of course, if that is the racist meaning you get out of it, this is yours to deal with.
 
If you say so. I work in a liberal-saturated environment and I'm pretty certain that if I laid out your program to those of my acquaintance that they'd all be aghast at a program which resulted in a widening of the achievement gap and a widening of income inequality gap between races even though it made the lives of all parties incrementally better.

Look at what's happening on the income inequality front. Liberals are blowing steam out of their ears about the RELATIVE increase in income inequality and they are not mollified by the ABSOLUTE increase in living standards that accumulate to the poor.

Why should I expect a different reaction to your scheme when I see with my own eyes the reaction that I detail taking place on a similar issue?

You're crafting a romanticized vision of liberals, one where they are thoughtful and rational. You have no evidence to back up that portrait. I've never heard of a liberal politician ever declaring that it was time to end a social program. Liberals love big, activist government. More programs means they have more opportunity to meddle.

Look at how affirmative action has changed and expanded over the years. It now includes all sorts of minority groups in its mandate.

Every liberal I know personally and have spoken to about it, believes a program like this, carefully planned and properly implemented, is worth the gamble. All agree that if we made this a national goal, it would change everything for the better, even if in the end it turned out to prove things that put their own worldview at risk.
 
I think most of the honest people on this forum would agree that Obama is smarter. The more important question is whether Obama is smarter than those who have said they want to run against him, and I have not seen one come forward to date who is smarter than Obama IMO.

It's not smartness that matters, it's leadership that matters.
 
and for the record, I do NOT support blanket affirmative action in industries and companies that do NOT have a proven track-record of long-term discrimination.

and I do NOT support affirmative action for blacks who are not descended from African-slaves.

affirmative-action was created to right a HISTORIC wrong, known as slavery & segregation. only those who have actually suffered from such institutions should profit from the remedy created for it.
 
which "myth",

The myth that evolution has produced a uniform result for all of humanity but has gone wild in producing variance on every other trait that defines humanity. Something magic stopped evolution from touching the human brain. The Chinese, not burdened with the same flavor of oppressive political correctness and liberal myth holding are blazing forward on the basis of believing that evolution hasn't spared homo sapiens.

The first brain bank specialising in the study of Chinese brains is to be established.

Researchers in Hong Kong and China hope to persuade Chinese people to donate their grey matter to medical science.

Brain banks in the West do not have an adequate supply of brain tissue from the Chinese to make research feasible.

Hong Kong University says the project will help scientists to gain an understanding of the differences between the brains of different races.​

you show me IQ tests done on 10,000 middle-class Caucasoids compared to the IQ tests done on 10,000 middle-class Negros, and then we can chat.

You see, you're even adopting the argumentative technique of your religious creationist counterparts. You specify a very specific condition that must be met before you will entertain the issue of questioning the myth that you adhere to. I've played whack a mole with religious creationists for a long time and I know their tricks. It's not surprising in the least that you're adopting their tactics.
 
and for the record, I do NOT support blanket affirmative action in industries and companies that do NOT have a proven track-record of long-term discrimination.

and I do NOT support affirmative action for blacks who are not descended from African-slaves.

affirmative-action was created to right a HISTORIC wrong, known as slavery & segregation. only those who have actually suffered from such institutions should profit from the remedy created for it.

That version of affirmative action died in 1978 with the Bakke v. Univ. of Calif. decision. Who cares what you support? It's illegal right now.
 
It's not smartness that matters, it's leadership that matters.

Leadership without "smartness" is not what I want in our country's Commander and Chief.
 
...You see, you're even adopting the argumentative technique of your religious creationist counterparts...

...I've played whack a mole with religious creationists for a long time and I know their tricks. It's not surprising in the least that you're adopting their tactics.


are you familiar with the logical fallacy known as the ad hominem & guilt by association?
 
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are you familiar with the logical fallacy known as the ad hominem & guilt by association?

Why yes I am. Are you trying to suggest something? If so, spell it out, because I haven't engaged in ad hominem attacks.

Until you can tell me how you can reconcile a belief in evolution and a belief that some unspecified mysterious force put a forcefield around the human brain and prevented any variation from developing, you're no different than a religious creationist who believes that god is the mysterious force that made mankind in his image. You're not appealing to god, just to some similar mysterious force.
 
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