Why is it illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater (when there's no fire).`? — Coben

A little historical information will help. There have been very bad fires in theaters, night clubs, and the like, resulting in very large losses of life. When someone smells smoke, sees the flames, etc. and sounds the alarm, people will all bolt for the door. No singledoorway can accommodate more than 3 or 4 people at a time. If 500 people try to get through a doorway at once, they will compact, trample and kill some people, and become an interlocked mass. If there is smoke and fire and many people, it is practically guaranteed that a good many will die where they are standing.

Similar disasters have happened at soccer and rugby matches, when for some reason people stampeded for the exits which were not wide enough to allow a mass of people to move through. In those cases, the deaths were from being crushed under foot and suffocating.

Sometimes doors have been criminally locked or bolted shut, and then the loss of life was even worse.

So, walking into a theater where there is no fire and yelling "FIRE!" is likely to lead to a stampede which will probably result in at least a few deaths, for which the person yelling "FIRE!" would be responsible.

The recent El Paso shooter confirmed his intended targets were "Hispanics", and his actions followed hate speech from the POTUS directed against them. The connection cannot be proven, of course. — Pattern-chaser

I agree with you that speech can incite others to act. It isn't as simple as me saying "Kill Bill" and you rushing out and shooting Bill in the head. The El Paso murderer claimed that he intended to kill hispanics, and he did. I'll take him at his word that he did what he wished and intended to do. Whether or not the El Paso murderer committed his crimes because he listened to one, two, several, or more speeches by Trump can not be proven, as you say. DT has attacked several groups repeatedly, and a lot of people get shot, so it's a bit difficult to disentangle one shooting from another.

Trump hasn't said anything as directive as King Henry II, "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" which inspired the murder of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. It's also not quite as inflammatory as "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2. And it wasn't the King who said it. It was the character "Dick". Henry wouldn't have been helped by killing all the lawyers. Most kings and hip POTUS must needs all the legal help they can get.

I was once told that butterflies fold their wings vertically while moths keep them horizontal. The winged critter on my hand had its wings folded vertically. So... — TheMadFool

It was probably a butterfly. My knowledge of entomology could be written on only one of your butterfly's white wings. Insects = 6 legs, spiders = 8. That's it.

Have you not previously noticed those small winged white things flying around at night? Moths?

Insects need more than nectar; they also need some minerals which they find on moist rocks, at the edge of very little puddles, and on your hand.

I felt a sadness for this beautiful butterfly and also a very close connection to it. Was I also like it, in the wrong place at the wrong time and all my life a futile nothingness, empty and pointless? — TheMadFool

We are all one, somebody said. And "Futility of futilities. All is futility." Ecclesiastes. (More familiar, older wording: vanity of vanities.)

Sic transit gloria mundi. (thus passes the glory of the world)

Thus, ALL objects in the universe are in motion relative to something else. All is motion. — TheMadFool

Observation tells us that the galaxies are moving away from each other because the universe is expanding. The galaxies are spinning, the planets are orbiting their stars, and are spinning on their axes. Then, on this planet, there is continental drift -- and you won't sit still either.

These are all good suggestions. I am in favor of all of them (with the possible exception of space infrastructure--meaning population habitat).

I believe/think/hope that a sustainable economy IS possible, is do-able, is absolutely necessary IF we are going to survive. We already know what sustainable food options are--it is vegetarian. The really difficult task involves an abrupt transition from fossil fuel/fossil chemical energy intensive economy to a much less energy intensive, economy.

The "World Made By Hand" series by James Howard Kunstler illustrates through fiction what life might be like in a catastrophic transition: do-able, but not at all nice. One can imagine that in a planned transition (over a short enough period of time to merit the term 'abrupt') it would be do-able, difficult, but not horrible. The unanswered question is how can any country (like the EU, the US, China, etc.) bring about a planned transition soon when the entire world economy is bent in continuing in the opposite direction of MORE, NOW.

It isn't the technology: It's the deeply entrenched elites (Koch Industries, et al) that are the primary obstacle.

It probably can. It's just insane to try to force it to by killing people. — Echarmion

I'm not in favor of killing 3 or 4 billion people either. So what's your do-able suggestion, aside from 3 or 4 billion people leaving the planet aboad space ships?

This thread is about how humanity can keep growing. — Echarmion

Actually, this thread is about CAN HUMANITY STOP GROWING?

The resources of the cosmos are more or less inexhaustible. All we need to do is get off this rock. — Echarmion

So true, but just a teensy bit easier said than done. So far, a dozen people have stepped on the moon, and the moon is only 250,000 miles away, and troubled by nothing worse than a vacuum.

Regarding Hubbert's graph...

The recent surge in US production of oil is the result of squeezing out more oil by using increased energy inputs (fracking). Even when the end of the graph is reached, let's say, 2050, there will still be substantial quantities of oil in the ground. BUT, as I understand it anyway, the energy required to extract the oil will exceed the value of the oil extracted. At that point, it simply doesn't make sense to drill a new well or go back to an old well.

I'm pessimistic and I'm sticking to it. IF we insist on pumping every last barrel of oil out of the ground, and shoveling out the last ton of coal, and burning it then we extend the energy supply on one end and decrease the supply of bearable climate on the other end. Meanwhile, population continues to grow, and I see no reason to suppose that we will manage to overcome changed environmental conditions by developing wheat, for instance, that can stand hot wet weather, or corn that can stand hot dry weather in the next thirty years. Fungal diseases, insects, soil depletion, floods, rising ocean levels, drought, etc. all weigh against an optimistic approach.

The argument that science & technology have improved our agriculture etc. yet now it is over is rather dubious too. — ssu

It is over for some people, and it will be over for more. I don't expect that our disaster will play out in one final cataclysm in Act V, scene 10 affecting everybody between South Africa and Finland, or between Tiera del Fuego and Nome (unless we get hit by a big meteorite).

Per your handle, I would suggest that a lot of the gain in the last 60 or 80 years in life expectancy has been from the development of antibiotics. Pre-penicillin and other antibiotics, infection and infectious diseases were the leading causes of death. Various vaccinations also contributed.

Prior to the antibiotic discoveries, minor--never mind major--injuries could and did lead to death. A minor infected wound could turn into septicemia and from there it was Shall We Gather at the River out at the cemetery. A sinus infection could (and sometimes did) turn into a really bad dying.

In much of the world, infections like malaria and tuberculosis become multi-drug resistant and prove fatal. Gonorrhea is a good example of a fairly common infection in the industrialized world that is becoming quite resistant to the available antibiotics. Some strains are now as untreatable as they were before penicillin. (Gonorrhea is normally not fatal, but anyone who has had it (I have) can tell you it is definitely not fun.)

Various nosocomial infections like Staphylococcus aureus are edging over the line to become untreatable, and it can be fatal.

I've got 200,000 years of human progress on the side of my argument. You've got 200 years of failed doom and gloom predictions going back to Malthus and spectacularly exemplified by Erlich." — fishfry

There wasn't much "progress" during our 200,000 years of hunting and gathering. Innovations were few and far between because hunting and gathering worked pretty well for the small populations of people at the time. They hunted, gathered, wandered, sheltered, and carried on without wrecking the environment.

Round about 10,000 years ago -- either as a state-sponsored conspiracy (some anthropologists have suggested) or as a remarkable and wonderful innovation (as most anthropologists think) we became agriculturists, settled down, and here we are.

While no one can argue with you that Malthus's and Ehrlich's predictions have failed to become fact, it is also the case that no one can refute the fact that Doom has been avoided by an extraordinary, almost incomprehensible extraction of energy resources from the earth, which is not repeatable. Once we have used up the stored carbon that is easily accessible (we are on track), there won't be more. And, of course, extracting the carbon from the ground means adding it to the atmosphere, which has, we find, rather inconvenient limitations on how much it can absorb without highly inconvenient consequences for our esteemed selves.

That the Trinity test of a plutonium bomb would ignite the atmosphere was not a serious concern among the Los Alamos scientists who constructed it. Someone quipped that maybe it would (check out Richard Rhodes History of the Atomic Bomb), but this idea was dismissed.

There was some ambivalence about the morality of the Manhattan Project among the small circle of people who had an overview of what the project was about, and there was a lot more ambivalence shading into revulsion after Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Medicine is advancing rapidly and allowing consumers to live longer than ever. — Pathogen

The major improvements in longevity have come about through better agriculture (more and better food -- this goes back to the late 19th / early 20th Century. Civil engineering in the form of sewers and pure water systems also can take credit for longevity. The third thing that has made a large difference is public health measures such as vaccination programs.

"The average age" of people has always been kept low by infant and child mortality. If people made it through the first few years of life, they had a good chance of making it to adulthood. Once they were adults, they had a reasonably good chance of making it to their 60s. Some lived Into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s--not a lot, but some. Even today, the number of people 100 and older is really very small.

Medicine has played an important role in the quality of life, certainly, but only in the 20th century, and not until antibiotics went into production during WWII. Advances in medicine, while very helpful to the sick, haven't lengthened life that much. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, etc. haven't added many years onto the average lifespan. I'm not criticizing cancer specialists in saying this.

All of Erlich's predictions were wrong. He lost all his resource price bets. I'd say the same will happen in the future. Human ingenuity will defeat doom and gloom as it has for thousands of years.

. So says @fishfry

Tell that to the people who died in the pandemic, the famine, the tidal wave, the war, the sinking boat, the earthquake...

What has forestalled the dooms predicted by Malthus or Ehrlich are improvements in agriculture and sanitation -- nothing terribly complex. Both of those have limits: Once improvements that depend on large energy inputs have been fully implemented, more energy inputs won't result in continual increase. There is only so much food value that plants can extract from soil. Once the sewers are built, the drinking water supply secured, and routine public health measures such as hand washing are established, more sewers, more water pipes, and more hand washing won't improve life.

So, we can feed more people and prevent many diseases. The population grows and eventually reaches a number (in the billions) where the supply chain is over-booked, and if anything goes wrong, orderly society starts falling apart.

It requires monumental stupidity for a species to paint itself into such a corner that it depends on some future technology that might never materialize to stave off an existential threat. — RogueAI

Precisely.

Human procreation will increase, but so will its mortality rate. — Purple Pond

At this point, however, births are about double the rate of death. To paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge, "If more people are going to die, then they had better get on with it."

Environmental constraints/carrying capacity are much more about the population growth of consumers and our industrial support than the raw population numbers. A few more million poor Indians won't matter as much as a few more million Humvee drivers. — fdrake

True enough, except that people usually don't exist as "raw population". The whole Humvee-style economy is a very perverse aberration.

You heard abut the 'isotope powered accident"? I understand the Russians are busy trying to build some sort of atomic powered rocket -- either a very fast high flying rocket, a low flying very fast cruise missile, or a drone torpedo armed with a large thermonuclear weapon. More nonsense. We will, of course, match them. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

We attempted this sort of technology back in the 1950s, early 1960s, at the Idaho Nuclear Laboratories. The project was abandoned as too risky.

As a rule I do not discuss female sexuality, because it is pretty much outside my ken. But... what I have observed (and read) is that women often establish sexual relationships with other women later in life than gay men do with other men. While a "lesbian" identity seems to be very strong for some women, many women in same-sex relationships don't identify strongly as lesbian or homosexual.

Sex seems to work a bit differently for women (so I have heard) than for men, for which there are various evolutionary reasons.

If by "queer" you mean "homosexual," this is not true at all in my experience. Perhaps others with more can shed light on this. — T Clark

In the last 50 years, all the homosexual men I have met were interested in having pretty conventional sex (adjusted for male anatomy) OR were interested in having sex with somebody else. I don't know... human anatomy doesn't really allow for much variation in sexual mechanics. There are shafts, orifices, hands, and brains.

Oh, and I have met many transgender and gender fluid people. The latter tend to make more sensible claims, in my opinion. But apparently it's not good form to ask them to explain transgenderism. It's considered "questioning their existence." Which is unphilosophical, but, hey, that's what fora like this one are for. — Artemis

The "gender-fluid" people I've met strike me as fairly confused and irrational about sex, bodies, roles, and so forth. Their confusions are aided and abetted by the times they live in.

I have long felt that bisexuals and trans people were inappropriately included in what was first the "Gay and Lesbian Liberation movement". "Bisexuals" just don't seem like they ever developed an identity as such. Trans-gendered people are not homosexuals, presumably. Then there are the "queers" who are some sort of limp dick nouvelle cuisine. So we now have the GLBTQ movement.

There is a specific political reasons for grafting bisexuals (a '3' on the Kinsey Scale), transgendered, and 'queers' onto the movement, such as it is: Numbers. The conventional politics of gay liberation has required respectable numbers, with "10%" being the desired [and delusional] portion of the population belonging to the gay movement. As Mike McCarthy famously said, "If 10% of men are gay, who is getting my share?"

Partisan politicians get away with the 10% figure because it sufficiently nebulous to disprove. So, 10% it is. (The percentage of people in the US who identify and perform as gays and lesbians is probably below 4%. Transgendered persons constitute less than 1/2 of 1% (based on surveys).

I take your opinion seriously. — T Clark

And I return this respect for the depth of your experience and opinions.

Simple - if a man were to tell me he feels like a woman, considers himself one, and would like to be treated like one, I would respond "ok." What more do we need to know — T Clark

I would agree with treating anyone how they like to be treated. I'm not sure why that entails believing them about their self-id. There are countless examples of self-id that we do not and should not take at face value, so there have to be other criteria to believe it. — Artemis

Back in the early '80s I lived in a building with a guy who believed he was Jesus returned to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven. He was a well-educated, urbane, gay, New Englander in his 30s and was a productive individual. "Jesus" was a great conversational partner. Really interesting on many levels.

Did I think he was Jesus of Nazareth? No. I thought he was either very deluded or enjoyed faking a delusion. I lost track of him back then when I moved, but lo these many years later, it doesn't seem like the Kingdom of Heaven has been inaugurated.

I've known transsexuals, some of them fairly well. Did I think that they were actually a man/woman in the wrong body? No. Did they seem to benefit from taking testosterone or estrogen, and undergoing plastic surgery? Yes. Does that convince me that they were not deluded? No.

Would I be polite to these delusional people? Of course.

But what is the root of this delusion? Not quite sure, but probably deep dissatisfactions. "The times they live in" have made it possible to reach farther out for what they imagine will be more satisfying ways of being in the world. in 1300 a.d. France or in 1845 Virginia, the solution to profound and deep dissatisfactions were structured along different lines than in 1930, 1960, or 1990...

Take Bitter Crank. Here is a guy who has nursed certain delusions about possible better worlds that are possible because of the times he lives in. Imagining that he is living out these delusions has at times been quite comforting. At other times it has generated a lot of internal and external static. He persists in these delusions, nonetheless, even those there is little evidence that his delusional aspirations are possible/probable/feasible etc. I blame the original Jesus for inspiring these delusions in the first place.

There is a mistaken assumption here. Neutron bombs still explode with quite a bit of force--and resulting destruction. The "desirable" feature of the neutron bomb is that it produces a lot of excess neutrons which penetrate vehicles and protective structures of the sort the military might use.

So, setting off a neutron bomb in Toronto would wreck too much property to be useful for solving the housing problem. There are lethal alternatives, but let's not go there.

you will have to get used to that (In so far that I am posting here, I guess.). — thewonder

There are effective means available to thwart your peculiar pronoun proclivities.

"Computer: commence thwarting @thewonder until further notice."

"Greetings, master. I will comply."

On the one hand, it seems fairly clear that the situation is hopeless: GO @Schopenhauer1!!! On the other hand, I hate that -- "There ought to be a way around the problem". But I don't see one. It's extremely unlikely that the share of 7.5 billion people who are young reproductives are going to decide that they should reproduce at less than the population replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple. Holding the population steady isn't enough -- we have to shrink it.

People in stable, prosperous industrialized nations tend to have low birth rates - often below the replacement level. That may be good for population alone, but prosperous industrialized nations use up a lot of resources, and immigrants to nations with shrinking populations tend to scale up their standards of living in the destination country. Every individual who becomes resident in the U.S., for instance, consumes much more than they would in Guatemala, Mexico, or Somalia.

Population is one aspect of the global crisis, global warming, pollution, and resource exhaustion being other aspects. At some point (not all that distant) the supply of oil and natural gas will start to diminish, and with it, the basis of the whole industrial agricultural complex of food production.

There are some things that could be done... We [the world] could back off on child survival and maternal health programs. We could cut back on vaccination programs. We could stop food assistance programs. We could not rescue immigrants in the deserts or on the oceans. We could stop life-lengthening treatment for people once they are 75 years old (frees up resources). We could lower the standards of care for illnesses and injuries--letting more people die, in essence.

We [the world] may need to decide that when famine strikes, aid will not be forthcoming, unless progress in the famine area has previously been made in reducing population--not just slowing growth.

First-world countries will have to abandon their high standards of living (which are extremely costly in terms of food, fiber, metals, energy, etc.) and revert to reduced (poorer) lifestyles. This in itself need not be a miserable experience, but it would require some tough adjustments.

We've been living in a fantasy world of continual growth and ever-rising standards of living. The fantasy is becoming downright indecent.

"it's" — god must be atheist

Yes, thank you. It is not surprising that people get confused by its and it's. Most words are made possessive by adding an 's to the word. Not it. it's = its. Why do we make contractions of two words with 4 letters anyway? Just say "it is". But I use it's all the time. It's seemingly easier, faster, cheaper, better.

Now in self-defense, I entered that comment in which you found the error on a tablet which eagerly spells words the way it wants to spell them. I'm blaming the gadgetry.

I am, by the way, a person degreed in English. So, fuck me.

This was considered to be grammatically correct, but it's totally absurd. — thewonder

It's not absurd. The reason underlying the grammatical correctness of using "he" is because in English, "man" is the default general term for "human, mankind, people". If you know that the person in question is female, then it would be incorrect to use "he" rather than "she".

If you want to be grammatical, forget about making up new pronouns:

These are your choices. Get used to it.

English is one of the German languages, Anglo-Saxon. Despite all of the words it has borrowed from other languages, it’s grammar has been stable for a long time. It has become less inflected, which makes that part of the language simpler.

I am amazed, sometimes, at the obscurity of some of the words some authors use.

The “corpus” of Anglo-Saxon words is maybe 10,000 - 15,000 words. After 1066 (William the Conqueror) a batch of French words were added. Lord of the Rings was written in about 80% Anglo-Saxon words, with maybe 20% common French-derived words.

Shakespeare invented quite a few words; a lot of words we used were invented by authors, which is how we got so many Latin and Greek based words. Shakespeare’s language is, of course, “dramatic” stage language. It doesn’t make for easy reading.

“Do you think English is one of the hardest languages to learn as an adult? I am a native speaker of English, but even still, I consider myself to have above average writing/reading literacy skills (it does not show here of course, when I am rushing and usually exhausted typing this) but at times, struggle with such niceties as punctuation and grammar.“... Grre

I do not know whether English is harder than Chinese or Swahili for instance. English shed a lot of stuff that makes some other European languages more complicated, like gender, part-of-speech changing word forms (can’t think of the word for that), and so on. English retains some, but not a lot.

Spelling is probably tough for some people in any language.

You sound like a good teacher. Keep up the good work.

The Guardian noted that a shortage of remotely affordable housing was an underlying frustration of many of the young protestors. Granted that HK does not have large empty parcels on which to build a lot of affordable housing, many feel the HK government could do better than it has in the housing area. True? No?

How about that “renegade province” NE of you? Any thoughts on their future?

they deserve our support. — Baden

I totally agree, but I have not the vaguest idea what I can do that would amount to even the most gossamer support. I fear that Hong Kong's goose is cooked. (New entrée: Take a flock of protesting geese; execute, torch their feathers, draw, quarter, stir-fry in blood. Pass it around the restaurant as a warning to everyone else.)

I experience sadness from time to time because I suffer from depression, and I sometimes wonder, will my brain run out or limit the chemicals or energy that produce these sad feelings? — Purple Pond

If it helps, people experience sadness from time to time whether they suffer from depression or not.

But what I want to focus upon is this: For some people with very severe depression (which is fortunately not at all common), "feeling runs out". They stop feeling much of anything, and lapse into a state of emptiness, blankness, blackness... all zeroes. These patients are the ones who especially benefit most from ECT. Why, or how this sort of intense, deep illness developed, I have no idea -- but in the one case I am familiar with, a history of MI and a lot of drugs and alcohol helped produce the state.

They aren't unconscious; they don't feel much of anything; nothing interests them; nothing gives them any pleasure. It's a bad state.

For the rest of us--the 99.99% of the population who won't experience this sort of severe depression, we can exhaust positive feelings. There comes a moment when we can't stand one more second in the sauna, one more second laying in the sun on the perfect beach, one more second being outside in lovely snow, playing with the dog, or even having sex. Enough becomes enough.

Fortunately we rebound. What was very pleasurable before becomes pleasurable again.

The pleasure bit can be a bit tricky. Take tobacco: smokers find lighting up pleasurable. Based on my own experience (and science) the pleasure comes from RELIEF rather than a positive sensation. After 20 minutes, or whatever length of time, the nicotine from the last cigarette has been metabolized and we are due for another dose. We yearn for the next cigarette, and when we light up there is immediate relief. It feels good, but it isn't the aromatic hydrocarbons and other toxic substances in the smoke that are giving us what we want.

What is true for pleasure is not true for unpleasant experiences like pain, nausea, numbness, severe itching, and all sorts of other things.

For mildly negative sensations (like pain) we can manage to overcome the pain with our own physical resources (endorphins for example) or distraction. When that doesn't work, we reach for some pain medication.

For major, severe discomfort, we either make some accommodation and alleviate the distress or, if we can't, eventually die because of it. For instance, people with advanced cancer "fail to thrive"; their bodies can no longer function. Severe addition, mental illnesses such as severe anorexia, very severe depression, and so on result in death because people stop eating and starve (or succumb to infection or some such cause of death).

One of the Guardian's list of 10 best jokes at the Edinburgh festival:

Ken Cheng: The other kids all called me “token” growing up. At least that’s what they put at the top of my Christmas cards. Sure, there was a space between the “to” and the “ken” but the point remains the same.
Ken Cheng: To All the Racists I’ve Blocked Before is at Bedlam theatre

May your obituary remain unwritten for a long time.

They’ll all be dead soon enough — I like sushi

There are a few who definitely won't be dead soon enough for my satisfaction. I won't begin naming names. Everyone, supply your own list.

If it was, then Germany would be paying the Jews for the Nazi era — Waya

And they have been paying Jews and the state of Israel - billions of Marks.

Unless, of course, you extracted it from those with the most resources -- the very small very rich segment of the population that controls most of the wealth in the country.

I gave up on the idea of reparations as I've worked through this discussion, but within my previous theory about reparations, we don't owe people anything for what was done 200 years ago. All those people are dead and gone. 5 to 8 generations (depending how you count) have passed since the end of slavery. The masters and slaves both are long dead.

The worst period of Jim Crow is now a century past. Those people are also dead.

The people to whom a debt could be considered payable are the children of the last generation and their parents. So 3 generations, back to the beginning of the Federal Housing Program post WWII. During the 1940s, 50s, 60, and into the 1970s, blacks were systematically excluded from a critical wealth-building program: the construction of huge suburban tracts around all of the major cities. They were excluded explicitly: Blacks were not to be approved for mortgages in suburban building projects. (You can read all about the policy in the recent book, The Color of Money.)

Whites who were given mortgages in the suburban projects were able to benefit from the appreciation of their high quality homes. Home value appreciation became the core cash asset of the white middle class.

For blacks? It was new, large-scale, high rise construction that was designated as rental property. The quality of the homes was good, but urban administrations were usually not willing to spend the money on maintaining the buildings so that they would remain good places to live. In any case, renters do not accumulate equity.

In cities where the large high-rise and dense public housing buildings were maintained, they remain in good shape. After all, cast concrete doesn't deteriorate very fast. Of course, it wasn't the concrete that failed in cities that neglected their public housing. It was the elevator systems, heating, ventilation, cleaning, routine maintenance, and security that failed, eventually turning the neglected buildings into cast concrete shit holes.

In addition to dealing the black population out of value-appreciating suburban housing, blacks tended to be concentrated (an active process) in specific "redlined" areas -- slums, in other words. Generally low levels of income caused by poor education, insufficient access to jobs or the transportation needed to get to outlying jobs, and harsh policing (which other groups of people were not subject to) resulted in the present underclass. You can add on to all that "the end of welfare as we know it" in the 1990s under William Jefferson Clinton, president of the US from Arkansas.

Just as suburban development benefitted whites from coast to coast, the pattern of denying blacks opportunity was also carried out coast to coast.

The blacks who would receive reparations, if reparations were to be handed out (don't worry, they won't be, ever) are blacks who are alive now and have suffered under current and recent policy.

Look, you didn't do it to blacks, and I didn't do it to blacks. My parents didn't participate in the suburban program because they lived in a small town, where the FHA was not building nice homes. I didn't benefit from black poverty, and neither did you. The idea of reparations doesn't depend on you or me benefitting or causing the problem. We are merely part of the country led by some people who went out of their way to fuck over black people once more time.

What do you think can be done to improve literary education and consequently, the educational success of students? — Grre

One has to begin very early by talking to children - a lot, and nicely - so that they accumulate a big supply of words as soon as possible. Then it is important to get little children interested in books (start with the thick-cardboard paged books). Read to the children, encourage them to read. When children see their parents reading, when children see books around the house, that is a good thing.

Language is nothing if not used, so engage in conversation with your young child. Encourage them to listen, speak, read, and in time, write.

Children first learn to read, then they use reading to learn content. (well, of course children are learning content before they can read, but...)

Unfortunately, children whose early language experiences are impoverished (they hear far fewer words spoken than other children, and more of those words are command words like shut up, sit down, go away... or curse words directed at them.

Children whose early language experiences are impoverished are disadvantaged from the get go. It is very difficult for these children, or their schools, to remediate the early deficiencies. Children from these impoverished backgrounds will fall behind children with richer language experiences, and they may stay behind. By the 4th or 5th grade, they may be permanently disadvantaged. (The early deficit is very difficult to fill in at a later date.)

Non-English speaking students may be at no disadvantage IF in their own language they have a rich language experience. But the later they begin to learn English, the more difficult it gets to acquire -- this is true for everybody. So non-English speaking adults will just not be as successful as 6 year olds in learning English. One hopes that non-English speaking students are being encouraged to read, speak, and write in their native language.

Before the 6th grade, absolutely before middle school, children who have not acquired adequate language skill are generally screwed, even if serious efforts are made to remediate their deficiencies. They just won't be able to use reading to acquire content efficiently. (EXCEPT: People can be very adaptive, and if they are ambitious, bright, flexible, and creative they will find ways around their deficiencies.

Economic advantage and white privilege are different concepts. Any individual, regardless of race, can have economic advantage over another. — NOS4A2

Very true. And when they have economic advantages over others, the advantages and privileges derived therefrom are about money--not race.

Baden is an Irishman living in Southeast Asia. — T Clark

The Anglo Saxon Gestapo knows exactly where he lives. As for you, just make sure that you gerrymander nothing but congressional boundaries.

gerrymandered — Baden

I've never seen that word used that way. Not a complaint. Maybe I'll use it too. That's how language changes. — T Clark

You do and you'll be sharing a small, damp, hot, mold and vermin-infested cell with Baden. He's being charged by the Anglo-Saxon Gestapo with felony misappropriation, unauthorized use of a term with a very solid and specific meaning***, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.

***early 19th century: from the name of Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts + salamander, from the supposed similarity between a salamander and the shape of a new voting district on a map drawn when he was in office (1812), the creation of which was felt to favor his party; the map (with claws, wings, and fangs added) was published in the Boston Weekly Messenger, with the title The Gerry-Mander.

More proof of how Massachusetts politics have been rotten from the beginning.

It's true, and also irrelevant, that race has no anatomical or genetic basis. That it's an artificial construct. Fact is, race in this context was invented by Europeans, white people, as a way to put other people in their place, to dehumanize them so they could be exploited. — T Clark

Wait a minute, people aren't red and yellow black and white randomly. People inherit the characteristics of their racial group (or mixed racial group), such as skin coloration and a zillion genetic traits from their biological parents. To paraphrase a George Carlin skit:

"Thorndyke Clark happens to be white."

He had two white parents?
Indeed he did.
And did they fuck?
Oh yes, they certainly did.
So, where is the fucking surprise? Wouldn't it be more surprising if he were Chinese?

Are you sure that no other large grouping of people, like those living in Asia, on their own didn't/don't parse differences among peoples in a similar way that Europeans did/do? Or People in Africa, the Western Hemisphere, etc.?

"Race" has both denotative and connotative meanings, some of the latter which are positive, some negative, and some neutral. In a 1912 hymn, "O master workman of the race" (Jesus), "race" means "human". It has also referenced what we call ethnicity--Irish, Catalonian, Ukrainian, etc. Race has been applied to the African, Asian, Caucasian, Amerindian, and Australian aboriginal peoples.

Then it has famously and notoriously been applied to the "Aryan race", a concoction of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the leadership of which often fell very far short of the Aryan Ideal: tall, blond, blue-eyed, muscular, etc.

Race, referencing ethnicity, should be criticized for seeing consistency of traits, particularly in Europe. The peoples of Europe have been stirred and mixed about as much as possible, going back to the earliest waves of migration out of Africa, and subsequent east-west-north-south sloshing of population movement.

Race, referencing the largest groups of peoples, has more validity. The people of Africa, those who did not migrate, display the genetic great diversity of the "root stock" of the world's population. Africans do not have Neanderthal or Denisovans DNA, because those and other ancient humanoid groups arose from the earliest outward migrations from Africa. The Eurasian plains, the area north of the Middle East, was the mixing bowl out of which Aboriginal, Amerindian, Asian, and European people came.

The Great Error in the concept of race is that some races are better than others, rather than there are some differences among the races.

You are a trouble maker.

"Education" is probably one of the most contentious topics. Everybody is in favor of it, but once we start discussing the details all hell breaks loose. We could, for instance, get into a fight about whether adults obtaining literacy improves employment opportunities significantly. Whatever kept them from literacy prior to adulthood might be an enduring disadvantage. Or not. The last time I checked, the evidence was weak. I'm still in favor of literacy, though.

I live in a state where the literacy rate is, county by county, quite high, but whether the ability to read at a 8th grade level or higher corresponds to solid cultural competence is another matter. People who can read quite well may not consider climate, health, economics, politics, foreign relations, international conflicts, trade, etc. interesting or relevant to them, and so would do poorly on a survey of general knowledge.

My general impression of high school graduates (over the last couple of decades, say) is that maybe 20% are receiving and absorbing a good, thorough general education. Maybe 30% are receiving and absorbing a somewhat deficient general education, and the remaining half are, to varying degrees, missing the boat.

Some adults pursue lifelong learning, at least staying informed about current affairs. A large share of adults are not staying well informed about current affairs, and some adults are just out to lunch on what is going on in the world.

What can be done? Obviously, if people stopped spending so much time watching TV or staring at their phones they could get more reading-to-become-better-informed done. Telling people this is pretty much just whistling dixie.

There are just so many interesting things to learn about...