Absent a post where someone else other than you stated this, you’ll have to carry this creative misunderstanding on by yourself. Electrons might be free but…
‘Validity’, in this usage, shouldn’t be confused with ‘validation’. Of course, you’re free to continue believing I meant both. Without a post stating so, nor even one implying such. Such is life.
Advocacy means being willing to roll up your sleeves and get to work, no matter how specious the arguments. Much as you might want one, you can’t always have a hammer.
“Absent a post where someone else other than you stated this, you’ll have to carry this creative misunderstanding on by yourself. Electrons might be free but…”
“Validity’, in this usage, shouldn’t be confused with ‘validation’. Of course, you’re free to continue believing I meant both. Without a post stating so, nor even one implying such. Such is life”.
I think what you wrote insinuated those things. Others on this thread might think differently. But that is my opinion.
Yes, definitely not for the lack of trying.
However, there is an assumption that what is learned is useful, and even more fundamental, is correct. And on both counts, most schools fail in many areas. But, even if the information is useful and correct, the students need to be taught the requisite analytical skills to decipher information.
Here is an example of how incorrect information about American history is peddled by so-called intellectuals, professors, and politicians to students and the electorate who have not been taught the skills to think analytically. It is a standard meme used to illustrate the Constitution’s inherent support of slavery and that that is the foundation the Founder’s wanted:
It always goes something like this - “The Founders counting blacks as 3/5th of a person shows what they thought of black people and demonstrates their support for slavery and black people being less than white people.” If you are a non-thinker, this sounds very reasonable and should piss you off.
However, the 3/5ths clause was actually, in substance and in practice, an anti-slavery clause – but remember, you have to know how to think analytically to get there. The clause was a congressional punishment for the southern states for having slaves, and that clause made it more advantageous for the South not to have slaves. How? Because since slaves were not counted as a full citizen for congressional representation purposes, the South was penalized by having fewer congressman than if the slaves were counted as one full citizen.
Therefore, the net result was the North had more power in Congress and more say in limiting and trying to end slavery. This allowed the Northern states to exert all sorts of pressure on the Southern states because of the South’s reduced legislative representation, and thus, less legislative power. Southern states could really only increase their representation and legislative power by freeing slaves and making them full citizens.
Seriously, do black people (and white liberals too) today really think that it would have been better for the Founders to adopt a system that would have made the Southern states, which wanted slavery, the most powerful bloc in Congress?
But hey, why get in the weeds of accuracy and analytical thinking, when the 3/5ths’ clause misrepresentation is a quick and easy way to garner more votes from dumb people? And worse, a lot of these dumb people have degrees. Go figure.
I am very happy I am 5/5 of a person and not 3/5 of a person.
@awcntdb So are you saying slave-owning Founding Fathers created 3/5 rule to end slavery? Or was the 3/5 rule actually reflective of their thinking and a lucky but unintentioned outcome for the North?
@mcat2 – thanks for the data but I was making a different point. I couldn’t identify with, say, East St. Louis if I triedd. Murders there are as emotionally meaningful to me as ones in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. While we’re technically part of the same America, we really aren’t. I’d argue this is actually far worse than anti-intellectualism in hurting the US.
As a relevant aside, I haven’t seen it mentioned that de Tocqueville noticed we were anti-intellectual eons before this article did. Is it only just now starting to matter? Likewise, the article’s spurious association with Dylann Roof is mind-boggling as I seriously doubt a stronger intellectual culture would’ve affected him much and the author did nothing to convince I’m wrong.
The article is a poorly-argued polemic.
I know that luck is some part of the package that determines success. My points are that 1) It is not the majority factor and 2) It’s nigh on impossible to quantify the amount of luck in business success.
Regarding 2, I suppose we (or a business wizard) could comb through a firm’s Marketing, Finance, Accounting and Operations documents to spot mistakes and then assign a “luck factor” to overcome each. Assuming the firm is still floating, we could assign some arbitrary - but at least researched and analyzed - “luck value”.
But talk about a waste of time… hehe
There are exceptions… but I was raised to believe, and have encountered life experiences that corroborate, that people who work hard, persevere through the sludge, and use their brains are those who tend to succeed and generally make up the middle class. And that if you want to join the 7-figure-plus-in-cash club, you add risk-taking to that list of attributes.
That’s as an abjectly unique explanation for a pointless disagreement as I recall seeing around here. Appreciated though, since it’ll save time with any that might arise in the future.
Katliamom, to my best recollection (and without looking it up), it’s absolutely correct that the 3/5 clause in the Constitution was intended by the North to make the states that owned the most slaves (since there were still Northern states that had some) less powerful: the North wanted slaves not to count at all for purposes of population totals used to determine Congressional representation; the South wanted them to count as an entire person – even though, obviously, slaves couldn’t vote and weren’t “represented” in any sense of that word in Congress. The 3/5, I believe, was a compromise, which also involved including (at the South’s behest) the provision that the importation of slaves couldn’t be prohibited for a specified number of years.
Actually, a Harvard study found that the five strongest predictors of upward mobiity are:
It’s appealing to believe the simplistic notion that we all determine our own destinies. But it just isn’t the case. Success is so much more, and so much more complex, than an individual pulling himself up by the bootstraps.
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/images/mobility_geo.pdf
Regarding the counting of slaves as 3/5th of a person, I remember being taught in my tenth grade advance history course that that was a compromise hashed out between the Northern and Southern delegates. The South wanted slaves fully counted for the purpose of Southern congressional representation, but the North realized that agreeing to do so could put it at a disadvantage, given that slaves represented upwards of half the population in some states in the South. Northern delegates were insulted by the South’s insistence that what was otherwise chattel should, for the extremely narrow and self-serving purpose of greater power, be now designated as “human beings”.
In 1974, my advanced American History course was taught tag-team like in a large classroom (whose 65 desks were tiered, college seminar like) by two very talented, and very enthusiastic instructors. These guys were like rock stars in our school, with kids clammoring to get into their classes. I think it was because they treated us like thinking beings with the ability to see history as the confluence of multiple variables (economic, social, religious, philosophical, & historical). Dates weren’t mere facts meant to be retained only long enough to regurgitate on a test. History, we were given to understand, remained as relevant and vital as our own times. We were asked questions, allowed to luxuriate in hypertheticals. The atmosphere in every class as charged with excitement. I can still remember the name of one of those teachers : Mr. hunt, if you’re still alive, thank you from the bottom of my heart. :x
If all high school humanities courses were taught in this manner, I rather doubt we’d have so many politicians and talking heads denigrating the value of a solid liberal arts education.
Discussing Iraq, etc. is wayyyy off topic. I am letting the 3/5 conversation stand because it came about somewhat naturally related to the topic, but now let’s bring this fully back on point, if there is anything left to discuss relative to the topic itself.
"Actually, a Harvard study found that the five strongest predictors of upward mobiity are:
It’s appealing to believe the simplistic notion that we all determine our own destinies. But it just isn’t the case. Success is so much more, and so much more complex, than an individual pulling himself up by the bootstraps."
It looks to me like one can control much of this, at least for their children. Take charge of #1 on your list, and you have taken a big step to improve the others on your list. Do not have children until you are older and married. Yes, you can determine your destiny this way. Have children while you are young and single, and you have practically guaranteed your destiny into a downward mobility spiral. Very likely your children will not have the option of attending the best schools, and very likely your income will be low. Your social capital is completely that of your own choosing. Pretty much the only thing that you do not have control over is your racial makeup.
It’s not so much an individual pulling himself up by his bootstraps, but an individual making conscious choices that will ensure their family will be in poverty.
@LasMa, I must question the bias of that Harvard study: I figure they found what they wanted to find.
unable to get the Edit function to work on my phone:
we are dealing with values being arbitrarily assigned to a myriad of factors. how you assign those values, and how you choose the factors, will lead directly to your outcome. this is soft science and, as such, is subjective per se.
Most of us have little control of the family we are born into. A one-parent birth family, a dreadful school system – neither of which a child can improve with hard work or discipline – push the starting line way back, compared to those of us lucky enough not to start life with those hurdles.
Low SES children have much more to overcome than middle or upper SES children do. Can we agree to that?
Yes, of course. But we can all choose to work and make good choices. I just don’t want people to think it’s all about luck; we’d end up with a bunch of whiners otherwise once kids hit their first hurdle. We can work to overcome hurdles.
Can’t punish the cart for the horse, LasMa. Children suffer for the failings of their parents but absolving generations of parents for flaunting commonsense known back to the founding of the Republic might very well be one of the key factors to whatever decline the country is undergoing.
Moynihan gets the last laugh.
Talk about nonthinking…this is a revisionist version of history that makes no sense if you think it through.
The framers of the Constitution didn’t agree to the three-fifths compromise as an anti-slavery clause (in substance or in practice) — that’s ludicrous.
If the anti-slavery Founders had had their way, slaves would not have been counted AT ALL as persons for representation purposes and the anti-slavery states would have had enormous power over the slave holding states. Knowing this, the Southern states refused to ratify without some inclusion of slaves as persons for representation purposes. So in order to preserve the Union and ratify a Constitution, the anti-slave Founders agreed to an inherently unjust definition of personhood. Not the most admirable aspect of the Constitution, but necessary to get it adopted.
You can’t claim that the South was being punished and had “reduced legislative representation” and power unless you come from the premise that they had a right to count slaves as full persons for representation and that right was taken away by the compromise. They didn’t. The Northern framers at the time had countered with the idea that if the South got to count their slaves as property, then the North ought to be able to count all property as well — horses, cattle, chickens, etc. and since that idea was going to go nowhere as well, a compromise had to be found.
The compromise gave the South MORE legislative and electoral power than it ought to have had if only legal citizens were actually counted. It wasn’t anti-slavery…it was a gimme to the slave states to get them to ratify and it allowed for slavery to be perpetuated for many years.
It was not even remotely intended as a way to encourage the South to free slaves to gain freed men as citizens to be counted as full persons. On the contrary, being able to count slaves as partial persons worked to the South’s advantage over time — the more slave children born, the more slaves imported from abroad gave the South increased numbers for Congressional representation out of proportion to the number of people who were actually citizens.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/01/10/historian-becks-defense-of-three-fifths-clause/174960
[…]