Are white people getting their just desserts?

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Does group Karma not exist?

"Are White People Getting their Just Desserts?"

Gelato is a dessert that is very popular with trendy white people. And there are gelato shops opening all over the country. I think they are getting their desserts!

Thank God for the internet, right?


Wow, what an angry opening post. I think I need to read through again when I'm not so pre-occupied. I'm a bit confused about this whole 'I'm white, but karma won't get me because I'm better than other white people' thing though. Not sure which cloudy fog of logic you picked that gem from..

There was a lo of horrible oppression and all sorts from white guys in Europe, but it happened in the States as well, let's not forget that.
Not to mention all those sacrifices the Aztecs used to make and all the horrible stuff they did to one another, that's hardly balanced whichever way you look at it.
Take a moment to look at the situation all over the beautiful continent of Africa. Zimbabwe is on the verge of something nasty, there was all this conflict diamond stuff and all sorts firing off over there. Did you conveniently forget that skin colour isn't contributary to doing nasty deeds? Ooops.

You should have made it so short.

There's definitely going to be some power redistribution amongst the global ethnicities in the next century, but karma doesn't have anything to do with it. It's demographics and social cause-and-effect.

Bingo.

It's not so much an issue of white people having 'bad karma' which is a load of BS, but it is an issue of white people choosing not to make enough capital goods and stuff.

Occam's Razor!

Not necessarily white people choosing to suck. Besides, I think whites will still be doing just fine. The only difference is that we will no longer militarily dominate the rest of the world, and since we are no longer invading/colonizing, other peoples will be able to have a free hand to be able to start competing with us economically. In the end, though, a freer economy will lead to benefits for everyone. The global marketplace is not a zero-sum game, and since war is likely to grow less frequent, different peoples have more to gain through collaboration than through competition.

The problem with this line of thinking is that large portions of the world population are racially mixed. Anyone who has roots in the US going back 5+ generations is probably mixed even if they are certain they are not. I would not be surprised at all to learn that I have some amount of Native American or African ancestry as my family has been here since the 1600s. You don't have groups of people living near each other for hundreds of years without babies being made.

Biracial children sometimes come out looking white... but what are they? Will they get the "karma" payback too?

If it was legal for me to wed a supreme being (sigh, only in ancient Greece), I would marry you.

Karma is a null concept. Your statements are racist. There are no reparations to be paid by white people, whether karmic or financial.

Deal with it.

How is material distribution non-zero sum?



War/murder, ranked by intensity, has had a fairly regular power law distribution for a very long time and I don't see that changing anytime soon

Because free trade promotes economic growth, which is why protectionism sucks. The physiocrats and mercantilists have been refuted thoroughly enough. Economics is no longer "the dismal science."

Inasmuch as I understand the actual religions of India, as opposed to the silly Western popularizations, no, it does not.

Divinity is a blessing and a curse I see.

Distribution does not involve a set sum of material, especially as a lot of distribution is non-material such as knowledge, software, cultural thingies, etc. There is also lot of matter out there such as soil and such, and a lot of distribution first involves processing available resources for use. Finally, even with a set sum, if the material is not allocated where it is most useful, then a non-zero sum interaction can occur to help all groups, such as if you have tea but want coffee, and your buddy wants tea but has coffee.

An interesting fact to keep in mind first is the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Erlich over resource prices from 1980 to 1990, Simon said that metal costs would go down over that time and Erlich said they'd go up as they'd get more scarce. Simon won that bet in both inflation adjusted terms and non-inflation adjusted terms, which means that metals got a lot more available during that period of time. They are a material good though... so.... material distribution that was non-zero sum occurred apparently.


Hmm... are you measuring just the number of conflicts vs deaths, or are you measuring the GDP losses from war over time(such as factories being destroyed and such). I think Orwell would argue that a measurement that takes into account a relationship between GDP(as a percent of world GDP) and war would be fairer as his argument is based upon economic development. As certainly we haven't had a direct war between powers since WW2.

Each unit of the x axis signifies the log base 10 of the number of people who died, so 1, 10, 100, 1000, ..., etc.

The figure on the y axis is the log base 10 of the number of conflicts that equalled the magnitude of war that corresponds to the x axis value. So at zero is the incidence of murder (usually one death), then skirmishes, then battles, then regional wars, then wider wars, ... and at 9.8, beyond the edge of the graph, the war that would kill us all.

Amazingly, this power law distribution has borne itself out for a very long time.

Last edited by chever on 04 Sep 2008, 3:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.