How much have white Americans benefited from slavery and its legacy?

Note: I am not endorsing this post. Not everything I post here is an endorsement. But I unlike most people do like examining things from all angles.

But, not quite on the same tack as Cowen, some other thoughts.

Sometimes there is a difference between what is morally correct and what makes economic sense, or even what would actually help. Understanding that is important, even (and especially) if one decides to do something immediately harmful for some hoped future gain, or just for the perception of righting past wrongs.

Personally, I think dismantling institutional racism is far, far more important than reparations, which would utterly divide the country.

Reparations are likely only to reinforce racism among those already prone to its worst manifestations, and would not have any lasting positive effect among black Americans. It’d be better that money were given to all poor people, white, black, or other, or even just $100,000 (for example) given to every person in America regardless of color or wealth (probably the most ideal solution most likely not to promote deranged animosity).

Anyway, arguing about reparations is about like arguing about meeting Albus Dumbledore, in that it’s about as likely to occur.

Why is it that literary writers rarely can write a good story – some of them being so idiotically preposterous or non-existent that the whole work is unreadable – and “genre” writers often have such terrible writing?

Do good ideas make for terrible writing? And does decent writing somehow make one have no ideas?

That’s not universally true, but it’s 98% true. Most literary writers can barely write a story that a 3-year-old would find plausible or interesting, and most genre writers don’t do much better at writing than a semi-talented 10th grader.

But I can’t understand why.

Here I stand and here I’ll stay.

This reminds me of my childhood and being told that I couldn’t possibly understand things that I very much did understand, often better than the adults pillorying me did. Children – even ones not as wildly precocious as I was – understand and realize far more than most adults give them credit for.

Even if you aren’t reading Moby Dick when you’re eight, most kids are extremely perceptive about their social milieu and what’s expected of them. Girls especially get told how they should be, and who they should be, more often and more forcefully than boys do.

I suspect that girls of the age 7-13 understand a lot of the messages in Frozen better than adults watching it do (if many of the adults understood it, they probably wouldn’t let girls watch it).

When I hear that people miss living in NYC, I can’t believe it. It’s like my brain really hears, “I miss living in Port-a-Potty.”

There are some things so foreign to me that it’s like I can’t process them. I mean, I believe them, but it’s also like a part of me that says, “Surely they must be talking about something different, or they’ve misspoken.”

It is amazing how different people can be.