nittany ram wrote:

It’s sad that we live in a world where oil companies can get away with making such outrageously stupid and obviously self-serving statements.

So I have to weigh what you say against this huge successful, prestigous business that has done so much good for all of us.

If oil spills are so bad, why is no one ever arrested for them. Hmm?

If you hate america so much why don’t you just move to vermont.

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Ozoneranger wrote:

“Inherited background advantages”?

What the hell is that?

wv wrote:

So, if actual communication is truly desired…everyone slow down, and post carefully, and listen hard.

Coz this is really difficult to converse about.

w
v

WV’s right, O. This is one of those key issues, and it IS tricky. Anyway, so far I have spent 3 long posts describing some of those advantages and where they come from.

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bnw wrote:

zn wrote:

bnw wrote:

Typical short sighted self absorbed liberal. Too bad you’re incapable of reading into my post what I sacrificed by living within my means.

Enough.

Only AFTER he called me SELFISH. You didn’t see that?

Ideally, yes, I would have seen it, but either way the rules cover that:

Board Rules & Policies

Do not make individual posters the object of derision or antagonism, even absent posters from other boards. Posts are fair game, not posters.

If a poster crosses the line and becomes insulting or antagonistic, do not respond in kind–politely remind that poster of the rules and let mods handle it. Mods quell conflict, they do not judge who is “right” or “who started it.” If a mod asks posters to move on from a volatile exchange, please do so without comment.

Political discussion is volatile, for so many reasons it would be hard to list them all.

But still. Enough (to everyone). Move on (said to everyone.)

bnw wrote:

Typical short sighted self absorbed liberal. Too bad you’re incapable of reading into my post what I sacrificed by living within my means.

Enough.

InvaderRam wrote:

i would think socioeconomic status would play a big part in these disparities. and not just being poor but how many come from broken families? single parent. no parent. parents addicted to drugs. etc… does that make a difference?

An interesting thing.

According to good sociology, one of the prime indicators of a child’s potential success in school and employment is the parents’s total assets. Homeownership is part of this, and many other things too. That is, the stability and resources that come from parents having those kinds of accumulated assets make a huge difference. (And it’s not necessarily money…you can, as many know, be house-poor and living on ramen but still own the house.)

In fact…

If you compare kids from the SAME general categories when it comes to this kind of asset wealth, they do equally well (or badly), regardless of race.

Kids whose parents (or parent actually) have asset wealth all do equally well, regardless of race.

Kids whose parents lack this do equally poorly, regardless of race.

————-
————

From Interview With Dalton Conley

PBS: http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-03-03.htm

Dalton Conley is director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research (CASSR) and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America.

What does the wealth gap have to do with race?

The one statistic that best captures the state of racial inequality in America today is wealth, or net worth. If you want to know your net worth, just add up everything you own, subtract all your debts and that’s your net worth.

Today, the average Black family has only one-eighth the net worth or assets of the average white family. That difference has seemingly grown since the 1960s, since the Civil Rights triumphs, and is not explained by other factors like education, earnings rates or savings rates. It is really the legacy of racial inequality from generations past. No other measure captures the legacy – the cumulative disadvantage of race for minorities or cumulative advantage of race for whites – than net worth or wealth.

The wealth gaps between blacks and whites aren’t explained by income. In fact, if you compare people at the bottom of the income distribution – say, a family that makes around $15,000 a year, you’ll find that the average black family that earns $15,000 year in income has $0 net worth, or is in debt actually. Compare that with the average white family that earns $15,000 a year, and they have a good $10,000 to $15,000 in equity. That means being poor, being at the bottom of the income distribution, really means two different things depending on whether you are black or white.

That white family has a little bit of a cushion. If unemployment strikes, as it does so often to people at the bottom of the economic distribution, they’ve got some means to ride out the storm. They might have a car that will increase the radius of their job search. They might have this money that they can spend in case of a medical emergency, even if they don’t have health insurance. But compare that to the situation for a poor black family with $0 or negative net worth. There is no cushion. There is nothing in between the paycheck and homelessness, so to speak.

The same kind of disparity emerges at the upper end of the income distribution. If you compare, say, a white family that earns $50,000 with an African American family that earns $50,000, you’ll find that the white family has about double the net worth – about $80,000 to $100,000 of net worth compared to about $40,000 to $50,000 of net worth for the African American family at that income level. So when you are talking about the difference between financing their kid’s college education, starting a new business, moving if they need to move for a better job opportunity – having $100,000 versus $50,000 in net worth might make the difference between upward mobility and stagnation.

How does wealth affect life outcomes?

The single largest item in most people’s nest egg is the family home. That has enormous consequences for the next generation. It means, for example, that if you own your home and have significant equity, you’re in a high-property tax district, and you’re going to a good, well-funded public school.

It means that when it’s time to go to college, if you don’t have money in the bank, you can always take a second mortgage and draw off the equity in your home to finance your kids’ college education. It means that you’re in a neighborhood, most likely in the suburbs, where jobs are on the increase, and not in the inner city where jobs are on the decrease.

It means that you’re in a neighborhood where your neighbors control information and access to jobs. So you’re getting the cultural aspects by virtue of living in a high property value area and you can get your kids better job connections. It means that if you want to finance your kids’ job search after school, you’ll have equity to support them for a while.

These are just a few of the ways that having wealth, or owning a home, has enormous consequences for the next generation, not to mention one’s own old age.

How does home ownership help you accumulate wealth?

There is this tendency for white Americans to see the structure of their aid in the form of tax credits and not as aid, or government assistance, or welfare. But they see other forms of assistance, like reduced rents or welfare benefits, as a direct handout from Big Brother.

Owning your home, first of all, gets you a big mortgage deduction. That means you pay less income tax than you would be paying if you were renting and making similar monthly payments. Second, it probably places you in a community that has higher property values than one where you were just renting. Owner-occupied communities tend to be valued more, and that means that the property tax base is higher. That means that local services, everything from garbage services on up to the public school system, most importantly, are going to be better off in that community. So, without even having to spend your equity in your home, you are getting benefits from it.

Third, there is the ability to borrow off that equity. You can finance starting up a business by taking a second mortgage. You can pay for your kids to go to college through a second mortgage. You can finance your retirement by selling your home. Since homes have increased so much in value over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, people can finance their retirements through the sale of their home and the capital gains they get from it. The home has been a central part of savings for most American families in the latter half of the 20th century. White Americans that is.

What role did the government play in shaping housing and wealth?

The American government provided low-interest loans to returning veterans and other white Americans after World War II. This created a boom in home ownership and helped suburbanize America, but blacks were excluded from participating. At this same time, the government was building high-rise public housing for minorities in inner cities. The segregation in America between a largely dark inner city and a largely white suburban community is not something that just magically happened from market forces. It is part and parcel government policy.

When the government instituted rental housing in inner cities, in the form of public housing projects, for poor minorities, and then developed home ownership in low-cost, suburban communities for low-income whites, where you could put almost nothing down, they created this incredible wealth gap.

What does housing have to do with wealth?

Where one’s family lives in America is not just a matter of taste and preference. It has important consequences for the perpetuation of advantage or disadvantage across generations for a lot of reasons. First, you have the issue of housing and wealth. The majority of Americans hold most of their wealth in the form of home equity. So, that is their nest egg. It is their savings bank. They are living in their savings bank.

To make matters worse, the way that we finance education in America public schools is based on local property taxes. This means even if you never cash in the value of your home, just living in a high property value district or a rental and low property value district is going to affect what kind of school your kids go to.

Increasingly, there are lawsuits in various states against this way of financing, where school funding is based on local property taxes. But still, it’s the dominant form. We pay for our schools locally based on property taxes. So, in high value neighborhoods, which are predominantly white, you are getting well-funded schools. And in low-value neighborhoods, which tend to be predominantly minority, you are getting inadequately funded schools.

The constraints that minorities face in the housing market doesn’t just affect quality of life issues, you know, and the selection of homes and styles that people can live in. It really has enormous consequences for economic stability and upward mobility and the life chances of the next generation.

Because minorities have faced limited housing options in the past, now they are usually confined to areas that have worse environment conditions, have poor school funding, have increased risk of violent crime, have worse tax bases. Plus their homes have less equity value, so even if they want to move, they are less able to afford to. Therefore the whole economic structure of the next generation can be really readily viewed in the limited housing selections of the previous generation.

Didn’t the civil rights era fix everything?

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s really marks both an opportunity and a new danger in terms of racial relations in America. On the one hand, the Civil Rights era officially ended inequality of opportunity. It officially ended de jure legal inequality, so it was no longer legal for employers, for landlords, or for any public institution or accommodations to discriminate based on race. At the same time, those civil rights triumphs did nothing to address the underlying economic and social inequalities that had already been in place because of hundreds of years of inequality.

The danger lies in the fact that many white Americans see the civil rights changes as having solved or addressed the racial problem, because it addresses the rules of the game. And many minorities recognize that because the starting line is so different for whites and blacks, it is almost irrelevant that the rules of the game were altered to be more fair. You really have this danger, where there is a complacency about issues of inequality, because we have addressed the official forms of segregation and discrimination.

How did the wealth gap come about?

There’s a lot of reasons why there are enormous wealth gaps between minorities and whites in America. The most simple answer is, it takes money to make money. Part of the reason that there’s this enormous gap is because whites have long had higher wages and wealth to pass on from generation to generation. And it’s like a snowball – it gets bigger and bigger as it gets passed on, and the interest gets compounded. That’s partly the reason why the wealth gap has actually increased since the 1960s, since the civil rights times.

But that’s not the whole story. There’s a long history of exclusion of minorities from wealth accumulation in America, going back to right after the Civil War.

First of all, during slavery, slaves were forbidden legally in most cases from owning anything, including their own bodies. After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws instituted policies such as the Black Codes, which required black entrepreneurs to pay, for example, a $100 licensing fee but required whites to pay nothing. Back in 1870, $100 was basically like a million dollars today. It would shut people out of business. So blacks in the 19th century through that mechanism, and through pure terror, threats of lynching, were precluded from becoming business owners, as one example.

By the 20th century, you had the institution of redlining as a policy in which banks rated neighborhoods for loans based on a four-tier system, red being the lowest ranking that a neighborhood could get. And African American neighborhoods were invariably given this red circle around them, and no loans from private banks would go into that system. That was a policy that was initiated by the federal government and adopted by private lenders.

Fast forward to the New Deal, when Roosevelt really cut a devil’s deal with white southern senators. He didn’t overtly exclude blacks from Social Security, but subtly did it by excluding agricultural workers and domestic workers, who were predominantly minorities, from receiving Social Security benefits. This was done explicitly to appease southern Senators, to exclude African Americans, who were disproportionately employed in those two sectors. It wasn’t until the Truman Administration that that got corrected. But there’s a whole generation of elderly African Americans that didn’t receive Social Security benefits, when in fact, it was the biggest giveaway of all, because no one had paid into the system yet.

So you had whites receiving this sort of windfall, and blacks not getting it. More poor black elderly not receiving Social Security means that working families in the African American community have to support them and pay for it. So it’s not only an issue of that generation. It trickles down through issues of inheritance and having to support the aged.

Fast forward again to after World War II when you have two separate American housing policies. You have this really pro home ownership policy where the government guaranteed low-interest loans for whites in suburban America and helped them obtain wealth. And for minorities you get rental, large-scale, inner-city public housing, which of course is a wealth destruction policy.

In the 1960s there were occasional efforts to foster minority asset accumulation, but they really focused on things like financial skills, and community benefit which was, by definition, nonprofit. These efforts really didn’t focus on rectifying the enormous wealth inequalities that had grown up to that point.

Until we correct the fundamental wealth inequalities, these little programs of financial education and other sorts of cultural issues aren’t going to make much of a difference, because the underlying economic structure is still unequal.

I also would like to mention, by the way, that savings rates are the same for blacks and whites. That’s a common stereotype, you know, of why these gaps exist – the idea that white people save more. And the data show that’s simply not true.

But aren’t there cultural factors that affect performance and have nothing to do with wealth?

Many social observers point to outcome differences between blacks and whites, say in education, where the college graduation rate for whites is double that of blacks. Or in occupational achievement, where whites are twice as likely to have a white collar or managerial job as blacks. Or in income, where white family income is on average about double that of the African-American unit. Or family structure, where whites are much more likely than African Americans to delay childbearing past their teenage years and until marriage. In almost any realm of life you can think of, there are racial disparities.

Often when policymakers or social scientists want to compare the outcomes between black and white kids, they’ll look at kids who come from families with the same income level. And when you make that comparison, you’ll find that there’s still a racial gap. People often point to this as something cultural or innate.

But often when we’re talking about these racial disparities, we’re comparing apples and oranges, because there’s still an enormous wealth gap between those families with the same income level.

And I find that when you make the right comparison – when you compare a black kid from a family with the same income and wealth level as the white kid from the similar economic situation – rates of college graduation are the same; rates of employment and work hours are the same; rates of welfare usage are the same.

So when we’re talking about race in terms of a cultural accounting of these differences or a genetic accounting of these differences, we’re really missing the picture, because we’re making the wrong comparison. We’re not comparing blacks and whites on an equal footing if we don’t take into consideration these wealth differences in addition to the income differences.

So a lot of times when we’re talking about race it’s really indirectly race. It’s that race is associated with these vast income and wealth differences. And that’s what’s driving these seemingly cultural or behavioral differences in the next generation. The real issue is inequality.

Why don’t we just replace race with class then?

In the post Civil Rights era it’s very difficult to talk about race and class as two separate entities, because they overlap so much in our society. Many things that we associate with race on the surface, like differences in savings rates or differences in education and performance, are really class differences when you get the data and compare individuals coming from similar economic circumstances.

But the complicating factor is that those very economic circumstances are determined by race, through historical inequalities; through contemporary dynamics where whites get jobs disproportionately more than blacks do and other minority groups. So race matters, but it often matters indirectly through the class position, the economic situation of a family.

How does past wealth help the future generation?

As individuals, we like to think that our property is a result of our talent, hard work or even luck – that it’s our individual fruits of labor. But economists have shown that about 50-80% of our lifetime wealth accumulation is really attributable, in one way or another, to past generations.

Inheritance actually plays a small role in that. What’s more common is something like your parents financing your college education, supporting you while you’re in school or taking care of you, letting you live with them, while you’re looking for a job. It’s also little gifts along the way, co-signing the loan for a mortgage, that sort of thing.

All those kind of things lead to lifetime wealth accumulation. And it’s this enormous debt we have to our ancestors’ wealth that largely explains the perpetuation – in addition to discrimination and government policies – of racial equality in wealth over generations.

So a lot of our wealth comes from our ancestors. Since whites have wealth in their family histories to a disproportionate amount, they’re able to confer wealth upon their descendants, and this reproduces racial inequality.

Blacks, on the other hand, tend to have not had wealth accumulation in the past generations for a variety of reasons. But whatever those reasons, even if the current generation makes a lot of money – because there’s not also the past wealth to pass on, this racial inequity in wealth gets reproduced generation after generation, and maybe in fact gets worse.

How does the housing market continue to perpetuate disparity?

The housing market is a place where culture meets economics – where values about what people want and where they want to live actually influence prices. Whites control the market by virtue of pure numbers, being the largest group. So when whites want to live somewhere, prices go up, and when whites don’t want to live somewhere, prices go down.

If you compare housing in black and white neighborhoods that’s otherwise exactly equal – the quality of the housing is the same, the income level of the residents is the same, education system is the same, almost everything is the same – you’ll find that the white housing will be worth more precisely because it’s white. Because whites are the biggest group in the marketplace, their preferences count the most in terms of supply and demand. So wherever whites want to live, housing values will be high.

The flip side is that if whites don’t want to live somewhere, the value of houses in that neighborhood will be less. Think about it: if you have a group that makes up 12-14% of the population like African Americans do – or even 25% of the population if you take the entire non-white population of the United States – they can’t compare with the demand created by the other 75-80% of the population, so houses in neighborhoods where whites don’t want to live will be depressed by virtue of supply and demand.

The evidence shows that even if a house is in exactly the same condition – it’s been kept up at the same rate, the neighborhood is almost exactly the same, but it’s black racially – it’s going to be worth less money than a similar situated white neighborhood.

At one time we had explicit legal racial covenants and/or redlining policies on the part of banks. Today we don’t need those anymore, because once we’ve segregated the market, it becomes in whites’ interest to perpetuate the divisions. Whites get a boost in their property values by maintaining a segregation of the marketplace, maintaining their position as the dominant group in the housing market. So once you sort of have the initial push of racial covenants or redlining or any other policy that segregated the housing market, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy after that.

And in fact, there’s a vicious cycle here. Because when a neighborhood, a previously white neighborhood starts to integrate, even if individual whites don’t have personal or psychological animosity or racial hatred, they still have an economic incentive to leave. Because they recognize that others might make the same calculation and leave first.

And therefore, if there’s a rash of selling by whites, which are the biggest group in the marketplace, prices will go down, by virtue of the laws of supply and demand. So you get a vicious circle where whites calculate that other whites are going to sell when the neighborhood integrates. Therefore, they want to sell first to avoid losses, and they actually make it happen – they make white flight happen and drive down property values when the neighborhood becomes more integrated.

It’s obviously disadvantageous to African Americans who want to accumulate equity in integrated or in predominantly black neighborhoods. But people don’t talk about how it’s advantageous to whites.

What’s in it for whites?

The strongest argument you can make to white people is that the current system is not in their own interest, in the long run. The fact is that homeowners and people who have a stake in the American dream are better citizens. So when you systematically shut out a group from wealth ownership, from their slice of the American pie, you’re creating an unstable and dangerous situation. You’re inviting civil unrest. You’re inviting crime. You’re inviting a situation where there’s incredible tension.

When you have an inclusive society, a republic of property owners where everyone has the opportunity and reality of owning, then you create a stable society where people care about their communities and have a stake in their future. And it’s in everybody’s interest for everybody in America to have a stake in the future in terms of asset accumulation and economic self-sufficiency.

What about affirmative action?

A lot of people say that affirmative action is problematic because it’s giving preference to a single group, but we’re doing that already all the time in our “colorblind” society. Take the example of college admissions. Sure, there are racial preferences, but those are only meant to countervail some of the more subtle preferences that tend to benefit whites. For example, look at legacies. Kids who have a parent who went to that college have an increased chance of getting into the college. It’s an explicit policy among admissions officers. Since whites, in the past, were more likely to have gone to college, especially elite colleges, that’s conferring racial advantage, without ever being an explicit racial policy. Affirmative action is one way to counteract that.

Another criticism of affirmative action is that it stigmatizes the group that’s receiving the aid. So if a white sees a minority kid in the hallways of Yale or Harvard, they always think, well, did he get in because of affirmative action or does he really “deserve” to be here? No one says the same thing about legacies, who get in at a much higher rate. Now, that’s because race is something that we can clearly mark or identify, in a way that you can’t see whether someone’s parent went to Yale or Harvard on their lapel when they’re walking down the hallway, as well.

So, it is true that affirmative action as it’s currently designed has some stigmatizing aspects, but it can be mended. I think it shouldn’t be eliminated, because the absence of it would mean that we’re doing nothing at all to level the playing field, when we recognize there’s enormous disparities.

I don’t know. Bit for starters it would help a lot if one didn’t carry a gun around. And follow the commands of the cops when ordered.

See these things are double-edged. You do know, for example, that blacks are more likely to be pulled over by police and LESS likely to be breaking the law than the whites police pull over.

Also, about the gun…open carry states are okay for whites, not blacks, right?

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Black Crime Rates: What Happens When Numbers Aren’t Neutral

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-farbota/black-crime-rates-your-st_b_8078586.html

There is a common conservative narrative that indicates the disproportionate incarceration of black people is not the result of systemic racism, but rather of shortcomings within the black community.

It is also common to hear the supposedly neutral statement that “black people commit more crimes than white people.” This “fact” is used to justify a belief that black people have a natural criminal propensity, or that a “culture of violence” is to blame for problems faced by black people in America.

Black people make up roughly 13% of the United States population, and white people make up 64%. Black people make up 40% of the prison population, and white people 39%. Therefore, even though there are roughly five times as many white people as black people in this country, blacks and whites are incarcerated in equal numbers. But the fact that black people are incarcerated five times as frequently as white people does not mean black people commit five times as many crimes. Here’s why:

(1) If a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person is more likely to be arrested.

This is due in part to the fact that black people are more heavily policed.
Black people, more often than white people, live in dense urban areas. Dense urban areas are more heavily policed than suburban or rural areas. When people live in close proximity to one another, police can monitor more people more often. In more heavily policed areas, people committing crimes are caught more frequently. This could help explain why, for example, black people and white people smoke marijuana at similar rates, yet black people are 3.7 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. (The discrepancy could also be driven by overt racism, more frequent illegal searches of black people, or an increased willingness to let non-blacks off with a warning.)

(2) When black people are arrested for a crime, they are convicted more often than white people arrested for the same crime.

An arrest and charge does not always lead to a conviction. A charge may be dismissed or a defendant may be declared not guilty at trial. Whether or not an arrestee is convicted is often determined by whether or not a defendant can afford a reputable attorney. The interaction of poverty and trial outcomes could help explain why, for example, while black defendants represent about 35% of drug arrests, 46% of those convicted of drug crimes are black. (This discrepancy could also be due to racial bias on the part of judges and jurors.)

(3) When black people are convicted of a crime, they are more likely to be sentenced to incarceration compared to whites convicted of the same crime.

When a person is convicted of a crime, a judge often has discretion in determining whether the defendant will be incarcerated or given a less severe punishment such as probation, community service, or fines. One study found that in a particular region blacks were incarcerated for convicted felony offenses 51% of the time while whites convicted of felonies were incarcerated 38% of the time. The same study also used an empirical approach to determine that race, not confounded with any other factor, was a key determinant in judges’ decisions to incarcerate.

***

Racial disparities at every stage of the criminal justice process build upon one another. So, if 1,000 white people and 200 black people (a ratio of 5:1 to reflect the U.S. population) commit the same crime, here is what the eventual prison population could look like:

100 white people and 74 black people might be arrested.

It is impossible to determine what percentage of crimes committed result in arrests because there can be no data on un-observed crimes. As noted above, however, it has been found that while black and white Americans smoke marijuana at similar rates, blacks are arrested 3.7 times as frequently for marijuana possession. These numbers were picked to reflect the 3.7:1 ratio of black to white arrests for marijuana possession. 100 is 10% of 1,000 and 74 is 37% of 200, so these numbers would represent an arrest disparity equivalent to that noted in the example above.

50 white people and 48 black people might be convicted.

If black people account for 35% of drug arrests and 46% of convictions, this indicates a conviction rate that is approximately 1.3 times higher than it should be based on the black arrest rate. So, if 50% of white arrestees were convicted we would expect to see 65% (.5 x 1.3) of black arrestees convicted: 50 is 50% of 100 and 48 is about 65% of 74. (50% was picked at random; the important factor here is the comparative proportion.)

19 white people and 24 black people might be sentenced to prison.

Using the example felony incarceration rates cited above, we might expect to see 38% of the 50 convicted white defendants (19) and 51% of the 48 convicted black defendants (24) incarcerated for their crimes. In this scenario, 12% of black people who commit a crime and less than 2% of white people who commit the same crime might eventually go to prison.

This example demonstrates that there are systemic differences in how blacks and whites are treated by the law. These differences, which are compounded in each successive phase of the criminal justice process, increase the percentage of black people incarcerated for committing a particular crime.

This example is NOT meant to be a conclusive analysis explaining the incarceration gap. The statistics presented above and applied to the illustrative example come from different contexts and refer to different crimes. Racial disparities in the application of criminal justice are not the only source of differential incarceration rates. Poverty, geography, and lacking educational and career opportunities all likely play a role. These factors exacerbate the effects of systemic racism and feed the cycle of incarceration, joblessness, and poverty that plagues some segments of the black population.

Regardless of the exact factors behind the incarceration gap, it is not some neutral, statistical fact that black people commit more crime. The gap is the result of numerous interacting factors, not the least of which is racism. Explanations of the incarceration gap as a result of black criminal propensity or insular cultural deficiencies are critically flawed, and by definition racist.

wv wrote:

We can all state one another’s positions now.

IMO? I don’t think that;s true.

It;s true in the sense that each forum participant knows where the other participants stands, in a crude sort of “choose sides” kind of way.

But I do not see a whole lot of ability to actually be able to neutrally state the POSITION. Not who takes what, but the position itself.

A lot of the time, instead of stating the other position, the poster resorts to simplistic derision and sloganeering and name-calling. That’s the extent of it sometimes. And often as not it takes the form of “since my position is the truth, and you are wrong, all I can do is slam your view for failing to be mine, which is truth.”

It’s as bad sometimes as qb debates.

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