Why is racism wrong?

[Mister Agenda]

This:

"First, racists often rely far more extensively on empirically derived facts than their opponents do. That is, racists don't "just make it up" and then rantingly insist upon their narrative. Instead, they do quite a bit of research before they write."

is an assertion. You're not off to a very good start.

Edit: Of course, I see I wasn't the first to note this.

If you will carefully examine some of my other posts, you will see that I give examples of racist/egalitarian debates in which my claim is illustrated.

Supporting an assertion you made in one post in a different post after it's been pointed out that it's a mere assertion does not magically make the orginal assertion no longer an assertion.

When I tell you that "racists don't 'just make it up' and then rantingly insist upon their narrative," I'm reporting what I have seen.

I think you're reporting what you've cherry-picked. And it still isn't very good.

Besides the examples I've already given, I have others. A great many, in fact. I'll provide them hereafter as seems proper.

Unless you provide the bad with the good in proportion to the way it's found 'in the wild', and it can be verified that this is the case, your examples won't support your assertion. You can't make a general claim like 'racists use more empirical evidence in their arguments' and support it with anything but evidence that shows your claim is empirically true. Showing that racists at least sometimes use empirical evidence and 'egalitarians' at least sometimes don't doesn't support your claim.

Mabye you should change your claim to 'racists at least sometimes use empirical evidence for their arguments and egalitartians at least sometimes use platitudes and slogans'. If you do change it to that, consider me already convinced.

When I was younger, I was an egalitarian. All the way through college, where I majored in physics and in astronomy, I held egalitarian views on race. Mostly because, I think, I just didn't have any reason to think much about the subject.

In your case, thinking about it seems to have been counterproductive.

The significance of the fact that my college was in southern Georgia, where about a third of the population is black, and yet not one black student majored in astronomy or in physics during my four years there, just didn't light any bulbs in my brain.

You didn't even notice, huh?

And I stayed like that, more or less, for about 12 years following my graduation from college. I was a liberal in general political opinions, and I was a egalitarian on race. But, most of all, I was unusually honest in the sense that I'd not intentionally cheat to win a debate.

In these parts we don't consider that unusual.

So when in 1995 - or thereabout - I entered a debate on the subject of racial equality, on the egalitarian side, against a racist opponent, with the Microsoft Network's early intranet being an unwitting host to the discussion, I was sure that I would win. I was smart. I was articulate.

You were over confident.

But I was wrong. And my racist opponent made sure that I knew that I was wrong.

It's unfortunate that the non-racist point of view was represented by you.

So I had a choice to make.

Admit you didn't do your homework and apologize for doing a poor job in the debate or become a racist.

Would I retreat under a cloud of ad hominems and misdirection in order to save face, and then forget that the entire debate ever happened so that I could remain egalitarian?

Sorry. Given your assertion of unusual honesty, I assumed that wasn't an option.

Or would I change sides in order to pursue the truth wherever it might take me?

You don't have to do the first thing to do the second. Moving to a neutral corner in order to pursue the truth wherever it might lead you would have been a choice far less likely to lead to bias.

I did the latter. Just as I'd done it 20 years previously when, at the age of 15, I decided that the truth wasn't to be found in Christianity and became an atheist.

Being an atheist isn't a positive assertion of anything but what you don't believe. By taking on the mantle of racist, you assumed the burden of proof on the claim that certain races are inherently inferior to others. You, and every other racist, has failed to meet that burden. That continued failure despite the best efforts of millions of racists is at least one check in the 'probably not' column of whether different outcomes between races are due to inherent differences between them.

What self-respect would I have, if I would not acknowledge having been persuaded by the side with the better arguments and the claims more likely to be true?

That the premises you personally used to support your conclusion were fallacious, ill-informed, not-thought-out, or whatever the problem was does not mean that your iniital conclusion was false.

However, you can easily demonstrate that racist arguments are better and racist claims more likely to be true by demonstrating so here. Preferably in your own words.

You've been to college. You've been in debates. You've learned your lesson. You can convince us with your own voice without having to post walls of text, can't you? Skip the pontless debate on what great debators racists are and go straight to making those better arguments for racism that you've learned.

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That isn't true, Ryantology. Racists often spend a lot of effort showing why those "outside" factors aren't as important as the egalitarians say they are. I had just shown you an example in which a racist proves that equally poor blacks and whites don't commit murder at the same per capita rate. In that example, the racist controlled for socio-economic status by confining his sample group to only "poor people" and then demonstrating that blacks commit about three times more murders than expected.

And that's a shame. But it doesn't mean the difference is genetic. There are so many possible confounding factors for the difference that short of finding a definitive biological reason for it, the only reason to conclude that the difference must be race is preconception.

Now, I happen to know from my own investigation (I checked up on this racist's claims about what the FBI Uniform Crime Reports said about Crime in the United States in 1995) that the racist didn't go as far as he might have. Because, you see, most of the 55% of US murders in the United States in 1995 having "black" perpetrators were committed by black males between the ages of 14 an 34, of which there were 8 million in the United States that year. In other words, 3% of the population perpetrated half of the murders in the whole country.

And that's a problem. One that there's no point in trying to solve if it is inherent to being black. But there are too many possible confounding factors to justifiably jump to that conclusion.

The racists might have an agenda, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't a desire to dominate other races. Most of the white racists living today aren't supremacists, as whites were 200 years ago.

Accepting that your horse can't win doesn't mean you don't wish it could.

The media calls white racists "supremacists" because the media are full of leftists who deliberately use as much pejorative language against racists as they can.

Maybe it has as much to do with white racists historically having been supremacists. That may also be the reason to use pejorative language, to make sure real supremacism remains a Nazi-esque fantasy instead of a horrifying reality.

But most racists today are nationalists.

Because they lost the argument.

They don't want to enslave blacks; they do want a racial homeland, a place where there are only white people living together as a white racial nation.

Not being able to enslave blacks is not the same thing as not wanting to. There are states they can live in where blacks are a tiny minority (Idaho, Vermont, and Montana have black populations lower than 1%); so whatever is stopping them from going some place where there are only white people living together, it's not lack of places to go. Maybe what they really want is a place where white people can openly talk smack about black people and be sure of getting a pat on the back for it.

Certainly, I can accept that. But individual traits, if those are the only ones allowed to matter, will not lead to equal outcomes for all races. If the YouTube Racist is right about the IQ distributions of whites and blacks, and an employer living in a demographically typical part of the United States is hiring, without the slightest racial prejudice, for a job he believes requires a minimum IQ of 130 to do well, then he will hire 1925 whites for each black hired, to fill his available positions. The NAACP would scream about discrimination, even though no bias had been used in choosing which persons were hired.

The YouTube Racist wasn't wrong about distribution. He was wrong about causation.

I'm willing to be persuaded, I recognized that many of the arguments against The Bell Curve were knee-jerk and poorly thought-out. I heard biologists claiming there hadn't been enough time for that much of an IQ difference to evolve as though we had determined a rate of evolution for IQ differences. As it turned out, The Bell Curve suffered more from bad data than bad reasoning, which I am willing to consider unintentional, but an object lesson in why it's better to publish your book after peer review rather than before.