The Dumbest Thing I've Heard All Year!

[Parsad]

Yes, even dumber than Tucker Carlson!  What type of incentives would this create?  Can you imagine it being duplicated by others?!  Cheers!

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/san-francisco-air-black-reparations-133030821.html

[clutch]

I'd actually welcome SF, of all places, to implement this as a social experiment and deal with the consequences.

[Spekulatius]

Who is black? I got to get myself tested.

[Gregmal]

Rachel Dolezal 

[nafregnum]

Reminds me of the last 3 of the 6 phases of big projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_phases_of_a_big_project

1. Unbounded enthusiasm,
2. Total disillusionment,
3. Panic, hysteria and overtime,
4. Frantic search for the guilty,
5. Punishment of the innocent, and
6. Reward for the uninvolved.

 

If this excerpt is too long for copyright, feel free to delete it.  Last year I read "The War on The West" by Douglas Murray.  These paragraphs from a chapter on reparations seemed like clear thinking to me:

 

"""

In 1969, the Holocaust survivor and celebrated postwar Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal published a work called The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. It is an account of something that Wiesenthal says happened to him at the Lemberg concentration camp. In 1943, Wiesenthal was one of a group of forced laborers and one day is plucked from the line and taken to the bedside of a Nazi soldier who is dying. The man, called Karl S in the book, turns out to have joined the Hitler Youth and from there moved up the Nazi ranks all the way to the SS. During this time, he participated in one particular atrocity. He confesses to the Jewish man at his bedside that his unit had at one stage in the war destroyed a house in which there were around three hundred Jews. The SS unit had set the house on fire, and as the Jews inside tried to escape from the burning building, by leaping from the windows, Karl S and his comrades shot and killed them all.

 

This is described in considerable detail, and if this was all The Sunflower was then it would simply be yet one more tale of the countless number of tales of Nazi atrocities carried out against Jews during World War II. But Wiesenthal’s book is not about that. It is about what happens next. Because it is clear that Karl has asked for a Jew to be brought to his bedside because he wants to confess to this crime in particular and to a Jew in particular, because he wants to get this particular atrocity off his chest before his imminent death. It is something in the way of a deathbed confession. And it is what happens next that makes Wiesenthal’s book so memorable. For after the SS soldier has finished his tale, and the reader perhaps expects some type of reconciliation, Wiesenthal gets up and leaves the room without saying a word.

 

Later, Wiesenthal meditates on whether he did the right thing, and the second half of the book is given over to a symposium involving a range of thinkers and religious leaders who contributed their thoughts on the events that Wiesenthal has described. It is noticeable, incidentally, that many of the Christians who contributed to this symposium believed that Wiesenthal should have offered some kind of forgiveness to the soldier. But the broader consensus that emerges from the contributors is that Wiesenthal did the right thing. And if there is a reason that this comes down to, it is this: that Wiesenthal, although he was a Jew, like the soldier’s victims, had neither the right nor the ability to forgive the soldier for what he had done.

 

In order for true forgiveness to occur, the parties involved must be not only the one who has done the wrong but the one to whom the wrong has been done.

Wiesenthal may have been a Jew, like the victims, but he does not have the right to forgive on behalf of his fellow Jews who were gunned down by the soldier as they jumped from a burning building. Wiesenthal is not these men, women, and children. He is not even a close relative of these men, women, and children. These victims may never have wanted to forgive their killers. Perhaps they would have hated their killers forever and not wanted them to die in peace. The SS soldier had participated in such a terrible end for them, so what right did Wiesenthal have to say on behalf of all of these people that the SS soldier is forgiven? Why should the SS soldier die with even a part of his conscience cleared? After taking no care about the consciences of so many other human beings.

 

Within this is a very powerful and important point almost totally lost in the debate about forgiveness in the modern world. In recent years, the prime ministers of countries including Australia, Canada, the United States, and Britain have all issued apologies for historic wrongs. Sometimes, as when the direct victims of these wrongs are still alive, this can ameliorate suffering and provide a form of closure for the victims. But when we are talking about apologies for things done centuries ago, we enter a different ethical territory. In such cases, neither the people claiming to be victims nor the people assuming the mantle of perpetrators are any such thing. When it comes to apologies for the slave trade or for colonialism, we are talking about political leaders and others making apologies for things that happened before they themselves were born. And apologizing to people who have not suffered these wrongs themselves, though some may be able to point to some disadvantage they can claim to have suffered as a result of these historic actions.

 

Any apology begins to consist of people who may or may not be descended from people who may have done some historic wrong apologizing to people who may or may not be descended from people who had some wrong done to them. In the realm of reparations, this becomes messier still. For at this stage, the divide in the West is by no means clearly between victims and perpetrators. Whereas the governments in almost every non-Western country are strikingly ethnically homogenous (consider the political leadership in India, China, or South Africa), governments in every Western country are now made up of people of a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. No Western cabinet would be able to work out the victim-oppressor divide even at the table around which they sit. Nor would any political party. Just consider the difficulty merely of working out what Elizabeth Warren may or may not be owed.

 

The issue of reparations now comes down not to descendants of one group paying money to descendants of another group. Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done the wrong. It is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.

 

Perhaps that is why the difficult questions on this are ignored by everybody who has argued for reparations to occur. For instance, were any such scheme to operate in America, the country would have to carefully determine which racial groups in the country have been most harmed by American history. It may determine to limit the scope of its attentions solely to the issue of people who are the descendants of slaves. Though there is no reason why it should limit itself to that. But if it did, then the prelude to reparations would have to be the development of a societal, genetic database. It could be that this would only be necessary to create for the black population of the United States. It would then have to determine how to apportion the funds available. Anyone who thinks voter ID laws or vaccines are intrusive should prepare for the questions that will follow this process.

 

For instance, after the genetic database is created, it will have to be decided whether or not the only recipients should be those who are 100 percent descended from slaves—if any such people can be identified. Should these people alone be given a full stipend? Should someone who is only descended from slaves on their mother’s side receive 50 percent of the same sum? Will the restitution process try to operate the “one-drop rule,” and if so, how will it ensure that nobody is taking advantage of the financial spigots that would result? And, of course, all of this would be predicated on the idea that a vast wealth transfer from one racial group to another racial group in America in the 2020s will bring racial harmony and will not cause any igniting or resurgence of racial ill feeling. Can anyone be sure that this is the most likely result?

 

Only around 14 percent of the US population is black. As of 2019 more than half of that population (59 percent) were millennials or younger (that is, under the age of thirty-eight).9 During their lifetime, it has been illegal to treat people differently because of their skin color. Jim Crow laws were decades in the past before this group was born. The official prohibition on the further importing of slaves into the United States had been signed two centuries before this group was born. To begin to apply reparations to this community would require a clear differentiation between black Americans who are descendants of Africans brought forcibly to the United States and black Americans whose ancestors voluntarily came to the United States in the centuries after slavery was abolished.

 

And what about the people doing the paying? There will be many people who have come to America’s shores since slavery ended—most of America’s Jewish, Asian, and Indian populations, for instance—who may make an objection at this point. Why should those whose ancestors played no part in a wrong be made to forfeit a part of their tax dollars in paying for something that happened generations before their family came to America? Should people whose ancestors died in the Civil War fighting for the North get any special dispensation? Should those whose ancestors fought for the South pay disproportionately more?

 

There are very obvious reasons why people might call for reparations: for political convenience or in genuinely seeking to right a historic wrong. But there is an equally obvious reason why they can almost never be drawn into giving any details of what the process might look like. That is because it is an organizational and ethical nightmare.

We also know that no matter how much is done to address the issue it will never be enough. We know this not least because Britain’s attempt to make up for the slave trade is over two centuries in the past and the issue of further reparations being made is still raised. Indeed, the subject is discussed as though critics either do not know or know and do not care how many resources Britain poured into abolishing slavery in the 1800s. The British taxpayer paid a hefty price for the abolition of the slave trade for almost half a century. And it has been proven that British taxpayers spent almost as much suppressing the slave trade for forty-seven years as the country profited from it in the half century before slavery was abolished. Meaning that the costs to the taxpayer of abolition in the nineteenth century were almost certainly greater than the benefits that came in the eighteenth century.

 

The British government of the day spent 40 percent of the entire national budget to buy freedom for the people who had been enslaved.

At the time, the only way that the British government could get the consensus needed to abolish the trade was to compensate those companies that had lost income because of the trade. This sum was so large that it was not finally paid off until 2015. And while some campaigners have used this to show how recent the trade in human beings was, it rather better exemplifies the unprecedented lengths the government was willing to go to in order to end this vile trade.

Two of the scholars who have done some of the complex math required here have estimated that the cost of abolition to British society was just under 2 percent of national income. And that was the case for sixty years (from 1808 to 1867). Factoring in the principal costs and the secondary costs (for instance, the higher prices for goods that the British had to pay throughout this period), Britain’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, it has been claimed, constituted “the most expensive example” of international moral action “recorded in modern history.”10

 

Several things could be learned from this. But one thing worth noting is that such actions appear in the current era to be almost entirely unknown. What is more, they appear to buy Britain—and the wider West—absolutely no time off in the purgatory of the present. The British may have actually overpaid in compensation for their involvement in the slave trade, but it appears to count as nothing; demands for reparations internationally and domestically still continue.

 

Is there any end to this? Are there even any means to an end to this? The British precedent suggests not. If America were to find a way to pay reparations today, why would the same demands not re-arise two centuries later, as they have done in relation to Britain? If the great reparations machine were to pour out money, why should it be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? It is not a problem that is unique to the British or American examples.

 

Whenever a country such as Greece gets into financial trouble, politicians there can always be found who are willing to say that Germany must pay Greece for its occupation of the country during World War II. Indeed, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras made precisely this demand again in 2015. There are not many ways to see how this would stop. Other than Greece never getting into financial difficulties ever again.

 

The same applies to the payment of reparations for empire or slavery. It will always be the case that there will be African politicians who will claim that the problems of their country are not to do with any mismanagement of their own, but because of colonialism. The late Robert Mugabe was a fine example of this genre. The only way for such demands to stop would be for every former colony to be thriving and well run for the rest of time with governments that are always and everywhere strangers to corruption.

Likewise, in the American context, what would it look like for reparations to have been paid off? Even writers, such as Coates, who have argued for reparations have joked about the likely consequences of doling out large sums of money to black Americans. Dave Chapelle did a skit on this, showing black people spending their reparations payments on fancy cars, rims, clothes, and more. It would be a good time to buy shares in Nike. But the serious fact is that it could only be deemed that reparations had worked if black Americans either performed equally to or actually outperformed all other racial groups. And not just in the aftermath of payments but for every year in the foreseeable future. If black Americans underperformed, then it could always be argued that reparations had not so far adequately occurred because inequalities still existed. In order for demands for reparations to go away, any and all wealth disparities would have to disappear not just once but forever. Until then, it is hard to see how the demands for financial compensation will be able to stop.

 

In the meantime, it is impossible not to note how fantastically one-sided, ill-informed, and hostile this debate has become. No world forum ever concentrates seriously on any form of reparations that does not involve the West. And there is an obvious reason why there are no calls for reparations to Africans abducted into the slave trade that went East. Which is that the Arabs deliberately killed off the millions of Africans they bought. But there is little explanation as to why it is that today it is only Western former colonial powers or former slave-owning countries that are expected to pay any sort of compensation for sins of two centuries ago. Modern Turkey is not expected to pay money for the activities of the Ottoman Empire. An empire that, incidentally, ran on for twice as long as the empires of Europe did. After all these years, it is still only the sins of the West that the world—including much of the West—wish to linger over. It is as though when looking at the many, multivariant problems that exist in the world, a single patina of answers has been provided that is meant to explain every problem and provide every answer.

"""

 

Excerpt From
The War on the West
Douglas Murray

 

 

[Castanza]

Someone needs to invite this guy to the next SF City meeting. 

 

 

[rkbabang]

I'm all for this. As long as it's paid to anyone who has every personally been a slave and paid by anyone who has ever personally owned a slave. 

 

No one should be responsible for the actions of their ancestors.  And even if you think they should be, my ancestors where literally dirt poor. My father grew up with no education, no electricity, no plumbing, in a dirt floor hut his family shared with his aunt and her family.  His father grew up homeless and familyless on the streets by himself at age 10.  None of my ancestors were responsible for anything to do with slavery, so I shouldn't ever have to pay a penny in taxation for anything like this.  Imagine being held financially responsible for the actions of your ancestors?  Now imagine being held financially responsible for the actions of someone else's ancestors?  Some people have the nerve to call all of this "justice".  I call it theft.

 

 

[cubsfan]

Thomas Sowell on Reparations

 

 

[crs223]

$5M reparation payouts are just a distraction.  Focus on the real issues: Stormy Daniels’ hush money and Hunter Biden’s crack addiction.