Yep.

>>92649

It doesn't matter if that is 100% true people will refuse to believe it.

>>92649
It always was, once the yanks cotton on we might see an end to race inequality in the US as well once they realise the concept of "whiteness" is basically class gatekeeping and it's why they're so obsessed with it.

The biggest cunts trick ever pulled off in American politics was convincing two dudes working the same job in the same factory that they're somehow different and have different political priorities because of their skin colour.

Geography and then class.

Some working class black lad with London and all its opportunities on his doorstep is better off than a middle class white lad stuck in Darlington.

>>92654

He's more likely to get stabbed though, significantly. So would a working class white lad in the same place be, in fairness.

If black people are poor because of racism, then it's our fault for being racists. If they're poor because of the economy, then it's the government's fault for mismanaging the economy. This report feels like a very subtle comment that the Conservatives have spent the past decade failing at every stage of the one thing they're supposed to be good at. If you read it that way, it's slightly easier to get behind.

I heard that much of today's divisive racial and identity politics escaped the fringes and started entering the mainstream during the days of Occupy Wall Street. I never paid much attention to OWS, but emphasising mundane nonsense like one's race or sexual orientation certainly seems like a good way to drive a wedge between people who share the same economic interests.

>>92658
Occupy Wall Street was 2012, wasn't it? Identity politics online predates that by a couple of years. acrobat was founded in 2007, and this is one of the points mentioned in that image that claims 2007 ruined everything (it also mentions iPhones and The Big Bang Theory). Nearly all my exposure to SJWs comes from Cracked.com, which became hugely popular around 2008 and once wrote that they started writing about social justice in 2010. Meanwhile, the people I work with are not the Internet power-users that we all inevitably are, and they still are not aware of a lot of this. One guy loves the fact that I know what all the letters in LGBTQIA+ are. In conclusion, I don't think you're right.

>>92659
"Mainstream" is relative then.

>>92659

I don't think he is wrong, If you measure this not by belief, or intimate knowledge but real world impact. It is one thing for the echo chamber of acrobat to be filled with this. It is another for a real world protest to purposefully stagnate and devour itself with constant gender politics that didn't matter.

Personally I feel this all became mainstream when the 2014 Rosetta mission (European space agency landed on an asteroid) and the whole thing was over shadowed by fisherpersons bullying one of the scientists on twitter about his shirt. The media of course reported it as 'trolls' rather than fisherpersons, but it is clear that they were, but calling them fisherpersons would obviously fuck up the meta-narrative that feminism and therefore fisherpersons acting as fisherpersons are wholly good, even if people didn’t know that was what it was, they were exposed to the effects of it the prime minister (BoJo) even wrote about it.

What is interesting is that the Rosetta wiki page is scrubbed of all mention of it and Matt Taylor’s page, is white washing of the fact it ever happened the right thing to do? Not sure, but it certainly isn't accurate and seems interesting ethics for an encyclopaedia.

>>92658
>>92659
>emphasising mundane nonsense like one's race or sexual orientation certainly seems like a good way to drive a wedge between people who share the same economic interests.

This was done as a purposeful attack from the inside to break up the OWS movement and stop it gaining any traction, it succeeded astoundingly, but there is a history of these tactics used to break up any lefty movements in the US. Very devious, but it works wonders.

>>92658
The mind worms were certainly around before then but the intelligence agencies used identity politics to destabilise the Occupy movement by using it to derail meetings so that little progress was made and people would grow disheartened and leave. It worked far better than they ever hoped it would.

>>92657
>If they're poor because of the economy

That's putting the bucket into the ocean. The problem isn't the economy but social mobility, if growth was at 0% but we had perfect social mobility* then it wouldn't matter from a racial standpoint as all the deckchairs would eventually be shuffled.

In our world inequality is only growing as the rich get richer at a far faster rate than the poor while mobility is handicapped by employers and wider society that doesn't invest in its people. Part of that is the result of everyone above working class having a war chest and willingness to support their children that the state couldn't possibly compete with and part of it is because working class people (and lumpenproletariat) have cultural issues.

Hard problems that our society would rather not address. Better to just ensure that our grandchildren will be owned by a rainbow aristocracy.

*delivered by those creatures in Dark City

>>92659
Not him but I always put it to Halloween 2011 because that's when 'culture not a costume' seemed to hit the mainstream bigtime.

The hyper-wealthy should be killed without trial.

>>92657

>This report feels like a very subtle comment that the Conservatives have spent the past decade failing at every stage of the one thing they're supposed to be good at. If you read it that way, it's slightly easier to get behind.

I mean, I suppose it depends where your usual perspective comes from. To me, it feels like that's the main thing it says, and I don't have to read it any differently to see that. It seems difficult to draw any other kind of conclusion.

I have a bad feeling, though, that your common or Guardian variety wooly liberal talking heads will quickly overlook that angle, and possibly never even consider it, in their rush to discredit the report because it doesn't fit the narrative. They'll immediately react as though it defends conservatives, because everything has to be utterly polarised now, in order to better propagate the cycle of misery.

>>92664
Surely inequality would still be growing if you had the same dynamics of wealthier people getting wealthier faster than poorer people, but with greater (perhaps even perfect) social mobility?
Reduced to absurdity to clarify my meaning: In a society with just 2 families, you're going to have a GINI of something like 1 if one of them has all the money and another has nothing, even if their descendants swap places so that the descendant of the poor family gets all the money and the descendant of the rich family becomes destitute. To actually get inequality down you'd need to redistribute money between rich and poor, rather than moving some people up to richness and some people down to destitution.

I'm not saying I'm against social mobility, but as viewed today it seems like a different kind of discussion: "Are the right people poor?" rather than "How the hell did we manage to configure the first world so that trillionaires coexist with the return of scurvy?"
I suppose that discounts social mobility in the sense of "working class people go from factories to service sector employment and start to identify as lower middle class despite largely occupying the same position in society as before", but that seems fair compared to tracking genuine movement into middle class professions, better wages, home ownership, etc.

>>92667
>Surely inequality would still be growing if you had the same dynamics of wealthier people getting wealthier faster than poorer people, but with greater (perhaps even perfect) social mobility?

It's beside the point in a thread on racism but social mobility addresses inter-generational inequality. That's a much bigger issue in my mind than Darren getting scurvy because he doesn't eat fresh fruit and vegetables although the two are related.

>In a society with just 2 families, you're going to have a GINI of something like 1 if one of them has all the money and another has nothing, even if their descendants swap places so that the descendant of the poor family gets all the money and the descendant of the rich family becomes destitute. To actually get inequality down you'd need to redistribute money between rich and poor, rather than moving some people up to richness and some people down to destitution.

I'd argue that both families would be more equal owing to social mobility making moves possible rather than without. Given the option I'm sure most people would choose the dystopia of inequality to one without social mobility. They're both shit but one preserves more of your dignity and creates an interest in solving the drawbacks from those currently in power.

Social mobility is a bit of a euphemistic term, I feel, that basically means "I want to have people beneath me." It's the same psychological sleight of hand that makes people prefer to see bennies cut than their own wages going up.

Raising the floor should be more of a priority than lowering the ceiling. If everyone could live the comfortable middle class life as a basic expectation and human right, it really wouldn't matter so much about the billionaires going to the moon while others starve.

That said, even then you have to grapple with the reality that excessive wealth accumulation is a net negative for the economy. Even thoroughly right wing libertarian types see and acknowledge this. It's not the mobility that's the problem, it's the degree of separation between the top and the bottom that eventually begins to inhibit the function of the system as a whole. Your Bezoses and Musks are like those giant fat-bergs blocking up the arteries of London's sewage system.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I think it's often surprising how much the left and the right can agree on, economically, that gets buried under ideology. If we look at the economy as a giant natural system with its own general rules and principles, like the laws of physics, it really doesn't make much sense to get all sentimental about it. Most of the things Adam Smith said three hundred years ago have proved to be remarkably accurate, and that remains the case wether you're a dyed in the wool socialist or a black hearted ancap.

The BMJ says the report's fundamentally wrong anyway
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/03/31/structural-racism-is-a-fundamental-cause-and-driver-of-ethnic-disparities-in-health/
despite how eager some people here are to be the victims.

>>92683

>Mohammad S Razai, Azeem Majeed, Aneez Esmail

Can't imagine these three harbouring any kind of bias on the matter, mind you. Totally impartial.

>>92684

No more or less than you.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/race-report-boris-johnson-authors-b1825516.html
This one's pretty funny.
>Two authors named as “stakeholders” in a landmark report into race disparities in Britain have hit out at claims they provided evidence, with one protesting: “I was never consulted”.
>“I was never consulted, I don’t know what record they have of contacting me.”
>“I just would not have agreed to have been consulted even if I had been asked, but I’ve not been asked. I have been invited to things in the past — not by this administration — I just don’t go, I just refuse. It’s just not something I do.”
>“How many other people have been roped unknowingly into this? Rubber-stamping this nonsense.
>“I am not naive enough either to expect either an explanation or an apology from anyone in government for this.”

>>92683
Who here has been eager to be a victim? That criticism, surely by politically neutral authors, misses the point entirely. They claim that health inequalities must be caused by structural racism, and in the same paragraph explain that this is due to residential segregation. How is "residential segregation" a sign of institutional racism? Minority groups will, generally speaking, cluster around their peers. This is natural human behaviour, not government policy.

Any time a confounding variable is introduced that can account for these disparities, a wave of the hand dismisses it with 'ah, then that is because of x which is itself a product of institutional racism!'. It becomes both axiom and proof, fitting since people beholden to the idea do so as a matter of faith. Which is why arguing about it really isn't helpful. Someone who deeply, genuinely believes that British institutions are fundamentally racist, against any and all evidence or argument, does so because it makes them feel morally superior. They have no psychological motivation to accept data that contradicts their position.

>>92687
I love how you start using a more academic lexicon when you're desperate to put your point across. It's a sort of adolescent posturing, "Look at all the big words I can use, I must be more righter".

>>92687

The whole debate seems pointless, because nobody can offer a falsifiable definition of "structural racism" and nobody seems to have any actionable suggestions on how it could be remedied.

It seems to be the racial equivalent of "the patriarchy" - it means whatever you want it to mean and it can only be fixed by someone else doing something that you can't specify.

>>92689
And yet you don't actually address any of their points.

>>92691
What!? No! Really?

>>92687
>Who here has been eager to be a victim?
Well there's that crimlad what gets pulled over by the rozzers who seems to insist that because he gets pulled over by the rozzers "for no reason" apart from having mates that deal drugs, white privilege must not exist.

>>92693
Well... I get pullover more than the average white guy. I don't do drugs or know anyone who deals it. They usually ask me a few questions and let me go.

Maybe I shouldn't buy an expensive car and wear hoodies. Or maybe I should not play black music in my car. Right, mate?

>>92695
Funny how you're playing the victim right now.

>>92692
Being a snarky cunt is easier I guess.

>>92701
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Funny-Atheist-Gift-I-m-An-Atheist-Debate-Me-by-FDST-shirts/33761311.FB110

>>92702
I'm not even the original poster you replied to. It just seemed like >>92689 was such a pointless post. I don't think people are necessarily looking for "debate", but at least engage in good faith conversation. If you disagree then put it across mate, I'm genuinely interested in this discourse because my own views aren't fully formed. I don't see what's so unreasonable about >>92687?

But I understand it's easier to be a dismissive snark so whatever. Getting drunk now so can't be arsed to continue the cunt off. Happy Easter.

>>92703
> Getting drunk now so can't be arsed to continue the cunt off.
You'll be back.

>>92696
Well... I do feel that way. Unless you think that there are other think at play...

>>92687
Perhaps, just perhaps, the fact that health services to segregated residential areas are of lower quality is a form of institutional racism? Why do clusters of nice middle class white suburbs not suffer from segregating themselves away from the povvos and excessively foreign?

(That's not a snarky perhaps: I'm not saying it is, I'm saying it seems at least worthy of consideration.)

>>92711
Maybe the middle classes take better care of themselves.

>>92711

I don't know how it is in Osset but in actual cities the middle classes live essentially check by jowl with the "povvos".

I grew up in a shitpile council flat in the same street where eight years ago some property developer was selling a shell of a house ("a serious fixer upper", it basically needed bombing and starting again) for a cool two million.

Sage for making relive my shitty childhood, even if momentarily.

>>92710
Why do you feel that way? If they're getting ANPR hits, then they're not exactly pulling you over for no reason.

>>92714

They can put anything they want on ANPR. I used to get stopped quite a lot when I became friends with someone who used to be a coke dealer.

I'll refrain from commenting either way on how I feel about that sort of policing, just pointing out it happens.

>>92711
>the fact that health services to segregated residential areas are of lower quality is a form of institutional racism?

I'm not quire sure I'm getting the point of your post (my own idiocy probably) but yes generally poorer areas are going to have shittier services, which again brings us back to socioeconomics and class.

Or otherwise I'd be happy to hear how specifically institutionalised racism causes this lower quality?

>Why do clusters of nice middle class white suburbs not suffer from segregating themselves away from the povvos and excessively foreign?

But again I don't think middle class white suburbs are like consciously choosing to segregate based on race, expensive majority white suburbs are going to exclude people because of cost more than anything else no? Again I'm just struggling to see how it's systemic racism, but happy to hear specifically how it is.

And as the other poster said in most of our cities although you will get areas with higher demographics of non-white/POC/BAME/useless reductive acronym, but it's also pretty mixed up, London isn't Paris. And to talk about London specifically large swathes of the most hyper expensive parts of the city are certainly not owned by white brits.

Waffle of a post but I just think the issue is ridiculously complicated and the idea of just saying "RACISM" when things are shit for people for all manner of reasons just feels reductive. I'd like to hear convincing arguments for both sides because I'm trying to hone my own views a bit. But admittedly I'd be described as a class reductionist at the moment.

>>92716
Just realised there's a similar conversation happening on the labour thread. Fuck it it's boring innit. Same old shit. Don't want to shit up the whole site with basically the same conversation.

>>92715
Right, but that's intelligence-led, which is what's supposed to happen. Nobody's pulling you over because they think you look wrong.

>>92716
>I'm just struggling to see how it's systemic racism, but happy to hear specifically how it is.
No, you're not struggling to see it, you're wilfully ignoring it.

>>92715
Hey tell us about that out of curiosity. What was it like? Did you ever say "what seems to be the problem officer"? What questions did they ask? Did they search you or your car and if so did they have legal grounds to do so?

>>92716
I suspect we're operating with different definitions of institutional racism.
I would define it as something along the lines of "institutional structures that deliver unfair outcomes to given racial groups", along similar lines to to "structural violence", which makes "point to where the institution is actually driven by racism" an unnecessary question. The institution can have the best intentions in the world (indeed, it could actively be trying not to be racist) and still deliver unfair outcomes identifiable as "institutionally racist". "Racism" in this sense doesn't have to be a personal prejudice.

I'm not against the idea that actually class is the big thing, or that most of this ultimately comes down to class (indeed you can probably draw this definition as far as "Class systems are a form of institutional racism"), but ultimately I (perhaps naively) take the view that the solutions to the problems tend to be the same however you look at them. If you're getting "racist" healthcare outcomes in a given city because all the Ruritanians live in a polluted part of the city with no hospitals, the "anti-racist" solution is the same as the class-based solution: build some hospitals and reduce pollution.

>>92722

Racism inherently contains the idea, the concept, the notion that it means people are being on some level at least, consciously biased in their treatment of others.

I take pretty personal issue with the charge being levelled at healthcare because as an NHS worker myself, although I've obviously seen examples of racist individual members of staff, I find it incredibly galling to suggest that an institution like the NHS is actually racist, that the doctors and nurses and support staff are all actively treating the darkies worse to the extent that it results in worse outcomes. The suggestion is to me, so absurd as to be offensive.

I feel like if you're going to backtrack to the point where you admit that what you're defining as institutional racism doesn;t actually mean people being racist then you probably ought to stop calling it racism, really. You're just confusing everyone and everyone gets angry and nothing gets done. Inequitable outcomes are there for everyone to see but it's a totally different thing to say the system is inherently racist.

Maybe it's a subtle distinction, maybe I'm being pedantic, I don't know. I feel like it is an important distinction. I don't disagree with you in principle, I feel like but too often this kind of line of reasoning used as a motte and bailey and before you know it we're back at square one being told the only solution is to make sure all the executives who sit on medical boards (and whatever else) come from ethnic minorities, and that will do something because reasons.

>>92723
> it means people are being on some level at least, consciously biased
>consciously
No, not consciously at all. That's the whole point. There's a whole type of racism where nobody is racist, but racist outcomes still happen. Let's say I was my boss, and I had to hire one person to replace me in the job I currently do. Two people apply for the job. They are equally qualified in every way, but one of them likes all the things I like, such as snooker and chess and Eurovision. The other applicant likes basketball, Kendrick Lamar and curried goat. All other things being equal, I might as well let personality be the deciding factor, and hire the guy I am more likely to get on with. This is what happens in real life, constantly. I haven't done anything wrong in this situation. But when Jamal the applicant goes to a bunch of other job interviews, the same thing happens every time, because most bosses are white. Not a single one of them is "consciously" being biased (remember, this is just a hypothetical situation and Jamal isn't real - he could be white for all you know), but the end result is still the same: by pure coincidence, somehow, Jamal finds it harder to get hired than Sebastian or Emily. And so when I quit being the boss, someone else will get promoted into my position, and they'll be white too because I hired a bunch of white people. And Jamal will apply again, and still won't get hired because he shows up to the interview in a grass skirt, holding a spear and with one of those giant discs in his mouth.

I forget if the above situation is "institutional racism" or "structural racism", but I don't think it really matters to be honest.

>>92725

I mean if the goalposts stretch as far as "people liking people who are similar to them more than people who aren't as similar to them" then I suppose we are doomed to live in a structitutionally racist dystopia forever more.

Historically I think goths, grebos and all the other assorted long-haired riff raff with piercings and tattoos etc have just as much of a claim to institutional discrimination, under that broad of a definition. I'm not trying to be a smart arse and demonstrate some kind of absurdity in your reasoning; just even under that framing it's hardly unique to racial groups, nevermind class.

Maybe the real problem here is more that race is the only aspect being focussed on, or allowed examination, when in reality it's only part of a very much multifaceted problem?

>>92723
>Racism inherently contains the idea, the concept, the notion that it means people are being on some level at least, consciously biased in their treatment of others.
It doesn't contain that at all.

>The suggestion is to me, so absurd as to be offensive.
Yeah, that'll happen if you use a faulty definition of racism that requires conscious action.

>Maybe it's a subtle distinction, maybe I'm being pedantic, I don't know.
It's neither. You're just being wilfully ignorant in choosing a definition of racism that's favourable to you personally.

Racism in medicine is well-documented. It is only within the past couple of years that someone finally created diagnostic images for dark skin. Trainee nurses in the NHS were until recently given training materials that claimed that black people had a lower tolerance for pain and would complain more.

Sure, you could bring the argument to class, but then you have to answer the question of why minorities end up stuck at the bottom of that.It's not as if they don't want to move up, and it's certainly not for lack of trying.

>>92727

>choosing a definition of racism that's favourable to you personally

Pot calling t'kettle a spade, I reckon.

>>92725

I've seen some (small, methodologically iffy) studies suggesting that this kind of unconscious bias has a material effect on employment, but it seems to square quite poorly with the overall data.

Bangladeshis and Pakıstanis earn significantly less than the national average, while Indians earn significantly more than white Britons. Part of that is explained by differences in rates of female participation in the labour market, but the disparity persists when you look only at the hourly income of full-time workers. The scale of the difference suggests that if ethnic or cultural bias is a factor, it doesn't have a particularly significant effect on outcomes.

If implicit bias really is an issue, I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about it - the evidence shows that tests to measure implicit bias have no useful ability to predict biased behaviour and implicit bias training has no statistically significant effect.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/income-inequality-by-ethnic-group/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6687518/

>>92728
You appear to have read that as "favourable to your argument", instead of the carefully-chosen "favourable to you personally".

>>92726
>it's hardly unique to racial groups, nevermind class
Why do you think that's relevant? Did you think that when people claim that society is structurally racist that means race is the only determinator?

>>92726
On some level, some things can be changed or controlled, while others cannot. Goths can wear suits, but black people can't become white. Also, please be aware that when I talk about the subconscious preference for people who like snooker over basketball, I am trying to make a fun post rather than a hectoring lecture about the truth, which is that implicit bias also makes you like black people less even if they play tennis and went to Eton. But in those cases, you might not necessarily prefer a white person if they have a spiderweb tattooed on their face and they try to sell you a second-hand car stereo halfway through the interview. So in a way, my example included other factors such as class and background, in that way. What a fine example it was. I am a genius.

>>92682
>Social mobility is a bit of a euphemistic term, I feel, that basically means "I want to have people beneath me." It's the same psychological sleight of hand that makes people prefer to see bennies cut than their own wages going up.

No, it means the ability for people to get to where they want to be with hard graft. You're glossing over something I find much more fundamental than poverty in the freedom to direct your own life and relationships rather than have it decided by who you were born or whoever ends up with authority over you.

You're allusion to economic harm in this context is bollocks because it pales in comparison to the economic harm posed by people being unable to use their talents to succeed and captains of industry being spoilt rich kids. Adam Smith would almost certainly rise from the grave and give you some strong words for ignoring that but you would do quite well in a third world dictatorship.

And fuck starving people too, the amount of whinging I see now that we're doing exciting things in space is surreal.

>>92732
And yet, despite all that money and time thrown at such research, there's no way to objectively measure racial biases. We vaguely know something happens, possibly, but every test devised for bias gives wildly non-repeatable results.

You really might as well say that there are biases that arise in job interviews from demonic possession. I mean, at least then we could try new things rather than giving the population anxiety because they now believe they're racist.

The oligarchy would much rather have a race war than a class war, and depending on how well the system currently rewards you, you might just find yourself feeling the same way. Pretty much all there is to it.

>>92739
Poverty is the single largest factor preventing people from directing their own lives and relationships. Even those who aren't living in poverty have to constrain their decision making based on the assumption that they might fall into poverty if they take too big a gamble. That's why it's mostly well-to-do people who can hop on investing in the newest technologies: Because if they lose a ton of money by backing the wrong horse they're just slightly less well to do, rather than forced to explain to Barbara at the DWP that they need housing benefit to live in a flat share in Grimsborough bypass because they couldn't keep up with the mortgage payments on their damp 2 bedroom house thanks to an ill considered bet on NFTs.

>>92746
You seem to do a whole lot of talking that involves envy on this. Social mobility and poverty do indeed interrelate but you can surely see how material conditions are not the whole picture, you have to ask why certain communities stay poor, and to circle back, why some people never use the markets or save for a home or why companies don't invest in their employees when they really should.

Sure we could just tax the shit out of the evil capitalists and give that money to everyone but I'm sure you can see that this isn't the end of human ambition in life.

>>92747

Your position seems really wierd and self contradictory, like you acknowledge the flaws in the system but you would just rather focus on other things that don't directly threaten the specific type of market commerce that benefits you. Are you an actual real life lib dem or something?

>>92748
I don't want to live in an aristocracy no matter the 'type of market commerce' and place high importance on self-actualisation. Coming from someone who grew up poor this is rather natural but I like to think it's pretty basic humanist thinking.

>Are you an actual real life lib dem or something?

Such biting wit! I bet you're the king of small facebook meme page.

>>92749
>I don't want to live in an aristocracy
It may come as a shock to you to learn that you do live in one.

>>92750
Someone should really fix that aye. I've not said otherwise.

Although I wouldn't use aristocracy at the moment as it undoes the message and what was originally being talked about (poverty v no-social mobility). You can still theoretically rise up the greasy pole but its harder, although for some reason reaching a high-level in politics from a poorer starting point tends to involve buses (Major, Javid, McDonnel).

>>92751
I'm not of the view there's actually a trade off between poverty reduction and social mobility in anything other than TV air time. That seems like the sort of false argument used as an excuse to fail at both and blame the other lot for why that's happened. Much like with space exploration, which I believe you alluded to earlier. The "Space vs Poverty Reduction" dichotomy has always existed to hide the fact NASA had its budget obliterated by people who wanted neither of those things. We're behind because of them, not because of a US welfare state that never materialized.

But it is worth noting that it has been argued that it's actually harder for families to rise up than it was under feudalism ( https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2011/04/04/social-mobility-slower-than-in-medieval-england/ ) and while I'm not 100% on the methodology used by the study, the line “The huge social resources spent on publicly provided education and health have seemingly created no gains in the rate of social mobility,” hint at it being the case that most supposed social mobility has really just been a rising tide lifting all ships faster than new class markers can be invented to sink them again.

As for why the political examples all involve buses, I think it's fairly obvious - what other option do people too poor to run a car have for mobility?

This one's even funnier in the context of you always harping on about how the financial times is unbiased because the readers need facts to be greedy.

>>92752
>I'm not of the view there's actually a trade off between poverty reduction and social mobility in anything other than TV air time.

Thanks mum! But the discussion in this thread has involved which dystopia would be worse and whether social mobility is an egoist buzzword.

>>92753
I know it always leads to naval gazing but we should have a thread on the sapir-worf hypothesis because I count at least 4 examples of new terminology in that text. I'd guess we use them so much when it comes to race because the topic makes us uncomfortable.

>Equity
Equality isn't enough, now we have a word to describe an equality of outcomes. The implications of this term are enormous for our society and ethics but there's no discussion on it either way, it just appeared one day. This eventually arrives at what is termed as 'justice' which, given we have absolutely no discussion, is worrying.

>Gaslighting
One of the most heinous acts you can commit in today's society - convincing someone that their experience is false. This sudden surging of this term feels like an echo for me of 90s science fiction converging with our modern divisive politics where objective and commonly accepted facts do not exist.

>BAME
Now fallen out of politically correct lexicon for grouping disparate groups in an all-encompassing other. But what will we replace it with? Why does the author think corporate lingo to appease middle class whites will care about her feelings?

>ESG
Starbucks for stocks. Don't ask why democracy isn't in that, China is worth too much money and it would upset some of our largest clients.

Anyway, it's clear these new terms not only frame debate but also in how we perceive the world around us and they're clearly having a hostile impact on social discourse. I don't want to live in a 1984 world defined by corporate shysters.

>>92754
Sorry mate, it was published in the financial times so you're obviously wrong.

>>92753

You do realise that this article was published in the opinion pages, where all the opinions go? I can understand your confusion, it's not like there's the word "OPINION" in inch-high letters at the top of the page or anything.

>>92756

You do realise that reaction was the first thing I anticipated when I saw it?

So it's coming out now that the government rewrote the original report to make it look better.

>>92920

Do you have a source for that? And what exactly did they change?

>>92921
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/11/downing-street-rewrote-independent-report-on-race-experts-claim
>Kunle Olulod ... is the first commissioner to condemn the government publicly for its lack of transparency. In a statement to the Observer, Olulode’s charity was scathing of the way evidence was cherrypicked, distorted and denied in the final document.

>“We did not read Tony’s [Sewell] foreword,” they claimed. “We did not deny institutional racism or play that down as the final document did. The idea that this report was all our own work is full of holes. You can see that in the inconsistency of the ideas and data it presents and the conclusions it makes. That end product is the work of very different views.”

>The Observer has been told that significant sections of the report published on 31 March, ... were not written by the 12 commissioners who were appointed last July.

>The 258-page document was not made available to be read in full or signed off by the group ... nor were they made aware of its 24 final recommendations. Instead, the finished report, it is alleged, was produced by No 10.

>One commissioner, who spoke out on condition of anonymity, accused the government of “bending” the work of its commission to fit “a more palatable” political narrative and denying the working group the autonomy it was promised.

>>92922

So the Tories doctored the report to make sure it ended up delivering traditional Marxist conclusions? Turn up for the books that one.

>>92923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

>>92924

That's a nice Wikipedia entry. What does it have to do with this?

>>92923
It delivered conclusions that de-emphasised innate characteristics and emphasised things that individuals can fix, which therefore means they can be blamed for not fixing them.

>>92926
> It delivered conclusions that de-emphasised innate characteristics and emphasised things that individuals can fix, which therefore means they can be blamed for not fixing them.

You seem to be saying non-white people are incapable of achieving what white people can, because of ‘innate characteristics'.

I am always fascinated by the outing of 'compassionate racist' who wants to help inferior people out.

>>92927

Innate characteristics of the institutions the report was on, not of non-white people.

I am always fascinated by the outing of 'smug morons'.

>>92928

institutions don't have "Innate characteristics" being social constucts.

Nah mate, your racist arse slipped up.

>>92929

Why would a report on institutions include conclusions about non-white people?

>>92927
>You seem to be saying non-white people are incapable of achieving what white people can, because of ‘innate characteristics'.
Well, yes. Last time I checked, skin colour is an innate characteristic.

See, if you admit that race plays a significant part, then you have to admit that structural racism exists, and that it's society's fault that non-white folk get held back. But if you downplay that, and instead turn the focus onto class and family structure, you can simply say that they're bad parents or that they aren't working hard enough to elevate themselves - in other words, classic Tory individualist no-such-thing-as-society ideology. Nothing Marxist about that at all.

>>92931
So what lens are we going to use to analyse the findings of the report? That race is more important than class or family structure?
You go down that path and you create a lot more problems than you solve.

>>92932
Fewer problems if you have an actual report though and not just something made up by number 10 as a very obvious attempt to smear BLM. Acting on a report that's just made up is not going to help at all.

>>92933

I feel like we are going to need more evidence than people who would almost certainly refuse to accept the conclusion if it is anything other than what they already believed decrying it.

I think we are going to have to see how this report and see how it has been cherry picked rather than take their word on it.

>>92934
You need more evidence than two of the people who the report was ascribed to coming forward and saying it's not what they wrote? Why? That's more than reasonable doubt.

>>92935

One person is what I read, and one anonymous tip. Yes I would need to see evidence for why the report is wrong beyond one persons who is the director of the charity Voice4Change just stating the report is wrong.

>>92936
>One person is what I read, and one anonymous tip.
You read wrong. Speaking "on condition of anonymity" means they confirmed their identity to the reporter but asked not to be named in the article.
So yes, two of the authors of the report are claiming that the report isn't what they wrote.

>>92936
You would need to see evidence that the report is wrong, but are prepared sight unseen to accept that the report is right?

>>92938
He's taking their word for it, except for when they tell him not to.

>>92937
The first guy is not an author of the report.

Fundamental questions: what evidence would persuade advocates of the structural racism theory that their theory is wrong? What benchmark could we use to measure the extent of structural racism and the effectiveness of efforts to reduce it? What would society need to do to convincingly eradicate structural racism?

Without answers to those questions, the whole debate is an exercise in futility.

>>92941

None, this is fundamentally more of an argument of faith now than it ever was about facts or evidence. Those who have a stake in the concept of fundamental, structural racism have the same rhetorical advantage as Christians do against atheists, in that even if it were the case, it's impossible to prove the negative that it doesn't exist.

Frankly though I think that's just missing the point. It's not about wether structural racism exists or not, I don't think anyone's in serious denial that it is a force which can affect people's life outcomes. But tackling material inequality, regardless of race or gender etc, would do more good in terms of addressing that issue than any of the nebulous social attitude adjustments we attempt to focus on racial inequality will ever make, and we are being subtly misdirected from that simple truth.

There is a dogma at play which prevents the things which would do more to help disadvantaged minorities from ever actually happening, because unavoidably, those things would also help white people.

>>92942
>Frankly though I think that's just missing the point. It's not about wether structural racism exists or not, I don't think anyone's in serious denial that it is a force which can affect people's life outcomes.

Did you know height is proven to have more of an effect on wages than race or gender?
I just feel if a prejudice no one has, affects these things more the problem probably doesn't exist and is more of a result of statistical anomalies. I haven't seen a study for eye colour vs wages but I could well believe that has some variance too because that's how taking subsets works.

>>92941
well we are back to the second post of the thread aren't we (>>92651)

>>92940
Yes, he is.

>>92943

It doesn't matter if it was 100% written by Dominic Cummings after sniffing a rail of pro-plus, people will still believe it.

>>92943

Sometimes statistically significant correlations appear by chance, and even when the associations do reflect reality they aren't necessarily causal. That doesn't mean we can dismiss evidence of structural racism because other more spurious, confounded, or harder-to-interpret associations exist.

>I just feel if a prejudice no one has, affects these things more the problem probably doesn't exist and is more of a result of statistical anomalies.

Alternatively, it could be that individual participants within a system harbour no or little prejudice, but the system itself operates policies which elevate certain groups over others.

>>92941

Speaking as someone working in health and social care it would take a lot of contrary evidence to undo the studies which show differential outcomes based on race and change my mind.

'Structural racism' is a term used mostly in a U.S. setting now, so searching for those keywords will generally bring up American results. British statisticians, social scientists, and public health workers have been studying demographic factors in health outcomes for many years, though, only we tend to focus on ethnicity and class. Maybe one of the most widely known researchers on health inequalities generally is Michael Marmot, specifically for ethnicity as a factor in health is James Nazroo.

Most studies, to my knowledge, tend to show that socioeconomic status has greater influence than ethnicity on health outcomes in the UK (e.g. disability free life years, overall life expectancy), but socioeconomic factors alone can't explain all the difference in most models -- which suggests other things are going on. Specific groups, mainly traveller, laplanderstani, Bangladeshi, and black Caribbean people, are shown to have worse outcomes on a number of different fronts, everything from heart disease diagnosis to oral health. The studies tend to be specific, but overviews are available and the greater picture built up is one of disparities in health services between social classes which are also compounded by ethnicity for some groups.

>>92946

>socioeconomic factors alone can't explain all the difference in most models

The problem is that there's no explanatory model underlying how "structural racism" or "institutional racism" might cause those disparities. There is no huge effect size that is unexplained by other factors. There is no effect that's consistent across ethnic minority groups. We're not starting from the data and explaining it with a hypothesis, we're starting with a hypothesis and trying to make the data fit.

There are disparities in outcomes, but those disparities don't follow any kind of predictable pattern that isn't already explained by socioeconomic status. South Asians have higher rates of coronary heart disease than whites, but lower rates of cancer. Most of that difference is simply explained by "Asians don't like booze and fags but they fucking love ghee", but there's a bit of the difference that we can't explain. A lot of people will point to the elevated risk of CVD and immediately call it evidence of racism, but nobody is demanding a government enquiry into why they have lower rates of cancer.

So much of the research and activism surrounding inequalities in health outcomes seamlessly elides between "ethnic minority" and "Caribbean, laplanderstani and Bangladeshi" in a way that's totally dishonest - there's a blatant example of Nazroo doing it at the link below. If you cherry-pick a subset ethnic minority groups who have poor health outcomes and low SES for fairly well-understood reasons and use them as a proxy for everyone who isn't White British, then of course it's going to look like racism.

The problem with using race as an explanatory factor is that it totally fails to explain the huge disparities between Indians and laplanderstanis or between Caribbeans and Africans. Socioeconomic status has a huge amount of predictive power, specific ethnic identity has a little bit of predictive power, but "ethnic minority" has basically none. The data isn't pointing the way that anti-racism campaigners want it to point, because it isn't pointing anywhere.

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/beacons/covid-catalysts/global-inequalities/ethnic-inequalities-health/

Those who are continuing to claim that the UK is racist are they themselves the racists. Not in a traditional sense but the tendency to analyse everything in it's relation to race despite the myriad of other factors which are far more contributory to the problem seems pretty racist, no?

>>92949
"I am rubber you are glue" is the best argument you can manage?