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Y'all are right about reparations. They're a stupid, terrible idea. It will mean one endless hand out for more free stuff and the other perpetually clutching a stick so they can continue beating white people over the head about racism.

If black folks want to talk about reparations, I'd love to have that conversation with them. Just not the one they think. I want to talk about 12,000 years of reparations for the horrible way women have been treated, oppressed, murdered, assaulted, and tortured by males (including 'people with penises', or the people formerly known as transvestites). And I promise you, THAT Day of Reckoning, based on 12 millennia rather than 400 years, will take a LOT longer and the penised will have to dig really deeply into their pockets to satisfy our chronic grievance.

(Yes, I'm kidding, but this is my answer to anyone who's never been enslaved from someone who has never enslaved.)

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No, but I've heard excerpts of it

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“They better not say racism is over just because they gave us the money.”

When you settle a lawsuit, the defendant gives the plaintiff money, and the plaintiff gives the defendant 3 things: a stipulation of dismissal of the suit, a general release, and a non-disclosure agreement.

If the Black plaintiffs in Black people vs. USA, don't want to give those 3 things, there is no possibility of giving them money as reparations. They just are not ready to settle.

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Having resentment over some decided wrong is not fixed by money.

There has to be forgiveness, there needs to be acceptance of the present not past, in order for growth.

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As a white Baby Boomer male, I'm probably the least qualified person to tell you what's in the minds of people of color, and I'm certainly no victim. I've received certain advantages based on my birth to two married parents, good education, service to my country, and a lifetime of good jobs and hard work. But, it really bothers me when I see people of any color derided as "privileged" or "undeserving" and asked to shut up because of a series of human qualities that they had no control over. Just as people can't control the color of their skin, I didn't choose my parents nor any of these other factors. We all have inherent advantages and disadvantages -- some physical, some intellectual, etc -- and your success or failure in this life has a lot more to do with what you do with those qualities than whether you were a victim of racism or discrimination. I truly believe that. I've stood alongside men and women of every color in the military, and they proved consistently that what I just said is true. They showed me how much more we can accomplish when we look past our differences and focus on what others bring to the table. Woke culture is about elevating hierarchies of victimhood and creating new forms of racial discrimination -- and thus projecting political power -- than it is about righting wrongs. You don't heal past discrimination by creating new forms of discrimination. It's simply not possible to achieve equality of outcomes for some people without holding back other people artificially. What we need to do as a nation is provide equality of opportunity.

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DiSantis is not a credible heir. He is but an infant compared to the resolve, incredible talent, perhaps genius intellect, and resiliency shown by President Trump. Those who are buying this nonsense show how woefully ignorant they are of so much that has gone on and continues to go on. When the full truth comes out, most will be totally amazed and will agree that DiSantis is a nothingburger compared to DJT.

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Who is Cara C.?

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I think it would be worse than what they describe.

Would upper middle class and solid middle class ppl benefit? Probably. They would be careful and would invest it.

But....all those poor black ppl who all of a sudden have $5 million? What do you think they are going to do with it? How long would it last them? What education, training or experience do they have that would enable them to manage that money to last? What happens when its gone and they are right back where they started?

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A silly straw man argument. Nobody has said Musk never did anything good ever. Nor is it a revolution to ask him and others to help pay for shared needs.

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Any luck on the Harlem renaissance Mr Lowry ?

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Well, it’s a political process, which means the tax rates vary over time, enormously. The thing to do is to build a consensus of what we need the tax dollars for, I think. (On my list would be healthcare (making Medicaid nationwide) , vocational education, childcare, climate change, job training. Others would take one or more of those items off the list and add something else, reducing the deficit for example, but you have to build a consensus around what’s needed.)

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founding

Reparations.

OK, slavery has been gone in this country for over 150 years. If reparations were to be made, the time to make them would be right after the Civil War, because the people who deserved it would get it from the people who did the harm. However, between the North losing about 360,000 men (which could be considered a reparation of sorts), and the South losing around 250,000 men and then being economically devastated, there was little to be had to even give the Emancipated Blacks.

Now we are proposing to give people money who were never slaves and "take" it from people who never had slaves. Never mind that California was not even a slave state to begin with.

For the purpose of "systemic racism" giving people money won't solve that problem if it truly exists. Do they really think giving people money in and of itself will fix any problems that inner city Blacks have to deal with on a permanent basis? If they do, they are sorely mistaken.

And who gets the money? I'm a White guy who has 1% African DNA, do I get 1% of the money? What about Black children of recent African or Caribbean immigrants, whose ancestors were never slaves? If someone looks White but "identifies" as Black, do they get a cut?

Sure, let's defund the police, spend school lessons learning about the evils of White racism and multiple genders while forgetting about science and math, and just give people lots of money without any direction forward. What could possibly go wrong?

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Feb 13, 2023·edited Feb 13, 2023

I am someone who leans right/libertarian , but I don't know why we eliminate most of this reparations talk/discussion by giving the worst school systems locations (based on results) school vouchers as a type of reparations. The right would get behind it due to it being a) the right thing to do , b) it would prove to the American people through results that school choice would have just as good results with less cost per student and c) it would break the ideological left's hold on public education and force teacher's unions to worry about creating proper merit incentives. This would help those MOST left behind instead of those in middle/upper class that use race as a cudgel. Most reparations talk doesn't help the generationally poor.

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If the war on drugs is reason for reparations, what do we do with the non-blacks who have been caught up in it? Or are they somehow deserving of their punishment in a way that blacks arrested are not? And John is right - SF could dole out any figure today, and the same chorus would still be singing the same tune tomorrow. Nothing would ever be enough, and that's finally starting to dawn on people, the ones who finally noticed that 2023 is not 1923 or even 1973. Racializing society was a disaster the first time, yet there are people who think that somehow, the result will be different this time. No, it won't.

The activist crowd never worries about the backlash that Glenn mentions because they never consider it. Look at how the idiocy of "anti-racism" has been ushered in, look at how many organizations are falling all over themselves to give the appearance of wanting more black people, and worst of all, look at the steady elimination of things like entrance exams in a back-handed, condescending attempt at recruiting minorities. It's just amazing that the same people who call these tests biased ignore the years preceding the tests, the years in which minority children, like all others, should be learning the skills that would allow them to compete for admission or employment or whatever else. White liberals love nothing more than infantilized blacks whom they can treat like mascots.

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What is crazy is that Black people are told they shouldn't have to be concerned about showing up on time, being accurate and speaking English correctly. To do these things is to "act White." Blacks who follow this advice don't have racism to blame for underperforming their wealth building potential. They can, however, blame malpractice on the part of so-called Black leaders who spread lies and nonsense.

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I am a white person and I am not in favor of paying reparations to any ethnic or other identity group. Something I would like to discuss, however, is how we as a country could invest in strategies that have potential to solve problems some groups of people are facing. I am not opposed to investing some of my own resources if there can be a process of Americans working together to define what practical things can be done to elevate the socioeconomic status of black Americans. From my perspective there have been a number of programs intended to improve education, nutrition and so on for black children, but I have not seen a good review of the effectiveness or lack thereof of these programs. Did some of them fall victim to the common governmental reactivity to the public opinion crisis of the moment, which gets dropped after a few years with not much learned about what did or did not work? I don't think that handing people checks is the right thing to do, and I certainly would resent it considering that taxes in Democratic states and cities are already too high. I do think we should try to do something else; it can't be impossible to teach a child to read.

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